…that katyushas on Haifa has always been a nightmare scenario in people’s minds here.

Haifa’im in air raid shelters is dreadful. I feel for them so much. Hearing the sirens, on TV, over the emptied streets I know so well, is a chilling feeling. I grew up in Haifa. We moved there just less than a year after the Yom Kippur War in 1973 - the decision to come to live here a direct result of that war. I vividly remember the nightmares I used to have as a child about having to go down to the air raid shelter in the middle of the night.

I lived in Haifa in the days when the brave souls in Kiryat Shmona, on the northern border, lived under a continuous barrage of rockets. In those days it was the Palestinians, Arafat’s Fatah, that was launching them (You’d forgotten that, hadn’t you?). At least they had some sort of excuse. How could anyone possibly support/understand/condone Hizbullah’s present day attacks on Israel, unless they were complete frothing-at-the-mouth loonies? or fools? or so utterly filled with hatred for Israel that they can’t see straight?

That’s why there is wall-to-wall support here for what our armed forces are doing at the moment in Lebanon. That’s probably why no one is bothering to heckle the handful of demonstrators against the campaign, like the ones that Lisa photograhed behind the flower stall off Rabin Square the day before yesterday. They’re not a threat. They’re a joke. A bunch of blabbering fools who are completely cut off from reality. They’re just rigidly continuing to chant their usual slogans (many of which are silly at the best of times) regardless.

The fact that Israelis are not out demonstrating against the war does not mean we have succumbed to hatred. Not at all. On the contrary. There is a place in between mindless, foolish pacifism at-all-costs and crazy out-of-control militarism. It’s called common sense. It’s called being reasonable. It’s called adapting to changing reality. It’s the place where most of us ordinary folk reside.

We Israelis are not at all filled with hatred for our Lebanese neighbors, by any means. We empathize with them, and their suffering. We are sorry for them - sorry that their elected leaders didn’t have the courage to face up to these thugs; sorry that they had to be caught up in this. They’ve been through enough.

But that doesn’t make us any less supportive of Israel’s actions in this war. It’s time for Nasrallah and his gang to go. Enough already. And it’s time for us to make it happen.