Gimme Shelter

It's all very well if a siren goes and you are home near shelter, or you are able bodied and can run to shelter or easily get down on the ground, but what if you can't?

This evening I was at a yahrzeit memorial service for a close family friend who passed from serious illness a few years ago. We were worried there might be a siren during the service outside in the cemetery in central Israel.

In the end the graveside ceremony was thankfully quiet and dignified but afterwards close family and friends went to honour the deceased's memory with a dinner as we do each year and it was then, as we were sitting out on a relatively exposed balcony in a city mall that we received a warning of an incoming Houthi missile fired from Yemen.

Most of us were able bodied enough to make it to shelter, but some were too elderly or disabled to make a dash for it. Neither could they get down on the ground and cover their heads, they had to just sit there and hope for the best, including a young boy walking with a cane because of a foot injury.

Even for those of us who did rush to the shelters 90 seconds was not a lot of time to make it across to the other side of the mall and find the secure area.

There have been so many sirens by now that for many people they are almost routine, some just saunter to the shelters, others are almost indifferent, another siren, odds are the IDF will successfully intercept it, here we go again.

It's a mentality I can completely understand but it is so dangerous precisely because there are no guarantees that the intercept will be successful (thank God most are) and even if successful, an intercept doesn't vaporise an incoming missile or rocket, it hopefully detonates the warhead high up in the atmosphere and breaks these giant projectiles into smaller less dangerous pieces, but there are still fragments left, some quite large, which do fall to earth. Less deadly than a huge missile armed with an explosive warhead slamming into Israel, but still a risk which can and does cause damage and possibly worse.

Tonight shrapnel "just" fell on the roof of a house and in a street not far from us. Fortunately noone was hurt.

At the moment of the siren I wasn't sure what to do. It felt like those of us who could get to shelter were abandoning those who could not, and yet what could we have done? Us staying in the exposed area alongside them wouldn't have afforded them any protection, there was nothing we could do to help them make it to shelter, there was noone we could have carried. So we decided that anyone who could make the 90 second dash would do so and with uneasy hearts we left those who could not. I felt physically sick having to make such a decision, to have to think that way, it goes against every principle to leave people behind when the siren goes, but my elderly uncle insisted that it was what I should do.

As I was walking briskly to the shelter my phone rang, my middle son checking to make sure I'd heard the siren, that I'd found shelter, letting me know he and his brothers were snuggled up with Abba on the mattress in our shelter trying to help the little boys get back to sleep, Abba reading them a story, our anxious little one curled up with the special blanket and cuddly animal he keeps in the shelter to comfort him through the sirens.

I knew his next call would be to my elderly uncle, my kids always phone him to make sure he's heard the siren and remembers what to do. I updated him about our situation, he said he'd call anyway to make sure he was OK.

We are all fine, it feels almost overdramatic to write about this, sirens have become so much a part of our daily routine. And yet after all this time I don't think I will ever not feel that primal pang of dread at the soul piercing wail of the air raid sirens. Yes I know what to do forwards and backwards and quite literally in my sleep. I know we have Iron Dome and David's Sling and the Hetz anti-missile systems guarding our airspace day and night, most of the time successfully intercepting the deadly projectiles. Intellectually I am calm and matter of fact about it all, I am after all someone who studied military history and ethics of war.

And yet, with all the practical calm and nonchalance with which we deal with this situation it's should never be routine or normal to have to live like this, with the constant attempts on our lives.

So what that our country has invested massive resources into protecting its citizens - the shelters, the anti-missile defences, the early warning systems - massive amounts of resources that could have been used for so many other things but had to be diverted to this huge protective umbrella because damn it there are so many people still trying to kill us.

At the end of the day the fact that our country has been quite successful at intercepting the rockets and missiles and attack drones doesn't remove the fact of the intent behind the people shooting at us because they are trying to kill us.

And that is why with all my knowledge, my practical understanding of the situation, that screaming siren will always strike a nerve within that reminds me that the Houthis, Hamas, whoever it is this time, want us dead and the missiles they send our way are purposefully aimed at us, if any of us are hurt it isn't collateral damage from a precision strike but reason for them to celebrate the murder of a hated Israeli. For them lobbing unguided ballistic missiles in the general direction of densely populated areas is the whole point, pure terror weapons.

My elderly uncle remembers that feeling from his earliest childhood when his family lived in wartime London, not the Blitz, but later, when the Nazis were sending flying bombs to inflict random carnage over the city. He remembers the makeshift shelter his father and uncle built in the garden of their shared building, the midnight "tea parties" the adults put on to distract the children from the nighttime raids, and the next day, children curious to find the bombsites and see the damage from the night before.

He never imagined that the next generation and the generation after would also live with "routine" air raids.

And tonight I couldn't even figure out how to get him to shelter.