Sunday, July 30, Connecticut Post
Living in a war zone
Ex-residents, kin detail terror in everyday lives, fear for those left behind
With the conflict raging in the Middle East poised to enter its fourth week, people with ties to the Bridgeport area report on life in a war zone. Their stories examine the conflict from a variety of perspectives. A resident of an Israeli kibbutz talks about sheltering refugees from the missile attacks in the north. A Housatonic Community College teacher recalls the horror of the 1986 bombing of Beirut. A Trumbull man visiting the West Bank witnesses a shootout on the streets of Ramallah. A visitor to Israel attends the funeral of the victim of a Hezbollah missile attack. Some wear their politics on their sleeve; others just want the violence to end. Their reports depict the horror of war. But they also serve as reminders that even in wartime, life goes on.
STAFF REPORTS
On the day in 1976 that Mona Mitri was born, bombs fell on Beirut.
"My father was trapped at work by the bombing," says the 30-year-old woman as she relaxes on a plush couch in the living room of her Trumbull home. "My brothers and sisters were at school. A neighbor finally drove my mom to the hospital."
In the end, the birth went smoothly and everybody, including little Mona, got home safely. It was just another vicious day of bombing and death in 15-year long Lebanese Civil War that lasted from 1975 until 1990.
But it was an oddly appropriate way for Mitri to be ushered into the world.
For the next 12 years, bombing and death would be as much a part of her life as playing games in the street are to most kids.
Mitri's family lived in East Beirut. She had three brothers and three sisters. Her grandfather was murdered by the PLO for being Christian.
"I had no childhood," she says. "We were always running downstairs into shelters to escape the bombs, or if we were tired of running, we hid in the hallways of our apartment," she says.
It's impossible for Mitri to pick out the worst day among 12 years of terrible days, but she recalls a day when she was 9 or 10 that the phone rang as her mother, Hela, was making Jell-O for her brother.
"Someone said that my brother's school was bombed and there were many deaths and injuries. My parents rushed to the school to search for my brother. It turned out he was the only survivor from his whole class. His teacher let him leave the room to get a Coke just before the bomb hit."Fear was the constant.
"I was always scared, but I never knew anything different. You learned to know the sound of the bombs. They sounded like 'vizzume.' Then you waited for the impact. If you heard it you knew you were OK."As if the bombs and snipers weren't enough, there were also constant shortages of food, water and electricity.
"You had to know someone to get bread or gas for the car," she says. "My father was a carpenter, so he built a big water storage tank in our house."
During the years of the Civil War, Mitri's parents rarely allowed the family to sleep under one roof. "They stashed us at various relatives' and friends' houses so if a bomb hit, not all of us would die."
One day in 1989, a bomb hit the house of the family's Muslin neighbors, killing both their sons.
"That was it for my father," she says. "He told us all to get ready to go. In a few days were on a fast boat headed for Cyprus in the dark of night."
After a few months on the Mediterranean island, the family departed for Canada, where an uncle agreed to sponsor their emigration.
For Mitri, Canada was a revelation.
"I couldn't believe there was a place in the world with no bombs and no snipers. I was 12 went I went there, but I felt much older."
But there were scars.
Once when relatives took her to see the huge Montreal Fireworks Festival, Mitri burst out crying and begged to go home. The booms of the fireworks were the bombs of her childhood.
Mitri adapted well to her new world, however, excelling in schools because, she says, the Catholic schools she attended in Beirut were far more difficult that the Canadian schools.
It was there she met her husband, Antoine, a software engineer, also Lebanese. The couple came to the U.S. and now have a 3-year-old son, Tony. Mitri teaches French at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport.
As for the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, Mitri say she is on the side of the civilians, who are suffering the most. "It's always the civilians who die when others countries and groups use Lebanon as their playground for war."
"I love my life here in the U.S.," she says, "For a long time I refused to go back to Lebanon. But as conditions seemed to be getting better there I planned a trip for this year. Then the war came again." — charles walsh
They started coming as soon as Hezbollah began firing missiles into Israel, refugees from cities like Haifa desperately seeking a safe haven.
For many, the Kibbutz Ketura, a remote settlement in the southern Israeli desert, was a perfect fit. And for David Lehrer, an Israeli and American citizen, there was never a question about whether to open the doors.
"We have been absorbing refugees from the north,"Lehrer said last week during a phone interview from his Ketura home.
"They have been driven out of their homes by missiles; 100 fall every day. There were 70 today. The neighbors who are not running away are living in bomb shelters," he said.
A dual American and Israeli citizen, Lehrer lives in a communal settlement on the outskirts of Israel, far from the Hezbollah missiles. His sister, Debbie, lives in Fairfield.
Lehrer said that during a recent turn at guard duty — members of the settlement watch the gate at night for thieves and others who might want to cause trouble — a car pulled in around midnight.
"It was a young couple with a new baby. They asked for rooms and we put them in a guesthouse. People are taking a seven- and eight-hour drive looking for a safe haven. They can't find a hotel, so we find them a place to stay," Lehrer said.
He estimated that the series of settlements, which normally house about 2,000 people, now hold more than 3,000.
Lehrer and his wife, Barbara, have three daughters. The middle daughter is serving her mandatory stint in the Israeli army along the Jordan border; the oldest is married, and a 12-year-old still lives at home.
The family resides in an apartment within the settlement. They share income, cars and other items with the 350 to 400 permanent members. Only personal items are theirs.
Lehrer is director of the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies, which works with Israelis, Arabs and Palestinians to find solutions to environmental problems in the Middle East. In his academic world, Jews, Arabs from Jordan and Palestinians work together and believe in a common ground.
But the world outside is rapidly changing, and Lehrer wonders if it will affect his work. He knows the toll it's taking on his country.
"It's frustrating. It takes years to build trust and it takes only a few incidents for that trust to break down. We need a new way of looking at these things."
"It's amazing what he does," said Debbie Goldstein, Lehrer's sister, who works as a teacher's aide in Fairfield.
"He's safe where he is, but I worry about my niece, who is in the army. A lot of kids are being killed. I'm pretty sick about the situation," Goldstein said.
She said a friend's daughter is also in the Israeli army. "I think Israel is doing the business of the rest of the world. It's this tiny little country that all it wants is to live in peace. As my husband says, Hezbollah are 'cowards hiding behind a woman's skirt,' " Goldstein said.
Back in Israel, Lehrer said he's disappointed at the failure of the international community to follow U.N. mandates and disarm Hezbollah. Israel, too, he noted, did nothing as terrorists armed along the border.
The missiles being fired into Israel are particularly frightening because they are so unpredictable. "In Haifa, bombs fell on a garage and people were killed. You don't know when it will happen."
Asked if Israel's response is appropriate, Lehrer said the country had to fight back. "On the other hand, we feel there is a better way. I work with Jordanians and Palestinians. The overwhelming majority recognize that Israel is here to stay. They know the only way for progress is peace. I don't think the leadership is getting it yet. They are more concerned about staying in power."
"The answer to terrorists is not Homeland Security and military force. It's getting at haves and have-nots," Lehrer said.
— BILL CUMMINGS
John Sakakini went to the West Bank city of Ramallah to visit family and study Arabic.
But with chaos spreading in the Middle East, the 19-year-old Trumbull native also got an education about the strife plaguing the region.
Last month he witnessed a full-scale gun battle that ensued after Israeli forces entered the West Bank, apparently to make an arrest, and met resistance. Corresponding by e-mail, he offers the following account, presented in full but lightly edited:
"I was sitting in my uncle's house checking my e-mail, when I started to hear gunshots. First I thought nothing of it, but the shooting became louder and more often. I looked out the window to see the light from gunshots close by.
"After things became too much for the undercover soldiers to handle. They called for backup, and that was when Israeli military Jeeps came and a full gunfight ensued. "The Israeli soldiers ended up killing the person, shooting him in the head multiple times in the middle of the street. During that time I had no idea what was going on but I could see people running for cover and screaming.
"In about an hour it was all over and the Israelis left Ramallah and the Palestinians were left to pick up the pieces. The sad part is this is not a rare occurrence."
His story could not immediately be confirmed via contemporary media accounts.
Sakakini arrived in Ramallah on June 6. A student of Middle Eastern studies at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., he enrolled in a summer Arabic program at Ramallah's Birzeit University.
On June 27, he was joined by his mother, Samar, 44, a social studies teacher at Hillcrest Middle School in Trumbull, and his sister, Haneen, 16, a Trumbull High Student.
His father, Khalil, an engineer who is active with the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, remained home in Trumbull.
As Christian Arabs [they're members of St. Nicholas Antiochan Orthodox Church on Park Avenue in Bridgeport], the Sakakinis also have friends and family in Lebanon, where Islamist Hezbollah guerillas have been locked in a fierce conflict with the Israeli Defense Force for nearly three weeks.
John Sakakini said he has been following the violence in Lebanon, as well as the Gaza Strip, on Al Jazeera television. He said that while he doesn't condone Hezbollah's kidnapping of Israeli soldiers or rocket attacks on Israel, he believes Israel's full-scale assault on Lebanon is "disproportionate."
"Palestinians were outraged over the escalations of Israeli attacks against Lebanon and Gaza. They expected the United States and the International community to intervene immediately. People also feel that U.S. media coverage of this crisis is not fair or balanced," he wrote. "Many of these attacks on civilian populations are with U.S. weapons."
Sakakini said in response to the tensions, he and his family moved up their return trip from Aug. 26 to Aug. 18 — mostly to ensure that if the strife delayed their departure, he would not miss the start of classes at Georgetown.
They plan to leave through the airport in Tel Aviv and have a back-up plan to leave through Jordan, he said.
Khalil Sakakini, John's father, said he's frustrated and worried about his family. "Every day I'm practically calling them in the morning, or the afternoon to check on them," he said.
— EDWARD J. CROWDER
Gilboa Ozery blinks back tears as he prayed with the other mourners at his cousin's sparsely attended funeral.
He notices that although his cousin, Rafael Damati, was young, came from a big Israeli family and had a large circle of friends, there are few mourners paying their final respects. Hezbollah missiles have turned Haifa, Israel's normally bustling third-largest city, into a ghost town.
In the midst of the graveside service, an air-raid siren starts to wail. Its message is crystal clear: Take cover now. Mourners slam their bodies to the ground. That's where they stay. Just above the dead, seeking shelter behind tombstones.
Any moment now they expect Hezbollah missiles to thunder down. That's what killed 39-year-old Damati and seven others the day before at Haifa's main train station. The mourners want to avoid being moving targets. So they don't move an inch. They play dead. And they pretend this will protect them.
Nice fiction.
The air-raid sirens scream some more. So they wait for the missiles to come. Two minutes go by. Then a few more pass.
"Eventually, they just got back on their feet and got on with the funeral," recalls Ozery's mother-in-law, Carole Rubin of Fairfield, who recounted the scene after returning from Israel last week. "That's just life for people in Israel."
Two of Rubin's three children, her son, Stephen, and daughter, Ellen Ozery, moved to Israel almost as soon as they became adults. They married there and raised families. Two of Rubin's grandchildren serve in the Israeli army, as their parents did, and a third granddaughter, who just celebrated her 18th birthday, is scheduled to report for duty in a matter of days.
"My son-in-law Gilly has a sister who lives in Haifa. She's sending her three children to her mother in Cleveland," Rubin says. "Her children have spent so much time in this cement shelter" since the missile attacks began. "It's a windowless, boring place and there's only so much time you can spend in those."
Three times a year for the 23 years or so, about as long as her daughter has lived in Israel, Rubin has traveled there to visit family and friends and vacation. She returned from her latest sojourn to Israel days ago, after war between Israel and Lebanon broke out. Rubin came home because her two-week vacation was at an end, not because she cut it short.
"There are a number of student summer programs going on there right now "that are heavily attended by American high school and college students. Some of their itineraries had to be adjusted" to avoid the areas where the missile attacks are, Rubin says, "but very few of them cut short their trips."
On the outskirts of Jerusalem, the four-bedroom, three-story house that Rubin's daughter and son-in-law and their three children call home, is now the temporary lodging place of 15 others. Most of the guests are children sent from their kibbutzim in northern Israel, where the Hezbollah missile attacks are ongoing.
"Haifa is like a ghost town. Practically everybody is gone," Rubin says.
Most every home has a shelter room in it somewhere, she says. "It's a cement-walled room with no windows in it, where you keep the bare essentials like water" and dried food and a battery-powered radio.
Yet life goes on. Gilboa Ozery runs an ATV business in the summer, leading ATV rides through the rolling, sandy terrain outside his town. Lemons grow in the couple's backyard. Teenagers still hang out inside Israeli malls and movie theaters.
"Kids are out and about. The parents seem to give all of them a lot more freedom than kids here have," says Rubin, who teaches Hebrew at Congregation Beth El in Fairfield. "In Israel, kids go out late at night and stay out until all hours. And their parents don't worry about them. They know that they are safe."
In Israel, shoppers are accustomed to having security go through the trunks of their cars when they pull up to a parking garage, or inspect their belongings outside shopping malls.
Yet Rubin worries about her family's well being.
"It's funny, I wasn't so worried about their safety while I was there. But back here, I am," Rubin says. "Why? I've asked myself that question a bunch of times. I just don't have an answer."
— marian gail brown
Fairfield Physician Joel Allen said he believes the current conflict in the Middle East is the most perilous challenge Israel has faced in its 58-year history. But Allen, 60, said he's confident Israel will persevere with help from its closest ally, the United States.
He said he recently heard from his sister, whose son is personal assistant to Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz and recently attended meetings with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice.
"He was very impressed," Allen said. "He thought that she was particularly brilliant."
Allen, who has family and friends scattered across Israel, added that he's heartened by the strong U.S. support.
"I'm so proud to be an American citizen and to see the leadership of the American government and the response and people like Chris Shays and Joe Lieberman," he said. "I feel like this is at this point a special favor from God, or whomever — divine providence — that we have the United States on the side of Israel."
— EDWARD J. CROWDER
Anson C. Smith, Public Relations Coordinator
Housatonic Community College
900 Lafayette Blvd.
Bridgeport, CT 06604
Tel: 203-332-5229, Fax: 203-332-5247
E-mail: asmith@hcc.commnet.edu