Patience

An update four weeks into the war

Four weeks in and I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’m tired of this war. Ashamed because what we are dealing with here on the ground in Jerusalem is so trivial compared to Tel Aviv which has many more sirens and many more missiles, and absurdly trivial compared to the few hundred pilots doing most of the real lifting, heavy and otherwise, in the skies over Iran.

The real challenge here in Jerusalem is not so much fear of death as it is the need for patience. Shalem College isn’t in session—we’re hoping to be able to open for the second semester after Passover and hoping we’ll be allowed to gather in person so we can avoid learning over Zoom. So we wait. I can’t get out of the country easily, for business or for pleasure. So we wait.

While we’re waiting, I’m mostly working from home. My wife and I go out now and then to run errands or have lunch. In line to order at one of our favorite hummus joints, the siren goes off and we head to a shelter. It’s frustrating but trivial. We talk about renting a car to get out of town for a day or two but worry about what we will do if a siren sounds and we’re on the road. You’re supposed to pull onto the shoulder and move quickly away from the car and crouch or lay down to make yourself as small a target as possible. This does not seem to fit well with the goals of R&R associated with the phrase “get out of town.”

So we stay home a lot, working during the day as best we can, reading Hebrew novels together (slowly) at night, keeping a running Scrabble game going, and talking about the war. It’s very Covid-like. Hunkering down and waiting for better times. Lots of waiting. Frustrating but not really anything like the heavy lifting alluded to above.

Israel has something like 300 fighter planes. Something like 200-300 pilots are doing 2-3 sorties a day, aided by stimulants of some sort, carrying out unimaginably intense missions wrapped in an aluminum and titanium engineering marvel worth tens of millions of dollars and somehow, keeping that precious life-saving death-dealing piece of technology aloft. The performance demands are off the charts. Yes, there is an incredible team helping the pilots with targeting and especially maintenance to make it all happen, but a few hundred people are doing the work, putting their lives on the line day in and day out.

I think about Churchill in the middle of the Battle of Britain in a speech to the House of Commons saying, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” He was speaking of about 1500 people protecting roughly 40 million English citizens. Here in Israel, 300 people are protecting about 10 million people. We here in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel have much to be grateful for.

I also think about the Blitz, when Germany bombed London night after night for about eight months. When the air raid sirens sounded, nearly 200,000 headed to the Tube for shelter. But millions headed to their backyard where people had buried government-distributed steel shelters in their garden. Or they had a special steel cage inside the house. The outdoor shelters could hold 5-6 people in a very cramped space, with a bucket for a toilet, condensation forming on the walls and roof and dripping all night long and the people inside those tiny shelters listening not to the dull booms and thuds of interceptions we mostly hear here in Jerusalem, but deafening explosions.

When you emerged from the hole you’d been in—either from the Tube or the steel structure in your backyard or inside your house—your neighborhood could be on fire, your house destroyed, your neighbors dead. Every death here in Israel is national news and we mourn them all—22 people have died so far in this war. In the eight months of the Blitz, 30,000-40,000 people died.

And it’s hard to remember because we know now how the story ends, but in the middle of the Blitz, there was a real chance that the Nazis might invade and conquer England. As of now, Israel may not achieve all of its objectives, but the downside risk doesn’t seem to be anything like what the British were worried about in 1940. So if I start to feel sorry for myself, I try to think of history. Makes me feel better and, I hope, makes me a little less impatient.

Finally, on the heavy lifting front, you can add in the reservists. Many of our students have been called up again after already serving hundreds of days in Gaza and Lebanon over the last 2+ years. Thinking of them and their frustrations at having their lives interrupted, and knowing they are once again headed back into harm’s way and the toll that takes on everyone who cares about them, I’m especially ashamed to be annoyed that I had to wait an extra 20 minutes to order my hummus or that the wifi is spotty in my neighbor’s bomb shelter where I head when the sirens wail. (And literally as I typed the period at the end of that sentence, my phone started pulsing and shrieking that an attack is imminent and to be prepared to take shelter. And despite my best intentions, I blurted out a word unfit for these pages and immediately realized I had failed at achieving the calm and perspective on the moment I’d prefer to have. Deep breath. Patience patience, patience.)

The Bigger Picture

That’s how the war is going on the ground—the worm’s eye view. Let’s try to soar a bit and consider the bird’s eye view a month into the war.

The important things to remember:

Rule #1: Those who say usually don’t know and those who know usually don’t say.

Rule #2: Politicians often say things they don’t really mean or believe. Sometimes, they lie because they want the home audience to stay confident. Sometimes what they say is to provoke or scare or intimidate the enemy. Best to ignore most of what is said. It’s mostly posturing of one kind or another. Having said that, I sometimes think about whoever is sort of running the show these days in Iran and how hard it must be for them to parse the latest post of President Trump on X. If I can’t be sure if he means what he says or whether it’s a negotiating ploy, I can only imagine how hard it is for the Iranian leaders.

Rule #3: Pundits (so-called experts) often say, with incredible confidence, what they hope is true rather than what is actually true. The confidence makes it sound authoritative. See rule #1.

What Comes Next

When you know your opponent wants unconditional surrender and an end to nuclear aspirations and theocratic rule, you fight to the death. What else can the United States or Israel threaten? It seems that all the plausible threats involve boots on the ground and the presumption is that this cost will be too high for Trump to pay.

So on the surface, this looks like a standoff. True, Iran has no air defense and a dwindling supply of missiles and launchers. But it appears to have a secret weapon beyond the Straits of Hormuz: time. They just have to have patience. They are counting on Israelis getting tired of running to the bomb shelters. They are counting on Trump getting tired of risking the midterm election outcome as the price of gasoline rises and a recession looms. They are counting on Trump wanting to avoid deaths of soldiers on foreign soil. They are counting on the unpredictable Trump changing his mind and settling for a symbolic victory that is no kind of defeat at all for the regime.

But time cuts both ways.

As the quality of life for everyday people outside of the leadership deteriorates, the higher the chances of a rebellion from within, either in the short run or down the road. Surely the rank-and-file of the IRGC is thinking about the tradeoff between staying on the good side of the current leadership vs. what might replace it if things fall apart. It looks like a stalemate and may look that way for a while. Then suddenly things change. We can only hope that it’s for the better.

Weirdly, the key to success for everyone—in Jerusalem, in Israel, in Tehran, in Iran, in Washington DC and in the United States—is the same: patience. Time moves forward. I don’t think the status quo can persist. Someone is going to be impatient. We’ll find out soon enough who that will be.