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Posted by Mirjam Bruck-Cohen on August 5, 2006, 11:12 am
Thank you Joan
it is Saturday , Shabat and the rockets are falling , and on some
other places people debate our right to live here , now . In this
country that Collected so many JEWISH refugees , from many countries,
where they were in danger as Jews,,, and here under falling rockets we
all feel Safer than in other countries .... becuase here there is
somebody to deffend us.
mirjam
>To All RCTY members.
>This is where our Mirjam lives, let's keep her in our prayers.
>Joan
>
>
>A dotted line of destruction: Haifa again city under siege
>By Rachelle G. Cohen
>Friday, August 4, 2006 - Updated: 01:34 AM EST
>
>HAIFA, Israel - On this day they were just red dots on a map - 36 of
>them - each marked a direct rocket hit within Israel's third largest
>city.
>
> In the command and control center in an underground bunker
>adjoining city hall, the map told the cold, hard story of what this
>city and its people had endured in the past three weeks. Green dots
>were rockets that landed just outside the city limits. And the blue
>dots showed where Hezbollah's Katyushas landed in the Mediterranean.
>
> "We stopped counting those after a while," a city official
>conceded.
>
> A hit on the train maintenance depot had claimed eight lives. The
>windows on one side of B'Nai Zion Medical Center are gone. A
>courthouse is damaged. Much of this goes unreported on the theory that
>it only helps increase Hezbollah's accuracy.
>
> At an apartment building in one of the city's poorer sections
>where 10 people were injured (the sole fatality was attributed to a
>heart attack), repairs were already under way - walls being plastered,
>glass replaced.
>
> "A week from now you won't know it was hit," said Yossi
>Gluzman of the Haifa-Boston Partnership program and my guide for the
>day.
>
> Pock-marked walls can be repaired. Other scars won't be so easy
>to erase.
>
> In a garage two stories under a shopping mall dozens of children
>are coloring or making gimp bracelets or watching an "elf." He
>re-enacts a rocket attack, hiding under a chair and in doing so he
>allows children who haven't had much to laugh about lately to laugh
>at their own fears.
>
> The shelter is staffed by city workers, soldiers and psychologists
>from the University of Haifa. They help mothers who accompany the
>younger children to deal with the emotional fallout of being a city
>under siege.
>
> "I'm very afraid," says the styled script of one drawing.
>"I want to have peace on my country." Another is simply a drawing
>of a dove and the word peace in both Hebrew and Arabic - not unusual in
>this comfortably diverse city.
>
> Sandy, 13, and her younger brother are Arab.
>
> "Here it feels safer," she says. "But I hear the [air raid]
>sirens. Three days they are quiet, but I hear them still."
>
> Her parents are home. "They don't work now," she explains.
>"Nobody works now."
>
> On this day some shops and cafes have decided to open, taking
>advantage of a 48-hour lull in the fighting. Locals run out to do some
>marketing. But a large McDonald's remains closed and traffic is
>light.
>
> Many have fled to the south - out of range of the Katyushas, they
>hope. They stay with family or with strangers - daily the Jerusalem
>Post runs notices from families offering to share their homes with
>those fleeing the rockets landing in the north.
>
> "Everyone I know is hosting someone from up north," says Miri
>Eisen, a former colonel in the Israeli military who next week will
>become the government's official spokesperson.
>
> She estimates that about 100,000 have fled towns in northern
>Israel.
>
> "We don't call them refugees," she adds.
>
> "But life is in limbo. A million and a half Israelis can't go
>to work. A million and a half Israelis are living underground," she
>says. This nation which has spent decades under siege is well prepared.
>
>
> "I don't feel I have to apologize for our lack of
>casualties," Eisen adds.
>
> It is just 24 hours after the Israeli attack on Qana in Lebanon
>claimed more than 28 lives, many of them children.
>
> "How do you fight a terrorist who puts a kid in front of him?"
>she says.
>
> Still she admits Israel's military campaign can't sustain
>"another Qana" and the attendant international pressure - and
>domestic too - it would bring.
>
> By Wednesday Hezbollah rockets are again falling on the north -
>some 200 of them. This time there won't be room for all the dots -
>red, green, blue.
>
> And the sirens that haunt the dreams of children will once again be
>real.
>
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