New Year

**Disclaimer: I’m in bed sick with a sinus infection gone bad. I apologize in advance if some of the things I write don’t make complete sense. My brain is functioning on cold meds… but I couldn’t sit here anymore and not write anything.**

I just want to start out by stressing that David and I are both safe and sound. He is very busy in the army, but due to the nature of his job he is not and will not be fighting in any front lines. His unit is working in shifts so he is even able to come home relatively often to catch up on sleep and see me. We live in a city near Tel Aviv that is (for now at least) out of the range of the rockets coming in from Gaza.

It’s been a strange and surreal week and transition into the new year. It is surreal mostly because I am so far away from it all. I live too far away from Gaza to hear anything but the occasional jet flying overhead from one of the air force bases in the area. For all intents and purposes my life is going on completely normally. The main connection that I have to the war is the radio. They are announcing whenever there are sirens sounding in communities in the south. My only real picture of what it is like there is to read the news and to listen to the frequency of the sirens. It was the same way during the Second Lebanon War. I was in Jerusalem, and if I hadn’t been an informed citizen or hadn’t had a cousin fighting up there I would have had no idea that a war was on.

I’m not really sure what it is really that I am feeling or what it is that I mean to say. I pray and I hope with all of my being that this government doesn’t make the same mistakes it made two years ago. I hope we finish this fight and leave when we are ready and have fully achieved our goals to bring real security to the South. Last time, the government agreed on a cease-fire that brought us nothing because Hezbollah is still rearming and gathering strength on our Northern Border and UNIFIL is doing nothing to stop them. I hope that our soldiers are not going in and risking their lives for nothing. I am very scared for them. At this point in my life almost all of my friends are in the army. Most of them I know are not in Gaza itself, but there are many that I am not sure where they are or what they are doing. The scariest thing, I think is not knowing. I’ve been sitting at home (sick) for the last almost week and have been doing nothing but scouring the news for more and more information. Especially now that the ground incursion has started I listen to the news with bated breath and am relieved every time there is no report of new injuries.

It’s scary and upsetting the thought that we’re at war, but if we really can bring real quiet and security to the entire Southern part of the country then it is all worth it. We deserve the same right to self-defense that every other sovereign nation in the world deserves. I am proud that we are exercising it and pray the world will allow us to defend ourselves. The New Year passed here with little to no notice. Hopefully it will bring with it a new reality. Hopefully Israel can reassert its deterrence capability. Hopefully we can rid our borders of terrorists who’s goal is to destroy us.