Countdowns

We’ve all got countdowns going in our lives. Right now, I’m four days away from being able to chew hard food, one week away from a camping trip, three weeks until I fly to Israel, 45 days away from the first day of school, and one year away from finishing Teach for America. However, none of those timelines concern me seriously right now.

The only countdown that I’m really following is this: the countdown on my phone every time Red Alert! Israel tells me that a siren has gone off in Israel announcing that a rocket is on its way over from Aza, and that Israelis have 15 seconds to reach shelter. I pause in my day as I imagine a rush towards shelters, and those caught out in the open (because, let’s face it, who would ever have dreamed that rockets from Gaza could reach Zichron Yaakov? That’s like Cuba bombing New York!) flinging themselves to the ground over their children. I come to, to find myself absentmindedly reciting strange mixtures of Psalms and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems on serenity. My facebook feed is filled with people’s comments about sleeplessness, advice on how to stay safe, and memes about life under rocket fire. My aunt sent us this email:

The kids are fine, they are a bit traumatized and the younger ones keep on asking us if the sirens are a false alarm. (they are not). The first night A slept with M in the mamad (sealed room), that was the only way we could get him to sleep. He's on his way to a tiyul shnati in the north as I write these words. M's school was cancelled today as they are in caravans and there is no shelter there. She will be spending the morning with her abba at work. The metal shutters in our sealed room will remain closed until this is over.  I am at work, looking at all the signs pointing people to the sealed room in my work. In a nutshell, life goes on and we are trying to keep up with the routine as much as possible. It will take a more than a few rockets to get us down. Am Yisrael Chai!!!

Her strength encourages me even as I freak out at my young cousins’ confusion.

So why don’t I turn off my phone, get off facebook, stop checking my email, and just focus on my research on agency in education that I’m meant to be doing? I’m in America, I don’t need to know this. I don’t need to have my day interrupted constantly by alarms (over 200 rockets were fired at Israel yesterday).

But I do. I need to know, and this is how. If I went by the New York Times and Huffington Post headlines, Israel has decided to “Hit Key Hamas Targets in Gaza Offensive”, which has “set off the heaviest fighting between Israel and Hamas since…” No note is made of the fact that Hamas has been shelling Israel since last week. No comment that Israel gave them 48 hours to stop sending rockets over that targeted Israeli civilians, and then another 48 hours after that of bombing civilians without check because they thought there was a chance that Egypt might intervene. In fact, the New York Times is annoyed because Israel warns Gazan targets by phone and leaflets that they’re about to bomb, and the Gazans don’t always listen. You see, “often, as in the Khan Younis case on Tuesday, people die in any case, because they ignore or defy the warnings, or try to leave after it is too late. And, of course, sometimes bombs and missiles do not hit the building at which they are aimed.” Unlike the Gazan rockets, which are aimed straight at civilians. Do you see the hypocrisy? When the IDF misses their mark, civilians die. When Gazan terrorists hit their mark, civilians die. How can the first be condemned and the second ignored? Did you know that Israelis have spent the past few days cowering in bomb shelters, or did you only find out there’s a war on when headlines framed Israel as the aggressors? What does the world mean, proportional response? How about an effective response that ends the rockets for good, ensuring safety for everyone and peace for a stretch of future?

I have seen lots of articles, blog posts, and facebook statuses by people who impress me with their yearning for peace. Muslims who disapprove of hateful comments towards Jews, Israelis posting from their bomb shelter hideouts that they hope that Gazan civilians are fine, Jews denouncing revenge and Muslims condemning kidnapping and Arab teens reacting to price tag vandalism attacks by rebuilding an ancient Jewish synagogue with the Jewish teens from a nearby village and both groups deciding that our shared upcoming fast day, the 17^th of Tammuz that falls on Ramadan, will be a mutual fast for peace. These give me hope; surely most of the world is like this, and not crazed fanatics of hatred?

I’m sure that everyone else embroiled in this mess feels the same urgency I do, to make sure that everyone knows that we and our friends feel enormous concern for the safety of every single human being in the region whatever their identity, to make sure the militants in our identity group know that there are good people in the other group, to make sure that the world knows that our family and friends are being attacked, and to balance this all with obeying the maximum limit of posts and comments and texts and conversations on one topic consistent with politeness. At the end of the day, we all crave the same thing: peace, the peace that comes now, that we were born for, that we've been singing in old Israeli folk songs hackneyed with age and brittle in disappointed meaning. But still, we sing for peace.