Israel, Lebanon, and kids

One mother, who is residing in Haifa, has a blog 'from a war zone'. I understand that this is the area of Israel where the daily grunt of Arab-Israeli conflict doesn' touch as much as elsewhere, but that now feels the heat of the conflict with Lebanon.

Recently she wrote about how she talks (or doesn't talk, as you will see), to her children about the war. I translated it to English:


***
I wanted to start with a quote from an article that I have read a couple of months ago/ Apparently, some Jewish people, who themselves have been born after the WWII, but whose parents lived through the Holocaust, were diagnosed with PTSD – and it was related to that war that they have never seen.

As hard it is for our children now, and whatever they’ll remember from this few weeks will depend, first of all, on us parents. Whether we are ready to shield them from the war, or if we are leaving them next to us, to feel all that we are feeling.
Of course where you live is important – it hard not to feel the war in Nahariyya. Yet it is not a deal braker – one can continue living in Haifa, or be afraid for your life in Ramat-Gan. IMO if a child in Tel-Aviv is playing sirens and rockets, or asks whether his grandmother in Haifa is still alive, this means first of all that his [arents didn’t protect him from the war, even if at the first sound of bombs they evacuated into the center of the country from Haifa.

I don’t agree that emotional stress also has positive sides to it. I think that peaseful life amd spending time with family and other children include enough emotionally challenging moments. Because of this, our fears of war and heavy thoughts should not get to out children. This is hard, and sometimes very hard. This means that you speak calmly and continue with a story when a ‘boom’ goes over your heads; you don’t discuss what’s happening in front of your kids. You tell them ’all is well, no one is hurt, you can go out into the hallway’ as you take out from your ear an earphone, from which you have been listening to news about a direct hit into a residential house in your town.

But – one minute after the siren life goes on, with dolls, games of hide-and-seek, bubbles, and going into the shelter(miklat), children say, ‘Mama, go on with the story’.

WE don’t have a TV in the house. If we did, we wouldn’t have watched it during the first days in front of the kids. Now, as they say, there is only a running text at the bottom of the screen, and they no longer show anything.

My children know next to nothing about this war. They don’t know the name of the country from which they are bombing us – but they know that it is far from here, and that our army will defend us. They know that the planes are roaring in the sky because they are flying to protect us. They know that our Army has almost hit The Big Bad Guy, and most likely soon will get him.

The magic word, especially during the first days, is ‘just in case’. No, the rocket will not hit our apartment – we are going downstairs just in case, because everybody is told to do this when a siren goes on. Of course everything will be fine with us all, and you are sleeping in the living room because that’s what everyone is told to do, just in case – and it is fun to sleep here, isn’t it?

When children go to sleep, I rearrange their shoes and slippers so that, when they get up, they could quickly dress on their own. ‘What if you want to go in our room, and can’t find your slippers?’

And a few more words about living town. First of all, I really do not want to make refugees out of my children. I understand people who live and take their children from Haifa to visit someone – friends or aquaintances – or go to a resort or a camp at the sea. It is harder for me to understand those who run or urgently evacuate from Haifa. Again, I understand that is worse in Tsfat or Nagariyya, and from there, perhaps, it is necessary to run, and perhaps than there is no time to think how to explain the departure to a child. It is not like that in Haifa. And I believe firmly that for the children the departure can and should be presented as a visit, and not as a desire to run away from bombings.

Second – returning to the subject of emotional stress – I am not sure that it is easier for a child, evacuated quickly without parents, than it is to my kids that are now dancing in the living room. I actually think that it is worse for a scared child. And people who ‘left Haifa in such a rush that they left everything behind’, probably, don’t have it easy either. Not because they don’t have their stuff , but because of fear, clutching their minds and hearts.

I should probably clarify – I understand very well that bombs are dangerous. We go down into the shelter ten to twenty ties a day, I do get scared when a ‘boom’ goes on up above; and when I leave the house for any reason, I scan the street to note which building I can run into if anything, and where the north is.

But this fear is in my head, and not those of my children. Because I know how to live with it and manage it, but my kids don’t.
***

She later commented:


I don’t think that one should shelter children from reality. But if this reality will disappear anyway, and pretty soon – does the child have to know about it, if we can get along without that? I think this is the rub. And you know, even if my children have been hearing sirens for 2 weeks, I hope that after a day of silence this war will be a history for them, something to read about or to listen to, and not a personal emotional experience.

***


Notice how valid and sound coping strategies are mixed with absolutely impossible mindwarping. As in 'THEY are bombing us', and not the other way around.

The actual death count illustrates quite a different picture .

The mindwarping is also being imparted to the kids through powerful archetypes (Big Bad Guys vs the army of defenders) and open ideology.

As much as I can relate to her anguish and the desire to do the best thing, it BEATS ME that she HAS NO CONCEPT that kids in LEBANON have no luxury of having their inner emotional landscape protected, or 'pretty soon' viewing this war as a 'history'.

Also I think there is a glimpse on how the average Israelis view the war, and what they actually KNOW about it (not much, or so it seems).

WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS?

Never thought I'd live to favorably quote an extreme conservative, especially this creep ... but he speaketh the truth here, at least in major part, so there goes:



WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS?
Pat Buchanan Wed Jul 19, 6:50 AM ET

When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert unleashed his navy and air force on Lebanon, accusing that tiny nation of an "act of war," the last pillar of Bush's Middle East policy collapsed.

First came capitulation on the Bush Doctrine, as Pyongyang and Tehran defied Bush's dictum: The world's worst regimes will not be allowed to acquire the world's worst weapons. Then came suspension of the democracy crusade as Islamic militants exploited free elections to advance to power and office in Egypt, Lebanon, Gaza, the
West Bank, Iraq and Iran.

Now Israel's rampage against a defenseless Lebanon -- smashing airport runways, fuel tanks, power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads and the occasional refugee convoy -- has exposed Bush's folly in subcontracting U.S. policy out to Tel Aviv, thus making Israel the custodian of our reputation and interests in the Middle East.

The Lebanon that Israel, with Bush's blessing, is smashing up has a pro-American government, heretofore considered a shining example of his democracy crusade. Yet, asked in St. Petersburg if he would urge Israel to use restraint in its air strikes, Bush sounded less like the leader of the Free World than some bellicose city councilman from Brooklyn Heights.

What Israel is up to was described by its Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz when he threatened to "turn back the clock in Lebanon 20 years."

Olmert seized upon Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers to unleash the IDF in a pre-planned attack to make the Lebanese people suffer until the Lebanese government disarms Hezbollah, a task the Israeli army could not accomplish in 18 years of occupation.

Israel is doing the same to the Palestinians. To punish these people for the crime of electing Hamas, Olmert imposed an economic blockade of Gaza and the West Bank and withheld the $50 million in monthly tax and customs receipts due the Palestinians.

Then, Israel instructed the United States to terminate all aid to the
Palestinian Authority, though Bush himself had called for the elections and for the participation of Hamas. Our Crawford cowboy meekly complied.

The predictable result: Fatah and Hamas fell to fratricidal fighting, and Hamas militants began launching Qassam rockets over the fence from Gaza into Israel. Hamas then tunneled into Israel, killed two soldiers, captured one, took him back into Gaza, and demanded a prisoner exchange.

Israel's response was to abduct half of the Palestinian cabinet and parliament and blow up a $50 million U.S.-insured power plant. That cut off electricity for half a million Palestinians. Their food spoiled, their water could not be purified, and their families sweltered in the summer heat of the Gaza desert. One family of seven was wiped out on a beach by what the IDF assures us was an errant artillery shell.

Let it be said: Israel has a right to defend herself, a right to counter-attack against Hezbollah and Hamas, a right to clean out bases from which Katyusha or Qassam rockets are being fired and a right to occupy land from which attacks are mounted on her people.

But what Israel is doing is imposing deliberate suffering on civilians, collective punishment on innocent people, to force them to do something they are powerless to do: disarm the gunmen among them. Such a policy violates international law and comports neither with our values nor our interests. It is un-American and un-Christian.

But where are the Christians? Why is Pope Benedict virtually alone among Christian leaders to have spoken out against what is being done to Lebanese Christians and Muslims?

When al Qaeda captured two U.S. soldiers and barbarically butchered them, the U.S. Army did not smash power plants across the Sunni Triangle. Why then is Bush not only silent but openly supportive when Israelis do this?

Democrats attack Bush for crimes of which he is not guilty, including Haditha and
Abu Ghraib. Why are they, too, silent when Israel pursues a conscious policy of collective punishment of innocent peoples?

Britain's diplomatic goal in two world wars was to bring the naive cousins in, to "pull their chestnuts out of the fire." Israel and her paid and pro-bono agents here appear determined to expand the Iraq war into Syria and Iran, and have America fight and finish all of Israel's enemies.

That Tel Aviv is maneuvering us to fight its wars is understandable. That Americans are ignorant of, or complicit in this, is deplorable.

Already, Bush is ranting about Syria being behind the Hezbollah capture of the Israeli soldiers. But where is the proof?

Who is whispering in his ear? The same people who told him Iraq was maybe months away from an atom bomb, that an invasion would be a "cakewalk," that he would be Churchill, that U.S. troops would be greeted with candy and flowers, that democracy would break out across the region, that Palestinians and Israelis would then sit down and make peace?

How much must America pay for the education of this man?

***


Where are the Christians indeed? Well, some of them are very busy bashing Buchanan:

Christians Against Buchanan is opposed to the candidacy of Patrick J. Buchanan for the presidency. We oppose his candidacy as Christians because his anti-semitism is unbiblical, and because Christ gives us a special mandate to oppose it.


Any criticism of Israel's foreign policy is equaled to anti-semitism in public opinion this days, or so it seems.