Kiryat Shmona is Israel’s New Orleans

The rights and wrongs of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict don’t amount to very much when ordinance is falling on one’s head. This is obvious in theory, but the people of the town of Kiryat Shmona have first hand experience going back years. Living on the Israel-Lebanon border, they are in the cross hairs of any exchange of fire. About 80% of the town’s population has left, and all that remain are the poor, just like New Orleans last year.

Only the painfully naïve would think that civilian casualties of war can be eliminated. The fog of war results in mistakes, and mistakes that involve explosives rarely end happily. However, the odds for a civilian improve once he or she leaves the front-line. Taking refuge elsewhere is a good idea; the word “refugee” means a person seeking (and finding, one hopes) refuge. Governments dislike the word, conjuring up as it does images of starving (usually black) people in some wind-swept desert lined up for a bowl of millet gruel. Other words are employed, such as “evacuee.”

By whatever name, one of the primary duties of government is to get its civilian population out of harm’s way. After all, governments were created to provide for the common defense, among other things. Besides, a nation’s military has a much freer hand to deal out death and destruction if the people dying are on the other side. The Israeli government has really failed the folks in Kiryat Shmona in this conflict.

As this stupid and inevitable stalemate enters week number five, there are still 4,000 or so of the town's 22,000 residents who haven’t left. On Monday, 160 rockets fell on northern Israel, more than half in and around the town. Those with the means to leave have gone. Those without have been under attack for about a month now.

With almost Bush-like ambivalence for the people it is supposed to protect, the Israeli government has finally announced that those still in town (and another 13,000 in nearby towns and villages) are going to get . . . a four-day holiday paid for by the state. It isn’t an evacuation, but rather a “refreshment” according to the government. The “refreshment” is supposed to start today, but details have yet to be worked out. Kiryat Shmona Mayor Chaim Barbibai owes it to his town to ask Prime Minister Olmert, “what happens after the refreshment?” That is an easier question to answer than, “why did you leave the poor in a war zone for a month?”

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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