It’s just an average day. You are going about your business. You just did shopping at the shuk (market). You just arrived at work or class, maybe you just dropped off your kids at day care or just stepped into the shower with your girlfriend. Maybe you are sleeping off that hangover from the previous night or eating popcorn and watching a comedy with family. Normal day for any person reading this.
But suddenly you hear the siren. It comes on often enough that you don’t know how to treat it. Do you run for the bomb shelter in the basement, seven flights down or just get into the stairwell. Do you get into the room that is furthest to the East so that it has to go through a few walls before it gets to you (everyone knows where East and West is in their home for this reason). Do you run back to day care, do you stop the car or keep driving, do you stay in the shower or do you have enough time to get out and go into a stairwell. Do you get to the side of the road and hide next to a concrete divider.
You don’t really know anything except one thing, there are people 20 miles away who want you dead. They don’t know if you are pro or anti-Palestine, Jew, Christian or Muslim, Arab or African, child or elderly, woman or man. They will celebrate your death regardless of who you are simply for the reason that you live on the other side of the fence. You know the rocket is imprecise, you know that they don’t care where it flies, you know that they shoot it with one thought: that it hits someone, anyone. You know it can’t destroy a building, but if it falls anywhere near you, it will kill you or maim you for life.
And so as you listen to the waxing and waning of the siren, you can’t stop but think about two things: what to do and are you unlucky. Because the chances of it hitting you are low. You have to be unlucky to be hit. But you don’t know if you are lucky or unlucky. If this is the day that you made the wrong decision to take the regular path or if this was your bad day because you took an alternate route that lead you to be just at the spot where a rocket lands to day. You sit and wonder are you unlucky enough to be hit by the few rocket that get passed the Iron Dome and picks you out of all the people in your city, a city that takes less time to run lengthwise than a 5k and only a couple miles in width. A city that is dense and compact and where there really isn’t time to search for a shelter.
And so you find a spot that you think is safe, and you hope that today you are not unlucky, that your friends and family are not unlucky. And you listen for the Iron Dome to hit the rockets and you wait to hear if any of them crash and you wait to see if you are going to stay alive.
Now in a normal country, if this happened once, the country would go and stop it. They would send their rockets at those who launch the rockets, send their troops to find the sadistic killers. But we can’t. Every time we try to, the world erupts in unison in condemnation, of how dare we try to stop their “resistance”, how dare we respond to them and kill civilians, when they purposely, sadistically, cruelly place themselves near civilians with the specific aim of having those civilians killed should we respond to derive the most sympathy to them and hatred towards us. Somehow the brain of the world will not for a second consider their genocidal actions towards me, or the people they hold hostage, the people they hide behind while shooting at me.
All we hear is “if we give them their land they wouldn’t try to kill you”. Something no one would say about any other conflict, because it would sound crazy to reward psychopaths with land in Russia, or China or India or any other country. But this is what they say and so we offer them a state, and they say no and go on a rampage killing us in clubs, cafe’s and on buses. We give them money and they buy more rockets that shoot further and destroy more. We leave the land that we won in a war of their agression, and they build more rockets and shoot more of them at us. And no matter what we try to do to appease them their goal doesn’t change: their goal is our death.
And so what do we do? We decrease the chances of bad luck by using our ingenuity and time and money on technology that destroys their rockets, instead of all the other things we could be making with that talent and money. And all they do is get more rockets with the hope of either getting us to spend so much money that we go bankrupt or that somehow a rocket gets passed the Iron Dome, and kills someone, anyone.
The insanity is that it doesn’t matter if that rocket doesn’t end our state. They know that rocket won’t creat their state. It doesn’t matter how ineffective it is to get them to their goal: the elimination of our people, all they care is that there is one fewer Israeli, Jew or Muslim, old or young, man or woman, white or black. They just want us dead and the western media, the student protesters, the world loves them for it.
And then it passes, usually with a boom and the slow silence of the siren. Your adrenaline falls. You leave your “safe” spot, you calm the kids nearby, and you try to get on with your day. And you don’t call anyone because there are too many people to call, except maybe your spouse. We assume that we are ok unless we hear otherwise. We simply kiss each other an extra kiss when we depart and give an extra long hug when we meet. Because no one knows when their luck is going to run out.
