Week 17, Monday

For those of you who have had enough of me writing about ‘the situation’, good news: so have I (at least temporarily). For those who want more, let me point you (not for the first time) to the man who, more than any other, makes me feel that anything I have to say is less thoroughly researched, less insightful, less well-expressed than anything he has to say. Daniel Gordis offers a substack (whatever that is) also available as a podcast, entitled Israel from the Inside.

Click the link in the previous paragraph to read all about it, and read it, and even subscribe to it. In normal times, it provides a fresh and wide-ranging dip into anything of interest culturally, socially, politically, academically, scientifically – anythingly really – in Israeli life. (Since October 7, it has, naturally, reflected Israel’s almost exclusive focus on current events.) Its own blurb states, accurately: ‘Israel from the Inside is for people who want to understand Israel with nuance, who believe that Israel is neither hopelessly flawed and illegitimate, nor beyond critique. If thoughtful analysis of Israel and its people interests you, welcome!’ While aimed primarily at American Jews, it is relevant and accessible to everyone, and I highly recommend it.

74 Today

It may have slipped under your radar that today (or yesterday, as it will be tomorrow when I send this out) is (or was) my 74^th birthday. I was planning to celebrate by sharing with you some fascinating facts about notable 74s. When I started researching (which is a rather grand term for Googling) 74s, I soon discovered that 74 is the number of different non-Hamiltonian polyhedra with a minimum number of vertices. This looked promising!

In a previous existence, when I was at college studying to become an English teacher, I was required to take a second subject. I opted for maths, having eliminated all of the options that didn’t appeal to me, and, as part of my coursework, I completed a project on regular polyhedra, which included building models from stiff card of all of the stellated regular polyhedral. (A polyhedron is stellated by extending the edges or face planes of the polyhedron until they meet again to form a new polyhedron or compound.) Here, for example, is a stellated dodecahedron.

 So, non-Hamiltonian polyhedra sounded promising. All that I was missing was the faintest idea of what the hell a non-Hamiltonian polyhedron was. A little further delving clarified the issue. Non-Hamiltonian polyhedra are polyhedra that are not Hamiltonian. Well, who would have thunk it!

All that I was now missing was the faintest idea of what the hell a Hamiltonian polyhedron was. A little further delving clarified the issue. A ‘Hamiltonian’, I learnt, is a function that is used to describe a dynamic system (such as the motion of a particle) in terms of components of momentum and coordinates of space and time and that is equal to the total energy of the system when time is not explicitly part of the function.

Not yet entirely daunted (although the amount of daunt I had left was rapidly shrinking), I felt my heart leap as I read the dictionary’s final laconic instruction: ‘Compare Lagrangian’. ‘Well, this looks promising’, I thought. Lagrange I did at least recognise as the name of an 18^th Century mathematician, The definition of ‘Lagrangian’, I discovered, is: ‘a function that describes the state of a dynamic system in terms of position coordinates and their time derivatives and that is equal to the difference between the potential energy and kinetic energy’.

Increasingly, in recent years, I find that there comes a point in some of my research where I realise that Google has a lot more in common with Hampton Court maze than is first apparent. I felt that I had reached that point, and decided to look for other, equally fascinating, but less abstruse, 74s.

So, how about this? What is the definition of a hurricane (or, indeed, a typhoon)? It is a system with sustained winds of at least 74 mph. How, you are doubtless asking, did they arrive at this precise number? The only explanation I can find is that this figure is chosen on the Beaufort scale because it ‘represents the point at which the storm’s wind speeds become strong enough to cause significant damage to property and pose a threat to human life. Even so, the decision to opt for 74 rather than the more rounded 75 seems bizarre. Converting to kph or even knots (119 and 64 respectively) sheds no further light on the puzzle. Another mystery of life unsolved.

My final, desperate attempt to find something interesting to say about 74 is this. A ‘seventy four’ was, so I gather, a third-rate warship with 74 guns. This definition aroused my interest. I found it difficult to imagine His Majesty’s Navy being so self-deprecating as to describe one of its models of warship as ‘third-rate’.

This was, of course, in the days before British warships bumped into each other, as happened nine days ago in a Bahrain port, when HMS Chiddingfold reversed into HMS Bangor, apparently creating a large hole in the unfortunately named Bangor’s hull. Rear Admiral Edward Ahlgren sounded, to be frank, less than reassuring when he stated that while a full and thorough investigation is conducted, “the UK will continue to play a key part in ensuring the safety of merchant shipping in the region.” It would be petty to point out that the Royal Navy appears to be unable to ensure the safety of even its own shipping.

But I digress! Back to those third-rate warships. In the rating system of the Royal Navy, a third rate was a ship of the line which from the 1720s mounted between 64 and 80 guns, typically built with two gun decks (thus the related term two-decker). A second rate had more guns and a third deck, while a first rate had even more guns, although no more decks. The Navy maintained a hierarchical system of six “ratings” in all, based on size and firepower.

Ironically, the third-rate warships proved to be what we would term ‘first-rate’, since they represented an excellent balance between firepower and sailing qualities. These third-rate warships formed the mainstay of most major fleets in Europe until well into the 19th Century.

So, the mystery remains of why we persist in regarding third-rate as reflecting a ranking of quality rather than being purely descriptive and not judgmental.

And that, dear reader, is about all of the most interesting stuff about 74, so you can imagine what the least interesting stuff is like! I have to say that, so far, 74, for me, doesn’t feel strikingly different from 73. Personally, I’ll certainly settle for more of the same as I enjoyed when I was 73. We are all, of course, wishing for a better year nationally, regionally and globally, but that’s another story that I’m trying not to think too much about for this one day at least.

Editor’s wife’s footnote: I’ve just realised why this post isn’t very satisfying. It’s not at all personal; there’s nothing of David in it.

Editor’s footnote: Bernice is, of course, right, as always. I promise to try harder next week, but it’s now 8:52 on Tuesday morning, so I’m cutting it a bit fine for a complete rewrite, even with my track record of finishing homework on the bus to school.

Wot? No Photos!?

Although I have been vaguely aware of deepfake for some time, an article in The Times one day last week made me much more conscious of deepfake’s invasive reach and ugliness. Apparently, facial images are being lifted from social media and faked onto actors’ bodies in pornographic and paedophile videos.

Over the day after we both read this article, Bernice and I each independently started thinking about this, and when Bernice suggested to me a day or two later that I should stop posting photos of our grandsons, I had already reached the same conclusion. To recognise that this is what the world has come to, and that there seems to be no concerted effort to find a way back, is a depressing thing to think about on your 74th birthday, but it is what it is.

Week 16: Monday

Can We Win the War, or Have We Already Lost It?

I don’t have much in the way of good news to share on the national front this week. Indeed, at this stage it is not easy to imagine what might constitute good news. As one week gives way to the next, the declared (indeed, originally proclaimed) aims of the war – to bring home the abductees and to eliminate Hamas – seem less and less realistic.

As someone wrote about an earlier round of fighting in Gaza: ‘The public invariably expects the government to continue the battle and “flatten Gaza,” believing that with enough punishment the Hamas regime would collapse. Yet that would only happen if we sent in the army. The casualties would mount: many hundreds on the Israeli side and many thousands on the Palestinian side. Did I really want to tie down the IDF in Gaza for years when we had to deal with Iran and a possible Syrian front? (The someone was Netanyahu, in his autobiography.) Is the country ready for the daily rollcall of fallen soldiers – on a good day, one; on a particularly bad day last week, nine – to continue for years?

Note: It’s now Tuesday morning. When I wrote that last sentence yesterday, my heart sank as I typed ‘nine’. When I came out of shul this morning and caught the news headline, I wept: since last night, 24 reservists have died. Of those 24, 21 were in the process of mining two buildings used by terrorists close to the border, in preparation for their demolition; the buildings suffered a direct hit from an RPG, which triggered the mines, and the buildings collapsed on the soldiers. Is the country ready for this to continue for years? On the other hand, do we have any option? May their memories be for a blessing, and may their deaths prove not to have been in vain.

As for the hostages, the feeling is growing that it is unlikely that they can be brought home. This is a feeling that was for some time unspoken, but now, tellingly, is being articulated in the media as well as on the street. A prominent radio pundit last week baldly stated that it is completely unrealistic to think in terms of an Entebbe-type military rescue. The conditions under which the abductees are undoubtedly being held, the alertness of their captors, and the complexity of the terrain in which they are being held, all confirm what he said.

As for negotiating their return, it now appears that Hamas is not interested in the release of security prisoners (which, if Netanyahu were to agree to it, would probably bring about the collapse of his coalition). Instead, they are looking for a protracted ceasefire – possibly over 50 days – with a staged release of all of the abductees in return for increased humanitarian aid,

These conditions would, of course, allow Hamas to regroup, repair and recruit. Resuming hostilities after such a break would be, for Israel, like starting from square one again, All of our fallen soldiers to that point would have died for nothing. Not resuming hostilities would, of course, make their sacrifice seem even emptier.

Add to all this the fact that a significant number of the abductees are probably already dead, with more liable to succumb with every week that passes. This horrible situation offers no glimmer of hope that I can see.

Meanwhile, on the Northern front, it can be convincingly argued that Hizbollah has already won the war that officially has not started. They have advanced from North of the Litani river (as per international agreement) to the very border with Israel. The buffer zone has now moved from Southern Lebanon to Northern Israel. With almost 100,000 Israelis evacuated from Northern Israel, and with no indication of when, if ever, they might feel able to return, Hizbollah has effectively taken territory from Israel to a depth of several kilometres south of the border.

Can We Start Again?

Before turning my attention to other matters, let me leave you with a flicker of better news. Like the first saplings emerging in a forest ravaged by fire, here and there are signs of a possible direction for Israel’s political future. I heard today on the radio of a grassroots initiative to create a dialogue between religious and secular elements in Israeli society to explore common ground in the hope of being able to agree on a shared vision for Israel. There are, from various directions, calls for entirely fresh faces to enter the political arena: leaders of industry, organisers of voluntary initiatives, social activists.

Meanwhile, on Another Planet…(It Sometimes Seems)

Every now and again some philistine argues that state education should focus on ‘real’ subjects (like sciences and maths), instead of wasting time on ‘soft’ subjects like music and art. This month, the power of the arts has been demonstrated resoundingly in Britain…and Zichron Ya’akov.

Let’s start with the big story. (Those of you who live in Britain can safely skip the next three paragraphs.)

Between 1999 and 2015 an estimated 4,000 branch owner-managers at the Post Office were accused of wrongdoing after faulty IT software showed errors in their accounts. Many were sacked, chased for money, or accused of crimes such as false accounting, fraud or theft. As many as 900 were prosecuted and 236 sent to prison. Others were ordered to pay back substantial sums, leaving them financially ruined. Some of the accused have died without clearing their names, at least four are known to have committed suicide and others have been shunned after being convicted.

Horizon was the largest non-military IT system in the world in operation at the time and had been designed to deal with transactions, accounting and stock taking. It covered each of the 20,000 Post Office branches in the UK. From early on, many workers continually reported bugs in the system, with unexplained shortfalls in their accounts, but these were ignored. The Post Office allowed many of these workers to think they were the only one reporting faults.

In 2009, after being contacted by seven postmasters, the website Computer Weekly ran an article detailing their struggles with the system. It led to the formation of a campaign group, the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance (JFSA), which began talking to MPs and fighting in the courts. Eventually, the High Court ruled that there were IT problems in the system, the Post Office apologised for the suffering caused, 10% of convictions were quashed and, in 2021, a full public inquiry was initiated.

However, all of this was much too little, and, for many involved, much too late. Despite the very real concerns being in the public domain, the powers-that-be seemed to still be wishing the story would go away, and stalling.

Then, in the first week of January this year, the mainstream TV station ITV aired a four-part dramatization of the postmasters’ struggle for justice, with the title Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Overnight, this changed the entire status of this story. Within days, the Government announced that a new law would be passed “within weeks” to achieve a blanket overturning of convictions, the former Post Office boss returned her CBE (a middle-order rank within the British Honours system), and the public outcry generated new interest in the case on the part of the police, the public inquiry and the press.

There is a long tradition of British television drama exposing injustices. The first prominent example is probably Cathy Come Home, which was a 1966 BBC television play about homelessness, unemployment, and a mother’s right to keep her children, topics that were not until then widely discussed in the media. The play produced a storm of phone calls to the BBC, and discussion in Parliament. For years afterwards Carol White (who played Cathy) was stopped in the street by people pressing money into her hand, convinced she must be actually homeless.

In 1990, the TV film Who Bombed Birmingham raised serious doubts as to the guilt of the Birmingham Six, six Irishmen who had been sentenced to life in prison in 1975 after two IRA bombs went off at pubs in Birmingham, killing 21 people.  The film led to their subsequent release after 17 years of wrongful imprisonment. The film discredited the government’s most prominent forensic investigator and went as far as identifying the actual culprits.

Cathy Come Home was watched on its first broadcast by 12 million people, a quarter of the British population. In 1966, when Britain had only two television channels, such an audience size was impressive, but understandable. In 2024, the British public’s home viewing options seem almost infinite. The average viewing figures across the four episodes of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, of over 9.8 million, are therefore arguably even more impressive.

The question I have been asking myself is: How is it that a dramatization that presented no new facts, that did not, essentially, tell the public anything that they did not already know, succeeded in igniting a nation in this way? The answer, it seems to me, is that the sheer scale of the impact of this miscarriage of justice made it more difficult for people to conceptualise. Mr Bates vs The Post Office, as the title suggests, personalised the story. It focussed on an individual story (that of one victim, Jo Hamilton, and one – albeit the central – campaigner, Alan Bates) that served to represent the total picture.

This is, of course, part of the magic of drama: its ability to capture the universal in the particular. Viewers were able to identify with the plight of one victim and extrapolate from that, in a way that the story as reported in the media had failed to make them do.

At a time when funding of the arts in general is under attack in Britain and Israel, this month has given us a timely reminder that a healthy democracy needs a thriving and independent art culture, not least to ensure that stories that need to be heard are heard.

And Closer to Home

On a not dissimilar note, Raphael’s fancy has been taken in recent weeks by a charming book entitled What’s Cooking at 10 Market Street. Each flat in the eponymous brownstone is occupied by a family with a different ethnic cuisine, and each double page of the book visits one family to see what they are cooking, and includes a recipe. Raphael, who, it’s fair to say, is fascinated by food preparation, adores the book. Here is the double-spread devoted to the Pings, and their stir-fried broccoli.

Under the influence of this book, Raphael is now a great fan of broccoli. Such, dear reader, is the power of art.

Meanwhile, Tao seems to be fascinated by a very grand-looking cake at a friend’s recent birthday party, Ollie continues to find the world a really fun place, and Raphael really enjoys his new sponge paints.

Week 15: Monday

Yesterday marked 100 days, a figure which not only resonated here in Israel, obviously, but which also echoed worldwide, in a variety of ways. Most notably in Turkey, perhaps, where Sagiv Yehezkel, an Israeli footballer playing for local team Antalyaspor, dedicated to the hostages a goal he scored, displaying on a bandage on his hand the inked message ‘100 days 7.10.’ As a consequence, he was suspended by his team and detained by the police for questioning with regard to a possible charge of incitement against the state. We have just heard that he has been released by the police and is expected to be expelled from the country. (Update: he has landed safely back home.)

In South Africa, the Jewish captain of the national under-19 cricket team was relieved of the captaincy on the eve of the Cricket World Cup being hosted by South Africa ‘for fear of endangering his safety in the face of expected pro-Palestinian protests at the event’.

In Mauritania, the exhibition that an artist friend of ours was invited to make, after travelling in West Africa and painting what she saw, has been cancelled for fear of antisemitic and anti-Israeli demonstrations and a real worry that the gallery would be burned down if it displayed non-political paintings of West African scenes by an Israeli artist.

And, of course, in The Hague, the International Court of Justice is trying Israel for genocide. Israel agreeing to this Orwellian trial is either a very smart or a very stupid move.

The statement from the German Government spokesman, when discussing his country’s request for third-party status at the hearing, was very encouraging: “In light of German history and the crimes against humanity of the Shoah, the German government is particularly committed to the [UN] Genocide Convention…We stand firmly against a political instrumentalization [of the Convention]… The German government decisively and expressly rejects the accusation of genocide brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice.”

David Cameron, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, when asked whether he thought Israel has a case to answer in the ICJ, stated: “No, I absolutely don’t. I think the South African action is wrong, I take the view that Israel is acting in self-defence after the appalling attack on October 7… To say that that country, that leadership, that armed forces…have intent to commit genocide, I think that is nonsense.

The US has stated that the allegations against Israel “are unfounded” and has called the submission at the ICJ “meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever.”

So far, so good. Naturally, the hearing also gives Israel an opportunity to make its case before a world audience that may find it difficult to ignore that case. While many of the ears Israel’s presentation of its case falls on will doubtless be deaf, there may be others that are prepared to listen.

The make-up of the justices hearing the case suggests that South Africa’s claim may even be rejected. While the judges do not represent their governments but are independent magistrates, nobody is under any illusions that Iran and its axis of evil partners will be swayed by Israel’s arguments. However, among the nationalities of the judges are several whose governments are not irrevocably hostile to Israel.

The 15 permanent judges hail from Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Jamaica, Japan, Lebanon, Morocco, Russia, Slovakia, Somalia, Uganda, and the United States. In addition, the parties to the hearing (South Africa and Israel) are each allowed to nominate a judge. It is not impossible to imagine a scenario where that panel votes 8-7 to reject the South African claim of genocide.

As I remarked to Bernice the other day, either the claim is rejected, which will be a good thing, or we will have an even clearer understanding of who our enemies are, which will be a good thing.

Meanwhile, in today’s (Monday’s) Jerusalem Post, Senior Editor David Brinn makes the excellent point that the slogan ‘Bring Them Home Now’ implies that the obstacle to the return of the hostages is our government or our army. Of course, this is not true. “The enemy is Hamas, and they would like nothing more than for the internal struggles that gripped Israel before October 7 to reemerge as a dominant force, with blame replacing unity as the primary fuel running the country… Hamas…could spare their people unimaginable suffering by simply doing one thing:” releasing the hostages. That, argues Brinn, needs to be the slogan going forward. Let us call on Hamas to ‘Let Our People Go!’ He makes a lot of sense.

Happy Talky Talky

After due reflection, we have come to the conclusion that we are a family for whom language matters, and one of the joys of this visit has been observing the language skills of all three of the boys.

Tao has spent most of his first four years with his parents, both of whom – Micha’el in English, Tslil in Hebrew – have avoided talking childishly to him. He also seems to have inherited his parents’ relish for language and his father’s ear. As a result, his command of English is very impressive. This obviously includes a mature vocabulary, but also an ear for accents.

Exposure to American children’s videos means that for his own imaginative play, when he is pretending to be a super-hero (or, more often, a super-villain such as the Green Goblin or Dr Spooky), he speaks in a pretty convincing American accent and register. In addition, when he combines his language skills with his considerable negotiating skills, he is often able to persuade his parents to see his point of view on issues such as bedtime or food treats.

Tao’s Hebrew is not as strong as his English. Although Tslil is very disciplined about always speaking to him in Hebrew, he usually answers her in English. One considerable side-benefit for Tao of his visits to Israel is that his interactions with his mother’s family, and with children of friends, help his fluency and confidence in Hebrew.

While his Portuguese is currently very much his third language, this is something that will, naturally, become stronger in the years to come.

Ollie, on the other hand, gets by at the moment with basically one sound: the schwa. (This is the sound of the second ‘a’ in ‘America’ or the ‘e’ in ‘item’.) Remarkably, Ollie can use this single sound, in combination with a set of hand signals, head movements, and body postures, to convey almost anything he wants to express.

While he usually only verbalises this one sound, there is nothing that Ollie does not understand. Indeed, the gap between his listening comprehension and his spoken expression sometimes seems ridiculously large. However, Bernice keeps reminding me that Micha’el did not speak until he was almost three (since when, of course, he hasn’t stopped).

What is slightly surprising, given his current limited range of speech, is that Ollie is quick to mimic, and has a good ear for mimicking, sounds that he hears. His animal sounds are very good; he quickly copied my tongue-clicking when I was imitating a horse’s clippety-clop; he adopted his brother’s raspberry blowing depressingly quickly; and, when Tao blew through a long tube and produced a note something like that from a shofar, Ollie immediately reproduced a remarkably similar sound without any tube or other artificial aid.

On our weekly visits to Zichron, we of course have the opportunity to see Raphael’s progress, in language acquisition. Like Ollie, he understands everything, and, unlike Ollie, he has a rapidly-growing vocabulary. While he very much favoured English until a couple of months ago, the influence of his gan has brought his Hebrew on tremendously (not least with such phrases as “בא לי” (I’d like…) or even, occasionally, “לא בא לי” (“Don’t want to). Paradoxically, what was always “מים” has now, for some reason, become “water”. He has also now graduated from a generic term that covered both Esther and Maayan to referring to Esther exclusively as “Mummy” and Maayan exclusively as “אמא” (Ima).

In addition, Raphael is now moving from single word statements to two- and three-word sentences, which he does not really appear to find quite as exciting a development as I do. Indeed, rather like his, and Ollie’s, ever-advancing walking skills, he seems to take it all in his stride.

As always, to spend any time with young children is to stand in awe of how they achieve what they achieve, at what speed, and with what apparent lack of effort.

A House Full of Action…and Then It Wasn’t

From Shabbat afternoon until Sunday morning, we had a houseful. Esther, Maayan and Raphael arrived to join Micha’el, Tslil, Tao and Ollie for a last overnighter. What a joy to see the three cousins interacting!

Then on Motzei Shabbat we had all the adult extended family round to see our lot, and for us to celebrate, very belatedly, Esther’s 40^th birthday. Uncharacteristically for us, the evening was marked by no formality: no speeches, no music, no presentations; just an opportunity for everyone to catch up and make a fuss of the three boys, all of whom stayed up and sociable way past their normal bedtimes.

The following morning, the kids somehow managed to keep the grandkids away from Nana until 8:30. When they could contain them no longer, they erupted into our bedroom, and we were soon up and into action. After Esther and family left mid-morning, Bernice and I spent the rest of the day with Tao and Ollie, while Micha’el and Tslil somehow managed to condense all of their varieties of stuff, including the many gifts the boys had been given by generous family and friends, into their cases and rucksacks.

This morning, after a last breakfast, and games, and stories, and one last puppet show from Nana (with Zippy – a shout-out to all the Rainbow fans among my readers), the taxi arrived at 9:45 and suddenly we were, once again, two old fogies banging around our suddenly huge house.

Games, toys, books, trikes, baby chairs, floormats, kids’ table and chair were all stowed away in record time. Birthday banners and balloons were taken down; floors were swept; kinetic sand was cleaned from Lego cars; marbles were retrieved from under sofas; the extraordinarily loud and aggravating battery-operated noise-maker toy that Micha’el and Tslil conveniently omitted to pack was discreetly disposed of. Finally, Bernice and I sat down to a quiet and leisurely breakfast.

…and in five weeks we fly off to Portugal.

Meanwhile, some photos, including a rare one of all three boys together (at Esther’s last week).

Week 14: Monday

A number of you (mostly from outside Israel) have written to me in the last couple of weeks, expressing appreciation for my reflections on ‘the situation’. Thank you for that support. While I actually want to write about a couple of entirely different things today, let me start by briefly reflecting on the state we are currently in.

Plenty of Whats, but Precious Few Hows

Discussion in the corridors of power, in the media and on the street is increasingly about ‘the day after’. This phrase is, I fear, deliberately vague, because everyone is increasingly reluctant to articulate exactly what marks the day before the day after. The official talk is of the aims of the war being the complete destruction of Hamas’s capability and the return of the abductees. However, exactly how we achieve either of those aims is far from clear.

Will anything less than the killing of all 30,000(?) Hamas operatives completely destroy Hamas’s capability? Tzahal claims to have successfully destroyed Hamas as an organised fighting force in northern Gaza. I very much doubt that that is the same as completely destroying its capability. What Tzahal has achieved to date, remarkable as it is both in its success and in its minimisation of civilian casualties, looks like little more than kicking the can down the road. Further down the road than previously, certainly; but, nevertheless…

(Let me put that ‘minimisation’ into context. Yesterday, the Gazan Health Ministry reported that at least 22,835 Gazans have been killed in the war. Israel reported that about 8,500 Hamas fighters have been killed. This represents a ratio of 1.7 civilian deaths for each terrorist death, in a war fought against terrorists embedded among and shielding themselves with a civilian population. This ratio is unprecedentedly low in the history of warfare.)

As for ‘bringing the abductees home’, everybody agrees that this is an aim; but how is it to be achieved? “They ‘must’ come home before 100 days are up” is the latest mantra, but it is a mantra without teeth. The sad fact is that, when you are fighting an organisation like Hamas, there are no pressures that you can put on them to force their hand.

The only thing we could offer them is an immediate end to the war and the release of security prisoners. As Hamas has made clear, this would be the equivalent of offering them the opportunity to prepare for a repeat of October 7 in another couple of years. Nothing else that we could offer Hamas (in other words, nothing that we would be prepared to offer) would be more valuable to them than witnessing the agony that their continued torture of the abductees inflicts on Israel.

The Histadrut (National Trade Union) has declared a 100-minute national strike on the 100^th day (January 14) to support the families of the hostages. I may be a cynic, but I fail to see how a national strike supports the families. I would have thought that a more meaningful gesture than damaging the economy and adversely affecting the functioning of Israel’s public life would have been volunteering to work an extra 100 minutes on that day. They could use this extra time to advance such initiatives as the payment of grants to businesses crippled by the war, and the provision of practical and emotional support for displaced families.

The entire Jerusalem Post magazine section last Friday was devoted to ‘the day after’, but, again, it was full of whats and almost empty of hows. Yes, a framework for Gaza has to be found where terrorism is no longer taught in the schools, but how? Yes, Gaza has to be rebuilt and its economy established and grown, while ensuring that no resources are taken to rebuild a terrorist infrastructure, but how? Yes, ‘the world’ has to take some responsibility for the policing and the nurturing of Gaza, but how?

Stating the whats when there are no hows to be found is, sadly, little more than mouthing political slogans, whether it is the Prime Minister or the man in the street making the statement. We are in Week 14, but the day before the day after looks no clearer and no nearer. The Chief of Staff stated yesterday during an assessment of the situation: “The year 2024 will be challenging. We will be at war in Gaza. We will be fighting in Gaza for the entire year.”

And so to matters less heart-wrenching, but no less important to me.

In the Eye of the Beholder

A week and a half ago, I took Tao to ‘the circus’. This was billed as a Ukrainian circus appearing on the stage of our local cultural centre in Maale Adumim in a performance dedicated to the memory of a local soldier who had been killed in Gaza. Quite apart from being on the side of justice in two current armed conflicts, and involving no animal acts, we thought that this was something Tao would really enjoy, and I would just about be able to tolerate.

In the event, the noise from the audience was far less than I had feared. Indeed, I could hardly hear the audience of children. Sadly, this was because the volume of the music that played throughout the performance was deafening. Tao didn’t make many comments during the performance, but I was unable to hear any of the few he did make.

The performance was very interesting, not least because of the difference between Tao’s experience and mine. What I watched was a rather sad affair: two Ukrainian circus people – a man and a woman – had been brought over, and augmented by half-a-dozen Israeli amateur gymnasts.

The Ukrainian woman performed a fairly good act balancing on a growing tower of chairs (although she failed to conceal the fact that each chair solidly locked into the one below it, rendering the act considerably less death-defying). She followed this with a graceful act balancing and spiralling on a silk skein suspended from the stage flies. The Ukrainian man performed a very good high-wire act, executing a perfect back somersault, and crossing the wire with his partner on his shoulders.

Apart from that, there was an inordinate amount of strutting and posturing by the Israelis, a few floor exercises, some bouncing on giant tyres and on Oscar-Pistorius-inspired blades attached to their ankles, and some general padding out of the afternoon.

Woven less than artfully around these acts, and ostensibly holding them together, was a devilish plot. A personification of evil (who provided the comic relief), was battling the rest of the cast (who, in a very demanding suspension of disbelief, we were required to believe were superheroes) for world supremacy. The villain’s avowed aim was to destroy the world, which would mean the elimination of fun and happiness but also, as he fiendishly pointed out, the elimination of school.

At the end of the performance, the superheroes were triumphant, trapping the villain in a net and hoisting him above the stage until he repented his evil ways, and left the audience with a message to spread love and joy.

While I was marvelling at the amateurishness of all this, Tao was never less than absorbed and more than once spellbound. At some point I decided to stop watching the action on stage and instead watch Tao. I then got much more out of the show, with the result that we both had a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon. As a bonus, by the time we returned home, I had almost completely regained my hearing.

I was a little surprised that the performance included an intermission, until I realised that this was just a marketing ploy. The foyer of the cultural centre was given over to the sale of merchandise. On offer were water guns, equipped with laser sights and looking chillingly realistic. Of course, in a country where every child at the moment sees assault rifles in their homes, streets, shopping malls and synagogues, authenticity is significant. Well, I had no intention of buying an assault rifle, even a water-firing one. So we kept looking.

Also on offer were rotor hand-held fans, laser-pointers and suchlike, all looking rather tatty and all on the theme of Santa Claus. Well, I had no intention of buying any of that, either. So we kept looking. Tao, I have to say, was very patient and accepted without any fuss that we weren’t buying anything we had seen so far.

It was at this point that we discovered a small pile of bubble-blowing guns. The downside was that they required a battery and played music. The upside was that the volume of the music was soft, and each gun came with not one but two bottles of bubble-mixture. Fortunately, Tao thought a bubble-blowing gun was a wonderful idea as well; the price was a half of what I had expected, and so we made our purchase.

Sadly, once we were home, Tao demonstrated that, in the imagination of a four-year-old, a rainbow-coloured bubble gun can be conjured into being as destructive as any far more realistic assault rifle. Still, once his parents had insisted that the slipperiness of the bubble-mixture spill meant that this was an outdoor toy, we were all well satisfied.

While Tao was at live theatre, Ollie was engaged in a puppet show, and Raphael was learning all about the seasons at gan.

Week 13: Sunday

I was just reflecting on the fact that it no longer seems practical to measure the passage of the war in days. This, in itself, is unusual for Israel when marking the passage of time during wars, but, as we approach the three-month mark, nothing points to a conclusion being reached any time soon. Today’s local news seems to be probing this passage of time from any number of directions.

First, the Government today decided to further postpone the local and municipal elections from the end of January to the end of February. With large numbers of candidates for mayor and for council seats currently serving in the forces, and with potentially many more than a hundred thousand reservist voters still serving on January 31, it is widely felt that a fair election campaign, and a large and informed voter turnout, would prove impossible.

In addition, the academic year in higher education officially began today, having already been postponed. It is impossible to see how the close to 30% of students who are currently serving in the forces can be expected to make up the time they will inevitably lose; even if remote-learning and other provisions are made, it is unrealistic to expect women and men fighting a war to be able to give any thought to their academic studies. On the other hand, the country cannot afford economically to ‘lose’ an entire academic year’s cohort. There is, I fear, no fair and practical solution.

Meanwhile, the fragile coalition seems to be showing signs of cracking over, among other things, the issue of whether the question of what ‘the day after’ looks like is a ‘military’ question for the smaller war cabinet that includes representatives of parties that have joined the Government for the period of the war, or a ‘civil’ question for the larger security cabinet that includes the Likud’s right-wing partners in the Government.

These issues are, of course, playing out against the background of hundreds of thousands still displaced and with no prospect of returning to their homes in the coming weeks, with all of the domestic and national emotional and economic strain that this brings.

And above and beyond all of this is the still horrifyingly large number of abductees and prisoners of war held in Gaza, whose release seems no nearer this week than last.

Surrounded by all of this, with an extraordinary dissonance that I am finding it almost impossible to cope with, we have been enjoying the first week of Micha’el and the family staying with us. They arrived in the small hours of Sunday night, and after a day and a half Esther and the family came for a couple of days. Rather than attempt to write at length about my very mixed thoughts and feelings in this most surreal of weeks, I thought I would leave you this week with a photo montage.