1st Israel Report: Leaving for Israel with Concern
Dear Friends,
I’ve lived in Israel on two different occasions, once for a year, and have traveled to Israel 15 or 16 times. This marks the very first time I’ve headed out on a trip to Eretz Yisrael with more foreboding than excitement. When you follow the war from afar it sounds like Israel is profoundly struggling. And that’s hard to hear about, but may be even harder to experience firsthand.
It’s not that I haven’t been in Israel in challenging times before. The very first time I was in Israel for the summer of 1976 happened to coincide with the Entebbe hijacking, which ended triumphantly for Israel but surely did not start that way. In the early 2000s I was on a rabbinic mission trip during the 2nd Intifada when we visiting rabbis were forcefully instructed to stay out of all cafes and off of public transportation, when stores normally crowded with shoppers were quite literally empty and all the news was of terrorist outrages and homicide bombers blowing themselves up in crowded malls and markets. And in 2014 I led a congregational trip to Israel that was on its last days when the news suddenly was filled with the three students who were abducted and murdered by Palestinian terrorists, leading to the last Israeli war in Gaza prior to this one.
Even when things were fine and my time in Israel was blessed with peace and great experiences and memories, we were never far from Palestinian violence and the murder of innocent Israelis. I was installed in the Cantors Assembly in the summer of 1988, rented a car with friends and got thoroughly lost driving in the West Bank just a few months before the First Intifada changed everything in that part of the territories, with its horrible death toll. In 1991 I arrived for a year of study in Israel just months after the end of the Gulf War, when the memory of SCUDS falling was fresh in everyone’s mind. The following spring when we tried to go visit the Samaritan Passover near Shechem, the rental van I was driving was stoned by a Palestinian kid, shattering the passenger window and showering me with shards of glass. Even jogging in the wrong Jerusalem neighborhood could lead to a hail of stones from Palestinians that year, a year in which most people were basically optimistic about the future. On one of my last visits to Israel, a time when things also seemed calm and prosperous, I drove past forests burned by rockets fired from Lebanon in the recent war with Hezbollah, aiming to destroy Israel.
Still, I have never been in Israel during actual wartime before. Of course, Israel has never experienced an atrocity like that perpetrated by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas on October 7th. The mass murder, rape and torture of civilians, the horrifying surprise of the atrocities that Hamas’ war crimes inflicted on an unsuspecting population, the huge number of innocent hostages brutally abducted by the criminal Palestinian Islamist terrorists, all were unique in the history of Israel. How would it be to visit when hundreds of thousands of reservists are serving on active duty in Gaza or in the North?
Nor have I been in Israel when soldiers were fighting, and dying, every day in hard fighting against a desperate enemy that hides behind civilians.
The flight to Israel was full, not surprising since El Al has been the sole carrier that didn’t cancel its flights to and from Israel. Notable for me was how helpful the passengers were to one another. The plane, like Israel itself, felt like a large extended family, making sure that everyone is OK and helping the flight attendants complete their tasks. My seatmate was a youngish father of three children under the age of 6, flying back to do volunteer work wherever he is needed with his parents and siblings. Tomer is a magician who performs at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, an extremely nice and engaging guy who said, “People don’t realize what losing a soldier means in Israel; everyone knows everyone, really, and it’s like losing a family member each time one is killed.”
Ben Gurion airport, always bustling and crowded, is very light on traffic now; the only planes I saw were El Al, plus one from Emirates Airlines, and one or two regional carriers, when the runways here are typically bustling with planes of all nationalities. War time.
During the 13.5 hour flight some passengers managed to get the limited El Al WiFi to work, and news spread of the tragic loss of 21 Israeli soldiers in a Hamas RPG attack that causd a building to collapse in Khan Younis in Gaza.
The other side of it is that so far as I can tell, in most other ways Israel is continuing to function just fine, with normal life proceeding even in the midst of war. I will of course know much more as the trip goes on.