Gaza's War of Attrition

Had the vaguest inkling of what the Israeli villages near the Gaza border went through last night. Accidentally left my mobile phone switched on and in my room over Shabbat.

From around midnight last night we were woken over and over again by the Red Alert rocket warning app going off on my phone. That's rocket alert after rocket alert through the early hours of Shabbat morning in dozens of Israeli villages and towns. Over thirty rockets fired in to Israel.

Usually I have the app configured to just ping loudly for alerts in our area (of which thank God there have been none for years) but I recently had my phone repaired and never got around to reconfiguring the app for my area only.

So over and over the screen of the phone flashed with locations around the Gaza border and the clanging alert sounded and we had a glimpse of the terrible Friday night the people living there had, running over and over to their shelters, praying that Iron Dome successfully intercepted all the launches aimed at so many Israeli civilians in their farms, villages, towns. Praying that no more fires would be started in the fields and woodland.

And we were only alerted to the rockets. Not to the thousands of rioters on the Palestinian side once again trying to storm the fence, throwing bombs and molotov cocktails over the border, launching more booby trapped balloons, destroy the fence and infiltrate Israel, part of a campaign to wear down the Israeli forces on the other side of the border, get them used to the constant riots and God Forbid one day use this is cover for even more deadly attacks. It's a war of attrition and it's been going on now for months, escalating little by little, creating a new routine which every day has the potential for deadly consequences.

Blessed Memory

Uncle just phoned in tears. He's in Tel Aviv watching Big Brother's choir perform in a gala Jewish music concert with several choirs, hazanim and well known Israeli singers.

Big Brother's choir just performed Shlomo Carlebach's beautiful "Barkhi Nafshi" right before the interval. Despite the large group of boys and the huge concert hall my uncle could make out Big Brother's clear strong voice passionately singing with every fibre of his being, and he choked up remembering his mother singing that very same song in her clear as a bell soprano.

"Are you old enough to remember that?" he asked weepily over the phone.

Am I ever. Bubbe, my maternal grandmother, didn't just sing it, she poured her entire self into it. She could stand there chopping the fish or kneading dough and for half an hour or more she could repeat over and over with a prayerful passion that must have stormed the gates of heaven "Borkhi nafshi et Hashem" to Carlebach's soulful melody.

It was one of her absolute favourite songs and she sang it often.

As I held the phone in one hand and a sort of dozing twin on my lap I happened to glance up at the newspaper on the chair next to me and a little chilll washed over me as I remembered the date. My grandmother's 16th yahrzeit falls later this week.

I can think of no better way of honouring her memory than for her grandson to sing her favourite Carlebach on the stage of Tel Aviv's Opera House in that same impassioned style of singing he inherited from the great-grandmother he never got to meet. It would please her so.

Danger: Balloons

If you are in Israel have a talk with your kids about not touching or going near balloons or kites they might see in the street, park or even floating in to their own garden.

If it isn't their own balloon they should stay away and call a grown-up.

For months now our Gaza neighbours have been sending thousands of balloons with incendiary devices or explosives attached, designed to cause fires or maim an unsuspecting person who touches the balloon or kite.

Some balloons have booby trapped toys attached to them.

Most of these have landed in nearby Israeli towns and villages just across the border from Gaza where they have sparked fires destroying large tracts of farmland, woodland and nature reserves, killing livestock and wildlife.

Some have drifted widely in to other areas of Israel, including Beer Sheva, Bat Yam, Jerusalem and Modiín.

Teach your children, your neighbours, tourists, visitors - DO NOT TOUCH balloons you come across in the street, a park, hanging on a tree, stuck on a street lamp, caught on your garden fence - wherever. Teach your kids to call a grown-up, make sure grown-ups know to call the police.

Burning fields

At a lovely leibedik wedding last night I met a woman from a village in the north-west Negev. She asked me if I could smell the smoke on her clothes because her region has been burning for days and weeks by now as fire-kites are sent over from Gaza in waves to destroy the fields, woodland and nature reserves on the Israeli side of the border.

The gentle hills and lowlands of the North-West Negev are Israel's grain basket and this time of year are covered in flammable fields of ripe wheat which can ignite and burn out in minutes, before fire crews can get to them, tons of food crops lost in an instant. Food which would go to Palestinians in Gaza, not just to Israelis.

In this clip you can see video of the arson damage to the farmland in this region. If you are wondering why no villages have burned, it's a mix of luck and sparse populations, there is a lot more farmland and nature reserve land than homes, though some fires have come pretty close and homes have had to be evacuated because of the proximity of the flames.

A bubbling pot in the north

To my mind the nuclear deal, Iran's nuclear programme and Trump's announcement are something of a red herring when it comes to what's going on in our region at the moment. The meaty issue is Iranian expansionism in the Middle East, through the basket case that is modern Iraq to the horrific chaos that is modern Syria and most specifically for Israel the placing of Iranian soldiers and bases right up against Israel's borders.

Add to this Hezballah's significant gains in Sunday's Lebanon elections and you have a rather worrying situation in view of the Iranian leaderships' very vocal calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

Iran is keen on bases in Syria to increase their hegemony in the Levant, including by directly threatening Israel's borders. Almost every Israeli air strike in Syria and Lebanon over the last few years has been in order to prevent this Iranian plan from coming to fruition. Iran's actions in the region are absolutely a legitimate casus belli for Israel to mount preemptive strikes in self-defense. Israel cannot tolerate such a well armed and hostile force threatening its population centres.

I really don't think it's a matter of Bibi or Barak or whoever might be in charge, I don't see any Israeli prime minister acting differently in this case. I think Olmert was one of our worst PMs on record, but he did one thing right, the 2007 preemptive airstrike on Syria's nuclear installations.

From our family archive

I've been going through some of the files of my mother's and grandmother's papers again. It is a sisyphean labour of love but I'm gradually making progress and now have another sisyphean task to complete in scanning all the photos and documents I think are either historically significant or just personally important for the family. Among this evening's finds awaiting scanning:

- A photo of 3 of my grandfather's sisters which judging from the youth of the women and their hair styles was taken after WWI, I'm guessing perhaps the early 1920s. Two of the sisters perished in the Holocaust. One moved to the UK in the 1920s.

- The menus from both my grandparents' wedding and my parents' wedding. Salmon and cucumber salads were served at both.

- My great-grandmother's Certificate of Registration, a kind of ID that non-citizens were required to have on them at all time. A stamp from the Aliens Registration Office dated November 1945 reads "The holder of this Certificate is to be exempted until further ??? from internment and from the special restrictions applicable to enemy aliens under the Aliens Order, 1920" There are later stamps from the 1950s showing that she checked in with the local police several times until a final stamp "ALIENS ORDER 1960, The holder is exempt from registration with the police". My great-grandmother arrived in the UK in 1904 but never took British citizenship and was interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man during the Second World War.

- A photo of one of the American cousins while serving in the US Army in WWII. He has what looks like a large glass of beer in his hand and is standing next to what looks like a wooden wagon with an improvised table and bottle of beer. Part of a sign reads "For Amer", my guess is this is somewhere in recently liberated Western Europe. On the back someone has written in handwriting "not for publication".

- A photo of some of the Israeli and British family in the lobby of a Tel Aviv hotel, including a relative who survived the Second World War by pretending to be a Polish Catholic. Unable to rescue any other family members she witnessed their fate, including the murder of her own husband and baby. After the war she eventually made her way to the infant Jewish State, remarried, started a new family. One day she was just arriving back at her Tel Aviv home when a taxi veered out of control on to the pavement and killed her where she stood.

- My teenaged uncle and his teen cousin, (the niece of the woman in the above story) on the deck of the Yerushalayim, a ship which sailed from Marseilles to Haifa in 1954 and brought many Jews to Israel in the early years of the state. Most of the other passengers on this voyage were Moroccan Jews making aliya to Israel.

- A photo of my primly attired grandmother, white handbag on her arm, in 1957, at a Bedouin encampment near Beer Sheva next to a kneeling camel and Bedouin men in old style white keffiyas.

- A business card from Yaakov Katz, member of Knesset and deputy mayor of Haifa. On the back there is a Hebrew dedication: "A souvenir to sons of my diaspora town of birth, Zlotchev, Poland, from the Holyland in the City of the Carmel - Haifa, 8th Iyar 5717, May 9 1957"

- A receipt from the Jerusalem yeshiva at which my uncle was a student in 1959

- Two letters my uncle wrote from Tel Aviv to his parents in London. They are dated June 6th 1967 and June 10 1967. He was volunteering in a hospital and inspecting air raid shelters. On June 6th he wrote:"For the past few days I have been working in a big Tel Aviv hospital 7am till 7pm.Tel Aviv has been very lucky no bombs have fallen. We can hear aircraft and explosions in the distance. Last night we went down twice to the shelters. Tel Aviv still seems to be gay except that buses are few and far between. Jerusalem on the other hand has got it bad: they have sent a lot of ambulances and doctors there from my hospital in Tel Aviv."

- A later postmarked June 12 1967 from my mother in Boston to her parents in London about her brother going off to Israel: "Thank Gd there is a ceasefire... Nevertheless volunteers are still needed to help keep the country going and put it back on its feet. I don't know WHY you have to say in almost every letter that you are bad parents. I think that every parent (and every boy) who's son is this week riding around in a car in GG/Hendon and sleeping in his own bed should be ashamed of his character and his upbringing. It was partly the fault of this type that 6,000,000 could die and no credit to them that we have a state of Israel... Of course my brother had to go - his whole ??? was that way - besides which he's a man with a conscience. Don't worry."

Front Row Seats to Jewish history

Always around this time of year, Israel's Independence Day, mixed in with the articles celebrating the State of Israel I see posts bemoaning the state of Israel, how it fails to live up to expectations, how they were full of Zionism but can't stand the current government or they tried aliya and discovered that Israel is not the country they dreamed of, the people are too rude, the streets dirty, the etiquette bizarre, the organisation lacking, the salaries low, the people unsophisticated, the cost of living too high and on and on.

Where is the Zion they dreamed of? Where is the gleaming perfection of their ideals beaming its light unto the nations? What happened? How can this be the Jewish state?

I do not want to belittle anyone's troubles, but I do think so much depends on attitude to those troubles. I'm under no illusions that life is easy anywhere, it isn't. People are people. Of course it hurts more when people being unpleasant or dishonest are your own people, blood of your blood, your extended family, your fellow Israelis.

That's life though, the good and the bad, the bitter and the sweet, the honey and the sting. Sometimes we get more honey, sometimes more sting. Life isn't perfect wherever you live. We're on the earth to strive to make it better, do tikkun olam, be the best people we can be, but no doubt, sometimes it seems like trying to climb up a mountain barefoot and shackled while carrying an elephant.

Whether your aliya goes smoothly or you hit many many bumps on your journey, never lose sight of the fact that for centuries Jews could only dream of a situation where there would be a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael to which Jews could freely emigrate. For all that moving countries is never simple, we are still an incredibly privileged generation in comparison with what previous generations had to endure to move to the Land of Israel.

My cousin came here in 1935 and spent his first few months living in a lean to shack he shared with a donkey. After that he got to share a slightly more solid shack with 3 or 4 other guys. No plumbing, no electricity.

I remember going to see him a couple of days after I officially became an Israeli citizen. He pointed to the view from his small Jerusalem walk-up flat, or should I say lack of view, it was mostly obscured by a newer block of flats. "You see that? When I bought this flat in the early 1970s I had an amazing view. Then ten years ago they built this new project below and blocked much of that view. Do you think I'm upset though? Do you? More flats are being built because more Jews are coming home and that means that I have a front row seat to the miracle of the Return to Zion. I am privileged to have my view blocked."

Such an important message for every oleh to keep with them. This isn't paradise, this isn't a rose garden. It is where the future of the Jewish people is being made and we are privileged to have front row seats.