Are we down for the count or not?

Is it possible that I chose to live in this country? Yes, yes, I think I did. No, this is not going to be one of those, “The funniest thing happened to me today on the bus ride through the city” blogs. This is going to be closer to “The crisis we are facing in our country today is one of great proportions, coming from so many directions that one can get dizzy trying to catch a glimpse of them all.”

I got home this evening, after a two-day educational tour around the southern part of the country, to find out there was a terror attack in Eilat yesterday. Before I glanced down at the colorful “Yediot Ahronot” (“Latest News”) newspaper carelessly thrown on the dining room table and the horrible news gracing the front page, my roommate asked me, “How was it?” “Well, I can’t say it was enjoyable,” I said, in my first attempts to shed off the emotional, physical, and daily hardships of the people I met on my trip, “But it was an experience I needed to have.”

Only after I had dinner and relaxed a little did I notice the paper and the headline, “Terror in the Vacation Town.” What I cannot get over is why I hadn’t heard about it. Earlier today, the director of our program said that the experiences we have had over the last couple of days were “punches in the gut” and should wake us up. The three punches:
1) Meeting settlers taken out of the Gaza Strip during the Disengagement
2) Meeting a Sderot resident and learning why the kassam rockets that fall on their town is sometimes the least of their worries
3) Meeting a Bedouin man whose village, despite all the evidence in the world, is not “recognized” by the state of Israel.

While the groups represented are very, very different is many, many ways, a common thread wove them all together—I don’t believe in the state anymore; I can’t make a difference; nobody, nobody cares about our lives.

And then, the fourth punch in the gut arrived—the terror attack which killed three people, that, like I said, I can’t believe I didn’t hear about.

The rain that started to pour down as we left the south, the flood that greeted our return to the Holy City, is close, very close to my mood right now.

So, what do you when you’re punched in the gut? Well, you hunch over for a bit, try to regain your breath, and then with your first full intake of air, thank G-d you’re ok. So, that’s what I’ll do for now. In the coming days, I’ll write more about the specific experiences above because the things I heard were said in vain if nobody else knows about them.