Couple Handle Fear as Geopolitics Hit Close by

In the days before the rockets and bombs started falling, it had been just another trip to Israel.

An Orange County contingent of some 40 people had traveled the northern roads near the Syrian border and celebrated the Fourth of July on a cowboy ranch. The group then dropped down to coastal Haifa before making its way to Jerusalem. They climbed the Fortress of Masada and floated in the Dead Sea. They spent an evening in a Bedouin tent and rode camels, imagining that ancestors Abraham and Sarah had lived in just such a place.

Then, last Wednesday, the fun, the excitement and the thoughtful imaginings ended.

In a part of the country where the group had been a week earlier, Hezbollah fighters from Lebanon killed several Israelis and captured two soldiers in a border raid. Israel retaliated with a wave of airstrikes into Lebanon, and the give-and-take has left the world wondering if it’s another flare-up or the start of something much bigger in world history.

For Kathleen Ron of Irvine, the threat came to her doorstep. As an official with the Jewish Federation Orange County, which sponsored the trip, she’d already been busy. But as someone married to an Israeli and holding dual citizenship, Ron soon learned that Hezbollah rockets had landed near her home in northern Israel.

Through a quirk of scheduling, the raid occurred on the group’s last day in Israel. So while the group finished a cocktail party and left Tel Aviv for the comforts of Southern California, Ron took a two-hour taxi ride to her home in the Galilean village of Kfar Veradim.

“We can see Lebanon from the front terrace,” she said Monday in Orange County, having returned Sunday. “It’s 10 miles away.”

Their Middle East home offers a view not only of the border but also of the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps for that reason, she and her husband ate dinner as Italian, Turkish and Israeli TV crews parked outside.

I ask what it would have been like if the tour group, which included children and grandparents, had been in northern Israel when the attacks began.

“I was thinking about how, God forbid, we’d been in that area,” Ron says. “It would have been very, very difficult and we would have had to evacuate to the center [of the country]. We’re talking about Americans with young children who would have been very, very afraid.”

But if only to suggest how places half a world away can be worlds apart, she says Israelis don’t demonstrate that kind of fear. Sad to say, it’s a part of life they know too well.

Ron married her husband, Rahamim, in 1997 and moved to Israel in mid-1998. She thought she’d live the rest of her life there, until she took the Orange County job and relocated last year. Rahamim has fought in three Mideast wars. So while Ron is American-born and raised, she has come to understand the Israeli way.

Later on her first night back at home, a village security car motored through and told residents by loudspeaker to go to the shelters that are legally required for Israel residences.

The Rons nixed that and continued eating dinner.

“The feeling of the American part of my brain, as you’re hearing the explosions and the anti-aircraft fire,” Ron says, “was that I was just exhausted from it. It’s mentally exhausting to fall asleep and wake up to that sound. The Israeli part of my head said, ‘We’re going out, we’re going to my sister-in-law’s for dinner, we’re driving, we’re not afraid to go.’ ”

And that’s what they did the next night, Ron says. “I joked to my husband, ‘Better to be a moving target.’ ”

The federation trip is called a mission and has a serious purpose, in addition to the fun excursions. While some Westerners might think such a trip would always be fraught with danger, Ron says the subject never came up during preparations.

The specter, she says, is no worse than the kind Southern Californians face on the freeway or driving through high-crime areas. So, when the real thing came last week and a wider conflict became a possibility, Ron says her thoughts drifted more to melancholy than fear.

“We just want to live in peace,” she says of her Israeli countrymen. “Live our lives, raise our kids, have a good life in this really tiny piece of real estate in that neighborhood. I just don’t get what Hezbollah wants, other than to destroy Israel. Which is just not going to happen.”

*

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.