What does it mean to have a "reservist" army?

Israel sees military casualties differently from the rest of the world. Other countries see military deaths as less problematic, but we see each soldier as an individual and to us its no different from civilian casualties.

Listen to a few minutes of "Unholy" where Jonathan describes this phenomenon (from 22:18 for about two minutes):

The reason for this is the fact that our army service is mandatory and that the majority of the army is reserve forces.

October 7th

I wanted to write down my experience on that horrible day, because one day we'll want to look back and understand what happened and people's experiences are how we're going to remember the story. 

7:30

My mom woke me up. We were living with my parents because we hadn't moved into the new house yet. We got the keys in mid-September but the house still needed work. I was sleeping in my old room with Yuvali and Yossi slept down the hall with Lavi in Ari's old room. That worked for us, because Yuval still wakes up at night and this way Yossi and Lavi can get a good night sleep.

My mom came into my room all nervous, saying she was hearing booms and there seemed to be rockets shooting all over the country, and she wanted us to be awake and downstairs in case we needed to go to the mamad. Immediately my heart started beating fast and my stomach felt like was tied in a knot. My parents live in a valley so they hear rockets and interceptions from all over, it's very nerve wracking. I took Yuvali downstairs and Yossi and Lavi came down too. It was chag so my phone was off, I turned it on and put on the news and learned that Hamas had infiltrated the Gaza border, but it wasn't clear how many terrorists and where they were. Hamas were shooting rockets all over the country. Bubby was sleeping in the mamad and Mommy wasn't sure whether to wake her up - it's not Bubby's first time being in Israel with rockets, unfortunately, but we knew it would make her nervous.

Around 8:30 she came out and just when Mommy was about to say something we had our first siren and we all went into the mamad. Abba came back from shul, he had gone to vatikin so he could be home with the kids when we went later.

It was simchat torah, and Yaira, Mom, and myself had planned to go to Levana davening at Brenda's house, which started at 8:30. I got dressed and decided to go - Yossi stayed home with the kids. I got to Brenda's around 9:00, luckily she lives right across the street, and Yaira and Kedem were already there. So were a few other women. I looked at Yaira and tried to make a face that says "well, this is shitty." We tried to have a normal davening, but there were a few sirens. Talli Rosenbaum stood outside just to make sure we would hear the sirens when they happened. Brenda's mamad light was off so I turned it on and said "oops".. Anyway I thought I was funny :) It was just so surreal. We even danced for hakafot, it sort of worked. I went back home in between - I was going to read the haftara, which is the beginning of Yehoshua, and I was really nervous about it. Yossi said he got a message from his miluim and they were waiting for instructions.

I don't know how I got through davening. Aviad drove over with Gefen. Around 11:00 Yossi called me out of Brenda's house and signaled that he was leaving. All I could say was "Yos." I mean, what do you say when your husband gets an emergency call to go to war? He drove out to the new house to get his things, then came back and left me the car because he had a ride up north.

I did read Yehoshua, but couldn't concentrate on it. Davening went on so long, it was almost noon and we hadn't even done musaf yet. Steve Ganot came home and locked the door, there were rumors that terrorists could be anywhere. We decided to stop the service and all went home.

I couldn't eat. I tried to keep calm around the kids. Kedem and Lavi put their toys in the mamad and spent most of the day playing in there. At some point in the afternoon I had coffee and that helped me relax a bit. I was getting whatsapp messages from the city of Beit Shemesh and from the Moatza with Homefront Command updates, basically telling us to stay near a mamad and download the Pikud HaOref app. Aviad was glued to his phone, but I stopped looking at the news. He sat on the deck outside and I went to talk to him, and he just said "it's bad." Yaira and I kept pretending to be normal for the kids.

As the day went on we saw more people from the neighborhood drive off - everyone was being called to miluim. We heard planes all day long, and more booms. We tried to stay indoors but did go out to the deck, the weather was beautiful, the contrast was so strange. I was worrying about Yossi. The Vocalocity whatsapp group was buzzing too, people checking in with each other, one of the guys said that his husband's family were trapped in their mamad in Ofakim with terrorists in the streets.

In the evening we started to hear numbers. First they were saying there were 60 people killed, then 100, then the numbers started to rise. Only later did they mention the Nova music festival, hundreds more killed. We knew there were hostages taken to Gaza, and we knew that people were still held hostage in their homes. How does an army (or country) deal with these sort of hostage situations? It looked like Hamas had invaded Israel and was present in quite a few cities, and looters were coming in, stealing things, and taking it all back into Gaza. It would be a few days before we'd learn exactly what happened.

I tried to stay in touch with Yossi. He was headed up north to Amiad, which is the base where he usually does his miluim. The plan was for his guys to replace the soldiers there so they could be sent down south. He got his gear and weapon but they stayed on the base for a while, they didn't really know what to do. 

On Sunday they sent him to some outpost on the Lebanese border. Hizballah were trying to infiltrate and they were shooting anti-tank missiles and soldiers on the border. That was the scariest part. Are they going to join the war? Is Iran going to join? Is this WWIII? Sunday night Yossi wrote that he wouldn't be available for a few hours. He wasn't back online until late Monday morning and I couldn't concentrate on anything until I knew he was safe. He kept using words like "אירוע" and "פעילות" which to me just means that he's in danger. Later he told me that they had to do some sort of ambush all night, but they weren't really prepared for it - he hadn't calibrated his weapon and they didn't have proper gear. And that's the other thing - the IDF is smart and knows how to handle almost any situation, but if you make stupid decisions then people get killed, and doing an ambush without a calibrated weapon is a stupid decision. So Yossi and his guys were lucky.

Schools were immediately cancelled. Aviad was called up on Sunday. I was supposed to go back to work on October 9th, which I did, but I worked from home and actually did no work at all. I had one meeting with my boss, that's it.

Bubby was supposed to stay in Israel for two more weeks but she managed to get a flight for Friday. In the meantime she was amazing with the kids! She played with Lavi and watched Yuval, and while Yaira and her kids were over she entertained them for hours. Lavi and Kedem really enjoyed playing together which was excellent for me because I wasn't really functioning. Mommy's tours were cancelled of course, so she spent her time cooking for soldiers and for us. Abba's base was closed to civilians so he spent his time at our new house installing the air conditioning and doing other work.

Best I could do was try to work on the house. Things move slowly because the Palestinians aren't working so there's no construction, and other suppliers are short-staffed because people are in miluim.

That was the first week.

Things you might not know about Israel if you've never lived here

These things are obvious to me but I wonder how many of them would surprise the average European or American?

• Work week starts on Sunday. We work Sunday through Thursday, and then the weekend is Friday-Saturday. This makes sense, because Saturday is the Jewish day of rest and Friday is the Muslim day of rest, and Israel is mostly Jewish and Muslim. There are Christians here too of course, and their schools and community centers operate Mon-Fri, but for all other purposes Sunday is the first day of the week.
• Every house, apartment, and public building built since 1991 has a bomb shelter in it called a "mamad." It looks like a regular room but the walls are solid concrete, the door is made of steel and has a hermetic seal around it, and if there's a window then it has a steel cover that you have to close in the event of a war. (*Turns out Switzerland has these too, which is funny because they haven't fought a war in over a hundred years.) Most of the time it's just used as a regular room, but you're supposed to have some emergency supplies in it in case you have to stay there for a while - so we keep bottled water and some snacks there, and should probably have a first aid kit and maybe an extra phone charger. In 2003 we all kept our gas masks there too.
• The IDF is a conscription army, which means that every Israeli over the age of 18 must serve for 2-3 years (as long as the country is in danger, but this has been the case since the country was founded in 1948). There are exemptions of course, but the vast majority of Israelis do some sort of army service right out of highschool. It's not all combat, right? There are plenty of desk jobs and there's even an Education Corps (which is a fascinating topic altogether). I have lots to say about what this does to a society (for better or for worse), maybe for a different post.
  
• Israel is very proud of its agriculture. Main exports include oranges and other citrus fruits and we have a successful wine industry. This is pretty cool considering that almost half the area of Israel is desert (definition for desert: an area that gets less than 200 mm of precipitation per year). Still, a lot of our fruits and vegetables are imported - I guess for financial reasons.
• Israel's official language is Hebrew, but street signs and official documents usually include Hebrew, Arabic, and English.
• German engineering. The building style in Israel is similar to European building, specifically German. Also, lots of words used in construction are German. The reason has to do with the German immigrants who came here at the beginning of the 20th century and brought the construction industry with them. In fact the Technion University, which is a prestigious engineering school in Haifa, originally taught all its classes in German. (Fun fact, that's why the Hebrew University is called the "Hebrew" university - because it was the first university in Israel to teach in the Hebrew language.) 

I'm sure I'll think of others. I'll keep adding.

Tiktok

Ok in my last post (just now, actually) I wrote about Tiktok. I'll be honest - I don't have a tiktok account and I don't know much about it so I really shouldn't have an opinion. But I'll tell you what I do know: tiktok aims to get an emotional response from its users just like any social media platform. Short videos aren't there to make you think, they're there to make you angry or to make you buy something. It takes a lot to argue with a video. So you watch some video about the middle east or the Jews or Palestine and you feel like you understand the subject enough to have an opinion. Then you see more videos like it and you're convinced that your opinion is correct. It's just no way to get an education :|

The Giver

Remember "The Giver" by Lois Lowry? I read it many years ago, probably for school. I might have gone back to read it again at some point. At the time I thought it was about how utopia can't exist - like, the message is that a perfect society isn't really perfect.

But I was thinking about it and I realized it's a different message. It's about the memories. The Giver's job is basically to hold on to all the memories of the bad things so that history doesn't repeat itself. And I think that's missing from today's tiktok-educated Gen-Z. Someone on Facebook pointed out that older people tend to be pro-Israel and young people are pro-Palestinian. I didn't ask where she puts the line between young and old.

It reminded me of another thing I heard once, something like "if you're not a socialist when you're young, you have no heart; if you're not a capitalist when you're old, you have no brain." I don't think this quote has to be taken literally but I like the point about how people's opinions change as they get older and learn more about the world. (Maybe the point is that young people are more fueled by emotion?)

So which is it? Are older people pro-Israel because they have more knowledge and experience? Is it because they remember the intifada or 9/11 and know what terrorism is like? Were they always pro-Israel? Or is it an age thing, did their opinions change as they got older and the young people just aren't there yet?

Going back to Gen-Z's, it's not only them. There are lots of lucky people in the world who really don't know terrorism and war, and they really don't understand just how shitty a situation can be. They're busy trying to find a "good guy" and a "bad guy," an "oppressor" and a "victim." One foreign reporter (on the BBC maybe?) asked if trading three Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli hostage means that Israel thinks that Palestinian lives are worth less than Israeli lives. I mean, WTF? Does she have any idea how negotiations work? Like, she actually thinks that Israel decided on a whim how that hostage deal would look?

The point is that if you want to have a strong opinion about war, you actually need to understand war. Tiktok needs a Giver.