An uneasy peace in Haifa
By Rachelle Cohen
The Boston Herald
HAIFA, Israel - The clubs and cafes of the Templer district are packed on Sunday night. A far cry from a year ago when this city was under siege from Hezbollah rockets and only the very brave or the very foolish went out. Besides, there was no place to go - the shops, the cafes, were all closed.
Only the bomb shelters were full.
But tonight young and old can party in Haifa in part because young men like Sgts. Ron Even of Houston, Amitai Cohen of San Francisco and Isaac Lauterbach of Philadelphia have been on the job with the Israeli Defense Force - last year in Lebanon, now at the border.
Lauterbach, it turns out, went to a Jewish day school just blocks from the high school I graduated from. The yamulkah atop his sandy blond hair shows his constant reverence to God; the automatic rifle at his side, his devotion to his new homeland.
“I never handled a gun before I came here,” he explains. Today he’s assigned to a sniper platoon.
On this evening we are all guests of retired Col. Kobi Marom, former commander of Israel’s Northern Brigade - and like most Israelis a man of strong opinions, his based on military experience.
He served in the first Lebanese War and during some of the nearly 18 years of occupation of the border areas.
“I traveled every week to Beirut,” he says of those days.
Visitors and workers passed back and forth through the so-called Good Fence that then divided Israel and Lebanon. Commerce was brisk.
Today the gate remains - but only for those with diplomatic passports. All other activity has been halted.
“Israel withdrew its force from Lebanon seven years ago. It didn’t take long for Hezbollah to fill the gap.
“In October of 2000 Hezbollah attacked and kidnapped three Israeli solders and Israel didn’t respond,” Marom says, “We were busy with the Palestinian territories. Our [political] leaders didn’t want to escalate the situation.”
The nation and its power structure were still in the grip of “Lebanon syndrome” - the Israeli equivalent of post-Vietnam syndrome in the U.S.
“When we had to do something we said, ‘We’ve suffered enough.’ ”
Last year’s response to Hezbollah’s shelling of Northern Israel was bungled from the start - a function of political leaders with little military experience making bad decisions, says Marom, but backed up by the interim report of the Winograd Commission (named for its chairman, Eliyahu Winograd, a retired judge).
The bottom line for Marom is that the war began too quickly and ended too soon.
“We didn’t complete the mission and we can only blame ourselves,” he adds. “We had international support. Even Europe understood we were fighting their war.”
Today U.N. peacekeepers remain in Lebanon but seem incapable of halting Hezbollah’s amassing of arms.
“The situation today is very unstable,” Marom says. “So it’s just a question of time. Hezbollah will start again.”
It is perhaps why the cafes are crowded now, why Ron and Isaac and Amitai will take time after their tours of duty to travel and play in the next year as hard as they worked in the past three. They will remain in the reserves until age 40 - their guns and uniforms always nearby.
It is why in the suburbs of Haifa in a charming hillside community of new homes each has a safe room - a shelter from bombs, sealable against poison gases too.
It is a way of life Americans can’t even fathom - a life of sacrifice and of hope in equal measures, a life of preparing for the worst and savoring the present.
It is what diplomats rarely see and academics don’t want to see.
It is about a spit of land and the people who inhabit it, love it and will give up only so much of it to live in peace.
Rachelle Cohen is editorial page editor. She was in Israel on a trip organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston.
