Aren’t you afraid?

Every time Israel enters a war, I immediately receive messages from a few close friends, my siblings and the odd family member outside of Israel. All the messages say the same thing: ‘I just saw the news. I hope you guys are okay. Stay safe’. My standard response is ‘all good here’, because it is. However that response does not satisfy all the inquirers. They want to ask the $64,000 question:  Aren’t you afraid? 

In fact, the question askers are afraid for us and they think they would be afraid if this happened to them – so they cannot understand why we are not shaking in our boots or packing our bags and making a mad dash to the airport or the Egyptian border. 

It is impossible to explain how Israelis feel at these moments. 

Here’s an example: You worked all day preparing food for Shabbat. Everything is ready and it smells great. Your family arrives and everyone sits down at the table. The food is on the plates; the glasses are filled. You pick up your fork ready for your first bite and suddenly …  you hear the sirens. Immediately you know that your enemies have fired a missile from 2300 kilometers away timed to arrive as a majority of Israelis are also taking their first bites of Friday night dinner. Of course they know it’s Shabbat. That’s why they did it. Everyone promptly leaves the table and heads to the bomb shelter, cursing the whole way. You spend the next 15 minutes in the shelter counting the booms you hear and thinking about the food, 25 steps away, coagulating on your plate. You’re not happy, but you’re also not afraid.

Now it is 01:30 in the morning and you are in a deep sleep. The siren warning jolts you awake. You are disoriented and your heart is pounding. You aren’t quite sure if the sounds you just heard are part of your dream or your real life. By the time you regain clarity you are sitting in your shelter counting how many booms you just heard and wondering if it’s okay to leave the shelter yet and go back to bed. You’re not happy, but you’re also not afraid.

And it’s the pinnacle of weirdness when you are home alone at 2:30 in the afternoon on a lovely sunny day and you hear the sirens so you grab some cookies and your book and head to the shelter alone. Talk about surreal. You’re all alone, eating cookies and drinking fizzy water that you left in the shelter during the previous round of bombing. All the while asking yourself if it’s safe to leave. And again, you are not happy, but you’re also not afraid.

For the most part we don’t see our enemies face-to-face. We read about them. We watch them on viral YouTube videos. But thankfully they are not up close and personal. That was one of the reasons why the Hamas attack on October 7 two and a half years ago was so horrifying. We saw the depravity with our own eyes because Hamas proudly filmed the whole attack. Burning children in front of their parents. Burning parents in front of their children. Raping women. Beheading men. Shooting living human beings point blank. Now that was 100 percent fear. And we were all afraid.

This is not living. You can’t go to the grocery store or the doctor without planning your route, which now includes all the locations of public shelters. True, it could be worse. A lot worse. When missiles do get through our defences and kill our people, it really, really hurts. It reminds us that we are vulnerable and how arbitrary our safety is. Thinking about your mortality is not supposed to be a daily activity.

So are we afraid? Not really. Fear is an ambiguous term. It doesn’t always have a single, clear cause. It might be real or it might be perceived. Fear is also subjective. Israelis are not fearful so much as they are pragmatic realists. The international media triggers more fear from its viewers than one feels living the situation in real time. Their lazy, indifferent reporting, combined with their inherent loathing of Jews, causes more dread than any other single entity. If you receive your information from The New York Times, CNN or The BBC, for example, you’re just looking for trouble. 

To all you inquirers from outside of Israel, we don’t have time to be afraid. We are too busy trying to maintain normalcy and making the best of our crazy situation. And we are pretty good at it. Still, we are sick and tired of wasting our resources on people who are hellbent on hate and destruction. But for better or worse, this is not our first rodeo, so back to our shelters we go.