In the Shadow of Airstrikes in Jerusalem

Hanukkah is one of my favorite holidays, and I was looking forward to it this year. I was even looking forward to Christmas Eve, and the chance to observe how it is celebrated in the Holy City, something I avoided when I was a more pious Jewish girl.

But so much for the holidays.

Christmas Day, we awoke to discover that in the course of the night, Hamas had fired 60 rockets into Israeli towns. And then came the news last night of Israeli airstrikes on Hamas targets in Gaza.

Moments after getting the news, I had to run to the family Hanukkah party that my mother had been planning for months. It's rare for everyone in my family to get together at the same time, especially now that two of my sisters are married with babies.

And with the coming war and intifada on my mind, it was no comfort last night to see babies. As my father held my six month-old nephew and two year-old niece together in his arms, looking happier than I had ever seen him, their little moon faces and identical huge blue eyes open wide, I realized that babies take a piece of your heart, and keep it with them. I can travel half around the world, I can forget I have Israeli citizenship (God knows, sometimes I've wanted to) but those pieces will be forever lost to me for as long as I am not here.

Thousands of rockets have been fired into Israel in recent years, yet because we in Jerusalem don't get them, it has always seemed somehow removed from us. And now it occurs to me how absurd it is that in Jerusalem we should feel distance from these events, when in fact these places are only a short drive away. Israel is roughly the size of the state of New Jersey. If rockets were dropping on Trenton, New Jersey, it's hard to imagine that the residents of Patterson would not be nervous. Yet so it is in Israel, that if the rockets are just several miles away and not actually aimed at you, you can sleep at night.

That is, unless your spouse or sibling or child is somewhere out there.

The airstrikes brought it close. No longer is Israel divided into passive bystander and passive victim: We are all involved in the outcome. Especially now that Hamas has declared a Third Intifada, and we all know what that means, because we've seen it twice before. Bombs, shrapnel, bullets, and bulldozers run wild -- all on the streets of Jerusalem.

In the car with my sister and her husband after the party, she told me she had been planning to take her daughter to the center of town for the day today, since it is her day off. "But now I won't, because Hamas is threatening attacks," she said. "I would go alone to meet a friend -- but take the baby? I couldn't live with the guilt."

I thought of a woman who was crushed to death on a bus in one of this year's bulldozer attacks. At the last moment, knowing her fate, she succeeded in handing her baby out the bus window into the arms of a stranger. And the baby was saved.

Meanwhile my sister's husband, who has plenty of army experience -- and who may get called in for reserve duty any day now -- was talking about the rockets. He said, "Whenever people report that there was a rocket, they say 'it went down.' People think it just falls. What they don't mention is that when it falls, it explodes."

A lot of things are not reported as explicitly as you might expect. When the victims of attacks are reported as "wounded," it can mean anything from shrapnel in the lungs to missing legs. I learned this in high school, which was my first experience with terrorist attacks.

Now I learned about the amount of time people have to take shelter when a rocket attack is launched. Apparently in Sderot, residents have 15 seconds to find a bomb shelter. In Netivot they are lucky -- they have a whopping 30 seconds after the siren sounds.

"A man in Netivot was killed in his house," my sister was saying. "There's a video you can see about it on the news."

I didn't want to see about it on the news. But it did hit me full force that my husband's younger brother is in school in Netivot.

My niece dozed in the car seat next to me, her lashes brushing her cheeks. I stroked one of her curly pigtails, but gently, careful not to wake her. Pieces of your heart.

"Everyone in Sderot will be sleeping in bomb shelters tonight," said my sister's husband.

Tonight. The word settled heavily in the air. A night of terror, of explosions in the dark, and loss. Tonight, and for who knows how many more nights to come.

Comments

[Drowning in rhetoric]

...Continuation
This bond brought Jews of all walks of life together that otherwise had no reason to. That could only last so long. A new common bond, goal or more preferably enemy needed to be put into place to keep a very young and immature nation from buckling. Not only to link the people but to enable and justify decades more to come of unharnessed , unquestioned atrocities under the guise of victimization.
Easy enough. Just push the "savages", whose land was just taken from beneath their feet, to the breaking point and when they finally do retaliate just deem them terrorists. The 9/11 effect.

No other ideology in existence could allow for and furthermore, completely defend, the horrific crimes that Palestinians have been subjected to decade after grueling decade.
The mere nature in which this situation is discussed is proof positive as to its corrosiveness. We discuss the matter as if it were a "war" in the conventional meaning. IN NO WAY is this a back and forth retaliatory battle, although that is exactly how the US media portrays the situation. The idea that the Palestinians are considered a "serious security threat" to the highest security super power on the planet is virtually laughable. The only real threat from the Palestinian people, in fact, the only true weaponry every single citizen and ex-citizen carry daily are truth and justice.

[Drowning in rhetoric]

Seadickrun... you are touching on something very important. I completely agree with you and would even take that thought a step further and be so brazen as to say that Israel wouldn't exist in the fashion it does now, if it wasn't for imperialist expansion/occupation/war on a people/ apartheid/ war on terror [whatever term you see fit]. It's impossible for me to imagine another scenario which can bring so quickly, and keep banded together people that, prior to arriving to Israel, didn't even speak the same language?? And outside of some religious ceremonies (a large number of Israeli's are secular mind you) differences run deep among the Israeli populous.
This misconstrued occupation coupled with blinding rhetoric has created a scenario in which not only the average American has been duped, but even the Israelis themselves, in some cases just a stone's throw away (pun intended) from where the IDF illegally operates on a daily basis, don't stop to understand the magnitude of actions taken against an entire population of people. An entire population that has been held hostage for 6 decades. No end in sight. How the world sat by to watch a nation be literally taken from it's people in 1948, only to repute those opposed noting the horrific tyranny and evil that these people had just endured; vowing never again. Never? Never to them, maybe. But I digress.

continued...

[Drowning in rhetoric]

Seadickrun.... you are touching on something very important. I completely agree with you and would even take that thought a step further and be so brazen as to say that Israel wouldn't exist in the fashion it does now if it wasn't for imperialist expansion/occupation/war on a people/ apartheid/ war on terror [whatever term you see fit]. It's impossible for me to imagine another scenario which can bring so quickly, and keep banded together people that, prior to arriving to Israel, didn't even speak the same language?? And outside of some religious ceremonies (most Israeli's are secular, mind you) differences run deep among the Israeli populous.
This misconstrued occupation coupled with blinding rhetoric has created a scenario in which not only the US has been duped, but even the Israelis themselves, in some cases just a stone's throw away (pun intended) from where the IDF illegally operates on a daily basis, don't stop to understand the magnitude of actions taken against an entire population of people. An entire population that has been held hostage for 6 decades. No end in sight. How the world sat by to watch a nation be literally taken from it's people in 1948, only to repute those opposed noting the horrific tyranny and evil that these people had just endured; vowing never again. Never? Never to them, maybe. But I digress.

Continued...

[Eres]

Is your "terror" somehow more valid that the terror of the Palestinian women and children who are being slaughtered tonight?

[larce1948]

IIana writes very well and I do not denigrate her personal passion for her people nor those she loves, however, she seems unable to realize that her situation is miniscule when compared to the daily oppression carried out by the Israelis against the Palestinians. The western myth that Israel withdrew form Gaza persists. Technically, they did but only to confine them within an iron wall of deprivation.

[ThomasJM]

It is human nature to see more clearly the harm done to those with whom we identify, but war and tragedy will never end until we learn to look through the eyes of those who hate us and see why they do it. Terrorism is a vile and despicable act of disproportionate hatred, but so is the confinement of over a million relatively defenseless people and condemning them to poverty and squalor before bombing them because some among them have used terrorism to fight back. Until we in the Western World begin to address reality in more even handed terms, we will never have the respect we think we so keenly deserve and peace will forever remain an ephemeral illusion.

[averygard]

I've got a crazy idea. If Palestinians don't approve of the actions of Hamas and don't want to suffer the ramifications of Hamas constantly attacking Israeli civilians, they should rise up and overthrow Hamas. Yep, it will be bloody and many good people will die, but that is the nature of all revolutions, and should it succeed, both sides of the equation can negotiate. How do you negotiate with Hamas?!

[chaos4700]

How about this: why don't the Palestinians go after the people who are actually the trying, in turns, to steal from, starve, and massacre them?

[AntiSocialite]

What you don't seem to realize is that Hamas was democratically elected, so there is no real movement to undermine them in the Palestinian Territories except by the minority Fatah, and of course Israel. Also, the mere mention of a bloody revolution in order to initiate negotiations indicates to me that you have no genuine regard for negotiation and compromise.

Peace

[jamilk99]

At least you can still celebrate Hanukkah. The Gazans couldn't celebrate much of anything even before these strikes.

[chaos4700]

And now they'll have a seemingly endless march of funerals instead.

[gwhizz]

Really. I don't imagine there were many parties for the people of Gaza to go to while the poster was enjoying herself and her family. She writes this as if she can't understand there are Palestinians who love their 'moon faced" babies too.

[Ilana Teitelbaum - Huffpost Blogger]

gwhizz,

My intent with this article was actually different. If there is any single point to this article, it is that the predominant emotion of most Israelis is not hatred and a desire to kill. The strongest emotion in most of us is the desire to protect those we love. And to do that, most of us would love to engage in dialogue to negotiate a deal that brings true peace. Land is meaningless compared to the value of human lives--and that means ALL human lives.

Unfortunately, the Palestinians are currently governed by a terrorist organization that terrorizes its own people. Any Palestinians who want a peaceful solution are afraid to speak up. I suggest you read Matt Beynon Rees' novel, "A Grave in Gaza," for its fascinating depiction of the brutality of life in Gaza under the Hamas regime. Rees was a journalist in the region for 10 years and knows his stuff.

[ShoshanaNY]

I'm happy to finally see an article on Huffington that shows the other side of this crisis. I've been in Israel many times, and was less than two miles from a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv several years ago. It's a terrifying experience, and one that many people who post on here can't seem to understand.

The overwhelming majority of Israelis would prefer a peaceful two state solution, and it pains me to see the ignorant and virulent statements against Israel's citizens by armchair pundits who are too myopic to see both sides of this tragic history.

[arvay]

Israel is a foreign transplant.

Its people don't belong there, they were put there by cynical Europeans happy to dispose of millions of homeless Jews in the wake of WWII. And of course a well-financed Zionist cabal, which put itself into power in the new nation.

They put this intrusion in precisely the place where the European Crusaders plunked their (doomed) kingdom. Brilliant. Its claim to the area is exactly the same as the Third Reich rationale -- "Blut und Boden" -- blood and soil. A specious link between people of a specific ancestry and land, often someone else's land.

The only solution is a single democratic state for both Arabs and Jews. Give up the role of master race and you will find peace, both in the world ad in your own heart.

[cherry33]

ShoshanaNY-

I've been critical of Israel in my posts, but I hope you know that those of us who are critical are not necassarily against the Israeli citizens. I know from friends who visit Israel that actually many Israeli citizens hav views that differ from their government. It's mostly a generational difference too. That's what I hear. This is bad for everyone involved, and I hope you know that isn't insincere. Many Israelis feel like pawns in this game called war.

[cherry33]

I thought the article was well-written and emotionally drew me in. However, what was missing from the piece, was a mere mention of the other side and their human tragedy in all of this. It's like she handled the audience's emotion with jealousy, making sure we don't for a moment consider the devastation caused to ALL innocent lives. And I'm anticipating a post that tells me I'm such a "bleeding-heart liberal" in some form or another. I guess I am then. I guess I'm so deranged to care about tragedy, regardless of the geography.

[Ilana Teitelbaum - Huffpost Blogger]

Cherry33,

My purpose in writing this article was to depict my personal experience. For that reason, it was very personal.

Also, at the time that I wrote it, the Huffington Post's top stories were about the bombings in Gaza. My sense was that people already had access to all the information they wanted about those events, while the Israeli experience was not receiving coverage. But you may notice that in my last sentence, I write of terror in the dark, and I don't just mean that of Jews. I consider war on all fronts to be a tragedy, and like most Israelis my deepest wish is for peace in our time.

[cherry33]

Point taken. Thank you for the well-written article. So much is about whether we're getting accurate coverage these days, that it made me focus somewhere else. I hope you're family is well and safe.

[mikesw]

The author poignantly and humanely points out how those in Jerusalem shouldn't feel removed from the rockets fired by Hamas. Relatively speaking, Netivot (where one man was recently killed by a Hamas rocket) isn't that far away from Jerusalem. But Gaza (where over two-hundred men, women and children have been recently killed by Israeli rockets) is not that far from Jerusalem either.

"Rockets falling", especially when they are nearby, should be a cause for concern, regardless of who is the victim.

[Doris]

It scares me how anti-Israel the liberals in the US - and Europe - has become. And I consider myself to be liberal. Sad.

[chaos4700]

Oh yes. We're all anti-Semites because we don't wholeheartedly endorse ethnic cleansing and civilian massacres. That line is getting tired.

[cheforacle]

She didn't say "anti-semitic". You read more into her remarks than she suggested. If people cannot even hear what the other person has clearly said, there is no room for dialogue.

[cherry33]

I think the "liberals" who you see as "anti-Israel" are people who are really disenchanted with the fact that a group of people (Israelis) who DO deserve a homeland seem so astonished that they should be met with a fight when they are moving into uninvited territory. Of all the places in the world for a new homeland, why the Middle East for crying out loud? You think there's gonna be problems? Hmm. My family and I have always supported Israel (even the Muslim side), but learning about how much power the Israeli lobby has in America, and how (what I've recently heard) that according to Israeli talking heads, Palestine was only dominated by Arabs for the past 100 years or so. That is a lie, and that made me personally very critical of the policies. And the way the news has been for so many years prior, using propaganda language to update us is shocking. I'm pro-Jewish homeland, but not the current attitude of arrogance of the Israeli government.

[ShoshanaNY]

I totally agree, Doris.

[chaos4700]

Really? Because as a rule, you can't be a liberal AND endorse ethnic cleansing.

[TerrapinCB]

Another article in the genre of "I reject reality and substitute my own"

[chaos4700]

More of "my fear of what might happen to me is more important than what is actually happening to the Gazans."

[cheforacle]

What factual assertions of the author do you claim are false.

[under5cents]

Here is a nickel's worth from under5cents...
I hate war and the killing of innocents. I also, to a lesser degree, hate paying taxes, going through airport security lines, and clipping my toenails. But, these things must be done. I know this sounds overly terse and perhaps insensitive to the plight of the Palestinian people.
The facts, however, are the facts. The properly elected body of government is Hamas. The Hamas Islamist movement has made it clear by their actions that they intend to continue to do what ever is necessary to destroy Israel. They have launched hundreds of cross border air attracts and brags that they have thousands of additional rockets. Israel has no choice, but to respond with overwhelming destruction.
I am so sorry. Under5cents http://www.under5cents.com

[rpophessagr]

I couldn't have said it better myself. It's nice to hear people understanding the horrible position Israel has been forced into.

[pfc1369]

Israelis are past masters of blaming the real victims, and casting themselves in the role of eternal victimhood.

If the Israelis have been "forced into" raining terror down on the people of Gaza, they should all relocate to another part of the planet.

[curlgirl]

Well said under5cents. It's nice to hear some common sense amongst the brainwhashed comments usually seen in articles about Israel. People are so busy being "humanitarian" they block out the reality that these people are shooting rockets towards schools and shopping centers, not to mention exploding in restaurants and buses, but if Israel tries to defend itself by destroying carefully chosen military targets it is genocide.

[bintalshamsa]

When you drop bombs in heavily populated neighborhoods, you are not engaging in "destroying carefully chosen military targets". If killing anyone near those who drop bombs is justifiable, then how can Israelis complain about what Hamas does?

[AntiSocialite]

Who exactly are "these people," that are shooting rockets curlgirl, would they be the ten or eleven Palestinian children under the age of ten that I have seen bloodied by Israeli bombs. You really should get with the program here because your so called "reality" where "people are shooting rockets towards schools and shopping centers," reads like a playbook for the Israeli offensive. Check the facts, I think it's the IAF that just bombed Islamic University. I'm not really trying to start a fruitless argument here but it is interesting how so many people fail to see the other side of an issue. Yes, I condemn the rocket attacks in southern Israel that have killed and injured Jewish citizens but does that mean that I cannot also condemn the clear overraction by the Israeli Defense Forces that have now killed over 300 and injured 1400 in three days?

Peace

[seadickrun]

What military is there in Gaza? I choose to call them freedom fighters. No one asked the Palistineans if it was okay if Israel took over their land after the Holocaust.

The UN established borders in 1967 but the US and Israel ignore those on a daily basis. We have been seeing terrorism since then starting with the 1972 Olympics and with no end in sight. Its in everyone's best interest to establish a true two-state solution as soon as possible.

How would we react if Europe decided to give the Gypsies a homeland in say, California? Would we just all pack up and move? Not on your life.

[ReHoover51]

the problem here is that hamas is a group, duly elected, but still a group of people and not a country ... their sworn enemy is a country. so when hamas attacks they are going after all the israelis and innocents get killed, but they are all the enemy.
when israel strikes hamas, they are attempting to strike the group, but innocents get killed that are not part of hamas ... so, how do you solve this ... israel believes it can retaliate and hamas believes it can wipe out israel ...
only the innocents lose ... they should believe in their faith ... but that wont help either cuz faith is non-sense and so is war.