Hype and Anticlimax
Dual citizenship – a citizen of the United States of America, grew up there, and a citizen of the State of Israel, living there.
When I made aliyah and became a new immigrant in the 1980s, I wanted to belong, speak Hebrew fluently, hold my own amidst abrasive, arrogant, aggressiveness and bluntness stereotypical of Israelis – but an Israeli roommate insisted on telling me that the war, ultimately referred to as the First Lebanon War (June – October 1982), was nothing like really experiencing a war, not having lived in Israel for the Yom Kippur War in 1973, I would never know what war is like.
Then come competitive degrees of war experiences. Jerusalemites describe Six Day War (June 1967) bomb shelter experiences that their Tel Aviv counterparts could hardly understand. My ex-husband, born and raised in Tel Aviv, enlisted in the army immediately after the Yom Kippur War, becoming an officer at record speed – filling ranks following the war’s casualties.
Haim was discharged from compulsory military service in 1973, three months before that war. His first reserve duty was spent in helicopters flown from Sinai to southern Lebanon, treating and evacuating injured soldiers, and worse. His childhood memories of 1967: digging bunkers in the streets of Tel Aviv, anticipating war.
The Gulf War, early 1991, Saddam Hussein launched scuds from Iraq to Israel (amidst the First Intifada, 1987 and 1993). My ex-husband was concerned for us and his employees. We spent one night with gas masks on the floor of his office lest factory workers had to take shelter and feel abandoned. Jerusalemite friends could mockingly attribute this anxiety to experiencing the Six Day War in a less vulnerable Tel Aviv.
The First Intifada – more threatening in Jerusalem than Tel Aviv. I traveled daily between the two cities. I frequently breathed tear gas from my office window in a building on the seam with East Jerusalem. Often, I took the bus to Jerusalem. One summer day was marked in my calendar to stay home after completing a project. That day, at the supermarket cheese counter, music turned to news on the speaker system. Casualties. Terrorists attacked the bus I ordinarily took to Jerusalem.
Friday afternoon, Haim’s daughter’s place, the television caught my attention. An interviewee, 60, or closer to my age. I began listening: his father arrived at the police station. I missed the part about the crime. His dad offered him a job if he was released. He accepted. He walked and asked his dad how he convinced the police. “I told them, my son came back from Lebanon a different person.” The next frame showed pictures of Sabra and Shatila (1982), moving to a shot of Thomas Friedman, then NYT Lebanon correspondent, describing unknowingly going to Shatila the day after, before anybody knew.
Remote control out of reach. Suddenly, our 8-year-old granddaughter switched channels. She was engrossed in Tik Tok, so I questioned why she changed the channel. She told me the television program was depressing. That’s when kids are tuned out.
Maybe Sabra and Shatila should have been my preferred distraction. The alternative screen: analysts predicting US timing for attacking Iran, commentators discussing implications for Israel if a bad agreement is reached.
A single mother at the pool told me she has a bag by the door with changes of clothes for her son and herself to flee to her parents on a moment’s notice of imminent Iranian missiles. But anxiety hovering over our heads is inconsequential. Society enjoys no longer having hostages in Gaza – like a permission slip for celebrating birthdays the way you did before the war, after a previous war.
If Iran anticipation-anxiety isn’t the preferred distraction, Friday morning, an acquaintance told me a friend of hers, Jewish Israeli, recently drove, innocently, to the West Bank for personal reasons. Not a leftie documenting Jewish terrorists attacking Palestinian villages. Idle travel in the occupied territories. Extremist Jewish settlers threw stones at her car. Idle Israeli soldiers on the roadside. Tacit government message to soldiers enabling Jewish terrorists?
Members of Israel’s founding generation brought World War II trauma with them and joined warfare leading to establishing the State of Israel. Nakba narratives dismissed, alongside narratives of the founding of this state. Circumstances. Historical context. Variations on a theme. Current civilian behavior of Jewish Israelis towards Palestinians strikes me as worse. No-policy policy: generic horror terms resonate, hover overhead, adding dimensions to collective traumas and their DNA.
Post-trauma surfacing tomorrow and fifty years later for soldiers who served in Gaza and in Lebanon, or in the occupied territories since October 7 – and for their children and grandchildren.
Chatting with the CEO – ten years younger than me – he looked around, reminding me, as I spoke of Rabin’s assassination (1995) – most of our colleagues were not yet born.
They didn’t experience the Yom Kippur War, but they have irrefutably experienced war. Relative to where they live in Israel, they can compete for who really experienced the events of October 7, subsequent Hezbollah attacks on northern Israel, Houthi attacks, or Iranian attacks.
Prior to this latest war, growing numbers of Israelis completed paperwork for foreign citizenship where eligible. Understanding governmental judicial reform was not designed to ensure the continuity of liberal democracy, they sought escape routes. I have two passports. I belong. Anticlimax.
Harriet Gimpel, February 7, 2026
