In the Wilderness

Toxic Fire from Gazans Burning Tires Along Israel's Border

This week’s Torah portion is Bamidbar, which translates as ‘in the wilderness.’ It’s also the name of the fourth of the five books of the Torah:  in Jewish circles it’s called ‘Bamidbar’ because that’s the first distinctive word in the book, while in wider circles it’s called ‘Numbers,” because its opening theme is a census taken of the Israelite men for the purpose of organizing them into an army.

There have been moments during the past week when I’ve found it easy to feel as if I’m wandering ‘in the wilderness,’ even though I live in Ashqelon, a relatively modern city of a quarter-million or so inhabitants, with all the conveniences and entertainments of such.

Ashqelon is situated just a few kilometers north of the Gaza Strip, that brooding presence down the coast that we don’t feel very often except when their dumping of raw sewage into the Mediterranean Sea at times of a northward drift, results in the closing of the beaches here.

There was a time, some 25 years ago, when the presence of Gaza was much more constantly felt here in Ashqelon.  After the First Gulf War, known as Operation Desert Storm, and the end of the (first) Intifada, one would see Gaza-registered trucks out on the north-south highway just outside Ashqelon, bringing Gaza agricultural products to Israeli markets or carrying consumer goods from the port of Ashdod to Gaza’s markets.  One would also see busses and minibuses full of workers heading to jobs in Israel’s center.  On Clara’s moshav, just outside Ashqelon, there were a number of day-workers from Gaza, hired to tend to the agricultural crops in the village as most of the Jewish inhabitants were working outside the village.  Clara’s father had Gazan workers tending to his lands, while he and Clara’s brothers occupied themselves in trucking.  At Barzilai, the hospital in Ashqelon, there were always patients who had been brought in from Gaza, whose hospitals did not offer the same level of care.  I remember once visiting Clara in the intensive care unit where she worked; she was in the middle of processing three Gazans who had been brought there after being hurt in a car accident.  While Clara worked on one patient, he muttered: “We’re terrorists.” Clara’s response was a humorous “Oh, shut up and roll over.” (So that she could stick a needle in his butt to deliver antibiotics to prevent infection.)

After the Oslo Agreements, when the Gazans and West Bankers joined to form the Palestinian National Council, the nascent Palestinian legislature, we used to see many cars with the distinctive ‘PNC’ registrations, moving freely on the Israeli highways between the two PNC-ruled enclaves.  It was a heady time, full of promise for a future of live-and-let-live.

After the outbreak of the ‘Al Aqsa Intifada’ in 2000, and several terror attacks in Israel by documented Gazan workers, there were far fewer allowed to enter Israel.  After Ariel Sharon’s unilateral pull-out from Gaza, and the Hamas takeover of the Strip, one stopped seeing PNC traffic passing by.  In the years since, there is almost no day-to-day evidence of the presence of Gaza so close, apart from the aforementioned sewage alerts, the occasional siren warning of an incoming missile from the Strip, or the sound of military aircraft flying south along the coast to attack some Hamas military installation in response to missile attacks against Israel.

These past few weeks, with the recurring riots on the Gaza border fence and the army’s responses to keep the Gazans on the Gaza side, so close to where I live, but with the only real hint of it the storm of reports in the news, life has continued normally here in Ashqelon in a manner that could almost be called surreal.  On Fridays, when the riots regularly reach a crescendo of violence, we keep our ears glued to the radio for hourly updates, or repeatedly open news websites on our mobiles, to check into what’s happening.  We’re not directly threatened by the mobs trying to cross the border, as are the inhabitants of the handful of kibbutzim and moshavim adjacent to the border fence.  We imagine that life, for those Israelis, is far more angst-filled these days.  Yet, most would hardly think of picking up and moving farther from the border; why let a terrorist-controlled mob dictate to them where they should live?

So, it’s been easy to imagine oneself as living in a surreal wilderness, maintaining as normal a life as possible while, just out of sight and hearing, thousands of IDF soldiers steel themselves for the regular onslaught of rioters trying to breach the fence and enter Israeli territory by any means possible, to slaughter any Israelis they can reach – as is their oft-stated aim.

But even more surreal, is the reaction of so much of the world’s news media, and many of the world’s governments, in particular to the events of this past Monday.  On the same day that the United States held a ceremony, officially opening its new embassy in Jerusalem, 62 Gazans were killed in clashes with the IDF.  The New York Daily News, on its front page, juxtaposed images of Ivanka Trump, participating in the ceremony, with the image of a cloud of tear gas wafting over violent rioters on the Gaza border, with the headline ‘Daddy’s Little Ghoul’ (a pun on ‘girl,’ just in case you didn’t get it), and reported that the two images were taken simultaneously ‘a few miles apart.’  The ridiculous implication was that the celebrants in Jerusalem could be aware of what was happening at the same time in Gaza, some 60 kilometers as the crow flies from Jerusalem, when we in Ashqelon – only about 10 kilometers away – could not!

Perhaps even worse was the (UK) Daily Mirror’s spread about the death of an eight-month-old baby girl, Lila, drawing readers to pictures of her ‘angelic face’ while lower on the page, it reported that she’d been killed by inhaling tear gas when it wafted into a ‘protest tent’ only meters from the border.  The question of why parents would bring an eight-month-old toddler to a violent riot aside, the press knocks the IDF for not making better use of ‘non-lethal’ means; but when they do use ‘non-lethal’ means, as tear gas, for adults, is nothing more than a mild irritant – I know this first hand, from training in the military – they still get painted as the devil incarnate because someone negligently brought a toddler to what amounts to a war zone.

Additionally, I would question whether it truly was Israeli tear gas, or the toxic and carcinogenic smoke from Gazans burning tires to mask their approaches to the border, that killed the girl.  This question seems to have completely escaped the Daily Mirror's report.

While European leaders are busy condemning Israel for protecting its border from violent infiltrations, they are completely ignoring the open pronouncements of Hamas, who claim that 50 of the 60 killed on Monday were their own fighters, and who have very openly proclaimed that the rioters are a cover for getting their operatives inside Israel.

It is, to me, a continual reminder that despite the urban infrastructure surrounding me, I live bamidbar – in a wilderness where rationality gets completely buried in the service of an anti-Israel orthodoxy that defies all reason.  So, it is a good thing that I also live in Numbers – in a time when the proud State of Israel regularly musters its young men and women into a strong army, standing ready to protect my neighbors and me from this menace which would kill me and obliterate my adopted land.