Here in Rehovot we went 5 days without any sirens (though we continued to hear many interceptions), then on Wednesday we had one, Thursday we had two, and one Friday and one this evening (update: none on Sunday). The fact that the routine when we hear a siren – and fortunately for us, we’ve been indoors for all of them – is to walk down to the bomb shelter in the basement of our building and wait for the boom of the Iron Dome interception is still surreal. (Correction: Saturday night our oldest daughter and her family were not quite home when the siren went off; they ran - she pushing the stroller and her husband holding their toddler – into the stairwell of their building). Thursday we heard less plane activity, but in general we’ve heard planes multiple times per day, and Friday night most of Saturday we heard sorties every 15-20 minutes. From the photos released by the IDF, it’s good to know they’re hitting their targets. (And if anyone reading this works for NPR or NYT or BBC or the like: IDF knows how to hit a hospital, and if it wants to hit it, the hospital will be rubble like every other target that the IDF hits.)
Schools have partly resumed. Our grandson was in daycare on Thursday during the first siren – it was nap time, so that must have been interesting for the staff getting these toddlers into the reinforced room. The first week of the war, our youngest son’s school went to Zoom right away (private school; the public schools took a week longer), went to partial in-person last week and this past week was in his dorm the whole week. They even held a shabbat at the yeshiva yesterday.
Thanks to Hamas and their buddies Hizballah, over 100,000 Israelis (possibly up to 200,000) have been relocated to hotel rooms that otherwise are largely empty due to the lack of tourist as a result of the war. The state (read: yours truly and every other taxpayer in Israel) is footing the bill. And there are 300,000 reservists who were called up. So while those of us who have not had to move have tried to maintain some sort of routine, there is of course no real routine. My wife, who is normally married to her lab (almost, I think in a pinch I’ll still win out), has not been to the lab in over two weeks. Instead she’s been involved in helping to acquire equipment for our son’s reserve recon unit. She’s not looking to switch jobs, but if she has to polish her cv, she can now add “arms dealer” to the list under “experience”. She says she’s planning to go back to her workplace on Sunday (update Sunday night: she did) but will likely spend more time on coordinating donations and expenditures for military procurements than on lab work (update on Sunday night: she did that too). (Others deal with the logistics of actually purchasing, picking up, and delivering the equipment.)
Apart from recon unit son, our two on-duty daughters, aged 23 and 20, are working 12-hour shifts in command centers. They work their shift, they get off the shift, they eat, they sleep, they get up and start over. And our on-duty son-in-law can’t tell us where he is, but inasmuch as he’s in an artillery unit, he have already been into and out of Gaza once or twice. Both he and our daughter were to have started/resumed university studies last week; clearly that’s being pushed off, though until when is still unknown.
Our oldest daughter was not called up for reserve duty, principally because she was in airborne intelligence, and the technology and software has changed enough to make her outdated. What I didn’t mention was that before she was drafted, she spent a year in a seminary studying Talmud and other things. The place where she studied also had a program for American girls, and when asked about them she would mock their priorities – “I broke a nail! Disaster!”. During that year, after reading part of my college alumni magazine, she said, “This looks like a great place, can I study there?”. I pointed out that, apart from the cost being way out of proportion with what she’d gain, by the time she started she’d be at least 22, more likely 23 if she became an officer, and those 18-year-old Americans, who would be her classmates, would still have the same maturity level. She got the picture, was drafted, met her husband in officer training, got engaged in the same week the she boith finished her service and was accepted to Hebrew University, from which she graduated with a degree in computer science (she had a baby in a buggy at graduation, and was not the only student for whom that was true), and now works for a little company called Microsoft.
I mention this because I contrast the experience of kids here versus the experience of kids in the USA. Our 18-to-22 year-olds are out right now defending the country. In the USA, as I write on Saturday night in Israel, many of them are getting drunk while cheering football teams. And they think like drunks, insisting on inanities like “sex is assigned at birth” rather than recognizing that there are just two sexes and you can’t change them, or accusing Israel of genocide (sure, I mean there were only a few hundred thousand Arab “Palestinians” in 1948 and there are millions today, that’s definitely genocide), and blaming Israel for the fact that children die when Hamas shoots from behind those children. (Do they know that Hamas doesn’t give a shit about their pronouns?) They don’t even appreciate what a luxury it is to grow up in a country that hasn’t faced an existential threat from outside in over 200 years; instead they think that a country like that is something to be loathed instead of treasured and defended. If I could give them advice, to quote Dean Wormer from Animal House, “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life”.
I also don’t get Jewish parents in the USA who continue to pay huge sums to send their children to US universities. You don’t need a degree from Harvard or Columbia to get a good job (see above re: our daughter, same is true of her husband and our older son), STEM subjects are the same everywhere, and Israeli universities are both cheaper than their US counterparts and devoid of the anti-Jewish bullshit that appears to now be rampant on US campuses.
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