........

Ok so not going to think just going to write.

Almost two hours ago two rockets fell on Beer Sheva. Yes, Beer Sheva where I am living and going to school. I was in my room, trying to start my reading when I heard this noise outside and thought, hmmm... I wonder, wonder if that could really be the air raid sirens they told us about. But then I thought, no, they aren't loud enough. But then my roommate knocked on my door and I knew. She was running around. I said, do we stay here or do we go downstairs? (where there is a bomb shelter.) I couldn't remember the time they said we had after the sirens go off before the bombs hit.

Sometimes they say it is better to stay in your room. She said, no, lets go. and pointed to the wall with a window -that wall is where they are coming from. (our rooms face towards Gaza I guess.) Then she ran back to her room to grab her keys. I realized I wasn't wearing shoes. Put my clogs on and grabbed my keys, trying to be more organized like her. Though neither of us were thinking very clearly. She opened the door and ran through, I started to lock it, she said no just come. We ran downstairs, two flights. As we were running, I thought, it's probably a drill. We started running around the courtyard down there but then stopped behind a wall. I asked why and she said, probably safer to stay here than to go all the way to the shelter. Some boys come running excitedly to where we are. Loud, and laughing. Cracking jokes. I felt like cracking jokes too. I also felt like grabbing my roommate.

Then I heard a boom. And another. I looked at her and she said yes. It sounds like they are close. And then I started to grab her and realized everyone else was acting more normally so I didn't. A guy I know in my program comes running wildly by us. I called him and he comes back. He says, I was looking for you. Valiant, sort of, but fool hardy. He had been in the bomb shelter and ran out. His movements were jerky. His voice was jerky. His nerves were shaking his whole body.

Then we heard another boom. It is not as clear as I am making it. I heard the sound but wasn't sure what it was. One guy had cigarrettes and a bunch of people grabbed them. A girl in my program grabbed them immediately. She was standing next to me. It occurs to me now that she had been trying to quit the last three weeks. Had gone weeks cold turkey. But as I turned to go back upstairs I saw her there smoking. Didn't know whether to stay or to go. I went up to my room with my roommate but now I feel bad for leaving her there.
I guess we were all acting more in control than we actually were.

Then went to call my mom and cell phone service was out. The network was too busy. Finally got through.

I can go through the rest but I will stop.
I did not mean to make a big deal out of this, or to drag out the actually process of the whole thing, but that's what happened.

I am still shaky. I pretend that I'm not but the adrenaline was real. I started cooking about half an hour afterwards and realized I was not hungry at all even though I hadn't eaten since noon. It was the adrenaline.

But now for the perspective. I wrote an email yesterday to a friend about what Israel is doing in Gaza and was having trouble.
It is terrible. I think 360 people are dead there now, after only a couple of days. Basically Israel is bombing them, saying they are going for police stations etc, but because everyone lives so close together there, lots of people are getting killed. Plus, police men are people too. (Everyone seems to ignore that).

Life has been going on pretty much as usual here (up until now). It sounds terrible -- that we go to school and party etc. while people only a thirty minute drive away are getting the crap bombed out of them, but I think everyone is aware of it, they just don't talk about it. Well, they do, but not as much as one would think they do from the outside.

I was playing soccer yesterday and my old roommate mentioned the possibility of rockets here. I didn't take the idea seriously. I also didn't say anything but was thinking that it was wrong of us to think about attacks against ourselves when such a full scale bloodbath was being done to the Gazans.

I realize now it is much easier to think like that when one hasn't experienced the sirens or the bombs oneself. And I didn't even experience the bombs. I just heard the noises. I thought it was insensitive of Israelis to talk only about the possibilities of what could happen to us when mentioning "this new development" but now I see they were being realistic. It doesn't mean that what is going on in Gaza isn't much worse than what happened here, it is, but that doesn't change the fact that something did happen here. What was my point? I lost myself.

I want to say, yes, it really is a war here. It is a fucking war. While I was standing in the courtyard of our dorms, behind the big wall, I looked at the Israelis around me, and I thought, I finally get what it's about. It is one thing to say two rockets fell on Beer Sheva, it is another thing to stand outside and listen to them fall. Even though no one died or was even hurt one will always have experienced the feeling of being under attack.
I'm not saying this to legitimize what ISrael does to the Palestinians, only to say that after having had so many Israelis tell me, "you just don't get it" I can finally say I am starting to get it.
I think. I don't know.

My thoughts went to the boy I kept writing about on this blog (DO Not Call). The playboy pretty boy and thought, he lives with this kind of thing? Well, maybe he hasn't yet, but he is now. It's just so hard to think of even the young and immature dealing with stuff like this. But they do. I was standing outside in the courtyard with them -- three guys who were probably only eighteen.

I will go on a bit more. Back in the room with my roommate. She's calling her mom and her friends. She tells me that this was happening in her city this past weekend, where she was. She hadn't mentioned that to me. Can you imagine spending the weekend at home, having bombs falling on you there and not telling your roommates about it afterwards? IT is hard to imagine. And yet, I can tell, that this is far from nothing for her. They live with this and yet they cannot hide that it affects them. My old roommate, the one I play soccer with, called me just now to ask if, for the next alert she can come to my room because she lives above us and her room has huge windows. She said this time she went down three flights of stairs in her slippers and that by the time she got down it was probably past the time for the bomb to have hit.
Her voice sounds different. She sounds more shaken than I am.


Ok. I didn't want to make a big deal about it because here it is not a big deal. It is both a big deal and not a big deal. No one was injured or even hurt by the rockets in Beer Sheva.
But I am trying to imagine bombs landing in Amherst MA or Summit NJ, I just can't. The sense that where you are is not safe, is a very strange sense. Right now I feel safe again, but for a second, after I heard the first boom while standing behind that wall, I felt unsafe.


But, most importantly, and this is what I wanted to get to, Israel is really doing something terrible to the Gazans. Talk about feeling unsafe where you are. There they are not just hearing booms, they are seeing carnage.
I haven't been watching the news (no tv.) and have only gone online a little, and now don't know if I want to but I still know, and I've seen some videos.
From the videos I did see, I will say it is both comforting to see normal streets and stores in Gaza, and gut wrenching to see the blood, debris, and wreckage there too. I say it is comforting because the way Gaza is discussed here, even when it is not being bombed, is as if it were some infectious disease. It is a thing we all try to stay as far away from as possible. I saw "it" from a distance of maybe 100 200 meters this summer, standing on a hill next to the security fence, and still it seemed like a place of booby traps and death, even though I could see the buildings of Gaza city from where I stood.
Why? Because what people tell us clouds what our eyes can see. And all one hears about Gaza is either how they want to destroy Israel, about the rockets coming from there, about the need to build the security fence around them, about ALL the security devices in place around it, so that one feels that even by standing in the sightline of someone in this place, on the other side of the wall, one is in danger of dying.
The old, ultra conservative south african man, who gave us a "tour" of the Gaza border certainly did all he could to make us worry that we were in danger being there.

But in truth people live there, go to school, work, eat pray, same as they do in Israel. Some do send rockets at us, but the rest just live. It is nice to be reminded of that. Because otherwise we just see the place as a huge, seething enemy.


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In other news, and you are going to think this is blase, passe, un important, but for me it is. I have hives or something all over my body. No one seems to give a fuck. I might be vain for worrying about the bumps all over my neck and chest and shoulders, and back, and stomach because I don't want to look like this when I go to a cousin's wedding in two days, but I guess I am vain.
My mom asked me if I wanted to go home after the bomb alert. No I don't want to go home after that. Honestly, the thing that would make me more likely to go home is this feeling I have that I can't take care of myself here and that I don't have anyone here to take care of me. First I was sick. Then the skin on my face was a mess. Then that got better but now this. I keep trying and failing. Finally I went to the doctor about the hives, after two days of telling myself that it was not worth a doctor's visit. I was worried they would see me, and I don't know tell me to stop complaining. I just want someone who will make me ok, so that I don't always feel like I'm sick or something.

Ok, have taken a couple minutes. I am ok. Sorry for the whining. I think I've just developed an allergy to eggs and that's what caused the hives. I am deducing this after looking things up on the internet and from the knowledge that I was eating way way too many eggs the last two weeks. (It was my attempt to get more protein without having to cook meat. OOOOps.) The rash probably won't go away in time for the wedding but that's ok. And I am learning to eat a more balanced diet.

And I am safe.
The end.