A blog about writing, sketching, running and other things
I was about to write a long post, but I decided that it’s not worth it. I’m too tired for this.
We had rockets at an expected time yesterday. One of my best friends had to run back from the playground with her kids, and her daughter had the beginnings of an asthma attack because of the run and the stress.
Here’s a sketch of a stupid dog with a ball.
We had the first day in two weeks with no rocket fire. I only wish I’d have known that we’d have a quiet night in advance, because then I could have actually slept properly for a change. As it was I kept waking up and imagining sirens. The south and north of Israel didn’t have such a peaceful day, with the south being pummelled by rockets throughout the day, and the Iranian backed Hizballah working with Hamas to do everything possible to drag us into another war in Lebanon.
Two hostages were thankfully freed and are back safely in Israel. I’m both happy about that and well aware that there are 200 more hostages in Hamas’s hands, and they won’t be freed so easily. Our disgraceful PM had the temerity to take credit over something that clearly had nothing to with — if anyone can take credit here it’s likely President Biden. It boggles my mind that Bibi and his pack of grossly incompetent cronies are still “in charge” and haven’t resigned.
What also boggles the mind is calls for a ceasefire at this stage from various clueless celebrities. I am a leftist, and I wouldn’t dream of a ceasefire with Hamas. They have hundreds of hostages, they performed multiple war crimes, and they have shown themselves to be 100% untrustworthy. This isn’t “just another round of fighting in the Middle East”. This is about restoring basic, basic, basic safety to the citizens of Israel (and yes, that includes Christians and Muslims, which were also deliberate victims of this war). Iran is doing everything it can to push an all out war in the area, just so the Saudi’s don’t get a foothold here. Hamas planned this attack well in advance, knew exactly what the repercussions would be, and is now trying to play the poor innocent victim card, and say “but what about the Palestinian people”? What about them, indeed? Since when did Hamas ever care about the people of Gaza except as potential recruits, cannon fodder and human shields? Go check their track record as rulers of the Gaza strip and then talk about how much they care for the Palestinian people. There are some choice samples of their treatment of Palestinian journalists if you can stomach the footage.
Two weeks after 9/11 nobody would have dreamt of telling the American people to sign a ceasefire with Al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. It just boggles my mind that celebrities feel justified in making that call now.
I live near the Mediterranean sea, and the ground here is both sandy and salty, and oftentimes there are strong salt winds from the sea. The sun is direct and scorching for most of the year. These are extremely challenging conditions for plants, to say the least. One of the few plants that have adapted to this combination of plant killing things is the Tamarix aphylla, or Salt Cedar. There are quite a few of them planted in the parks and gardens around my house, and I always find it uplifting to see them survive and thrive despite everything around them trying to kill them — scorching sun, branch breaking wind, poor soil and the ever present salt.
An inspiration.
Last night we got a rocket barrage at 23:00, which meant that I had a pretty sleepless night. This morning I went to the farmers’ market, where there was a family of farmers from Otef Aza, the area hit worst by the terrorist attack. Their farm was destroyed and they were evacuated, but yesterday they were allowed to go and salvage what little produce was left. They loaded up a truck with what was left of their produce (melons, watermelons and corn), and went to the Tel Aviv farmers’ market to sell it. They have no place to store it, so what isn’t sold today will be binned. I’ve been spreading the word (and I’ve bought things from them myself) and I really hope that they manage to empty their truck. It’s a small comfort in the face of the destruction of their life’s work, their community and home, but it’s something. So fingers crossed that they sell it all.
We had another rocket barrage at 14:30 today. Several large explosions, one powerful enough to shake the building. There’s likely to be more of those tonight. Every little sound at night makes me jump at this point, as I expect the sirens to start.
The 13-year-old autistic girl, Noya, and her 80-year-old grandma, Carmela, were found dead today in kibbutz Nir Oz. It took 12 days to find them as they were burned to death. Noya’s last message to her single mom was that there were terrorists taking apart grandma’s house and she was scared. Carmela’s son and two other grandkids are still missing, thought to have been kidnapped to Gaza.
I have no words.
President Biden came for a quick visit to Israel, so we had a blessed day of no rockets on Tel Aviv — until his plane took off and then my parents’ got a barrage and an hour later I got one too. As I’m writing this it’s 20:30 and we’ve had another barrage so I am writing this from the shelter.
Good night.
We had 4 rounds of rockets fired on Tel Aviv yesterday, the last one at 21:45. A 5-year-old girl that lives in the building cried hysterically all the way to the shelter, and then while we waited for 10 minutes in the shelter, and then all the back to her parents’ apartment, and then until midnight. I couldn’t blame her.
Today will likely be marked with a lot of attacks as President Biden is planning a visit tomorrow. We’ve already had a few rounds of rockets fired on Tel Aviv, two while I was writing this post.
I decided to answer a few questions here, some from the comments, some from questions I got from friends who live abroad.
When there’s a rocket barrage there’s a notification in all the new channels, a notification and siren from the Home Front app, a notification in the Home Front Telegram channel, and air raid sirens. The sirens are loud but depending on where you live you might not hear them very well.
The Home Front app is something that you download from the App store/Google Play for free and then it uses GPS to send you location based alerts, or you can ask for alerts for a specific area. Everyone knows the name of the area they live in, but if you don’t you can write your address in the app and it finds it for you. Tel Aviv is a large city so it has several areas: south, central, east and north. Most cities have one or two areas.
The app is GPS based and there have been issues with GPS in Israel over the last few days — as part of the war here there are deliberate GPS scrambling periods, particularly in northern Israel, where Hizballah and Hamas have been firing missiles of various kinds on cities, villages, and military outposts along the border. That means that everyone had to add their location manually to the app to receive alerts.
Once an alert sounds you have between a minute and a minute and half (depending on where you live) to get to shelter. The sirens and notifications are loud (as are the rocket explosions), and ever since they started everyone is jumpy every time there’s any kind of loud noise. It’s more pronounced now as the city is completely quiet otherwise — very few cars, buses or people around. The ambulances have changed their siren sounds to be different than they usually are, so they’ll be distinct from the siren sounds.
NOTE: People in southern Israel have much less time to get to their shelter. Those next to the Gaza border have 0-30 seconds, those slightly further away have between 30 and 45 seconds, and these areas have received by far the most rocket barrages, several of them direct hits. If you want to know how that feels, lay down in your bed, and then start the stopwatch on your phone. How long does it take you to get up, put on some sort of footwear, and either get to a windowless internal room (that isn’t the bathroom as it’s full of glass and ceramics that will shatter on impact), to your basement or to a stairwell in your building? People get injured running to safe locations all the time in part because you often have very little time to react. If you have a dog you also need to grab it and take them with you.
As you only have a minute, a minute and a half to get to shelter, and as large gatherings have been forbidden, a lot of “normal life” has completely stopped. But more on that later.
My shelter is at the basement of my building. For many buildings in Tel Aviv it’s the stairwell — you go out of your apartment, and go down two stories and wait. Our stairwell is full of glass and open to the outside world and so is unsafe. The basement is on floor minus one, and I live on the first floor, so I normally don’t have problems getting there in a minute and a half. There are people in my building that are disabled and live on the fourth floor, and you’re not allowed to use the elevator during an attack, in case you get trapped there. They stay in their apartment and hope for the best 😦
In the basement I get to meet many my neighbors, their kids and dogs, and sometimes people that were outside in the area while there were sirens and were allowed into the building to take shelter. In the past we used to leave the doors to the building open for just such cases, but now with the possibility of terrorists still active in the area, people need to be buzzed into the building or have the door opened for them.
The kids thought that it was all a big adventure at first, but as the days go by and the number of attacks doesn’t fall, it’s affecting them more and more. The dogs too range from the hysterical to the apathetic.
I have two cats which I’m forced to leave behind as I go to take shelter. They hide under the bed and there’s no way I can stuff them into a carrier and bring them down with me in a minute and a half.
Once I’m in the basement, we wait for 10 minutes, listening for the “boom!” That indicates either a rocket hit or an Iron Dome missile hitting the rocket and it exploding in mid-air. It’s loud, sometimes loud enough to shake the entire building. During those 10 minutes everyone is on their phone, getting updates from everyone else, checking the news, various messaging groups, trying to figure out what’s going on.
Oftentimes the attacks come in waves, which means waiting 20-30 minutes in the shelter. Those who live in the south of Israel can sometimes spend hours in the shelter.
It’s rough. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated or displaced. Many of them have lost members of their family, their home, and all their belongings in a span of a few short hours. Imagine arriving at a hotel after being evacuated to it on an armored carrier, having had terrorists tear through your home, brutally murder your family and friends, kidnap people you knew and cared about, and burn houses and fields. You have nothing on you — no clothes, no toiletries, no medications, no food, no water, sometimes no phone. You likely can’t use your credit card because the terrorist have bother to stop their killing spree to steal it and then proceeded to buy stuff with it. You have been in a few short hours completely stripped of your identity, your faith in your country, your grasp of reality shattered.
If you lived in the south, in cities like Sderot, you couldn’t leave the house for a week. There were gun and grenade wielding terrorists in the streets, missiles fired constantly on you, and you only have a minute to get to shelter. You can’t go buy groceries, and you can’t get medications, and you don’t know when it will end.
In both cases volunteers came to your aid — getting into private cars and trucks with supplies donated by people from central Israel, and bringing them to you. Food, clothes, medication, baby food, diapers, tampons and sanity napkins, phone chargers, toys, etc. Not long after that companies started coming through with donations of their own.
If you’re a reserve soldier you’ve been drafted to a war zone in a few short hours, and likely had to make your own way there. Nobody is prepared for such an influx of soldiers, so there’s not enough food, shelter, equipment at first. You’re fighting, your family is worried, but you’re in the desert or in the mountains of the Galilee — there’s no place to charge your phone, and cell service isn’t great to say the least. My friend’s husband could only send her a single heart emoji once a day to let her know that he was alive. He hasn’t showered for 10 days, and the fighting has been non-stop. They got to talk in the weekend thanks to a guy with a generator and a truck, that rigged together a 100 charging outlets to it. He open sourced the design and a few other people did the same. Others organized carpooling services to soldiers to and from the army’s staging areas in the south and the north.
If you’re like me and live in central Israel, in a place like Tel Aviv, then this is how you’re life has changed so far:
The level of anger and distrust towards our terrible government are at an all time high. The pro-democracy activists are leading the relief and volunteer efforts, while the government disappoints us again and again. People feel rightfully betrayed, they feel like there’s a tremendous crisis of leadership and professionalism in our government, and that it’s up to us, the citizens, to take care of ourselves. That’s never happened to this degree ever before. Ministers and members of the (religious and right winged) ruling parties get literal objects thrown at them when they arrive to hospitals and evacuee centres. Netanyahu rigged his meeting with the families of those kidnapped so it would look like they embraced him and supported him. A growing majority want him and his government out, and despite having restrictions on large gatherings of people that prevent demonstrations now, there are small demonstrations next to ministers and the PMs houses.
I was sickened by the decision to cut off their electricity and water supply. There are tactical reasons to do so and I’ve heard them all and I disagree with them all.
While the number of dead there is also in the thousands, there is deliberately no split between Hamas terrorists and civilians killed, to give people the false sense that 100% of the dead in Gaza are civilians and zero Hamas terrorists were killed.
The call to evacuate the northern part of the strip is meant to prevent Hamas from using their favourite tactic of attacking from the midst of civilian populations, particularly schools, hospitals, mosques. If you think Hamas cares about the people of Gaza you haven’t seen them shoot Palestinian reporters who dared criticize them, or use UNRA schools to stash weapons, or steal aid and supplies from civilians for their own needs. Their leaders live and operate from Qatar, and their stated goal isn’t to better Palestinian lives, but to kill as many jews as possible. They attacked now so that they could stop the Saudis from affecting the area — even with our religious, ultra right wind government an agreement with the Suadis was going to include aid to Gaza and improve Palestinian lives. And cut off their best friends Iran from influencing the area.
I hate to see the destruction in Gaza. I hate that civilians there are trapped by Hamas in a war zone. Yes, there are many of them that support Hamas and enjoyed seeing babies and grandmas butchered in their beds. I still don’t think that we need to raze the place to the ground. And to be 100% clear, we won’t be razing Gaza to the ground. Those that say we will are clueless at best and spreading hatred and antisemitism at worst. Before this attack I believed in a two state solution and voted for leftist parties repeatedly. After this attack the Israeli sentiment is much more right wing than before, which in itself is a win for Hamas and their attempt to delegitimize the Palestinian authority and destabilize the area. I will still vote for leftist parties (and be called a traitor for it by many Israelis), and I still believe in a two state solution. I just don’t see a path to it now, which is another victory for the Hamas.
Here’s Inktober 15, 16 and 17.
I’ve been in shock at the beginning of the week, and then in survivor mode for the rest of it, so only today did it hit me, the depth of the horrors and hopelessness of our situation. It’s Gaza. The place that neither Jordan nor Egypt nor the Palestinian Authority want, because it’s Gaza. And we’re about to go into it again. Nobody wants that here, but there are hostages involved, and the attacks from Gaza (all of them deliberately targeting civilian population) continue non-stop, so we’re going in. That will mean many more wounded and dead, hails of rockets on Israeli cities and villages, and Gaza itself. The place where foreign aid money was turned into ammunition, booby traps and a maze of underground tunnels, instead of for any kind of benefit to the Palestinian people. The place where Hamas is even now doing everything possible to use civilians as human shields and cannon fodder.
So far there were two rocket barrages today. And lest anyone think that they didn’t do massive damage because the Hamas are like Stormtroopers who can’t hit anything, it’s only because of Iron Dome that the casualties here aren’t 10 times or more the already staggering 1,400 they currently are. These attacks are deliberately only targeting civilians, and they too are terrorist attacks (much like the Blitz was). I wish words could convey what it feels like to experience one of them.
I still have a low grade fever, but hopefully it will go away tomorrow. As my hands didn’t shake today, I made up for yesterday’s sketch and sketched another sketch today.
Today was marked by the rising toll of the dead (1,300) and the hostages (150-200). There are 800 dead that still need to be identified before they can be buried, a gruesome and harrowing ordeal as the bodies have been mutilated beyond recognition. Children are still at home, with remote learning starting only next week. The academic year has been postponed to the beginning of November. There were several rocket barrages aimed at the Ben Gurion airport and now more or less only El Al and Arkia, the Israeli flight carriers, are flying in. That also means that imports and purchases from abroad are significantly delayed. No Prime Day here.
The northern border is heating up, with several run ins with the Hizballah from Lebanon sending thousands of people up north into shelters for hours at a time. In the West Bank there were several terrorist attack attempts, and violent protests.
I went to get my Moderna Covid shot (as a cancer patient I need to keep up to date on all my shots) today, and one of the busiest thoroughfares in Tel Aviv was eerily deserted. Only in Yom Kippur, when there aren’t any cars around, have I seen it like this, and even then there are bikes and pedestrians.
Many bus drivers were drafted, and so the buses are running less frequently, and in some cases complete routes were cancelled. The result is that the normally packed bus lane is now completely free. Shops and restaurants are still largely closed. It’s scary to walk around, and I did the round trip to the clinic as fast as I possibly could, hoping that I won’t be caught outside when there was a rocket barrage.
Thankfully I wasn’t. Normally when there’s a chance of rocket fire, buildings leave their door open so pedestrians can take shelter inside if needed. But now there’s a chance that terrorists are roaming the streets, and people are hyper vigilant and suspicious. Doors are not only locked, they aren’t opened even during a rocket barrage. If you’re outside, you just lay down on the ground and cover your head, hoping for the best. Two friends were severely wounded today in Sderot in the south, as they were caught outside in their car and didn’t have time to get to shelter when rockets fell.
Today’s Inktober is lilies, which are in bloom along the coastline right now.
Here’s hoping for better days.
After being cooped up at home since Saturday (apart from quick runs for supplies to the supermarket next door), my depression hit such a state that I decided I needed to walk outside for a bit, before my PTSD gets completely out of hand. The streets were deserted, the local pool dried out and closed, the marina abandoned.
The weather was perfect and the sea calm, but the beach was empty and no lifeguards were around.
The busy Independence Garden was deserted — no runners, no cyclers, the only person I saw was a grandpa walking his dog.
I’ve never seen it like this — there are people in this area at all times of day and night.
Today was marked by a lot of scares of attacks from Hizballah in the Lebanon, and a human error that sent all the country (including myself) to the shelters for several minutes as we thought that a swarm of explosive laden drones was about to crash land into buildings. These once sci-fi thriller scenarios are now our reality. The neighbors brought food and water into the shelter, and we had several nearby rocket falls (imagine a loud “boom!” and the building shaking around you).
I also learned that the 17-year-old boy that I regularly saw selling flowers at the local farmer’s market was murdered as he went surfing on Saturday with a friend. Just like the paramedic who chose to remain with the wounded in the kibbuz clinic instead of saving herself and was butchered, or the two middle-aged bike riders that were murdered because they couldn’t outride gunshots, or the children that were bound and shot point blank with their parents.
The number of dead is now at around the 1,200 mark, with hundreds more wounded, and hundreds taken hostage into Gaza. The morgues are overwhelmed with the number of the dead, doctors and nurses are overwhelmed with the number of the wounded, and everyone is bracing for what is yet to come.
I sketched the empty Gordon pool.
It’s 21:00 here and Tel Aviv is dead quiet as everyone is waiting for the rocket barrage the Islamist Jihad promised at 21:00. We already had two rocket barrages today, and everybody’s nerves are starting to wear thin. The neighbors are nice and everyone is kind, and tries to remain calm and cheerful as there are little kids with us in the shelter, but you can see how tired everybody is. Nobody has slept well since Saturday morning, when this whole thing started.
Supermarket shelves are empty and there’s rationing. The issue is a terrible amalgamation of people buying supplies to send south, to where the fighting is going on, and the home front spokesman causing widespread panic when he told people to hoard 72 hours worth of food and water. Couple that with the fact that there aren’t enough delivery drivers and that produce isn’t coming in from the south anymore, and you get supermarkets with no dairy, eggs, fruits, vegetables, bottled water, etc.
People are still looking for ways to help, which means 1,500 stood in line for hours to donate blood in Tel Aviv today, and people are opening their homes to refugees and survivors from the attacks on the southern, (and now also the northern) border.
Everyone who can is working from home, shops and restaurants are closed, and school is still cancelled, though classes are resuming remotely, like they did in Covid times. Parents now also face the challenge of making sure their kids don’t see videos and pictures of the slaughter that happened in the south.
At work things have slowed to a crawl — a lot of people are on reserve duty, others are out helping the situation in every way they can, and the rest of us are finding it hard to concentrate on work when the torrent of bad news keeps pouring in: so many kidnapped, missing, wounded, dead. Entire kibbutzs wiped off the face of the earth in a few short hours. My mind still finds it hard to accept this new reality, and I find myself reviewing the events from Saturday onward again and again, trying to make sense of it all.
This is today’s sketch. It’s the best I could do under the circumstances.
Writing at Large 