In Tel Aviv, Scuds and the Lessons of War : Israel: Even pessimists now realize the gulf conflict has brought a message to the Jewish state: Israel is not alone.

In one way or another, every Israeli’s personal history is woven into the national history.

For Shlomit Riter and her children, this war will be remembered as the time they lost their worldly possessions when a Scud missile landed three doors down the street in a middle-class neighborhood in Tel Aviv. For them, this war will be remembered as the miracle of their physical survival while just next door, people were buried under rubble. They’ve learned the lesson that life is more precious than belongings.

For Leonid Markovitz, this war will be remembered as his first opportunity for a new life. A TV technician who arrived from Leningrad three months before the war broke out, Markovitz got his first job on the third day of the war. He’s now part of a TV crew working for one of a thousand journalists who descended on the country to wait for the gas attack on a Jewish state still full of Holocaust survivors.

For Sarah Stern of Cafe Tamar, a popular watering hole in downtown Tel Aviv, this war will be remembered as the first time she closed the doors of her cafe in 35 years. A World War II veteran of the Jewish Brigade of the British army, Stern shut down for the first three days of the war, and was apologetic about afterward.

For many of the country’s army reservists, combat veterans with more experience under fire than most of the Americans in the Persian Gulf, this war will be remembered as a time when their children were in the foxhole with them, and often took command of the situation. Schools across the country have been closed since the fighting began, but before the schools closed, the kids learned about gas masks and atropine antidotes, hermetically sealed rooms and the different pitches of sirens announcing air raids or all-clear.

In small ways, each of these personal experiences that add up to the collective memory is about learning something about ourselves and our region during this war.

Presumably, politicians here are learning something about the limits of Israeli military power, even if few people are admitting that the war has changed their perspective on solutions to the more familial dispute with the Palestinians.

The maximalists are able to say, “Imagine what would have happened if there had been a Palestinian state aligned with Saddam, right next door to us.”

Minimalists are able to say, “See, all we need are Patriot batteries on top of the hills overlooking the coastal plains and the Jordan Valley.”

But things are changing nonetheless: Israelis and Saudis are suddenly able to identify with one another about the horror of Saddam Hussein’s Scud terror.

As it is, the Saudis, and even the Syrians, whose anti-Israeli enmity has been much more effective militarily in the past than Hussein’s missiles could ever be, are willing to countenance an Israeli retaliation against Iraq. For the Middle East, the recognition of Israel’s right to self-defense is revolutionary.

These small lessons are like the drying cracks in the masking tape sealing the windows in our homemade bomb-shelters. It’s too early to tear the tape completely off the window frames, indeed meanwhile we’ve added tape to the windows in the rest of the house to keep the glass from shattering as a consequence of the sonic booms and the exploding concussions.

But despite some of the strange bed-partners in the coalition, like Syria, which is run by a regime no less brutal than Hussein’s and with the exact same ideology of individual subservience to the state, this is the West’s war, and in that sense, it is a war about making the world safer--not only for Kuwaitis or Israelis, but also Iraqis and indeed even Syrians.

For if this war is to win the peace, it will have to define that peace as a global one, in which the personal memories and little lessons will add up to the realization that countries no longer exist as absolutely independent, absolutely isolated and absolutely ruled.

The battle against Saddam Hussein, which we in Tel Aviv have long expected, is the Middle East’s own version of the events that took place in Eastern Europe in recent years.

Nobody expects Saudi Arabia or Syria to reach the end of this war as parliamentary democracies or bright shining lights of human rights.

But the Saudis watch CNN just like the Israelis, and the Israelis, as cynical as they might be about the sudden international sympathy for the stoic suffering of a Jewish state that can finally say “I told you so” to the world, have learned that they are not necessarily alone.

Indeed, even Yitzhak Shamir, a septuagenarian whose entire adult life has been based on the premise that the Jews can rely on no one and that deep down inside all goyim are anti-Semites, has finally admitted that “Israel is not alone in this campaign,” something that might appear obvious to people in living in America or even Europe, but has not always been obvious to us here. And that, by itself, is a major step forward.

So, now that the duration is being counted in weeks instead of hours and days, the optimists among us here are looking forward to the final outcome of this war as a lesson to all the brutes who combine modern technology, illiteracy and ancient superstition to twist the meanings of civilization’s rules.

Meanwhile, even the pessimists have learned the lesson that Israel is not absolutely alone.