Israeli Town Fears Pullout Will Bring Back Rockets

When you ask people what it was like, invariably the first thing they mention is the sound. Many say it’s impossible to describe. Those who try to describe it speak of a “whistling shriek.”

It’s the sound of an approaching Katyusha rocket, and if residents of northern Israel are particularly attentive to noises, it is because, more than three years after the last Katyushas brought death and destruction to their settlements, they still remember.

“Even more than it damages, it frightens,” Menachem Amit, head of the regional psychiatric clinic, said about the Soviet-made rockets, a mainstay of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s arsenal when its guerrillas were entrenched in southern Lebanon.

Because of the memories, the government’s decision three weeks ago to withdraw its army from Lebanon has stirred a tangled mixture of emotions among Israelis living in the north. They, too, have lost sons fighting in Lebanon and want to see an end to the Israeli occupation of the southern sector of that country. But they also remember the sound of the Katyushas, and they fear that the guerrillas and their rockets will come again when the army pulls out.

The government has tried to reassure these northerners but concedes that security in the region is bound to suffer when the Israeli troops leave.

Nowhere is the resulting tension greater than here in Kiryat Shemona, a town of 17,600 a mile or two from the Lebanese border in what Israelis call the “finger of the Galilee”--the northernmost part of the country. It stands as a symbol of the war.

It was in Kiryat Shemona that former Prime Minister Menachem Begin pledged that “no more Katyushas” would fall on the northern settlements--a promise used to justify Israel’s invasion of Lebanon on June 6, 1982.

Because it is a symbol, the town is particularly vulnerable, Mayor Prosper Azran said in an interview. “In order to prove that Israel’s whole policy in Lebanon was a failure, the PLO will try to hit Kiryat Shemona. There’s no doubt about it,” he said. “There’s already a tension in the air that their weapons are about to be trained on Kiryat Shemona.”

Danger is no stranger here. Founded in 1950 when the government gave town status to what had been a tent city for new immigrants from Morocco and Romania, Kiryat Shemona (which means Town of the Eight) was named after eight Zionist pioneers killed in 1920 while defending the nearby settlement of Metulla from attacking Bedouins.

Things were relatively peaceful until Dec. 31, 1964, the date on which a then-new Palestinian guerrilla organization called Fatah, headed by a pistol-packing, one-time civil engineer named Yasser Arafat, kidnaped Samuel Rozenwaser, a new immigrant from Metulla. (Rozenwaser was exchanged a year later for a captured Palestinian terrorist.)

Sporadic PLO raids from Lebanon followed, and in 1968 the first Katyusha fell on Kiryat Shemona. Katyushas fell on and off for years, with particularly heavy bombardments during the summer of 1981, when thousands fled the city.

‘Like a Cemetery’

“If we had put up markers every place a Katyusha fell during that time (since 1968), the whole town would look like a cemetery,” Mayor Azran said. “I can’t think of any example of a soldier being under fire for that long a time.”

Residents were bitter. They were treated as second-class citizens, they felt, and were expected to endure terrorist attacks that would not be tolerated in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

Kiryat Shemona cheered when the army marched north. Its residents talked about the invasion as their long-overdue annexation into the state of Israel.

This is still a politically hard-line town. In last summer’s elections, nearly 54% of the people here voted for Likud, the Israeli political party controlling the government at the time Israel invaded Lebanon. Nationally, Likud got less than 32% of the vote.

When asked which public figure they would most like to invite to their school, students at Kiryat Shemona’s Danziger High School last month ranked right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane at the top of the list. Second was Ariel Sharon, former defense minister and architect of the Lebanon war, and third was the equally hard-line former army chief of staff, Rafael Eitan. Prime Minister Shimon Peres came in fourth.

“The last two years, we lived like all the country did,” said Ruth Reich, a resident for 21 years. “We began to taste normal life.”

The number of newcomers settling in Kiryat Shemona jumped sharply soon after the invasion. The bomb shelters where residents had literally spent days on end during the worst of the shelling fell into disrepair. “We didn’t touch them for 2 1/2 years because we didn’t want to remember them,” Chaim Bitton, the town security officer, said.

A Terrible Price

On the other hand, residents of the north knew that a terrible price was being paid for their security. More than 600 Israelis have died in the war, and nearly 3,700 have been wounded.

“You think: ‘Because of me, that I want to live here in Metulla . . . so many people have to be killed and wounded in Lebanon,’ ” said Bialik Belsky, 50, a third-generation resident and the owner of the Arazim Hotel at Metulla, on the border about five miles north of Kiryat Shemona.

The Belskys are among those who swear they will never leave. “We are like the trees here,” Ayana Belsky, the hotel owner’s wife, said. “The PLO wants us to move from here, but we shall not do it. Never!”

If Israelis start giving in to intimidation, she added, “we may as well close up our country and go to America.”

While Metulla is a town of Zionist pioneers, residents of Kiryat Shemona are relative newcomers, and many do not have the same deep commitment. They seem more likely to leave if the Katyushas come again.

There is already a local joke about it. When 5-year-old Yakov Malka showed up in Tel Aviv the other day after disappearing from Kiryat Shemona, people quipped that the reason was that “he heard about the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from Lebanon.”

“Overtly, people say already, ‘I see no need to stay here, to struggle again,’ ” psychiatrist Amit said. “ ‘This time we’ll leave.’ This is what people say.”

Notices of apartments for sale are already up, Amit added.

“If it would continue as it was before the war, I, as head of a family, would have to think about leaving,” said Eli Azulai, head of Kiryat Shemona’s department of new residents and a father of three. “I’m responsible for the lives of my children, after all.”

Azulai has lived here since 1960 and knows the nightmare of Katyusha attacks. “It changes everything,” he said. “The worst part is the children. It starts with small things, like they don’t want to sleep alone. Sex life disappears. You’re always worried about where the children are. You don’t work--you just go out to buy food or to arrange something, and then you’re back home. You’re not free. You’re always on edge. This feeling of being on edge all the time is much worse than the bombing itself. You never know when and where it will fall; and even when it’s relatively peaceful, you don’t relax.”

Kiryat Shemona’s deputy mayor, Shmuel Ochana, is worried that the renewed security threat, on top of the town’s serious unemployment problem, will drive young people away.

“The young generation must live in Kiryat Shemona, because they are the future of the city,” Ochana said. “But if they don’t have work, they’ll leave, and (only) the old men will stay in Kiryat Shemona. The old men can’t be the soldiers of this area.”

While others fret, people like Amit and security chief Bitton are working feverishly toward the Feb. 18 date set for completion of the first phase of the troop withdrawal. The first phase will not affect the part of southern Lebanon just across the international border from Kiryat Shemona, so for a while people here will continue to have the protection of Israeli troops.

But the withdrawal is expected to be completed by summer, and the town’s residents are getting ready.

Amit is beginning a series of community meetings this week to prepare residents emotionally for the possibility of new Katyusha attacks. His message: “Don’t panic. Now it’s up to us to prove our responsibility. If you’re prepared, you are better able to avoid harm.”

The schools are planning Katyusha drills to remind students where the bomb shelters are and what to do if they hear that telltale shriek of an approaching rocket.

Readying Bomb Shelters

Bitton’s main concern is getting the town’s 200 neighborhood bomb shelters ready for use. City employee Elias Asaraf sat at a dilapidated desk the other day sorting boxes of new keys for the shelters. Nearby were stencils and phosphorescent paint to renew the identifying numbers and arrows that guide residents to the appropriate bunkers.

At Shelter No. 110, hidden beneath a neighborhood synagogue, a woman was washing nearly three years worth of accumulated dust off metal bunk beds. At No. 512, Bitton ordered a new metal sink to replace a broken ceramic one.

The security chief said the army is building 25 additional shelters here, and he has asked for $3 million in emergency funds from the state to buy more metal bunks, water pumps and first-aid kits.

“It’s like we were on a 2 1/2-year holiday,” Bitton said. “Now we’re going back to school.”