Written by 5:26 pm Blogs, Camels Abroad

Guns N’ Roses

“Sorry it went straight to voicemail,” he said. “A Grad missile hit the city today so the cell phone lines are going crazy.”

No problem. A Grad missile. Cousin to the Qassam rocket, gift package from the Gaza Strip. My plans for the weekend in Be’er Sheva, in the desert area of Israel, were casually prefaced by a propelled explosive. Luckily, the missile only caused damage to inanimate objects and the IDF responded the next day with some incredibly vague attack in Gaza that I know nothing else about.

“So I’ll pick you up at the train station tomorrow then,” said my friend, Sagi.

“Oh yeah…right,” I said. Back to normal, I suppose.

Sagi grew up on a small moshav (settlement) 40 minutes outside of Be’er Sheva where he now goes to school with other 20-something-year-olds who are out of the army. We spent Shabbat (the Sabbath) on the moshav with his family and the weekend largely consisted of hookah and the army. The Hazan family has adopted a lone American soldier from Minnesota a year younger than myself. Seven people at the dinner table were either in the army, fresh out, or watching their children walk through it. A part of Israeli life that is so foreign to me. Sitting there with my Californian friend Talia, already a year away from our first degree while Israelis our age are still busy serving their country. We’re so far ahead and simultaneously so far behind.

On the bus on the way back from Be’er Sheva, several soldiers were traveling with us, presumably on their way back to their bases. That’s a group of green-clad boot-wearing young men and women chillin’ in the middle of public transportation with fat guns in their laps. A passage I wrote for a free-write assignment in my creative writing class here at Tel Aviv U:

His smile was goofy and his uniform was worn and rolled. A cell phone in his hands displayed someone’s Facebook profile and he quickly scrolled down the page, goofy smile. A friend in matching uniform passed over an iSomething and so began the most careless game of FruitNinja I have ever experienced. His swollen fingers shot across the screen sporadically slicing melons and oranges. I wanted to lean over, tell him it really only takes one fatal blow to get each piece of produce, not thirty. Without that smile I would have thought it was a violent game. In between each swipe of the finger, he adjusted the position of the machine gun between his legs that stared at the ceiling of the bus. This was no ninja, no child, but an IDF soldier.

Ignore my sketchy photography skills and here is the normal scene. Every bag of every stranger walking into any public space in this country must be hand-checked by security. But a soldier can walk through anything with a weapon longer than my torso. The trust among these people is visible, almost tangible. These are young people with old roots and values that they carry visibly under the berets clipped to their shoulders and caked in the soles of their heavy boots.

Now, after accidentally leaving the flash on my camera and creeping on his game of FruitNinja, this particular soldier started peeking at me. There is something very strange about staring into the eyes of a man holding a gun.

ROSES from KASSAM

When we first arrived at Sagi’s moshav, he took us across the street to his neighbor’s place for an incredibly moving experience. Yaron Bob is a well known “war and peace” artist and just so happens to live ten seconds from Sagi’s door. He is a blacksmith who spent the beginning of his career teaching an art class for kids at a local school on how to transform a fork into anything. No joke: he made me a snail and a bracelet with one pair of pliers and three minutes of time.

Now, Yaron focuses his work on using the metal from locally landed Kassam rockets to make roses of various designs. I touched the remains of a rocket that was launched into Be’er Sheva and is now used as a vase for roses Yaron creates. Yes–I hijacked this picture from Google because I didn’t want to offend Yaron by snapping photos in his workshop.

In other news, Yaron’s work is owned by several celebrities including President Obama. Each piece states what date the rocket landed and is authentically certified. I asked him where he gets them from and he told me the local police happily supplies him with the rockets. And he admitted sometimes he butters them up with some roses. Fun fact: the day I was there, Yaron made a deal with an international organization to make authentic costumes for an upcoming old-school Camelot-style battle reenactment. I got to feel the chain mail.

ON the BORDER

It was a foggy day, but imagine you have superhuman vision. Look past the dense sky and you’ll see what I tried to see. Welcome to the Gaza Strip:


I was less than 3 kilometers away. Standing on the top of a monument dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the Six Day War in 1967, I could see the border of Gaza and simultaneously the border of Egypt. But it wasn’t what I was seeing that kept me up there despite my more-serious-than-I-realized fear of heights; it was who I was seeing it with. Eran, just a few years older than myself has been done with his army service for a few years now. After casually picking up a 15 yr old hitchhiker, he rolled up his sleeve while making more room for us in the back and that’s when I saw the scar. He was shot in the arm while fighting in Gaza.

Eran walked slowly ahead through the beautiful memorial. I made sure to look at each and every pillar. The pieces of metal that decorate the pillars are all remnants of tanks that took part in the Six Day War.

It’s what I discovered that weekend. What we normally view as unseeable, intangible things are so apparent here. I can touch the history; I can feel the trust, tradition and connection that all seem to stem from this visible entity of the Israel Defense Force. Those who’ve been through it, those in support of it, those praying for it. All my life I’ve grown up inserting a prayer for Israeli soldiers into formal services. Here it’s just casual conversation. Or sitting on a bus next to an armed teenager.

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