War Babies

This has neve happened to me before. Israel is at war and I’m far away from the country, in the peaceful depths of rural France. I was born into the Second World War, and as a baby (and later) I suffered as a result of being evacuated to the country, seprated from my parents and the environment to which I was accustomed. This was the standard procedure for children in English cities and was done in order to protect them from the bombs being dropped on England by the Luftwaffe.

And so I survived, and as an adult I moved to Israel, where I married and had three children. One month before my first child was born the Six Days’ War broke out. Once again, I survived, and found myself sheltering several neighbours in our ground-floor apartment while providing cups of tea and coffee. It evoked memories of what I had seen on newsreels of Londoners during the Blitz, and I felt happy and proud to be able to share in that spirit in my own small way.

Almost exactly three years later, two days after I had given birth to our second child, the war of attrition broke out. I was still in hospital, but saw the medical staff preparing to receive injured soldiers and civilians. I was glad to be able to leave the fraught atmosphere of the hospital and return home, even though our little family had to seek shelter in a neighbour’s apartment downstairs when the sirens blared.

Once again, we survived unharmed, and just before our third child was born the Yom Kippur War erupted, and Israel was attacked by Egypt, together with Syria, far away from our civilian centres. We laughed and said that if we had no more children there would be no more war. How foolish we were.

Just eighteen months ago southern Israel suffered a terrible attack from the Hamas terrorists of the Gaza Strip, with over a thousand civilians murdered, raped, tortured or burned, and 250 taken captive into the tunnels of Gaza. Since then we have been in a constant state of war against Hamas in the south and Hizbollah in the north, just over the border with Lebanon. Once again, our soldiers are dying and being injured, the hostages are suffering horribly and their families in Israel are unable to secure their release.

There seems to be no end to the cycle of wars in Israel. So now it is Iran and its nuclear ambitions that have triggered the current conflagration, whether deliberately or not. And just one month before hostilities broke out with Iran our newest grandchild was born. By coincience, some of her (much older) cousins are now serving in the IDF. She won’t remember being taken down to the bomb shelter, but that is the reality of her life now as Iran and Yemen fire rockets at Israel

What a crazy world we’re living in. One can only hope that the endless cycle of war and the label of ‘war baby’ our offspring bear will eventually come to a happy end, and the hatred and hostility Israel has always had to suffer can finally disappear.