The map of fear

Safety of Israeli citizens and anti-Israel protests go hand in hand, as if Israel ought to be ashamed to keep its people alive.  This year, the Iron Dome defense and the red alert sirens are the culprits.   But don't take me too seriously, because i'm just a bit irritated.  I had the pleasure yesterday of ducking into stairwells and having the walls shake during 4 or 5 missile attacks, just before seeing that Europeans have embarked on yet another round of anti-Israel protests.

In my last blog I said that people in Tel Aviv seem relatively unfazed compared to the last war, and that the city is thrumming.  I still feel that's true.  However, some others disagree with me, so I guess it depends on where you are and who you are around.  I didn't go out last night to investigate, so I can't report if the bars were full.  What is for certain is that yesterday was a heavy day for rockets.  We even had a loud building-shaker in the evening with no warning siren.  The topic of every conversation is the war.  Bits of rocket landed in the neighborhood just south of me.  After a few barrages, you get in the mood for absurdity.  Neighbors invited me to have late night drinks with them after we had huddled together for a few sirens, and we bonded in the lackadaisical air of war.

If you want to understand the Israeli mentality about all this, look at this map:

This is a map of fear.  The numbers are the number of reported rocket attacks (most involving multiple rockets) in each city or region of Israel from the end of May up until last night (most in the last week), and they are in fact proxies for the amount that the citizens in those cities have been terrified.  No Israeli citizens have died yet in this war, but they certainly have been scared, and you can easily see from this map where they've been scared the most.  That is what terrorism is about.  Note that the Tel Aviv area has had 28 attacks over the last days.  People living anywhere in the vicinity of Gaza are not living ordinary lives, and this is the whole point of Hamas' endeavor.  Their warnings are shorter, too.  In Tel Aviv, we have one and a half minutes after a siren starts to seek shelter.  In Ashkelon, they have 30 seconds.

This map also represents a manifestation of the capabilities of Israel's enemies.  If you keep in mind that the part of Israel south of Gaza is thinly populated desert, and that the areas north and south of Jerusalem are the Palestinian-populated West Bank, you'll realize that the red circles pretty much cover the whole country.  There were even a few attacks in the North from Lebanon and Syria, probably as symbolic gestures (&/or spillover from the Syrian civil war).  This is what I meant in my last blog post when I said that you must huddle in the center of the country in order to (almost) avoid missiles.  Most Israelis could have sketched out this map before the war ever began -- they basically know where their enemies can hit.  So they take this map into consideration when they decide where to buy a house, where to send their kids to school, what they will do on vacation.  It is insane to carry such a map in your brain, knowing that anywhere in your own country, whether it's from Hamas rockets or Hizbollah ones, you may not be safe.  

Putting aside this general lurking fear, if you consider any country on Earth under this week's missile barrage, it is obvious that the country will retaliate.  This is the spectre that haunts the holy land.  Israel builds sophisticated, expensive anti-missile defense systems to keep its people safe; Hamas, in the other hand, tells its citizens to stay in their houses when they are warned they will be blown up.  This is a cultural difference that you shouldn't forget when you see the numbers of casualties.  If Israel attacks Gaza, it will certainly be condemned.  If it refrains, it will greet internal protests once some Israeli citizens inevitably are killed from Hamas missiles.  What to do?

Here are the numbers of rocket barrages against Israel on a daily basis in the last couple weeks (it's the same underlying data as in the map -- gathered from reports in the ynet news ticker).  Note, the numbers refer to individual reports, and most of the reports involve multiple rockets.  The purple bars represent the number of times that a rocket attack was reported on an Israeli city or region.  You can see here the Israeli defenses at work: code red sirens and/or iron dome missile interceptions are mentioned in most of these reports.  There were already a number of attacks against Israel each day for a week before this war began.  Would that be acceptable for you, or would you bomb your enemy back?  Israel's leadership actually showed some restraint before jumping in.  Also, note that the last few days have seen 80 to 100 rocket barrages per day.  What would you do if you were Benjamin Netanyahu?  Would you stage an extended air assault, trying to blow up missile-launching targets and Hamas militants, as he's done?  Would you send in ground troops?

Related Posts:

Precipitous war

Beyond Rockets (maps here, from the last war)

Fajr Fajr, burning bright