Living With It

You don’t learn to live with it – another billboard, the logo of the families of hostages demanding their return in the corner. Yet, they live with it. I won’t presume to understand how.

By loose association, I recall a children’s book validating children’s feelings. It’s about times when a child falls and adults say, “You’re ok, nothing happened.” The book acknowledges that something happened, that if something hurts, it hurts, regardless of what others tell you. We are all partly that child with an ache or pain, visible or not, that does not heal by being undermined. Adults owe children that validation.

Similarly, and by extension, we cannot undermine the uncertainty that lives with families of hostages. As adults, and the children within us, we owe them validation, as they manage, if they manage, the uncertainty.

A different form of uncertainty reappeared with an item from Al Jazeera texted to me yesterday – another Israeli-engineered atrocity in Gaza. Earlier, Ha’aretz headlines reported Israel brought all activity to a halt in a Gazan hospital. It didn’t sound good. Ha’aretz news notwithstanding, coverage by Israeli media seemed negligible. Haim and I raised our eyebrows disturbed yet skeptical about the details in Al Jazeera: the head of the hospital, doctors, patients – how many Gazan fatalities, and weren’t they avoidable? Who – in their words – was taken hostage? It hardly sounded defensible.

Later in the day, Israeli media added information about the hospital staff – members of Hamas, terrorists. Haim and I looked at each other again, wondering where the truth lies. Where Israelis and Palestinians move from left to right, I disengage, falling between parallel lines where extremes and centrism are unaligned. I clutch at uncertainty on one line and grasp for validation on the other.

Revisiting children’s validation needs, I recall questions last week before flying with our 10-year-old granddaughter to Dubai. She asked about the likelihood of a missile aimed at Israel hitting us after takeoff. In May 2021, when she was 6-1/2, she expressed similar concerns during a short war when Haim and I were flying to the US. Then, I found a way to calm her legitimate fears. This time, I adapted the explanation and validation to her age.

One night during our trip, a siren woke us. It sounded frighteningly identical to sirens in Israel warning us to go to a safe room when missiles are en route from from Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis. But we were in Dubai. Trying to focus once awakened, I told her everything was surely ok, and I would check if Haim, in a separate room, or my sister and brother-in-law knew the cause.

Calling their names in the hallway, I realized they were sound asleep. Still foggy headed from the wakeup, I concluded it was an ambulance or fire engine. But as my head cleared, I realized the sound of the siren came from her phone. I checked mine.

Then I understood. She lives in Raanana, next to Kfar Saba where I live. Her app activated a siren because sirens were activated at that moment in Raanana. My app was quiet because this alert to imminent missiles – or shrapnel from interceptors – hitting didn’t apply to Kfar Saba. She lives with this, as we do, for almost 15 months, with periodic weeks of heightened frequency. Currently, we are experiencing such a period in Raanana and Kfar Saba. I updated her that her app – the one she knows alerts you to go to the safe room – made the noise because there had been an alert in Raanana. It was scary, but familiar. I asked if she wanted to call home to check-in, but she preferred to go back to sleep. I texted her parents as I would have at home.

I struggled to fall asleep again, as I would have after a middle-of-the-night Houthi attack at home. I thought about people functioning the next day at less than full capacity.

I only thought about us. I didn’t think about starvation in Gaza. I didn’t think about the text message from a colleague that week, from the West Bank showing IDF vehicles plowing through the streets of his town hardly looking like a justified strategy even if there were a location, or persons, in the town they might justifiably be targeting. I didn’t think about several busloads of Jewish settlers arriving that same night at his town with zero justification, and the fear that would have generated for the residents. These thoughts troubled me at other times, and at those times, I also thought about us – Israel – as a player in this unending conflict.

Drifting back to sleep that night in Dubai, thinking about our granddaughter, about children. Anecdotes about the children are getting boring and fleshing through my same internal struggles with the harsh injustices are just variations on an incessantly, recurring theme. Observing children experiencing war, complexity is disclosed as it escapes simplicity from the child in each of us. Redundant themes, each anecdote a validation. Each recurrence, isolated, lived with, amidst uncertainty and conflict, nothing learned.

Harriet Gimpel, December 29, 2024