Questions From the Bomb Shelter

Some dreams do come true.

At night, I dream of the rising screech of sirens across Jerusalem, of running to a bomb shelter, of thinking wildly about my grown children elsewhere in Israel dashing through dark streets for safety as missiles whoosh overhead. I dream of distant booms that I hope are interceptions and not direct hits on apartment buildings.

I wake to a chorus of sirens and to the harsh clack of the army’s Home Front Command app on my phone, announcing how many minutes we have to seek cover. Outside, running to the shelter, I see the red flash of rocket engines overhead and their long white trails, and I hear far-off explosions. After the all clear, I get texts from my children: “Safe.” News flashes appear of buildings hit in other cities by Iranian missiles that evaded interception, and of the search for the wounded and dead.

I do not sleep again. Until dawn, I ask questions about why this is happening: Are the reasons we have been given for war true; can we possibly trust the people who gave those reasons; how in the world will this end?

Life is a warped jigsaw puzzle: The pieces of the normal and the abnormal do not fit together. The small grocery on the next street seems fully stocked; the air-conditioning works in my apartment; faucets give water. The streets have not been this quiet since the pandemic lockdowns. I take morning runs through my untouched neighborhood, with my map app set to show public bomb shelters. Sometimes a workout ends with a sprint for cover. A news site shows pictures of an apartment building in another town: The “before” image looks like my building, a 1950s housing project; “after” shows savaged concrete and the gaping squares of what were people’s homes.

Everyone I know is sleepless because of the nighttime attacks. People who do not have bomb shelters or the reinforced rooms required by regulation in newer buildings camp out with friends or family members, if they can. Leaving Israel is virtually impossible, because all flights out have been canceled. In WhatsApp groups, friends trade long lists of suggestions for dealing with stress: dance and laugh with your family, breathe slowly, don’t scarf sweets, stop doomscrolling war news an hour before bedtime (who are you kidding?). I receive a text message purporting to be from the Israeli military warning that terrorists will target bomb shelters, so people should stay away from them. A news item cautions citizens to ignore such digital warfare. As a journalist, I get repeated emails from the military censor, reminding me that the location of direct hits cannot be published, lest it help the enemy aim better.

Some people work from home; some are not working. Many are serving in the reserves, as they have, off and mostly on, since the other war started more than 600 days ago. The Israelis killed by missiles get less coverage, my daughter points out, than if they’d been killed in terror bombings during the Second Intifada. The dead in Tehran are only a number. The dead in Gaza—our soldiers, many more Palestinian civilians—have mostly been relegated to back pages. Mass protests demanding that Israel’s government reach a deal with Hamas for the release of our hostages and the end of the war have stopped, because a missile could hit a crowd. Iran is the news.

That the unfinished war in Gaza has now barely become background is, itself, a reason to begin asking questions.

On June 12, media reports said a nighttime meeting of senior ministers would be held to discuss hostage-deal negotiations. Afterward, it emerged that the announced topic was a ruse, a diversion aimed at Iran. In reality, the ministers moved from the normal meeting room to a bunker, where they approved the attack.

Or, I ask: Is this new conflict itself a diversion from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, where he has promised but cannot deliver “absolute victory”?

[Read: Netanyahu takes desperate measures]

At 3 a.m. on June 13, sirens woke everyone in Israel. The Houthis again, I assumed. Just another single missile from Yemen that would be intercepted within 10 minutes, as has happened often over the past months. My wife and I ran for shelter, where we learned from news bulletins that Israel was bombing Iran. And yet, no missiles had been fired at Israel. The messages on the Home Front Command app, we realized once we had caught our breaths, warned only that we must be ready for Home Front Command instructions in case of an attack.

This was strange, as people around me noticed. Sirens normally sound only when missiles are on their way, when danger is immediate. At a press conference that first day, the army spokesperson explained that the aim was that citizens would “be alert and attentive” to instructions. This may be the full explanation. But trust in this government has been so strained that I consider other possibilities. I find myself wondering whether the oddly timed alert had a political origin, meant to create the sudden solidarity and support for fighting that sweeps a country when war begins.

At the outset of the Iran campaign, that support appeared to materialize. A survey conducted from the third to the fifth day found that 70 percent of Israelis favored the offensive. Prominent commentators repeated and expanded on Netanyahu’s explanation: that “within a short amount of time” Iran could build nuclear weapons. “The knife is at [our] throat,” one columnist wrote. “Israeli intelligence has uncovered the fact that Iran has begun the process of the ‘breakthrough’” to creating a bomb.

I cannot dismiss this evaluation. If it’s true, it’s nightmarish. What if one of those warheads that hit Tel Aviv were nuclear?

But, lacking our own sources of data, we journalists cannot verify or challenge this claim. Governments publish or leak intelligence for political purposes, which may not require that what is made public offers a complete or true picture of what secretive agencies have uncovered. And even when an intelligence community is convinced of its conclusions, it can be mistaken. Americans need only recall the lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003. Israeli espionage obviously penetrated Iran to an extraordinary extent, as shown by the ability to locate Iranian generals. But this doesn’t mean its evaluations of Iranian intent are accurate. The U.S. assessment that Iran was not on the verge of building a bomb is at least as questionable.

Regardless, the attack on Iran is under way. How long can Israel, already exhausted by the Gaza war, keep fighting on a new front? Would Netanyahu, who rejected Barack Obama’s diplomatic agreement to stop Iran’s nuclear effort, accept a new one? Without an accord, how long would it take Iran to rebuild, and create a nuclear weapon? Iran’s air defenses have failed. Its stock of ballistic missiles did not deter Israel. For Tehran, a nuclear deterrent may have just grown all the more attractive. This danger did not end with the U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, including the deep-underground Fordo facility. Arms-control experts have warned that Iran already had a significant supply of highly enriched uranium, and Tehran has now threatened to withdraw openly from the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

[Read: Israel plunges into darkness]

I am turning over these questions not just because they are the unanswerable anxieties of war but because we Israelis have so many reasons to distrust the man who has led us here. Perhaps no one said it better than Benjamin Netanyahu himself, back in 2008. At that time, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was under police investigation even as he was exploring peace talks with Syria. Netanyahu challenged Olmert’s motives in a television interview: “We’re talking about a prime minister who is up to his neck in investigations, and who doesn’t have a public and moral mandate to decide such fateful matters for the state of Israel. There’s a real concern … that he will make decisions on the basis of his personal interest in political survival and not the national interest.”

The same is now true of Netanyahu, who has refused to leave office despite being indicted in three corruption cases in 2019. His trial has dragged on for five years, and the prosecution finally began cross-examining him early this month. Because of the war with Iran, though, courts are holding only urgent hearings and the trial is on hold. Since the Hamas attack of October 7, Netanyahu has resisted public pressure for a judicial inquiry into the catastrophe. Last week, his government just barely survived a coalition crisis. These conditions hardly inspire confidence in his decision to drag the country into a potentially calamitous war.

These questions yield few answers so early in this war. But even without sirens wailing in dark hours, they would be enough to keep me awake.