(This post is about my recent 3 week visit to Israel, where I spent most of my time in Jerusalem.)
Words just don’t cut it when describing what it’s like to be caught outdoors when an incoming missile alert siren sounds. Especially the part that news reporters don’t record—the ten minutes after the siren goes silent. So here are two pictures: one showing an Iron Dome interceptor hitting four incoming rockets near my Jerusalem neighborhood when I was visiting, and the other showing two cars decorated for a wedding ten minutes later.
And here’s the connection…
It was about 5:45 pm a week ago this past Tuesday, and my wife, Terri, and I were taking a walk in our neighborhood. We were on a very popular path, and it was crowded with families with young children, an elderly person being pushed in a wheel chair, joggers, and middle-aged couples like us. At about 5:55 pm, the siren sounded. We were nowhere within the approximately 30 seconds that we had to find a bomb shelter. Terri turned to me and said, “What do we do?” to which I said, “Run like everyone else around us and drop to the ground. And that’s what we did, along with an older woman near us, and a family with three young children under the age of five.
Then I looked up and saw the awesome power of the life-saving Iron Dome missile defense system. And Iron Dome does not just save Jewish lives. It saves the lives of all Israeli citizens: Muslims, Druze, Christians and Jews. And it also saves the lives of more Palestinians in Gaza, for without Iron Dome, Israel would have needed to undertake ground operations in Gaza many times to destroy its massive arsenal of missiles that are hidden under deep tunnels, sometimes near schools and hospitals.