Gimme shelter (or déjà vu all over again)

As a boy growing up in Toronto I always thought I had several things in common with Winston Churchill — but not everything. On the positive side, definitely a legend in his own mind, we both admired him. As well, he loved the English language and enjoyed writing, as do I. Of course, what we don’t share is that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I have yet to receive any middle-of-the-night calls from Stockholm. For no better reason than having grown up in Canada, I have always been, like Churchill, a royalist. I also like to consider myself someone with an acute sense of humor. For his part, Churchill was a riot. Both of us bald.

However, there is one thing he had over me: Churchill was a very brave man. Or to put it more acutely, he seemed fearless. I am not.

However, my recent experience just a few months ago, proved that while not exactly brave, I can survive some pretty scary situations, even if inside I may be quivering a bit. As almost everyone in the world who is still conscious knows by now, several months ago, Iran launched more than 350 projectiles at Israel, where I now live. Each armament was meant to kill, maim and destroy — especially Jews like me. Even the possibility that a few Arabs might be killed along the way seems not to have exercised our Iranian neighbors all that much.

Despite the ballistic onslaught, due to a combination of Israel’s robust air defenses, a little help from allies and no doubt a dollop of good luck, our friends in the curiously named “Islamic Republic of Iran” pretty well missed the mark. Ninety-nine percent of their missiles were knocked out or failed on the way over.

And as I write these words, it could all happen again, and sooner than later.

The fact is that the Iranian mullahs proudly proclaim that their holy actions are taken in the name of The Prophet. However, last time around, the fact that the only person hurt was a 7-year-old Muslim Israeli girl, hardly made headlines in the Times of Tehran. At least here in Israel, Muslim and Jew alike prayed for her speedy and complete recovery.

Back to that evening. As everyone in Israel is understandably a news freak, we all knew that Iran was going to attack that night. In fact, we were even dutifully informed around 11 p.m., that, like a package from Amazon, the missiles were “on their way” and would arrive sometime in the early hours of the morning.

Having been built after 1985, our house has a mandatory bomb shelter which we use in more peaceful times as a storeroom. But our youngest son and his fiancée live in an older apartment in town without such a benefit, so we invited them for a sleepover, along with their dog and thus access to a more “safe space” (to use today’s lingo).

However, this was not our first experience with air raid sirens, missiles and entering the shelter. And it will surely not be our last. To remind anyone who might have forgotten, beginning when Hamas attacked Israel on that notorious morning of October 7, these freedom fighters sent more than 12,000 missiles (each a war crime by the way) into Israel over a period of several months months, until we could largely snuff out the launchers. From time to time, they would even target Jerusalem, a city purportedly considered holy by these Islamicists. As such, we have seen this film before. But back in April and certainly this time, the Iranian armaments are purportedly much larger, more accurate and thus far more dangerous.

The next few hours were among the most bizarre I had ever experienced. We all bade each other good night with a “see you soon” and took to bed, hoping we could get some sleep before the sirens began to wail. For my part, I have never liked flights that leave early in the morning, as they necessitate one going to bed early and being awoken in the dead of the night by an alarm clock. I always have a hard time falling asleep on such evenings, but much to my surprise, in this wacky case, I actually succeeded.

I was awoken, not yet by air raid sirens, but by the sound/feel of explosions high in the sky above us. I hoped they reflected our air defenses blowing the Iranian missiles out of the sky and not the sound of these deadly projectiles actually hitting targets on the ground. In retrospect, that was indeed the case, but there was no way of knowing this happy fact at the time. Not wanting to wait for the sirens, I got out of bed and scrambled into the shelter. For some reason, I was last in, with my wife, son, fiancée and dog already sitting there calmly. I was politely asked to shut the blast doors behind me.

Then the sirens went crazy accompanied by more bangs and explosions. We have been reassured over the past few years that those who take to their shelters are “fairly” immune from damage — even if a missile hits your house. But I was hardly interested in testing out this hypothesis. We sat, apparently calmly, awaiting the “all clear” on our special phone apps. It came after a while, with the announcement that all the Iranian missiles had now arrived and been “dealt with.” We knew that while the 4 1/2 of us were OK, we had no idea if any friends, colleagues or other family members had been harmed; nor the extent of damage to the country’s infrastructure: airport, hospitals electrical power plants, water purification systems, etc. This had to wait for the morning.

All that was left to do was to climb back into bed. Much relieved that at least we were OK, I did not believe I would sleep a wink more. But apparently, according to my wife, my head hit the pillow and I was out.

Looking back, and with even more trepidation, forward, I am thinking once again about my hero, Mr. Churchill. Apparently, more than brave, he was actually quite fearless. Not only that, he seemed to love to be in the thick of things. In 1898, he quipped after the Boer War that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

And it is here where my hero and I most definitely part ways.