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.