An American Living in the Hezbollah War

A year after Northern Israel started being attacked, an American Israeli writes about life under fire.

The week before Rosh Hashana there are a thousand interesting timely topics to write about. However, instead I am writing about this war. Right now it is 11:15 pm. The echoes of artillery shelling are keeping me awake. I live alone, but this is a night when I particularly wish for company.

The U.S. government has been pressuring Netanyahu to call a ceasefire with Hamas and Hezbollah. Blessedly, he has refused.

The news media in most of the world are reporting that Israel is planning to invade Lebanon. This is false. Words matter. We are not invading. Our army will take the steps necessary to protect us. This is not “invading.” I repeat: it is protecting its citizens by going after an army that has been attacking for 51 weeks.

First, a reminder of what happened on October 7, 2023 that began this war. The number of deaths of innocent men, women and children was 1200. This is meaningless to Americans unless you look at the numbers this way:

Figure 1. Chart showing the number of Israeli deaths on October 7, 2023, with the number of American deaths that would represent as a percentage of population.

PART A: WHAT ISRAEL FACES

What Is a “Suicide” or “Homicide” Drone? What Is a Missile?

A “homicide drone” is an unmanned flying instrument outfitted with explosives that can be remotely controlled. Originally we called them “suicide drones” but this is not accurate as nothing living commits suicide with it. They are designed to commit homicide, to kill or start a lethal fire upon impact.

A missile, as used in this war, is not small and simple like a molotov cocktail.[i] It is also not a rocket of the “Apollo” moon launch type, with a big installation necessary for its send-off. Hezbollah’s military missiles are rockets carrying warheads. They may be ballistic (launched in a high arc under guidance for its ascent but unpowered and unguided once it begin its descent[ii]) or directed by remote control. They are small enough to be carried by men. They are kept, as in Gaza, in homes and are fired from those homes. The word is that Lebanese are paid to have missiles in their homes.

Hezbollah’s Arsenal

According to Missile Threat: CSIS Missile Defense Project[iii], “Hezbollah’s arsenal is comprised mostly of small, man-portable and unguided surface-to-surface artillery rockets.”

 For information that was accurate in 2021 about Hezbollah’s missiles, see this report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization located in Washington, D.C.

Nasrallah’s Role in Lebanon

The CSIS report states that the late Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s Secretary General, claimed that the purpose of the arsenal was to deter Israel from attacking Lebanese civilians. However, this is pure propaganda. Israel never attacked Lebanese civilians. Until the Lebanese Civil War, beginning in 1975 when Palestinian Arabs destabilized the Lebanese government, Israel lived peacefully with Lebanon, which was historically a Christian Arab country.

UNRWA is the UN refugee agency dedicated to returning Palestinians to the homes they left in 1947-48 during Israel’s War of Independence. UNRWA has for 76 years prevented these people from being resettled and given citizenship, keeping them instead in festering camps. UNRWA, together with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), under the leadership of Yassir Arafat, fomented the trouble with Lebanon. Using the same tactics employed just last year on October 7, Muslims in Lebanon attacked Christian villages, raping, murdering, and burning alive citizens with whom their only argument was one of religion.

Nasrallah was the leader of the group supporting these attacks. Israel had absolutely nothing to do with them. UNRWA, however, was 100% implicated. Until Israel found proof that UNRWA workers were involved in the October 7 atrocities, this United Nations agency had been considered untouchable, so its history in the region has been obscured.

During the Lebanese Civil War,[iv] Israel opened the fence between Israel and Lebanon, providing escape routes for Lebanese refugees. I personally worked with a woman whose husband and two children were killed by the Muslims, with her third child seriously wounded. Carrying her wounded child for several days to the Good Fence, she and the child were then rushed to the nearest hospital where the child was saved. The Israeli government provided her a stipend to live on, and she and her child eventually made it to the U.S., where she took a job as a nurse at the Jewish nursing home where I worked. Brigitte Gabriel, head of the US lobbying group Act for America, also survived by escaping through the Good Fence. You can hear her story here.

Missiles Today

Hezbollah was reported, before the war began, to have 150,000 missiles. They have shot about 10,000 at us since October 8, when they decided, without provocation, to join Hamas and make this a two-front war. This means they have about 140,000 missiles left.

Hezbollah, like Hamas in Gaza, has located its missiles in homes—in living spaces. This is why a ground war will be necessary: Israel cannot simply bomb a few large installations to get rid of the threat.

PART B: Israel

Israel, including disputed territories, encompasses 10,862 sq. miles (27,869 sq. km). Of this, 6,171 sq. miles (15,982 sq. km) are comprised of the Negev desert and the Dead Sea.

The Idaho Panhandle, for comparison, from the Canada border on the north to the southern border of Idaho County, has a land area of 21,012 sq. mi. (54,422 sq. km.).[v]

For a fascinating look at Israel’s comparative size, see Israel Size Comparison Maps, IRIS: Information Regarding Israel’s Security.[vi] These maps are just two of many. If you want to understand Israel, I strongly recommend you browse through more of these comparative maps.

Maps from https://iris.org.il

PART C: WHAT LIFE IS LIKE NOW

Safety Instructions

When missiles are launched, Israeli equipment can sense them and their trajectories. Alarms are sent, and the Iron Dome is activated to intercept and destroy missiles headed toward populated places. Each Iron Dome activation costs about $100,000. Ten thousand missiles have been sent to Israel since Oct. 7, 2023, about half of which have been intercepted. You do the math. Our taxes are going up to cover this cost.

Where I live, we have five seconds from the sounding of the alarm to the moment the missile will strike. We are told to get into a safe space. My safe space is a windowless hallway. I am supposed to stay away from doors also, but that is impossible, so I keep my heavy shutter-like blinds closed all the time and close the room doors.

The rug and pillow are because the floor gets very hard before ten minutes are up.

When the Iron Dome intercepts a missile, it does not vaporize it; it destroys it, and the pieces fall to earth as shrapnel. We are instructed to remain in our safe space for 10 minutes after the sounding of the alarm because it takes that long for all the shrapnel to land. The shrapnel is collected by the army; pieces need to be handled very carefully by sappers to ensure that they do not detonate.

I have slept on my recliner almost every night since the war began. At 78, sitting up from a supine position takes a moment; pulling up my legs and turning my body to get out from the covers takes another moment; and standing takes a third. Yet from the time of the start of the siren, I have only five seconds to get to my safe place: impossible from being in my bed. Pulling the handle on my recliner immediately puts me in a sitting position, prepared to stand. I feel much safer when I can get to the safe place in time, so I sleep sounder in the chair than in the bed.

If we are outside when there is an alert, we are to go to a safe space if possible. If not, we are to go to the lowest point around, lie face-down with our arms over our heads, and wait the ten minutes. The majority of injuries to Israelis have been shrapnel wounds.

If shrapnel falls on my apartment roof, I will probably be fine; if a missile hits, goodbye.

That there have been so few deaths to Israelis by these missile attacks can only be attributed to God’s protective hand. There were also remarkably few casualties during the Scud attacks during the 1991 Gulf War.[vii]

Photo by author of entrance to home, walkways, and entrance to community shelter.

Sound Carries

When thunder sounds, you surely have counted seconds to see how far away it is; so you know you can easily hear thunder from a lightning strike 10 miles (16 km) away. We hear the Iron Dome breaking missiles apart from a long distance as well. Some days the booms are almost constant—some near, some far.

When we hear booms, even distant ones, our hearts clutch. We know some place is under attack. Many of us stop and say a psalm or short prayer for the safety of those others. Sometimes the booms are so loud that the windows rattle. Concentration is difficult, as is sleep. I have learned to sleep with podcasts playing on my phone; the low rumble of voices muffles the softer booms, letting me sleep better.

There’s a sneaker ad on the Internet that I suspect has been surprisingly unsuccessful in Israel: it shows a sneaker exploding out of its box. I have also noted a huge reduction in ads for violent computer games online: the ads receive a lot of “inappropriate” comments from those of us who DO NOT want to be scrolling through and hear booms. We have enough of them in real life, thank you very much.

Someone drops the lid on a dumpster, and everyone in the vicinity jumps.

Daily Life

Refugees:  Between 80,000 and 100,000 families have been evacuated from their homes in northern Israel since October 7, 2023. Many families, comprised of one or two parents (often either mom’s or dad’s unit has been called up to the reserves) and several children, have been placed in hotel rooms—one family to a room, with children sharing beds. The government provides room and board.

Israel has few laundromats or public laundries, and few hotels have on-site laundry machines. This means parents have been washing the family’s clothing in the hotel bathroom sink and drying it by hanging it over furniture in already crowded rooms. When our ancestors lived in 1-room tents or hovels, at least they often had the great out-of-doors for the children to play in. Hotels are generally in urban areas where the children are not afforded that pleasure. They attend schools with strangers and feel like what they are, outsiders.

Economic hardship: Men young enough to fight are mostly fathers. Women also serve in the army, including in combat units; they are also called up to the reserves. Without the income from the parents’ full-time jobs, families are suffering greatly.

Soldiers who own businesses have had to close their shops. Without income they have quite possibly had to give up their rented spaces. But not only the families of soldiers suffer. Without workers, other businesses have closed.

Crops have rotted in the fields without hands to pick them. In the past, many Israeli farmers hired Palestinian Arab workers. But on October 7, many families were massacred easily because their Palestinian Arab workers—many of whom had been employed by the families for so many years that the Israelis considered them practically family—had given Hamas detailed descriptions of the homes, farms, and behaviors that made invasion and massacre easy. As a result, most Israeli Jews no longer trust Palestinian Arabs, no matter how friendly and trustworthy they seem.

Thousands of men, women and children have volunteered to harvest, but they cannot provide enough help. Food prices have risen as a result of shortages.

Hundreds if not thousands of farm animals have been killed by missiles and missile or drone-caused fires. Acres of farmland, orchards, and forests have been burned.

My friends’ clothing and décor shop, in a small community just west of Kiryat Shmona, was open to the public one day this week for the first time in months. They have subsisted on the trickle of mail-order purchases for a year. (They do not ship abroad.) During that year, the pregnant wife and two small children lived alone for three months while the father was serving in the reserves in Gaza. Their community has been under frequent attack, and many neighbors are refugees deeper inside Israel. As recent missile attacks have proven, however, the country is so small that there is no getting away from the attacks.

Uncertainty: We never know when an attack will come. This uncertainty affects everything that we do. A few examples: For 40 years I have spent the last hour before the Sabbath showering and getting personally ready. Now I do that in the middle of Friday afternoon; I do not want to be caught all shampooed up and have to wait 10 minutes to rinse and finish. I heard of a young husband, home on a very brief leave from the army; he and his wife were interrupted by an attack from an important relationship-bonding activity.

When an alert sounds, if we have been cooking we have to turn off the stove so dinner doesn’t burn. Should I walk to the supermarket, or take the bus, in which case I am not in unprotected spaces as long. Should I tutor in my home, where I don’t have a real safe room—would a parent feel safe letting their child come to me? Everything we have done for a year is considered in terms of possible attacks.

Faith: People of faith tend to handle this tension better than those with no belief in the Divine. We believe in prayer, we have words of supplication at the tips of our tongues, and we have belief that God is ultimately in control. Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, are much more prone to feelings of powerlessness. Just one example is my non-Jewish downstairs neighbor, raised by a Russian atheist mother. She often disciplines her children with a loud voice, but as the war has gone on she has been screaming at them more and more frequently, with greater anger than before. The tension is damaging her, her parenting ability, her children, and her marriage.

Volunteer Work

As I have written before, I am involved in preparing Sabbath food for soldiers. In small camps along the border, the army provides the Israeli equivalent of MREs: nutritious but not tasty. So every week my community puts together hundreds of Sabbath meals for soldiers stationed along the northern border. Last week we sent 1,000; this week we are providing for the two days of Rosh Hashana and the Sabbath, and for more people as the war in the north is heating up.

Photo of author’s refrigerator with food for soldiers’ Rosh Hashana and Sabbath dinners.

All the food has to be prepared in a kosher kitchen; those who do not keep strictly kosher are helping financially or by other volunteer means including sorting and packing the donations needed for each encampment.

We give them grape juice and challah bread for the Sabbath table blessings, plus all the things necessary for a home-style Sabbath dinner: salads, fish, chicken or meat, rice or potatoes, vegetable sides, and dessert.

I prepare about 5 kg of chicken each week. Having serious food issues myself, I understand the needs of those on special diets and am one of the volunteers who has taken on these duties as well, making gluten-free challah rolls for the five celiacs and a hearty vegan main dish for the five vegans each week. Tomorrow I’m also making gluten-free honey cakes, a traditional holiday treat, for the celiacs.

How do the soldiers keep food safe? Donated refrigerators. I suspect many people with adequate funds are replacing their adequate old refrigerators with new ones; or maybe they are just purchasing new ones to donate to soldiers.

Conclusion

There is one other question I know many of my readers have: why do I stay in a war zone? Several of you have invited me to return to the USA and stay with you for the duration, or until I can get resettled “at home.”

Home for me is and will remain Israel. Here, among others of my faith and underlying culture, I am at home in a way I never was in the USA. Always in the USA there was a difference. Outside of religious questions, there were many cultural norms in the USA that I did not understand and, while I participated with enjoyment, never or rarely initiated, and when I did I “did them” just a bit wrong. On my mother’s side I was 4th generation American; on my father’s second; yet I still did not really fit in. Secular as we were, as hard as my parent tried to assimilate, we still had cultural traits that I know now stem from the centuries, no millenia, of Jewish life. Here in Israel, even though Jews have come from over 80 countries, each with its own customs, those underlying traits unite us as much as our beliefs.

I will remember my Idaho years and the friends I made with love. You accepted me, welcomed me, and included me in spite of our differences. Pocatello will forever remain my “home town,” although I was not raised there. The Lock Screen photo on my PC is, right now, the hills on the west side, photographed from the top of Center and Arthur. But Israel is my true home on this planet. I have wonderful neighbors here who make sure I am included; people to call on when I need help or company. People who need me as well. This is where I belong now.

I hope that this answers many of your questions. Life is difficult now in Israel, not only in the north. Just as the main-stream media picks and chooses what it says about conservatives in the USA, it picks and chooses what it says about Israel. Perhaps these explanations will help you inform others around you who may be basing their understanding of the situation on what they read or hear on the biased main-stream media.

Appendix

Here are some reputable Israel relief organizations that are certified as tax-exempt charities in the USA. There are many others, but these stand out:

Our Meals for Soldiers effort can be helped here: https://www.jgive.com/new/he/ils/donation-targets/115133

Magen David Adom in Israel, the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross*: https://www.mdais.org/en/donation

United Hatzalah, a volunteer emergency medical relief organization whose members can respond to calls within seconds, often saving lives that would otherwise be lost. https://israelrescue.org/donate

Zaka: provides relief in catastrophic situations. These are the people who spent weeks collecting bodies from the killing fields of October 7 so that the unrecognizable could be identified via DNA and given proper burial by their loved ones. https://give.zakaworld.org/campaign/we-need-all-the-help-we-can-get-now/

*Contrary to their charter, the International Red Cross has refused even to attempt to visit the Israeli hostages who have been held in inhumane conditions in Gaza for almost a year. I cannot recommend donating to them.

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[i] Molotov cocktail: a glass bottle filled with gasoline with a rag or other wick stuck in it. The rag is lit and the bottle thrown. It explodes, sending burning gas, shards of glass, and bits of burning rag all around.

[ii] Merriam-Webster online dictionary, merriam-webster.com, accessed September 29, 2024.,

[iii] Missiles and Rockets of Hezbollah, Missile Threat: CSIS Missile Defense Project, last updated August 10, 2021, https://missilethreat.csis.org/country/hezbollahs-rocket-arsenal/, accessed Sept. 29, 2024.

[iv] Lebanese Civil War, Britannica.com, accessed Sept. 29, 2024.

[v] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_panhandle, accessed Sept. 29, 2024.

[vi] Israel Size Comparison Maps. IRIS: Information Regarding Israel’s Security, https://iris.org.il/size-comparison-maps/, accessed Sept. 29, 2024.

[vii] During the 1991 Gulf War, 39 Scuds reached Israel, mostly the Tel Aviv area. Yet there were only two deaths. “The number of Israeli deaths and serious injuries produced by the modified Scud missiles at first glance seems remarkably low compared with previous ballistic missile attacks. In fact, the total number of direct deaths and serious injuries in Israel was less than that caused by just one average missile impact in London or Tehran.” DACS Working Paper, Casualties and Damage from Scud Attacks in the 1991 Gulf War, Lewis, G.N, Fetter, S., Gronlund, L., March 1993. https://dgi.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2019-08/1993-DACS-Scud.pdf, accessed September 30, 2024.