Why does this #%$& keep happening to me?

If one were to look out on the beach in of Tel Aviv, it seems like the opposite of war. Volleyballs flying in the air, children laughing, girls covering their bodies with tanning oil, but I digress. To the eyes, there is no war going on right now in Tel Aviv. The mind and heart senses something different. As I write this, if you drive an hour north or an hour south there also exists the increasingly remote possibility of a rocket falling on your head. Despite the low probability of this occurring, for some reason this almost happened to me twice in less than one week. While the in Sderot, a Qassam fell 200 feet from my car. And now, a Katyusha comes within 10 seconds of ending my life. I can only wonder why?

Hundreds of journalists have gone to Northern Israel to report on the situation there. They usually go to the scene of some attack that already occurred, hoping to shed light on what happened during the attack. I was hoping to do the same thing. I was going to go to Haifa, film the scene of where a rocket fell, maybe visit some local bomb shelters, interview Jews and Arabs on the streets, and then go back to the “safe zone” of Tel Aviv.

I checked my email just before leaving and I received an abnormal number of emails telling me to “be careful” or “stay safe.” Even my producer at Current wrote me a nervous email questioning how safe it was up there and to at least bring my flak jacket and helmet along. But the decision had been made. I brought my good buddy Garret along to film me in the car on the way up so that I could describe the situation to Current TV viewers. We left Raanana (northern Tel Aviv suburb) at about 10 in the morning. We took the old coastal highway up, passing the seaside Kibbutz of Maagan Michael and the neighboring Arab village of Jizr ez Zarqa. The fresh ocean air was a welcome change from the smog of Tel Aviv. We arrived in Haifa an hour later to see that almost every single store was closed. The vibrancy of this beautiful coastal city seemed to be sucked out of it. It actually felt like lots of rundown areas in America. Buses passed by empty bus stops, a random car whizzed by, a single pedestrian scurried past a Buy 2 Get 1 free promotion outside a closed shoe store.


Instincts told me to start the day at the Haifa train depot on Tuesday morning. More people died in this single attack than in any other. Eight train repairmen died were killed after a Katyusha rocket fired from Lebanon struck the center of the depot three days before. We drove around for an hour looking for this train depot. We went to a closed train station, ended up halfway to Akko, and finally asked a policeman for good directions. We made it there finally, and the Russian security guards at first would not let us in. I showed them my Press ID, told them I came all the way from America to do this one story, and that I was not leaving until I could speak to their supervisor. This is the only way to get things done in Israel. The supervisor, Yitzhak Fried, was firm at first, but as soon as I told him I work for Al Gore’s network, he not only agreed to let me in but also offered to do an on-camera tour of the scene.

Literally 5 minutes into the interview with Mr. Fried, we heard a rocket detonate relatively far away. He gave me a serious look I will never forget; suggesting that this was something real and maybe we should go the shelter. It took us about 10 seconds to walk briskly to the shelter when suddenly, as were looking out the window for where the last one fell…BOOM. But it wasn’t just BOOM. The sound waves lasted for at least a couple seconds. It was more like, BOOOOooooommmmm. I could feel the vibration of the rocket and knew that it must have detonated nearby. My camera was rolling the entire time and even though I was filming out the window, you can almost feel the impact as my body’s natural defense mechanism retreated backwards away from the exposed window.

It turned out that the rocket fell less than 20 feet away from where we had been standing 15 seconds earlier. Had that first rocket not existed…Had we not heard it for whatever reason (falling in the ocean, or not detonating)…Had we heard it and not reacted immediately…Had Hizbollah fired the second one first…et cetera. The possibilities are endless.

I woke up that morning intending to make a different movie that would not have been nearly as powerful. Now in the film that you can see on www.current.tv you can feel a little bit of what I went through that day. Humbled, I walked out of the train depot thinking that our human intentions can only take us so far in life.

As a war-victim for the first time in my life, I can only now understand what it is like. You are not that scared as it is happening, but afterwards you are different. Just after the attack, Garret said something that really freaked me out. He said that the rocket was in the air flying directly towards us while we were doing the interview. It had our names on it. It was going to hit us, until we moved. Now even in my daily life, I wonder what other threats are flying towards me that I don’t know about. Cars, suicide bombs, choking on an apple. I have become morbid and frightened.

As I was driving back to my Tel Aviv apartment from Raanana, they foiled a suicide bomb plot coming from militants in the West Bank. Due to this I was stuck in a roadblock for 4 hours. We waited patiently.

Finally back in Tel Aviv, Garret and I purchased a 175 gram pink Frisbee and tossed it around for a while before jumping into the cool, green Mediterranean Sea. In the sea I feel safe. There are no shark attacks or hurricanes here like there are in Florida. The water is familiar. I am alive.