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02-14-2003
Friday, February 14, 2003 -- Elena Segal, a travel agent at Issta's office in upscale Maccabim, says she has begun booking flights overseas for a few clients, including one woman for whom she has been making reservations once a week, five weeks in advance. "With every week that passes peacefully, I cancel the booking," Segal says. Even with America's war with Iraq being expected any time within the next few weeks, as yet there is no rush for flight reservations abroad. "A lot of clients say that if something happens, they'll send their kids out, but right now everything is pending," she says. The reason for this hesitancy, she explains, is that nobody knows when the war is going to start and what it will mean for Israel. People are worried about not being able to get cheap flights home once the war starts. It's not like it was before the 1991 Gulf War, says Segal, who was a travel agent for Amir Tours in Jerusalem at the time. "Then everyone knew weeks in advance when the war was going to start, and they knew Saddam was going to fire Scuds at Israel. As soon as the Americans publicized the Jan. 15 deadline [for Iraq to pull out of Kuwait, after which the bombing would begin], we got a flood of flight reservations. Hundreds of people from the Jerusalem area alone called us to buy tickets overseas, mainly to the US, where they had family - in Brooklyn, in Florida...," she says. Things have changed. Besides the uncertainty of the starting date of the war, the official Israeli prognosis is that there won't be another rain of missiles on this country because Saddam's offense is weaker and Israel's defense is stronger. But with Saddam's demise in the offing, the chance of a last-gasp, Hail Mary attempt - such as a kamikaze plane loaded with chemical or biological weapons - seems to have increased. This makes it harder for Israelis to decide whether it's wise to leave the country for the war. Another deterrent is the recession - while the rich can still afford flight reservations to relocate overseas, many in the middle class can't. Can't find what you need? Try a Google Web Search in the box below!
Finally, the advent of al-Qaida means that no place, certainly no Western urban area, is really a safe shelter anymore, certainly not during an Israeli-backed American war on Iraq. Yet when asked if she expects another flood of flight reservations abroad to come in if and when the first missile - conventional or non-conventional - lands on Israel, Segal replies, "Certainly. At the very least mothers will be leaving with their kids." FAMILIES INTENDING to sit out the war overseas are a small, secret subculture. Public opinion pollster Dr. Mina Tsemach this week estimated them at 2% of the population. Three of them - two fathers from the Tel Aviv area and one from Jerusalem - were approached for this article, but each adamantly refused to be interviewed, even off the record. Their profile can only be sketched broadly: They tend to be economically well-off, residents of the populous center of the country, parents with children in the house, and bearers of an overseas address of close relatives or friends with whom they're planning to stay. And they are held in contempt by the keepers of Israeli national pride. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz recently told Yediot Aharonot that there was little point for people in Tel Aviv to rent rooms in the Galilee or Negev during the war because a kamikaze plane filled with non-conventional weaponry could poison "half the country," so no place in Israel was really safe. Asked then what he thought of people who agreed with this analysis, and had come to the conclusion that they had to get their families with flight reservations beyond the borders of Israel during the war, Mofaz said he had a problem of "values" with that. "You don't abandon your country," he said. Shlomo Lahat, the former Tel Aviv mayor who created a lasting controversy during the Gulf War by branding as "deserters" those masses of locals who headed for the periphery of the country, says that for this war, by contrast, the government should organize a mass evacuation of people from Area A - the Dan Region - to the far north and south. But as for leaving Israel altogether? "It's a disgrace, they're defectors," he says. (See box.) While flight reservations to fly out of the country to escape danger remains a taboo, the disapproval of those who relocate to safer spots within Israel's borders seems to have dissipated. For one thing, the exodus of residents from Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan during the Gulf War may have saved lives. People remember how Scuds fell on apartment buildings that turned out to be relatively empty of residents; only one person, a Ramat Gan man, was killed directly by the impact of an Iraqi missile. Can't find what you need? Try a Google Web Search in the box below!
And with assaults on Israeli civilians continuing year after year, from one enemy after another, no matter how staunchly people stand up to them, there is an acceptance of families who say they can't take the pressure, they don't want their children to live in terror, and have packed up the car and gone to stay for a while with the kidsā grandparents on the kibbutz or their uncle on the moshav. After the Gulf War, no one dared publicly criticize the residents of Kiryat Shmona when they headed south almost en masse during the worst shellings by Hizbullah. Likewise, no one reproached the residents of Gilo who sought safer quarters during the shooting assaults by Palestinian gunmen across the valley in Beit Jala.... Compare and book your flight reservations here /cheap airfares home |