August 8, Northern Command Headquarters, Har Canaan, Israel — In this heavily guarded Israeli army base perched on a small forested mountain near the ancient city of Safed, about seven and a half miles from the Lebanese border, Brig. Gen. Shuki Shahar is offering a briefing filled with the numbers for the 28th day of the war: 2,500 Hezbollah rockets fired so far into northern Israel (a majority of them 122 mm or 240 mm in diameter, packed with ball bearings 6 mm in diameter to maximize carnage), 65 Israeli soldiers and 38 civilians dead, 6,500 Israeli air-force sorties, 20 Hezbollah fighters captured. This came at the end of a day during which I had been inundated with enumerations, tallies, and quantities. The Israeli press has lately been using numbers to conjure both today’s enemies and yesterday’s ghosts, sometimes to numbing effect. One television channel lists past attacks perpetrated by Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah terrorists: attacks on the American embassy in Beirut, April 1983, 63 dead; on the Marine barracks, October 1983, 241 dead; on the American embassy, September 1984, 20 dead; on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, March 1992, 22 dead; on that city’s Jewish community center, July 1994, 80 dead. I had started the day in Acre, eleven and a half miles from the border, where the exhausted-looking deputy mayor, Zeev Neuman, reported that 80 percent of his coastal city of 52,000 inhabitants (nearly a third of them Israeli Arabs) had fled south. Then he showed pictures of the five residents who had been killed by Katyusha attacks here on August 3. Also on August 3, three young men were killed by rockets in Maalot-Tarshiha, a beautiful Jewish and Muslim town in the heart of the western Galilee six miles from the border. For most Israelis, the name Maalot still calls to mind the massacre there on Israel’s Independence Day in 1974, when Palestinian terrorists who had infiltrated from Lebanon killed 21 elementary-school students and five others. Today, Mayor Shlomo Buhbut was sitting in his command offices in a shelter in the basement of town hall, hosting Minister of Infrastructure Binyamin Ben Eliezer, who was saying that he considered the Lebanese army to be nothing more than “Hezbollah in uniform.” But I was distracted by a large aerial map of Maalot hanging on the wall behind them, with red dots marking the locations of Katyusha strikes. There were some 400 dots. During my visit, three more rockets crashed into Maalot, one of which destroyed a residential building. Buhbut said that of the town’s 23,000 citizens, only 7,000 or 8,000 remained. Those who chose to stay were hunkered down in one of 78 public shelters and 110 private shelters. As with any war, however, the essence of this one does not reveal itself in numbers. The more basic truth lies in the steadfast resolve residents of northern Israel have cultivated in the face of decades of terrorism and cross-border attacks. No one understands the critical importance of resolve better than Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah himself, who has said that the vulnerability of the “Zionist entity” is its weakness of will, its wavering conviction, its inability to stomach casualties. In a celebratory speech on the occasion of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Lebanese security buffer in May 2000, the Islamic fundamentalist leader said, “It [Israel] has a nuclear weapon and the strongest air force in the region, but in truth it is weaker than a spider web.” But if the people I met in shelters in Acre and Maalot are any indication, this web is a surprisingly resilient one, spun out of an impressive tenacity. In a war in which the home front has in a sense become the front, these Israelis exhibit fortitude, stamina, and determination, and they overwhelmingly support their army’s actions. “Let our soldiers take as much time as they need to get the job done” is the sentiment most often expressed. They understand, perhaps more clear-sightedly than their political leaders, the urgent necessity of severely damaging Hezbollah’s military capability, restoring the IDF’s deterrent power, and securing the release of the two Israeli soldiers — Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser — abducted by Hezbollah on July 12. They’re also aware of being on the frontline of the global war on terror, and of battling an enemy that has struck — and continues to threaten — their American counterparts. (In February, then-CIA director George Tenet warned that Hezbollah had developed an “ongoing capability to launch terrorist attacks within the United States.”) One final number: 16. In the shelter I visited in Acre, a girl who had made her home there was celebrating her 16th birthday. Above ground, the city’s shops shuttered, an eerie and deceptive quiet held fast. But underground, there were shouts of joy as the girl’s friends put her in a chair and lifted her in the air 16 times, her head almost reaching the rough concrete ceiling. There was no fatalistic despair here, only a faith that the next birthday will be spent differently. For a moment it struck me that this was the heart of Israel, which can be seen as a kind of national shelter where a love of life and an equally unrelenting desire for normality prevail time and again against deadly adversity. — Benjamin Balint is a writer living in Jerusalem.