An Israeli's life in Haifa under constant rocket fire

Looks like I can throw away my alarm clock. Hezbollah has it timed now to wake up Haifa around 7 a.m. with missiles that trigger the air raid sirens and send me running in my pajamas to my apartment building’s bomb shelter. 

Afterward, I go home, which takes about 10 seconds, and fetch thick gloves for garden work. It calms me down to rake leaves and fallen bougainvillea petals. But how much raking can one do?

I have been living in Haifa for the past two years. Now Iran is threatening to flatten the glorious Carmel mountain range with a crushing response. This intense war is a test of wills.

Theodor Seuss Geisel, aka the late, great author and illustrator Dr. Seuss, put it into proper perspective in his last children’s book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! The plot revolves around some funny little person traveling through time and space to arrive at “the waiting place,” where everyone there waits for something to happen. 

Well, here we are in Israel in the waiting place. We’re waiting in Haifa. Tel Aviv is waiting. Jerusalem is waiting. The northern Arab villages – ironically receiving a disproportionate share of the missile fire and casualties – are also waiting. In this small country, nowhere is an island. 

You’re off to Great Places! 

You’re off and away! 

You have brains in your head. 

You have feet in your shoes. 

You can steer yourself anywhere you choose.

That’s easy for Dr. Seuss to say. In terms of daily life in Haifa, many feel that we can’t steer ourselves anywhere we choose. I ask myself whether this is the whole point of being an Israeli: to commit to being here, wherever in the country we happen to call home, no matter what.

I’m discovering opportunities in Haifa that were inconceivable before the Hamas invasion of Israel and its mega-atrocity of Oct. 7, 2023. I find myself wanting to be more useful than I ever imagined. Volunteering is where my feet are taking me these days in Haifa, and I’m discovering that volunteering sounds like I’m doing someone else a favor. 

It’s a two-way street, and the more I do, the more I connect to a solid purpose for loving my life in Israel. 

A chance encounter at Bnei Zion Hospital

When I’d heard on the Ahuza Anglo Community WhatsApp group that a large number of wounded soldiers were being released, and volunteers were being requested to cheer up the ones who weren’t, I signed up. I joined others from the Ahuza group, which is named after an upscale neighborhood of Haifa blessed with sunset views over the Mediterranean Sea.

Upon receiving the directions, I discovered that the Bnei Zion Hospital was so close to my home that all I had to do was climb two mountain staircases to get there. 

On the appointed day, I entered a reception area overflowing with shiny colorful donuts and home-baked cakes. Tables were also covered with T-shirts and sneakers that had been generously donated by a name brand company. The atmosphere was lively, and the recovering young men were in high spirits, content with their donuts and visits by family and friends.

There wasn’t anything for us to do except witness the scene. At that moment, things crystallized for me. It was enough to be a fly on the wall and see how things are done in Israel. On the day that these severely wounded soldiers were being released from the most profound life-threatening event of their young lives, a hospital ward sent them home with a wonderful party.

Hof HaCarmel cucumber farm

Much as I want to volunteer, it’s not as simple as it sounds. A new friend, Lia Shinozaki Kagan, and her husband, Henrique, olim from Brazil, were volunteering almost daily over the summer to help farmers in the Haifa area pick their crops. Getting to these places isn’t difficult – if you have a car. 

Lia and Henrique kindly picked me up before 7 a.m. so we could reach the cucumber greenhouse in the cooler part of the morning. We worked largely in a calm, meditative silence. It was only months later, when Lia stopped by my house, that I learned why she was embracing life in Haifa with such vigor and enthusiasm.

As a first-generation Japanese born in Brazil, she still had relatives in Japan. That’s all I knew about her until the air raid siren chose its moment to blast. We were carrying parts of a sukkah to her car when a siren sent us dashing into my building’s bomb shelter. 

And there, over long minutes of waiting, Lia told me how she had miraculously survived the deadly Kobe earthquake of 1995, having been pulled out of the rubble five hours after her dormitory collapsed on top of her. 

As I listened to Lia’s story, I thought about the 30 years I lived in Japan, and the gut-wrenching earthquakes I’d experienced. As we looked at each other, the same thought occurred to us: We feel safer here in Israel, no matter what. With God running the show, what is there to fear?

Our farmer was generous and sent us home with more cucumbers than we could eat. I considered knocking on the doors of neighbors, sharing the bounty and getting to know them a little. But because my neighbors don’t exactly meet my standard of tidiness or house pride, I had to put my gripes aside before I could do so. 

A free, municipality-sponsored online Zoom session by Dr. Anthony Naftali, a Haifa psychiatrist, helped me put it all in a laughingly simple perspective. Trading cucumbers for smiles, miraculously a few days later, piles of junk, gravel, a rusty toaster oven, and dusty bottles magically disappeared.

A shiva call

A WhatsApp post on the Ahuza Anglo Group leads me to the home of a family sitting shiva for their son, Amit Hayut, a 29-year-old soldier, in Neveh Sha’anan, a bus ride a few neighborhoods away from my Hadar HaCarmel home.

What I’m about to do is intense, barging in on this shiva mourning period for Amit, who was killed in Lebanon the day before. I don’t know the family, as I’m not a friend or neighbor. Only in Israel would I dare to do such a thing.

How do I introduce myself as I step into a ground-floor apartment filled with people who knew and cared about Amit? I explained I was here as a writer for The Jerusalem Post. This isn’t the first time my work as a journalist has taken me way out of my comfort zone to situations in sync with the tragedies unfolding daily in Israel. 

In a gazebo-like tent, soldiers from Amit’s battalion have gathered to talk about their commander, “the best of all best friends.” Visiting the family, hearing soldiers recall their friend’s last moments, seeing the mouth-watering plates of food and desserts going largely uneaten, sitting shiva brings the enormity of the loss into sharp relief. 

I eventually find Tsippi, the fallen soldier’s mother, and ask to take a picture of her and the newspaper article about her beloved son, headline news for the worst of reasons. RIP Amit Hayut, at 29, far too young to go.

Out there things can happen

And frequently do

To people as brainy 

And footsy as you.

For a smart city, we’re still vulnerable

Haifa is a brainy town. 

We’ve got the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. We’ve got the University of Haifa. We’ve got Matam – a well-appointed Mediterranean seaside hi-tech park, our own Silicon Valley. We’ve got army, naval, and air force bases that send fighter jets across Haifa’s skies multiple times a day. Besides Bnei Zion Hospital, we’ve got the Rambam Health Care Campus, with its 2,000 hospital beds underground ready for triage, to treat and operate in a pinch – God forbid. 

But there’s plenty here that’s not very smart and makes life in wartime downright miserable, if not extremely dangerous. 

The Haifa metropolis sprouted a century ago, one concrete block of apartments at a time. Swaths of nature reserve still grace the slopes of Mount Carmel. They provide clear views to the Mediterranean Sea, the Haifa port, and beyond to the newer Krayot high-rise neighborhoods, which are the most vulnerable to attacks from missile fire from Lebanon and Iran.

The very thing that makes Haifa picturesque – Mount Carmel rising like a crown over the city sprawl – turns out to be its most dangerous feature. Neighborhoods tend to be built on the hills, connected by lone highways that run through nature reserves. There’s nothing more lovely than a quiet boulevard offering a clear view across the bay to Acre and Mount Hermon, farther in the distance. But as Dr. Seuss reminds me, I’m in the waiting place now. 

My phone navigation app tells me that I’m living in Lebanon. My clock app tells me I’m on Amman time. As I head home from the Grand Canyon Mall, having tried unsuccessfully to fix these App glitches, I find myself walking on a boulevard flanked by an unspoiled mountain nature reserve. I am alone, and it occurs to me that I have nowhere to run in the likely event of an air raid siren. 

But what am I supposed to do? Stay home in fear? I don’t think I’ve ever been more relieved than when I boarded an Egged bus that traveled along a stretch of Haifa highway near the mall, where sidewalks were deemed essential, but bomb shelters were not. 

And then things start to happen.

Don’t worry. Don’t stew.

Just go right along.

You’ll start happening too.

An artist in residence

I moved to Haifa because it’s a great place to be an artist and writer. Climbing the steep forested mountainside staircases helps me to write. Meandering walks under tall cypress trees lead to lots of picture-taking that inspires my paintings.

I keep a separate album on my phone just for soldiers, demonstrators, and protesters. I photograph the soldiers wherever I see them, on the Tel Aviv-bound train from Hof HaCarmel and inside falafel shops. They’re like rock stars to me, the men and women keeping us safe and at such young ages. 

I photograph the demonstrators, older folks maintaining a vigil for the hostages in front of David HaCohen Square, which is more of a circle. Over the past year, this circle, with a fountain at its core, has become part art installation, part shrine. Posters with the faces of each hostage have been attached to empty yellow chairs. The dedication of these volunteers, demonstrators, and conscientious objectors to war seeped into my imagination and shifted my outlook from being an observer to a participant. 

Between picking cucumbers and painting scenes from normal daily life, there’s no time to worry, no time to stew. 

And yet, I’d be lying if I said that my heart doesn’t race when I hear the evil-sounding air raid siren, threatening to bring us into depression and despair, even though it’s saving our lives countless times each day. In Haifa, we’ve been dealing with these sirens almost daily for a month. 

Though it never gets easier when the air raid siren blasts over the skies, I know that there’s nowhere I’d rather be than right here. As Dr. Seuss – a lifelong Lutheran whose soul came into this world through Jewish-German parents – so aptly put it in Oh, the Places You’ll Go!: We’ve got what it takes to be resilient.

Even a journey through a bizarre land, seeing things we’ve never seen before, and never imagined possible, not knowing what to expect as we navigate the uncertainties, doesn’t mean we have to run away from it: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” 

The weather is balmy. The leaves are turning beautiful golden colors. Facing this latest hurdle in Israel’s complex history, standing together with other resilient people of Haifa, simply feels like the right thing to do. 