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.