How Are You Doing Over There? “Rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air”
- Ronnie Dunetz
- 1 day ago
- 13 min read
Image by bobkovayana from Pixabay
Image by Maya Kadosh
I have been wanting to sit down and write this blog post for nearly three weeks, but there's always something coming up. Like sirens and missle warnings, for example, which have abnormally become part of our daily (and nightly!) routine here in Israel. I'm not complaining, I certainly would not want to be in Iran now, but let's face it, there are better ways to live one's life than popping in and out of "safe rooms" day in day out.
How many and how much, you may ask? We have it good over where I am, in the Sharon area about 20 or so miles north of Tel-Aviv: I have had nearly 50 trips to the safe room, lasting between 10-15 minutes a shot, and there have been about 70 other "early warning buzzers" as well. The latter are these obnoxiously loud buzzers that go off a few minutes before a possible siren (which doesn't happen about half the time", that tells you to get near a "safe area" for a siren that may arrive. Of course, when the buzzer goes off at 2:00 AM or so it is not the easiest thing in the world to get to sleep again.
What am I complaining about, right? These safe rooms and siren-buzzer mechanisms have saved potentially hundreds of lives. A safe room is a reinforced space built from steel-reinforced concrete with a sealed structure and blast-resistant door and window, designed to keep occupants safe by absorbing shockwaves, blocking shrapnel, and protecting against collapsing debris. I am sure that the oil-rich Arab countries in the Gulf who are being beseiged by Iranian missles would love to have the degree and depth of the Israeli air defense system- they don't.
Image by Maya Kadosh
It's all a matter of perspective, isn't it? Our brothers and sisters living the Tel-Aviv/Central region are having 3 times more sirens and missle landings than we are. Those living near the northern border often have little or no warning sirens; although many rockets are intercepted, loud explosions are heard overhead and falling debris can still pose a real danger. About twenty Israeli civilians have been killed thus far, hundreds have been wounded. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of families like ours in which one of the grown children have fled their Tel-Aviv apartments with no safe room to come back to the "parental womb", often their own room of childhood. Ever since the start of the war we have had my daughter, son-in law and one year old grandson Goni stay with us. Wow! I would have never have imagined so much quality time with Goni, the new love of my life, as I am with him nearly every morning at 6:30 AM , in addition to our frequent safe-room visits and additional pockets of time during the day. We have become a multi-generational home thanks to the war with Iran! I am not at the stage of writing a thank-you card to the regime in Iran, but this is definitely a positive development from a very negative situation, in my little neck in the woods.
I have found myself several times in public safe rooms and shelters in shopping malls, gas stations, physical therapy clinics. The more you go out the more you risk having to find one of these places when the sirens go off. You find all kinds of phenomena in these places: kids with pets, loquacious people who don't shut up, teenagers giggling, angry people shouting at each other, older, younger, well-dressed, sweaty laborers, foreigners, worried faces and children having a grand time. I once stood next to a loud spoken agitated man who continued to swear at the lady in charge of the gas station convenience store who spoke with a Russian accent, as he objected being "forced into" the safe room during a siren. The female manager said "If you don't want to stay here get off the premises", to which he answered, "This is a free county, go back to your Putin!" as he kicked the door open to get out. The manager was from the Ukraine...
And is it not like you just go into one of these public shelters and wait the ten minutes or so till you come out. People keep coming in as they mosey along to the shelter, some of those on the inside keep wanting to get out saying "It's enough time" (who decided?), so that the door is constantly opening. That is if the door works, in one shelter I found myself in they didn't close the door because one person who works on that floor claimed that it got stuck the other day. You don't easily get Israelis to comply just because someone said "This is what you have to do."
We are supposed to wait in the safe room/shelter until we get the message to our phones that the incident is over. This is to protect people from being injured by falling debris, very common with the intercepting missles, especially now that we are under cluster bomb attack. Damage can be anywhere, and there has been extensive damage in various places. But do you think people really pay attention to this? Some do, some don't, some don't even bother to find or go into a shelter. There is no "policing' here, in fact if you are in an open area with no shelter nearby you are to lie down and cover your head. How many people do this, do you think? From my observation- a minority. This does not mean that on the whole the Home Front Command is not doing a sensational job at keeping the level of casualties in the Israeli population to a minimum. While the damage to houses, cars, landscape and roads has been considerable, the Home Front Command is doing a stellar job at keeping people safe.
Israelis take cover in a public shelter in Tel Aviv as a siren sounds warning of incoming ballistic missiles fired from Iran toward Israel, March 1, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
There is much to praise and feel proud of in this situation. The Israeli nation- which I am part of- has exhibited amazing resilience time and again. It is hard to describe to those who don't live here what it is like to go in and out of safe room time and again, to get up numerous times during the night, and still try to continue "life as usual". Believe it or not people continue to frequent pubs and restaurants, shopping malls are full, people work remotely and continue on-often online-with their daily lives. The Israeli air missle defense system is among the best- if not the best-in the world. If it were not for the Arrow defense system, Israel's casualties may have been in the hundreds if not thousands, the fact is that the great majority of rockets are intercepted and destroyed and thus Israelis have "gotten accustomed" to this abnormal situation. The Israeli population has just come out of 2.5 difficult years of war which began with the traumatic horror of October 7, 2023. On the whole, this is a country which has never really known many years of peace since its inception in 1948, there have been numerous wars, terrorist attacks and security crises.
One must not forget where about half of us came from just a couple of generations back: ~600,000+ Jews from Arab/Muslim countries and ~300,000–350,000 Holocaust survivors. These two groups carried very different but equally profound traumas and histories:
Holocaust survivors: genocide, destruction, loss of entire families and worlds
Jews from Arab/Muslim countries:rapid displacement, loss of homes, property, centuries-old communities.
Together, they shaped the early Israeli society—not just demographically, but psychologically, culturally, and existentially. While the years have passed threats and events have never been too far away, the resilience of the early years has given way to the resilience of today. Israeli society is very resilient and despite all that has and is going on, the people of Israel are experienced and programmed to come through in the end.
Lest I fall into the slippery slope of romanticization, the fact that we "embody resilience" does not mean it is easy, fun and not deeply damaging. Children have been out of school three full weeks now, which means many parents have not able to work. Businesses struggle, many have shut down, medical procedures and family celebrations/vacations, among others, have been canceled or postponed, calls to mental-health crisis lines have skyrocketed, the war is costing a fortune. Who is to measure the effect of cumulative stress, worry and lack of sleep on people and society in general?
And...Can someone please explain to me how Israel, amidst all this mess, is still coming out as number 8 in the world happiness survey?
I've seen wars ("clouds") from both sides now
I've looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow it's cloud illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds at all. (Joni Mitchell)
Over the years, I've often pondered these words of Joni Mitchell's beautiful song of my youth. To ponder these "clouds" for me is to ponder many things in life that seem to invite us to observe and interpret for ourselves. For me it has invited the Hebrew term that seems to be on everyone's lips these past few years- the word "murkav " which means something between "complex" and "complicated", perhaps the joining of the two. My sense of the word is that it deeply communicates that there may be many answers, that there are more shades of gray rather than anything else. It is the direct opposite from the world of social media in which you are either "with us or against us", there are the "good guys and the bad guys". Life is certainly more complicated than all that. My associative mindset takes me to the game we used to play in the US when I was growing up in the early sixties (which I am sure for was around for many decades prior to that)- "Cowboys and Indians". The cowboys were the white folk, the "civilized", brave, moral, righteous ones who are just doing the "right thing", with the Indians being "savage", cruel, immoral and blood-thirsty. Of course no one told us about racism, land dispossession, lying, broken treaties and multi-level methods of violence. As a kid I remember no one wanted to be "the Indians", everyone wanted to be on the side of "the just and brave".
If I were an American living in America I would have a hard time justifying this war, with Donald Trump as my president. Not that I doubt that Iran and Islamic fundamentalism are not real threats to the US and the Western way of life, in the long run, and that a nation needs to be on top of things. Western liberal countries, on the whole, are for me places which espouse the values- at least publicly-that I identify with. Yet, these very same countries have been negligent in guarding these very same values and preventing the infiltration of terrorist cells who do not share these values and actively work to dismantle them. I know that most of the people who will be reading these lines are on the spectrum of just opposing Donald Trump to outwardly and vehemently detesting the man and all that he represents. If I am to be honest with myself, from all that I have read, seen and heard from and about Trump (and this is considerably less than my friends in the US), I too find myself shocked, fearful and even disgusted by what I see as a very dangerous leader. But here is where the murkav comes in.
Image by fjdafdafafa from Pixabay
No matter what I may think of Donald Trump, the fact of the matter is that he has done some amazing things to benefit Israel. It was he who brought home the last of the surviving Israeli hostages from Gaza as well as the bodies of those killed and taken to Gaza. This is an achievement that cannot be overstated for Israel and Israelis, at it cuts right to the moral compass of the solidarity of our living here. Whatever is going on in Gaza now, at least we are not in a full-scale war at this time, this too was part of Trump's "Peace efforts", Netanyahu and his cronies were in no rush for a cease fire. And now the collaboration in attacking the vicious Ayatollah regime of Iran- which has been open and active in its desire to wipe Israel off the map for the last 47 years- can I as an Israeli really oppose this war? A poll at the beginning of the war showed that 93% of Israeli Jews were in favor of this war, you don't get 93% of Israelis agreeing on anything these days...this just goes to show us how deeply concerned we have all been about Iran since the revolution in 1979. We know very well here how Iran has armed, trained and supplied our terrorist enemies for decades- Hizbollah, Hamas, formerly Syria, the Huties in Yemen, not to mention Iran itself. For us in Israel, this is not a "sudden war" but a major shift in an ongoing war that has taken on different forms and intensities for decades. The existential threat is real, present, visceral, even if it has usually been behind the scenes and off the media focus.
Thus, as this war drags on and its "goals" shift, the "interests" of the US government and internal pressure will rise, Israel may find herself more and more alone, fighting both in the distant Iran and increasingly on the bodering Lebanon. I stop and wonder: what do I really think about this war?
Murkav, Murkav
Sometimes I just have to stop and pinch myself: is this real? Am I really saying all this in favor of a war that doesn't seem to have any real end? Is this really me-with all this talk of assassinations of leaders, killing terrorists, blowing up buildings, factories, etc., when have I ever let this stuff dominate my brain cells?... When I say murkav I mean murkav !- because for nearly five decades now I have always seen myself as part of the side that says "no" to war as a way to live and breathe life. After the massacres of October 7th, I - as nearly all Israelis- found myself identifying and supporting the moral and existential imperative to defend our homes and our very lives. Yet, as the war dragged on, as they often do, more and more doubts arose and with it, the feeling that as brilliant as some of Israeli military accomplishments are so is the lack of wisdom and creative courage to leverage these achievements into new possibilities on the diplomatic and national level. I am sensing that once again we are approaching this point of diminshing returns, or might I call it "the point of increasing losses"?
In 1973, during Israel's Yom Kippur War, which was regarded as the greatest national trauma until October 7th, a song came out called “Ani Mavtiach Lach, Yalda Sheli Ktana” (“I Promise You, My Little Girl”) that was written by Ehud Manor (lyrics) and composed by Nurit Hirsh. It became strongly associated with the war and was widely played on radio as a song of hope and longing for peace, being conveyed as an imaginary conversation between a father going into battle and having to leave his little daughter behind. What embedded it in the national consciousness at the time and for years to follow was the human need of parents to "promise" their children- and themselves!- that even with all the pain and trauma, hope will lead to new opportunities for peace. This longing of the soul was not new, even back in Israel's War of Independence in 1948, battle-weary soldiers wrote how they felt that they were fighting "this war to end wars", so that their children would not need to fight. How sad it is to know how wrong they were...Nevertheless, four years following the Yom Kippur War Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian presdient, became the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel and subsequently a peace treaty was signed which has lasted to this day.
This song and "parental promise" has also been viewed as an expression of "naivete" from many people who feel that Israel will "always need to live by its sword".
Radical Hope is always in sight
It is painfully easy to assume that the situation Israel finds herself in "will always be this way" and we would do best to lean less on such songs and more on our military and intelligence prowess to ensure our survival. I, for one, do not ascribe to this view, and actually feel that ensuring the "hope" of our people is no less important than our military capabilities. Ensuring military superiority is absolutely essential in what might be the world's "roughest of neighborhoods", but no man nor nation lives by bread alone, and this certainly is the case for Israel, in my opinion.
We can easily grow despondent as the end does not seem to be anywhere in sight, but that is also one of our great frailties as human beings- we lack "the long view of history". Who today can even recall "The Hundred Years' War", a long series of wars between the kingdoms of England and France from 1337 to 1453. Despite the name, it wasn’t a continuous war—it was fought in phases, with truces in between, over more than a century. Eventually even it came to an end. The "bird's eye view" of history requires an ability to see farhter and deeper, and most of all, to maintain patience and trust that even the "small stuff" for change, plants seeds, thinks thoughts and creates processes that may take years to come to fruition.
Where may hope lie ahead? I am no prophet but the Iranian regime will certainly not be around forever, and they are definitely weakening and taking some major blows- what might the Middle East be without the Ayatollahs? The Lebanese government is demonstrating unparalleled resolve to rid itself of Iranian presence, a greatly weakened Hizbollah without Iran is something we have never seen. The new Syrian goverment is siding with the US and open to some level of relations with Israel. Saudia Arabia and the Gulf states are all being attacked by Iran...can a post-war situation bring them all closer to normalization with Israel.
Finally, there is Gaza, the place of so much terror, war and suffering- how might it develop in a new Middle East if some or all of the above come into being? Will the Palestinians finally be able to have a state of their own, as I hope they do, beside Israel and not instead of it- will terror be amply neutralized to allow for a new vision even in this war-weary place on earth?
We don't know, we cannnot really know. It may all be- and I believe will be, at least in part- subject to many developments that we cannot predict. The uncertainy of life peaks under the uncertainty of war. For now we can all sing of the "rockets red glare and the bombs bursting in air" - not just in the US- but literally, here in Israel, time and again, night after night. Let us hope that in the end not only will our flag still be there, but so will our humanity, our purpose and our historical reason for being who and where we are.
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