Israelis During This War
The view from my home in the periphery
Last week marked the start of the fifth month of the Hamas War. My American friends are saying things like, “How are you doing?” “I heard Israelis are really depressed.” “Why don’t you come here, you can stay with me?” “You must hate your government!”
Most of my comments are based on myself and my experiences in my small community in the north, near the Lebanese border, since that is what I know best. From what I have heard from friends in other places, though, what I write is pretty much the national consensus.
Hizbollah has been threatening Israel and shooting rockets at Israeli communities farther to the northeast for a very long time. In recent years my city has been safer than many other places along the northern border, although terrorism is part of its history.
Our Government
Most people I know are very happy that Netanyahu is prime minister, in spite of his problems. Many of those purported issues are as (il)legitimate as claims against Trump and have been promoted (and probably financed) by the same forces. Netanyahu has, so far, stood up to pressure and continues to defy calls from Europe and the U.S.A. to do things that are against Israel’s self-interest. We need to win this war.
We are sick of sweetly hiding in shelters, having massive taxes, and spending a fortune on defense. We want to live in peace like those in the West who are telling us what to do, but whose demands would ensure that we continue to be sitting ducks for our enemies.
We are sick of leftist prime ministers and Knesset members who have endangered us in the past by placating the leftist U.S. State Department, the E.U., and the U.N. We are solidly opposed to a 2-State Solution. We have tried that several times. Palestinian rejection of the plan and an increase in terrorism has resulted each time.
Trying to appease the West is one reason we are in the situation we are. Our interests are not those of the USA and certainly not the same as the Europeans, whose grandparents stood by while ours were massacred. Unfortunately, our media is as left-wing as the media in Europe and the USA, so the world gets a skewed impression of what is happening here.
Statistics
Israel’s total population is about 9,000,000, of which about 20 percent are Muslim Arabs and another 5% are Christian (including Arabs), Druze, and others. Foreign workers are an important source of manual labor. Students come from many countries for both university degree programs and short, specialized instructional programs.
About 1200 civilians, including foreign workers and foreign students, and around 280 soldiers died in the October 7 terror attack, and nearly 230 have been killed in combat since then. In proportion to total population, this is the equivalent of approximately 44,000 Americans. For contrast, consider that in the total 10-year Viet Nam war, approximately 47,000 American military personnel were killed in action and another 10,000 died in VietNam.[i]
Everyone here has a family member, friend, co-worker, or neighbor who has been killed in this war.
Within the first month of the war, Israel intercepted 9,500 rockets fired at us by Hamas and Hizbollah.[ii] Since the Iron Dome does not go after rockets that go to unpopulated areas, the number fired at Israel by terrorists is far higher.
Within the first two weeks of the war, between 200,000[iii] and 500,000[iv] Israelis had to flee their homes. Some had just five to ten frantic minutes to pack and leave. Besides those whose communities were evacuated to protect the civilians, many mothers whose husbands were called up or killed left their homes and moved where they felt safer or had help with children. The number of Israeli refugees is certainly higher now since the war on the northern border is heating up.
Because of the war, tourism has fallen to almost zero. The government has rented hotels and placed families in them, with whole families sharing one or two rooms and meals provided. Other refugees are living with total strangers who opened their homes. Some refugee schools have been opened; in other places, refugee children have been attending school with neighborhood children. Many of these people will be able to return to their homes, but the homes of others—and in some places their whole communities—have been destroyed.
Sirens, Booms, and Daylight
This is, to most Americans, an unbelievably small country—about the size of New Jersey, including the mostly-empty Negev Desert. It is surrounded by a sea on one side and enemies on the others. Rockets can reach anywhere. as we have seen since this war began.
For at least 20 years, “safe rooms”—reinforced rooms that provide protection from rockets—have been required in new construction. Some older apartment buildings have been retrofitted—all the rooms in a vertical row, first to highest floor, were reinforced at the same time. Most people here live in apartments; many of those living in private homes have extended or retrofitted their homes. Other communities, including the neighborhood I live in, have communal shelters.
Rockets cause the earth to shake in areas near the point of impact. We are instructed to keep our shutters closed to protect us from shrapnel and to reduce the amount of window glass breakage. Most homes have heavy retractable blinds or panels of blinds that they can open or shut. Because we have so little time between rocket launch and contact, most people in my region have kept their blinds and shutters closed, or closed most of the time. That means that for 130 days (as I write this) we have lived with little or no daylight in our homes.
Communities close to the borders are considered to be on the confrontation line. Today’s rockets travel much faster than they did 20 years ago, making communal shelters much less helpful. In my community, the time between a rocket launch and contact is measured in just a few seconds. If we do not have a safe room and cannot get to our communal shelter in that time, we are to go into an interior, windowless space in our home or building, lie down on our face, put our hands across the back of our neck, and wait for ten minutes before moving. Why ten minutes? When the Iron Dome blows up a rocket, the bits of rocket fall, and it can take almost that long for all the bits to fall out of the sky. Some of those bits are very large, some are small; all can do damage to life and property.
If we are outside, we are to find shelter; if there is no shelter, we are to go to the lowest place around and lie face down, hands across our necks. A friend was driving when there was a rocket attack; they lay down in a ditch, with her covering her youngest child with her body. They stayed like this for ten minutes. Luckily, this was the second or third dry day in the middle of a prolonged period of rain. Otherwise, they would have been lying in the cold winter rain or on soaking ground for ten minutes in the middle of flu season. Certainly other families have not been so lucky. There is no way to count the number of illnesses that sprang from being chilled and soaked while sheltering.
My safe place is a long hallway. My building is made of cement and is not centrally heated. Until last week, night temperatures outside have been from the high 30’s to the mid-40’s F; days from high 40’s to high 50’s. The tile floor is very cold, so now I keep a throw rug in my hall. I also leave a pillow there. I am not as flexible as I used to be, and keeping my hands clasped across the back of my neck is difficult. When I need to release my hands to relax my shoulders, the pillow provides a little protection.
Twice I have been enjoying Sabbath dinner with neighbors when the sirens have sounded. Both times my friends insisted I sleep at their home, which is on the ground floor; I live on an upper floor. When a building gets a direct hit, the upper apartment is damaged or destroyed but the bottom one is probably going to be undamaged (except for things falling off the walls or possibly out of cabinets from the force of the impact. People near the impact point may have temporary hearing loss from the sound.
Hizbollah, like Hamas, is not run by idiots. Many of the leaders have been educated in American and other western universities, and they use their brains and educations against us. So they deliberately send the rockets at times that will cause the most distress. Hence the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and this new Hamas War, which began on Simchat Torah/Shemini Atzeret.[v] Midnights, 6 am, and Sabbaths are also favorite times for attacks, the last especially around mealtime when Jewish families are gathered at the table.
Since the war began on October 7, my community has had warnings of several attacks, including possible suicide drones, terrorists on the ground, and rockets. Our Iron Dome has destroyed rockets approaching our community and we have felt the earth tremble as some have landed in uninhabited areas not far away.
Additionally, we hear echoes of our artillery firing at Hizbollah positions when Hizbollah starts firing at our soldiers. Depending on how far the artillery is from us and how the wind blows, the booms are very loud or barely audible. The Hebrew term is “boomim,” the “im” ending being the plural ending, the way “s” or “es” is in English.
A couple of weeks ago when I was having Sabbath dinner with neighbors, their 3-year-old son said (in Hebrew, of course) of a particularly loud boom , “That’s a good boom hurting the bad guys, right?”
Sometimes the booms wake me up at night. Sometimes just one or two booms are needed to eliminate the threat; at other times the booms continue for a long time.
This is our daily reality. We are lucky; we have had fewer alarms than places nearby.
Economic Realities
As during the Corona, many people are saving money. There’s one simple reason: they don’t want to be far from home or a shelter in case of a rocket. Another reason for not spending is uncertainty about the future: why do expensive upgrades or buy better furniture if your home could be struck by a rocket the following week?
Other people are struggling. Refugees are still responsible for mortgage or rent payments on the home they had to leave, plus arnona, a municipal tax that is paid by every family, not by the owner of the property as is done in the USA. Plus, they have expenses in their temporary home: possibly rent, definitely clothing, other necessities, and things to keep children occupied. Families who rented apartments probably had to buy appliances because these are almost always the tenant’s responsibility. And because there are almost no laundromats, “appliances” includes at least a washer. My friend in Beersheva, in the Negev desert, can usually hang clothes outside to dry. But in the north, where winter is the rainy season and concrete block apartments do not have central heat, clothing can take four or five days to dry inside. Dryers, while expensive to run, are considered necessary by many.
Most of the soldiers are men, and most of the reservists are family men whose jobs are necessary for the family. Their families are suffering without those paychecks.
In addition to these issues, the uncertainty has caused “war spending,” purchase of things needed or possibly needed because of the war. For example, I upgraded my phone to a more reliable one, then discovered it required Bluetooth if I was going to use headphones—something that would be helpful if I were in a community shelter or sleeping in a friend’s guest room for weeks or months. I am not a traveler and had to purchase a large suitcase on wheels in case my city is evacuated—a real possibility because of our proximity to Lebanon and the heating up of the war with Hizbollah. Information broadcast on an emergency system phone app is duplicated on certain radio frequencies, and I didn’t have a radio—so I got one. The government has encouraged us to put in a goodly supply of canned and boxed food, which also costs.
In addition to these expenses, which we might have spread out over months or years if we were not in an uncertain emergency situation, we have been donating to charities more than before because the need is so great. Helping the soldiers, widows, orphans, and our own refugees has been important—and expensive.
With so many men called to active military service, business has been disrupted. Many businesses are shorthanded or temporarily closed, so there there are lots of delays and shortages.
I get my cooking gas from a very small business. The owner, a certified gas technician, lives in a community that has been evacuated; his family is sheltering in southeastern Israel. He comes back from his military base one or two days a week to take care of his customers. His wife, whom he has not seen in months because she is at the other end of the country, takes his orders and handles his books like normal.
Postal service has been disrupted. Bus service was disrupted the first week or so, but has been pretty much normal since then; it looked to me that a lot of retired drivers were called back to replace the young ones. Since January, though, the bus company serving my community has started using women drivers. The first time I got on a bus with a driver wearing a hijab it was a real surprise.
One good thing: getting building permits has always been a years-long process. Most municipalities have reduced the permitting process for people who want to build shelters in their homes or yards. There is hopeful speculation that after the war, having proven that approvals can be made quickly, the permitting process for all home expansions and renovations will be simplified and expedited.
And then there’s the elephant in the room. We are going to have to pay much higher taxes to pay for this war. Arms and materiel are not free, and support from the USA, promised at the start of the war (which while very helpful would not have paid for all the expenses anyway), may disappear in order to appease certain segments of the American electorate.
The “Matzav”: The Situation and Reactions to It
A couple of months ago I told my doctor, “I am short-tempered and find it hard to concentrate. Is it because of the situation?” He put his head down on his desk, pounded the desk hard three times, sat up straight, and in his calm, cultured voice said, “Yes.”
Everyone is tense.
Author and psychology podcaster Dr. John Delony, whose best seller, Living a Non-Anxious Life, was published a few months ago, says that anxiety is our body telling us we are in danger. Usually it is a reaction based on the superficial similarity of a present benign experience to an old traumatic one.
But for us, the uncertainty is current and very real. Every time we step into the shower we know that we might have to run to our safe place while naked, wet, and soapy. Parents are anxious whenever their children are out of their sight—and Israeli children, as a rule, have much more freedom than American kids. Many people have curtailed all but necessary errands outside of their home.
Some of my English-speaking friends cope by setting up their warning app to notify them of all threats within a certain radius. Whenever they hear a loud boom they post in the English-speakers’ WhatsApp group and then others report, whether they heard it loudly or at all. They feel safer when they are aware of all the war activity going on around us.
One friend has her phone set to “all alerts.” Once when I was visiting her, the alert sounded almost constantly. Each time she looked at her phone to see where the problem was. Now, with the Hamas infrastructure in the process of being destroyed, there are fewer alerts. I can see how much calmer and more rational this friend is, now that her phone is not alerting her of a rocket every few moments.
I am on the other extreme. I ignore the booms. I was told by a member of our city Home Guard how the Iron Dome works, and that if my location is targeted I will get a siren and warning. So unless those things happen, I ignore both the booms and the WhatsApp messages others post. I feel calmer when I pretend things are almost normal.
That’s not to say I handle real alerts well; my body reacts.
Nightmares
I have heard that some children are having nightmares. The adults I know are more likely not to sleep well. I sleep much better in my recliner in the living room than in my comfortable bed. After 4 months I finally figured out why. When I am in the chair, my two cats like to sleep on me. The moment anyone sets foot on the path leading to my door, they bolt for their hiding places, waking me up. If we are subject to an attack like that on October 7, I do not want to be awakened by a terrorist or killed in my sleep. I want to know it is happening, and to shout “Shema Yisrael”[vi] at the top of my voice to the monsters.
I know that the likelihood of this kind of attack is on the low side, but when I lie down in my bed, where the cats sleep near but not on me (sneaking on and off the bed without my awareness), I simply do not sleep well.
The government recently changed the gun law and is providing training to a much wider range of people than before. Many of my friends have bought guns and learned how to shoot them. I have never had good hand-eye coordination, so I did not. But also, I do not have a family to protect, and most of them do.
Coping Strategies
We all have our individual coping strategies. Here are a few:
I began posting on Facebook every day, but that got boring when nothing much was happening here, except the booms. Then I started publishing my thoughts in this newsletter. I also have made a number of sock dolls for young children. Several were given to infants born while their fathers were at the front.
During the second week I went to visit a good friend who had two sons, a son-in-law, and her husband who had all been called up. Her house, which has a real safe room, was packed with relatives. At first I thought it was a bad time to visit; then the very energetic 5th grader asked me if I knew how to play foosball, which here is a miniature soccer game, not American football. I did not, but Yehuda tried his best to teach me. Keeping him occupied gave his mother, who already had a six-year-old and a two-year-old needing immediate attention, a brief respite, and kept him from being under his grandmother’s feet as she was getting food together for her husband to take before he left in his full uniform.
On October 7, one wounded soldier,[vii] who was wearing tzitzit, a fringed shirt-like garment worn by religious men, was laying in a ditch surrounded by dead terrorists. He was almost shot by fellow soldiers, but at the last moment one noticed his fringes and they realized he was a Jew. After this story got out, so many non-religious soldiers decided to wear tzitzit that they sold out in this country. Volunteers ordered them from abroad, dyed them the color required by the army, and distributed them.
At the beginning of the war, our soldiers were not well supplied. The call-up was massive and was unexpected, so the army was not prepared. We citizens have donated towels, blankets, socks, battery packs for phones, money for boots, ceramic vests, helmets, and more. Girls in school and elderly women in senior living facilities and day programs are knitting black wooly hats; our soldiers are living in tents and the temperature can get down to the 30’s (F) at night, probably below freezing on the Golan Heights. People are doing laundry for soldiers stationed near their homes.
And we are cooking. The army provides food, but for the small camps without mess halls it is of the packaged type. A group of about 80 soldiers camped near my city somehow made a connection with a service-oriented American family. The family and some teenagers began providing sandwiches and other things for them. Then we began providing hot, home-cooked Sabbath meals for them: challah bread and grape juice for the Sabbath blessings, chicken shnitzel (a favorite here), rice, potatoes, salads, vegetable side dishes, and desserts. A couple of weeks ago, when we were in the middle of a prolonged period of heavy, cold rain, the soldiers mentioned how much they would like hot soup. So I and three others made big pots of vegetable soups, which were taken to them. This small group of volunteers fed the soldiers every week until last week, when they were sent home and their camp disbanded (at least for the time being).
A much larger group in my town has been providing Sabbath meals for around 1,000 soldiers every week. In addition to food, they are providing Sabbath candles and matches, grape juice, and booklets with the prayers said at the Sabbath table. While most religious soldiers carry small prayer books with them, many soldiers who were not religious before have felt the need for God in their lives and want to add some Sabbath observance.
Collecting food and Sabbath items for 1000 soldiers
Who benefits more, the soldiers with the hot, homelike meal, provided by loving hands of strangers, or those of us at home, who find giving the best antidote to worry? It is probably a toss-up.
The electronic war news update that I receive three times a day always ends with a report of good news. Sometimes this is about school children, or a particular volunteer program, or something similar. This way, one reads the news and ends with a smile.
Although my city has lost more than one soldier, we celebrate whatever we can, with all our heart. Ten days ago a family gave a large collation following Sabbath services to celebrate that their son, a young man in his 20’s, reached the milestone of being cancer-free for five years. The young man’s mother worked for 35 years for a family of German Christians who run a free retirement home for Holocaust survivors and their elderly children. One of their sons had volunteered for the army[viii] and was killed in Gaza just a few weeks ago, but even so they all came to this celebration. Birthdays, weddings, and other family celebrations are more important than ever. Not only do we need to socialize, but celebrating milestones is a way of affirming our love of life.
Mental Health of our Soldiers
Before being released from their service, each group of soldiers spends a week with specially trained counselors, talking about what they saw and did, processing it, crying together when necessary, and in general decompressing. I have heard that anyone who does not talk does not get released because releasing the ugliness, pain, fear, and perhaps guilt is necessary before they can safely return to their families, homes, and jobs. This is a step in the discharge process that the United States military would be wise to emulate.
Conclusion
Are all Israelis depressed? No. We are filled with resolve. This is our only country, and the demonstrations and riots across the western nations have proven that we need to protect our homeland at any cost. This is one reason I have no interest in returning to the USA at this time.
In my community, we support our prime minister and wonder who is paying those who are trying to divide the country politically. This is so against national interest that we are sure they receive funding from somewhere else. We have our ideas of where, but it is purely speculation.
The lies told about us, the vast number of young adults who are shouting slogans against us, most without the slightest understanding of the meaning of the words, is distressing. But we also have support, sometimes from the most unlikely sources. And there have been enough open miracles to know that God is protecting us.
We are a huge family, not just a nation, and we know that the Jewish people is eternal. We have outlived the Babylonians, the ancient Greeks, the Romans, and other civilizations militarily superior and considered by the writers of history to be more important than us. With God on our side, we have confidence that we can survive our present oppressor as well.
We pray for the hostages and for their safe return. We pray for our soldiers and for their families at home, and for the souls of our dead.[ix]
And we pray for the coming of the Messiah, who will usher in the era of universal peace, joy, health and prosperity.
[i] https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/factsheets/fs_americas_wars.pdf
[ii] Frantzman, S.J., Israel has intercepted 9,500 rockets fired thanks to its multi-layered air defense system. Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Nov. 9, 2023, https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/11/09/israel-has-intercepted-9500-rockets-fired-thanks-to-its-multi-layered-air-defense-system/ , accessed Feb. 13, 2024.
[iii] About 200,000 Israelis internally displaced amid ongoing Gaza war, tensions in north. Times of Israel, Oct. 23, 2023, https://www.timesofisrael.com/about-200000-israelis-internally-displaced-amid-ongoing-gaza-war-tensions-in-north/ , accessed Feb. 13, 2024.
[iv] Agence France Presse, Around Half a Million Israelis Displaced Inside Israel: Military. Barron’s, Oct. 16, 2023, https://www.barrons.com/news/around-half-a-million-israelis-displaced-inside-israel-military-139782b3 , accessed Feb. 13, 2024.
[v] Shemini Atzeret/Simchat Torah is not commonly celebrated by Reform and Conservative Jews in the USA but is an Israeli national holiday and very important to people who keep Judaism according to Jewish law and tradition.
[vi] This is the cornerstone of Judaism. The first line of this important prayer says, “Hear, Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is One.” It has been said by martyrs for millenia.
[vii] VIN News, Heroic Soldier Saved Because He Wore Tzitzis. Anash.org, Oct. 12, 2023. https://anash.org/heroic-soldier-saved-because-he-wore-tzitzis/ , accessed Feb. 13, 2024.
[viii] Although born here, he was not a citizen. As a Christian non-citizen he was exempt from the draft, but he considered this his homeland and died defending it.
[ix] We Jews do not pray for ourselves; we believe that when we pray for others we receive the same reward that we are requesting for others.