Israelis Take Planning for War in Stride

The line grows thicker at rush hour: a girl with fuchsia hair and a bored countenance; an Orthodox man in gray beard and stiff hat; a young couple with children in tow.

They amble past the soldier who slouches in the doorway with an apple, a magazine and her M-16. They stand in line to show their identity cards. Then they tuck their boxed gas masks under their arms and head home.

This dingy school gym on the fringes of Tel Aviv is doubling as a Gas Mask Freshening Station, one of dozens thriving across this nervous nation.

“I almost believe the gas mask is psychological for me,” says 39-year-old Avital Cohen, spine resting casually against a pile of standard-issue gas masks. “But it’s our civic duty to have it.”

The people of Ramat Gan can tell you what a missile sounds like when it crashes to the ground -- “like the Earth shattering,” former resident Jonathan Peled says. Their streets were pelted with missiles during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and accounts of the long days spent besieged in bomb shelters became, as Foreign Ministry spokesman Peled says, “a kind of national folklore.”

These days preceding an anticipated war in Iraq are feverish ones for Israel. The army has been putting out information on everything from how to protect a flock of sheep from chemical attack (build a plastic shelter) to what should be done if one’s religion prohibits shaving one’s beard in order to don a gas mask (special masks will be provided).

Families wrap their windows in plastic, lug home canned food and check the seals on the fortified shelters that have been a legal requirement in Israeli construction since 1991. Newspapers are bursting with advertisements for flashlights, canned food and masking tape. In the safari theme park on the edge of Ramat Gan, the giraffes and elephants have been inoculated against anthrax; the bears were vaccinated with blow darts.

All this is carried out with an air of eerie equanimity -- waiting for war is nothing new here. A Hebrew phrase meaning “What happened -- war?” has long been a fixture of regional dialogue, roughly equivalent to the American “Where’s the fire?”

At the makeshift gas mask depot, a baby-faced soldier blows her bangs out of her eyes and begins yet another demonstration for a huddle of elderly women. Towheaded children spin toy tops in the shadow of boxed gas masks.

“People have undergone this experience before,” says Hebrew University sociologist Eyal Ben-Ari. “It’s become normal.”

If the United States leads another assault on Iraq, the question of whether Israel would come under attack from Baghdad, as it did in 1991, is open for debate. Still, nobody is taking chances. The government has warned the public to lay in stockpiles of mineral water and plastic sheeting.

“It’s a normal craziness, or a crazy normality,” Peled says. “It’s our way of coping.”

The gas mask is no longer, and hasn’t been for some time now, the stuff of postmodern nightmares. As the Home Front Command frequently reminds people, it’s a part of life. Masks are tucked into virtually every house and classroom in Israel, their plastic machinery taught in careful detail to preschoolers and the elderly. To frazzled commuters in Ramat Gan, they’re a bureaucratic detail; a nagging errand; a matter of national law.

The waspish goggles and clipped anteater snout are familiar icons. In a television commercial, a naked man sports a mask over his groin like a jockstrap. Elik and Belik, the beloved puppet hosts of a program popular among young children, will soon make appearances in custom-made gas masks.

Gas-mask key chains dangle in a souvenir shop window in the stone alleys of Jerusalem’s Old City. Hospitals hand out reminders to new mothers: Have your baby outfitted with a protective hood.

The government-issue masks come tucked in a cardboard case along with a ready-for-use atropine injection. A group of rabbis this winter asked the army to add a prayer book; it didn’t.

Nobody is supposed to open the box until the government gives the word, but not everybody listens -- a few children have already been rushed to the hospital after accidentally injecting themselves.

The masks are free -- required, in fact -- for Israeli citizens, but tourists can protect themselves too for a partially refundable deposit of about $50. When a group of Thai workers held an underground meeting last month to practice strapping on gas masks, however, it came to a bad end: Authorities burst in and rounded up the illegal workers in an immigration crackdown.

Since then, the government has softened and issued gas masks to foreign workers. Arabs living in the Palestinian territories are on their own, though, despite an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Ask Rafael Dadoun whether he finds the notion of a gas mask station strange and he shrugs.

“Some are affected by this. Others aren’t,” he says.

At 66, Dadoun has been in the country during all but one of Israel’s wars. He’s bought mineral water and cleaned out his safe room, but if the United States attacks Iraq, he plans to volunteer for reserve military duty.

“Whoever takes me,” he says. “This is my country and the call of my conscience.”

Those who are fearful enough -- and have the cash and the time to spare -- are expected to take refuge at the remote ranches, lodges and resorts sprinkled throughout the Israeli countryside. Managers of country hotels have reported a spike in telephone inquiries and reservations.

With memories of 1991 shadowing his municipality, the mayor of Ramat Gan arranged a voluntary evacuation program for residents. Thousands of people have signed up to be driven to a southern village where they would stay with local families.

That brand of trepidation will drive a few Israelis out of the country altogether; some have already booked rolling airplane reservations. The travel industry, struggling along with the rest of the flailing economy, has been quick -- and sometimes unsubtle -- about capitalizing on the anxiety.

“Where will you be when the missiles fall?” reads a travel advertisement in Hebrew dailies. “These packages include, in the event of war, plane seats and thousands of apartments and hotel rooms in the Mediterranean basin.”

But most Israelis will stay put.

“If I had the money to go away for a month, I’d go,” says 35-year-old Mor Levy. “The terror attacks are bad enough. I think all the time about leaving here and going someplace where there’s peace.”

Levy is a bridal makeup artist, but there hasn’t been much work of late -- couples aren’t planning to wed until after April, she says. So she fills her free time packing suitcases with her children’s clothes and stocking up on water and food.

She tries not to watch television news when her boys are home. She can read their fright in their clinginess, sudden quiet and reluctance to be left alone.

Soldiers visited their classrooms to give lessons about the gas mask. The 6-year-old doesn’t grasp the meaning, she says -- but her 10-year-old is attuned to the menace.

“What are we going to do?” he asks. “Where will we go?”

“I’m scared too, but you never show it,” she says. “I don’t want to make them nervous.”

Paused on a sidewalk outside the school gym, airport worker Yariv Calif glances down at his 3-year-old son. The boy’s class has practiced with gas masks in preschool, the father says, but the child is too young to understand. Children sometimes think it’s a game, he says.

“What a game,” Calif says in disgust, before turning toward home.