The Displaced Club - A Trip North

I traveled north to visit my brother and his family, who remained behind in Kibbutz Lehavot Habashan. The kibbutz is located ten kilometers from any border, Lebanon or Syria. It's far enough away not to receive tax benefits and not to be evacuated by directive. But it's close enough for soldiers to block and guard it and close enough to hear the explosions in Kiryat Shmona.

It seems that they've given up on interceptions in Kiryat Shmona, both because Hezbollah fires flat and short - after all, it's only 2 km from the border - and because they've evacuated most of the residents, so why waste $150,000 on an interceptor when you can settle for compensation for damage in less than 10% of that.

Bicycle of my nieces in the kibbutz - watercolor on paper

Since I arrived here, there have been explosions in Kiryat Shmona. Two barrages plus an anti-tank missile hit throughout the city. The windows in Lehavot shook a little, and the explosions echoed in the valley.

I joined a WhatsApp group called "Kiryat Shmona Residents Remaining in the City" to find out what's happening. My heart is still in Kiryat Shmona, but my body is deeply displaced. I'm scared to go back. The municipality issued another evacuation notice, promising IDF Home Front Command soldiers to patrol between the houses to mark which houses have been evacuated and which still have people. Who are these marks supposed to serve? Our forces? Their forces? The thieves?

Someone on the WhatsApp group was looking for tights for ages 3-4 and a one-piece jumpsuit for age two. Someone else was looking for a barber for a platoon of soldiers with wild hair. Routine.

I took my niece shopping in Rosh Pina. The picturesque Moshava has never been as lively as it is now. In addition to the regular residents, dozens and hundreds of soldiers with a variety of falafel in their mouths and on their shoulders were entering and leaving every possible store. Authorized short leaves in Rosh Pina are a thing. We tore Hazor and Rosh Pina up and bought bike tubes, books, a pencil case, and McDonald's. Life itself.

On the way back, we stopped at Checkpoint David because there was a rocket fire alert in the area. Luckily, we turned right into the valley; otherwise, we would have waited forever. There are trenches, communication trenches, sandbags, APCs, and machine guns at every intersection, hill, and tree. Vibes of World War II in color and reality.

At least the bikes are okay now. We can ride them in the kibbutz.

TEWT* or a guide to a bunny-wuss

I leave the kibbutz, turn right, disguised by eucalyptus trees from other wars, twist with the road, and Hopa! No eucalyptus trees. The view to the north of the Hula Valley opens, spread before me, with the town of Al-Khiam in Lebanon towering at its end. To its right is Kfarchouba on the slopes of Mount Hermon, and to its left is the town of Odaisseh, peeking from a hill between Misgav Am and Metula.

The illustration is made from a photo I took in Kiryat Shemona. The Graffitty says: "Only I decide here."

Exposed in the Hyundai's hatchback, I drive north. At any moment, an Anti-tank missile can flutter at me. A flash of fire or a cloud of smoke, and Hopa! Break with the Hyundai to the fields, sink in the mud, halt in some ditch. Unload outside before the rocket burns my soul.

The gaze jumps from side to side, looking for something wrong: smoke, fire, sharp movement. Every Stork is a KATYUSHA, and every Otter is a crawling terrorist.

If I survive the exposed road between Lahavot and Anafa Hill, I arrive at an unnamed junction near the hill. They built a concrete bunker that controls the intersection. It got a firing slit, like in 'Band of Brothers' the WWII TV series that Spielberg produced, not the movement that Netanyahu ignited. The bunker is relatively new in the landscape and creeps at challenging levels. Before they built it, there were just excavations, connection tunnels, concertinas, and sandbags.

The dilemma at the intersection is enormous for a junction with no name. One option is to continue north through the checkpoint of Kfar Szold with the optimistic sign "Warning! - Red Axis - You are entering a threatened road". At the checkpoint, soldiers are immersed in their phones, a quiet testimony to the duality of the situation.

The second option is going west through the road between Sde Nehemia and Kiryat Shmona.

Why a dilemma?

Because north of the checkpoint in Kfar Szold, you pass by "The Mother" Hill, a 9M133 Kornet missile almost peeled a car a few days ago, but if you pass "Horshat Tal", the eucalyptus reappear, and you can drive calmly. The second option is to drive exposed from Sde Nehemia to Kiryat Shmona, which is actually to pass by Beit Hillel, where there is also a checkpoint with the same optimistic sign and Anti-Tank missiles flying over them all the time. On top of that, they have the most alert emergency squad, and because they are so uptight, they shoot at pelicans or themselves whenever there are sirens.

Dilemma.

Choose option B: cross the green (Joseph) bridge, press the gas and fly forward. I hope the bunkers won't shoot me. I wish The yellow gate on the road to Kiryat Shmona would be open, and no KATYUSHA would miss Beit Hillel and fly over me. If something arrives, it will come from the north. The only shelter is a drainage ditch north of the road packed with prickly raspberry bushes and reeds. So break right to the tunnel and order a tow truck. That's the drill.

A crow jumped, and my heart froze. I almost finished in the ditch. Every crow that dives near the Hyundai clings me down, my head folded between my shoulders, hiding behind the steering wheel. It's pecan season, so the crows dive and toss pecans on the road, hoping it'll crush them so they can nibble.

Slalom between bursts of pecans until the entrance to Kiryat Shmona and Hopa! Shelter under the Schchumit hill.

I live in the highest building in Kiryat Shmona, which is adjacent to the police station. The building caught one rocket in the Second Lebanon War, and at the beginning of this war, an Anti-Tank missile hit a house one street above. You can see my erected building from all of southern Lebanon. You can't ignore it. If there is a target in Kiryat Shmona, it is my building. If there is a tunnel, it is under it; if there is a ground invasion, it is on it.

At the entrance of the building, there is still a "Scanned" sticker even though restless tenants come and go and come again. I climb the stairs gently, not to wake anyone. Plastic chairs are scattered in the stairwell. This is supposed to be the safest area in the building. In the Second Lebanon War, the KATYUSHA formed a new window on the seventh floor with a diameter of a meter. But what will Burkan do?

I leave the door open to escape quickly and check if my chef's knife is still stored in its drawer. I've got a wooden pestle hanging at the entrance to the living room. There are empty Goldstar bottles in the laundry room, Turpentine because of my print engraving, a Glycerin I bought to mix watercolors, and impact glue.

I'm ready.

Suppose a tunnel opens in the yard, and thirty terrorists from Radwan's force take over the building. In that case, as the terrorists approach the building, I prepare Molotov cocktails, throw them out the window, turn the computer table, and hide behind it. Suppose they launch a 9M133 Kornet missile at the house. In that case, I crawl and hide in the bathtub, wait for them by the door with the wooden pestle, hit the first terrorist on the head, snatch his Kalashnikov, shoot his friends, take magazines and grenades from him, roll grenades to the stairwell, slide on the railing while shooting and escape from the building a second before a Burkan collapses it. Hopa! Jump to the Hyundai and hit the gas straight to the nut shop in the shopping center, on the far side below my building, to hide from the shrapnel flying from the blast. It's too bad the store is closed; I would buy roasted mixed nuts without salt to eat as I wait in line for compensation from the Government property tax.

• TEWT - Tactical Exercise Without Troops. "War game" with the participation of unit commanders and their officers without soldiers in the training area. The exercise was held in the past using communication and telephones (hence also called "phone exercise") and today using C&C (control and command) systems. (From Wikipedia)

This post was translated from The original Hebrew with Microsoft Copilot, Grammarly, and Google Bard. I'll be happy to know if you have any suggestions or corrections.

Thanks.

The IDP* Club

An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country’s borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee. (Wikipedia)

The first time Kiryat Shmona received an evacuation order was on Friday, two and a half weeks ago. Though steeped in military history, Kiryat Shmona has a history of resisting evacuation orders. And so I found myself uprooted, displaced, wandering, homeless.

Google’s Bard suggested some prompts; this is what happened in Adobe Firefly.

Home is security, roots, and a place in the heart, head, and reality. And me? My security crumbled, my roots were torn, my heart was broken, and my head sank into thoughts, and the thoughts sank into reflections, and the reflections of the thoughts floated and rose aimlessly in my head. I stared at the ceilings, at the ceiling of the car while waiting for the traffic lights, at the ceiling of the coffee shop, at the ceiling of the children’s room while they were uprooted too from their own room and moved to another one with more concrete and a steel window.

Nothing feels like yours. You are a guest in the lives of others.

Everyone is more than pleasant. Considerate, encouraging, asking, interested, “What do you need? What do you feel like? What suits you? Make yourself at home!”

I don’t need anything, I don’t feel like anything, nothing suits me, and I can’t feel at home.

It’s really not their fault; it’s my fault that I planted roots, built a place that felt like home, and settled in it in the homeliest way possible. But now it’s not mine anymore. It’s a tool in others hands. Maybe they will spare it, and maybe not, but it has lost its security and its homeliness. It’s just distant walls right now, for now just walls.

Google’s Bard suggested some prompts; this is what happened in Adobe Firefly.

Right now, I’m trying to float in Pardes Hanna. I washed dishes at a coffee shop in the evening to boost my morale; my morale went up because I was busy washing dishes, stacking them, and placing them all in place, like a children’s game of zero to three of slipping shapes into holes in a box. Locals laughed outside, and I dropped my expectations and focused on removing garlic butter from stainless steel trays. Activity calms the thoughts, and box games even more!

A Watercolor painting I made at the coffee shop in Pardes Hana

It’s nice here in Pardes Hanna; there are no alarms. There is a nice Falafel that scolds you for ordering their Falafel, not their SABICH. The streams here are intermittent. We went to run on the shore in the morning Between a strategic facility of the Israeli electric company And the strategic bunker of the prime minister’s neighbor. A plane passes every once in a while. After all, war is war.

Google’s Bard suggested some prompts; this is what happened in Adobe Firefly.

This post was translated from The original Hebrew with Microsoft Copilot, Grammarly, and Google Bard. I'll be happy to know if you have any suggestions or corrections.

Thanks.

The strangest thing that ever happened to me with a watermelon

In the canal, not the one in Sinai, the one in Berlin

I don't know why, but lately, I've been thinking a lot about war and the military. I've been humming "Ash and Dust" and remembering stories from my service time in the army. One of my favorite stories is about the strangest thing that ever happened to me with a watermelon.

My first ambush as a commander was a scorching hot day, and the evening wasn't any better. It was at a base called Rotem (or Ras Al Bayada), on the coastal area in the northwest corner of the South Lebanon Security Zone. I can say a lot about it, for example, that it's on a cliff that slopes down to the sea above the Lebanese coastal highway that is carved into it. And I can say it's next to a village called Ras Al Bayada, which in Hebrew means "Egg Head." And I can say that below Rotem was a tremendous railway tunnel that once ran along the coast from Cairo to Beirut. And I can say many other things, but we have an issue with a watermelon.

So this watermelon thing started on one of the hottest days at Rotem, and just by chance, it was the day that supplies arrived. I don't remember how often supplies came, but we usually finished all the good stuff on the first day. That's how delaying gratification in the army is. Before leaving for the ambush, we used to do military drills with an officer. Our CO was a severe moron, so I won't mention his name, and whoever remembers him deserves it. Besides being a moron, he didn't particularly like me (I have no one to blame but myself because I was a moron, too), so this moron CO made us do drills.

One of the gear items carried a lot in ambushes, and the most hated thing to carry is a "medic pack," which is a slightly more beautiful name for a stretcher. The soldier who carried the medic pack, a more attractive name for a stretcher, was Golan. And Golan was a fellow soldier in my company, the Support company. And besides that, he was the nicest guy in the world.

So during the drills of the moron CO, I turned to Golan, who was carrying the medic pack, which is a slightly more beautiful name for a stretcher, and asked him to give me his helmet so I could attach it to the medic pack so it will be easier for him. I forgot to mention that there is a designated place for a helmet on the top of the medic pack. If you don't put the helmet in its designated place, then any movement with the medic pack ends in casualties for our forces because the entire medic pack becomes an uncontrolled load.

So I turn to him, and he says, 'Leave it. I don't need it.' I didn't give up and turned to him again, and he said, 'Leave it, Miler, I don't need it.' The moron CO started to get angry that we won't be ready on time, ordering us to stand in movement positions and put our helmets in place.

I grabbed Golan's helmet and tried to put it in the designated place for the helmet on the medic pack, which is actually a slightly more beautiful name for a stretcher. But the designated place was packed. So I asked Golan, 'You already have a helmet. Why do you need two?'

And Golan answers me .. 'Miller, this is not a helmet.'

'So what is it?'

'It's a watermelon.'

..

Of course, I told him he would throw the watermelon back in the kitchen as soon as the drills were over.

And, of course, as soon as the drills were over, the moron CO wanted to get rid of us as quickly as possible and sent us straight on our way.

And, of course, I didn't say anything to him about a watermelon that needs to go back to the kitchen.

And, of course, the highlight of the ambush was eating watermelon on the edge of the cliff of Rotem base in southern Lebanon on a scorching hot day as the lights of Tyre reflected in the calm waters of the Mediterranean Sea.

Of course.