Ceasefire

On Wednesday, November 27, at 4:00 am local time, Israel and Lebanon declared a ceasefire. Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah and Israel had been engaged in a sort of tit-for-tat in which Hezbollah would fire over a few rockets and Israel would return fire. On the afternoon of September 17, 2024, the pagers of thousands of high-ranking Hezbollah officials blew up in their pockets, in their hands, and over their ears. The next day, Hezbollah walkie-talkies exploded in a very similar fashion. Two days later, Israel bombed a building in the Dahia district in Beirut in which more than 60 senior Hezbollah officers were meeting. The result was the “3rd Lebanon War.” Israel sent multiple divisions of forces into Lebanon, capturing towns and dismantling Hezbollah infrastructure. By the end of the war, they had reached the Litani River, more than 10 miles north of the border. At the same time, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets, missiles, and killer drones at Israel. The vast majority were intercepted by the Iron Dome and David’s Sling anti-missile systems, but the rockets that managed to pierce the Israeli missile shield injured more than 200 people and killed 47.

The ceasefire was brokered by the U.S. and France, a country with strong Lebanese ties. Over the past month, this blog has laid out critical parameters of any ceasefire – what needs to be included and what should at all costs be excluded. Based solely on these parameters, the ceasefire that was signed is suboptimal. For example, the ceasefire mandates that the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will be responsible for ensuring that armed Hezbollah terrorists remain north of the Litani River. As we have shown, the LAF are infiltrated by and simultaneously beholden to Hezbollah, such that handing security arrangements over to the LAF is like leaving the cat in charge of the cream. High-ranking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers I have spoken with admit that the ceasefire will not lead to “peace in our time” and that an imminent 4th Lebanon War will be fought in a decade or so. Support of Israelis for the terms of the ceasefire is divided. According to a poll taken by Channel 12 News, one of Israel’s largest news outlet, 37% of respondents supported the terms, 32% opposed them, and 31% didn’t know.

And yet, whether or not Israelis support the terms of the ceasefire agreement, there is overwhelming support for the cessation of the hostilities, and for a number of reasons. The first reason is that the ceasefire will enable the IDF to release a large number of reservists – indeed, many have already been released – and will significantly reduce the amount of reserve duty that will be required in the near term. Since October 7, most reservists have served more than 200 days of emergency reserve duty. My two sons have each served about 260 days over two rounds. Some people have already begun a third round of reserve duty, this time for “only” seventy days. The substantial amount of time being spent in the army is taking a toll on the reservists. While on the whole they are in high spirits and determined to crush the enemy, they are admittedly suffering the effects of months spent away from home and work. Some own businesses that are failing. Some have families that they see all too rarely. Some are trying to study in university; most of them with limited success. It is often too difficult to fight Hezbollah during the day and catch up on lectures and homework at night. The families of the reservists are also suffering. Above and beyond the sleepless nights spent in fear of the lives of their father/son/grandson/husband/partner who is in harm’s way, and above and beyond their panicking from every knock on the door and every time the phone rings, families have been forced into “single-parenthood.” Wives of soldiers are raising their children by themselves. Since September 17, many of these women have spent more time at home than they have spent at work. The ceasefire in Lebanon combined with the victory in Gaza is returning reservists to the lives they left stored in a box on October 7. They can return to work. They can salvage what is left of their businesses. They can once again be fathers, sons, and husbands. Israelis are embracing this with both hands.

Another reason that Israelis are relieved that the fighting is over is because their children finally can return to school. Since September 17, schools as far south as Haifa, about 20 miles from the Lebanese border, have been severely impacted by rocket attacks. The IDF Home Front Command can impose restrictions on whether or not a school can open and how many children can attend classes on any given day. The restrictions are a function of the town’s proximity to the border and the frequency of rocket fire in that particular area, and they are applicable to all schools from pre-kindergarten all the way to the 12th Grade. Schools furthest from the border were completely shut down for only a few weeks. During this time, students attended classes virtually. From the experience gained during the COVID-19 pandemic, it should not be surprising that virtual classes, especially for the younger grades, were completely and entirely ineffective. When schools were allowed to open, the number of children permitted to come to school was limited by the space in the school’s bomb shelters. In most cases, there was sufficient space for about half the total number of enrolled children. The classes would alternate children coming to school on one day and attending virtual classes the next. The schools nearest to the border have, for all intents and purposes, been shut down since September 17. My son lives in Acco, about 10 miles from the border. He has four children from pre-K to 3rd Grade. Today, December 1, was the first day in two and a half months that all of his children went to school. Being able to attend school full-time is not only important for the children, it gives parents the freedom to go back to work full-time.  

And then there is the rocket fire. Since September 17, the IDF Home Front Command has published a periodic update on location-based safety regulations: How many people could congregate indoors and outdoors, who could enter his place of employment and under which conditions, and, as mentioned above, where children could go to school and under which conditions. At the beginning of the war, gatherings of more than 100 people from Haifa northward were prohibited. This essentially precluded most Israelis from praying at their local synagogues. As this coincided with the High Holidays, the impact of this restriction was tangible. Many arranged services on the street, bringing back memories of those heady days of COVID-19. Movie theaters were empty. Even when gatherings were permitted, nobody wanted to be in a movie theater when an alarm sounded. Concerts were cancelled. Even traffic arrangements were modified to prevent large clots of cars from forming. In RAFAEL, a large defense contractor in the north, a “Green Front Door” policy was implemented in which when entering and leaving the plant, employees merely brandished their badges for the security guards instead of swiping them, speeding up the flow of vehicles.

There was the sound of airplanes flying overhead all the time. Some of the time it was the throaty whine of fighter-bombers. Some of the time it was the growling of Apache helicopters. Often the airplanes flew low to escape detection from Hezbollah radar. The sound of low-flying aircraft is deafening, and, by the way, sounds a lot like the launch of an Iron Dome interceptor.

There was the sound of air raid sirens, a haunting rising and falling moan signifying that one’s life was in mortal danger. Sometimes a siren would go off in a person’s current location, causing him to rush to the nearest bomb shelter. Sometimes the siren was from a nearby town, close enough to hear but not signifying an imminent attack. Those alarms were nearly as bad as the first kind. There was always this uncertainty – should we continue with our lives or should we enter the bomb shelter, just to be safe? Sometimes the alarm would go off on the Homefront Command application on mobile phones with a “chic-a-chic-a-chic-a.” The phone's alerts did not always signify that the area around the phone was under attack. More often than not, the application was linked to that person’s hometown, and he would rush to call his children to make certain they had entered the bomb shelter. And then there was the rush to the bomb-shelter or some other “safe-ish” location. One night, my daughter and I were driving in Acco to visit my son and his family when the air raid siren went off. It was a killer drone. We stopped the car right there in the middle of the street and ran to the sidewalk, where we lay down with our hands cupped over our heads until the sirens stopped. The problem was that where we stopped the car, there was no sidewalk so to speak. There was only a patch of grass which was muddy from the recent rain. The feeling of sheer helplessness was indescribable. I was thankful it was only a drone. A rocket attack would have had the added threat of shrapnel – “interceptor residue,” the media called it – falling from the sky. There, on the muddy grass, we would have been just as exposed to the elements as we had been before the threat was destroyed.

There was the sound of explosions of interceptions. From my home, we could hear the explosions from nearly every interception in the north. We learned to know where and when Hezbollah rockets had been intercepted and when they had impacted the ground – ground impact produces a much louder and higher-pitched bang. We learned to identify the lower-pitched thud of IDF artillery launches. Even schoolchildren were able to discern between the various booms.

But the worst part of the war was the complete sense of helplessness. Life had been turned upside down, and there was not a thing we could do about it. As far as we knew, the war was going to go on forever. One study predicts that over half a million Israelis are at risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks and the ensuing war. To handle the elevated stress levels, Israelis practiced “Shigrat Herum” – “Emergency Routine.” While this term is admittedly a contradiction in terms, it is perhaps the most straightforward way of understanding how Israelis have managed not only to live, but, to thrive under the most strenuous conditions – by compartmentalizing their panic, by converting the source of that panic from an ever-present threat into something that required management. The first time I heard the term “Shigrat Herum” was in the first Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein fired 39 SCUD-B guided missiles into Israel, missiles that, we were warned, could be carrying Chemical and Biological warheads. And so every day we would send off the kids to school with their gas masks and their epi-pens. Nothing extraordinary here – just another thing to send to school along with their lunchbox. In the current war, most people treated air raid sirens as a nuisance. “For crying out loud! I’m in the middle of putting together a PowerPoint presentation for the boss and now I have to burn ten minutes in the bomb shelter. Seriously??” That is “Shigrat Herum.”

The ceasefire agreement signed last week may be suboptimal, but given the current situation in Israel, it is critical. It gives us time to breathe, to go back to real normalcy, to assess and to plan for the 4th Lebanon War that, as a direct result of the terms of the ceasefire, is all but a certainty.

Good things,

Ari Sacher