"Home alone" ... never has Israel, in such deep danger, been so leaderless
But the air force had a very, very good night. Israel had surprising allies. A surreal moment was punctuated by a lot of laughing, too. Resilience is this country's middle name.
Turns out that our safe room checklist wasn’t entirely complete. We had the stuff we needed. Canned food (with a can opener) and crackers. Gallons and gallons of bottled water. The generator. Flashlights. A radio you wind up in case there are no batteries and no power. (When my father bought it for us years ago, we laughed. He’s getting the last laugh now, somewhere up there.) Laptop and iPhone cords to connect to the generator. (Two Samsung cords for our stubborn children who have a “thing” about Apple, but that’s a different story). Pillows, blankets. Even books (my wife being the eternal optimist about getting reading done.)
Seemed all good.
Then, at about 1:40 a.m., the sirens went off . Our kids and grandchildren were staying with us, because they don’t have a safe room in their Tel Aviv apartment. They were sleeping right through the siren, but we heard it, woke them up, and we all traipsed downstairs to the safe room (which is normally a pantry and laundry room).
Everyone in. Children still asleep in the parents’ arms. Pitch black because we don’t want the kids to wake up. We hear boom after boom after boom in the sky. So much for “they’d never dare aim at Jerusalem.” Time to shut the safe room door (the kind that was shot through on October 7th). We got it shut, sat on the floor or folding chairs, and listened to the booms.
“How long do we have to stay in here?” someone asked.
“They said for ten minutes after the end of the last siren.”
Quiet for a moment or two as we were all glued to our phones.
“Uh, we have a problem,” my son then said. I knew what he meant, and he was right. We’d brought everything IN, but one thing needed to go OUT. The diaper pail.
The situation was serious. “Our chances of dying from the diapers is much higher than from Iran,” he said quite correctly. We opened the door, got rid of the diaper pail and (pun intended), breathed easier.
And then we all started to chuckle at the utter absurdity of the whole situation.
It’s hard to know where to begin when one wants to list the absurdities, but our most serious problem, obviously, is that we have no leader. Virtually no one here believes a word the PM says, and he was noticeably almost entirely absent from Israeli TV last night. More on him below.
So people here watched the people they trust. Daniel Hagari, the IDF Spokesperson. Some of the better commentators on the news. And we got whatever information we could from government websites and television news, which of course broadcast uninterrupted.
Like watching the stats during an NLF game, we were given updates and all sorts of information. For example, how long does it take for their “stuff” to get here. None of us had any idea, which was strange since we’d been warned for days that it was going to happen. But no one I know had bothered to Google it.
TV had the answer:
From left to right in the middle of the screen (in the white print with the black background under the pictures of the weapon type), drones take 9 hours, cruise missiles take two hours, ballistic missiles take 12 minutes.
And then, in red, right below that, what we have to counter each. For the drones, Patriot and Iron Dome. For the cruise missiles, David’s Sling and Iron Dome. For ballistic missiles, the Arrow 3 system.
Everyone’s looking at their watching, trying to remember when they said the stuff had been launched, trying to figure out how long we had until the action started.
Then came the social media post—and we all burst out laughing.
These are the times of “drone entry”: Tel Aviv 8:31, Haifa 8:25, Jerusalem 8:43.
Why’s it so funny? Because it was an obvious play on the list of Shabbat times that appears on the front of every Israeli newspaper on Friday. Here’s this week’s, from Yedi’ot (which has Shabbat starting and ending times):
But, of course, most of it didn’t get to us. The US, Jordan and mostly Israel got almost all of it, which was a stunning failure for Iran.
Stunning.
Still, Israelis were mesmerized by the video of the launch that was shown on Iranian TV and that quickly make its way around here (and, I assume, everywhere):
Just when the excitement seemed to be over, my son burst out laughing again, and shared a Tweet someone had just sent to him.
Or this one, from a friend down the street:
We were all in safe rooms. It was the middle of the night. We’d heard countless explosions in the skies above us, and still, within minutes, Israeli social media was humming with humor.
The resilience here is truly something to behold.
The jokes aside, there is nothing funny about what this country now faces. Retaliate and risk starting a regional war? Don’t retaliate and communicate that we’re a country that permits other countries to fire hundreds of rockets, missiles and drones at it? What would that do to whatever’s left of our deterrence?
Not simple.
Which is why it would be nice to have a leader. More on that, and our tentative schedule, below.
Until Saturday night’s attack, the subject here was Bibi. The consensus that he is completely ineffective is now almost wall to wall.
There’s no end to what one could post here:
What might have made the situation even more dire for Bibi was the release, on Thursday night, of an extraordinarily damning interview on Uvda (“Fact”) with the widely admired journalist, Ilana Dayan. She interviewed two of the people Netanyahu has appointed to be our negotiators for the hostages’ release, and with their voices electronically modified, they didn’t hold back:
Though this has been covered in numerous places, look at the Times of Israel article from which the following quotes are taken:
“There is a massive gap between the narratives they are trying to create in the public eye and the actions in reality,” said “A” …
He further described an atmosphere of “cold indifference” to the plight of the hostages from “the top,” specifically from the Prime Minister’s Office, and said that in discussion on strategy, Netanyahu was unwilling to entertain new ideas.
“Since December, definitely since January, it has become clear to everyone that we are not negotiating,” he said.
“I can’t say that without Netanyahu there would have been a deal, but I can say that without Netanyahu, the chances of making a deal would be better,” said “D.”
“It happens again and again, we get a mandate during the day, and then the prime minister makes phone calls at night. He says, ‘Don’t say this, don’t approve that.’ This is how he gets around the heads of the negotiation team as well as the war cabinet,” he said.
“A” added that the Israeli team has been forced to make impossible demands, such as the March demand for a list of living hostages, that they know Hamas will not agree to.
“When that demand came up, it wasn’t realistic to expect we would get it.”
“It was a ridiculous demand,” said D. “We already had the list on our own. Why should we get it from Hamas?”
Netanyahu was very, very lucky that the Uvda interview came out on Thursday evening. By then, the weekend papers had been printed, and all anyone had bandwidth for was the Iran story.
But Iran aside, no one has lost sight of the larger issue. One of Israel’s leading and most respected Hebrew language journalists, Nadav Eyal, finally came out and said it. “The government is losing the war.”
Here’s the Google Translated tweet to his article:
Why? It’s pretty clear:
Netanyahu says “we’re one step away from victory,” but we have made virtually no progress on the hostages. And getting them back was part of the definition of victory from the get-go.
Netanyahu says “we’re one step away from victory,” but there are six battalions of Hamas still left, and it’s not clear that we’re going to be able to get them.
Hezbollah has not budged, and the some 100,000 evacuees from the north can’t go home.
The south is still devoid of most of its inhabitants
The likelihood that Bibi will get most of the Haredim to get drafted seems nil (though there are rumors of a compromise of some sort in the air)
Israel’s relationship with the US, with the exception of the moments that Biden has stepped to the plate in truly statesmanlike ways, is in the toilet.
(Last night, as the news was reporting that the US was firmly at Israel’s side, had beefed up its military capabilities in the area and was shooting down some of the Iranian weapons, the commentator from INSS remarked that there’s never, ever been a US president this good for Israel, and that in the morning, every Israeli should wake up and thank Joe Biden. Then, she rephrased: they should first thank God, and then thank Joe Biden. Theology aside, her point was clear.
Israel’s more marginalized in the international community than it can afford to be.
And on and on ….
The Iran thing could be over, or it could just be beginning. Either way, it would be nice if there were someone at the helm.
But, as everyone here know, that’s not likely to be the case any time soon. We’re gonna need that resilience.
This is all entirely tentative, because everything here could change, or we could lose power, or cell towers could be taken out … heaven knows …. But everything being equal, which it is not likely to be, here’s what we’re planning:
MONDAY (04/15): Our promised discussion of how to fashion a Seder appropriate to these unprecedented times.
TUESDAY (04/116): The Iran fallout. Smotrich on why he refused to watch a new video of soldiers being killed on October 7th, and how his reason disgusted the nation. And Levin had an unbelievable explanation for why the country is so torn. We’ll cover some of those people you haven’t heard about in a while. Plus, why my wife is so happy that I got cancelled. (Yup, there’s a story there, and it speaks volumes.)
WEDNESDAY (04/17): Rabbi David Stav is to many people one of the most venerated religious figures in Israel. Once a candidate for the Chief Rabbinate, he exerts more influence than almost anyone else calling for a more embracing, inclusive, moral and Zionist Orthodox Judaism. We got together to speak about the drafting of the Haredim, a move Rabbi Stav strongly supports.
As rumors are now beginning to leak that Netanyahu and the Haredim have reached a compromise that might for the drafting of as many as 25% of the Haredi eligible young men, the issue could well take on heightened importance, and we’ll hear Rabbi Stav on why the current situation is one of the Haredim stealing from the country in four different ways. As usual, we’ll post a segment for everyone, and the full discussion along with a transcript for our paid readers.
THURSDAY (04/18): There has been much coverage of women who lost their husbands, fiancés, boyfriends, etc., during this war. But there is of course also the obverse: men who have lost wives, fiancées, girlfriends—yet these men receive much less recognition. We’ll share some coverage of this issue from the Israeli press.
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Impossible Takes Longer is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and at other booksellers.
Biden's response to Iran's incursion was fine until the defensive effort was over. Now, calling for restraint, is as bad as helping yesterday was good. If ANY country launched ballistic missiles, drones and other missiles at the US in just the numbers launched at the tiny nation of Israel, that country would pay the price quickly and devastatingly. Yet, our response is to try and tie Israel's hands. Sadly, this has been the US response to Iranian attacks on US soldiers as well throughout the Middle East. The world needs to be rid of Iran and all of its proxies, the sooner the better. This is coming from someone who is Anti-Trump, Pro-Israel, Anti-Islamic Fundamentalism. Where do people like me need to go on Election Day? P.S. One can be both in favor of humanitarian treatment of Palestinians and, at the same time, in favor of eradication of Iran, Hamas and the rest of the Axis of Evil. Seeing celebrations in the US for Iran's attack on Israel, scrapes the bottom of a barrel that seems to be bottomless these days...
Daniel Gordis - NEVER turn on that generator in a closed room. Carbon monoxide!!!!!