Israel is a different country. Some changes are modest, others enormous. People realize that this is not a tennis match but rather a life-and-death struggle. People are acting accordingly.
My wife and I decided to take a break from war footing and go shopping at IKEA. There was no traffic on the way there and I have never had such a large selection of parking spots. Once inside, it was clear that there were simply not that many people in the store—nothing like a normal day when it is packed with young families looking for affordable furniture to add to their apartments. Only a few minutes inside and there was an announcement that a missile siren had gone off and that all customers had to make their way to a secure room. The staff ran before everyone and pointed us towards a hidden reinforced room that could easily hold 30 people. A pair of American seminary students asked me what the announcements in Hebrew meant. I told them that there was apparently an incoming missile from Gaza coming in this general direction. They ran like crazy. The “mamad” as it is known had an air conditioner, toilets and an emergency exit via a floor hatch. After ten minutes, we were told that the threat had passed and that we could go back to spending our money.
A question one has to ask is, if dealing with terror and rockets is comfortable then maybe no one is in a hurry to end it. Since the 2005 exit of Israel from Gaza and the northern Samaria region of the West Bank, Israel has faced a war with Gaza on average every two years. Rockets are fired. F-15’s and F-16’s are dispatched. Then after a few days or maybe a week or two, the whole thing is over and we go back to our normal lives. Until what happened on Oct. 7. More people were murdered in one day in southern Israel that day than throughout the country in six years of the second intifada. The previous engagements between Israel and the Palestinians were like taking painkillers instead of dealing with the underlying illness. Eventually the illness may overwhelm and can no longer be ignored.
Would it have been better if tens of customers at IKEA had been going down flights of stairs, tripping over baby carriages, breaking limbs, and pushing furiously to some dimly lit basement bomb shelter? Of course not, but maybe if that had been the arrangement for the past decade, Gaza would have been dealt with long ago. Israelis got used to the Gaza “nuisance” and now the time has come to simply destroy Hamas. It turns out that it was not a nuisance after all; it was a full-blown threat to the State of Israel and the safety of its citizens.
In thinking about the future of Gaza, there seems to be more questions than reasonable answers. How do you give people cement when they use it to build terror tunnels instead of rebuilding their homes? How do you give them aluminum or water pipes when they use them to make rockets instead of repairing mangled infrastructure? I don’t know if the Israeli leadership has a plan, but nobody seems to know a) how you get rid of Hamas, and b) what you do on the day after the last of them is dead? Brain-dead people reflexively say call in the Palestinian Authority. Hard pass. Israel has to administer it? But wasn’t that what it was running away from in 2005? Some gooey international body that looks the other way as the UN has been doing on the Lebanese border for decades? I guess we all have to stay tuned to find out.
Palestinian workers have an outsized presence in construction, farming and manufacturing in Israel. Thus, the house nearby that they had been working furiously to finish prior to the Jewish holidays stands quiet as there are no workers and probably several of the subcontractors are also unable to enter Israel proper. In the first few days of the war, there was no production, so my local store was not getting shipments of supplies. The store seems pretty well-stocked today, but there are times where one might go shopping and simply see certain items missing. On the way home from IKEA, I looked up at the big board that gives updates on traffic conditions. On the bottom, it was written with LEDs in Hebrew, “Together, we will win.” All of the advertisement boards in Jerusalem have huge Israeli flags on them instead of the normal announcements of concerts or sales. My wife turned on a broadcast, only to see her cousin as an officer in the home front command giving over instructions for the folks at home. Collection sites for goods for soldiers can be found all over, filled with bags and boxes of food and other items going to the north and south. The same is true outside of Israel, with El-Al bringing tons of goods collected by concerned citizens in the US and elsewhere as well as returning soldiers (to the point that they sat on the floor of a plane coming from Singapore). If you need black duct tape, you’re out of luck. It’s all been sent by citizens to the army, and there is nothing left in the hardware stores.
Israel is as united as I have ever seen her in my 30 years in the country. About 2,000 ultra-orthodox Jews signed up for the Army. An ultra-orthodox wedding ended with the playing of the Israeli national anthem, Hatikva, something that would have been an anathema not long ago. I saw someone who offered dog-walking services for free for those called up. Hotels are still advertising free rooms for those displaced in the north and south. People seem more friendly. As the sign said, we win if we’re all in this together.
The good feelings and neighborliness will not bring back those shot, hacked, burned, and decapitated. Instead of the pain starting to go down, more videos—some of it GoPro material from the terrorists themselves—keep coming out and thus making the pain fresh again and again. An EMT said that one of his fellow paramedics was tied by Hamas murderers to a telephone pole. Over the course of nine hours, he watched as they killed, raped, tortured and captured those living in the kibbutz below. I hope that you have noticed the simple houses on the kibbutzim, even if many of them were burned and destroyed by thermobaric bombs thrown by the monsters from Hamas. That is how these people have lived for decades. They worked the land and they lived simple but fulfilling lives. Hamas may have won Round 1, but the Jews have experienced murder and destruction over the course of millennia. Today, we are united and there will be no Round 3.