Last night Sarah Tuttle-Singer published her personal bomb shelter with the kids story on a very large mommy blog: Scary Mommy. Without talking politics she described what millions of us are going through. For some it’s many times a day, for others its less frequent. But it’s the same for all of us (fathers included).
No. This is not a test. This is not a test. This is not a test.
We live in Israel, and our country is at war with a terrorist organization just an hour’s drive away; a terrorist organization committed to destroying Israel, a terrorist organization hurdling rockets at us for the last 10 years. And anyone living in this country – Muslim, Christian, or Jew – is a target.
And you know what’s crazy? Just like I learned STOP DROP AND ROLL as a kid growing up in LA smack dab in earthquake country, my kids knew exactly what to do when the sirens screech through the night. They ran to their flip flops lined up by the door – thank GOD for cheap slip-on shoe. My daughter struggled with hers, so I swooped her up in my arms while my son and I fled our home, past the purple scarecrow my children built “to keep the rockets away, Mama, so they don’t hurt us when we sleep,” over rough and rocky ground to a public bomb shelter.
Um, can I get a WTF? We have a public bomb shelter.
Like everyone else in Israel. Bomb shelters are all over this country.
Eight hours, 13,900 Facebook likes, 472 tweets, even (21 shares on Google+) and 299 comments later…..
The comments are an interesting mix and, as usual, thrown in are the usual hand grenades citing “genocide” and poor Palestinians not having bomb shelters and inhuman Israelis blah blah.
I’m not sure I see the point in answering some of the more hate filled comments but I did write one answer to a particularly persistent lady on Sarah’s Facebook post and at least if I turn it into this blog post, it wasn’t wasted effort. She wrote:
And seriously – their card game got interrupted & they went to a bomb shelter. At least they weren’t killed like so many Palestinian children have been. I’d really love to know, and this is to the author, what of the Palestinians’ rights? I’d love to hear an Israeli solution that respected Palestinians’ right to a homeland & self-determination instead of just dismissing them as subhuman. No group has the right to destroy the civil & human rights of another group.
Israel doesn’t just have the right to destroy our enemies. We have a moral obligation to do it. I’m sorry if talk of absolutes scares people but we can’t live under rocket fire or waiting for a tunnel to disgorge murderous Hamas terrorists into a kindergarten.
We don’t suffer many casualties, correct, because we have taken extensive steps to protect ourselves first with shelters on the ground and then with rockets in the sky. As I said in my radio interview: would it make the world happy if we lined kids up on the border and let Hamas kill them? You know Hamas would take the shot.
On the other argument, what have we done for peace, we’ve gone to Hell and back trying to give these people a state. We’ve pulled out of Sinai, Lebanon and Gaza and each of those has become a terrorist launching point. In fact they always were terrorist launching points which was why we took each of them.
No, I’m done apologising, the world’s agonising over Palestinian deaths does nothing to encourage the Palestinian people to overthrow terrorist rulers and choose a path of life not death. Unfortunately the conclusion many of us here have reached is that they really do hate us as much as they say and as much as their celebrations of our dead children show.
So yes, I’m proud we tell them to get out of the hospitals they’re using as military bases, but we need to flatten all their hospitals until they stop using them as military bases.
This is my one futile talk back of the day. Off to create a startup business and do some good in the world.
