Voices: War preparedness drills bring back trauma for Israeli kids
JERUSALEM — Two air-raid sirens — the real deal, the undulating kind you hear in old movies about the London Blitz — sounded throughout Israel on Tuesday, part of a week-long drill to gauge how well the country is prepared for war.
Although Israel holds such drills annually, this year's version felt different — and more alarming than usual. It comes less than a year after last summer's war with Hamas; amid heightened threats from Lebanon, where Hezbollah has vowed to infiltrate Israel via underground tunnels; from Hamas, which still has a huge arsenal in Gaza; and from Syria, where armed militants sit right across the border.
The drill, which simulates attacks from all three enemies, has been described as the most extensive nationwide civil defense drill in Israel's history.
For many Israelis who sat in bomb shelters during the summer of 2014, this week's drill, which included two air raid sirens, mass-casualty simulations and the closure of the national airport, is more than some hypothetical exercise. It's a trigger for past traumas and a reminder that the next war could be just around the corner.
Both Israelis and Palestinians are war-weary.The Palestinians waged two uprisings against Israel, the first and second Intifadas — from 1987 to 1993 and 2000 to 2005 — and Israel and Hamas have fought three short but intense wars since December 2008.
As wars go, last summer's 50-day conflict was relatively brief. But the emotional remnants of the ordeal remain.
Last August, Pernilla Ironside, chief of UNICEF's Gaza field office, said 373,000 Palestinian children needed "immediate psycho-social first aid."
The children of southern Israel are so traumatized that the Home Front Command decided not to sound this week's sirens in Gaza border communities out of fear of triggering trauma.
Joel Wardi, who heads the clinical division at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, says the sound of an air raid siren, even during a well-publicized drill, causes the most traumatized people to go into survival mode.
"It's an echo of what happened when there were real sirens, which was not so long ago," he says. "There's something about trauma that makes it feel as if time has stopped. It's a trigger of certain scenes, certain fears, certain losses."
Even people not suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder suddenly become fearful during a drill, Wardi said. They imagine their children or spouses being called up for military service and being dispatched to the front lines.
Sara Wolf, the co-founder of a swimwear company, says the sirens caught her completely off guard this week because she didn't know about the drill ahead of time.
"It sent my heart pounding, and my first thoughts were of my kids," she says. "Last summer, my otherwise very non-clingy and easygoing daughter of 11 would not sleep unless I laid down next to her, even when we were visiting New York in August."
I spent the first of Tuesday's sirens at the Naamat Baka day care center in Jerusalem, where Julia Mitzelmacher, the center's dedicated director, and 11 staffers did everything they could to keep the children calm and orderly when the siren wailed.
Ten minutes before the siren sounded, the staff brought the center's 45 infants and toddlers indoors and sat them down in front of an inner wall. Like many older buildings in central Israel, the preschool lacks a bomb shelter.
For the next 15 minutes, the toddlers' teacher read to them from a storybook and led them in song.
Unlike in southern Israel, where the siren provides virtually no time to seek shelter on the Gaza border to 30 or 45 seconds farther from the border, Jerusalemites have 90 seconds to enter a concrete-reinforced room when a rocket is launched from Gaza, 47 miles away.
While that should be reassuring, it really isn't, not when you and your kids have to run down four flights of stairs to your building's shelter whenever a siren wails, even in the middle of the night.
But as difficult as these drills are, especially for the children of Israel, at least most have access to a shelter. In Gaza, the children don't have even that.