Why am I glad that Israel Railways carpets the floors of their train carriages?
Because it makes it a little more comfortable when there is an air raid siren and you have to lie on the floor and try to take cover under the seats.
People are usually very friendly in these situations, there is a certain camaraderie of lying on the floor on a moving train trying to figure out whether it's safe to get up yet when suddenly you meet all the people in the neighbouring seats to commiserate and make jokes about the bizarre circumstances we find ourselves in.
Like yesterday, the train was passing a usually quiet area, not far from Modiin when the sirens went off. The Arabic speaking mother and kids diagonally across the aisle from me were the fastest to react, instantly pulling down the shades on the windows, the smaller kids squeezing into the spaces between the seats which are meant for luggage, the rest of the family hitting the floor and covering their heads in a flash, clearly well drilled in air raid sirens, no panic, no fuss, just autopilot, while the rest of us were a few seconds slower, taking a moment to register what was happening.
Flat on the floor, half under the seats my eyes met those of my neighbour across the aisle, the mother shielding her kids and the woman on the next bench over and we all kinds of smiled sheepishly at each other, lying there with our hands over our heads trying to fit ourselves as much under the seats as possible.
"We made it all the way from Nahariya with no sirens, who would have believed it would happen here!" declared the mother ruefully. Turns out they were coming from a village in the much bombarded north of Israel (two people were killed yesterday in a direct hit on Nahariya) to get some respite in the relative quiet of central Israel.
I was coming home from a day volunteering on a kibbutz right on the Gaza border where yes, we had heard the chilling sounds of the fighting in Gaza, including at times the staccato of heavy machine gun fire, but it had all been in the distance, listening to a war that while only a few kilometres from us, did not directly endanger us, but rather the opposite, was mostly the sound of the IDF protecting us from the remaining ragtag Hamas gunmen attempting to regroup.
There have been very few sirens lately in the Gaza border area. I had to take the train from Ashkelon because the section of the line from Sderot towards Tel Aviv is still closed because it is very exposed to line of sight from Gaza, and the IDF thinks it is still at risk, though they are hoping it will be safe enough to start running again in a few weeks.
Ashkelon was thankfully quiet. Tel Aviv was thankfully quiet. But here, on the train so close to home, davka here, the air raids sirens wailed.
"At least the floor is carpeted" commented the young across the aisle woman brightly. "It might be filthy from all the people walking on it, but at least it's soft to lie on."
