Threat of attack quiets Israeli vacation spot

BY MATTHEW McALLESTER | Newsday Middle East Correspondent

July 30, 2006

KIBBUTZ SASA, Israel - To drive into northern Israel is to enter a land that becomes stranger and stranger with each passing mile.

Where are the children? The women? The cars?

The pine-covered hills of this farmland and vacation region house a thousand spas and restaurants and wineries. The gates and doors to most are closed.

Smoke appears suddenly on hillsides and in villages, in a mushroom cloud, then drifts up from the subsequent fire. Swaths of the tinder-dry, summer slopes are charred. This is where a rocket has landed.

Toward the border with Lebanon, deep booms from Israeli artillery batteries nestling in fields sound across the otherwise silent vineyards and forests. Now and then, a farm worker appears, driving a combine harvester through a field of ripe corn. The farmers can't afford the luxury of escape to the south. Crops need tending.

"The feeling is like gambling," said Shay Yatom, 60, secretary of Kibbutz Sasa, a farming collective that nestles next to the border. The kibbutz has about 750 acres of agricultural land - corn, apples, wheat. "You go to work all the time. You can't stop working. If you stop you lose your orchards, you lose everything. We can't go away."

The unpeopling of northern Israel is because of the rockets. They sail in an invisible arc from Lebanon, fired by Hezbollah guerrillas about 100 times per day, usually landing harmlessly in a field but sometimes ripping into homes and cars, killing at random. A Jewish woman one day, an Arab teenage girl another. Never before have so many enemy rockets rained down on modern-day Israel, so even the war-hardened have packed their bags and headed beyond range. For now, that's about 30 miles. On Friday, large rockets landed near the town of Afula, farther into Israel than ever before. The fear is moving steadily south.

Left behind in the north are the stubborn, the devil-may-care, the farmers, those with nowhere to go - and the thousands of soldiers involved in the war.

A country getaway

Being farther north than the arid hills of central and southern Israel, the Galilee region is the country's orchard, its weekend hideaway for city-dwellers wanting to ride horses in the afternoon, have their shoulders massaged at sundown and eat dry-aged porterhouse steaks from the Golan Heights and drink local wines in the evening.

There's a laid-back atmosphere in the north, a frontier mentality mixed with a love for the good things in life: wine, organic food, hiking, horses, art, space. People who live in tense Jerusalem or non-stop Tel Aviv usually speak of the Galilee as a place of sanity and peace.

At this time of year, the roads are usually packed with families and couples heading for the numerous guest houses, or to the shores of the Mediterranean and the Sea of Galilee.

Now, the beaches are empty. At a famous spa hotel, Mizpe Hayamim, a guard was the only person to be found on Friday afternoon. The Relais & Chateaux hotel had been closed for more than two weeks, he said. "We hope it will end very fast," he said, before returning to his security booth in front of the locked gate on the hotel's driveway.

Down the road, at the well-known restaurant Jaouni, the doors were open. Soldiers from a nearby base like to eat there. But there were few customers at lunchtime Friday. Outside were some notices to prospective customers.

"Open for the mood," said one, ambiguously. Defiant or pragmatic, it was hard to tell.

"Twenty-percent discount for security personnel" another read, hoping perhaps to show solidarity with the police while also luring those who are still using the roads in the north.

"For your own safety and according to police orders, service will only be offered inside the restaurant," read a third. "Sitting outside is forbidden."

Nearby, at the Bat Ya'ar Ranch and Steakhouse, the restaurant was closed and there were no would-be cowboy guests to witness the birth of a foal. Four hours old, she staggered under her mother, craning her neck to feed for the first time. The only people watching were ranch hands who sipped mint tea and gazed at the new life, even as deaths piled up only a few miles away in Lebanon and, less often, in Israel itself.

Uncommon scene

Things in the north can sometimes seem a little surreal. Overweight reservist soldiers with dreadlocks amble around at roadblocks. Young, male religious Jews from the messianic Hasidic sect stop their van and dance around in wild joy with slightly bemused soldiers. A vendor drives his van along the border, selling ice cream to soldiers, child-friendly music blaring from a speaker.