As soon as the fighting with Hezbollah escalated, I began looking for inspiring people to report on. It’s part of the job for a journalist living in a warzone.
There’s the obvious heroism of the Israel Air Force personnel and that of Iron Dome crews working tirelessly to save lives. Then there’s the steadfastness of the residents of Safed and other northern cities who have stayed put despite frequent rocket fire. Yet I was looking for the everyday bravery that is often overlooked.
In our quiet neighborhood in northern Haifa, I went down to the municipal bomb shelter, which suddenly looked like an out-of-place cafe. The bunker’s sidewalk had people chatting into the night as they snacked on sunflower seeds at tables laden with food, drinks and ashtrays.
This scene began unfolding this week in Kiryat Haim following the municipality’s decision to open the normally closed bunkers amid an escalation in the fighting with Hezbollah. Its terrorists have targeted Haifa with rockets for the first time in years as Israel hunts them and their assets in hundreds of strikes in Lebanon.
At least one family has moved into the shelter for a few days. Like most Haifa homes, that of Moshe Aladi, 36, has no sheltered area. When warning sirens go off, Aladi and his wife can’t reach the bunker with their three small children within the 60-second safety buffer.
“So we decided to camp out here at night instead of waking them up each time there’s an alarm,” Aladi said outside the bunker where his children, aged 2-9, were sleeping. “It’s a temporary, minor inconvenience until the Israel Defense Forces finish them off and give them what they deserve up there,” he added, referring to Hezbollah.
Aladi’s mix of determination and caution is typical of the 500,000 people who live in Haifa and its environs, where rocket fire has so far wounded several people but killed none. Hundreds have been killed in Israeli strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon, according to Lebanese media reports. As thousands flee Lebanese cities, Haifa has seen no significant population movement, the municipality has said.
The story of a family moving into a bomb shelter may be relatable, but it’s unrepresentative and not exactly the wartime tale I was looking for. The search continued amid rocket alarms—and logging my children into video conferences. Schools have largely shut down in northern Israel since Sunday in favor of Zoom learning and the scholastic excellence this method is famous for nurturing.
The escalation has done little to diminish everyday chores and complications. My father in the Netherlands needed help booking a plane ticket to Athens. The first rains in Haifa came with a leak in our roof.
Like Aladi, my wife and I also lack a rocket-proof space in the semi-detached that we bought here shortly after immigrating to Israel from the Netherlands in 2021 with our two children, 7 and 8.
Two of our neighbors have invited us to use the mobile shelters that they’d bought and placed in their yards earlier this year after Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel in solidarity with Hamas. Their hospitality, typical of how Israelis come together at times of crisis, is heartwarming. But if you, like me, find sharing an elevator awkward, try a small, stuffy shelter at 4 a.m. while wearing slippers and random clothing items.
And so we usually wait out the sirens in a windowless niche that also functions as our home office. We wrestle for the best spot with our 75-pound mutt, who got diarrhea just in time for the escalation. Forbidden from leaving the niche, the kids are easy prey to unwanted parental cuddling.
On Monday, I took my son out with me on a reporting assignment in the Kiryon, one of Israel’s largest and oldest malls, hours after a rocket landed about a mile away, damaging several homes and wounding three people. The place was deserted, but not for lack of interested would-be patrons.
Management had limited the mall’s capacity to 100, leading to long lines at the entrance. Security guards asked the crowd queued up to enter to disperse because congregating in the open was unsafe. “That’s right, so let us into McDonald’s already!” replied one man in Russian-accented Hebrew, prompting chuckles.
This imperviousness to terrorism, which has developed in the north over decades of living in Hezbollah’s crosshairs—including during the 2006 Second Lebanon War—is an important aspect of life here, I thought. But are fast food munchies the kind of valor under fire that I was looking for?
My dad called from the airport in Amsterdam, asking whether I had booked him a suitcase and whether he needed the receipt to check it in.
On Tuesday I made preparations to visit Safed, a northern city that is seeing far more rockets than Haifa. It’s remarkable, I reflected, that I get permission to run around in combat zones from my wife, a secular Jewish woman who was born in Amsterdam and moved with me to my native Israel three years ago on something of a whim.
Having despaired with regard to persuading me to return to the Netherlands with her and the kids for the duration of the war, she has accepted a situation she intensely dislikes and understands only superficially, as an outsider. Waiting out the sirens and loud thuds of inbound rockets that reverberate through the neighborhood, she resumes life’s routines, and her demanding job, with inspiring resilience. But one can’t profile one’s wife in a newspaper article.
Meanwhile, the trip to Safed got postponed. I needed to travel south on Wednesday for the one-year anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas onslaught, in which some 1,200 Israelis were killed or murdered and 251 more were abducted, triggering the ongoing regional war that has just escalated in the north.
It’s an important story, but it won’t help me report on how Israelis are faring up north.
I saw that during one siren I had missed a call from my father. He was born in Poland and made aliyah to Israel when he was 10. In the 1990s, he left for the Netherlands. Recently, he returned, settling in Kibbutz Eilon near the border with Lebanon. He had to leave shortly before the escalation because his spouse in Amsterdam got sick.
As in many families, my father, who’s 77, and I often argue over politics. A liberal secularist, he sometimes calls me, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, a “fascist.” I retaliate as best I can without running afoul of the fifth commandment.
“I’m here, the bald eagle has landed,” texted my father, whose mother was a survivor of Auschwitz and who has fought in three wars as an Israeli soldier. From Athens, he flew to Israel. He’ll be sleeping at the home of his sister, my aunt, in Samaria for a night or two, he said.
Then he intends to travel back to Eilon, which is almost completely vacant but for a handful of reservists guarding it and even fewer stubborn old-timers like my dad. The remainers prefer Eilon’s frequent drone and rocket attacks to the state-funded accommodations they’re offered away from the border. Like the other stayers, my dad is critical of the evacuation of the north, in which some 60,000 moved out of border adjacent communities. He believes it’s a strategic error.
“I’m too old to run,” he said of the prospect of leaving Eilon, “but too young to stay somewhere I don’t really want to be,” he added, referencing Europe. Then he asked me: “How about you? How’s the family, work? Did you find your inspiring wartime hero yet?”
