HAIFA AFTER THE ROCKETS

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 03 TEL AVIV 003551

SIPDIS

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: PGOV CASC CMGT IS
SUBJECT: HAIFA AFTER THE ROCKETS


1. Summary. Two Embassy Tel Aviv consular officers made a
post-ceasefire visit to Haifa, Israel's third largest city,
principal port and for about a month this summer the frequent target
of Hizbollah rocket attacks, to assess operations of our consular
agency there and get a feel for how the city as a whole is
recovering from the war. Following are vignettes gleaned from that
visit. End Summary.

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The Intrepid Consular Agent
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2. The consular agent's lot is normally a peaceful one, accepting
passport applications, notarizing documents and answering general
visa questions, to lighten the workload for Tel Aviv's Consular
section. But all that changed for long-time Haifa consular agent
Jonathan Friedland when he returned from vacation to work July 16
and was greeted by salvos of rockets, including a hit on a nearby
train depot that killed eight people. Later, another rocket took out
a vacant house two blocks from the consular agency, in the city's
smartly restored German Colony neighborhood. "We didn't think this
could happen," he admitted. "You don't do this to a major city like
Haifa."


3. As the rockets continued to rain down, Friedland stayed open for
business, to post's utter amazement. He filed vivid e-mail accounts
of the attacks and answered tons of calls from anxious residents
(Most common exchange: Q: I'm scared to death. How can I protect
myself from attacks? A: Leave town and head south.)


4. Looking back now that it's over Friedland, an imperturbable Yom
Kippur War veteran, admits it was a bad time for the city, but not
as bad as the wave of suicide bombings several years ago. At least
with the rocket attacks residents after the first few days had a
reliable siren warning system in place that gave them a minute or so
to find a shelter, he said. The suicide bombings, in contrast, came
with no warnings and left residents with a feeling of total
helplessness.

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The Green Deputy Mayor Sees Red
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5. After paying tribute to the courageous Consular Agency staff,
conoffs headed over to City Hall for a briefing on the city's
response to the wartime attacks and their aftermath. Haifa
officialdom has already perfected its pitch to the steady stream of
official visitors coming their way to view first-hand the rocket
damage they saw daily on CNN. The city has put together a slick,
101-slide PowerPoint presentation, complete with full-motion video
and moving red arrows to trace the path of individual incoming
rockets. Crisp, close-up photos detail dust-blasted living rooms,
ball bearing riddled parked cars and wall-less upper floor dining
rooms, with tablecloths flapping in the hot summer breeze.


6. There is other damage - not the visible kind but serious
nonetheless - that the city is also facing. Deputy Mayor Shmuel
Gelbard told conoffs the city is already in debt to the tune of
about 50 million shekels (over USD 10 million) and counting due to
war-related costs. The city's fiscal year runs through December and
there is no telling how deep in the red it will stand by then. He
said the city will look to the national government to pitch in and
fill the gap.


7. Gelbard, an ardent Green Party environmentalist, has a particular
axe to grind, in connection with the recently ended war. As he
briefed conoffs on Haifa's response to the attacks and the status of
its recovery efforts he segued into his personal agenda of making
Haifa less of a target for future attacks by moving out its chemical
industry facilities - most particularly a very large ammonia storage
tank - and replacing them with his vision of a burgeoning tourism
industry. He believes Haifa's industrial economy pollutes the
environment and is responsible for excess deaths above the norm to
the tune of 500 per year. The ammonia tank was a particular concern
during the war due to a doomsday scenario that goes something like
this: an incoming rocket hit on the tank would split it open,
releasing the super-cooled ammonia that on contact with normal air
turns into a viciously poisonous gas cloud that could kill thousands
as it wafts across the city. Although the tank reportedly was
drained of virtually all its contents during the war, to avoid just
this scenario, Gelbard still feels the risk further buttresses his
case for moving industry out of Haifa and bringing tourism in. He
asserted that in such a swap-out, every lost industrial job would be
replaced by three nice, clean tourism jobs. (Comment: Whether the
three tourism jobs, weighted heavily no doubt towards table waiting,
bed making and dishwashing, would pay as much, combined, as the one
chemical job they would replace was left unsaid. End comment).


8. The debate over Haifa's industrial based economy in general, and
the ammonia tank in particular, played out just after the war in a
vitriolic exchange between proponents and opponents captured in the
English-language daily, Haaretz. On the one side, a professor from
Haifa's prestigious Technion - Israel Institute of Technology looked
at a missile hit scenario on the storage tank. In vintage
science-speak he said, "We referred to the wind directions - we took
the percentage of residents and the percentage of vulnerability, and
we came up with about 100,000 casualties."


9. The major general who heads the Israeli Home Front Command was
having none of that. "We can go back to being a stone age country,"
he sneered, "avoid using these substances, in which case we will
produce pitas with olive oil here, and hummus, like our neighbors -
or we can have these substances and be a progressive country like
Britain or France or America."

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Underground Day Care
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10. On the way out of City Hall, Gelbard took conoffs across the
street to a modern annex building where, five floors below ground, a
child care center sprang up in the building's parking garage during
the war. With the ceasefire in place and the new school year about
to start, things were winding down at the time conoffs visited, but
it was remaining in operation until school began. At its peak, the
parking garage kids camp hosted 200 children, producing a continuous
ear-splitting racket as the usual kids' ruckus reverberated
endlessly off the confined concrete space. This was about the only
way to look after kids in a group during the war, outside of bomb
shelters, since all the usual child care facilities were ordered
closed, to avoid the horrific possibility of mass child casualties
if a rocket were to hit such a location. Israeli Defense Force
soldiers were pressed into service in the garage as camp
counselors.


11. Amidst parking spaces and support columns painted bright orange
to remind inattentive drivers what level they were parked on, the
city installed inflatable rubber play gyms, Moon Bounce trampolines
and crafts tables. Across a couple parking spaces a movie viewing
area on the morning conoffs visited was featuring "Bride and
Prejudice," a recent Indian Bollywood offering about (what else?) a
young woman who objects to her impending arranged marriage. Odd
viewing fare for a clutch of Israeli five-year-olds, but they didn't
seem to mind.

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A (Steamy) Stroll Down Herzel Street
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12. Next, Gelbard took his visitors on foot to a nearby commercial
district. Leading conoffs on a fast-paced walk around heavy
vehicular traffic in the torrid midday heat, he stopped first to pay
homage to the traffic circle outside a downtown post office where
shrapnel from a direct rocket hit on that building severed a woman's
leg. "She's a hero," he said. "She's said she is going to walk
again, and she is going to dance." From there it was just a short
hop to Herzel Street, once Haifa's prime shopping thoroughfare but
now decidedly downscale. Russian is as prevalent as Hebrew here.
The stores offer no-brand clothes, money changing and cheap
electronics. Several clothing stores feature male mannequins
sporting snowy white leisure suits with pastel colored open collar
shirts. The energetic, white-bearded deputy mayor clearly senses
post-war opportunity here. Gelbard told conoffs he sees Herzel
Street as a vehicle-free, pergola-covered pedestrian mall, teeming
with coffees shops, bookstores and other decidedly upscale
appurtenances. It's another part of his vision to turn the port town
into something post-industrial, new age and therefore lower down on
the enemy's target list. No room for leisure suits here.

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The Shop-Til-You-Drop Cop
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13. Wilted from the heat of that forced march, conoffs gratefully
shifted to the air conditioned comfort of a police car, driven by a
female Israel National Police officer, for a tour of the principal
rocket attack sites around town. At the site of an attack that hit a
medium-sized apartment building, tearing off much of the front
exterior wall and producing several injuries, but no fatalities, a
neighborhood resident stopped to complain to our police escort about
all the war tourists, saying in Hebrew this "wasn't nice." Or words
to that effect. Gelbard said a Chinese delegation visited the same
spot while missiles were still flying. During their visit, the air
raid siren sounded and he hustled them into a nearby shelter, where
the stressed residents were surprised to be suddenly sharing their
space with a group of bowing, smiling Chinese. Perhaps this was the
origin of the neighborhood's war tourist animus. Our police escort
was another story in herself. Over lunch after the tour she
mentioned proudly that she had recently made a personal shopping
trip to New York, buying USD 11,000 of merchandise for herself in
one week. Must have been all that overtime she racked up during the
war.

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Inside an Immigrant Neighborhood - Some Happy Campers
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14. After a tasty lamb shish kebab lunch, conoffs headed crosstown
to the Neve Yosef Community Center, to see how the war experience
affected one of the city's poorest neighborhoods. We knew Haifa's
more affluent residents simply left town to escape the rocket
barrage. (At the peak of the exodus, 30 percent of the city's
270,000 residents were gone. The city came up with this figure from
a close analysis of domestic water usage data). But what about those
who had nowhere else to go? And, how did the residents feel about
their uneasy proximity to the aforementioned industrial chemical
complexes? The controversial ammonia storage tank is clearly
visible in the near distance.


15. This neighborhood has been something of an Ellis Island for
Haifa since the time of independence in 1948. First came newly
arrived Jewish Brigade war veterans. They moved on and along came
North African immigrants, primarily Moroccans. In the early 1990's
it was the surge of migrants from the former Soviet Union. Now the
neighborhood is made up largely of Ethiopians, who began arriving in
the late 1990s.


16. For each of these groups, the Neve Yosef Community Center has
been an assimilation factory, taking in newly arrived migrants,
dazed, confused and disoriented, and turning out new Israeli
citizens. The city of Haifa contributes some funding to the center's
operation, but its big patron, judging from the billboard out in
front, is the United Jewish Appeal of Northern New Jersey. The
multi-story structure is the hub of neighborhood activity - adult
education, crafts courses, computer labs for kids, field trips for
young and old alike - and it was at the peak of its summertime
activity when the war erupted. The center's general director, Moshe
Hazut, said he and his staff sensed the danger of their situation
immediately. The nearby chemical facilities no doubt were at the
top of Hizbollah's Haifa target list, and their rockets were not
entirely accurate, so the neighborhood was a sitting duck for near
misses. This made it imperative to keep residents inside, in
fortified shelters, for as much time as possible. His staff went
through 40 apartment buildings in the neighborhood to check out and
supply their shelters. Many of them had been neglected for years and
turned into storage rooms, filled with decades' worth of junk. One
team emptied and supplied the shelters. A second team ran
activities for the occupants, to help pass the time while confined
inside them. The center also organized day trips out of the war
zone, to give residents a respite from the tension and danger. Ten
carefully selected teenagers traveled to the United States, at the
invitation of a Jewish day camp on the affluent north shore of Long
Island (a/k/a Great Gatsby Country),near New York City. These very
happy campers spent two-and-a-half weeks there living with local
families, reveling in typical summer camp activities and sightseeing
in the Big Apple. By the time they returned the war was over.


17. The neighborhood emerged from the war unscathed, at least in the
physical sense. There were no rocket hits anywhere in the vicinity.
The poor aiming of the rockets proved to be even poorer than they
had dared to hope. The chemical facilities never were hit, and
neither was Neve Yosef. But damage has been done on a deeper
psychological level, according to Hazut, and that may take some time
to heal. He has noticed a greater emotional fragility in the
children. They act differently now. They cry, they're tense, they
don't want to be separated from their parents. The elderly feel
lonely and a bit shunned, sensing that in the wartime flurry of
activity to take care of children and help their parents, they were
just as scared but somehow overlooked.


18. The center is already at work on all of this, Hazut said. It
re-opened almost as soon as the ceasefire took effect, to show
everyone life was returning to normal. Counselors are encouraging
residents to talk it all out and express their feelings. Given the
center's long history of dedicated, industrious service to the
neighborhood it's a good bet the psychological wounds of the
recently ended rocket war on their way to healing. Just as the
center for decades has shown newly arrived immigrants the way to
settling into a new country, it's now showing them the way to get
over the recent trauma and move on.

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Conclusion: The Katrina Syndrome
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19. Looking back on the long day's journey through the city, conoffs
were struck by parallels between Haifa's situation after the
Hizbollah war and that of the city of New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina last year. In both cases the shock of a sudden, traumatic
event brought to the surface long-simmering and very much unresolved
issues. In Haifa's case, the debate is sharpening over its future
direction. Should it stick with its industrial base, or should it
diversify radically into clean industry such as tourism, both for
environmental reasons and to diminish its desirability as a target
in a future conflict? The war experience also highlighted economic
inequalities, as those with means left the city for safety to the
south and those without such means stayed and endured the almost
daily rocket attacks. (Exception noted for the aforementioned happy
campers).


20. Those issues will continue to be debated, and it's anybody's
guess when, if ever, there will be a resolution. But this much is
clear: as the wartime tension uncoils itself and life returns to
normal in Haifa, public and private discourse can be expected to
follow suit - marked by pride and defiance, fear and frustration,
debate and derision, love and compassion. In other words, Israel.

JONES