Higher Than Me

At 1.00 AM last Sunday morning, I was woken abruptly by our bedroom door flying open and our ten-year-old son, Yaakov, jumping on to the bed.

Still half asleep, it took me a minute to figure out that the booms I was hearing outside were not part of my dream.

Colin and I both checked our phones and saw that Hezbollah was firing a barrage of rockets into residential neighbourhoods across the north of Israel. Israel’s Iron Dome was doing its best to intercept the missiles in the skies above us before they could land on the homes, schools, hospitals and shops where they were heading.

I explained to Yaakov that we were hearing the sounds of rockets being shot down and that if a siren went off in our area, we would all go into Hannah’s room (our apartment’s safe room). Yaakov was relieved that it was “only rockets” and not a tribe of thieves and kidnappers surrounding the house and pummelling on the windows, as he had originally thought!

I allowed Yaakov to enjoy his sense of relief. I didn’t tell him how serious this escalation in the war was. But of course, I quietly, groggily, grasped the significance of what was happening.

We are now approaching a year since that most dreadful of days on 7th October 2023 when thousands of Hamas terrorists in Gaza surged across the border into Israel and carried out a brutal spree of murder, rape and kidnappings amongst innocent and unsuspecting Israeli civilians.

Over the course of the year, the world media has gone crazy condemning Israel for its war against Hamas, seeming to forget that this barbaric regime is still holding around a hundred Israeli civilians hostage in Gaza, including elderly men, women, and young children. We don’t know how many of these hostages are still alive and Hamas refuses to tell us.

But, while the focus of world news has been on the humanitarian situation in Gaza, no one has reported the fact that Israel has been defending itself against attacks from terrorists in Lebanon for the entire duration of the war.

Hezbollah, the internationally designated terrorist organization sponsored by Iran and operating out of Lebanon on Israel’s northern border, has been launching missiles into Israel since the day after Hamas carried out its horrific massacre on 7th October.

Even before Israel lifted a finger against Hamas – while her forensic experts were still retrieving and identifying the dead – Hezbollah was baying for more Jewish blood on the northern border.

Last October, in response to Hezbollah’s rocket fire in the north and the potential for a terrorist infiltration from the Lebanese border similar to the Hamas incursion from Gaza, the Israeli government decided to evacuate all the communities living within 3 km of the Lebanese border. This affected over 40,000 people. Many more thousands of people living within 5 km of the border “voluntarily” evacuated because of Hezbollah’s daily missile attacks. Altogether, around 60,000 people were forced to leave their homes in northern Israel (and this is without taking into account more than a hundred thousand people displaced from the Gaza border communities in the south).

For nearly a year these people have been internally displaced within Israel, living makeshift lives in hostels and hotels or staying with friends and relatives.

Many of the northern evacuees no longer have homes to go back to because Hezbollah’s relentless missile attacks have decimated the towns and villages they come from. Rebuilding these northern-border communities will require billions of shekels and years of work whenever the rockets finally stop.

For nearly 12 months, the northern evacuees have been calling on the government to take action and make it safe for them to return home. Too often, they have felt like their voices have been falling on deaf ears. Every day, Colin and I drive past a big billboard on the main road leading into Nesher, where we live, that says in Hebrew: “Enough! Stop abandoning the North.”

What other country in the world would tolerate a neighbouring regime firing rockets across the border every day? What other nation would stand idly by while the country next door steadily obliterated dozens of its villages, displacing tens of thousands of its citizens? Yet the world expects this level of “restraint” from Israel.

Over the last few months, Israel has hardened its stance towards Hezbollah. Instead of responding to the missile attacks with small, token gestures – firing only as far into Lebanon as Hezbollah fired into Israel – it has embarked upon a targeted campaign to assassinate the Hezbollah leaders responsible for its terrorist operations.

On 17th September, Israel’s security cabinet made “The safe return of the residents of the north to their homes” into an official war goal. Later that day, Hezbollah’s network of pagers began to “spontaneously” explode, injuring over a thousand Hezbollah operatives, in a move that was later traced back to Israel’s secret services.

In response, Hezbollah unleashed its arsenal and began sending missiles deep into Israeli territory.

Since Saturday’s sleepless night, we have heard many more explosions overhead. Several times sirens have sounded, warning us that rockets are heading directly for us. Where we’re living in Nesher, we have just sixty seconds to make it into our bomb shelter when we hear a siren.

It is an extremely stressful time, particularly trying to explain the situation to Yaakov and Hannah and keep them calm. All the schools are closed, so Hannah is back to learning on Zoom in what feels like a macabre throwback to COVID lockdowns.

I wish we didn’t have to go through this. I wish that our children could be spared this trauma and anxiety. But at the same time, I fully support Israel’s right to take military action against Hezbollah and I believe that it is necessary.

The world media is focusing on the damage and loss of life that Israel’s air strikes are causing in Lebanon. They are not considering why Israel needs to carry out these strikes, or why Hezbollah – just like Hamas in Gaza – is conducting its operations from civilian areas.

It was not reported in the western news that Israel’s attack on a building in the Dahieh neighbourhood of Beruit last Friday was in fact an extremely precise missile strike that eliminated the top commanders of Hezbollah’s shadowy Radwan unit as they met together to plan a ground invasion of the Galilee. The Radwan unit has been planning and training for this act of aggression, known as “Conquer the Galilee,” for many years. The intention is to carry out acts of terror and hostage-taking in civilian communities across northern Israel, much like the Hamas attacks of 7th October – only bigger because Hezbollah is far stronger and better equipped than Hamas. It is widely known that Hamas drew inspiration from the Radwan unit.

Nor is it being reported in the world media that the reason why Israel is carrying out air strikes in civilian areas – and therefore why the roads are jammed with thousands of Lebanese people fleeing for their lives – is that Hezbollah makes rental payments to Lebanese civilians in exchange for a room in their home to store its weapons. Just like Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah is using Lebanese people as human shields.

I know of no one in Israel who is delighting in this war. War is brutal, bloody and costly. It is my deepest prayer that peace will be restored to the region and that civilian lives will be spared – in Gaza, Lebanon and in Israel.

But I also believe that Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah is necessary. World history has shown us that despotic regimes do not often bow to diplomatic pressure and that evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

I hate it that I have to worry about keeping my children physically and emotionally safe while the maniacal terrorists across the border aim rockets at us, but I am also proud of my country for having the courage to stand up to a key player in the Iranian-sponsored axis of terror that poses an existential threat not just to Israel but to the whole free world.