JAMAL AWAD/FLASH90/JTA

Israeli security forces 
search from Hamas 
Militants in the southern 
Israeli city of Sderot, 
Oct. 7, 2023.

OUR COMMUNITY

Initial reaction from Metro 
Detroiters who made aliyah.

The
Shemini 
Atzeret/
Simchat 
Torah War: 
Operation 
Iron Swords 

NATHANIEL WARSHAY EFRAT, ISRAEL

I

n the western Midwest states 
of Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska 
and others, where it is so 
flat you can see from one state 
line across to the other; farmers 
and many urban dwellers have 
tornado shelters, essentially 
hardened underground safe 
rooms. In Michigan, we know to 
shelter in the basement or inside 
a doorframe when the tornado 
siren sounds.
There are no tornadoes in 
Israel. Instead, we have indoor 
bomb shelters that, since the first 
Gulf War in 1991 when Saddam 
Hussein sent poisonous gas in his 
ballistic missiles, must be sealed 
airtight. The Oct. 7 invasion of 
Israel by Hamas, which rules the 
Gaza Strip, introduced a new 
use for our safe rooms — that 
of being a panic room. Jodie 
Foster’s 2002 film Panic Room is 
the closest most Detroiters have 
come to appreciating the need for 
a physically safe space from home 
invasion. 
What is so horrifying in this 
invasion, as if there is something 
more so than death and destruc-
tion, are the roaming gangs of 
Palestinians bent on killing Israeli 

civilians, not because they are 
combatants, but because they are 
Israeli Jews. Most of the deaths 
and injured so far are civilians 
on the streets, in bus shelters, in 
their cars and in their homes. 
Some 260 of them were youth 
and young adults at an all-night 
rave at a nature reserve near 
Kibbutz Re’im, close to the Gaza 
border, where Hamas made an 
early-morning assault.
The unspeakable Palestinian 
focus on civilian deaths belies the 
claim there is resistance to “occu-
pation.
” Palestinian terrorists or 
fighters or militants (you decide), 
rarely focus on fighting the Israeli 
military unless it is to kidnap 
individual soldiers to ransom for 
hundreds or thousands of their 
brethren convicted of terrorism 
(murder of civilians, primarily).
Unlike so many Detroiters who 
lock doors as soon as they are 
closed, Israel is generally a safe 
area, where doors are left open, 
bicycles left outside unchained 
overnight, and things are not “dis-
appeared” by people walking by. 
However, Oct. 7 saw a new 
form of Palestinian terrorism, 
that of civilian home invasion, 

34 | OCTOBER 19 • 2023 J
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