Mid-1970s Israel

Today's snippet is unusual in that I haven't yet written a Miss Riddell set in Israel, though I've thought about it often. Instead, these few words are about life in an uncertain world.

As well as my love of the natural world, I love history. So, when I was offered a chance to work in Israel, I grabbed it. To be clear, England and its northeast corner where I grew up have an incredible range of visible history stretching from late Stone Age stone circles to the present time. The Middle East, though, has sites going back further still and many of them we all know from our long association with Greek, Roman, and Biblical stories. While I was there, I visited every site I could but the life-lesson I learned from being in Israel was how little war can impact people.

How is that possible? Here's what I mean. Shortly after I arrived, a group of Palestinians crossed Israel’s northern border and hijacked a bus heading for Tel Aviv, Israel’s largest city. The Israeli army attacked the bus and though they thought they'd killed everyone on it, they weren’t sure. For days, the army blocked access into, and out of, Tel Aviv, which was where we were staying.

When the travel restrictions lifted, I watched the Israeli Air Force practicing bombing out in the Mediterranean Sea and saw tanks being moved north during the evenings and night. None of it made much impression on me until soon after came the invasion of Lebanon. Now this wasn’t my war, and I could be killed but I, and everyone else in our company, continued going to work, coming back to the hotel, and going out in the evening to restaurants and bars. Somewhere along the way, I finally understood how my parent’s generation had lived through WW2, a war that seemed world ending. You just get on with living your life.