Image Credit: mattmillsap on flickr

Before you even touch down on Israeli soil, you are made all too aware that this is no ordinary holiday destination.

Looking out of the cabin window, I can make out Tel Aviv. Suddenly the woman next to me leans across with a look of concern on her face and warns “don’t take any photographs out of the window; they’ll be confiscated and you’ll be questioned”. Clearly security is not an issue which Israelis take lightly, and who could blame them?

2008 sees the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state, and each of those years has been scarred with war and stained with blood.

Flying into Tel Aviv is to fly into one of the most complex Gordian knots of international politics; it is flying in to a land which has suffered invasions, counter invasions and suicide bombings.

It is because of this recent history, and Israel’s continued foreign policy of occupation, that means this is a country where war, or at least the perceived threat of war, is burned into the national consciousness.

The occupation of the West bank, the human rights abuses committed against Palestinians, the vast partition wall; each of these crimes stand in accusation of the Israeli government.

Whilst it is these war crimes I went to witness, it is crucial to remember that this is not a one sided conflict. There are heroes, villains and victims on both sides. It is in a bar in Haifa that this message is hammered home to me.

In the city of Galilee I heard the voice of the ordinary Israeli epitomised. Tomer is a thirty year old family man, who owns the “Sketch bar” where I found myself during my first night in the city.

After I explained why I was in Israel, I asked Tomer what the ordinary Israeli feels about the war. He told me, “we keep smiling even through we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. We’re surrounded by countries that want to wipe us out.”

When I spoke to Tomer, it was eleven months after the war waged between the Israeli defence force (IDF), and the Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. During the conflict, the Israeli air force mercilessly bombed Lebanese cities resulting in what UN general secretary Kofi Anan denounced as war crimes.

Simultaneously, the Hezbollah launched hundreds of Katusha rockets over the Israeli border. Tomer informed me that such a rocket exploded only yards from his home.

He sent his family to Eilat in the south as it was the only thing he could do to protect them. Fear for his family is etched on his face as he then moves the conversation onto Iran, the Iranian nuclear programme being the newest perceived threat to Israel.

I ask if he believes Iran would use such a weapon, and he waves his arm dismissively as he says that Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds during the Gulf war proves that “Arabic nations will use weapons of mass destruction.”

He continues by saying that the IDF could “wipe the West bank out in half an hour”, that Israel were too concerned with avoiding civilian casualties to tackle the Hezbollah properly, and that the Government should “build the wall higher”.

Almost a year after the war, the people of Israel have retreated into a mental mixture of fatalistic apathy and official rhetoric. Indeed, these are the words of a man who knows the front lines lie only miles away.

Today, as the Hezbollah threaten war, as Israeli government spokesmen rattle their ideological sabres, as the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsens, remember that there are victims on both sides.