A 21-year-old Yeshiva University student from Tiverton says that when you live in Israel, "the threat of terrorism is always in the back of your mind."

But Jacob Benesch, who has spent the last year in that country, most recently working in Jerusalem with an Internet-based news agency, says it was only when his roommate came back from northern Israel with pieces of a Katyusha fired by Hezbollah fighters that the war on terrorism became just a little more real.

"That's what made it more tangible for me," Benesch, who will return to Rhode Island on Aug. 11, says. "It's one thing to see the news reports. It's another thing to touch one of these rockets and to feel the ball bearings, and to realize they were made to inflict the maximum possible damage."

Benesch and Nadia Maccabee, a 20-year-old Brown University junior who has spent the last six weeks working as a first responder on an ambulance in the Negev Desert as part of the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, Megen David Adom or "Red Star of David," are in programs arranged by the Jewish Agency. They say the overall mood right now is akin to what the English used to call the stiff upper lip.

"I have some family in northern Israel, and when I decided not to go, many Israelis here were surprised. Their attitude is that we should not let the terrorists keep us from carrying on our lives, and that we must be strong," Maccabee says. "I explained to them it wasn't me who didn't want to go, that it was my parents who were worried."

Maccabee, who hails from St. Paul, Minn., said she chose to work with the Megan David Adom because she's a community health major at Brown and has a strong interest both in justice issues and the health professions. She plans to return home Monday.

After 60 hours of training to be a certified first responder, she was dispatched in June to the Megan David Adom station in Beersheva, the largest city in the Negev. Surrounded by Bedouin villages, the city is far from the Lebanon border but relatively close to Gaza.

Maccabee said in a phone interview last night that in her five previous visits to Israel she had never seen security as intense as in the last three weeks.

"It's striking how often bags are checked, even in a Starbucks coffee shop or in a restaurant. Soldiers are everywhere you go in Beersheva. And at the hospital, every single ambulance is searched before it can get onto the grounds."

While most of her ambulance runs have been routine, one involved a 20-year-old woman from Haifa who witnessed a rocket strike near her home. Maccabee says the woman was so traumatized that after her family brought her to Beersheva, far to the south of Haifa, she began to knock on people's doors, screaming "the rockets are coming."

"At first nobody knew who she belonged to. Then someone threw water on her, and she became catatonic. We were about to take her to the hospital when her family got her. The next morning we were called to the same neighborhood. Her family asked us to take her to the hospital because they couldn't control her. It was pretty frightening."

Maccabee said just last week two Arab-looking men straggled into the ambulance station. While one immediately fled, the other displayed a bloodied face, with the top of his head burned and much of his skin torn off.

"He said he was from Hebron, which is in the Palestinian territory. He said he was making coffee and the coffee maker exploded in his face. The medical people were dubious because the injuries more consistent with that of a homemade bomb. I understand the nurses called police, and I don't know what happened after that."

Maccabee said while most members of her ambulance team are Jewish, at least two of the drivers are Arab Israelis, and one man is Christian. Whether they are Arab or Jewish, she said, they all identify themselves as Israeli and, since the rocket attacks began, have become more united in their belief that Hezbollah's rockets must be stopped.

The loss of life associated with the Israeli air strikes are viewed as tragic by Israelis, she says, but the general view is that Hezbollah bears the blame, for using innocent civilians as human shields.

She hopes the conflict will not be forever. "I like to think that years from now, when my child visits Israel, there will be a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and no one will have to be afraid of a suicide bomber walking into a coffee shop."

rdujardi@projo.com / (401) 277-7384