As another week comes around, I can hear the kids next door playing in their garden.
They’re not sick, as far as I can tell.
Like so many other children, they’re home because their parents are too scared to let them out of their sight after the recent, indiscriminate terror attacks in which 11 innocent people were murdered.
Unsurprisingly, many do not feel safe here in Israel at the moment.
I was chatting to a woman earlier about the fact that I worry about my daughter walking home from school alone. I told her how I had offered to walk up to meet her so we could walk back together. My daughter, who isn’t at all worried about the situation, simply scoffed at the absurdity of the suggestion, given the fact that there was nothing I could do if, God forbid, we came under attack. She’d be fine walking back alone, she said.
Although my daughter didn’t get it, the woman readily understood my need to be there, just in case. In fact, she’d had a similar conversation with her own daughter that very morning and was on her way to collect her from an appointment, despite the fact she’s 27 years old! They had also discussed the idea of going for a coffee somewhere but then thought better of it and decided to head straight home instead.
Yes, we all try to put on a brave face and carry on so as not to let “them” win, but we’re only human. We may resolve not to put our lives on hold in the aftermath of an attack, but that’s easier said than done when the attacks are on our own doorstep (Israel is a tiny country) and most of the victims are known to so many, in one way or another.
There’s no “war” to speak of, just terrifying, random attacks that strike at the very heart of the nation, leaving scores of people broken and bereft and the country in turmoil.
Over the last days we’ve buried sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and so on;
Eleven lives brutally cut short.
As another week begins and the news cycle rolls on, not only is it essential for us to try to reclaim a sense of normality, it’s also important for us to remember the victims.
With that in mind, I have dedicated this column to those innocent Israelis, murdered on our streets by terrorists in cold blood as they went about their business; Jews, Christian, Druze, Arabs, Ukrainians…
Their names are listed below:
Beersheba attack – March 22: Doris Yahbas, 49, a mother of three; Laura Yitzhak, 43, mother of three; Rabbi Moshe Kravitzky, 50, a father of four; Menahem Yehezkel, 67.
Hadera attack – March 27: Yazan Falah, 19; Shirel Abukarat, 19; both Border Police officers.
Bnei Brak attack – March 29: Amir Khoury, 32, police officer; Yaakov Shalem, 36, father of five; Rabbi Avishai Yehezkel, 29, a yeshiva teacher and father of two; Victor Sorokopot, 38, and Dimitri Mitrik, 23, two workers from Ukraine.
May their dear souls rest in peace.
The writer is a former lawyer from Manchester, England. She now lives in Netanya, where she spends most of her time writing and enjoying her new life in Israel.