Jeff Bezos famously said that he spends the first hour of his morning without looking at his phone at all and just “putters.” That sounds nice. But it’s pretty clear that he doesn’t live in a country at war.
I’d like to do just as Bezos does, but the first thing I do when I awaken is grab my phone and check the Homefront Command app to see if my son had to flee to a bomb shelter in the middle of the night.
My son Danny is on the autism spectrum. He is 28 and can talk, but he doesn’t have a phone and doesn’t like to chat by telephone. During the week, he is in a therapeutic village about an hour away from Jerusalem, where I live. The Houthi terror group based in Yemen tends to fire missiles at the part of the country where his village is located between two and four a.m. on a fairly regular basis, more often than they aim for Jerusalem. At least, that was how it was before the ceasefire and that’s how it’s been since the war started up again last week. I know well that the staff where he lives is competent to handle any missile alerts and that there is a bomb shelter in the basement of his building. He could ask a staff member to call me for comfort after a missile alert, but he never would. I could call a staff member and ask about Danny once an attack is over, but I feel that they have more than enough on their plate without having to assuage my anxiety.
The dilemma
Now that the fighting and the bombings have resumed, an inner debate has resumed for me, too: Which Areas of Interest should I choose on the Homefront app? For those who don’t live in Israel or who choose to live without this app, let me explain. If there is a missile alert where you happen to be and your phone is on, the phone buzzes with a sound like a rattlesnake hissing that cannot be ignored. This sound is meant to coincide with the sirens outdoors and it usually does, although I tend to hear the app first.
But you also have the option to add Areas of Interest, from a list of every community in Israel, and then your phone will buzz if there is a missile attack in any of these places. Many of my friends in Jerusalem, for example, have Tel Aviv listed as their Areas of Interest because their children live there. For a long time, I did have the town in the center of the country where Danny lives during the week on my list, and when he went on a hiking trip, I would also add that place for the duration of his visit. I realize that me knowing that there has been a missile alert there does not alter what he is going through in any way. But I feel, very intensely, that if he is running for his life, I need to know about it in real-time.
Or I felt that way until the Houthis started their almost nightly missile maneuvers a few months ago. After I awakened with the rattlesnake hiss of a missile alert on his village three nights in a row and struggled to fall back asleep each time, I began to question my maternal logic. One night when I knew I would be driving him home for the weekend the next day and needed to be well rested, I finally took the step: I deleted his village from my Areas of Interest.
I still didn’t sleep well, though, and it seemed I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t. I didn’t like getting woken up with the alerts, but still, I couldn’t relax, not knowing what was going on.
Then came the ceasefire, and I got really spoiled with the lack of missiles. The only time I thought of the Houthis was when the comedy show, Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country), came on and I would wonder if they were going to make an appearance because they’re so funny – in the TV skits.
Now, they’re back, on Eretz Nehederet once a week – this week they gave Donald Trump the Yemenite specialties, malawah and hilbe – and in our skies, almost nightly.
They sent a missile our way just last night when Danny was home. He was relaxing and listening to music when the rattlesnake hiss began and I immediately called for him to put on his shoes. Hearing from my voice that I was stressed, he said, “Sorry, Eema (Mom).” As a child, before he received speech therapy and other therapies for his autism, it was hard for him to understand what was expected of him, and he often unintentionally did things he was not supposed to do. Sadly, he got in the habit of apologizing when he saw adults around him who looked stressed, not knowing exactly what was going on. Even at the beach, when a lifeguard would call for a kid to get back to the swim area, he would say, “Sorry,” even when he was not anywhere near the child who had breached the rules. And last night, there he was, apologizing for a Yemenite terror group bombing Israel. It was sad and touching at the same time.
I handed him his shoes (we have seen scorpions in our building bomb shelter, and it was also very cold) and he put them on. We made it to the shelter within the 90-second window before the missile and/or missile debris hit. Once there, I reassured him that he had done nothing wrong. The whole concept of missiles and sirens has been explained to him as something like, “Bad people are throwing things at us to hurt us,” and I didn’t feel the need to go into that again, mainly because I didn’t see how it would help him to know more detail. I could get out a map once we got home and show him where Yemen is it and say that people there think it is a good use of their time and money, although millions of their people are starving, to shoot bad things at Israel. At other times, I could have shown him Gaza on the map and explained something similar. But in the end, what matters for Danny is that he gets to the shelter in time – and understands that he has done nothing wrong.
Sitting in the shelter, he was filled with energy and chatted up our sleepy neighbors, greeting those he already knew by name and introducing himself to the newcomers.
“How are you feeling?” he asked each one in turn, in English to the Americans and British-born people and in Hebrew for everyone else. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that if he can get people chatting and smiling in a bomb shelter during a missile attack, he could have a career as one of those people at events who get the party started.
I wondered whether over in Gaza, another young man on the autism spectrum like Danny is keeping people entertained in a miserable, scary situation. But then I remembered that although the top Hamas leaders have net worths in the billions, they didn’t choose to use any of their money to build bomb shelters for their people. There are only a handful there for two million people living in a place that regularly provokes wars with a much better-armed neighboring country. According to many reports, there are about 500 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza, built with concrete that could have been used for shelters, a network about the size of the New York City subway system. Danny knows the New York subways well because he was born in New York and ironically, on Friday night during this alert, he was wearing a T-shirt showing a map of the NYC subways. But from what I’ve read, even disabled Gazans like Danny are not allowed to take shelter in the tunnel network to protect them from the bombings. No civilians are, apparently.
This isn’t London during the Blitz, when hundreds of thousands hid in the Underground. The tunnels are strictly for Hamas terrorists to hide in and for torturing hostages, 59 of whom remain in Gaza. Anyone like my son across the border has no protection from the bomb strikes. So whatever some guy on the autism spectrum there has to say is drowned out by the noise of the strikes. Many civilians like him have lost their lives, as Hamas continues to hide among them, putting their lives at risk and it's tragic and maddening to think about all the deaths and suffering there.
We waited in our shelter for the required 10 minutes and back at home, Danny snacked on a carrot and put on a Beatles playlist. “Let It Be” came on. We were certainly in “times of trouble,” and I tried to find “words of wisdom” to convince him and myself to “let it be,” since this war shows no sign of ending. I’m not sure right now what this resumption of the fighting will mean for my Areas of Interest list, but I do know that it will be a long time before I can putter around the house in the morning without looking at my phone.