Jon Polin
Israel from the Inside, Aug. 20, 2024
“There is war, there are reserves, there is Lebanon and there is Iran. The hostages? “It’s complicated,” and they choose not to speak.”
Barely a few weeks into this war, back at the end of October or the beginning of November, we had most of our kids around the Shabbat lunch table. Some have always lived here. Some didn’t then (but are returning soon) and they had chosen to return to Israel to rejoin their unit; some were visiting to check up on us to make sure that we, their parents, were doing OK.
Given geography and the complications of traveling with lots of little children (we’ve been blessed that four more (grandchildren, not children) have been added over the past three years), we’re not often all together like that. So it was a wonderful time, but a fraught one. Several of the boys were at war, and the entire country was still in shock from October 7.
Yet it was also a naive time, a time when we still believed in Israel’s overwhelming power, a time when we “knew” we were superior to anything “they” had, a time when we felt with certainty that we’d get this all done quickly. Had anyone said then that nine months later Hamas would still be fighting the IDF and firing rockets at the Gaza border communities, we would have thought them nuts. The notion that Iran would actually fire 300 rockets at Israel would have been thought “unglued”. So many elements of where we are now seemed then, even though the war had already begun, utterly unimaginable. But here we are.
At that Shabbat lunch, the conversation turned, of course, to the hostages. One of our kids said, during the conversation, “If the hostages don’t come home, this country will not survive. And this country will have no justification for surviving.” … [To read the full article, click here]
