Here and There

Please allow me (and maybe all of the Israeli participants, but I can only speak for myself) to apologize for having been and continuing to be a little bit preoccupied every now and then in the last couple of days. While we are here a war is going on in Israel and Gaza. My family and I live near Haifa, in the north of the country. In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, my wife was pregnant with our third child, and after a week we fled to Holland, where we stayed for five weeks. I constantly (wherever and whenever there is WIFI, that is) receive updates from home and follow the news. Yesterday it was very quiet in the north, my wife even went to a wedding with her mother, and our kids stayed home with an older cousin. This morning, though, I woke up to read that a rocket had been fired from Lebanon in the direction of Haifa. An elderly woman collapsed on her way to the bomb shelter and died. It appears to have been a lone incident, the rocket was fired by a small Palestinian organization. If, heaven forbid, Hezbollah starts to be an active player in this round of the conflict, we will be talking about a war of totally different dimensions, and the whole of Israel will be in the firing zone.  My wife whatsapped to me that at least the children were not woken up by the sirens this time. Most of the other Israeli CSA participants live south of Haifa, and all of them have families, so I suppose that they are at least as worried as I am. I can tell you that for people in southern Israel this has been their reality for a decade or more. Last March I was there with my school, and the people over there live in what for us is a totally unreal situation (except for those weeks in 2006). And I can only imagine what it must be like for the poor people of Gaza, who have basically nobody who truly cares for/about them. Anyway, if I (or any of us Israelis, but again, I cannot speak for anybody else) seem(s) slightly distracted these days, please don't take it personally or be angry about it.