Life in A Northern Town

Amir Melzer, a resident of Metulla, said that people in northern Israel are getting tired of living in a war zone. His home overlooks the border with Lebanon above Fatimah Gate, the closed crossing point. "If there was peace, I would be eating hummus in Beirut," he said.

Having lived in Lebanon for the last four years --- including the July war with Israel last year -- one of the things that I wanted to do while here in Israel was visit the towns in the north that I'd only seen from the other side of the angry, closed border between the two countries. So earlier this month, Aaron Klein -- TIME's Israeli correspondent -- and I drove around the sea of Galilee and up into Metulla, the northernmost town in Israel (outside the occupied Golan) which sticks out into Lebanon like a sore thumb.

From the war-ravaged Lebanese side -- a haphazard Third World landscape even in the best of times -- the meticulous rows of Metulla's red roofed subdivisions, surveillance antennas, and observation posts stare at you in middle class passive aggression. Surely, I thought, only hardcore Zionist ideologues would risk living in what looked like the world's ultimate gated community. But what I found when I visited the Israeli side was in its own way weirder. Metulla is actually like some long-lost northern California hill-town transplanted to the Middle East. Its main street is a series of arts-and-crafts-style bungalows and the occasional Bauhaus landmark. People come here for the outdoorsy, laid-back lifestyle, subsidized by government tax breaks. There's multi-million dollar sports complex with bowling alleys, swimming pools, squash courts, and the only Olympic-sized skating rink in the Middle East. The local kids all hitchhike.

But this funky Galilean vibe may be a thing of the past. Although the residents of this area long ago got used to the occasional rocket attack from across the border, last summer's war was a different story -- a sustained 34-day conflict that had almost the whole area evacuating or living in bunkers. Now local officials are trying to get their heads around what they need to do if there's an even bigger or longer war sometime in the future -- with Syria, or Iran, or Lebanon or some combination of the three.

The problem is there's not much they can do. Kiryat Shmona, the small city down the slopes from Metulla, has built a municipal emergency command center, repainted some of its bunkers, and is trying to sweat some of the small details -- like how to get pension money to senior citizens during wartime. But the area can't really build a whole new secondary, wartime infrastructure while its normal economy and infrastructure are barely sustainable on their own. Tourism, one of the mainstays of the economy, doesn't exactly thrive in once and future war zones. The fancy sports center in Metulla is practically empty, a white elephant made possible only by donations from Canadian Jews.

Even more seriously, people in and around Metulla don't seem psychologically prepared for another war. There's a certain amount of shock that almost 60 years after the founding of Jewish state, they still have to live with this kind of instability while most of the country is busy making money and living the Mediterranean dream life. Nor does it help that the country's leaders -- mired in corruption, sex, and political scandal -- are not exactly inspiring the country to sacrifice individual interests for the public good. "No one wants to die for this corrupt government," said Amir Melzer, a Metulla council member. Half of the houses in Melzer's neighborhood are for sale, he said. He's even thinking of selling his, which has such a spectuacular view of the Lebanese towns of Marjayoun and Khiam that Israeli generals used it as a command post during the war. "You sit in the jacuzzi and watch Hizballah," he said.

Like Szderot -- the Negev town that's getting pasted by Hamas rockets launched from Gaza -- Metulla and Israel's other frontier towns have found themselves facing a reality that the rest of the country is trying to ignore -- that the Israeli way of life as it's lived now is getting harder and harder to sustain. Israel can't be both a garrison state and a modern consumer economy. At this rate, it's only a matter of time before the rockets get bigger, and the ranges get longer, just as its only a matter of time before the violence of Gaza spreads to the West Bank. Pretty soon Israel will have to choose.

--Andrew Lee Butters with reporting by Aaron J. Klein/Metulla