I managed to get a few hours of sleep last night, after drinking a big glass of wine (my third or fourth of the day – I lost count) at around 1am in an attempt to relax my mind and body enough to fall asleep.
Just to give you an idea of the scope of what happened, according to a Google search I just did, 600 deaths here would be proportionately equal to approximately 20,600 deaths in the US – six 9/11s. That’s what we are facing right now.
We are living in a nightmare. Against the backdrop of battles between Israeli forces and terrorists that are still continuing down south and renewed tension along the northern border with Lebanon (terrorist groups fired several mortar bombs across the border last night and our troops are responding), the magnitude of what’s happening here is starting to take shape. They’re currently reporting more than 600 confirmed dead and more than 2,000 injured, and the names of those who lost their lives yesterday are beginning to trickle into the public sphere. You look through the lists praying not to see a familiar name, but at the same time, whether or not you know them isn’t really important. Israel is a small country, and everyone knows someone who has been directly impacted.
One particularly heartbreaking (I feel like I’m going to use that word a lot over the next few days, weeks, and beyond) aspect of the lists is when you see several people with the same last name listed one after the other, signifying that several members of a family were murdered. One list had three people with the same last name, and you can’t help but wonder if one of them was a child…
My Facebook feed is filled with photos of Israelis who are missing/were kidnapped. A young mother and her two daughters, aged 4 and 2, are being held hostage in Gaza. One friend’s son, another friend’s nephew – both taken to Gaza. (It is believed that more than 50 Israelis are now being held in Gaza – both soldiers and civilians. Youngsters. Elderly – some of whom, might be Holocaust survivors. The mind can’t cope with such a scenario. I know mine can’t.
What do we do? How do we get them back? How does the government—and such a horrifically incompetent government at that—bring these people home safely? How many terrorists with Israeli blood on their hands will we have to release from our prisons in order to bring back a two-year-old girl being held captive across the border? I mean, maybe our intelligence organizations and our military (yesterday’s outrageous failure notwithstanding) would somehow be able to locate and rescue a few of our citizens, but more than 50? All of our options are agonizing to think about.
It is utterly maddening and mind-blowing that somehow, our government, our military leaders, and our intelligence agencies were caught completely by surprise by what happened. I’m not going to write anything else about my feelings at the moment regarding this aspect. There will be time (and hopefully energy) to focus on that later, and I really don’t feel like talking about it now. My anger is too great to put into words, and I can’t deal with the extreme depth of my sadness and the absolute fierceness of my anger at the same time. I have trouble managing the intensity of my feelings even on the best of days – it’s impossible to do it on the worst of them.
The three of us are still safe, though so many people are not. Reservists are either being called up or volunteering for duty on a massive scale. Schools are closed across the country today. Yesterday, a call for blood donations resulted in blood donation centers being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of people who came to donate.
I really don’t know how to end this post. There is so much to say and nothing to say. It is exhausting to come up with words that adequately convey feelings, so for the moment, I’m going to stop trying.
One last note – I’m making all of these posts public on purpose. Please feel free to share if you wish to do so. There’s no need to ask.
UPDATE: Moments after posting this, it breaks my heart to share that the friend who thought her son was taken to Gaza recently shared on Facebook that her son was murdered by terrorists on the kibbutz where he lived.
UPDATE #2: A soldier from our town was killed in battle yesterday. My son knows him because they have a mutual friend.
