Blogger’s Note: On Thursday of this week, local elections are taking place for 136 ; authorities in England, including some of the largest cities and the whole of London. I have a very real fear that, once the results of those elections are announced, it may be a very long time before I feel like writing a light-hearted blog post again. So, this week, I am making the most of the sunshine while it lasts.

Here in Maale Adumim, the season has very definitely changed. Last week saw me in open-toed sandals, and even in shorts on a couple of days. It is true that, since then, we have had a light sprinkling of rain, and, as I write, on Tuesday afternoon, the wind is once again setting the towering cypress swaying gracefully and our screen door banging gracelessly. However, it is impossible to miss the fact that spring is very firmly here.

In our front garden, the birds had clearly decided last week that the loquats were ripe enough to eat. Despite my clearly explaining to them every year that they are more than welcome to any fruit over three metres high, they still insist on having a taste of the lower-hanging fruit as well.

Fortunately, our tree yields enough fruit to keep both the birds and us happy. I have now, in three batches, harvested all but the last couple of kilo of fruit. Our total yield this year is likely to be about 13 kilo, which is more than enough for me to add a half-a-dozen loquat to our morning fruit salad for a few weeks, for us to offer bags of fruit to our neighbours (at least those who don’t have their own tree), for me to freeze several two-cup portions to make batches of ice-cream through the year, for us to take a bag every week for three weeks to Esther, and, as I decided last week, for me to make 3 kilo of jam.

All of which explains why I spent a good couple of hours last week removing the seeds and the innards from about 5 kilo of loquat. As always, I washed the seeds and laid them out to dry in the sun for a week, before soaking them for a month in alcohol, with lemon zest and vanilla pods, to make my loquat liqueur, which, unsurprisingly, is very similar in flavour to amaretto. Unfortunately, the seeds were exposed to yesterday’s brief rain shower while we were in Zichron, so I may have to give them an extra day or two to dry out completely. I don’t actually have a lot of wiggle room, because, as I realised with a shock after laying out the stones, if they are to sit in the alcohol for a month before I add a sugar syrup and bottle the liqueur, I will be completing the process only a couple of days before our next trip to Portugal, in mid-June.

All of which, of course, assumes that we will actually be going to Portugal in mid-June, and not, once again, running from home to air-raid shelter, or, another possibility presumably, being grounded because of a world oil crisis. These are possibilities we are trying, for the moment, not to contemplate.

After I had finished all of my loquat prep, I became aware, over the next day, of two distinct pains in my right thumb. I soon realised that I must be suffering from what I have termed LGBT – loquat-gutter’s buggered thumb.

For you to understand the pathology of LGBT, I should tell you (or, rather, remind you, since I did explain this on this very site just over five years ago) my technique for preparing loquats. The most important point is that, for ice-cream and jam, I don’t skin them. In preparing ice-cream, my Vitamix zaps the skin without missing a beat; in jam-making, the skin enhances both the flavour and the texture. My technique for ‘filleting’ the fruit is to hold a loquat between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, with the stalk facing up. I then place the thumb of my right hand on the calyx (the opposite end from the stalk), and push that thumb up through the centre of the fruit; almost as if by magic, the seeds, the membrane and the calyx all emerge cleanly from the stalk end of the fruit.

To clean 5 kilo of fruit, repeat this process about 200 times. You will end up with 5 kilo of very juicy, succulent fruit, a large bowl of innards and calyces, 2 litres of smooth, shiny seeds, and, of course, LGBT, which manifests as two separate conditions.

The first, and more immediate, condition is a fairly acute pain deep under the right thumbnail. I eventually decided this must be caused by tiny pieces of grit, twig and plant fibre that I had repeatedly pushed deeper and deeper under my thumbnail. I spent much of the next day with a nailbrush and a manicure set, trying, with limited success, to dislodge the more stubborn flecks of detritus. I am happy to report that, over the course of four or five days, the matter has decomposed sufficiently to no longer be an irritant.

The second condition I was vaguely conscious of by the end of the day, but only became fully aware of when, on Shabbat, I shook the hands of one or two shul members who have what we used to call a manly grip. This condition is thumbsprain – a word I am particularly pleased with for its five consecutive consonants. Incidentally, and coincidentally, the word in English with the greatest number of consecutive consonants (eight) is also a medical condition: congenital aganglionosis of the gut goes by the name of Hirschsprung’s disease. (Some people will claim that aspartyltryptophan – the dipeptide formed from the amino acids aspartic acid and tryptophan – has nine consecutive consonants, but the two y’s are both actually vowels in that word.

Eight days later, my thumb is now fully recovered, and I know that the jam, the ice-cream and the liqueur will more than compensate for the temporary incapacity. Even if our art is only culinary, we artists must, it appears, be prepared to suffer for it.

There are at least three urgent topics from this week’s news that have to be addressed, but…you know what, I just don’t have the strength. I take my hat off to Daniel Gordis, who, week in, week out, draws his followers’ attention to the questions that matter, both the obvious and the less obvious. If you want to know what those questions are this week, and, indeed, every week, then I recommend you subscribe to his podcast, Israel from the Inside.

Which leaves me free to focus on the questions that really don’t matter. For example, what constitutes acceptable audience behaviour at a classical music concert: more specifically, at the Proms, London’s annual, eight-week long, summer festival of daily concerts of classical music? Each season consists of concerts in the Royal Albert Hall, chamber music concerts at a couple of London venues, and many ancillary events. The season is a significant event in British culture and in classical music, and has been fairly described as “the world’s largest and most democratic musical festival.”

As the classical music world prepares for the 2026 season, debate has arisen over appropriate audience behaviour during concerts. The Proms have had some success in attracting a new, younger audience to classical music, but this has apparently created some conflict. Last week a debate started in the media over mobile phone usage at classical music recitals, which, according to the boss of the BBC Proms, threatens to alienate new fans. Sam Jackson has encouraged seasoned classical music lovers to embrace a new audience of listeners who may film with their smartphones, amid debate that the use of mobiles during these live fixtures can cheapen the moment and prove a distraction.

“Anything which makes them feel the Proms is welcoming to them is a good thing,” Jackson said when asked by The Times about excessive phone use. “What I am not saying is that I want everyone to have their phones out. It is absolutely not that. But there is a real risk in the classical music world that we hold back from welcoming new people.”

Let me make my position clear. I am, by temperament, firmly in the camp of those who clutch their metaphorical pearls at the prospect of audience members filming a concert, or, the other contentious issue, applauding between movements of a single piece of music. And yet, and yet, at the same time I recognise that my personal preference is just that, and not the only conceivable approach to listening to music.

Perhaps a little historical perspective, and a dash of etymology, are appropriate here, as they so often are.

Late eighteenth-century composers such as Mozart expected that people would talk, particularly when audience members took dinner (which many had served during the performance), and took delight in audiences clapping at once in response to a nice musical effect. Individual movements were encored in response to audience applause. Mozart would almost certainly have expected food, drink, gossip, and a rowdy 18th-century crowd.

The nineteenth century brought a shift in venue from aristocratic gatherings to public concerts along with works featuring an unprecedentedly wide dynamic range. Mahler clamped down on claques (groups of people hired to applaud a particular performer), and specified in the score of his Kindertotenlieder that its movements should not be punctuated by applause.

With the arrival of recording technology in the twentieth century, applause between the movements of a symphony or suite came to be regarded as a distraction from the momentum and unity of a work. With the background silence of 20th-century recording studios, audience noise has come to be viewed as intrusive to performers and patrons alike.

That this is a convention and not the only logical approach to listening to music can be clearly seen if we consider what constitutes appropriate audience behaviour when listening to jazz. It is regarded as good etiquette to applaud after each solo within a single piece or song, in acknowledgement of the soloist, and also, particularly when the instrumentalists play an elaborate intro to a well-known standard, the moment the audience recognises the tune they may well applaud.

To give one last example: applauding after an operatic aria is a time-honoured tradition.  In truth, it makes no more or less sense than applauding after a single movement of a multi-movement symphony or concerto, particularly in a dramatic opera. Applauding after an aria is the musical equivalent of applauding after a fine rendition of a Shakespearean speech – Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, or Henry V’s ‘One more unto the breach, dear friends’ address to his troops. In the one context, it is regarded as acceptable; in the other, it is not.

To be honest, in both cases it seems to me to destroy the dramatic flow of the piece, and I would much prefer it if it never happened. Mind you, it is not as bad as the pernicious habit of applauding a star performer in a play when they first come on stage. I suspect that that is a habit driven by West End or Broadway theatregoers desperately wanting to convince themselves of the uncontainable excitement of the experience for which they have paid a mouth-watering sum of money.

In the context of the BBC Proms, which is where we started, promming refers to the use of the standing areas inside the Royal Albert Hall (the Arena and Gallery) for which ticket prices are much lower than for the seating. Prom concert-goers, particularly those who stand, are sometimes referred to as “Prommers” or “Promenaders”.

The businessman and musical impresario who launched the Proms, Robert Newman, wished to generate a wider audience for concert hall music by offering low ticket prices and an informal atmosphere, where eating, drinking and smoking were permitted to the Promenaders. He stated his aim to the founding conductor, Henry Wood, in 1894 as follows:

I am going to run nightly concerts and train the public by easy stages. Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical and modern music.

In light of all this, Sam Jackson’s call for tolerance to be shown toward an inexperienced audience seems very much in the Proms tradition.

I should perhaps also point out that there is a long Proms tradition of Promenaders following a very specific etiquette at the final Prom concert of the season. The Last Night of the Proms is, shall we say, an irreverent occasion, as you can see here and here. (In the second clip, you may not immediately realise that the audience are humming along with the oboe soloist, but you can’t possibly miss them whistling along with the flute section and singing along with the brass.) Placed alongside the Last Night shenanigans, a little cellphone filming seems fairly tame.

So, despite my personal preference for near-sterile concert-hall conditions, I suppose I have to admit that audiences need to show a certain amount of tolerance. There is no substitute for being in the presence of a great live performance, and if the electricity that generates also creates a little static from time to time, that is, in honesty, a small price to pay.

Popcorn in the cinema, on the other hand….

My readership is split into two main groups: those to whom this week’s title will seem intriguing, and those who knew as soon as they read the first figure in the equation above what I am writing about today. I am writing on Tuesday morning, a little after 11AM, which means that the 2-minute siren sounded throughout Israel has not long died away. This is not a rising and falling siren, the kind that sends us immediately to our safe rooms and shelters, but the one that quickly rises to a steady pitch, and stays there, unwavering, for 120 seconds, to mark the daytime observance of silence for Israel’s fallen, both military and security forces and civilian victims of terror, who have been killed defending Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel since 1860.

Today is not the day to point out that the start of the modern assault on Jews in the Land of Israel began not in 1967 but in 1860. Today is the day to reflect on the 30,961 members of the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement before the state was established in 1948) and Israelis (since 1948) who have made the ultimate sacrifice for the Zionist ideal. This year, for the first time, each second of the two-minute siren carries the weight of 250 lives, and each life, as Jewish tradition holds, carries the weight of an entire world.

Listening to the state radio broadcaster’s treatment of Memorial Day this morning, I found myself wondering how to characterise it in today’s blog post. The first thing that struck me was to test our national feeling of the disproportionate enormity of the numbers against the experience of the only other nation I know at all. Taking the yardstick of deaths due to conflict since 1860, Israel has lost the equivalent of 0.33% of its current population. Britain, over the same period, has lost 1.86% of its current population, over five times as large a proportion.

Again, on October 7, 2023, on the day of the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, just over a quarter of one per cent of the population was killed. On July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme in World War 1, over two-fifths of a percent of the British population was killed. The Israelis were mostly civilians, massacred in their homes and at a dance party, while the Britons were conscripts, massacred in the Flanders mud. Nevertheless, as a proportion of the nation’s population, over one and a half times as many died on July 1, 1916 as on October 7, 2023.

Of course, the impact of that first day of the Battle of the Somme was not felt as immediately, as nationally, as graphically in 1916 as October 7 was felt in Israel. The world and its inter-connectivity are of course so different today from a century ago.

However, there is another difference. To illustrate it, I want to draw on the finest work of the finest of the poets forged in the furnace of the First World War: Wilfred Owen.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
 And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

What sings through Owen’s verse is the futility of the war and the meaninglessness of the loss. He views the dying soldiers as passive and powerless victims. Unsurprisingly, he does not for a moment see them as individuals.

None of this, I hasten to add, is intended as a criticism of the poem, or a suggestion that Owen was unfeeling. However, it is difficult to imagine a ‘treatment’ of soldiers’ deaths that is more different from what happens on Israel’s Memorial Day, in the public arena of newspaper features and radio interviews, just as much as in the private space of a mourning family. In Israel, every year, the unique path of each one of a host of individual soldiers is, with love and appreciation, traced by family and friends. This may seem like hagiography, but the hard evidence confirms that it is, rather, a celebration of an extraordinary group of individuals. 

Time after time after time, the stories illustrate the truth: a disproportionate number of the fallen are officers, leading their troops by personal example; a disproportionate number of those who volunteer or are selected for the kind of combat roles that bear the heaviest losses are the natural leaders, the idealists, the visionaries of their generation. So many of the fallen leave behind them diaries, journals, poems, songs, ethical wills that are inspiring. So many of them drank as fully as they could of the deepest joys that life holds: whether a closeness to nature, a tireless desire to help others, a deep love for another human being, a deep well of creativity: and, for so many of them, a simple, unbendable, recognition that they must serve their country.

Every year, Memorial Day uncovers more and more stories not only of bravery on the battlefield, of sacrifice for others, but also of lives, however brief, lived as fully and as well as they could be. Every year, we weep for the potential that has been lost, and wonder that there is so much potential and even, despite their youth, achievement, in the present generation of young soldiers. Every year, we wearily ask how long we need to ask our youth to make this sacrifice, and, at the same time, marvel at their readiness, if needed, to do so.

And, of course, alongside the commitment of youth, every year we measure, in astonishment and gratitude, the untiring readiness to serve of the reservists from previous generations. Who can weigh in the scale the sacrifice of a twenty-year-old with their whole life before them against the sacrifice of a parent in their forties with a young family? As, indeed, who can weigh in the scale the grief of a parent burying a young adult child against the grief of a young child burying a parent?

Which brings me to my last observation. On Memorial Day, the vessel in which the memory of the fallen is offered to us is the bereft family. Two voices stood out for me this morning. The first was that of a woman in her nineties, retelling the story of her father’s heroism in one of the key battles of the War of Independence, and of his death in action in 1948, when she was 14. This same woman was packing emergency supplies for the people of the Gaza envelope on October 9, 2023, when she was almost 90, when she was told that her grandson had fallen in action in the Gaza envelope. She fought successfully to have him buried next to his great-grandfather in the military ceremony on Mount Herzl, and she now visits the graves of her father and grandson together.

At 10 this morning, Liat Regev, the presenter of a daily interview programme, began by saying, with no introduction: “I visited the military cemetery on Mount Herzl with my father the other day. He is now in his eighties, and he can’t cope with the crowds of bereft families on Memorial Day itself, so a couple of years ago I starting taking him a few days before.” It wasn’t initially clear to me whether she was reading an account by someone else, but it soon became clear that she was telling her own family’s story, of her father’s own father falling in the early years of the state, leaving a widow and two sons, the younger of whom, Liat’s father, had hardly any memories of his father. All Liat has is two black and white photographs, and her grandmother’s and uncle’s stories.

This is Israel’s Memorial Day, when, it seems, almost everyone has an individual, deeply personal, national story to tell, even the radio presenter, and everyone listens. By the time you read these words, we will have transitioned, not, as I wrote last week, jarringly, but, rather, naturally sand inevitably, into the celebrations of Independence Day. If their journals, last letters, and ethical wills are anything to go by, this is only what those who paid the ultimate sacrifice would want. They leave behind them a collective message, urging us to embrace life.

I leave you with the wish, even though I am not foolhardy enough to think for a moment that it is a realistic wish, that next year, as this year, we will mourn 30,963 again, and not one unique life more.

For some unaccountable reason, my thoughts have been turning recently to the question of continued Jewish existence. I know: bizarre, isn’t it? Don’t ask me what triggered it, but there you are.

What struck me very forcibly is that the Jewish view of time is that the path of Jewish history unfolds along a spiral staircase. The path that we take, viewed from above, is circular, and that circle is the Jewish year. Historically, we step onto the staircase at Pesach, with the Exodus from Egypt, when Jacob’s children became the Children of Israel, and move through Shavuot and the covenant at Sinai when the Torah was given and received. At Sukkot we celebrate the protection God afforded the desert generation on their long journey to the Land of Israel, while at Chanukah and Purim we recall the miracles of the Maccabees’ defeat of the Greeks, and Esther and Mordechai’s earlier thwarting of Haman’s plans to exterminate the Jews.

Parallel to these historical memories is our annual exploration of our personal and national relationship with God. As a celebration of the agricultural year, the three pilgrim festivals are also a celebration of God’s relationship with the people of the Land, as expressed in the bounty of the Land. They are also, of course, reminders of the mass ascent of the people from their homes throughout the Land, an ascent to the Temple at those three festivals. At Yom Kippur, also, we remind ourselves of the role of the High Priest in the Temple, asking God to forgive the sins of the people. Further along the staircase, we commemorate the Maccabees’ rededication of the Second Temple, and, a little later in the year, the courage, faith and resourcefulness required when God hides his face and the Jews live in exile, with no Temple.

As I said earlier, viewed from above our path is a circle through the cycle of the year. However, viewed from the side, we are made aware of the vertical dimension of the staircase. The fact is that if, at every Pesach, we find ourselves exactly where we were spiritually last Pesach, then we have expended energy on the staircase, but we haven’t used it for the purpose it was designed to serve, spiritual ascent. Indeed, for some of us the staircase sometimes seems to be designed by M C Escher: as we walk along it, we are sure we are ascending, and yet, a year later, we find ourselves in exactly the same place as we were the previous year.

Within that annual cycle, there are smaller, self-contained, flights of stairs, that represent a historical ascent that we are invited to take inspiration from. The 10 Days of Awe, from the start of Rosh Hashana until the end of Yom Kippur, is one such brief and intense period of personal and communal repentance.

A longer period, the counting of the Omer, marks the seven weeks from the second day of Pesach until Shavuot, the period from the Exodus to the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. We learn how the Children of Israel, through their initial experiences before, during and immediately after the Exodus, were able to rise from slavery in Egypt to entering the covenant with God, and we strive to emulate that ascent.

There is another, flight of stairs, packed into the first part of the seven weeks of the Omer. I was going to call this Israeli, but the fact is that I don’t really see a distinction between Israeli and Jewish here, and the Jewish nature of this particular flight of stairs is completely undeniable.

We start with the first night of Pesach, the moment at which the Jewish people was formed. On the last day of Pesach, we remember the splitting of the Reed Sea and the drowning of the Egyptian army. A week later, we mark Yom Hashoah, the day of remembrance of the Holocaust and the Heroism. The survivors giving testimony are every year increasingly drawn from the millions of Jewish children swept up in the Holocaust (those survivors who were even as young as 16 in 1942 are now celebrating their 100^th birthday.) Naturally, most survivors were not old enough to be active in resisting the Nazis. And so, equally naturally, the stories that dominate the media in Israel throughout Yom Hashoah are stories of suffering, of hiding, of fleeing, of surviving, rather than of resisting. In the early years of the State, this view of the Shoah was at odds with the message of the Zionist endeavour. Modern Jewish military heroes wanted, and ‘needed’, to be provided with suitable models for imitation.

Thankfully, Israel matured, and became sufficiently confident in its military strength, to be able to relax the official line, and to give proportionate voice to the suffering and helplessness of the vast majority of victims of the Holocaust. The pejorative depiction of Jews going ‘like lambs to the slaughter’ was recognised as the factual distortion that it clearly is. On Yom Hashoah, and this has been true for many years, the nation mourns and honours all of those who were murdered in the Shoah, without distinguishing the helpless victims from the defiant resisters or the resourceful or fortunate survivors.

A week after Yom Hashoah, the nation again pauses, on Yom Hazikaron, to remember all those who fell in the years leading to the Declaration of Independence, and in all of the wars from the War of Independence until today, as well as all victims of terrorist attacks. As a friend observed on their Whats App status today: In Israel, we have two memorial days every year: the first to remind us of the cost of not having a state, and the second one to remind us of the cost of having a state. The timing of these two days, a week apart, has always hammered home that message very powerfully. However, since October 7, 2023, I have found it more and more difficult to contemplate that message without wondering, in a corner of my mind, whether there is not a dangerous smugness in the neatness of the message. ‘Never again’ sounds a little glib in the wake of the massacre at the Nova festival, and, after two and a half years of fighting, and despite some stirring tactical victories, to still have northern communities suffering daily bombardment from Lebanon, and troops still needing constant vigilance on the Gazan border, and heroes being killed and injured in Lebanon, and Iran with its nuclear threat still intact, is sometimes, in the cooler hours of a dark night, to wonder whether Israel does really offer every Jew in the world the promise of security.

Is the Jewish world in a better place now than during the Shoah? Without a shadow of a doubt! Is that difference qualitative or only quantitative? On October 6, 2023, I would have answered, without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Qualitative!’ And now, in the world after October 7? And in the world after October 8, by the end of which day it was clear that antisemitism had come out of the closet worldwide? I would still answer: ‘Qualitative,’ but only after thinking about it for a little while.

From Yom Hazikaron, we move instantly into Yom Ha’atzma’ut, and celebrate Israel’s independence. Some find that transition jarring. However, I think it makes perfect sense. You cannot in any way live with the terrible price the Jews and other citizens of Israel have paid to ensure the establishment and the continued existence of the Jewish state unless you celebrate the miracle that is that state. And, of course, Israel is not a perfect state. What country is? For some reason, many other nations demand that Israel, uniquely among the family of nations, be a perfect state, or forfeit its right to exist. They can demand, but we are not obliged to accede to their demand.

Nevertheless, there is so much to celebrate in Israel’s continued existence. Its unequalled absorption of refugees; its thriving economy; its incredible advances in agriculture, water purification, technology, medical science; its recreation of Hebrew as a vibrant living language; its thriving religious and cultural life. I could go on and on.

And so, at the end of a period of three weeks that began with the Exodus, we reach our modern world. Almost 3000 years brought us to the depths of the Shoah. Three more years brought us to the Declaration of the State of Israel. A further 78 years have brought us to where we are now: achieving miracles on a regular basis, partnering with a world superpower in a struggle to save Western civilisation from an existential threat, Is everything rosy? Far from it. Is the future secure? No. Would the State’s achievements to date have been imaginable in 1948? I think not.

Driving home from Zichron last night, still basking in the sunlight of Raphael’s energy and Adam’s chattering away in fluent rubbish, Bernice and I listened to a couple of instalments of Daniel Gordis’s essential listening: Israel from the Inside. After we listened to the second, I turned to Bernice and said: ‘There’s one word that leapt out at me from that discussion.’ ‘What word?’, she asked me. ‘Yet,’ I replied, and, from my mention of that one word, Bernice knew exactly the sentence of the 63-minute podcast I was referring to. Discussing how the current resurgence of antisemitism makes the Zionist idea as relevant now as it was to Herzl and Jabotinsky, Gordis said: ‘I don’t think Jews are going to get rounded up by train in America. I just don’t think that America has the capacity to do that…yet, but I don’t know what’s down the road.’

I simply cannot imagine anyone with Gordis’s intellectual stature and intimate understanding of Jewish American life making a statement like that at any time before 2023. I was even shocked to hear it now in 2026, after all that has happened in the last three years. However, if that’s what Gordis feels, then I’m certainly not in a position to question his judgement.

There may be moments when I have my doubts about the future of Israel as a Jewish, democratic state. However, when weighed against the prospects of future viable Jewish communities in the Diaspora, Israel still looks like the only genuine game in town. So, I shall be raising my glass next Wednesday, and drinking a toast to her second 78 years.

Blogger’s Note: Because the second Chag of Pesach begins this evening, I am posting 19 hours early this week. Next week should see normal service resumed. Meanwhile, Chag Sameach.

Earlier this week, I made a phone call to England, to speak to my cousin Marilyn, whom I love dearly. It’s a call I had been putting off making, as, it transpired, she had as well, because we were both afraid that if we spoke, in these very difficult days, we would find it impossible to avoid talking about ‘the situation’, and we both knew that would probably be a very difficult conversation, which we both feared might sour our relationship.

We bravely broached the subject of whether we should broach the subject early in our conversation, and, having more or less decided that we would avoid the issue, we then, briefly, didn’t avoid it. During this short exchange, Marilyn expressed her disappointment that in my blog posts, I, whom she knows as a person of some sensibility, have not, among all my references to the tragedy of the Israeli deaths since October 7, 2023, felt the need to mention even once the deaths of innocent Palestinians.

I want, today, to explore that observation, which is, objectively, undeniably true, and to ask myself whether that is something I should be ashamed of, and something I need to rectify. I will, as always in my blog, be thinking aloud. I have never seriously revised a first draft of a blog post, and I don’t intend to do so with this one. So, if it seems as though I am feeling my way, it is because I am.

My initial reaction was to consider the factors that contribute to the chasm that yawns between Marilyn and myself. Sixty years ago, we were probably pretty closely aligned as fairly typical children of the Britain of the sixties, although I was always (as anyone who knows either of us will not be surprised to hear) considerably more conventional – a Morris Minor to Marilyn’s Mini Cooper. Since then, a combination of factors has contributed to our views diverging. I became more religious, in the Orthodox Jewish stream; Marilyn’s Jewishness remained more a question of peoplehood. I came on aliya; Marilyn stayed in Britain. Marilyn continued to embrace left-wing, feminist, multi-cultural, pacifist values; I embraced increasingly mainstream Israeli nationalist values. I suspect Marilyn supports the idea of a Jewish state (although that’s part of the conversation I haven’t dared have in the last few decades), but not at the expense of any other people’s right to self-determination. 

All that is implied by that last paragraph is also, obviously, heightened by each of us inhabiting the echo-chamber of our life choices. I might note the wide range of political viewpoints represented in the Jerusalem Post, and the anti-Bibi sentiment expressed by many presenters on the state radio and TV network, but I only need to glance at Haaretz’s online headlines to see that there is a slew of stories and alternative opinions that I do not follow daily.

All of which leads me to two conclusions that pull in opposite directions.  Marilyn may not understand the reality of life in the Middle East, both because she does not live here and because she gains only partial and distorted insight from the media she accesses. At the same time, I may lack the emotional and physical distance to judge the situation here objectively, and the media I access are equally partial and distorted.

Events since October 7, 2023 have only heightened this media distance between us, in a way that is very relevant to this discussion. I understand from family in Britain that, during the war in Gaza, pictures of Gazan children, injured, killed, made homeless, in the aftermath of Israeli attacks, were a constant presence on British mainstream media. At the same time, these images were almost completely absent from Israeli mainstream media.

It appears that there is a lot of truth in the adage: Out of sight, out of mind. It is a lot easier not to think of suffering Palestinian children when they are not visible.

There are additional factors at play here. Throughout the war, the only figures provided of deaths and injuries suffered by Palestinians in Gaza were the figures provided by the Hamas-operated Gazan Health Service. Given the climate of vocal public opinion in the Arab world and in the West, Hamas were only too aware that any figures they issued would be accepted by large swathes of the West’s liberal population. There was certainly nothing stopping them exaggerating those figures: no independent body was in a position to authoritatively challenge them, and, as became apparent in the immediate aftermath of October 7, even before Israel counter-attacked Gaza, the world was very ready to accept Hamas’s version of the truth.

In the figures of casualties published by Hamas, no distinction was made between combatants and civilians. Indeed, as is very well documented, Hamas makes no distinction between civilian and military at any level. Rocket launchers were hidden in residential homes’ sheds. Hostages were hidden in residential homes. Hamas control centres were integrated into the buildings and communication systems of hospitals. Tunnel entrances were located in mosques and schools. Arms caches were hidden under children’s beds.

Faced with an enemy that fights this way, it is incredibly difficult not to accept the enemy’s own definition, and, instead, to make no distinction between Hamas and Gaza. In any war between nation states, not only the enemy’s armed forces, but all the enemy’s nationals, are the enemy. To be expected to play by different rules when the enemy is a terrorist group is a very big ask. It is, in addition, true that Hamas was elected in 2006, winning 74 of the 132 seats, Fatah winning 45. Hamas was democratically elected by the people of Gaza. They must take responsibility for that.

In addition, while it is not easy to gauge the truth in Gaza, it is undeniable that after the first wave of Hamas terrorists drove through the breached security fence on October 7, they were followed by thousands of ‘civilian’ Gazans, who behaved with a bestial savagery that matched that of Hamas. Similarly, the successful concealing of the hostages for months and months points to a high level of collaboration from the Gazan in the street.

Going back to the official Hamas fatality figures, they did make a distinction between the sexes and between adults and minors. The reported figures are as follows:
Men: 39,606; Women: 12,500; Children (under 18): 20,179

I turned to Country Reports, a website that provides facts and figures for the countries of the world, and extracted the following figures for the Gaza Strip:

Median age: 18.1; Sex Ratio at birth (male/female): 1.06

Applying that data to the official Hamas figures, if Gazans were killed entirely indiscriminately by Israel, we would expect the breakdown of deaths in the war to be as follows:

Men: 19,052; Women: 17,973; Children (under 18): 35,260.

It seems reasonable to assume that the ‘extra’ 20,000 men (and, sadly, some of the 20,179 under 18-year-olds) were Hamas military.

Ignoring the under-18 combatants, the ratio of combatants to civilians killed is, by this calculation, very slightly worse than 1:2.5. This is, as experts in urban combat have stated, an incredibly low ratio of civilian casualties. (In fact, there is some evidence that the Gazan authorities included all deaths from all causes in the above statistics, and that the true ratio is close to 1:1, which would be astonishing.)

Does any of the above make any less tragic each individual death of a child under the rubble of a collapsed home under aerial bombardment, or the death of a young woman mistakenly identified as a terrorist by automatic rifle fire? Categorically, no. Am I proud of not having acknowledged that earlier? No. Am I ashamed of not having acknowledged that earlier? I think not. We are at war, and the people of Gaza have done nothing to indicate that they do not support all of the actions of Hamas on and since October 7, 2023.

I end by reflecting on the words of a woman who was both considerably tougher than I am and considerably more compassionate, and so wise. Golda Meir is quoted as saying: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” I thank my cousin Marilyn for provoking/inspiring/triggering this post; I mourn the insensitivity to human suffering that living in the reality of the Middle East has tempted me into. I mourn the death of innocents in Gaza, at the same time as I defend Israel’s right to risk inflicting those deaths as an inevitable consequence of its justified decision to engage in an existential war. I weep for a world in which war is necessary, while also recognising that that is the world we live in, whatever Pope Leo might prefer to think. War is necessary, because to have liberal, democratic pacifists on one side of a conflict is not enough. It takes two to tango. I weep for the way the world is, but wishing it otherwise does not make it so, and Israel cannot afford the luxury of ignoring reality.

Dateline Tuesday afternoon. That this week’s blog post comes to you at all is little short of miraculous. Under normal circumstances, I can, most days, give a passing imitation of a functioning human being. However, the last four weeks of war have taken their toll on me. Not that we have had a tough time in Maale Adumim. On the contrary: our 54 sirens, and our total time of 14 hours 36 minutes in the shelter, place us in 361st place in the national ranking. Kiryat Shmone, in first place, has had 171 sirens and has spent over 44 hours in shelters. Add to that the fact that residents of Kiryat Shmone, being fired on at very close range from Lebanon, have, typically, no heads-up warning, and, effectively, no time to reach a shelter after the siren sounds, whereas we usually have five minutes or so between heads-up and siren, and, after the siren starts, 90 precious seconds to reach the shelter.

Effectively, this means that at night, we have time to add a layer of clothing, go downstairs, put shoes on, pick up coats and keys, and then sit and wait for the siren that may or may not come. We are not in the best place in the country: Mitzpe Ramon, down south in the middle of nowhere, shares 701st and last place (or should that be first place), having had its first and so far only siren on Shabbat, courtesy of the late-to-the-party Houthis.

Incidentally, you may remember me mentioning that we recently adopted the habit of wearing slippers rather than shoes in the house. This is out of deference to our new lounge suite with the reclining seats, whose footrests we are determined not to sully. One consequence of the war is that we now seem to spend a significant part of our day (and, sometimes, night) putting on shoes in anticipation of a siren and taking them off again when the heads-up fails to convert. It would be an exaggeration to say that it is a disappointment, after ten minutes sitting downstairs in tracksuit and shoes, clutching a coat, at 2AM, for the siren to fail to materialise, but a little of the edge of relief is taken off by all that retrospectively unnecessary effort.

Not that we are getting complacent. We diligently follow Home Front guidelines for every incident. Even when we were driving to Esther last week, and a siren caught us on the motorway, we moved into the nearside lane as soon as the heads-up sounded, and then, when the siren started, we stopped the car, got out, moved into the field by the side of the road, lay down, and 50% of us kept our heads down with our hands over our head for the full 15 minutes until the all-clear sounded, For much of that 15 minutes, 50% of us were occupied with saying: “Will you please keep your head down and covered by your hands!”, while the other 50% countered with: “A fat lot of good that will do if a half-tonne missile lands on me!”

It is not entirely clear to me which of us is Eeyore and which Piglet, in this scenario. Bernice firmly believes that if the missile has her number on it (she, who doesn’t even have an army number), then she might as well stay in the car in comfort and wait for it. I, on the other hand, am eager to take whatever meagre steps I can to mitigate the impact of a single small piece of shrapnel travelling eight inches above the ground.

I have to report that, apart from us, only one other driver, as far as we could see, stopped his car, and even he, after ten minutes of lying down, got up and resumed his journey. During the 15 minutes, upwards of 100 vehicles must have driven past us heading north.

At least everyone seemed to be driving sensibly. On other occasions, after a heads-up and before a siren that never came, we have seen drivers travelling 30 or 40 kph above the 120 kph speed limit, weaving in and out of traffic, in what was, presumably, an attempt to outrun the missile. Conversely, we have seen other drivers swerve into the nearside line and skid to a stop on the hard shoulder, narrowly avoiding causing an accident. There have, in fact, been several accidents caused by drivers reacting unsafely to a siren.

I see it is now 750 words since I mentioned that the war has taken its toll on me mentally: me and many others, I think it is fair to say. Let me pluck just a couple of examples from the many available. Bernice and I have whiled away a couple of afternoons trying to work out whether today was Tuesday or Wednesday. Last night, having changed over the kitchen for Pesach but not having time to cook, we decided to try out an Asian restaurant in our local mall. We spent the five-minute drive to the mall trying to remember whether the restaurant was called Oshi-Koshi (Wasn’t Oshen-Koshen a children’s clothing manufacturer?). It is, in fact, Oshi-Oshi (I think – let me check with Bernice – yes, it is) and surprisingly good, if, unlike me, you find the idea of eating in a mall attractive. In the end, I sat with my back to the passing pedestrian traffic, and the food was easily good enough for me to block out the background noise.

One last example. After our meal, we went to a cheap homeware store to buy something we needed, and then spent a couple of minutes in front of the store trying to remember what it was we wanted. We did eventually remember, although they did not have it in stock. Nevertheless, we chalked that up as a win, having remembered what we were there for.

Today, we had an early morning siren, around 5:30, and when we returned home at 5:50 we went back to bed. Bernice, thankfully, managed to go back to sleep, whereas I eventually gave up trying and got up to make what should have been an early start on my Pesach cake and biscuit baking. These days, I find I need hours just to get going in the morning, so it was actually 10:00 when I started.

I have a set routine that I follow every year. On paper, once I have prepared the mixture for the chocolate cake, the oven should be in constant use. If I work efficiently, I should be able to prepare the next item within the time the previous item is baking. The key words in that previous sentence are, of course, the first four: If I work efficiently.

If, on the other hand, when I am separating, the eggs a piece of shell falls in the bowl containing the whites, it takes time to fish it out. Bags of sugar in Israel are designed so that the glue bond on the top of the bag is slightly stronger than the paper, so that the bag, if you are not very careful, will split and require you to pause for clean-up and transfer to a plastic bag. The mock Tupperware I store the biscuits in is packed away very tightly after Pesach, and it can take a precious minute or two to prise apart two boxes that are wedged tightly together, and another full minute to get the lid to close once the biscuits are packed in. The pack of baking paper sometimes decides to play hide and seek in the kitchen. The baking powder and icing sugar sachets are almost indistinguishable from each other.

In a perfect world, I would have taken the last item, the cinnamon balls, out of the oven at 1:30. That I did so at 2:30 I regard as a definite win. Of course, the other thing my beautiful timetable fails to take into account is that, once the cooled and double-tossed-in-icing-sugar cinnamon balls are packed away, the countertops (or rather the polygal plastic that we tape down over the countertops for Pesach) looks like the scene, in Spielberg’s wonderful Peter Pan film Hook, where the lost boys have a food fight. Clean-up took another hour. Still, we now have a cupboard full of dessert to see us through chag.

Which seems like a good lead-in to wishing you all Chag Sameach. Wherever you are going to be, however you plan to celebrate the chag, and even if the war has changed your plans, as it certainly has changed ours, we hope that you will find meaning and joy in the holiday. My head isn’t there yet, but maybe next week I will reflect on some of that meaning in Israel in 2026.

The traditional question of the London black-cab driver reflects my own uncertainty. I had it all planned. This week’s post was all set to be a calm and measured philosophical reflection on the extent to which the artist’s conscious intentions determine the meaning of a work of art, all nicely inspired by a bang-up-to-date example, backed up by contributions from commentators from an earlier age. It was going to be a really class act. And then along comes ‘stuff’, and barges its way to the head of the queue, leaving me no choice but to be led by the nose.

Our story begins in the early hours of Monday, when three dark-clad and hooded figures were captured on CCTV setting fire to four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green, an area of north-west London some 50% of whose residents identify as Jewish. Hatzola is a charity that raises money, largely from the Jewish community, to finance the purchase and operation of an ambulance service that acts as a supplement to the National Health Service, providing emergency services to all local residents, regardless of race, colour or creed.

As the story developed over Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it a “horrific antisemitic attack”; Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch said that “all of us need to make it clear in our words and actions that Britain will not tolerate antisemitism”; the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan condemned it as a “cowardly attack on the Jewish community”. Meanwhile, the BBC resolutely persisted in referring to a “suspected antisemitic hate crime”. Let’s not leap to any hasty conclusions here. This may well have been just an act of random vandalism/

In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I have a small current agenda with the BBC. In the last week, catching myself spending rather more time than is healthy listening to panels of experts on Israel radio and TV attempting, and failing, to find a path of sanity through the dense undergrowth of Trump’s announcements and Iranian conduct of the war, I have taken refuge in BBC Radio 3, which is the BBC’s radio station dedicated to classical music and, to a lesser extent, the arts in general.

Their mid-morning programme has a daily feature, The Playlist, in which the station plays a piece of music near the start of the programme, and invites listeners to write in with suggestions of follow-up pieces that they feel would go well with the starter piece, in tone, style, theme, or whatever. Over the next couple of hours, the presenter reads one or two of the emails sent in, and then, towards the end of the programme, the presenter plays three or four of the suggested pieces that the programme’s producers have selected.

Yesterday (Monday), the starter piece was In Party Mood by Jack Strachey, familiar to boys and girls of my vintage as the signature tune of Housewives’ Choice, a BBC musical request radio programme that our mothers listened to in the 1950s. You can hear it here. I immediately knew what would make a perfect pairing, and I duly sent off the following email to the BBC.

The joyful forward drive of today’s choice, and something in the confidence of the orchestration (though I lack the musical knowledge to identify exactly what) brought to mind, for me at least, the work of Leroy Anderson. Might I suggest that The Typewriter Song makes a perfect companion piece, highlighting, as it does, one of the principal options open to women who chose not to embrace housewifery in the 1950s.

David Brownstein
Ma’ale Adumim
Israel

You can watch the Leroy Anderson composition being performed here.

I was delighted, a couple of hours later, to hear my email read out on air, as a prelude to my suggestion being included in the selection to be played. It was true that I was only one of many listeners who made this suggestion, but it was my email that was read out! I have, you will note, lost none of my competitive appetite.

Actually, that last paragraph is inaccurate. I wasn’t delighted, but rather disgusted. Let me explain why. The presenter is in the habit of reading the listener’s name and location – ‘Brian from Walsall’, ‘Heather from Beaconsfield’, and so on. However, in my case, the presenter declared: ‘David writes to say that…’

I must confess that I was a little devious in writing my address as Maale Adumim, Israel. I was fully aware that I was placing the presenter in a dilemma. As far as the BBC is concerned, Maale Adumim isn’t in Israel, but rather, I imagine, in the currently imaginary state of Palestine. So, she couldn’t say: ‘David from Maale Adumim in Israel’, nor even ‘David from Israel’ either of which would concede me a point the BBC wouldn’t dream of conceding. On the other hand, to say ‘David from Maale Adumim in Palestine’ or even ‘David from Palestine’ would be ridiculous. It is not possible to live in an imaginary state. She could have said ‘David from Maale Adumim’ but then, when listeners wrote in to ask where Maale Adumim was, she would not be able to answer them.

So she chose to present me as homeless, which prompted me to write a follow-up email:

I would be flattered to be selected for my email to be read out, and my suggestion if Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter Song adopted, this morning on Essential Classics Playlist, were I not disgusted by the fact that BBC Radio 3 feels unable (on what possible basis I can only guess) to include my address. 

I am typing this while I listen to missiles being intercepted… missiles which, if the future of Western civilisation rested in your hands, would soon be winging their way to a civilian residence near you. 

I would strongly advise you to pray to whatever supreme power you believe in that that never happens, and meanwhile to recognise and name the struggle that the US and Israel are currently engaged in for what it is. 

Yours in disgust, but, even more sadly, no surprise whatsoever

David Brownstein
Still of
Ma’ale Adumim
Israel. 

(I must confess that that bit about typing while listening to missiles was poetic licence, but I hope you won’t begrudge me that.)

Needless to say, as of writing I have received no reply, not do I expect to. I am currently contemplating how to present myself next time I write to the BBC. I might try just giving Israel as my address, to see how deep the BBC’s antipathy goes. I might, alternatively, just give Maale Adumim.

I know enough about Greek tragic drama to be aware that my feeling of occupying the moral high ground has the unmistakable sanctimonious smell of hubris. This should have made me more on the lookout for the inevitable nemesis. This arrived last night when I read about something that happened in a village called Burqa, in the Ramallah area, a very long way from Golders Green and yet, in a sense, nowhere near as far as you would expect. At about the same time as a gang of hooded thugs (possibly ideologically driven, possibly funded by Iran) were setting fire to ambulances belonging to a Jewish organisation in London, another gang of thugs (almost certainly Jewish settlers, ideologically driven) were attempting to set fire to a health clinic in an Arab village in Judea.

The symmetries here are inescapable. Some mainstream media in Britain made much of the attack on the clinic, and underplayed the antisemitic aspect of the attack on the ambulances, while some mainstream media in Israel ignored the attack on the clinic and headlined the attack on the ambulances. In both cases, a morally unjustifiable action against the innocent is lauded by its supporters as an attack on an entire group that is seen, uniformly, as the enemy.

In Britain, over the last years, it has been impossible to escape the feeling that the Muslim community, and, within it, Islamist extremists, were being given a free hand by the police and the authorities to act as they wished.

In Israel, over the last years, it has been similarly impossible to escape the feeling that the hilltop youth, and extremist settlers, have been given a free hand by the police and the authorities to act as they wished.

In both cases, this leniency seems to be politically motivated. Bibi indulges Ben Gvir; British politicians court the Muslim vote.

Having got here, I’m not sure where I go next. The irony does not escape me that I, too, am a settler, however nice the distinction the government, most of the population, and I  myself draw between ‘major Jewish conurbations’ over the green line, and outposts of a handful of families living in caravans. I know that the world’s decision, exclusively where Israel is involved, to regard land won in a defensive war as occupied, is arbitrary. I feel justified, geopolitically and culturally, in living throughout Eretz Yisrael. But that does not mean that I am not as sickened by settler violence as I am by antisemitic violence in Britain, or anywhere in the world. If we call out the one, we need to call out the other. Anything less is a betrayal of our values as human beings.

Let’s start with a quick roundup of this last week’s news from the theatre of war, which, it appears, is also the theatre of the absurd.

Item 1: Among those joining a march through London last week in support of the Iranian regime were CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Not since Queers for Hamas has an organisation shown so little understanding of the way the world is.

Item 2: Bloomberg News broke a story last week that the new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei, owns 11 properties in The Bishops Avenue, an exclusive street in north London known as Billionaire’s Row. The shell company through which the properties were bought received a £36 million loan that was ultimately financed by a company that is part of a British investment company founded by businessmen of Israeli origin, Sol and Eddie Zakay, brothers originally from Ramat Gan. I feel sorry for anyone writing fiction these days.

Update: Item 2 should, it now appears, read, not “the new supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei”, but rather “the possibly newly no-longer supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, Mojtaba Khamenei”.

Item 3: The Jerusalem Post reported that Russian officials lodged an official protest with Israel in recent days after a strike near the Iranian city of Bushehr unknowingly hit in the vicinity of Russian scientists working in the area. Repeated strikes near Russian experts were, they warned, unacceptable, and Israel must take precautionary measures. I may be wrong, but I think that’s what we call chutzpah.

Item 4: A British Government minister, explaining today why Britain was reluctant to send military support to keep the Strait of Hormuz open to shipping, emphasised: “Let’s be clear that it is dangerous. There are civilian ships in the Strait of Hormuz that are being fired on by the Iranians.” I had assumed that that was a substantial part pf the reason why Trump was asking for support from the British navy, but maybe there’s something I’m missing here.

Speaking of which:

Item 5: Ari Larijani, who it appears was actually running Iran, was eliminated by Israel in a precision strike on his home. Does he not follow the news? Arguably, Israel could have tracked him down wherever he attempted to hide, but choosing his own apartment to ‘hide’ in made killing him the equivalent of me playing Hide and Seek with my three-year-old grandson Ollie a year ago, when he was two.

Update: Larijani was apparently hiding in what he believed to be a ‘safe house’. It transpires that this was just another of his mistaken beliefs. (It’s not easy keeping up with all the breaking news in a developing story.)

Enough of this. Time, I think, to bring you up to date on our week, with a few siren stories.

At the end of last week, my niece shared with the family group that her boys had worked out how to tell whether our early warnings of possible attack would convert to sirens instructing us to take shelter. Typically, the heads-up arrives 5–7 minutes before the siren. However, we receive far more early warnings than sirens. This is because, when a missile firing is detected, an immediate assessment is made of the target area. This assessment is necessarily vague, and so large areas receive alerts. A few minutes later, a much more exact calculation is made of the missile’s target area, and only the settlements, or quadrants of cities, within that smaller area, receive a siren.

Maale Adumim is within the large area of Judea, which stretches north into the centre of the country. As a consequence, when the centre of the country gets a warning, all of Judea gets the same warning. When the target is narrowed down, only the towns and settlements in the north part of Judea receive a siren. Our great-nephews had observed that, when Jerusalem as well as Maale Adumim gets an early warning, then Maale Adumim always gets a siren. When Jerusalem does not get an early warning, Maale Adumim does not get a siren.

Naturally, we do not rely blindly on the accuracy of this observation, but it has so far proved correct. What this means in practical terms is, that if Jerusalem has also received an early warning, we put on our shoes and stay close to the front door. If not, we carry on with what we were doing before the alert, and listen out for, but do not expect, a siren.

The only time this system failed was when I failed to spot Jerusalem’s name in the list on the app. Having assured Bernice we should not expect a siren, I was as surprised as she was when we did. I now check even more carefully than previously.

Bernice observed, last Friday, that if the Iranians had any sense, they would send over a volley of missiles about an hour before Shabbat, when probably half of the country is showering, Sure enough, later that day, I had just stepped into the shower and was soaking wet when the alert sounded. I nipped out of the shower, checked my phone, saw that Jerusalem had not received an alert, and decided to carry on showering. Fortunately, we did not receive a siren, and I was able to complete my ablutions undisturbed.

We did have sirens over Shabbat, and, when we stepped into our public shelter, we found that it was virtually standing room only. One set of neighbours had two married children and four grandchildren with them over Shabbat. Another family had a set of grandparents staying with them. Another family had two married children and five grandchildren over. It was all very convivial.

By contrast, yesterday, when a gradual return to school had begun, of one family (two parents, four pre-teen children), only the husband and the two youngest children arrived in the shelter. This is a family who always come to the shelter, at any time of day or night. When we asked about the rest of the family, the husband explained that the two older children were in school. And the wife? With a sheepish smile, he admitted that she had stayed home.

I certainly know of some people who refuse to use their public shelter, and find what shelter they can in their own home, despite the insistence of the authorities that this is an unsafe and risky option, and despite the chilling video of the damage that a direct hit, and even of a substantial piece of shrapnel, can do to an unprotected home. Almost certainly, the longer the war goes on, the more people will weary of interrupted nights and disrupted days, and will decide to take their chances.

Meanwhile, a couple of items I caught on the radio in the last few days. First, a discussion about how many missiles constitute a salvo. Clearly, a single missile is not a salvo, and ten missiles are, but what about three, or two. There appears to be no clear official decision on this. And don’t tell me it’s only semantics. There is nothing ‘only’ about semantics.

Then yesterday, one of the two co-presenters on the morning news programme began by saying: “Forget about divisions between religious and secular, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazi and Sephardi. In the current situation, there are only two meaningful divisions in the country: between those who have a safe room inside their homes and those who have to go outside to a public shelter; and between those who have pre-teen children and those who don’t.” That statement rings very true. I am deeply envious of those who can sleep in their safe room and have a relatively undisturbed night, and I am full of admiration for those who manage to make it to the shelter with their large families of young children, time after time.

Finally, presumably in an attempt to calm those who can’t sleep for worrying about the war, Israel TV is rerunning, at midnight every night, all of the seasons of the very popular thriller series Teheran, about an undercover Israeli agent in Iran. Just the thing to settle the nerves, I would have thought.

I am pleased to announce that I have managed to complete writing this post with no interruptions from the East. This means I can now relax and prepare for the drive up to Zichron tomorrow. Wishing us all a quiet week and may we hear good news.

Well, here comes Tuesday again, and it finds me, again, facing a blank computer screen. That probably sounds a bit weary and edging on despair, but the truth is considerably more uplifting. I was reading a piece by the journalist Max Hastings yesterday, in which he described his feelings on rereading, at the age of 80, the letter that his father, the author Macdonald Hastings, wrote to the three-day-old Max at the end of 1945, and gave to him when he turned twenty-one. In the article, Hastings recalled his father giving him a piece of advice when Max was a teenager: “Embrace the challenge of a blank piece of paper”.

Hastings continues: “I could not then understand his meaning, but I do now. Every time I open a screen, I feel a thrill at filling it with words that somebody may want to read.” I’ll drink to that; or, rather, I would, if I were not slightly apprehensive that this war is driving me to the bottle a little more than can be justified medicinally. In a normal week, Bernice and I open a bottle of wine for Shabbat. If we are hosting for one meal, we open two bottles. Depending on which of our friends we are hosting, we may finish the two bottles over Shabbat. (You know who you are.) If we are dining à deux, we will enjoy a moderate glass each with each of our two main Shabbat meals, usually leaving enough for dinner on Sunday, and sometimes even a half-glass each on Monday, evening.

Apart from that, and a generous whisky for me and a small shisky (loquat liqueur) for Bernice for Kiddush on Shabbat morning, Bernice has a dry week, and I might have a small bottle of home-brewed beer with a plate of humous, techina and a pitta for lunch one day.

Last week, we certainly indulged at the Purim seuda (festive meal), if only, so we claim, to the extent required by Jewish law. A fellow guest, who, in our circles, qualifies as what Adam Montefiore (wine critic of the Jerusalem Post and scion of the famous family) describes as a feinshmecker, brought two excellent wines. He also brought two of the renowned cocktails mixed by his own fair hand, both rum-based, and simple politeness required that we taste both.

The week before, we had actually felt obliged, faced with an excellent sea bream fried to perfection by Bernice on the Monday evening, to open a midweek bottle of wine, which saw us nicely through until Shabbat, when we could open another.

When I suggested, last night, that we might consider doing the same again, Bernice issued a stern veto. So, I can state categorically that this war is not driving us to drink.

All of which, I realise with a shock, was a huge detour from the subject at hand, which was the thrill Max Hastings feels every time he faces a blank screen. I do identify with that, even if the thrill is occasionally accompanied by a certain sinking in the pit of my stomach as I realise I have no idea what to write about.

Which is almost the position I was in 535 words ago, and look how well I’ve done without actually having to decide on a subject for this week. Of course, we all know what I ‘ought’ to write about is the situation, or, rather, ‘The Situation’. If you are one of my more astute readers (and, of course, all of my readers are, by self-selection, more astute), you will recognise the above 600 words as nothing more than avoidance behaviour masquerading as bonhomie. The time has come for me to beard the lion in his den.

Now, there’s an interesting idiom. I thought you might like to know the origin. When David, the shepherd boy, appears before King Saul in Samuel 1, Chapter 17, and volunteers to fight Goliath, Saul rejects David, saying: “You are a lad and he is a man of war from his youth.” David then tells Saul: “When the lion…would carry off a sheep,…I would…strike him down and rescue it. And if he would rise against me, I would seize his beard and strike him and kill him.”

So, here, finally, is me, bearding the lion (having managed to waffle for 725 words). However, I am not going to talk geopolitics. Instead, let me just tell you about our war. From now on, this is much more for my readers outside Israel, than for those of my readers in Israel, who have probably had similar experiences over the last nine days to myself.

With an extraordinary sense of timing, halfway through that last paragraph, the heads-up alert from the Home Front sounded, preparing us for a potential full-blown siren in the next few minutes, after which we will have 90 seconds to reach our shelter. I will pause here, to put my shoes on.

That turned out to be a false alarm, as most of them, thankfully, are. In fact, checking on the handy widget that is available on one of the news sites, I see that Maale Adumim has slid (thankfully) from 181^st to 303^rd in the national ranking for time spent in the air-raid shelter since the war began, at 6 hours and 51 minutes, spread over 25 separate sessions in the shelter.

Yes: this being Israel, we have an app for that. You type in the name of your town and your record is displayed. You can try the app out here, provided you can type the name of a town or city in Israel in Hebrew.

This is, however, not the app that captures most accurately the spirit of the nation. That would be the one for which I have captured a screen (below) in English, which gives you a statistically calculated answer to the burning question: If I go for a shower now, what are the chances that I will be interrupted by an alert?

You can try this app out here. You simply set your location and the desired duration of your shower, and the app displays the probability that you will not be disturbed if you shower now, and also displays, in graph form, the calculated safety of any given time of day today.

The app also shows you the parameters used to determine the probability that you will get through your shower uninterrupted, and allows you to adjust the default settings that determine to what degree each parameter will influence the calculation.

The parameters include:

• Alert gap proximity (how long since the last alert).
• 24-hour activity today vs typical activity;
• Muslim prayer-time bias;
• Darkness and operational cover;
• Time-of-day vs history.

We take our flippancy very seriously in Israel, as you can see, and our seriousness very flippantly.

On a more personal note, the timing of the war was unfortunate for us. Before I explain why, let me emphasise that we, particularly in comparison with others, have nothing, literally nothing, to complain about. While others face the tragic loss of life from missile attack, the trauma of injury or a near miss, the disruption, financial loss and upheaval of property damage, the hardship of having a parent, spouse or child called up yet again for another tour of reserve duty in the North, the loss of earnings in a disrupted economy, the disruption of education for children who have only briefly known normality since before COVID, our not being able to go to Zichron last week was a mere annoyance.

Thankfully, we felt, and Esther agreed, that we should go up this week, and on Monday we drove up. The weather was glorious, the road was significantly less crowded than usual, and we reached Zichron in good time, with no hiccoughs. We had a great few hours with Esther, Maayan, Raphael and Adam. Raphael was full of three-year-old’s energy; Adam managed to throw up twice over Bernice and twice over me; and we wouldn’t have missed any of it for the world.

Our journey home was slightly more eventful; at one point we had an alert, but no siren. The instruction, in the event of a siren, is to park the car, distance yourself from it, lie down and cover your head with your arms. Since we grew up in an era when American children were drilled in sheltering against a nuclear attack by crouching under their school desks, this seems like a perfectly adequate defence against a half-tonne ballistic missile. We were also advised yesterday that, if you can’t escape your vehicle, you should wind down the windows and lie down on the floor. None of the reviews I read before we bought our car mentioned this as a design flaw of the Kia Picanto, but the fact is that an adult can lie down in a Kia Picanto only by parking right next to another Kia Picanto and removing the two touching doors, although, technically, that is lying down in two Kia Picantos.

More significantly, Micha’el and the family were due to arrive in Israel this Thursday, for a two-and-a-half week visit. Yesterday, Micha’el finally cancelled that trip, which we are all hoping will be rescheduled for later in the year.

At the same time, my brother and sister-in-law were due to come to Israel for a six-week visit, spanning Pesach. We planned to join them, and their sons and families (from Israel and England) for the first three days of Pesach. Now they have had to accept that they won’t be here for Pesach. This would have been only the second seder that Martin and I have shared in the last 53 years, and it is a real shame that it is not going to happen. Everyone else may, I suspect, be secretly relieved – two old men reminiscing about childhood Seder nights is probably as unforgettable an experience for others as it is for us, but in a subtly different way.

Not being able to be together with Micha’el and family, and, even more importantly, Micha’el and Tslil not seeing their siblings and their children, our grandchildren not getting to know their cousins, Tslil not seeing her parents and grandmother, and at the same time not getting to be with Martin and his family, are real disappointments. However, we are trying to keep it in perspective. We already have our next trip to Portugal booked for mid-June to mid-July, and maybe Martin and Adèle will come later.

Meanwhile, we just had another alert, and this one, for the first time here in Maale Adumim since Shabbat, was followed by a siren, and, once we were safely in the shelter, one of those explosions that sounds considerably closer than it probably is. You see us here in good spirits, waiting for the all-clear. Just before that, I remembered that I had not saved this post to the cloud before going to the shelter. As I remarked to Bernice: “If the house gets bombed, I’ll have to write the entire post again.” Thankfully it didn’t, so I didn’t. Round here, that qualifies as a good day.

Welcome to this week’s post Mark II.

For the first time in a very long time, I actually had a really good idea for this week’s post, andI even wrote it. This is how it started:

Dateline: Friday, 27 February, 2026

As the gardener left yesterday, Bernice remarked: “Well, when Iran retaliates, at least the garden will be looking tidy.” No, don’t ask me; I have no idea. However, I am fairly sure that Iran will indeed retaliate, because I am fairly confident that the US (and, possibly, Israel) will attack this weekend, or, at the latest, and with historic irony, on Tuesday, which happens to be Purim, when we celebrate our last unequivocal victory over a Persian extremist who wanted to annihilate us.

Where, you may be wondering, does my confidence come from. From my remarks last week, you would infer, correctly, that it does not stem from an in-depth analysis of Trump’s public statements. It comes, rather, from my feeling that I am just starting to wash the car. Let me explain. If ever the country is in the grip of a drought, I always like to wash the car as a public service, quietly confident that, if I do wash the car, it will rain the next day. Unfortunately, living as we do in Maale Adumim, sometimes what arrives overnight is not rain but a sandstorm, which just goes to prove that man proposes and so on.

In the present case, the car I am about to wash is in fact the blog post I am about to write. Having really struggled the last couple of weeks before finally coming up with a topic at the eleventh hour, this week, indeed a couple of days ago, something happened which prompted me to say to Bernice, once we had both stopped laughing: “Well, at least I now have a topic for next week’s blog.” Shortly afterwards, it occurred to me that, rather than running the risk of forgetting the planned topic by the time I sat down to write the post, I would write it early, and enjoy a stress-free Shabbat, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. This was beginning to look like a win-win situation, until it suddenly struck me that something might happen between now and Tuesday of such significance that I would be forced to scrap the planned post and write a new one.

Of course, the only obvious candidate for ‘something of such significance that I would be forced…’ is war with Iran. So, if it happens, you can blame me. Or, possibly, thank me. We’ll have to see how it pans out.

…..

Dateline: Monday, 2 March, 2026

Well, we all know how that panned out, don’t we?

And, if we are talking about irony, that line above about me enjoying “a stress-free Shabbat, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday” has certainly come back to bite me, hasn’t it? Indeed, Shabbat, Sunday and the start of Monday have all proven so much the opposite of stress-free that I turned to Bernice this morning and said: “I really can’t run with that blog post, can I?”, and, much as she would have liked not to have to, Bernice agreed with me.

Which is why Monday morning finds me writing a new post, this time about ‘the situation’, and filing the other one away for a rainy day. It is a good enough story that it will keep for that other, rainy, but simultaneously sunnier, day.

Meanwhile, let me tell you about my week so far. For the second week running, I woke early enough on Shabbat to get to shul for the start of the service, which meant that at 8:15, when the first siren sounded, I was already deep in the first part of the service. A friend who had kept his phone on, and on him, for just such an eventuality, informed me that the siren was ‘merely’ a signal that Israel had launched an attack on Iran and was anticipating retaliation, rather than a warning of incoming missiles. Nevertheless, our service moved from the upstairs sanctuary to the downstairs hall. I don’t personally feel this is any safer, since our shul is built on a hill and both the upstairs, with its entrance to the west, and the downstairs, with its entrance to the east, are actually on street level, and both spaces have a lot of windows.

Bernice and I, and a couple of close friends, stayed to hear the Torah reading and, specifically, this week’s special reading of Zachor, the passage in which we are commanded to remember Amalek and what the Amalekites did to the Children of Israel, attacking them from the rear after they had crossed the Reed Sea after the Exodus. It is a cliché that every year, every week’s Torah reading has a particular relevance to the current events of that week. Never has the truism been truer than this week, since Haman, the villain of the Purim story, is both identified as a descendant of Amalek and recognised as the political leader of the Persian empire who sought the total destruction of the Jews. Not for the first time it strikes me that not believing in God must require a tremendous act of blind faith in the face of all the evidence, but we won’t get into that.

We all left hastily immediately afterwards, and our friends, who live towards the fashionable end of our street, invited us to join them for refreshments. As we finished our drinks, a ‘proper’ siren sounded, and we made our way to their communal shelter, shared, as ours is, between their ‘terrace’ of five houses. After ten minutes, following what were the rules of engagement the last time we faced missile bombardment from Iran, we all dispersed, and Bernice and I made our way home.

Through the rest of the day, and the night, we suffered several more raids, in each case preceded by a ‘heads-up’ from the Home Guard, warning us to stay close to, and prepare to enter, our shelters. We also gradually realised that the rules had changed, and this time we were required to stay in our shelters until the Home Guard sent a clear message that we could come out.

Bernice and I decided that this time round we would take our chances at home, rather than having to dress and put on shoes during the night and go outside to the public shelter accessed from our neighbours’ garden. Tragically, a man of 105 died of a heart attack yesterday while making his way to a public shelter, and many others have suffered more and less serious injuries on their way to the shelter.

It is not easy to explain this decision. We rationalise it as follows. Our home includes an extension added by the previous owners. This enables us to sit in our upstairs hall, under the original external wall, which is now an internal wall (a strong structural point), by the stairwell (a strong, structural point), in a space with no windows and closed doors between us and all external walls. Our step-count is also enhanced by having to climb our stairs. Listen, you take what you can!

If our house takes a direct hit from a half-tonne ballistic missile, the effect, as we saw yesterday in the tragic attack on Bet Shemesh, would be no worse than if our public shelter takes a direct hit. If (the far likelier event) debris from a hit falls near the house and we suffer a shock and shrapnel, then I am confident it will not penetrate to our inner sanctum. Anyway, what are the chances that anything will fall in Maale Adumim – he writes after two large fragments fell a kilometre away and a humongous missile casing fell about as close, causing a boom which slightly dented even our joshing bonhomie for a moment or two. We had by then grown used to the sound and window- explosions, which we are hearing far more of in Maale Adumim than we did last June.

The Home Front app on my phone allows me to monitor in real time the alerts and attacks in Zichron Yaakov as well. Esther and family have the luxury of an integral safe room that doubles as a spare room in their flat, and they are sensibly sleeping there during this period, which means they get a considerably less disturbed night. The degree to which Raphael has, reportedly, adjusted to the situation is wonderful, and simultaneously slightly depressing, depending on how you look at it.

I went to the Health clinic yesterday morning to fill my prescriptions. I didn’t bother to make an appointment, fondly assuming that nobody else would be venturing out. As I walked up to the clinic, the sirens sounded, and I spent my first 15 minutes there in the fairly large shelter, which was packed out. When we received the message that we could leave the shelter, I found I was 18^th in line for the pharmacy, and it was taking the pharmacists a ridiculously long time to open up, so I gave my number to an older man who had arrived after me, and went home to make an appointment for later. When I returned for my 4:40 appointment, the pharmacy was empty. I had obviously caught the panic-buying morning rush earlier.

My regular bridge competition yesterday morning was cancelled, but I did play yesterday evening at the home of a friend, locally. She has a safe room in her apartment, but, when the early-warning siren sounded as we were about to leave after an enjoyable couple of hours, we all agreed we would drive home rather than staying. In the event, the early warning did not lead to a siren instructing us to take shelter. (This often happens, since the early warning frequently comes before our defences have been able to determine what exact part of the country the missile is heading for.) I got home safe and sound.

Meanwhile, in Tel Aviv, where many people in older neighbourhoods do not have safe rooms or even communal shelters close to their homes, many people have apparently been sheltering in the recently opened Tel Aviv and suburbs light rail, which runs underground for much of its route. While I am not old enough to remember it, footage of people flocking down the escalators on Saturday night’s television news put me in mind of the Blitz, when London Underground stations were pressed into identical service.

Until now, touchwood, tu-tu-tu, spit twice and turn round three times, we have not had a meal or a shower interrupted by a siren. Just sleep. As the above doubtless shows, living in Israel means taking all this sort of thing in your stride as part of daily life. Some might argue that that has to be a very unhealthy way to live. I think I would argue the opposite….but ask me again in a week.

Meanwhile, stay safe, Purim Sameach (we’ll be hearing the megila in a neighbourhood shelter – that’s a first) and may we all, by next week, have good news to share.