Trading Punches

An artillery unit of Israeli reserve soldiers contemplates their lives and the war, while exchanging fire across the border.

METULA,

"It was really hard," he says of shifting from civilian to soldier in such a short period of time. "You're living your life, then all of a sudden you're at war."

Israeli reserve units are the very definition of civilian soldiers, reporting for service looking very much like they simply came off the streets and changed into their uniforms — which was likely the case for many in this conflict.

Unlike the regular army, which has uniform and grooming standards, reserve soldiers, by law, can't be forced to cut their hair or conform too much. Some report for duty in dreadlocks, others in ball caps; some wear Jewish yarmulkes under their helmets.

Kevin Sites reports from the Israel-Lebanon border» View

Captain Sharan's Battery B unit is made up of such soldiers — men like Max Lieberman, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, whose regular job entails hanging from rappelling ropes on high rise buildings as a window washer. Now, clad in a red bandana and a black and white camouflage t-shirt, he runs 155mm rounds and charges to the loader in one of the mobile artillery units.

Omer Gazit, 30, runs a tire business and is scheduled to get married in two weeks. But at the moment he's in charge of one of the Battery B guns currently firing volleys of high explosive shells into south Lebanon. He says the wedding will go forward as planned since it would take more than a war to stop the 350 guests already invited from coming. He's only concerned that some of his family, also called up to serve in the military, may not be able to make it.

He, like others here, has heard about the civilian casualties in Lebanon from the Israeli offensive. But since the soldiers have no access to television or the Internet, they haven't seen any of the images.

"We don't really see what's happening on the other side, but I assume it's not very good," he says, though personally he believes what they're doing is right.

"I think this is a just war. We withdrew from Lebanon (in 2000). We withdrew from Gaza. We declared we want to withdraw from the occupied territories. To me, this is a just war."

The unit's medic, Dotan Arad, a 28-year-old doctoral student in Jewish history, was in Lebanon 10 years ago as a conscripted soldier during that earlier occupation.

IDF reserve units must quickly switch from civilian to soldier» View

"I felt there was a moral dimension then," he says, "that it wasn't occupation because we were trying to give the citizens there a peaceful life." He believes this conflict is more complicated for both sides.

"It's a different type of conflict with different conditions. Maybe more difficult, because we can't see [Hezbollah fighters inside Lebanon], so we have more victims from their rockets and their fire," says Arad.

But he's also aware of the civilian casualties in Lebanon, specifically the incident at Qana, where 28 people, the majority of them children, were killed by an Israeli air strike.

"When I heard about the event at Qana, it was very sad for me. That is not our goal. I have a lot of Muslim friends. I'm a volunteer in organization of interfaith dialogue. And I met a young lady from Cairo and she says she believes [the Israeli army] has a mission to kill Palestinian kids. But I know this army. These are my friends; we don't do things like that. Sometimes there are mistakes, but that's not our mission," Arad says.

Arad says he thinks there is a moral difference in the way the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are fighting this war, as opposed to Hezbollah.

"They don't try to make any difference between civilians and military," he says. "They just fire their rockets into cities."

When the reservists in the unit find out that I've just come from Lebanon they ask me what the Lebanese are feeling about the war.

"Are they mad at (Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan) Nasrallah?" another soldier, Alon Harel, asks me.

"Not the ones that I've spoken to," I tell them. "Some, mostly those in Christian neighborhoods in the north, expressed a little anger early on. But the attacks on Lebanese infrastructure — like the bridges connecting Beirut to the north — have muted that." Now, I tell them, even those with political differences with Hezbollah seem to be closing ranks with them.

They are surprised, even a bit saddened to hear this, wanting to believe that the strategy of punitive strikes against Lebanon would actually drive a wedge between Hezbollah and the Lebanese people.

Nearby in the town of Metula, I walk to the actual physical border between northern Israel and southern Lebanon. I can hear both the whistling of Israel artillery shells flying north and the occasional Katyusha rocket arcing south and slamming into the Israeli hillside. Israel and Hezbollah are, it seems to me, simply trading punches.

This part of the border is a weird and eerie place, a desolate no-man's land separated by a high electrified fence that no longer seems to carry a charge.

On the Israeli side, there are beautiful orchards of green apples and red nectarines, many unpicked and overripe, falling from the trees. On the Lebanese side, there are scores of abandoned buildings; many are marked with the yellow and green flags of Hezbollah, still flapping in a strong, warm breeze.

Kevin Sites finds an area of the Israel-Lebanon border to be surprisingly desolate» View

I'm somewhat surprised to see the flags so close to the border, especially when buildings nearby have been crushed to rubble by Israeli artillery and air strikes. It seems strange to me that the IDF would leave the flags untouched, simply from a symbolic perspective.

As I walk along the fence, I find a gaping hole cut in the wire. The draw is too strong. I climb through and walk inside Lebanese territory. I inspect the nearby building that has been turned to rubble and walk along a pathway toward buildings flying both the Lebanese and Hezbollah flags. I begin to wonder if perhaps Hezbollah left a few snipers for people like me. I'm also concerned that Israeli spy drones may see me and mistake me for Hezbollah.

I hear the sound of an ATV on the Israeli side of the fence and scramble back to that side of the border, only imagining the kind of explaining I will have to do if the IDF finds me walking around Lebanese territory, regardless of how close to Israel.

But the man riding the ATV is a local orchard owner named David Greenberg. He says I need to be careful about the fence line. He thinks Hezbollah might still have people in the area.

Greenberg says that most of his workers left because of the fighting and that if he doesn't get his crop picked in the next two weeks, it will all fall off the trees and rot.

"If the government doesn't help me financially after this," Greenberg says, "I'm finished."

He tells me he used to have many Lebanese friends and people that worked for him in his orchards, but all that changed when Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000.

Reserves on the front lines» View

That's when, he says, Hezbollah moved right up to the border and constructed a large building where he says he saw men with rifles.

"It's the one that's been bombed," he says, pointing to the crumpled building on the other side of the fence.

"Hezbollah would encourage people to throw stones over the fence into Israel. One day my son was with me and he had a slingshot. He said, 'Dad, we should throw those stones back.' I pointed to the man with the rifle in the building and said 'Okay, if you want to be dead.'"

Greenberg says despite all the artillery shelling, the air strikes and the ground fighting to push Hezbollah away from Israel's northern border, he thinks the situation will likely remain the same for years to come.

"They will come back, yes. It will take one week, two weeks and they will control the area," he says. "But the important thing is that they were now punished. They know Israel made big problems for them."

"Do you think this will just be the way it is?" I ask him. "That Hezbollah causes problems and you punish them, as you say, and things just go back to the way they were?"

"I'm sure. One hundred percent," he says. "These are bad people. They don't care about anything. They just want to make problems and, if they can, they kill you."

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