Living under rocket fire has a rhythm to it. That sentence sounds insane. And it is. But after enough alerts, enough shelter sprints, enough interrupted dinners and interrupted sleep and interrupted everything, you start to know the stages. You start to have opinions about the stages.
Here is what Israelis are actually thinking at each one.
Early Warning Alert
Okay. Where is everyone? I need a head count.
Also, I need the bathroom. We all need the bathroom. Single file. Do not pretend you do not need the bathroom. We are going to be in that shelter for an unknown amount of time and I am not playing games.
Ten Minutes Later. Still No Siren.
This is ridiculous already. Just send the siren. Some of us have things to do.
Dinner is getting cold. My coffee is getting cold. Everything is getting cold. Give us the siren so we can do the thing and move on with our lives.
Siren in the Next City Over (But Not Yours)
So close. Shoot smaller missiles. Drones, even. Something that lets us skip the whole production without the forty-minute ordeal.
My kids are asking questions I do not have the patience to answer right now.
Red Alert: Actual Siren, Actual Shelter
One rocket. It was one rocket. The probability of shrapnel reaching our specific location is basically zero. I have done the math.
And yet here I am in the shelter, sitting on a plastic chair at 11pm, because my wife gave me a look that ended the debate before it started. She is not wrong. I know she is not wrong. But I reserve the right to be annoyed.
Incident Ended
Thirty minutes. It has been thirty minutes since the early alert. The actual event lasted four minutes.
Israel built Iron Dome. We invented drip irrigation. We founded more startups per capita than almost any country on earth. We can optimize a rocket alert timeline.
We Joke to Stay Sane. The Threat Is Real.
We joke because it gets us through.
We joke because the alternative is sitting in silence with the full weight of what this actually is, and sometimes you just need to make it to the next morning.
But let me be clear about what this actually is. The threat is real. The rockets are real. The scale of what has been launched at Israeli civilians over the past year and a half is staggering, and it does not make headlines the way it should.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes in the north and south. Families have been living in hotels, in temporary housing, in shelters, for over a year. Children have grown up running to bomb shelters so many times that it has become reflex.
We are not exaggerating when we describe the exhaustion. We are not dramatizing when we say the disruption is constant. And we are not being cynical when we find ways to laugh about it, because humor is one of the oldest survival tools the Jewish people have ever had.
We joke to stay sane. We stay sane to keep going. We keep going because there is no other option.