Highways and high explosives

Me and Adam
Me and Orit, eating fruit from the garden
The Ayalon Freeway, the tall buildings at the right are my hotel
The TOW anit-tank missile

This evening, I took an hour's drive north up to my aunt's house for a Shabbat dinner. I cruised in my undersized company car up Highway 6, the main road to the North, easily gliding among the eight empty lanes. It gets dark early here, but the road is flood lit most of the way. The roads were almost empty, and the experience was more like driving across miles and miles of freeze-framed airport runways than anything else. The many overpasses I glided under, each trimmed with Tron-like blue florescent lighting only reinforced the effect. After turning off the main highway and completing the last 30km on an equally luxurious side road, I remained with impression of a road network vastly overbuilt for a country this small.

I suppose Israelis being the least patient race on earth must drive a strong need to build away any threat of traffic jams, but I have a lingering feeling that the construction is more than that. It must be a holdover from the early days of the country, when the Jewish State was only what could be built by the Jews. There was a time, when Israel , though present, was still not quite a reality in the minds of many people, including most of its residents -- the newness and fragility of the country needed a counterbalance in the form of steel and concrete, poured high in the towers of Tel Aviv and wide in the roads that linked the ancient hills and valleys into a modern country.

I arrived at my Aunts house and had dinner in time to have leisurely postprandial hookah smoke with my cousin, back home for a few days from the army, where he's halfway through the three year military service that all Israelis enter upon their 18th birthdays (women, of course do only two years). He's a paratrooper, in an anti-tank unit, trained to blow up the same Syrian tanks that his father, my uncle, fought against 25 years ago in the Lebanon war.

There not being many tanks around these days, he spends most of his time on the border with Gaza, fighting a low-grade war only slightly tempered by the cease fire between Israel and the Hamas government. Missles fly in both directions, the deaths mount up slowly, one here, two there.

A month ago his unit was sent to demolish a house which concealed the endpoint of a smuggler's tunnel from Gaza. The house was mined, and when the armoured bulldozer crosser into the yard it exploded into a massive fireball which knocked down the nearby houses. A friend of his somehow had gotten hold of footage from an unmanned surveillance drone, and I watched the clip twice with him.

He's since managed to get himself enrolled in a course to be an off-road driving instructor. I saw pictures of his training; it looks pretty awesome -- driving Humvees over every possible terrain in light and dark for days one end. His mother, my aunt, confided over dinner that she was pleased that he was going to be now stationed in some school in the interior of the country rather than on the front lines. He gave that "oh, please mom!" look that every young man has to give in the face of a mother's worrying.

I've given that look many times, except the things that I do are only theoretically dangerous. I've never actually come into contact with anything truly dangerous; I've never really been scared. Adam was very nearly blown to bits. It wasn't a big deal, no one was seriously hurt, it's just a rite of passage, I guess.

But the fact remains. Within easy distance of one of these beautiful space-age flood-lit highways, a foreign force detonated a mine as a defence against a military operation. Most Israelis will take the position that the army is not merely a right of passage, it's actually an active fighting force. It's not quaint that Adam has been trained to fight aging Syrian tanks, it's practical. But I have to wonder -- given that the army is such an integrated part of the fabric of society, might it not be perpetuating its own role by engaging in such house-for-bomb exchanges with the Gazans? And might mainstream Israelis be tolerating it because of the secondary benefit of the conflict's institutions turning boys into men?

So if the sweeping highways and new towns still being built serve to the ease the Israeli psyche, let them continue to build. Perhaps soon they will be attractive enough to receed into completely.