Keeping Safe, Keeping Sane

In how many countries of the world are relations between neighbouring states so abysmally dysfunctional that rockets are continually lobbed over the border in hostilities so acute that fear reigns supreme?  This is terrorism writ large.  This is the siege of a population whom a neighbouring population loathes to the extent that it has attempted and will continue to attempt to extinguish it from the geography.

Children living in Sderot in southern Israel, on the border of Gaza know intimidation and fear.  They know what it feels like to be hated, threatened, and to be fearful that they and those they love will be killed by those who hate them.  Many of these children suffer mental problems as a result of the psychological pressures that accompany this type of threatening living condition.

When societies are under existential threat of possible annihilation they take measures to protect themselves.  During the Cold War when the Free World had to contend with the potential impact of a clash between the United States of America and the Soviet Union, both with an arsenal of atomic bombs and each suspicious that the other had plans to unleash Armageddon on the other, people were encouraged to build bomb shelters.

Municipalities built local bomb shelters, there were early warning signals launched to give people time to react to the possibility of an incoming weapon of mass destruction.  Children in elementary school practised daily exercises meant to alert them to the possibility of an attack, as though ducking under a school desk would somehow manage to preserve them from the obliterating effect of an atomic bomb, and anxiety levels were high, even though people learned to live with them.

Children in Sderot, Israel, actually experience those rockets whining overhead and zeroing in on their village.  They know what to do when the alerts signal an incoming rocket.  It has been a dozen years since the Israeli evacuation of a Jewish settlement presence in the Gaza Strip, and the hope was that Palestinians would undertake to discipline themselves to less crime and more attention to civilize themselves into a working state.

Instead, what has taken place is that a number of Palestinian terror militias have taken firm root and for a dozen years have been attacking across the border into Israel.  The number of suicide attacks has been severely cut back thanks to a restraining wall separating the Palestinians from the Jews, amidst claims of apartheid.  No wall can be built tall enough to stop rockets.

Along with new defences such as the "Iron Dome" to stop some of the rocket attacks, a $27.5-million structure containing the Shaar Hanegev High School for 1,200 students offers safety inside concrete walls reinforced windows and a specially designed architectural plan to deflect rocket fire. There is a heavily fortified elementary school, a special indoor playground with a mini-soccer field, video games and bomb shelters.

"You can concentrate on your studies.  It used to be that even before you said hello in the morning you were telling people where to run", explained the principal of the junior high school located inside the new complex.

The town of 24,000 residents has experienced fear and trepidation for far too long.  In the process eight people have been killed, hundreds more wounded and everyone has been traumatized by the incessant siren warnings and rockets raining down, exploding on buildings.

Since the IDF went into Gaza in a three-week offensive against Gaza militants where hundreds of civilians were killed among the 1,400 Palestinians who died, the Hamas government has maintained a semi-cessation of rocket fire.  Smaller armed groups continue to lob their rockets over the border, with 440 having been fired so far this year.

And in greater Israel, the population has been discovering pamphlets in their mailboxes issued by the military.  The pamphlets advise that people would have between 30 seconds and three minutes to find shelter between the time air raid sirens wail and rockets slam down into their area.  This 15-page pamphlet instructs Israelis how they may prepare a safe room or shelter for emergencies.

In the event, for example,of an Israeli military attack on Iran's nuclear installations it is assumed that Israel itself will be hit by a pre-arranged series of retaliatory attacks, principally from Iran, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, and from Hamas in Gaza.  If the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad remains in control despite the current civil war, they too might be expected to attack Israel.

This is the legacy of the modern-day Middle East; not that much different in its tribal antipathies, politics, social disruption and inter- and intra-religious strife than in the days of biblical yore.