To get a sense of what life is like in Israel these days, consider the circumstances in which air raid sirens have caught me over the last several days:
Reading the Purim megillah in a school bomb shelter near my synagogue. We closed the door when the siren sounded, causing us to lose the internet connection we were using to broadcast the megillah reading over Zoom.
Grilling barbecue. After the siren, I had just seconds to grab my burgers, kebabs, and sausages off the open-air grill so they wouldn’t burn or be snatched by an enterprising cat.
While grocery shopping at a Rami Levy supermarket, other shoppers and I were herded into the bomb shelter that doubles as the supermarket synagogue (a common feature of Rami Levy supermarkets).
Going to sleep, in a deep sleep, about to wake up.
On a walk to the corner park for a breath of fresh air, then sprinting home to make it to shelter in time.
On work calls, doing work, thinking about doing work.
While writing a piece about what it’s like to live in Israel during the latest war with Iran.
To be sure, I am among the fortunate ones. My home was built with a mamad — the Hebrew acronym for “apartment safe space.” Mandated by a 1992 law for all new construction, these reinforced safe rooms include walls designed to withstand explosives of a certain intensity, a shatterproof window protected by a heavy steel shutter, and a thick steel door.
What is life like in Israel during war with Iran?
Originally meant to protect Israelis from the sorts of gas attacks that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein threatened to use during the 1991 Gulf War, the safe rooms were used on Oct. 7 by Israelis living in communities near Gaza to shelter from Hamas assailants, with varying degrees of success. The doors and windows proved to be bulletproof, but Hamas attackers managed to force their way into some of the rooms, including by setting fire to homes.
Mamads are a terrific convenience. I can put my children to sleep in the private bomb shelter, and they usually sleep right through the sirens at night. I don’t have to share my shelter with strangers, or run outside and into some dank public shelter filled with dead cockroaches, as others do who live in older buildings without mamads. I don’t have to lie down to rest in subway stations, like friends in Tel Aviv.
But mamads are not bombproof. They weren’t built to withstand ballistic missile attacks, and a direct strike by an Iranian missile or drone likely will destroy a mamad and kill its occupants. That’s exactly what happened when an Iranian missile struck a shelter in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh on Sunday night, killing nine people and wreaking a wide radius of devastation.
So, in this war, mamads are part psychological shield, part actual protection. They’ll withstand deadly shrapnel and some indirect explosions, but they have their limits.
Inside the mamad, we hear all kinds of sounds of war. There are the shuddering booms of Israel’s anti-missile defenses firing, and massive metallic bangs that my wife thinks are falling shrapnel or missile strikes in the vicinity. I’m not sure what they are, and when I asked a missile expert I know who helped design the Arrow system about them, he refused to answer me.
We hear Israeli warplanes. It’s not clear whether they’re patrolling the skies above our heads as a defense measure or are en route to bombing runs in Iran.
Perhaps the most startling sound of all is the blaring mobile phone notification we get alerting of an incoming rocket attack and warning us to be close to a bomb shelter. The earsplitting, high-frequency alert is a very nasty sound to wake up to at 4 a.m., especially when it arrives in stereo from the four different mobile phones in our house.
Then we must wait several minutes to learn if we’ll actually get an air raid siren or not. When the siren comes, we supposedly have 90 seconds to reach shelter, but the booms often start sooner than that.
As in many homes, our family has a running debate over when it’s safe to exit the mamad. Is 10 to 12 minutes from the time of the air raid siren sufficient, or do we have to wait for the official all-clear phone alert? Sometimes, we get another air raid siren before the 10-minute count is up, and the clock starts all over again.
With in-person school canceled for the foreseeable future, all my children are home all the time, and we’ve started to get on each other’s nerves. But in the middle of the night, nobody complains when we crowd into the mamad and share blankets and small camping mattresses on the floor so we all can lie down.
The people subject to Israeli and U.S. bombardment have it much worse. Their leaders invested in ballistic missiles, attack drones and other weapons of war. We have those too, but we also developed sophisticated alert systems, in-house safe rooms, bomb shelters and, crucially, a variety of anti-missile defenses: Iron Dome for shorter-range missiles, like those fired by Hezbollah and Hamas; the Arrow, which counters ballistic missiles in the upper atmosphere and lower space; the new Iron Beam, a laser that works like the Iron Dome; David’s Sling, designed for medium-range ballistic missiles.
And, of course, there is the Israeli Air Force, which shoots down missiles en route and bombs missile-launching systems on the ground in enemy territory.
If Israel’s enemies were more concerned with the welfare of their own people rather than attacking the Jewish state, perhaps we wouldn’t have this war in the first place.
I’d write more, but there goes the air raid siren again (no joke)!