As Death Toll Climbs, The War Becomes Personal For Every Israeli
Downtown Jerusalem is deserted apart from Israel Border Police deployed in Zion Square (Photo by Gil Zohar)
(ESSAY) The sound of air raid sirens blared and fighter jets screamed overhead.
That’s what accompanied my phone call with my wife Randi on Monday as I rode Jerusalem’s all-but-empty light rail.
With an edge of panic in her voice, she asked me what she should do. I calmly instructed her to follow the Home Front Command orders for civilians. We had repeatedly reviewed them since Saturday to the point that I had downloaded the app to my cellphone.
READ: How The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Escalated Into A Full-Blown War
Our beautiful stone home in downtown Jerusalem, built in 1886, lacks a reinforced steel and concrete bomb shelter, which is known by the Hebrew acronym MaMaD (Makom Mugan l’Diyur).
I reminded her to go to the neighbor’s basement apartment quickly — but without running — and to wait there. Grabbing Bella, our dog, she left the apartment door and windows open so that a blast from any possible explosion would not result in the windows being shattered and glass debris destroying our home.
I think below-grade structures can make for poor bomb shelters since poison gas is heavier than air. But there’s no alternative. Nine children were killed by Hamas rocket fire in the Western Negev since their village lacked a proper MaMaD.
We heard the multiple boom of Israel’s air defense system — known as Iron Dome — intercepting a rocket barrage fired from Gaza. The strike lit up the sky. The threat was over, at least until the next alert.
As of Tuesday, nearly 1,000 Israeli civilians had been killed, including 260 massacred at the Nova Music Festival near Kibbutz Re’im, after Hamas launched a surprise attack on southern Israel just three days ago. More than 130 civilians and soldiers have been taken hostage back to the Gaza Strip. Apart from 35 Israel Defense Force soldiers who died in the line of duty, the names of the deceased have not yet been released.
It remains unclear if Hezbollah will open a second front from Lebanon. Israel has threatened to destroy the Syrian capital Damascus, which backs the Shi’ite Muslim terror group, should the war broaden to the north.
Families of the kidnapped, missing and 2,200 wounded civilians are begging for news. Israel remains shrouded by military censorship. Nor is the news from the 2.3 million people in Gaza any clearer. Al-Jazeera, for example, lists out-of-date statistics. Based on data reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry, the Red Crescent Society and Israeli Medical Services, 560 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed. Those numbers are likely to rise exponentially in the coming hours and days.
More than 48 hours since the war broke out, the IDF spokesman announced the the army has neutralized the terrorists who overcame 22 cities and villages near the Gaza Strip. Israelis, meanwhile, are being evacuated from the border area in anticipation of a ground invasion. Some are being housed in empty hotels near the Dead Sea.
I’ve offered up our adjoining apartment. All our AirBnB guests have cancelled. Apart from the Israeli carrier El Al, airlines have stopped flying to Ben-Gurion Airport. The financial losses to the tourism industry will be enormous.
More surreal is the number of the dead, missing and wounded. The IDF has called up 300,000 reservists in the last 48 hours for what it has termed “Operation Swords of Iron.” Among them is my nephew Guy Carmeli, a Canadian-Israeli dual citizen and veteran tank gunner who lives in Herzliya with his wife Yael and 2-year-old son Oz.
Randi doesn’t know of his call-up. Maybe she’ll read it here. My wife doesn’t do well with stress.
At the same time, a news release from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denies Egypt is trying to broker a ceasefire. It reads: “No message has arrived from Egypt and the prime minister has neither spoken, nor met, with the head of Egyptian intelligence since the formation of the government, neither directly nor indirectly. This is totally fake news.”
The implication? Israelis must gird themselves itself for a “long and difficult war ahead,” according to Netanyahu.
The electronic tom-tom drums uniting immigrant Israelis have been busy. Nine Americans have been confirmed dead and 10 Brits are assumed to have been killed.
Adi Vital, the adult daughter of Ottawa native and Jerusalem resident Jacqui Vital and her husband Yaron, was kidnapped from her home by the Gaza Strip. Vital’s two children, ages one and three, were also taken hostage but abandoned at the border by their captors who felt the children would slow down their retreat to Gaza. Adi’s body was found on Wednesday.
Canadian-Israeli Shye Weinstein, who attended the desert rave I mentioned earlier, documented how he and his friends fled. He described their nail-biting drive to Tel Aviv: “We only slowed down for checkpoints and bodies.”
Nuseir Yassin, author of the popular blog Nas Daily, described for me his conflict as an Arab citizen of Israel: “For the longest time, I struggled with my identity. A Palestinian kid born inside Israel. … Many of my friends refuse to this day to say the word ‘Israel’ and call themselves ‘Palestinian’ only. But since I was 12, that did not make sense to me. So I decided to mix the two and become a ‘Palestinian-Israeli.’ I thought this term reflected who I was. Palestinian first. Israeli second. But after recent events, I started to think. And think. And think. And then my thoughts turned to anger. I realized that if Israel were to be invaded like that again, we would not be safe. To a terrorist invading Israel, all citizens are targets.”
He added: “More than 40 of them are Arabs. Killed by other Arabs. … I love Palestine and have invested in Palestine. But it’s not my home. So from today forward, I view myself as an “Israeli-Palestinian.” Israeli first. Palestinian second.”
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto and moved to Jerusalem in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.