Punch-Drunk, but Still on Our Feet. Still.

Two Years Later

This is a revisit of a piece originally published Nov 20,2023 at God of the Desert Books

Trailer trash Ariel Sharon style.

Our first taste of rocket bombardments came some years after the disengagement from Gaza, our home of nineteen years, where we raised our four children. We had been transported to temporary housing (double-wides), that turned out for us to be temporary for nine years. That was insult enough, but we were few, and as soon as we were thrown into these — our own refugee camps — it seemed as if the entire nation wanted to forget about us. When the rockets started to rain down upon Israel, as we had warned would happen, and as then-Prime Minister Sharon had promised would not happen, a glaring oversight was discovered. The trailer trash had no bomb shelters. The geniuses responsible for the planning of our expulsion and had succeeded in deflecting all criticism of inhumane treatment of their fellow Jews, rose to the occasion and found a creative solution: sewage pipes. That first round of rocket fire caught the entire nation off guard, including us, and at the time, though still insulted and resentful, I remember being thankful that they had found this solution.

A few years later, we had moved into our new home but still faced the threat from the south.

A Child’s Dream of an Iron Dome

The young boy in the picture is the subject of my earlier post, in which I recall an executive meeting with him while I was babysitting for him:

Eye to Eye

At the time, his father and his uncle, my two sons, were fighting in Gaza, the same Gaza that was their childhood home. Here is a before and after picture of our synagogue:

The nights were the worst, as my wife and I would lay awake all night staring at the ceiling, praying non-stop for our sons’ safety.

During this latest round, sitting on my back porch looking north towards Ashdod, I calmly watched the Iron Dome dealing with a missile attack towards Tel Aviv, fairly successfully in this case. The intercepts were too far to hear, so after a week of running to the shelter from close-in attacks, I relaxed to watch the light show. The single boom heard was an intercept over our area.

That first time that we were under attack we were overwhelmed by the inability of the IDF to shut the attack down, and by the fact that our warnings had been more than accurate—they were literally prophetic. Of course that was the last thing that the supporters of the expulsion of Jews from Gaza wanted to hear, from the prime minister to the leaders of the opposition in parliament to the chief of staff of the IDF, to the entire Israeli journalist herd of one-brained singularity. They had a world-view to uphold, the same world-view that now lay shattered to smithereens.

In the aftermath of the latest wholesale slaughter of Jews, the country is in a state of suspended mourning. This scenario, of rape and pillage of hundreds of innocent Jews in their homes, we truly thought that we would never see again. So now we have seen it, as has the entire world thanks to the terrorists’ live-streaming, death-cult, blood-lust celebration. And though we have suspended our national mourning, we have not closed our eyes, as we watch with astonishment the myriads denying that there was a slaughter and claiming that in case there was, then it was the Jews’ own fault, or even that it was the Jews themselves who perpetrated it.

Israel has seen and heard enough from the world, and has taken notice.