I Now Understand

I now understand why Israelis yearned for this operation. Before last Wednesday though, I didn’t really get it. Nicolas Kristof [New York Times columnist] points out in his latest column that out of all the rockets that have fallen in the last six years, only 20 people have been killed. Is that really worth the havoc that Israel has unleashed in Gaza? After all, it was similar calculus that led Israel into Lebanon in 1982 and again in 2006, and from the Israeli perspective, it is largely agreed that those two wars have not been worth the price.

But Wednesday night and Thursday morning I understood. I am a student at the Medical School for International Health at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva. That evening, all of a sudden, the low, loud hum of the air raid siren rang for the first time. I made it into my stairwell which is secure, and then BOOM -- the landing of the Grad could be heard. All of a sudden things changed.

My friends came over, company in numbers. A friend of mine who lives in a free standing house called and asked if she could sleep over, as she didn’t have a shelter. She came over. Shaken up, but didn’t exactly sleep well (none of us did).

The next day on my way to my exam the siren rang again. Luckily I was near a shelter, got there in time and then again, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, this time closer, as the school right across from our hospital was hit. Luckily, no one was there because school had been canceled. I am sure the press might have read differently, though, had Hamas got its wish and the classroom had been full of dead children.

Nevertheless, we, a group consisting of mostly non-Jewish American medical students committed to international health took our exam. There were numerous breaks to run to the nearest shelter. I didn’t abide by the “no cell phone rule;” in Israel there is a different rule, when terror strikes you immediately text your family to say you are all right. That is yet one of the many weird things you learn during these crazy times – you can always text, even if the lines are busy.

Rockets are truly terror. Statistically they are not that bad. But psychologically they are worse. I have been in Israel through some of the worst periods of terror. When I lived in Haifa, the bus I took regularly was bombed. But it is actually not the same. With bus bombings you know that as long as you take cabs you are all right. When you get home and close the door you are safe. But now, my goodnight conversation with my girlfriend consists of whether we should keep the window open so the siren would wake us at night.

The truth is, it reminds me of the period of the sniper in Washington D.C., where I am from, when people would race from their car to the supermarket. Now, we plan our walk to the University based on staying near buildings with shelters and look to the sky as we cross the large major intersection that we know is realistically more then 60 seconds away from a shelter. You kind of take a gulp and say . . . “whew, all right, we’ll only be exposed for a minute, let’s go.”

Now every hum of a car winding up or the sound of the wind through the windows makes us jump. When we fled Beer-Sheva for the weekend, we had the surreal experience of feeling like refugees, kind of scared to come home. A totally new experience. We have surreal conversations that make us laugh at their absurdity like, how if you are outside and can’t get to a shelter, why lying on the ground covering your head actually may save you from flying shrapnel; or whether our friends have a robe we can borrow so that we can flee our shower in a hurry if we need to.

So I don’t know whether this operation in Gaza will be worth the heavy price that has been paid in both Israeli casualties and the suffering of Gazan children. I hope and pray it will be. But right now, at least I understand. You can’t call regular rocket fire falling next door to where you live, work or go to the gym an acceptable status quo. God willing, it won’t be.

BGU’s Medical School for International Health, a collaboration with Columbia University Medical Center, is the only medical school in the world that trains individuals from around the world to become doctors who can relate to multiple cultures and provide healthcare for people all over the globe. The program is taught in English and most students are not Jewish.