Operation or was it War?

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I was finishing the GA with a metting with the New York Federation and the CEO said, I just want to let you know that I think that you your Otzma group will be here for the net war. Low and behold we were.

Was this an operation or War? For awhile the Israeli govt kept saying that it was not a war and that it was just the fault of the media for calling it that. It was just after Shabbat Channukkah and my entire family was together when we heard that war broke out. I was not surprised ebcause for a while while I was living in Beer Sheva the last couple of days I noticed that the Negev region was getting blasted with rockets. It was on Sat December 27th, 2008 when air strikes were started by the IAF, I remember that my aunt and uncle both ran to the raido and the tv right when shabbat was over so that we could know what was going on.

As the days went on, my eyes were glued to haaretz.com as well as ynet just to get news. It all began with rockets in sderot right after the disengagement in 2005. But not it has escalated to sderot, ashkelon, netivot, kiryat gat, kiryat malachi, ofakim. That is where 99% of of the NE group are supposed to live. I wonder what is going to happen now. There is no way the Otzma staff would allow them to be endangered. People claim that since I am on an American program that we are sheltered and dont really feel the pain of what really is going on but that is not true. I think the majority of the people who were supposed to live down there really wanted to but knew that they couldnt.

Living in Israel at the time of war I was asked many questions Did it feel different? Did you fee your life was at risk did you want to leave? The answer to all those was no. I really needed to feel like my life would be in danger to a point where I couldnt live my normal life; get on a bus, walk on the streets before I would go home. I also knew that my parents knew that I was safe and having family here helped a lot. If I needed anything, I had people to go to. Plus my friends here on Otzma were also not leaving so I knew that I was and would be ok. MD ended up leaving the war was the last straw for her. I was very sad that I had to say goodbye but I knew it was the right thing for here. From the very beginning she was struggling with a couple of things.

My parents lived here during the outbrake of the first Intzafada and it was hard to live here during that time as well. I new that if I needed to to overcome a challenge I could. I moved to Rehovot so I never was being directly effected by what was going down south because I knew out of the 51 of us on Otzma I was pretty ok. But then Hamas started rocketing 40km rockets and hit Beer Sheva, and Gedera and Yavneh. Out of those three cities two of them are 5-10 km away from me. It is slowly creeping up on my personal life. All I think about is hopefully I dont have to move from Rehovot because what is truely going to happen if they are able to hit the Negev region of Israel as well as the Merkaz (center).

All day and every day my roommates discussed the war it was a disease in our apt. It was consuming our lives. All I wanted to do is gon on the train and travel somewhere else so that it was not the only think I heard or spoke about. January 18th there was a Unilateral ceasefire with Hamas and now it is February 19th (about a month later) and there are rockets as well as some IAF or military action taking place in Gaza. Every day there are at least two rockets fired from Gaza by Hamas and nothing is being done by the international community. Countries and the UN but mostly Turkey want to condemn Israel with war crimes and that just boggles my mind, since I know that if this was happening to any other country they wouldnt have waited this long to help their citizens.

It is an interesting time now, elections happened a week ago and the coalitions are being formed as we speak so depending on who is the prime minister we will see what happens next with this situation at hand.

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