Week 8: October 18 – 24: A “healthy living” insight from the War

    The ravaging impact of the attack a week ago in Israel’s south has hit me, and every other Israeli, hard. Virtually every Israeli knows someone who was involved, in some way, by the attack, or who have family members being called up to serve in the planned engagement with Hamas. My daughter’s ex (my grandson’s father, who I know well, him having lived one floor above me for a few years) is a very shell-shocked survivor of the carnage on Saturday a week ago (he was at the music festival). He is simply glad that by a miracle he survived. (He was shot at; the gun jammed.)  My step daughter’s ex (who I also know very well), is part of the angelic “zaka” crew who went into the burned slaughterhouse the south had become, to collect body parts and provide burials for the victims. I have heard from family some of his horrified descriptions of the sadistic scenes that he witnessed there. I will spare you the details; I want you to be able to sleep tonight. 

     It immediately was obvious that Israel’s response would be large, and would probably take an extended period of time. That made it pretty obvious that I better coral my son to quickly get the door of my safe room into place* (it had been removed, unwisely).  Suddenly, my day became largely focused on surviving real and feared** threats.

-Is it safe to take a walk around the perimeter of the town?

-Is going to Tel Aviv to take photos a good idea, or a slight (but unneeded) risk?

- What are the chances of my being killed (or worse) by an infiltration of terrorists?

- etc etc etc etc

It was hard not to be obsessed about it……

[Image: Composited scene using minitures and an air raid shelter for those who do not have a "safe room".]

  However, my attitude shifted a bit early in the week when I received a notice of the death of a good friend’s husband.  For a moment, I assumed that he had been a victim of fighting somewhere, and then I realized that he was too old to be in the army, and since they do not live in the south, had probably “only” died of natural causes.

   THEN it hit me: My chances of dying in the next month of rocket fire is probably less than the chances of me dying from a heart attack or stroke.***

 

   I should be working on my sleep and exercise the same way I worked to get my son over here to fix the safe room.

 

   I should be tracking my food and making healthy choices if I really want to stay alive.

 

    I should be making a “safe room” of healthy living to protect myself, building it not with bricks, but with healthy choices.

 

 

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*He did!

**This whole blog is really based on my being afraid of death. In reality, I have realized any fear of death is massively overshadowed by fear of sadistic terrors…..   But I decided that if the comparison mentioned above is helpful to anyone- which includes me-  it was worth writing.

*** If the West Bank walls are breached, however, those statistics may be altered considerably. That is also part of my “feared” threats.  In my mind I know that G-d has His own plans, and that I need to trust him. But ingraining that trust in my heart and feelings is vastly harder than to understand it intellectually.  

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   A final note.  I believe that there is a very good way to help deal with the stress of really difficult situations.  One of my “favorite” holocaust memoirs (can a book on the holocaust be “liked”?) is a book called To Vanquish the Dragon by Pearl Beinish. This book follows a group of “Beis Yaacov” (a religious orthodox Jewish girls school) students, as they experienced the holocaust. What is interesting is not only how some of them survived physically, but more than that- how they survived emotionally. The answer is that each of these young women was centered on helping her friends, rather than on her own survival.

   And indeed, those here in my town are quickly realizing that the best treatment for a numbing inactivity of fear is the act of getting busy, and helping others. The amount of support for soldiers and people displaced from southern Israel is massive.

LET US ALL TRY AND MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER KINDER PLACE THIS WEEK....

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And for anyone who wants to read my views on Israel VS Hamas. please read my post from a few hours ago/

Thoughts On Israel, Gaza, etc.

 

I know that once Israel invades GAZA, the destruction and inevitable civilian deaths that will occur, even people who were shocked by Hamas’s atrocities last week will start saying that Israel’s attacks are “revengeful”, “out of proportion”, etc.  I would like to address this.

   In the past, Israel has targeted basically MILITARY Hamas, as opposed to the political wing.  Israel wrongly assumed that the political wing would value the lives of Palestinians, provide services, and maybe even one day reach out to make peace. But we were wrong, terribly wrong.  Hamas has shown itself to be an absolutely sadistic growth- a cancer for both Israel AND Gazans as well.

   Does Hamas protect its citizens? No! The footage coming out of Gaza’s hospital tonight shows civilian casualties.  Since Israel is targeting HAMAS installations (that Hamas purposefully puts in civilian buildings, in order to make the Gazans “human shields”- which-by the way- is a war crime), there should be lots of injured Hamas soldiers also arriving at the hospitals. But THEY are in the concrete tunnels, tunnels built with funds that could have built schools, schools, etc. They are even so brazen and callous as to tell civilians not to heed Israel’s pleas (given in leaflets dropped over Gaza) to evacuate northern Gaza.

    Gaza is often termed by the press as “one giant prison”.  Yes, it is.  But when someone consistently commits murder and mayhem, who is guilty, the jailor or the jailed? In 2005, Israel made a significant concession when they closed 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza, displacing over 8000 Israelis.  The result was not a response towards peace from the Palestinian authority, but, ironically, the rise to power in 2007 of Hamas (largely due also to widescale corruption in the PA) and the shooting of rockets from Gaza into Israel.

 

  Even tonight, the coverage of the news media is wholly on Gaza. There is no mention of the 50 plus  alerts for incoming rockets and a few attempted terrorist infiltrations from just the last few hours that appear on my phone. Each rocket sent could kill many here, but here is ISRAEL, the army is NOT hiding in tunnels under civilians, but tries to protect its citizens with the iron dome system. Also nearly every citizen has access to a safe room or a bomb shelter. We have not been using our concrete to build terror tunnels. It seems that we are only seen as “right” when we manage to allow ourselves to be killed. 

    The reason for the proportionality of higher deaths between Palestinians to Israel and is not just due to Israel striking back harder, but also due to Israel trying very hard to protect their citizens, while Hamas does the opposite, using civilians as human shields. And while sometimes Israel messes up, they DO try to prevent civilian deaths in Gaza- an attitude that Hamas cynically uses against us. As Golda Meir once famously said: “We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us”.   

   I won’t say that the footage of injured children in Gaza does not move me. It does.  But the type of violence visited on us by Hamas on last Saturday, the sheer sadism and evil shown towards Israelis-this shows that any dreams of making peace (which many leftist Israelis campaigned for) is impossible with Hamas. (It is worth noting, that being a leftist, or even an Arab, would not give mercy to any Israeli confronted by the Hamas terrorists.) Hamas must be completely irradicated, like a cancer,  because if you do not kill a cancer, it will kill you.

    Now to the issue of “revenge”. This is not about revenge. This is about irradicating the cancer of Hamas (and by some hope, some dream, of maybe getting our captives back.)  If this was about revenge, we would just bomb Gaza off the map. But no, we are preparing to send in ground troops. We are preparing an assault that will unfortunately undoubtably add to our terrific death toll from last week.  We would not risk our young men and women for revenge. We had more than enough burials last week.

  Now a few cancers have new targeted therapy that will only attack cancer cells.  Now if anyone has a good idea on how to irradicate the cancer of Hamas, or of their extremism, that will not hurt the citizens of Israel or the citizens of Gaza, please let us in on the secret. Meanwhile, it seems that the “treatment” will unfortunately, like chemotherapy and radiation therapy, kill “healthy” cells alongside as well. But just like with cancer, do we really have a choice?  We in Israel are not willing for last week’s atrocities to become a “normal” reoccurrence, every two years or so, like the rocket barrages have become.  Forgive us, but we really have no intention of letting Hamas push us into the sea. We will beat this cancer. We have no choice.