Matt RubinWashington University junior Carl Johnson could see and hear katuysha rockets explode four miles from his dormitory at the University of Haifa in July.
He, like some other Washington University students, was living in Israel when the conflict with Hezbollah broke out. Johnson was taking an intensive Hebrew-learning program, Ulpan. He was on his way to class the Thursday morning after the war started and the rockets began to hit the region.
“We spent a large part of the night in a safe room,” he said through e-mail. “The next morning, hordes of students left to go down south to Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.”
He and most other Ulpan students opted to stay in Haifa through the weekend until another day of rockets forced his program to shut down.
“While walking to class on Sunday, I heard a series of loud booms and then some sirens,” he said. “Several landed about seven miles from the campus, within viewing distance. We spent more time in a safe room. They evacuated the program on Sunday and brought us all down to Hebrew University” in Jerusalem.
Despite being so close to the violence, Johnson says he never felt in danger.
“I’ve felt safe,” he said. “A lot of the non-Israeli Jews here got caught up in hysteria. I just follow the lead of the Israelis, who have remained entirely nonchalant about the whole thing. The truth is that only the foreigners seemed to feel unsafe.”
He remembers hearing that residents of Haifa frequented bars and restaurants like it was a regular day, and that the war was being blown out of proportion by the media.
“I heard that American news sources completely sensationalized this conflict and really only displayed the worst of it,” he said. “It really left most of us unaffected.”
He did know Israelis his age being called for reserve duty, but says the domestic security mainly consisted of choppers and planes flying over Haifa on the way to Lebanon.
Johnson will continue living in Jerusalem for a semester abroad at Hebrew University, which he feels should be “relatively” safe.
Senior Megan Swider was also in northern Israel on a kibbutz doing archaeological work when the conflict began. She shares a slightly different story about the general reaction to the war than Johnson.
“Personally I felt fine,” she said. “I think that was an unusual sentiment though. Some Israelis were very strongly concerned. They maybe had friends who were soldiers. For them it was a possibility they could be called up.”
But she, too, noticed that Americans were generally more uptight about the situation than Israelis and that the media abroad exaggerated the danger.
“My mom told me not to go to Tel Aviv,” she said. “But I said ‘where’s that news coming from? No one else here is hearing that at all.’ It’s really just life as normal. Yes it is serious, but still.”
Rabbi Hershey Novack, director of Chabad on Campus at the University, pointed out specific examples of media bias. He mentioned an incident in which Reuters withdrew two photographs of the conflict after discovering they had been altered in Photoshop. A freelance Lebanese photographer darkened and added smoke to one picture, showing the destruction in Beirut after an Israeli air strike. In another, the photographer increased the number of flares being dropped from an F-16 fighter from one to three.
Reuters has suspended the photographer until it completes further investigations on the photos he altered.
“There is certainly some amount of overt media bias against Israel,” said Novack.
Novack’s sister Tziporah was living in Safed, another city in northern Israel, when Hezbollah started launching rockets. She also evacuated to a safer place.
“Her initial impression was that the rocket attacks were a passing phenomenon,” he said. “That was the pervasive mood at the time.”
Tziporah stayed longer in Safed than most of her community, though, before leaving the area.
Now that the violence is at a standstill with a shaky ceasefire, people reflect on the situation and how it could have been handled more effectively.
“There are those who feel that it was a military intelligence failure [by Israel],” said Novack. “Others feel that ground troops should have been committed earlier.”
But he believes that Israel learns quickly from the past and that such circumstances will not reoccur.
Currently Israel is rejecting United Nations (UN) demands to lift the sea and air blockade of Lebanon. It will only do so after the UN fully implements its ceasefire, according to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.