A Night on the Gaza Border, Waiting for Another War

• A Night on the Gaza Border, Waiting for Another War
  by SETH J. FRANTZMAN, 27 March 2019, https://www.jpost.com/
  The Gaza border is haunted by memories of former wars. In 2014, the fields around Kfar Aza were churned up by the D-9 bulldozers, Merkava tanks and aging M-113 armored personnel carriers.
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  On Tuesday night, the area was quiet. The fields were troweled, ready for springtime. They did not want to be trampled by tank treads. But the fields, like the people of Gaza and the surrounding communities, have no say. We are waiting for the next war that will be decided in Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s bunker, or in the Kirya military headquarters in Tel Aviv.
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  Every round of violence along the Gaza border of the past year, since the Great March of Return began in March 2018, has brought the same cycle of tit-for-tat exchanges. Hamas has tried to innovate with its mass human wave protests along the Gaza security fence. It has made balloons. It has tried sniper fire. It even used an anti-tank missile in November. And it still fires its long-range rockets, feigning “mistakes” after they struck Beersheba last October and Mishmeret this week.
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  I went down to the Gaza border, as I’ve done so many times, making the 58-minute drive from Jerusalem down Route 3 to Ashkelon and then to Yad Mordechai. Sometimes, I take Route 232 over to Sderot, in case the road has been blocked near the border. On Tuesday night, the drive down was interrupted several times by lumbering M-109 self-propelled howitzers nesting on flatbed trucks, being taken south. This is called the long “tail” that follows armies into the war zone, the massive logistics operation involved in deploying an armored brigade like the Seventh Armored, which was deployed this week as tensions rose.
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  What is perhaps remarkable about Israel is how it has gotten so used to preparing for war that armored units and the men attending them can be rushed to the South without disrupting civilian life everywhere. People can drive along the border and intermix with an army that is being deployed. Often one wouldn’t know there was a conflict brewing, if one didn’t know where to look and kept the radio off.
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