On October 8, 2023, the Hezbollah, a terrorist organization embedded in Southern Lebanon and Iran’s most powerful proxy, opened a northern front against Israel. They began indiscriminately firing rockets on Israeli towns and antitank missiles on IDF troops. The fact that Hezbollah would open another front was unsurprising. One day earlier, the IDF had initiated a mass callup of reserve soldiers, including my two sons, to stave off a potential “northern version” of the October 7 massacre, which could have been much worse than the massacre that took place in the Gaza envelope. The fact that the Hezbollah response was limited to rockets and missiles actually came to many as a relief.
Ten months later, it is clear that the IDF planners grossly underestimated the magnitude of the Hezbollah threat. After only a few days of incessant rocket fire, the IDF ordered all residents living within three miles of the Lebanese border to evacuate to the south. More than 100,000 residents obeyed the orders, assuming that they would quickly return home. They remain refugees in their own country to this day. The northern towns and kibbutzim remain frozen in time until somebody figures out a way to stop the rocket fire and the sniping. Hezbollah has successfully created a security zone in sovereign Israel. For the first time in her 75-year history, the State of Israel has retreated under fire and ceded land in the process.
Years ago, my wife and I made a decision to live in the north of the country on a hilltop in the Western Galilee. The town we chose was close to where I would end up working, and the lifestyle up north is much more relaxed than in the center of the country. If Tel Aviv is like Manhattan, then the Galilee is like the Poconos. It is a place where people come for a vacation and decompress among the mountains and the pine forests.
My home town of Moreshet is about 10 miles from the northern border as the crow flies. Fortunately, we were not forced to evacuate our home. Since October 8, we have experienced only one alarm, a false alarm that affected nearly every town in the northern third of the country. Urban legend has it that some soldier accidentally sat on a switch that triggered the alarm and sent the entire north into panic. Compare this tranquility to the turmoil experienced by one of my Contract Managers who lives in Ga’aton, about 5 miles south of the Lebanese border. She and her eight-year-old daughter have learned to distinguish between the sound of Hezbollah rocket fire and IDF artillery fire and the sound of Iron Dome interceptors being launched. They regularly sleep in their bomb shelter. But in Moreshet, it is often difficult to believe that we are in the middle of a raging war. Last Friday, my wife and I went down to a shopping mall adjacent to an IKEA (Israel has more IKEAs per capita than any other country in the world). The purpose of our trip was to meet our granddaughter, who is starting first grade, to buy her a backpack for school. And while we were in the neighborhood, we met my son and his family at IKEA for an insanely cheap breakfast with all the coffee you could drink. There was no war in sight. There were no soldiers, no barricades, and no sandbags. The mall was jam-packed with a slice of Israel: Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, people of European (Ashkenazic) descent and people of North-African (Sephardic) descent, large families there to eat an inexpensive breakfast, and old-timers there just to watch them. The scene was so idyllic. What a wonderful country we have. Why would anybody want to fire rockets at us?
While we were filtering out the war, not everyone else was following suit. 45 years ago, I played in a band in Binghamton, New York, and four out of five of us have managed to remain close despite the passage of time. Two of us live in Israel, one lives in the U.S. and spends his summers in Israel, and one owns homes in both countries and he divides his time between the two. Last year, we all decided that the next time we got together we would go to a trendy new restaurant that my wife and I had set our sights on. The restaurant is located in Ramat Yishai, in the northern part of the country, about 15 miles south of Moreshet. Reservations needed to be made three months in advance. My wife and I booked a table in May. Last week, a few days before we were to meet, I sent out a message on our WhatsApp group to verify that everyone was coming. I was completely taken by surprise by the response. The other band-members are situated in the center of the country and they were in agreement that the north was not a safe place to be at this time and that the most prudent thing to do was to cancel the reservation. What surprised me most was that one of the band-members lives across the Green Line in a place that many Israelis feel unsafe to enter even in peacetime. I tried cajoling them. I tried showing them how distant the war was, but to no avail. We’ll have to wait another year. Fortunately, a more adventurous couple who also lives in the center of the country braved the potential for disaster and joined us for a most wonderful evening at the restaurant. As we entered the restaurant, we were told where to go in case of a rocket attack. We smiled blithely.
Truth be told, my fellow band-members were not entirely wrong. On Saturday morning, fighter bomber air traffic over our home was much louder than usual. I assumed that something had happened – or was going to happen – and a nearby air base had scrambled a large number of aircraft. A few hours later, my assumption was verified. While returning home from the park down the street, where I had been pushing my grandchildren on the swings, I heard a distant thud from the northeast. An Iron Dome interception. And then another one. And another one. Clearly, the Hezbollah had fired a large salvo of rockets, most likely on Mount Meron or possibly on nearby Safed. And then I continued walking home as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Just another day at the office. I thought of something my son said to me a few weeks earlier as he sat on the beach in Acco with his children, listening to the distant noise of Iron Dome. “This is surreal,” he told me. “Here I am, sharing a lovely afternoon with my family while just down the road our country is burning.”
My friends were not alarmists. I had become inured to the fighting, but they had not, nor should they have been. Last week, one day before we were scheduled to go to the restaurant, Jews around the world observed the fast of the Ninth of Av, a day that commemorates the many calamities that have befallen the Jewish People over the years: the destruction of two Holy Temples and subsequent exile, pogroms, inquisitions, and the Holocaust. This year another calamity was added to the list: the Massacre of October 7. A story is told of Napoleon, who had just captured the city of Acco. One night, as he was walking the streets with his officers, he heard a group of the locals wailing. Fearing an insurrection, Napoleon asked his officers to investigate. A few minutes later, they returned and told him that he had absolutely nothing to fear. It was the Ninth of Av and the Jews were crying over the destruction of their temple. Napoleon asked, “How long ago did this happen?” They answered, “Nearly two thousand years ago.” Napoleon retorted, “A nation that can still cry over a calamity that happened nearly two millennia ago will surely live to see their temple one day rebuilt.” If our pain remains real, if we remember how to cry, then there is a chance that one day we might be able to address the root cause of our anguish. Only if we refuse to allow ourselves to become used to the surreality, to the sounds of those not-so-distant thuds, to the 100,000 displaced families, to the more than 100 hostages living in hell underground in Gaza, only then is there a chance that we will one day return to reality. A reality in which we expend energy not by dodging bullets, but by building the country that we so badly deserve.
Good Things,
Ari Sacher
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