From September 1994 to August 1995, I lived in Israel. I was doing an organised program, between school and university, run by the Zionist Movement (or one of its agencies, anyway), for active leaders in Zionist youth movements throughout the world. The way the program works is that different groups send their people to a central study program in Jerusalem for about 4.5 months, and also have a 6.5 month or so program elsewhere in the country, doing community work, with continuity provided by having people from the same groups go to the same areas year after year. I took part in the program under the auspices of AJ6, the Association of Jewish 6th-Formers, originally started as a splinter or spin-off from the Union of Jewish Students, which is a very active national organisation in the UK. So, from September 1994 to February 1995, I lived in Jerusalem, with around 50 other kids, studying 8 hours a day, and from February 1995 to August of that year, I lived in a tiny little moshav (village) called Netuah, right on the Israel-Lebanon border, approximately 20km inland from the Med. It's a beautiful part of the world, if a little rugged, with mostly friendly people - although again, they can be a little rugged. It's green, it's hilly, there are streams, wide vistas, clean air, the most incredible views of the night sky I've even seen - it's nice. When I was there, there was no cable TV in the village, and most people didn't have a satellite dish, and it was before Internet access got universal - although one of the projects I worked on was a regional dial-in network for schools, pupils, teachers and parents - so it was quite isolated, in a good way for us as visitors, but not necessarily so good for locals. Apart from the economic and social issues caused by the isolation, the main problem in the area was terrorism.
One of the things which gets confusing when talking about Israel is what the various lines on the map around her edges (or in some cases outside) actually are, and what they mean. A border is a line drawn on a map between two countries, recognised by those two countries and the 'international community' as a whole - normally in the form of a treaty or other formal agreement between the countries, recognised by the UN. Until 1979, Israel didn't really have any proper borders at all - mainly cease-fire lines, a significant proportion of which weren't even on international boundaries, since Gaza and the West Bank weren't part of any country, but were firstly occupied by Egypt and Jordan (respectively), then by Israel in 1967. With the signing of the peace treaties with Egypt in 1979, then with Jordan in 1994, those countries accepted borders with Israel, and they are now stable and reasonable secure borders, with relatively small, but highly significant, amounts of commercial and tourist travel crossing them. In the north, however, things were, and remain, different.
Israel has, from pretty much the beginning, had a stable border with Lebanon. There are unused border crossings at a couple of points, and one particular location is known as the Good Fence, because in the past things were calm enough there that there was a small amount of informal commerce across it. Without going into the background (now!), in 1970 there was something close to a civil war in Jordan, the result of which was that the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation - an umbrella body covering most of the non-Islamic Palestinian terror/liberation groups, in particular Fatah, the movement of Yasser Arafat, and Mahmoud Abbas) was expelled from its former base in Jordan and ended up relocating in southern Lebanon, a convenient location from which to continue attacking Israel. Lebanon, at the time, was relatively stable, and is unique in the Middle East for being a somewhat democratic, reasonable 'modern' (i.e. Western) and secular, or at least multi-cultural republic. Unfortunately, this fell apart in the mid-1970s, leading to a civil war largely along religious and tribal lines, which was doubtless made worse by the fact that both the Syrian army (in the east) and the Israeli army (in the south) intervened, partly to support those groups they supported, and partly to gain some control over Lebanon for their own purposes. Until 1982, the Israeli army didn't tend to stay in Lebanon - rather, they attacked over the border - but in 1982, the attacks from Lebanon into Israel became strong enough that the Israeli government decided to invade and maintain control over a buffer zone in south Lebanon.
I used to get the school bus to work - I was working at a primary (elementary) school, as a teaching assistant. Since the school served a region consisting almost entirely of small villages, there were a few bus routes, bringing children in from all the villages, and dropping them off at different schools along the way. I had noticed - I couldn't fail to notice! - that there was a large sculpture outside one of the bigger schools (not mine), but it took me quite a while to work out what it was. In May 1974, there had been an incursion of terrorists from Lebanon, who first attacked and commandeered a van, then drove it to the town of Ma'alot, where they ended up taking over a school where children were sleeping after a day out hiking. They demanded terrorist prisoners be released, and threatened the children. The Israeli government decided, after negotiations apparently failed, to send in an elite army unit to try to rescue the children, but by the end of the operation, all the terrorists and 21 children had been killed. That is what the sculpture was - a memorial to the 21 children killed in their own school as a result of a terrorist attack from Lebanon. There is no suggestion that these were Lebanese terrorists - they were Palestinians, based in south Lebanon, and attacking Israel from there.
I lived on the Israeli-Lebanese border for less than 7 months, during the period that Israel was holding the buffer zone. During that time, there were 6 significant rocket attacks from Lebanon, which came far enough into Israel to cause formal alerts. I spent three nights sleeping in a bomb shelter, and one of the attacks was strong enough that we were told, afterwards, that if it had continued a few hours longer, we'd have been evacuated to a safe area. The AJ6 group who were in Netuah in 1996, the next year, were evacuated due to activity on the border. In 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from south Lebanon, following the election of a Labour (left-wing) government which had the withdrawal as a campaign promise. Israel and the UN consider that after the withdrawal, Israel should no longer be considered to be occupying Lebanese territory, but Lebanon and Syria dispute this. There is an area, commonly called the Shebaa Farms in English, around where the boundaries of the three countries meet, still held by Israeli troops - Lebanon and Syria consider this area to be part of Lebanon and therefore occupied Lebanon, while Israel and the UN consider it part of Syria and therefore occupied Syria, leaving no Lebanese land occupied. To be honest, as a cynic, I think that Lebanon and Syria do truly believe it to be part of Lebanon, but only as a convenience to provide support for Lebanon remaining part of a 'united front' against Israel.
I don't like the fact that Israelis in absolutely undisputed land (as long as Israel herself has the right to exist) had to live under threat of rocket attacks. I don't like that every house and building has to be built with a safe room, with reinforced walls and metal shutters. I find it absolutely tragic that the local children laughed at us panicking during our first attack, because they are so used to it - no children, anywhere on the planet, should be subjected to enough violence that they become used to it. I can, however, understand and appreciate the rational, the justification for those attacks. At the time - and again, no-one sane is going to dispute this, I think - Israel held Lebanese territory, as a buffer zone to protect northern Israel - to protect villages like my Netuah - purely as a military occupation. There was no suggestion that this was liberated Israeli land, or that Israel had any long-term or natural right to be there - it was purely a security arrangement. I can understand the Lebanese disagreeing with that, and I can understand their fighting against it. I don't condone attacks on civilians by anybody - Israel against Lebanese or Lebanese against Israelis (and me!), but they were fighting an occupation. That, however, is not the case anymore.
Yesterday, with all that is going on in Gaza (also, not the subject of this post), Hizbollah decided that the time was right to heat things up on the northern border again. Hizbollah is an interesting organisation - it is Lebanese, not Palestinian, and it is mainstream in Lebanon. In its region - the southern part of the country - Hizbollah is the dominant political and welfare organisation, it has MPs in the Lebanese national parliament, and it effectively provides local government, security and so on in the south, to the extent that the border is really between Israel and Hizbollah, with the border between Lebanon and Hizbollah being somewhat further north. On the other hand, Hizbollah is largely funded by Iran and controlled by Syria. It used to be said that you knew there was an Hizbollah attack coming whenever there was any sign of peace or positive contacts between Syria and Israel, because Syria would use Hizbollah as the stick, the bad cop, either to push things along or pull them back, depending on what mood they were in.
First, they fired some katyushas. These are relatively small, truck- or even shoulder-launched missiles, without a huge range or warhead, and without much accuracy. They can fire it towards a town and have a reasonable chance of hitting the town, but anything smaller (like the smaller villages in the area) aren't easy targets. Apparently they managed to hit - I read reports of people taken to hospital from Shutla, Zar'it and Fassuta. Zar'it I visited a few times, Shtula I worked on a summer camp in, and Fassuta I only visited once. Zar'it and Shtula are both small moshavim, like Netuah, with regular people trying to earn a living and bring their kids up. Fassuta, on the other hand, is an interesting target, and I would hope or assume an accidental one. Fassuta is a decent-sized Arab village, just across the valley from Netuah, which we wandered into one weekend when we were bored. At the time, I would say it was a sane thing to do, if a little pointless, but since the debacle of 2000 (Arab rioting in Israel, which subsequent governments have completely failed to come to terms with and deal with the aftermath of) it would be a little risky. So, I assume no-one in Lebanon was aiming for Fassuta, but I would say that if they hit it, there's a pretty good chance they were aiming for Netuah - aiming for my friends, my students, my adopted family.
There should be more to come later... this is getting very long.