a long night indeed

My friend Nadav Samin produced and sang in a song called "The Long Night" about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, referenced previously in this blog. I have begun to appreciate how appropriate it is to compare the Arab Israeli conflict to a long night. And how oddly optimistic; because every night ends, eventually. This I also learned last night, my last scheduled shift as a counselor for the Halfway House for young women who cannot live with their families.

I came to the house with chocolate pastries, which Arin and Shadia eyed with distrust. As usual, they were shy and did not touch the sweets while I was in the TV room with them; as soon as I entered the counselor's room to speak to the social worker via phone I could see hands reaching toward the plate.

The social worker clarified the girls' cagey attitude towards the food; the previous visit, I had noted in the notes we write up after each shift that the girls had taken many sweets from the locked pantry, taking advantage of my not knowing how much of every commodity was allowed. Canned pineapple, ice cream bars, grapes...to teach them a lesson in portion control and rationing, the social worker had not allowed them any such treats for the two intervening days.

Then, she told me, "if you hear explosions or a siren, the safest place in the house is the corner next to the pantry. Go there, and stay away from the windows."

Say what? I had spent the past two days assuring my parents, my friends at home, and various and sundry friends who live in the "Merkaz" here (i.e. in the area around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) that there was no way anything would come near Nazareth. My coworkers had said so, my landlord had said so, and I also wanted to believe that this was the case. "Hezbollah would not target the largest Palestinian city over the border" I heard myself saying many times.

After hanging up and snagging the last remaining pastry for myself, the girls and I watched the news. This is not as passive an activity as one might imagine, because in order to get both the latest news from Israel and Lebanon as well as quality commentary from both sides, we juggled between Channel 2 and 10 (Israeli), LBC (Lebanon), the Syrian channel, al-Jazeera, and the local Palestinian Israeli channel.

What we saw:

Palestinians in Haifa scared and crying but also complaining harshly that there were no emergency shelters built in their neighborhoods

The army police chief assuring people that they were safer in the saferooms of their homes than in the shelters anyhow and that people should stay put when there is an alarm

Syrian families in the Golan whose houses had (ironically) been hit by Hezbollah's Katyushas

Oded Ben Ami interviewing the wife of one of the Israeli POW's who refused to say "if" and instead insisted that "when my husband returns, he'll be interested to read all the letters I've been writing to him and to see what I am going through"

Israeli economists exultant that the steadily falling stock market jumped at the end of the day

Israeli commentators on the G-8 summit saying that "the statement could not have been more supportive of Israel had Olmert's office drafted it and sent it over...only Jaques Chirac spoiled the picture a bit by calling Israel's response disproportionate"

Nasrallah, on every station, warning of further attacks and looking confident

Lines of foreign nationals waiting to leave Lebanon

Lebanese families who fled north from southern Lebanon, homeless

Israelis families who fled south from northern Israel, homeless

Explosions in Beirut, from LBC's cameras and then through the lense of a fighter jet's targeting screen, broadcast by Channel 10

An interview with Israeli MK Muhammad Barake in which he condemned Israel's excessive use of force

Burial services for Israeli naval soldiers

Shaul Mofaz saying, "to us, Hezballah is al Qaeda. Nasrallah is Bin Laden"

Syrian intellectuals, including the head of the communist party, showing their support for Lebanon on a talk show

Finally the girls had had enough and requested we switch to a music channel. We ate malfuf (cabbage leaves wrapped around rice and meat and spices) and played with the samples of perfume and makeup I'd brought for them.

Then at 11:30, as we were getting ready for bed, we heard a series of thuds in the area. Shadia, already on edge because her family's town had been targeted, asked me anxiously what was happening. When I turned on Channel 10, it showed a map of Israel with little cartoon explosions in the middle. For once, I was glad that Shadia was not a dilligent student with her Hebrew reading and therefore could not read the names next to the explosions:
נצרת עילית נצרת עפולה מגדל העמק
Nazareth Illit, Nazareth, Afula, Migdal HaEmek.

I told the girls they could break rules and sleep in the same room and stay up talking, if they wanted; I stayed up until 2, listening. There is no siren in Nazareth, and in any case the sirens lately in the north have been coming after the missiles. Thankfully, there was nothing else that night except the constant dull roar of fighter planes overhead. It's still going on now as I write.

Earlier in the day in Tel Aviv, Yuval told me that if I heard a siren, I should go into the nearest building or stand in a protected doorway. I heard his warning without thinking much of it at the time, but thought about it the whole night. "You can come stay with us," he told me when hearing that Nazareth was no longer magically protected by its Palestinian identity. But its not clear where is safe and where is not. Some of my coworkers from Akka could not come to work today because of missiles falling; others live in quiet areas but have to traverse areas that have been targeted to get here. Like Christine, whom Josh and I visited, who lives 10 miles from Lebanon.

You can listen to "The Long Night" at http://www.megaupload.com/?d=YZN37DEP. Or, ask and I can send you the MP3. Incidentally, it was to be the music for the hip hop class I was supposed to teach for a summer camp in Yafa which is now cancelled because of warnings that Tel Aviv might be the next target for Hezbollah's Katyushas. The organization that is running the camp, Sadaqa-Reut, has its offices housed in a bomb shelter that the municipality, like many across Israel, had designated for non-profits to use after the Gulf War. Now, the organization has been evacuated as the municipality readies the shelter to be used, for the first time in a long time, as a shelter.

Postscript: I wrote an account in the Halfway House ledger detailing the scary night we had and mentioning that the girls want to know more about the conflict and how it could affect them. But I wish Sana, the third girl who lives there, would come back from her visit to her family in Jerusalem because now I am stuck writing my comments about the girls in the rarest and most difficult grammatical form in Arabic, the feminine dual. I could use a quick refresher course (ahem ahem, Khaled and Rana).