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Living Under A Rocket: Life In Israel

You drive down the same old highway, looking at the same old signs and the same old stores. Suddenly, a rocket slams into the highway, shattering your normalcy with a sobering dose of reality.
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Close your eyes for a minute. Imagine a normal, ordinary day in your life. You wake up, put on your suit, have a cup of coffee, read the morning paper, say good bye to the wife and kids and start your car. Normal right?

You drive down the same old highway, looking at the same old signs and the same old stores. Suddenly, a rocket slams into the highway, shattering your normalcy with a sobering dose of reality.

If you live in Israel, this is your daily reality. This year alone, there were over 500 rocket attacks and counting. And this was not "warfare" or attacks targeted against the Israeli military. Schools, Hospitals, Roads, Temples and Movie Theaters are all targets. It's terrorism, in the classic sense of the word.

On October 17th, a rocket slammed into a kindergarten in a small town. Luckily, there was no one in the school at the time. But imagine for a moment this was a school in Sarnia, or Taber, or Abbottsford. Imagine your child was at the school. Imagine getting the call, saying the poor child was a victim.

Five hundred attacks is a huge number. If 500 rockets were fired at Vancouver, or Toronto, what would the news be like? Front Page no doubt. An endless parade of experts, commentators, exposes, media packages. Tel Aviv, a city of almost half a million people, is the subject of dozens of these attacks.

And yet the silence of the media in this war is staggering. I actually had to look up Israeli News sources for the information here. Not a peep is heard from the western news. Why is that?

A big part has to do with the inherent bias of the left wing media. The anti Semitic and anti Zionist crowds love to paint Israel as the villain in the decades-old conflict. It matters not that rockets fired by terrorists kill innocent Israeli children, but when a Palestinian child is run over while trying to blow up a tank, all hell breaks loose. It seems, in the media's eyes, Israel can't defend its people from their enemies, but the enemies may valiantly struggle against the evil Zionists.

And history gives us another reason for silence. The Troubles in Northern Ireland scarred two generations of families. People in that conflict were killed weekly, but besides the occasional spectacular scene of violence, it was rare to see a headline outside of Ireland. The world allowed the killings to become routine, and not worthy of attention.

Is violence ever routine? If you ran the risk of being killed each time you stepped outside the family home, would you call that routine?

For the Israeli people, it has. That nation has been at war, almost since its inception. And even while no conventional wars are fought, there is always the ever present specter of terrorists ready to strike. And yet, to their credit, the Israeli people don't cower in fear. They live their daily lives, on guard, but not in fear. They have placed their trust in the government and the military to protect them. There can be no argument that the IDF is one of, if not the most skilled and capable military forces in the world. Using the skills they have acquired over 40 years of almost unceasing warfare, they have protected the Israeli people from being totally destroyed by people hell bent on seeing that conclusion. The Israeli government remains steadfast in confronting any potential adversaries, and they realize that not even a single mistake can be made.

I remember 9/11. There was a worldwide feeling of coming together to support the healing of a terrible tragedy. Everyone came to help out the Americans as they suffered through to fight back against the enemy.

Where is the coming together for Israel? Is it because we hate them? Is it because we don't care because it happens all the time? Is it because we just don't understand what living under a rocket must be like?

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