Israel's Home Front

At precisely 11 A.M. tomorrow, May 26, the sirens of war will echo throughout Israel. The army is conducting its annual week-long series of home-front drills to prepare the police, hospitals, emergency services, volunteer agencies, and civilians to cope with the possibility of an unprecedented onslaught of rockets or missiles laden with high explosives or chemical warheads.

Authorities are presenting the exercise as routine.  Although civilians who can do so have been instructed to enter a protected area like a communal bomb shelter or private reinforced-concrete room, those for whom participation in the drill would cause "unreasonable disruption" have been advised to go about their normal business. Meanwhile, Israelis have been retrieving their gas masks.

Ever since Hizballah in Lebanon began receiving Iranian missiles capable of striking as far south as the Dimona nuclear facility, rumors have circulated of a war igniting this summer. Hizballah itself continues to mobilize, both militarily and politically. In Gaza, Hamas may soon possess the capability of striking Ben-Gurion airport.  Along the Gaza frontier, Islamist gunmen press their attempts to penetrate into Israel. Over in the West Bank, Fatah leaders have announced (again) that they may resort to "armed struggle" if the objectives they seek cannot be attained via the current U.S.-mediated negotiations.  All these tensions are in addition to the overarching existential menace of a nuclear-armed Iran.

With enemy capabilities mounting, Israeli officials expect the next conflict to see the bombardment of troop staging areas, air-force bases, and power plants, and the possibility of a cyber attack to cripple Internet services. The IDF has two—not yet operational—Iron Dome batteries intended to provide partial coverage against short-range rockets, but there is no nation-wide anti-missile system to cope with thousands of incoming projectiles. Presumably, the state-of-the-art Patriot system will be held in reserve for the most lethal dangers. But how to manage the masses of ordinary Israelis expected to self-evacuate from metropolitan Tel Aviv or other urban areas should they come under incessant bombing? What to do with those left behind?

Outside Israel, the country's relentless security predicaments tend to be disregarded or denigrated. Within the country, things look normal; tourist hotels are full, and no one is canceling summer plans. This is the image that Israel prefers to project, and it is more than merely an image. As Dan Schueftan of Haifa University has shown, Israel's population demonstrated astonishing resiliency during both the suicide terror attacks of the second intifada and the missile attacks of the second Lebanon war in 1996.

No other Western-oriented country is quite in Israel's shoes; none faces such an array of imminent dangers. If, today as yesterday, there is no panic, this is no doubt because, in the Israeli context, the present, charged environment is, basically, normal. Still, the pressures take a psychological toll, visible, among other ways, in the fact that nine percent of Israelis suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, three times the level in the U.S. and other Western countries.

Can even sympathetic non-Israelis ever be fully in tune with the psyche of those who live the Israeli reality 24/7?  The question might be expected to give pause to anyone poised to proffer advice that could have life-or-death consequences. 

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