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.