Brian Greenspun offers a view from the Middle East front as seen through the eyes of Rabbi Marvin Hier

Rabbi Marvin Hier

Wednesday, Aug. 9, 2006 | 7:39 a.m.

I'd like to share with our readers an important report from the front, so to speak, as Israel defends itself against Hezbollah's continuing deadly attacks. Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, returned recently from a humanitarian mission to Israel undertaken by the center and has provided a firsthand account of how the people of Israel are handling the war on terrorism.

Israelis are survivors because they have no choice. They did not ask for Hezbollah rockets to rain down upon them and their families. The rockets are a "gift" from Iran and all those who dare to believe that Iran wants only good things for the Middle East. What Iran and Syria and Hezbollah want is for Israel to disappear. Forever.

That will not happen because Israeli mothers, like the one in Rabbi Hier's report, will do what they need to do. If not for their children then for their grandchildren.

Decent people understand that sentiment. The others? Well, they won't learn until it is their turn in the box and, by then, it may be too late.

Words alone cannot adequately explain what we saw and what we experienced during our humanitarian mission to stand with our brothers and sisters in Israel in their moment of great need.

These brave young men and women are Israel's best and brightest. They did not have to die. It was not their war; it was a war forced upon them by those who want to destroy the Jewish State.

The northern cities we visited, Nahariya, Kiryat Shemona, the holy city of Safed, where the Kabbalists and mystics sought solace, are like ghost towns now. The great port city of Haifa is deserted, her life sucked out by the senseless barrage of rockets deliberately aimed at civilian population centers.

A week ago on Wednesday, just as we arrived in Nahariya for our 11 a.m. appointment with the mayor, the sirens sounded. We were told to immediately go down to the bomb shelter, three stories below, where we found emergency personnel gathered and manning the phones. We later heard a Katyusha rocket hit an apartment building just a few blocks away.

Our group included a cardiologist and an Auschwitz survivor. Both were visibly shaken, as we all were by what had just occurred. But for us, it would soon be over - our funds had been distributed and our bus was now leaving soon for the relative safety of Jerusalem. But for those left in the northern cities, there is no choice; this is what has become their daily struggle.

We saw it at all the hospitals that were deliberately targeted and hit, and at the classroom in Sederot where the missiles struck just 10 minutes before the young students were scheduled to arrive. This is a different war than all the others that have preceded it. This is a war for Israel's very survival, a war targeting its civilian populations, a war that no country would tolerate, a war that Israel must win.

These sentiments were driven home in the story that the Cabinet secretary told our group during our meeting in the prime minister's office: A mother who had been living with her five children for weeks in a bomb shelter demanded from a government representative who visited that she needed to speak with the prime minister urgently. When Prime Minister Ehud Olmert heard the request, he phoned the woman. She said to him, "Mr. Prime Minister, conditions here are unbearable; there is no air, the facilities are unsanitary, and I'm living here with my five children. But I called to tell you, do not stop - keep doing what you're doing - there is no other way for all of us."