As Hezbollah's missile bombardment on northern Israel is in its third week, local businesses and residents are left staggering under the financial cost. Since July 12 some 1,500 rockets fired by Hezbollah have hit northern Israel, striking targets previously unaffected by the missile barrages which the Iranian-backed group launched in the past.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are now under siege from the air. Many businesses have halted payments to employees sent on unpaid leave to nearby bomb-shelters. Larger firms say they will bear the losses and keep paying their workers.
But it's not just companies and factories which are affected. Along the Sea of Galilee, hotels are empty when they should be registering full occupancy during the summer months. And the Tiberius coastline, normally packed in July with holidaymakers, now has only empty beach chairs and piles of folded sunshades. Zamir Gesser, General Manager of the Gai Beach Hotel in Tiberius, says he has lost around 50,000 dollars a day since the start of the Lebanon crisis, but is resolved to keep most of his employees' salaries flowing.
Even as his deficit mounts and the long-term damage is tallied, he is unrelenting in his support for Israel's attack on Hezbollah and is willing to absorb the financial burden as his own personal financial contribution to the offensive. "I am willing to accept these losses. Whether the government helps me out after or not, we need to get them," Gesser says. Gesser is in the minority.
Local news media regularly discuss how small businesses buckle under the financial strain and are forced to halt payments to their employees hiding at home from rocket attacks. Adding - often literally - insult to injury, a wave of burglaries has swept across the northern communities, with many people reporting the loss of cherished valuables.
Tzvia, a special education university professor, had returned home to Nahariya after hiding from the rocket bombardments in Tel Aviv for the past week. Though terrified by the continuous explosions as the rockets strike the small resort town just south of the Lebanon border, she returned fearing burglars would break into her home as they had with so many of her neighbours.
In an already absurd situation where the entire northern population of Israel is huddled in sweltering underground bomb-shelters, Tzvia says that "there are reports of endless break-ins. When I heard about it, I packed my things and rushed back."
Nahariya police captain Anwar Amer says that since Hezbollah began bombarding northern Israeli communities, there has been a sharp rise in the number of break-ins at homes. "There have been at least 22 break-ins in the last two weeks, which we know about. There are more which people don't report," he says. Sharon Cherkey's house was targeted several days after the attacks began, while he was down south at his parents' home. "They took everything," the 38 year-old grocer says.
In this time of conflict, Hezbollah's television channel al-Manar broadcasts not only the usual wartime sabre-rattling and patriotic music but also features a parade of women swearing loyalty to the Lebanese Shiite movement, to its fighters and to its leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. "I have four sons," says one such woman. "And I am ready to give all of them to Sheikh Nasrallah so that they become martyrs in the battle against Israel."
The Hezbollah fervour evident on the al-Manar airwaves is repeated in the Beirut shelters where refugees fleeing the bombardment of the south have gathered. Here the Hezbollah mantras and the militia movement's anti-Israeli slogans roll off the tongues of mothers, adolescents and even children. Reasons for this unwavering "to the death" loyalty to Hezbollah, incomprehensible to the outsider, are many. For one thing, the group is not just an armed militia, but a fully functioning political party that in the past two decades has erected a network of social services for its supporters. Also to be considered is the fact that in the eyes of many, Hezbollah is the one organisation to have "restored Arab honour" with its continued resistance to the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, a conflict in which the armies of other Arab nations were found wanting.
Hezbollah supporters regard the movement's resistance campaign as solely responsible for the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. Not to be underestimated also is the personal influence of Sheikh Nasrallah, a powerful speaker who commands much loyalty among ordinary people. The personality cult and level of popular support which has grown up around Sheikh Nasrallah is of the type normally reserved for heads of state in the region. Posters of Nasrallah hang everywhere in Shiite districts; from lampposts, car rear windscreens, in the toilets of hair salons.
Some Sunnis, Christians and Druze in Lebanon also draw satisfaction from the fact that the Israeli army, for all its technological might, has found its current advance through the south of the country a painful and casualty-heavy slog in the face of Hezbollah resistance. To publicly criticise Nasrallah and Hezbollah has become taboo among Shiites.
Meanwhile those who in principle support the movement, but who are unwilling to offer their lives, sons or houses to its cause, are keeping a low profile. Few wish to raise any suspicions among their neighbours for fear of being exposed as a "spy" or an informer. The culture of martyrdom carries strong meaning among Shiites, whose major religious icons were all slain in battle.
An indication of how many young Shiites have answered Hezbollah's call to arms can be gleaned from a visit to the emergency shelters housing displaced in Beirut. In these shelters, where residents of southern Lebanon and the southern suburbs of the capital fled after the bombing campaign started, are hardly any men between 18 and 40. North of Beirut in the Maroun-Abud high school, temporary home to over 750 people, the situation is the same.
Naji Kalil, 42, waits with her two daughters in the close heat of a summer's night while bread is being distributed. The slim woman, dressed in a simple frock and wearing an Islamic headscarf secured with a bent safety pin, fled her home close to Tyre after the first bombs began to strike her village. According to neighbours, Kalil's house has been half destroyed by the bombardment.
SHE HAD EXPECTED AS MUCH: a Hezbollah "centre" lies just 200 metres away. Asked whether she would also be willing to send her only son to the front, Kalil answers in a firm voice: "Everybody has his own mind. God protects all our young men."
"They are destroying our houses over our heads without mercy." Sipping water (maybe the only thing he's consumed in three days, says one aid worker), Ali Ballout, a 16-year-old boy, sighs and asks: "Why all this hatred?" "Not all the people in southern Lebanon are Hezbollah but they are turning us into Hezbollah by their massacres," he said, echoing a similar warning by boys who have survived the relentless bombardment of southern Lebanon and southern Beirut in the past two weeks.
Since the Shiite Hezbollah guerrilla group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border operation on July 12, Israel has launched thousands of airstrikes that have killed more than 400 Lebanese, injured at least 1,000 and displaced 850,000 others, while much of the country's infrastructure has been destroyed.
"How do you expect us to accept any peace with Israel when they have now killed my family and threaten more destruction," he said. This war is "against little children, the elderly and innocent civilians, not against Hezbollah," Iffat Zeidan, one of the women providing medical care to refugees, said.
"The majority of children are extremely traumatised," Iffat explained. "What do you expect when so many of them have seen their loved ones killed in front of their innocent eyes?"
DPA