Close to home

Itai Roth thought that he would have to celebrate his bar mitzva ceremony without his father present, as his father, Benny, is a reservist combat soldier on active duty in Gaza. However the army was able to release his father for a few hours to surprise his son on this special occasion, before returning to the front.

This is a small bittersweet story in a big war, but aside from the personal joy of this young boy, it's also a story about just how close the front line is to our homes.

Active duty in Israel doesn't mean being sent off to fight in some foreign war on the other side of the world, active duty in Israel means soldiers going off to defend their own homes, sometimes literally a few minutes from the front lines, often only an hour or two away from the war zone.

For many parts of Israel the front lines are close enough that residents are hearing the bombardments from the combat in which their parents, spouses, sons, daughters, neighbours, friends and colleagues are taking part. In most other parts of the country we are at the very least hearing the daily roar of military jets taking part in the fighting.

This proximity means that our soldiers are going in to battle with the knowledge that they are literally defending their families and communities.

It also means that sometimes they are able to take a few hours break from the war to join their loved ones briefly for births, weddings and sadly funerals. And yet even with the frontlines so close to home there are many combat soldiers who have hardly seen their families in many weeks.

I feel like often for friends overseas this is the part people don't understand. Just how small distances are here, the extent to which those going off to war are both a world a way from the relative normality (or at least appearance of relative normality) in much of the home front, and yet physically the distance between the battle zone and their homes is small, sometimes shockingly so.

Make no mistake, there but for the IDF soldiers actively pursuing terrorists and destroying the Hamas terror infrastructure on the ground, and Iron Dome intercepting the majority of the thousands of missiles launched at Israel from Gaza in the air, our home front would much more closely resemble the war zone.

The relatively (emphasis on relatively) routine existence that has to some extent returned to most of Israel's population centre is not because Hamas isn't trying to kill us, but because the IDF is doing all it can to stop them from succeeding.