HOME ALONE inside Israel

HOME ALONE
Daniel Gordis from Israel from the Inside with Daniel Gordis
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"Home alone" ... never has Israel, in such deep danger, been so leaderless
But the air force had a very, very good night. Israel had surprising allies. A surreal moment was punctuated by a lot of laughing, too. Resilience is this country's middle name.
APR 14


Turns out that our safe room checklist wasn’t entirely complete. We had the stuff we needed. Canned food (with a can opener) and crackers. Gallons and gallons of bottled water. The generator. Flashlights. A radio you wind up in case there are no batteries and no power. (When my father bought it for us years ago, we laughed. He’s getting the last laugh now, somewhere up there.) Laptop and iPhone cords to connect to the generator. (Two Samsung cords for our stubborn children who have a “thing” about Apple, but that’s a different story). Pillows, blankets. Even books (my wife being the eternal optimist about getting reading done.)

Seemed all good.

Then, at about 1:40 a.m., the sirens went off . Our kids and grandchildren were staying with us, because they don’t have a safe room in their Tel Aviv apartment. They were sleeping right through the siren, but we heard it, woke them up, and we all traipsed downstairs to the safe room (which is normally a pantry and laundry room).

Everyone in. Children still asleep in the parents’ arms. Pitch black because we don’t want the kids to wake up. We hear boom after boom after boom in the sky. So much for “they’d never dare aim at Jerusalem.” Time to shut the safe room door (the kind that was shot through on October 7th). We got it shut, sat on the floor or folding chairs, and listened to the booms.

“How long do we have to stay in here?” someone asked.

“They said for ten minutes after the end of the last siren.”

Quiet for a moment or two as we were all glued to our phones.

“Uh, we have a problem,” my son then said. I knew what he meant, and he was right. We’d brought everything IN, but one thing needed to go OUT. The diaper pail.

The situation was serious. “Our chances of dying from the diapers is much higher than from Iran,” he said quite correctly. We opened the door, got rid of the diaper pail and (pun intended), breathed easier.

And then we all started to chuckle at the utter absurdity of the whole situation.


It’s hard to know where to begin when one wants to list the absurdities, but our most serious problem, obviously, is that we have no leader. Virtually no one here believes a word the PM says, and he was noticeably almost entirely absent from Israeli TV last night. More on him below.

So people here watched the people they trust. Daniel Hagari, the IDF Spokesperson. Some of the better commentators on the news. And we got whatever information we could from government websites and television news, which of course broadcast uninterrupted.

Like watching the stats during an NLF game, we were given updates and all sorts of information. For example, how long does it take for their “stuff” to get here. None of us had any idea, which was strange since we’d been warned for days that it was going to happen. But no one I know had bothered to Google it.

TV had the answer:


From left to right in the middle of the screen (in the white print with the black background under the pictures of the weapon type), drones take 9 hours, cruise missiles take two hours, ballistic missiles take 12 minutes.

And then, in red, right below that, what we have to counter each. For the drones, Patriot and Iron Dome. For the cruise missiles, David’s Sling and Iron Dome. For ballistic missiles, the Arrow 3 system.

Everyone’s looking at their watching, trying to remember when they said the stuff had been launched, trying to figure out how long we had until the action started.

Then came the social media post—and we all burst out laughing.

These are the times of “drone entry”: Tel Aviv 8:31, Haifa 8:25, Jerusalem 8:43.
Why’s it so funny? Because it was an obvious play on the list of Shabbat times that appears on the front of every Israeli newspaper on Friday. Here’s this week’s, from Yedi’ot (which has Shabbat starting and ending times):


But, of course, most of it didn’t get to us. The US, Jordan and mostly Israel got almost all of it, which was a stunning failure for Iran.

Stunning.

Still, Israelis were mesmerized by the video of the launch that was shown on Iranian TV and that quickly make its way around here (and, I assume, everywhere):


Just when the excitement seemed to be over, my son burst out laughing again, and shared a Tweet someone had just sent to him.

Or this one, from a friend down the street:

We were all in safe rooms. It was the middle of the night. We’d heard countless explosions in the skies above us, and still, within minutes, Israeli social media was humming with humor.

The resilience here is truly something to behold.

The jokes aside, there is nothing funny about what this country now faces. Retaliate and risk starting a regional war? Don’t retaliate and communicate that we’re a country that permits other countries to fire hundreds of rockets, missiles and drones at it? What would that do to whatever’s left of our deterrence?

Not simple.

Which is why it would be nice to have a leader. More on that, and our tentative schedule, below.

Israelis are facing an unfolding crisis, but also an important opportunity to rebuild. If you would like to share our conversation about what they are feeling and what is happening that the English press can’t cover, please subscribe today.