Nearly three years on: Notes from an ordinary life in Israel

Somebody asked me recently what has changed most in Israel since the war began, and the honest answer surprised them. The sirens, the checkpoints, the news: All of that becomes furniture. What changes you is the calendar. Two years in, the rhythm of ordinary life here has been bent and remade so many times that a Wednesday can hold a funeral, a birthday party and a product launch, and nobody at any of the three will find the combination strange.

I want to give Rhode Island readers a sense of what that actually feels like from the inside.

The siren you almost ignore

In Efrat, where I live, the alert system still sends phones shuddering across dinner tables. The first year, everyone ran. Now there is a pause, a mental calculation about direction and distance, and then most people continue what they were doing. That pause is not indifference. It is a learned skill, the same one that lets a bus driver in Tel Aviv finish his route after a red-alert app chimes. Psychologists here call it functional coping. My neighbors call it Wednesday.

The harder adjustment is the people missing from the table. Nearly every family I know has someone who served months of reserve duty, and too many have someone who did not come back. Communities have absorbed a vocabulary nobody wanted, shloshim markers, hostage posters faded by sun, the particular quiet of a family whose son is still in Gaza.

When a mother in my neighborhood needed help during her husband's third call-up, the signup sheet for meals filled in an afternoon. The same communities keep showing up for each other in ways that never make international headlines.

Work around the uniform

Reserve duty, miluim, is the load-bearing wall of this whole period. Roughly 300,000 Israelis were called up in the war's first months, and the call-ups never really stopped. Workplaces learned to plan around empty desks. Some companies in my own industry, technology, lost 15 to 20 percent of staff to call-ups — and still shipped product. A friend's firm rotated engineering teams like sports lines, so that whoever was left could keep the servers alive while teammates were at the front. The same pattern held in the U.S.-Israel tech partnership, which deepened under pressure, as well as in hospitals, schools and farms.

Money got tighter for many and stranger for everyone. A war economy does odd things. Restaurants in Tel Aviv were full in the same season that small businesses in the north went under for lack of customers. Israelis describe their finances these days with a shrug that covers real anxiety, and charitable giving, remarkably, went up rather than down. The instinct to patch the hole in the boat before bailing your own cabin runs deep here.

Why ordinary is the story

I know some American readers picture Israel as either a war zone or a fortress. The truth is more mundane and, I think, more moving. Life continues, carefully, stubbornly, with grief woven into it rather than pushed aside. Families still argue about holiday seating. Kids still complain about school. Couples still get married, though more cautiously and more gratefully.

Two years in, ordinariness itself has become a small act of defiance, and it is the part of this country the cameras will never show you. The story of Israel right now is people insisting on their own lives. That is what I want readers in Providence to take away. Not the map, not the rhetoric. The people who keep choosing the everyday, one careful Wednesday at a time.

MARK GINSBERG lives in Efrat, Israel, and writes about Israeli society and technology.