Alon Krifcher | A different college experience

Picture this: as you’re studying for tomorrow’s exam, your classmate continues to tap his pencil against the table. He’s noticeably nervous. You get up to walk around but feel trapped in the confined space. You realize there is too much going on in your mind and that studying will be ineffective so you go to sleep, realizing that tomorrow, the troubles you face will only be more acute.

For most of us, this is a familiar story. We hadn’t been doing the reading for one of our courses and suddenly the midterm is twelve hours away. However, for students at Ben-Gurion University in southern Israel, the stakes are far higher than an imminent ‘C.’

Following a barrage of one hundred eighty rockets targeted at Israel over the past two days, the Israeli Air Force killed the terrorist leader Ahmed Jabari, an act comparable to the killing of Osama bin Laden a little over a year ago. As the head of the Hamas terrorist group’s military branch, Jabari was responsible for countless terrorist attacks against Israel, including the kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was held captive for five years and three months.

In response to the precision strike against a terrorist leader, Israel expects even more rockets to fly into its population centers in the South, endangering the lives of over one million people.

These missiles are crude weapons that are not capable of having targets but merely fly in a certain direction, the location of their eventual detonation undetermined. At risk from these missiles are nurseries, farms, factories, homes, and yes, a major research university with longstanding ties to Penn.

While we go on with our lives as usual, the students of Ben-Gurion University are currently studying in bomb shelters. Our Israeli counterparts do not fear the Wharton curve, but rather the trajectory of rockets. They worry about their studies, now put on hold as the Israeli Defense Forces calls them up from reserves to serve on the front lines. The thoughts preoccupying their minds are not tomorrow’s exam, but whether they will survive the night.

Thankfully, for a Penn student, these concepts of mortal danger are simply unheard of. But for the citizens of Israel, this is their daily reality.

For me, these are more than headlines. About a year and a half ago, I was finishing my gap year in Israel before coming to Penn. On my way home from the grocery store one day I heard a loud bang. I kept thinking to myself that it couldn’t be — it had been so peaceful that year. I walked into my dorm and everyone was frantic. I heard snippets of conversation. “Bus bomb,” “there was a child,” “fatalities.” Suddenly, the conflict that had seemed so far from me became very real.

The Middle East is a complex place — a combination of poverty, religious fundamentalism and dictatorship creates constant instability. It’s easy and convenient to keep it out of sight, out of mind. However, students at Ben-Gurion University don’t have that luxury and the democratic state of Israel doesn’t have that luxury. At Penn we can forget that the government of Syria is in the midst of brutally killing tens of thousands of its own citizens. Israeli citizens in the north, however, feel this conflict first hand as rockets fall onto the Galilee region. And all the while, we can’t forget the looming shadow of a much greater threat: Iran spinning centrifuges in its quest for a nuclear bomb.

To the extent that I can, I seek to contextualize these many problems for students at Penn for whom the Middle East can sometimes feel like another planet. The students at Ben-Gurion University are not all that different from Penn students. Except, of course, that their lives are in constant flux since a siren warning of impending rockets can go off at any moment.

Last night, the government of Israel ordered all residents in the south of Israel to stay within fifteen seconds of a shelter. Why fifteen? Because the time it will take you to read this sentence is the time it will take for a rocket to explode after the sound of the warning siren.
In these very difficult times of fear and uncertainty, let us keep in mind our strongest ally and the only real democracy in the Middle East: Israel. The people of Israel are in real jeopardy. May their tomorrow be free from fear and destruction.

Alon Krifcher is an Engineering sophomore, and a Education Coordinator for Penn Israel Public Affairs Committee.

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