Saturday December 30

I'm watching a pair of kayaks glide across the calm and waveless expanse of the Mediterranean outside my window while trying to block out the incongruous beeping of trucks backing up somewhere outside my field of vision. It's early on a clear and sunny Saturday morning, and I can already see lots of people walking along the beach. As it gets warmer through the day I know there will be crowds on the boardwalk by the time I venture out. A swimmer gives wide berth to the fishermen on the rocks as he splashes around the jetty and heads toward the beach. It's too windy, or maybe too early, for the volleyball and matqot players to be out, but I heard them on the beach late last night and expect to see them gather again this afternoon. This is the brief weekend here, Friday afternoon and Saturday. Tomorrow is the start of the work week, and we're expecting several days of rain to begin in the morning. 

Tomorrow is also the start of the university "Fall" semester here, on the final day of 2023. My daughter is all settled into her dorm and enjoyed a Friday dinner with her new roommates last night. She is happy, and eager to begin classes tomorrow, finally. As for me, after my trip to the south I've found it difficult to get back into writing this week, though I have responded to a number of overdue emails and have been reading a lot. I've also started the long and tedious (much longer and more tedious than I had anticipated) process of moving to a new blog site, which hopefully I'll be able to finish soon (stay tuned). 

Being in the south was interesting for a lot of reasons. Although Israel is a tiny country, there are definitely different feelings and flavors to each of the cities. Be'er Sheva is a fiery mix of Muslim and Jewish religious conservative communities alongside left-wing academics and peace activists centered around the university. I have never seen so many different kinds of Muslims and Jews in the same place, of all different races and cultures, with diverse clothing and headgear articulating their specific religious brands -- not even in Jerusalem. I had coffee with a colleague of mine who teaches at BGU and was fascinated to hear her impressions of being a female faculty member teaching in an environment with such a strikingly vast religious and cultural spectrum among faculty, staff, and students. 

We sat outside a busy coffee shop, surrounded by Israelis of all ages. A group of male and female soldiers appeared and stretched the line-up to the sidewalk. Around us we heard mostly Hebrew, but also Arabic, English, and a smattering of French. Occasionally the chatter was interrupted by the noise of a military helicopter, which my colleague explained was likely flying the injured troops from Gaza to the nearby hospital on the BGU campus. She said they could hear the helicopters every day, and also often the bombing at night from her house in a gated community about 20 km north of the city. She said sometimes the walls shake. 

But what left the most lasting, and sobering, impression on me was my journey out of the city, on my way back north. I knew of course that Be'er Sheva was close to Gaza, but last time I left the city I was not really focused on the map or on the sights along the way (see my October 8th entry). And I hadn't realized quite how closely the road going north was flanked by Gaza on the left and the West Bank on the right. Here's a map of this leg of my trip so you can see for yourselves -- note the scale of about an inch (on my screen anyway) being equivalent to 10 km.

Seeing it on the map, and really paying attention for the first time to how surrounded the southern cities, villages, and farming communities are by the two Palestinian enclaves, was frankly scary. It's not that I was unaware of the geography (in fact I'll confess that I know the geography of Israel better than that of Canada or the US, which I'll chalk up to an occupational perk); it's rather that the terrifying breach of that dotted line on October 7th and the ensuing savagery starkly highlights the extreme vulnerability of that entire region of Israel to being quickly overrun by rampaging murderers. Being in the city of Be'er Sheva felt like ... being in a city. There's a false sense of security in being embedded among buildings, roads, residential areas, marketplaces, gardens, playgrounds, hospitals, and schools. It feels civilized, and safe. October 7th took that away, and the ongoing unrest in the West Bank, along with the continued discoveries of weapons arsenals and plans for a similar breach there, would make even the most left wing ideologue or peace activist (the majority of the residents of the areas overrun on October 7th) uneasy.

I re-read this and think of my relatives who follow this blog, so I'll quickly add that my daughter is in a dorm that has a safe room literally 5 steps from her own bedroom, in a gated and guarded community that can only be accessed with the proper ID (and sometimes a bag search as well). The university is also gated and anyone coming into the grounds goes through metal detectors, bag searches, and security guards who closely scrutinize each piece of your ID. That is, in fact, the reality at all of the Israeli universities, and has been for decades. And, as in all of the cities in Israel, wherever you are in the city, you are bound to see armed and uniformed soldiers and police officers walking around among the rest of the population (many of whom are now also armed). I can't say that I don't wish the University of Haifa had an exchange program arrangement with her home university in Canada so that she could have attended here instead of there, but I've made peace with my daughter being there; and given the concentration of the Israeli army in and around Gaza and the West Bank right now, I know she's as safe as possible. But when this war is over, I do wonder how safe the regular residents of the region will feel about staying there.

As for the drive back, well, obviously I'm aware of the war, the bombings, the daily tally of dead Israeli troops and the daily claims from Hamas about how many civilians have been "indiscriminately murdered" by the IDF. But driving out of the city, it was still jarring to be so close to it. I could see clouds of smoke rising from Gaza in the distance. Bottlenecks on the highway were formed periodically by caravans of 16-wheelers transporting damaged tanks and ATVs northward, and as I looked at them and saw the bullet-holes and other signs of heavy use on them, I couldn't help but imagine the young men -- same age as my children -- who had been inside them, who were injured, or who had died fighting in them. It was strange to me that as close as I've been to this war in my head, it had still seemed somehow far enough away from my spot here on the Mediterranean, watching the kayaks -- now stand-up paddle-boarders -- that it was something happening "over there." But then driving alongside tanks, with helicopters overhead and smoke in the distance, I thought of the soldiers at the coffee shop I had just left. I thought about them all the way to Jerusalem. I'm still thinking about them.