After the siren went wailing, my mother and her neighbors, living in southern Tel Aviv, couldn't make it in time to the shelter in the basement of their building — five days into the IDF Gaza offensive, they hadn't yet settled into the routine of the Tel Aviv area being fired upon and having to find shelter within 40 seconds. The head of the residents' committee hadn't changed his habit of locking the door to the shelter, so the neighbors heard the boom of the rocket while gathered at the staircase.
Like many Israelis, after the attack my mother returned to the computer and wrote in her blog: "What has to happen here? [...] What more do they need to understand the horror of this situation — for this country to disappear? [...] It will get worse, if this jihad isn't stopped."
The daughter in me hastened to call her to make sure everything is all right. But I also couldn't stop myself from writing a comment in the blog, reminding her that people in Gaza are scared, too, and dozens were killed, including children.
She asked me to remove it. I reminded her that she'd never visited Gaza or Ramallah and had never spoke to a Palestinian family that lives in the territories. One of the worst implications of escalation is that it seems like a good reason to forget there are people on the other side. It also always seemed to me she does not feel comfortable even discussing the possibility that Israel might be wrong in something since our first year in the country, 1991, when we were sitting in gas masks in rooms hermetically sealed with plastic and masking tape, waiting for a scud missile to bring a chemical surprise from Iraq.
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