יום הזכרון

מדהים, או אולי נורא, שביישוב של 150 משפחות יש לפחות 12 משפחות שאיבדו קרוב משפחה בפיגוע או בשירות בצה"ל. וכמובן עוד כמה שאיבדו חברים בשנה האחרונה, כי עם כמות המילואים שאנשים עושים פה זה בלתי נמנע.

שניים מתושב היישוב נהרגו במלחמה בעזה.

ועכשיו נודע ליוסי שמגייסים אותו לעוד סבב, הפעם צפונה, אולי לבנון או אולי סוריה, לא ברור. הסבב הבא שלו אמור היה להיות באוקטובר אבל הנה יש צו חדש לעכשיו כי מרחיבים את הפעילות בעזה. 

עדיין לא אמרנו לילדים, נגיד להם ביום שהוא יוצא. יהיה קשוח. אפשר לקלל קצת? יופי. נניח הערב בטקס יוסי ניגן בקלידים, שזה תמיד מהמם, אבל אומר שאני הייתי עם הילדים בטקס. אבא שלי הגיע אז לא הייתי  לבד שזה מעולה כי הילדים לא יודעים לשבת בשקט. הם טיפסו אחד על השני ועלי ועל סבא עד שהם התעייפו אבל רציתי שיראו את יוסי מנגן. בכל מקרה הם הגיעו לשלב ממש עייף אז לקחתי אותם הביתה ומיד לביא התחיל לבכות שהוא רוצה את אבא.

"אבא מנגן, הוא לא יכול לבוא עכשיו"

"תכף הוא מסיים ומגיע"

אומייגאד הוא בסך הכל מנגן, ילד! הוא ממש פה בחוץ, פשוט לא נמצא עכשיו בבית. אתה יודע שהוא תכף יוצא למילואים? מה תעשה אז? אתה כבר מרגיש שזה קורה? יש לך חרדת נטישה? ומה יהיה אם הוא ייהרג, אה? מה תעשה אז? תמשיך לבכות לי על אבא? ומה אני אעשה? אמשיך להרגיע אותך ולעשות כאילו הכל בסדר? כוסרבאק איתך יחד.

Memorial Day

You know you're fucking privileged when your memorial day is a day of celebration. 

Realizing your worst fear?

For the first year of the war I had terrible anxiety. I refused to hear anything about what Yossi was doing in miluim. I didn't want to know what my friends were up to, didn't want to hear about people getting killed or injured unless I knew them personally - every accidental piece of news had my heart jump to 150 and I would shut down until it calmed. Sometimes it would take hours. Once my dad said "did you hear the news?" and that was enough to send me spiraling.

Surprisingly, that's changed. Now my skin is much thicker. I can hear stories, even ask questions, and I think I understand why: I had my greatest fear realized -- Yossi went into Lebanon. (*Ok maybe not my greatest fear, because let's face it, I have lots of fears and they're all great. But,)

Since we started dating I knew that Yossi is positioned in the North. His miluim in the past was usually along the Lebanese border, and his training was all to do with combat in northern terrain. I also knew that since 2006 Israeli leadership has been warning that there will be another war with Hizballah. So I always had this fear in the back of my mind that Yossi will get sent to war in Lebanon.

When October 7th happened my biggest fear was war with Hizballah, and I felt bad because everyone was focusing on Gaza and Hamas and here I was worrying about a possible war that wasn't actually happening, but it was all I could think about. A week into the war I saw a neighbor who said his son was on the Lebanese border talking about combat, two weeks into the war my colleague's son was killed in Gaza and in his letter he mentioned the possibility of "Lebanon III," and a few weeks later Nasrallah made a big deal about giving a speech to the Israeli public. It was horrible.

Then Yossi was called up in September 2024, and Nasrallah was killed, and Yossi went into Lebanon and came home. And that's it - my fear was realized and I can function again like a normal human being.

Narrative: Stories

I've been asking my friends about their war experiences. I don't have a narrative, just a bunch of experiences I was told firsthand from soldiers. They're not even stories. Stories have a beginning and a middle and an end and some sort of plot, but when you're experiencing life things don't fit neatly into stories.

So in no particular order:

#1

When Yossi and his guys were in Gaza last summer they would carpool. One of the guys would pick up Yossi and a few others, they'd drive just over an hour to Be'eri and park in a parking lot near the kibbutz. Then the army would provide an armored vehicle to take them from there to the base in Gaza. Then after a week to ten days they'd carpool back. That's it, just a commute to the war and back.

An American relative sent me a song that was written about the war, which apparently was a hit among American Jews: "Daddy come home... fighting a war so far away." I admit that the song made me cry because it's a kid asking where his father is and that hits close to home, but guys - the war isn't far away. It's literally a fucking commute.

#2

One friend, let's call him A, is doing his reserves in an intelligence unit that's responsible for collecting information about our own hostages. This is interesting because usually intelligence is about researching the enemy, not your own people. One day he mentioned that he has hostage files on his personal computer and he should probably erase them for security reasons.

#3

Friend B's reserves are a little nightmare-inducing, not because he's in the war zone but because he deals with identifying bodies. Trigger warning: dismembered bodies. Skip ahead if this bothers you.

When the attack on Oct 7th was happening the paramedics were evauating unidentified casualties. They couldn't necessarily tell whether a body belonged to an Israeli or Palestinian, and unfortunately many bodies were in fact just body parts. Some body bags ended up with an uneven number of limbs. So B spends his time looking for DNA of Israelis among the Hamas body parts. At first it was just about understanding which missing people were kidnapped and which were actually killed, but even a year later there's still missing information and those body bags might still hold clues.

#Note

I'm removing my friends' identifying details for security reasons, so I have no proof that these experiences are real. Except that I heard them firsthand from friends. More experiences coming soon.