ISRAEL: Revisiting the gas masks

"You are invited to return your family's protective kits," was the notice on my local bulletin board. Protective kits? Oh, yeah. Those cardboard boxes containing gas masks, atropine syringes and other protective equipment in case of a non-conventional attack. The kits had first been issued to Israeli residents during the Gulf War in 1991, and again in the early 2000s with the American war in Iraq. Mine stayed closed the second time.

In early 2007, the IDF's Home Front Command began collecting all the kits for "refreshment" as their contents have become worn, dried out or expired, and as any immediate threat of non-conventional warfare attacks from the direction of Iraq grew more distant.

Having recovered the boxes from the attic, where they'd been  gathering dust for years, I stared at them for a few minutes. Two adult kits, one for a child, one for a baby. A family of boxes for a family of people. My daughter's kit, a cardboard box with a sling-strap, had been decorated with girlie stickers and happy flowers, converting the thing into a grotesque version of a lady's pocketbook. They had spent a morning decorating them in school -- personalizing them to make them less threatening. "We love you," her father and I had doodled on the side, with hopes that they'd never have to open it in school, or anywhere else. They didn't.

Mom, what are those boxes, the kids wanted to know. Groan. Uh, the army gave them to us a few years ago. What for? Er, in case there were chemicals in the air during a war. Hey, can I see mine? I only showed the pamphlet that showed a happy kid, smiling inside a plastic contraption. They shrugged. So what's for lunch?

Yesterday afternoon, as I was walking up the block with four gas masks in one hand and my garbage bag in the other, no one paid any notice. 

"Hoping only for the best of news!," says the Home Front Command's website.

— Batsheva Sobelman in Jeruslaem