Sandra Steuer Cohen
My daughter Keren sits in a bomb shelter in Afula, beneath her building. She calls me on a cellphone almost every day. Keren is mother to a 3-month-old and a 3-year-old who are quickly taken from their beds and carried downstairs virtually every night. The shelter itself is dark, airless, and full of roaches. Apparently no one has seen fit to clean it in the past years when no attacks came to the small town. She is nervous, overtired, and stressed. Her husband continues to work driving a truck to and from Haifa, where missile after missile lands. He was across the road from the train station when it was bombed several days ago. Everyone in the north lives on the edge.
No one seems to know where Afula is. For that matter, some non-Jews and some Jews I’ve spoken with have absolutely no idea where the Israeli borders are or how very close these borders are to the people actually trying to exist in Israel.
Afula, pretty much a village, is near the Christian city of Nazareth, southeast of Haifa by 20 minutes and south of Tiberias. It has a hospital for the region and an airforce base, hence the bombings. Many kibbutzim surround it.
A map of Israel, with distances in miles, should be on the news each day, illustrating the minute size of Israel and its actual proximity to fighting and rockets. A map of the entire Middle East, of Israel and its neighbors, should be on the front pages of newspapers to teach their readers what Israel has been fighting against for the past 58 years. The areas that Israel has given up and evacuated in the name of "peace" should be marked in red.
But no, its far more interesting for readers and television-viewers to observe the brave evacuation of American citizens’ interrupted vacations in Lebanon than the interiors of bomb shelters and the daily lives of Israelis under conditions of endless stress.
Think about sitting in a shelter with your babies. Think about living so close to the borders that you can hear falling rockets.
Sandra Steuer Cohen lives in Teaneck.