Experience Pours Concrete
I live in Rehovot, a quiet college town in central Israel. For the past several months, the soundtrack outside my apartment has been jackhammers, concrete mixers and the voices of workmen perched on scaffolding.
The building across the street is adding mamadim—reinforced safe rooms—to apartments that were built decades before anyone imagined they would become necessities. Soon, every family there will be able to reach shelter without racing down three flights of stairs to a communal bunker in the middle of the night.
From the street, it looks like an ordinary construction project. It isn’t.
A mamad is engineered as part of the building itself. Thick reinforced-concrete walls surround heavy steel reinforcement. Blast-resistant steel doors and protected windows are designed to withstand forces that no ordinary room could survive. It is not an addition intended to make a home more comfortable. It is built to keep a family alive.
Recently, when Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel, my wife and I slept in our mamad. Friends whose buildings lacked one hid their jealousy. They hurried downstairs to communal shelters every time the sirens sounded, no matter what time of the day or night. Some carried sleeping children. Others helped elderly neighbors descend staircases in the middle of the night. A room measured in square meters became the difference between sheltering in place and racing against the clock.
My daughter recently spent a considerable sum retrofitting her older apartment with a mamad. Across Israel, similar projects are quietly transforming older neighborhoods. Portable reinforced shelters that once seemed characteristic of communities bordering Gaza now appear far deeper inside the country.
No one celebrates these additions. No one wants them. Yet almost everyone understands why they are being built.
That realization struck me more than the construction itself.
Countries often speak about resilience. Israelis increasingly build it into their homes.
Visitors sometimes remark on how normal life appears in Israel despite the threats that periodically interrupt it. Cafés are full. Children play in parks. Weddings continue. Buses run. The remarkable part is not that Israelis ignore danger. It is that ordinary life has adapted around it.
A guest room may also be a bomb shelter. An apartment purchase is evaluated partly by how quickly its occupants can reach safety.
Parents quietly calculate whether they have enough time to gather their children before the sirens end. Early in the war, my grandchildren—old enough to understand the need to seek shelter but too young to understand why they were being targeted—learned to identify which buildings they could run into if the sirens sounded while they were walking down the street.
These are not dramatic conversations. They have become practical ones.
Experience is a demanding architect.
Every war leaves behind more than damaged buildings. It changes the buildings we choose to construct next. It changes building codes, neighborhoods, family budgets and expectations. It reshapes what people consider essential and it changes their outlook on life.
I sometimes look across the street and hope these new rooms will spend decades serving as home offices, storage rooms or spare bedrooms for visiting grandchildren. Nothing would make me happier.
But experience has taught Israelis not to confuse hope with preparation.
Perhaps that is one of the quietest lessons of living here. We pray for peace not because we expect preparation to fail, but because we hope it will someday become unnecessary.
Until then, the sound of jackhammers outside my window is not the sound of fear.
It is the sound of experience pouring concrete.