MODIIN, Israel – About the same time that sirens sounded throughout Israel on April 30 marking a moment of silence on the nation’s Memorial Day, a major blaze broke out in the forest not far from my home.
The fire was concentrated in a wooded area near the main highway connecting Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and within hours spread to Canada Park, an idyllic expanse of forested hills where I frequently go mountain biking.
By afternoon, fierce winds and high temperatures fueling the conflagration forced the evacuation of nearby communities and prompted Israeli authorities to cancel public parties planned for that evening’s Independence Day celebrations. All available emergency personnel were needed to deal with the fire, which ended up burning 5,000 acres.
The turn of events ‒ having a fire emergency overshadow Israeli Independence Day ‒ felt like an apt metaphor for what has been a particularly bleak year in Israel. More than 18 months since Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel still is mired in a war that shows no sign of ending.
On the contrary, things are heating up again.
On May 3, the Israel Defense Forces sent orders summoning tens of thousands of Israelis for reserve duty ahead of what’s expected to be an intensification of the war in Gaza.
After a three-month hiatus in Israeli casualties on the Gaza front, Israeli soldiers started getting killed there again in late April, with seven deaths over the past two weeks, darkening the national mood.
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In Syria, Israel has been stepping up military interventions to protect Syrian Druze communities that have come under attack by Syrian government forces, and Druze communities in Israel want the IDF to do more.
In Lebanon, despite a tenuous ceasefire that ended the two-month war last fall between Israel and Hezbollah, the Israeli Air Force has been carrying out strikes against targets in the Beirut suburbs and points south, and the IDF is still stationed at some key points in southern Lebanon.
Two weeks ago, while on holiday with my family in northern Israel, my kids and I used binoculars at a lookout point to peer into Lebanon, where we observed an Israeli tank and surveillance drone monitoring a partially destroyed Lebanese town.
The day before my kids were due to return to school after Israel’s Independence Day weekend, we woke up to news that the start of classes May 4 would be delayed due to a teachers’ strike. While I sat on the couch reading a book to my 7-year-old daughter, an air raid siren suddenly sounded, sending us running to our in-home bomb shelter.
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It was a missile attack from the Houthis in Yemen. We heard a huge boom, and minutes later learned that the missile had struck the grounds of Israel’s main airport, quickly prompting a growing number of foreign carriers to announce the suspension of all flights to Israel. My teenage son, working on his homework in the bomb shelter, barely noticed the boom.
For him, attacks by the Houthis have become routine.
Sometimes I feel like this war is harder on adults than on children. My kids’ experience of the war is limited to what they feel directly: the air raid sirens, the news that a friend’s older brother was called back for more reserve duty, the banner hanging on our neighbor’s apartment building memorializing a 26-year-old who grew up there and was killed in Gaza last December.
We adults worry about our children’s future and struggle amid the constant flow of upsetting news. More than 575 days since the Oct. 7 attacks, 59 of the 250 people snatched from Israel and dragged into Gaza are still being held captive; only 24 are thought to be alive.
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The Hamas attack killed 1,200 people in Israel in one day. Over the past year, the Israeli death toll climbed by an additional 320 soldiers and security personnel. In Gaza, the Palestinian death toll is estimated at more than 50,000.
Israel’s minister for strategic affairs, Ron Dermer, has suggested that it would take another year for Israel to declare victory.
Meanwhile, inside Israel there’s a fierce battle for control of Israel’s democratic institutions. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s bids to curb the independence of Israel’s judiciary have prompted massive protests.
Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has announced he’s resigning June 15 ‒ after accusing Netanyahu of trying to fire him for refusing to spy on Israeli citizens leading the protests and of asking him to provide a security pretext to halt Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial.
Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet, warned in a recent opinion column in The Guardian that Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state is at risk.
“The very fabric of the state of Israel and the values on which it was founded are being eroded,” Ayalon wrote. “The truth is that our hostages in Gaza have been abandoned in favour of the government’s messianic ideology and by a prime minister in Benjamin Netanyahu who is desperate to cling to power for his own personal gain.”
One method I use to maintain my sanity amid all this turmoil is to ride my bike. My go-to route takes me through picturesque vineyards and yellow wheat fields into forested hills where the pleasant sounds of birds tweeting and wind blowing through pines help drown out the cacophony elsewhere in my life.
But the recent wildfire ravaged that route, and it will take years for the area to recover.
Surely, I’ll find some alternative route to pedal out my frustrations. But sometimes I wonder what kind of a country this will be when all this is over, what kind of long-term trauma this war is inflicting upon us, and whether, after so much conflict and upheaval, we can ever fully heal.
Uriel Heilman, a native of New York, is a journalist living in Israel.
In Israel, wildfire and war are heating things up. How will we ever recover? | Opinion – USA Today
