"On a day of destruction we're working on restoration"
Letters from Israel
Monday, July 14, 2025
From destruction to rebith
Sunday, July 13, 2025
Tammuz 17th
These days if you are an Israeli or a Jew you have it thrust in your face many times a day from ignorant and hateful people around the world that Jews "have no connection to the Middle East", that our people are colonisers, interlopers, thieves and charlatans.
Sunday, June 29, 2025
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
Tomorrow will be a better day
In the scheme of things while our country is at war this is a very minor issue, but for my daughter who has been passionate about Gilbert and Sullivan her whole life this is huge. She's probably one of the greatest G&S experts in Israel, she knows all their productions, the stories of the actors and singers who first performed them, the historical background to when and how they were staged, every detail about the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Sunday, June 15, 2025
Maybe it's hard for people outside of Israel to understand, but this is not some kind of baseless "hatred" between Israel and Iran. On the contrary, most Israelis feel an affinity and great sympathy with the Iranian people who have suffered under the brutal rule of the radical Islamist regime since Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution in brought him to power in 1979. Prior to that revolution Israel and Iran enjoyed warm friendly relations. Khomeini's new regime broke off relations with Israel and designated Israel an enemy.
I just wanted to update everyone that we're OK, very tired, but doing OK.
Friday evening until Saturday morning we had barrage after barrage of ballistic missiles to our area, constant air raid sirens. The missiles from Iran have been targeting civilian areas, towns and cities, crowded residential areas.Thankfully most missiles were intercepted but a few still got through that there were casualties including fatalities and extensive damage in the crowded cities of central Israel. Our immediate area was safe but we heard the interceptions and impacts loudly.
At one point the whole building shook and the heavy reenforced steel blast door of our shelter shook. I was the only with a direct view, and the way the door vibrated I almost wondered if it was going to implode. It was just a second or two, a brief, massive boom when everything shook, but it seemed to stretch out so long. We found out later that one of the missiles had scored a direct hit on a town about 15 miles from us decimating a residential street and killing two people, wounding others. What we felt was the edge of the shockwave from that blast all this distance away.
Our shelter is small, windowless and underground, very hot and stuffy, but we are very grateful to have it. It's like human tetris trying to get everyone in at night when people just want to sleep but there isn't room for the whole family to lie down at the same time.
We tried to make things a bit more light hearted for the kids, joked about having a "picnic dinner" in the shelter, joked that it was really silly we made soup because nope, no way we were eating hot soup in a crowded little shelter. And we sang together, and we read Psalms together and prayed too.
We've been through a lot of rocket and missile attacks but this is the most intense I can remember. The missiles from Iran are much bigger, more lethal and pack a far larger warhead than those fired at us by Hamas, Hizballah and the Houthis. The damage one of these things can do, just one, is far greater, and we had plenty of damage from the smaller rockets. It's always terrifying to know that someone is shooting projectiles at you, whether they are smaller or bigger, they are all designed to kill, but this time is definitely more terrifying still. We've had hundreds of these huge Iranian missiles fired at us, even if only a very few get through the air defences, that's a lot of damage.
I'm awake at 0230 because we just had another alert to get to shelter because of expected incoming missiles in our area. Again. All night there have been air raid sirens in the north and far south, I think attack drones from Yemen and ballistic missiles from Iran. Now the densely populated central Israeli cities are being targeted again.
We can hear explosions in the distance, getting closer. Sirens going again now for us. Lots of booms and thuds. We're following local civil defense instructions, staying in our shelter, listening to the alerts, hoping and praying for the best.
Friday, June 13, 2025
Middle Eastern elders
As with the Houthis attacks on Israel, there is an extreme irony in the way the modern Iranian Islamic Republic has gone after Israel with a single minded hatred.
Very simply, there are vast numbers of Iranians in Israel. Most of them Jews, yes, but still with a deep connection to Iranian language, history and culture.Israeli Jews and Iranians are after all the most prominent remnants in the Middle East of the region's ancient civilisations, predating the Arab and Islamic conquest and to this day clinging to languages and literature that tell the story of the time before it was Arabicised and Islamified.
Unlike the Jews, most Persians lost their ancient religion and became Islamified, even adopting the Arabic script for writing the Farsi language. And yet they retained a keen sense of Persian history and identity, that they were scions to one of the ancient Middle East's greatest empires, a vibrant and influential civilisation who's ruins remain in stunning archaeological sites across Iran and in Iranian literature and folklore, most famously the Shahnameh national epic, and even imprints on the languages and cultures of the Arab and Turkish empires who supplanted them, with both Arabic and Turkish full of loan words derived from Farsi, including terms relating to court life and government, such was the inlfluence and stature of Persian culture even in the eyes of those who sought to dominate it.
Iranians and Jews, Iranians and Israelis, share this feeling of being the older siblings of the modern Middle Eastern peoples, repositories of knowledge of times and cultures buried under the conquests of later civilisations. This kinship of fellow ancient peoples has come up in conversation with many Iranians over the years, both nations appearing in the Bible. Maybe that's the reason Khomeini and his successor Khamenai held such a deep hatred for Israel, Israel reminded them of their own pre-Islamic roots, a nation standing up for its identity and culture, a lone non-Muslim majority country in the heart of the Middle East, a people with a different language and a different script from all their neighbouring Arab and Islamic states.
Jews from Iran and neighbouring Judeo-Parsi speaking communities such as Afghanistan and Bukhara, were among the first to return to Zion in the modern period and develop the city of Jerusalem beyond the walls of the historic Old City during the 19th century. The names of wealthy Bukharan and Persian Jewish benefactors from this period can still be seen on historic Jerusalem buildings originally built as orphanages, soup kitchens, synagogues and community housing for the Jews of Jerusalem. Israel became the biggest world centre for Persian Jewry.
Unlike Jews from most of the rest of the Islamic Middle East, most Iranian Jews came to the Land of Israel out of Zionism rather than as refugees because they had been expelled. Until the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran Israel had close ties to the country, with shared economic and military interests. Israelis and Iranians visited each others countries, shared technology and intelligence.
With Israel home to the largest community of Persian Jews in the world they could be found in all parts of Israeli society, from working class artisans and shop keepers in the markets to prominent musicians, senior generals, a Chief Rabbi and president and more.
Just as there is something absurd about the Houthis in Yemen attacking Israel with its large, thriving, Yemeni Jewish community, so too the notion of the Iranian leadership counting down Israel's destruction with a giant clock in Teheran and a nuclear and missile programme they openly describe as being developed to wipe Israel off the map.