Living With Rockets

“I go to visit a local family,” writes the journalist Tuvia Tenenbom. “It is Friday Night and the family sits at the table. The husband makes the Kiddush, the wife shares the challahs with everybody, some people sing some songs and everybody gets busy eating the Sabbath food: fish, chicken, meat, followed by Coke Zero and Johnnie Walker Black Label.” He is in Israel, near Gaza.

A conversation follows about beautiful sights in distant lands and then, just before the cakes and cookies are to be served, which for me are the most precious Sabbath items, a siren louder than God’s voice in Mt. Sinai is heard.

“We have only 15 seconds!” my hosts tell me as they jump out and run to a secured room inside their house, a shelter somewhere behind the kitchen. “And you must come with us.” I look at them, at this sad image of people running for their life, and stare at my phone. Lately, Hamas has been flooding Israeli cells with special text messages, in which it brags of its success in forcing Israelis to “hide in shelters like mice.”

These Jews run to shelters; their parents and grandparents ran in fear to Treblinka. It seems as if Jews are forever running for dear life.

I follow them to a windowless anti-rocket room with no air and no windows that every new home in Israel must have, and I feel as though I am in a grave. They stand close to each other, like a group of mice indeed, hanging on to life as hard as they can.

His report, parts of which are grimly funny, particularly his observations of the international press at work, gives the other side of the story from the dramatic and heartbreaking pictures of Palestinian losses we see on the news. As I’ve written before, Israel’s success in protecting its people puts them at a disadvantage in the battle waged through the media. Reports like this one show us what we don’t see.