Hours before the first interception early Sunday morning, Israelis heard on the news about hundreds of attack drones launched at them by Iran. The subsequent hours were terrifying for many, who sat and waited, or tried to sleep, as the waves of drones and rockets hurtled towards them. The week leading up to the attack was also tense with conflicting reports of the possible format and timing of the attack dominating news channels.
Jerusalem resident Marne Rochester dealt with the fear surrounding the attack and its lead-up with dark humor. The news of incoming drones from Iran was “material for more memes,” she said. Memes have been part of Rochester’s coping through humor, and she joked in a Facebook meme that the drones will take hours to arrive and “they should have sent [them] via DHL instead of Israel Post.
While Rochester was determined not to “panic prematurely,” in the lead-up to the attack, which was rife with conflicting reports about when an attack might happen and what it might look like, she was prepared Saturday night, with her robe by the door and a bag full of snacks. Rochester, like many Jerusalem residents, does not have a safe room in her apartment and spends her time sheltering in the stairwell. Her building does have a bomb shelter, but most of the residents of Rochester’s building prefer to stay in the stairwell, near their apartments.
Rochester didn’t go to sleep before the sirens and sounds of the explosion that rocked Jerusalem in the early hours of Sunday morning. She also didn’t go to sleep for hours after, staying up watching the news. “Around 4 a.m., I saw that nothing was going to change, and started getting tired,” she said, explaining that that is when she went to bed.
“It was pretty funny that some of the commentators on the news programs were telling people to go to sleep,” she said. “I felt like they were all being Jewish mothers telling me to get some sleep. They were saying ‘Don’t hurt yourself, don’t run, you have time, walk to your shelter.’”
Things already started to feel normal on Sunday during the day, explained Rochester. “You have the initial shock and then it’s like, ok back to normal,” said Rochester, explaining that she made aliyah right before the Gulf War. “I get a little nervous, but I’ve also done this before.”
Israelis describe an array of experiences from Iran's drone attack
“Israelis, for better or for worse, know how to deal with war,” she said. Rochester has seen several Israeli flags on cars and plans to put one on her car today. “Even when we are under attack, we are proud to be Israeli, and we’re going to survive this. As Golda Meir said: ‘We have no place to go.’”
Jerusalem resident Ittay Flescher had been following the news leading up to the attack for days, but says that at first, an Iran attack “was the subject of jokes and memes.” People said things like “we don’t need to [clean for Passover],” or hoped that “Iran doesn’t load hametz onto the drones,” he said. By Saturday night, however, it became a lot more serious, he said, and Flescher cleaned out the shelter in his building, making sure that he had a radio, blankets, and other gear ready for his family.
Saturday night was very frightening, said Flescher, saying that he isn’t sure if waiting for the threat of a fleet of Iranian drones to arrive in Israel was better or worse when compared to the horrible shock of the surprise attack on October 7. “It was the opposite of October 7,” said Flescher, explaining that it felt like every part of the threat on Israel was known Saturday night.
Flescher says there is a Purim and a Passover metaphor to be found in last night’s event. “The Purim metaphor is that all the rockets were launched from Hamedan, the city in which Esther and Mordechai are buried,” he explained, saying it was interesting that this is where the attack came from.
The Passover metaphor was in the timing of Israel’s air defense, which reminded Flescher of the perfect timing of the opening of the sea as the Israelites left Egypt. “Something about the incredible effectiveness of Iron Dome last night feels like the Exodus from Egypt. Can you imagine if it wasn’t effective last night? There would have been thousands of people dead here today.”
“I feel very grateful that I live in a country that was able to defend this,” he said.
Flescher added that he is “concerned by people saying that we need to have a devastating response on Iran like that is the only thing to do now.”
He added that last night’s experience felt to him like we “just had one night of what it is like to be in Gaza.”
“How many people in Gaza go to bed at night with drones above their heads thinking ‘Is it going to hit my home or not going to hit my home? What will happen to me? What will happen to my family?” he asked.
It is the fear that “something that I can’t control can potentially destroy my life tonight. So many people in Gaza have been living like that for the last six months, and we just had one night last night,” he said. “If anything I hope this makes us and the Palestinians and the Iranians and the Americans and the British and the Jordanians, everyone involved in this think how awful war is and how scary it is and how we should all commit to trying not to escalate it but to end it, and there are many ways to do that,” he said.
“Last night was a reminder of how awful war is and how it should be avoided at all costs.”
Tel Aviv resident Eva Kahn moved to Israel less than a year ago. The past week has been frightening, she described, touching on the difficulty of waiting for “something to happen.”
She spent Saturday night stocking up her apartment’s safe room and glued to the news with her roommates. “My roommate slept with the window open to make sure she would hear the sirens,” she said, adding that the whole apartment was in “preparation mode,” and had trouble sleeping, preferring to stay up late together in the living room.
“I thought I would definitely be woken up by sirens and was surprised to wake up in the morning,” she said. “Last night felt like going back into ‘survival mode,’” explained Kahn, saying that she hadn’t felt that way since just after October 7. “We knew something was coming, but we didn’t know what,” she said, adding that the uncertainty was hard.
Kahn and her friends had previously discussed that a war with Iran could be something that would make them consider leaving Israel, but now, in the wake of the attack, “no one is talking about leaving.”
Kahn isn’t sure what changed or why that is but said that it could be partial because her life is more embedded in Israel now. Kahn also says she is learning a lot by being in Israel. “It’s been moving to see how much people are willing to sacrifice for their country,” she concluded.