'I’m sorry,” said Danny, my 29-year-old son who is on the autism spectrum, as the first siren sounded during the weekend.
It’s how he responds to seeing me stressed; he assumes it must be something he did. I told him, as I always do, that I love him and that he hasn’t done anything wrong, and he nodded. But he still said that every time there was a missile alert.
It was the beginning of a long weekend, the second of this war, and I didn’t know what was in store for us, or, as Danny likes to say, what was “in the store for us.”
Danny has lived in Israel since he was four, and he can read and write in Hebrew and English and can identify written and spoken Arabic and Russian, but he does not grasp much about the current war. He does not even fully understand that Arabs and Jews are different groups, or that there are different religions. Those concepts are too abstract for him, and I see no point in focusing on them. What he understands is that people speak different languages. I don’t think that trying to teach him a deep understanding of the Iranian regime and its animosity to Israel, or the specifics of ballistic missiles, nuclear enrichment, and drones would enrich his life in any way.
He has internalized an explanation about missile attacks going back to the war in the summer of 2014, something along the lines of, “Bad people are throwing dangerous things through the air at us, and we have to go to the bomb shelter because then the things can’t hurt us.”
Varied reactions to a changing situation
Over the past two-plus years, he has experienced many missile alerts, although I wouldn’t say he has gotten used to them. His response varies due to many elements, such as what time of day they come, what he is doing when he is interrupted, and whether or not we can hear loud booms in the shelter. If responses to missiles can be seen as being on a spectrum, like autism, he is somewhere between the people throwing a rave in the shelter and a four-year-old having a tantrum because she can’t stand to go through this again.
For most of us, though, our understanding of what Israelis euphemistically call “the situation” is the lens through which we experience this war. Since Danny lacks this lens, which even very young Israeli children absorb, it feels different for him, and I decided to record the story of our weekend through a diary. I can’t claim that this diary will show how all, or even many, people on the autism spectrum perceive this conflict. As the saying goes, “If you know one person with autism, you know one person with autism.” This is just about my son and how he is coping during this latest conflict with Iran.
Thursday
I arrived at the therapeutic village where he lives, which is near Beit Shemesh, at about 10:30 a.m. While I longed to see Danny and I knew that he would enjoy coming home for the weekend, I was scared, and had this not been a weekend when the village was closing to give the staff some much-needed time off, I might have let him stay there. Traveling around cities is a much less risky business, because if you choose your route carefully, there is always a public shelter nearby or a friend whose safe room you can stay in. But out on the highway, you are completely exposed. The only option is to pull over, get as far away as you can from your car, and lie on the ground with your hands over your head. That isn’t as futile as the “duck and cover” drills in the US in the 1950s and early 1960s, in which students were told to climb under their desks if the Russians launched a nuclear weapon. This advice from the Home Front Command in Israel makes good sense in terms of minimizing injuries from
the debris of missile interceptions. But if a missile lands right where you are, it was nice knowing you.
So, although I normally pick Danny up on Thursday afternoons, I decided to go in the morning, when I judged the roads would be as empty as possible and when there seemed to be fewer alerts. My boyfriend offered to drive me to pick him up, as he has done many times since October 7, 2023. He would be able to help me calm Danny down if we had to lie down next to the highway.
This time felt different, though, more dangerous than during the war with Hamas, possibly because the Beit Shemesh area in central Israel seems to be coming under particularly heavy attack since this war started. A few days before, nine people were killed in a public shelter in a synagogue in Beit Shemesh, about 10 minutes away from where Danny lives. For those reading this abroad who have not heard of Beit Shemesh, it is a largely ultra-Orthodox town of about 160,000 residents, and it is not, by any yardstick, a military target. But Beit Shemesh has been bombed many times since the start of this conflict, by Hamas and the Houthis since 2023, and by Iran in the previous war in 2025 and in two attacks in 2024.
The roads were clear, and there were no alerts as we drove towards the Valley of Elah, believed to be the site of the confrontation between David and Goliath, right near Danny’s village. When we arrived, I had a brief chat with a staff member about how Danny was doing as he took his backpack and got ready to go. We walked back to the parking lot and, just as we stepped into the car, an alert sounded, saying a missile attack was expected in a few minutes. We went back into the village and sat in a safe room with Danny and a staff member. More than 10 minutes passed, and no attack warning came. If one had, and we had not been in the safe room already, we would have had a minute to get to it.
The drive home was similarly uneventful, and Danny and I even managed to stock up on groceries before we went home. But just as we sat down to lunch, there was a missile alert for our Jerusalem neighborhood, and Danny apologized for the alarm, but he seemed basically unruffled. In the shelter, he talked to our upstairs neighbor about her dog, Prince, and her previous dog, Cola. He wanted to play with Prince, but the dog was on edge. He spoke in English to an American neighbor, asking her how she was doing. Then it was over, and we went home and finished lunch.
A couple of hours later, Danny was looking at photo albums when there was another pre-alert. I had Danny get into his shoes, and again, he apologized, more flustered. It was the third alert of the day, after all. But although we were ready to go, no attack came. I wasn’t complaining. He asked me to read him one of his favorite books, Truck Song, which is a long poem by Diane Siebert, illustrated with evocative drawings by beloved children’s book illustrator Byron Barton, that tells the story of a long-haul trucker meeting every challenge as he makes a run from coast to coast. Earlier in the week, I had thought of a line from the book, “With eagle eyes and steely nerves,” about how the trucker navigates tricky mountain roads, as I was taking the train back from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem on a nerve-wracking trip on the second day of the war.
The same sequence with the alerts happened again a little before 11 p.m. I had just finished writing up the reveal of the new Israeli Eurovision song, “Michelle,” on KAN 11, and not long after I sent the article in, we got the screeching beep of another alert. Danny was in what he wears to sleep, sweatpants and a T-shirt with a picture of the New York City subway map, and I made him put on socks, shoes, and a sweatshirt. He sat at the table, sipping water from his favorite mug, ready to run. But in the end, this time there was also no alarm. Given the all-clear, he soothed himself with Truck Song again.
Friday
We got to sleep through the night, which felt very good. Danny awakened early and woke me up, saying, “Eema, you need to have coffee.” While I had my coffee, I delivered some bad news: We wouldn’t be able to enjoy our usual Friday morning routine, which generally consists of traveling around the city by bus and doing any errands we have, then picking up bagels at a place that has several ceiling fans, his favorite thing to look at, where he knows most of the staff by name.
But I didn’t like the idea of being on a bus and having to get off wherever it happened to be at that moment, and trying to find a building with a public shelter if there were an alert. We could likely have found one, but I wanted to avoid the panicked stress of the search. He accepted a modified version of the routine.
It was quiet all morning in Jerusalem, and we went out to our local grocery store again. He saw his favorite cashier, Jerry, who was there, and it was like a reunion of long-lost friends. Danny can’t hide his feelings, and when he’s glad to see someone, they really feel it. Jerry was happy to see him, too. “Thank you so much for coming!” he said.
Danny enjoys picking out the kinds of cheese, cookies, and fruit he likes. As we waited in line to pay, there was a kind of party atmosphere in the longer-than-usual line, fostered partly by Danny. He asked one man where he was from, and the man answered upstate New York. A man further down the line said, “Me, too,” and it turned out they were both from near Newburgh, and, not surprisingly, had a mutual friend. But they wouldn’t have discovered this without Danny’s questions.
Although our usual Friday excursions were curtailed, Danny seemed content, and in the late afternoon, we settled down as always to watch his favorite movie, Toy Story 2.
The rest of our day and evening went by quietly, and Danny fell asleep quickly around 10, after listening to me read Truck Song to him again.
SATURDAY
We were awakened at around 5:30 a.m. by sirens. Danny said he was scared and didn’t want to go, but he put on his sneakers when I told him to. I grabbed what I thought was a black sweatshirt for him – it’s cold in the shelter – but it turned out to be a pair of sweatpants. He was pretty miserable as he sat with the sweatpants wrapped around his shoulders. After telling one of our neighbors that he recently saw a backhoe and that it was yellow, and learning that the name of her dog was Messi, he put his head in his hands and didn’t look up till he got the all-clear. Who could blame him?
When we got back home, he couldn’t sleep, and we had breakfast. After a couple of hours, we headed to the synagogue. We’re not a religious family, but Danny and I started going to synagogue years ago when we lived on a moshav, and everyone there was very friendly to him. After we moved to Jerusalem, we joined a Conservative congregation where our friends were members, and people couldn’t have been more welcoming. Danny loves the people and finds the prayers, which are the same every week, reassuring. It’s funny that a need for repetition is considered part of the pathology of autism, but virtually all religions have the same service week after week, and it’s considered perfectly normal.
Only this Saturday, it wasn’t quite the same. A boy had his bar mitzvah and now has a story he can tell for the rest of his life, about how not long after his speech, sirens rang out. Danny got stressed more than I have seen him get upset over missiles since 2014. His hands were white as he gripped the seat, and he said, again, that he was afraid and would not move, only this time, he seemed to mean it. I think it was especially upsetting because he saw the synagogue as a kind of refuge where this couldn’t happen, since it never had before. But as the rabbis asked us to go downstairs to the shelter, he got up and went with everyone.
The shelter is used for a preschool during the week, and the walls were painted with the names of the children and had handprints in many colors. The service continued, and he was fine. It ended, and we got the all-clear. At the kiddush, there was an elaborate cake that looked like a boy next to a Torah scroll, and Danny liked it very much.
In the afternoon, we skipped our usual drive to see what he calls the Lion Tunnel, the tunnel by the Supreme Court building that is decorated with statues of lions, because I felt it was too risky to go to an area where there were no residential buildings where we could take shelter. But we did take out the recycling, which often turns into a long walk for us. This week, though, we went to the recycling stand right on our corner, where we could easily get to our building shelter, if necessary.
After that, we watched the movie Cars, another favorite, and had dinner. Danny was about to take a shower when we got a pre-alert, and I told him to sit down. Once again, sensing my stress, he apologized and hugged me. After 15 minutes had passed and there was no actual alert, the app said, “The event has ended,” and I told him to go ahead and take a quick shower. In October, he had been in the middle of a shower when the Houthis sent a missile our way, and I didn’t want to have to rush him to get dressed again. He has a certain rhythm for activities, and it’s difficult for him to change his pace, but he managed to speed it up.
After the shower, Danny asked me to read him Truck Song again. There were no alerts at night, and he slept straight until morning. I was very gratified that in the midst of all this upheaval, he could still sleep so peacefully.
Sunday
Sunday morning was as sunny and mild as Thursday had been. Accompanied again by my boyfriend, the drive started out a bit scary, as there were multiple alerts on the radio, which cut into the songs. But they were for the South, not our area. Dori Ben Zeev, the genial presenter on 88 FM, stayed calm as each song he played was interrupted over and over. As he did after October 7, he read from a book of poetry by Toyo Shibata, a Japanese poet who started publishing at 98, called Don’t Lose Heart.
And we didn’t. Danny pointed out every interesting car and milestone along the way, until he said, “It’s the Valley of Elah,” which was filled with goldenrod and seemed to glitter, and we arrived at his village.
He headed quickly to the kitchen to greet the staff, telling them he had had fun, and smiled when he saw that the cook had prepared fresh red cabbage salad, one of his favorites, as part of breakfast. It was hard for me to leave Danny, as it always is. I spoke to him about the next time I would pick him up, and he said, “It’s time for you to go and check on the baby,” which is what he still likes to call his 26-year-old brother, a hangover from the days when his brother was a little kid and used to get upset at being called a baby. I said I would and left.
As we drove back to Jerusalem, I thought about Truck Song, and how, when the trucker reaches his destination, the text reads, “Now backing slowly to the dock/I sign my papers/Check the clock/Unload the goods and when I’m done/I sign up for tomorrow’s run/Another route, another load/My rig and I back on the road.”
For over 25 years, Danny has been enjoying this story, which ends with the trucker meeting his goal and heading out for a new drive. Nothing has ever interfered with the trucker’s journey, and despite all the alerts during our weekend, nothing had harmed us. Danny was still able to enjoy the road trip and that plate of cabbage salad awaiting him at the end of it.
Maybe next time he is home, there will be no sirens, and he will not feel the need to apologize for a thing.