The effects of the Lebanon War

Hiking in the Upper Galilee, there are many raw and disturbing reminders of the war with Lebanon last summer.

On our way to one hiking trail, we passed a town that had been particularly hard-hit by Ketusha rockets. As we passed through, the tour guide pointed out a home that had been destroyed while a family was eating dinner; a child was killed. Once out on the trail, we passed an entire side of a mountain where the trees had pretty much been wiped out by rocket fire. Nearby was a military tower, which the Hezbollah attackers had been trying to hit (unsuccessfully).

The war has receded from the memory of most Americans, but it is still, not so surprisingly, widely talked about here -- and with a great deal of passion. For the daylong hike I missed due to my headcold and migraine, I couldn't return to Haifa using an intercity bus because it was Shabbat and public transportation shuts down. So instead, I hung out with the driver of our privately hired bus, who was a 34-year-old descendent of Polish and Romanian refugees.

Ehud recounted for me in vivid detail what it had been like to have rockets literally whizzing over his home outside Haifa, and his pessimism that Israel's Arab neighbors will ever stop trying to destroy them. "We have enemies on all sides of us, and all they want is to see us sink in the sea," he told me. "They will never be happy until we are all dead."

Like all Israeli men, Ehud served his mandatory three years in the Army, where he was a truck driver; then he served in the compulsory Reserves service one month out of the year. He was released from that duty a few years ago due to some kind of hip injury I didn't have the Hebrew skills to understand.

Ehud said that despite his years of military service, the war last year was terribly scary to live through. "Anyone who says he wasn't afraid is lying," he concluded.

As for the Haifa ulpan, the students were evacuated to Jerusalem after only four or five days of classes last summer. Many of the students here this summer were here last summer when this happened, and had either completed the ulpan in Jerusalem or gone home. They were back to try and give the Haifa program another try. The ulpan administrators were proud to report during the welcoming orientation that the enrollment this year is actually as high as it was last year -- which was a welcome surprise.

Apparently the same cannot be said about the effects of the war on tourism in general. Our tour guide in the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv, who has been a guide in Israel for over 30 years, had to take a job teaching English a few years ago when the latest Intifada broke out and tourists stayed away. He couldn't get enough work. Tourism was just starting to rebound when the war with Lebanon broke out, he said.

"The overall numbers are way down from what they were last summer," he told us. "If you look around this museum here, it's dead, there's almost no one here. This isn't just happening at this museum -- it's happening everywhere."