Jets overhead

We live near an Air Force base. My daughter’s school is practically beneath the runway, so the students hear the planes coming and going.

We hear and see them, too, sometimes close enough to see the undercarriage and read their call numbers.

Why do I bring this up? Most people in the US have never experienced this, and I want to describe it because it is not what you think.

It is not the same as being in the flight path of your local airport, even if that airport is Heathrow, where the Concorde flew, although that was the closest thing that compares. I know; I used to work near there.

The engine roar, especially when it is heading out, is thunderous, window-rattling, and high decibel, while the ones returning are closer to regular airplane sounds.

On the ground, we know that the men and women pilots are up there doing their jobs to protect us, their families, and friends.

They are following orders, often stringent ones, about their missions. It doesn’t mean innocent people won’t get hurt. Even when hitting the target, shrapnel has a mind of its own, and that price is one that we have to live with because, let’s be honest, it means that the mission is to prevent more rockets from being launched at our people or other insidious things from occurring.

People in the US have not needed this type of preventative maintenance locally since 9/11; even then, it was not coming to the US but going to where it started in Afghanistan. Before 9/11, maybe the Cuban missile crisis was the previous time; before that, it was World War II and Pearl Harbor.

It is easy to armchair quarterback the war. Israelis do it as much as anyone else. And while you will see demonstrations against the prime minister, and some of the reasons for it are valid, to argue against the military aspects of what is happening is minimal, especially lately.

Early on, we all wanted more done; we wanted the hostages found and brought back, and we still do. But to be myopic and think Gaza was the only problem is, as we say here, rosh katan (small head/thinking) of you.

In the past, before October 7, if we heard a jet on Shabbat, we knew something was wrong somewhere. If we heard many jets, we knew something was really bad.

Since then, we have had various numbers of jets flying daily, and on Shabbat a few weeks back (when we hit the Houthis), we heard the planes leave. There were many of them, but we only found out later what that mission was. And this is where you may disagree, but it was a typical Middle East reply. An eye for an eye, so to speak.

If you think the war in the Ukraine or here will be solved by Western thinking, I can’t help you. As a rational-thinking person, I agree there must be a better way. However, after doing business across South America, the US, Europe, and Russia, I can tell you it is not that easy.

Sweden, Finland, and other countries are constantly on the lookout for movement from Russia because they know what can happen, sometimes quickly, as Ukraine found out. Don’t forget that Ukraine sniffed something terrible coming and was training and supplying the country before Russia invaded. It would have been overrun long ago if it had stuck to Western thinking.

While we try to be in talks to help release the hostages, we also have to fight the battles every day, while waiting. Our jets are reminding the people of Gaza that their lives, like the lives of our hostages, are in perilous danger, and they should do whatever they can to return the hostages. After 11 months, however, it is obvious the people of Gaza have no interest in helping to return our hostages.

Those jets overhead are doing their job. They return and do the next run. They also serve as a beacon of hope to the hostages who know the jets are ours and are looking for them.

But our enemies are many and driven by their ideals, which obviously do not include Western thinking but are still locked into the Middle East way.

Should we not use any possible method to protect ourselves? If it were your family, friends, and fellow citizens that were being sent to bomb shelters perpetually up north and down south, would you get up and say, “We should talk to them and get them to stop this madness.”

No, you wouldn’t. Most of you would be screaming to carpet bomb the crazy people trying to kill you and your people. But we see that is not how everyone sees this moment in time.

When we see and hear our jets, we know our government and army are there for us. They are doing what we, the non-pilots and non-army people, would be doing if we could.

Once upon a time, everyone loved the three musketeers and their “all for one, one for all” attitude. But nowadays, the world seems to feel the opposite, “all for me, me for no one.”

Some people argue that it is an imbalanced war because we have jets, while Gaza and Lebanon do not. They both have other methods at their disposal that we do not. Nothing is fair in war.

Friends and family in the US ask what it is like here right now. The answer depends on where you live.

Up north, meaning from Haifa across to Tiberias, Tzfat, and the Galil, they have been under attack for the last two weeks. People even further north, from Kiryat Shemona to the Golan and many other places, were already displaced months ago because of the situation.

Down south, people still can’t return to their homes near the Gaza area.

Relatively speaking, where I live in Rehovot, it has been quieter, especially since the majority of the rockets from Gaza were minimized and eventually almost stopped. Somehow, they still have the ability to send some rockets to us, but those do not leave their area.

Our daily lives have not had to change as much as others, and that, on the one hand, sounds crazy, but is also not very comforting. However, that can change at any time, like when we were woken up last week by an inbound missile.

As long as the jets keep flying, we know what to expect. We hope and pray they finish their missions completely and none is lost during those missions.

It would be nice to believe there will come a time when we do not need our jets, but given the way the world has chosen to react to us since October 7, I am betting we will have jets for many years to come because, just like in the comics, villains never really die. They always come back somehow.