Ghoulish Israelis

Wall Street Journal, January 8th, 2009 11:11 am
Israelis Watch the Fighting in Gaza From a Hilly Vantage Point

They Come With Binoculars and Lawn Chairs; Nurse Znaty: ‘I’m Sorry, but
I’m Happy’

By Charles Levinson

GAZA BORDER — Moti Danino sat Monday in a canvas lawn chair on a sandy
hilltop on Gaza’s border, peering through a pair of binoculars at
distant plumes of smoke rising from the besieged territory.

An unemployed factory worker, he comes here each morning to watch
Israel’s assault on Hamas from what has become the war’s peanut gallery
— a string of dusty hilltops close to the border that offer panoramic
views across northern Gaza.

He is one of dozens of Israelis who have arrived from all over Israel,
some with sack lunches and portable radios tuned to the latest reports
of the battle raging in front of them. Some, like Mr. Danino, are here
to egg on friends and family members in the fight.

Others have made the trek, they say, to witness firsthand a military
operation — so far, widely popular inside Israel — against Hamas, the
militant group that controls the Gaza Strip.

Over the weekend, four teenagers sat on a hill near Mr. Danino’s, oohing
and aahing at the airstrikes. Nadav Zebari, who studies Torah in
Jerusalem, was eating a cheese sandwich and sipping a Diet Coke.

“I’ve never watched a war before,” he said. A group of police officers
nearby took turns snapping pictures of one another with smoking Gaza as
a backdrop. “I want to feel a part of the war,” one said, before
correcting himself with the official government designation for the
assault. “I mean operation. It’s not a war.”

The spectators share hilltop space with an army of camera-toting Israeli
and foreign journalists, who have so far been banned by the Israeli
military from entering Gaza to report on the conflict.

Mr. Danino has a personal link to the fighting. His 20-year-old son,
Moshe, is a soldier in an infantry unit fighting somewhere below his
hilly perch. From the sidelines, he is here to root for his son the
soldier, he says, just as he once sat on the sidelines of soccer fields
cheering for his son the high-school athlete.

“The army took all the soldiers’ cellphones away before the attack, so
this is my way of staying in contact,” he says..

On another hilltop overlooking Gaza, Sandra Koubi, a 43-year-old
philosophy student, says seeing the violence up close “is a kind of
catharsis for me, to get rid of all the anxiety we have inside us after
years of rocket fire” from Hamas.

Jocelyn Znaty, a stout 60-year-old nurse for Magen David Adom, the
Israeli counterpart of the Red Cross, can hardly contain her glee at the
site of exploding mortars below in Gaza.

“Look at that,” she shouts, clapping her hands as four artillery rounds
pound the territory in quick succession. “Bravo! Bravo!”

Ms. Znaty lives in Sderot, the immigrant community on Gaza’s border that
has long been a target for rockets fired from Gaza by Palestinian
militants. Her daughter lives on Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, an Israeli
community even closer to the Gaza Strip.

Last year, Gaza-launched rockets struck Ms. Znaty’s home twice in a
single week. She escaped both attacks unscathed but has a simmering
anger for those living on the other side of the Gaza fence.

She acknowledges an uncomfortable, self-conscious awareness that she is
cheering on a deadly war. Israeli planes, ships and artillery have
blasted the small, sealed-off territory for more than a week, killing
more than 680 Palestinians and injuring about 3,000. Ten Israelis have
been killed, including three civilians, according to U.N. officials.

The weekend ground assault has sent civilian casualties climbing,
overwhelming hospitals and triggering the International Committee of the
Red Cross to declare a humanitarian crisis inside the small, seaside
enclave of 1.5 million.

On Tuesday, the UN said one of its schools in Gaza was hit by an Israeli
strike, killing 43 civilians who had sought refuge from the attacks and
injuring about 100.

“It’s weird that we have to take lives in order to save lives,” Ms.
Znaty says. “But we were held hostage by Hamas while our government
ignored us, and now we fight back. I am sorry, but I am happy.”

War watching is not a new phenomenon. Up until World War I, when more
powerful weapons began to be used on the battlefield, it was common for
civilians to perch on grassy lookouts on a battlefield’s periphery.

Nor is it unique to Israelis in the current conflict. On the Egyptian
side of the border, across from southern Gaza, Arabs, too, were coming
from miles away to watch the aerial bombardment.

But at Gaza’s border crossing in the dusty town of Rafah, the mood was
of anger and somber resignation amid the punishing Israeli attacks.
Egyptians in Rafah, and many of the Arab aid workers who have flocked
there to help evacuate Gaza’s wounded, share deep ethnic, family and
economic ties with the territory.

Over the weekend, as ambulances ferried out bloodied Palestinian
casualties, plumes of black smoke, accompanied by dull thuds and
trembling earth, rose across the border, just a hundred yards across a
no man’s land marking the border with Egypt.

“We feel helpless. We feel like we are so close but we can’t do
anything,” said Rami Ibrahim Shahin, a 20-year-old mechanic, whose
family is originally Palestinian. His brother lives on the other side of
the border, now under Israeli fire. They talk every day, when phone
connections work. Each evening, Mr. Shahin walks several miles to reach
the border crossing, where he can get a better view of the attacks.

“All day long, it’s like this, we see the attacks with our own eyes,”
shrugs Rafah resident Osama Al-Beyali, a 51-year-old porter in torn gray
coveralls. As blasts ring out across the border, onlookers swear at
Israel or offer prayers for victims.

A father of six, Mr. Al-Beyali says he thinks of the Palestinian
children suffering in the cold, with little food or safety, under the
barrage. “When I see my children, I feel ashamed and guilty. I feel like
I should find a way to go over there and fight the Israelis.”

“Injustice, injustice,” he mumbles.

Many Israelis see the Gaza offensive as a welcome change. “I come here
because our army is finally doing something, showing the world that we
are not weak,” says Mr. Danino, the unemployed factory worker. On his
hilltop overlooking Gaza, Mr. Danino has taken to quarterbacking the
assault from his folding chair.

Having sat here for much of the past week, he now fancies himself
something of an expert. He says, for example, that Palestinian militants
are fond of firing rockets from the cover of a distant block of greenhouses.

When a plume of smoke — the result of an Israeli attack — rose from
what appears to be empty farmland Monday, Mr. Danino shook his head.
“No, no, no,” he said. “We should be hitting the greenhouses.”