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.

While we were video-chatting this morning, my brother asked me what the sense was in Israel of when, what and whether America (and Israel(?)) would attack Iran. I replied that no opinion was worth the ether it was written on. Political commentators are only going through the motions of analysing Trump’s comments and actions because they are afraid that, if they admitted that they have no better idea than anyone else what he will do next, they would be talking themselves out of a job.

There is a sense in which we are all waiting for something to happen, and kind of wishing it would happen already, so that we could drink all the bottled water we have bought, stop wondering whether we should be sleeping fully clothed, and get on with our lives. There is certainly no atmosphere of panic buying or changing plans. Bernice’s brother and his wife even came for a short visit from England, recognising that if they wait until it is ‘safe’ to come they may never make it. Their only concession to the situation was to fly El Al rather than their usual BA. We had a lovely couple of days with them, and by the time you read this, they should be safely on their way back home.

Speaking personally, I must confess to not feeling particularly, and probably not sufficiently, worried about the external threat from Iran, or, indeed, anywhere else. I am convinced that Israel’s real existential threats are internal. I don’t pretend that this is an original thought. Indeed, I would say that it is now part of the national mood.

In 2025, for the first time since Israel’s founding in 1948, the rate of population growth fell below 1%. There are several reasons for this. First, it is a consequence of Israel’s age structure: large age cohorts of Jews and Arabs have begun entering their 70s and 80s, and life expectancy in Israel is about 83.

Secondly, fertility rates are declining in all sectors: most steeply in the Arab sector, but even in the Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) sector.

Finally, there has been a sharp shift in Israel’s migration patterns since 2023. In 2024, the number of immigrants entering Israel minus the number leaving turned negative, reaching -26,000. This trend continued in 2025, and is continuing in 2026, and has no precedent in the country’s history. While this mainly reflects the remigration of non-native Israelis (including many who are culturally but not halachically Jewish), it also includes increasing numbers of native Israelis.

Many of those choosing to leave wish to escape, and to take their children away from, a war zone. Months after the announcement of the ceasefire, there is no sense that the country is at peace, and parents of young children particularly are disturbed by the fact that their families are only too familiar with the drill for getting to a safe room or public shelter within the allotted time.

Others wish to escape the other stresses of life in Israel: the sectarian political squabbles; the refusal of the Haredi world to see itself as part of Israeli society in terms of military or civil service or the economy, and the clashes this refusal generates; the violence in the Arab sector and the unwillingness or inability of the Israeli civil authorities to deal with it; the burden of military reserve duty, the rise in the cost of living, the shortage of affordable housing, and so on and so on.

More and more Israelis are finding the strain of day-to-day living at this level of intensity unbearable, and are looking to escape to a simpler, quieter life abroad. Fewer than usual are looking to the US and the West, and more are looking to more remote locations in Europe and the Far East.

At the same time, other Israelis are looking at the stresses and faultlines in Israeli society and asking how the threats these pose can be met. I have only recently learnt in detail about one such group, and I thought today I would share with you the vision they are currently refining. The group is called The Fourth Quarter, reflecting the theory that young countries typically face existential challenges in the fourth quarter of their first century. This is certainly proving true of Israel, which turned 75 last May.

The Fourth Quarter is honing an Israeli Contract, designed to reflect a broad consensus on the most important challenges facing Israel. Let me present those challenges, and the proposed method for achieving common purpose to meet them.

Education

One education system with different streams.

There should be one common national education council, and a council for each stream. 50% of studies should be core curriculum, common to all streams. There should be a set budget for each child, and not differential budgets for different streams. In addition, preference needs to be given to fully national-Haredi schools, which will put an end to discrimination against Haredi pupils: every pupil is entitled to a state education. Local authorities will be compelled to set up such schools, and budgets and buildings will be made available for these schools.

Security and a Strong Army

We need a strong army and compulsory service. Currently 50% of the cohort do not enlist. The army is lacking 12,000 troops.

There should be no automatic exemption. Everyone should be required to report to the recruiting office, where priority will be given to the needs of the army. Civilian national service will be compulsory for Arabs. All those who serve will receive benefits, commensurate with their service: reductions in fees, help with childcare and housing. Exemption (at a rate of 5% of the total cohort) will be granted to the elite (in sport, music, Torah study, etc.)

The Torah World

The state should take responsibility for the Torah world. Yeshiva high schools should offer tailor-made tracks for military service. Decisions on exemption from military service should be made by the state and not by the yeshivas.

The Economy

Torah alongside work. An end to subsidising those who choose not to work. Maximising one’s earning capability should be a condition for receiving allowances and discounts. The status of ‘Yeshiva student’ should be time-limited (just like the status of ‘Student’). There should be a limited number of positions for Torah students (as there are for academics). The allocation of coalition funds (awarded to Government parties) should be restricted; it should be forbidden to award them to a particular sector only.

Law Enforcement and Governance

Governance: An end to Autonomy Outside the Law.

An emergency unit should be set up in the Prime Minister’s office to fight organized crime. An authority should be set up to oversee NGOs. The powers of private Haredi courts should be reduced.

The Keys to Lifelong Citizenship

Everyone should be aware, from a young age, that everyone serves: that is the default. A flag in every school should be a condition for state funding. Studies in Israeli history and civics should be a condition for schools receiving state funding. Everyone should receive their ID card in an official state ceremony. A high IDF enlistment rate should be a condition for a yeshiva receiving state funding. Citizens should apply directly to state institutions to receive services, not through agents.

I have presented the Fourth Quarter’s proposal in such detail both because I believe it identifies accurately so many of the pain points in Israeli society and also because I find it impossible to disagree with its proposed solutions.

Of course, the key question is: How do we get from here to there? It seems to me that the only answer is: By electing to the Knesset a new generation of politicians that are committed to effecting this kind of social change. In order to do that, we need to have leaders of that new generation who are willing to stand for election. The last two-and-a-half years have shown that suitable candidates exist. The aftermath of October 7 threw up an amazing number of social activists who displayed, and continue to display, the vision, the organisational skills, the empathy and the sheer energy we look for in a politician. What is less clear is how many of these leaders are prepared to enter the cesspit of Israeli politics.

What seems clear is that, until we eradicate the no-longer-sustainable mass exemption of Haredim from service and subsidisation of their exemption from the workforce, and until we address the inequalities and sense of abandonment by or dissociation from mainstream Israeli society felt by many in the Haredi, Arab and other sectors of Israeli society, the country will be unable to move forward from its current crises. Until political parties free themselves from the perceived need to buy Haredi parties’ support in a coalition, there is no way to move forward. However, if a political party emerges from the endeavours of The Fourth Quarter, then, at some point in the future, Israel may be able to start reshaping its social fabric to move towards its 100^th anniversary with renewed strength and confidence and a more united vision. The alternative may chillingly but realistically be that Israel will not reach its 100^th anniversary, and that is a prospect that I don’t want to contemplate.

You can learn more about The Fourth Quarter (in English) here, and you can respond to the survey they are conducting to help refine the Israeli contract (in Hebrew only, as far as I can see) here.

I inherited far too few of my parents’ many admirable traits, but one thing I am very grateful to my father for passing on to me is the Brownstein sleeping gene. If I wanted to add up the number of times in my life I have had to count sheep after failing to fall asleep within a few minutes of laying my head on the pillow, I could count them on the lambs of one litter. (Actually, on the rare occasions when I can’t drift off, I don’t count sheep. Instead, I play through an imaginary England Test cricket innings, which is usually more entertaining, and always more successful, than the real thing.)

However, I seem recently to have encountered a number of stories that threaten to disrupt even my sleep pattern. Since misery loves company, I thought I would, this week, share some of them with you, on the off chance that you’ve been looking around for something to make you feel really depressed.

First, a podcast referred me this week to a Substack article offering an insider’s view of the future of AI that, while being far from sugar-coated, does actually offer some guidelines on how to avoid being totally crushed under the wheels of the AI juggernaut. Rather than borrowing from the article (as I like to think of it) or plagiarising it (to be more accurate), and thereby failing to do it anywhere near justice, let me just give you a link to it. The article is very readable, and while, as I say, it pulls no punches, it does also offer what seems like very sound advice for those who are still (if, conceivably, not for as long as they think) in the workforce. So, pour yourself a stiff drink, and, if you haven’t already encountered it, settle down to read: “Something Big Is Happening”.

Next, the Sports pages of the Times of London. No, this is not going to be a bewailing of the inadequacies of England’s performance in the T20 World Cup. First, I realise this is a niche topic; furthermore, T20 isn’t real cricket anyway. In addition, any disappointment I feel is tempered by the knowledge that Australia, England’s arch rivals in all things cricket, haven’t even qualified for the next round of the competition, the Super 8 stage. This is a huge comfort.

What I really find depressing about the paper’s sports pages is that they are full of not-sport stories. One day it will be Sturla Holm Laegreid, the Norwegian biathlete, exploiting his live television interview shortly after winning a bronze medal at the Winter Olympics to confess that he has been unfaithful to his girlfriend. He had already confessed to the girlfriend, in private, and she had left him. By what journalistic criterion does this qualify as a news story? And even if we are currently living in a universe where the Winter Olympics biathlon bronze medallist’s lovelife is deemed newsworthy, then the story certainly does not belong on the sports pages.

Perhaps even more incomprehensible, because it is not even prurient, was today’s story about Coco Gauff, a black American tennis player ranked fourth in the world, who in a set of less than fluent answers, presumably in a press conference, stated her opposition to Trump’s recent deployment of ICE in Minneapolis. Is this a sports story? No. Is it a news story? Only if you believe that Coco Gauff has something insightful to contribute to the debate. If she has, she appears to be keeping it close to her chest. Her grandmother is apparently a civil rights figure who, in 1961, became the first black student to integrate her Florida high school. However, pedigree alone is not a sufficient qualification for Gauff.

This story followed on the heels of British-American skier Gus Kenworthy who posted an image purporting to show a urine script of ‘f*** ice’ in the Milan snow. I have to say that the neatness of the calligraphy (consider, for example, the perfect flow control required to render the dot above the ‘i’ in the picture below) leads me to suspect that the image was the equivalent of ‘airbrushed’, even before I added my censorship. So, this was not a sports story, not a news story, and almost certainly not a true story.

However, my prize for the week’s most depressing story was the publication of a report in Britain highlighting how increasing numbers of children are entering the education system in a state of unreadiness. Among the areas of unreadiness highlighted were personal hygiene, with one primary school reporting that 50% of children of the pupils in reception and nursery (ages 3–5) are not toilet-trained, and some are unable to state their own full names. An increasing percentage are also unable to interact socially at an appropriate level for their age.

The immediate consequences of these statistics for Britain are dire. Countless thousands of class-contact hours a year have to be devoted by teachers and teaching assistants to toileting, cleaning and dressing children, rather than to the curriculum’s age-appropriate education. These hours are disproportionately lost in schools whose pupils come from disadvantaged homes. Any hope of levelling up is destroyed in such an environment.

Above all, I can’t stop thinking about the home lives these children have been living for the years before they first come into the state system. The opportunities that have been lost to help them develop their innate intellectual, emotional and social abilities; the passivity of their early childhood; the stultifying lack of stimulation they have experienced.

I have been reminded in the last six years in my own family what an amazing time early childhood can be. To see how readily children respond to stimulation and how rich their potential is; to watch the joy in their discovery of the world; to see them explore and test the boundaries of humour, storytelling, music, painting. All of this is to have something of one’s faith in human nature restored, and to manage, somehow, and against all the odds, to sleep easy at night.

Sweet dreams,

I’ve spent the last four days trying to think of a topic for today’s post, and failing completely. Only just now, as I sat facing that blank white rectangle in the centre of the laptop screen, did I realise the reason for the blank white rectangle in the centre of my brain. There is an obvious topic for me to write about; it is one that I have been thinking about a lot in the last few days. However, it’s a bit contentious, and a lot serious, and I don’t quite have the necessary moral courage today to accept the challenge it represents. However, at some point in the near future it will probably loom so large that I will no longer be able to avoid it. Watch this space!

Well, if that doesn’t guarantee decent reading stats for the next week or two, I don’t know what will. Meanwhile, I’m forced to dredge up and recycle something I first mentioned in a blog post four weeks ago. You will doubtless remember that, when writing about our new lounge suite, I said:

“We confirmed the choice of fabric from the swatch book (Note to self: research the etymology of ‘swatch’ – such a wonderful-sounding word)”

I did, indeed, the very same week, research the etymology of ‘swatch’, and now, as a public service, I’m going to save you the trouble of doing the same.

Our journey begins in 16^th Century Northumberland (not an obvious tourist destination), where ‘swatch’ was a dialect word meaning: ‘a countercheck of a tally’. Now, if only we knew what a tally is, and what, indeed, a countercheck is, in this context, we’d be sitting pretty. As it is, we have traded one obscure word for two, in what doesn’t convincingly feel like progress.

So, let’s tackle ‘tally’ first. We all know, from our mastery of medieval Latin, that ‘’talea’ means: ‘a cutting from a plant, a, rod, stick or twig’. (Interestingly, in Greek. ‘talis’ means ‘a marriageable girl’, with, perhaps, the same associations as ‘Twiggy’ in English.)

In medieval times, it was common practice to record debts by a system of notches cut into a stick (the size and spacing of the notches indicating the size of the debt). This stick was known as the tally. In time, the sum indicated by the notches also came to be known as the ‘tally’. After the notches were cut, the tally would then be split lengthwise in two, so that each half retained the notch marks. One half, the master, would be kept by the creditor and the other half, the countercheck, would be given to the debtor, as a record of the debt. At any time, and particularly when the debt was to be settled, the debtor and creditor could lay their sticks side by side, to check that the two halves matched, thus avoiding any argument about the size of the debt. If one of the two parties tampered with his stick, in an attempt to cheat the other, then, obviously, the two halves would not match, or, as we say, they wouldn’t tally.

By the 1610s, in Yorkshire, the word ‘swatch’ had been borrowed and applied to ‘a tally attached to cloth sent to be dyed’. Presumably, this tally was simply a copy, on paper, of the original retained by the customer ordering the dyeing. This adaptation is an indication of the advance of literacy.

By the mid-1600s, a further meaning had developed: ‘sample piece or strip of cloth cut off for a pattern or sample’, which is, of course, more or less the normal modern meaning.

In a later development, the size and shape of swatches led to the term being borrowed by knitters, with a rather different meaning. In knitting, a swatch is a sample piece of knitted fabric used to determine the gauge of a project. It helps ensure that the finished garment fits correctly and is of the desired size. To create a swatch, you typically knit a small square (often 4×4 inches) using the same yarn and needle size as your project. This allows you to compare the gauge of your swatch with the pattern gauge, ensuring that your finished piece will match the designer’s specifications.  

One of the sources I looked up online including a graphical representation of the frequency of usage of the word ‘swatch’ over time. When I first looked at this graph, I was puzzled as to the astonishing increase in use of the term starting around 1988.

However, a few moments’ reflection were all that was needed for me to realise the explanation. In the 1970s and 1980s, Japanese companies such as Seiko and Citizen used quartz technology to threaten Swiss dominance of the watchmaking industry. In response, in 1983, Ernst Thomke, Elmar Mock, and Jacques Müller established a new company to produce trendy, Swiss, quartz watches to appeal to the younger market, and called the company Swatch. It is this company’s success that is responsible for the uptick in the graph above.

It is amusing that a name that was doubtless intended to sound modern and trendy should also be a word with such a long pedigree. The moneylenders of early-16^th-Century Northumberland could have no idea that their neologism would enjoy a new lease of life 475 years later. Such are the vagaries of vocabulary.

It takes the moon approximately 29.531 days to orbit the earth once. It takes the earth approximately 365.256 days to orbit the sun once. This means that it takes the moon 6,939.7703125 days to orbit the earth 235 times. And it takes the earth 6,939.864 days to orbit the sun 19 times.

If you could devise a calendar that measured time in lunar months, then adjusted the calendar to allow 235 months in 19 solar years, then, every 19 years, that calendar would be synchronised with the solar calendar.

The Hebrew calendar is just such a solar-lunar calendar. The length of the month is determined by the orbit of the moon. Some months are always 29 days long, some are always 30 days long, and some are sometimes 29 and sometimes 30 days. In addition, every so often (in 7 years of every 19-year cycle) an extra month is added to the year. In this way, the calendar ensures that the festivals fall at the same approximate time of year every year, and, using the fine-tuning described in the last sentences, the Hebrew calendar and the Gregorian solar calendar are synchronised.

Last week I celebrated my 76^th birthday, and, since 76 is 4×19, last Thursday was both my English and my Hebrew birthday. Sometimes the synchronicity is a day out, because of the effect of the irregular Gregorian solar leap-years (every 4 years, but not when the year is divisible by 100, unless it is divisible by 400). However, this year the synchronicity was exact: 29 January fell on 11 Shevat, just as it did in 1950. (For the purpose of this argument, I am assuming that I was born before sunset on January 29. There’s nobody left alive to ask and my brother only remembers that he was playing toy soldiers with his big cousin on the landing of our aunt’s home at the time. He can’t remember whether it was light out.)

To cut a long (76 years and 5 days, at the time of writing) story short, this year I completed four cycles, and that feels like some kind of milestone. I can already almost glimpse 2045, and my 95^th birthday, through the haze on the horizon of the next 19 years.

As if this were not enough to lead to some reflection on the transience of life, these last few weeks have brought a heavy burden of loss.

First, we heard of the death, in a freak work accident, of someone who was a couple of years older than Bernice and myself when we were all teenagers in Hanoar Hatzioni. Even though we had not seen him for many decades, the news of his tragic death came as something of a shock.

Far more painful were the next two deaths, in our closer circle. The first was that of the husband in a couple we became friendly with when they arrived in Maale Adumim from America about a decade ago. Although we had not been in close touch since they moved to Ramat Bet Shemesh a couple of years ago, we, in common with almost all their friends, felt close to them, mainly because of the incredible warmth in which they both bathed everyone they met. The husband suffered painfully with ill health for decades, but you never heard him complaining. Indeed, you never saw him without a smile on his face, and, typically, a joke on his lips. He died far too young, defeated eventually by the disease that he had refused to let define him for so long.

Also last week, my cousin’s wife was taken by a cruel cancer that made her last months a constant struggle to maintain her wonderful spirit. ‘My cousin’s wife’ fails to convey how much a part of the Brownstein family she became almost immediately and remained, over the 52 years since she ‘married in’. Her humour, her warmth, her generosity were always her signature, and she leaves a great emptiness.

Between these two deaths, I learnt that someone I was in Israel with on a year programme 58 years ago had died. We had met again at our programme’s 50^th reunion, and, in fact, Bernice and I shared breakfast with him on the day after the reunion ended, when almost everyone else had already left for home. He was a gentle, quiet-spoken and delightful man.

The sequence of these four deaths, one seemingly leading to another, and all leading up to my birthday, perhaps inevitably led me to reflect on my mortality. It is difficult to escape the sobering fact that, going forward, I can only expect to hear more and more of the same sad news, until the moment when I become the news item. The trick of fooling myself that I am still 18 years old is proving more and more difficult to accomplish.

And yet, at the same time…

I sat in shul a week and a half ago, watching the rows in front of me fill with the sons, sons-in-law and grandchildren of our dear neighbours, marking the Shabbat Chatan of their middle son. To see four generations of the family praying together, to wonder at how tall some of those grandsons are, while remembering their mother as a 9-year-old; to see a granddaughter whose father’s brit I can clearly remember; to remind myself that this family was celebrating not only a wedding, but also the birth of three new grandchildren in the preceding couple of weeks; all of this was to be reminded that just as there are always some stepping off the escalator, there are always, always, others stepping on at the bottom and beginning the long ascent.

And, if I need a reminder even closer to home, I only need to travel up to Zichron, as we did yesterday, and to hold in my arms a stirring, snuffling, warm, smiling (I swear he was, honestly) bundle of vibrantly actual and infinitely potential life. Still feeling his heft in my arms, I am today anchoring myself to the knowledge that, while mortality is individual, immortality is familial, communal, and thereby the stronger force. I can sense the haze lifting just a little on the horizon. I’m feeling ready to take on this fifth cycle!