It can all come back in a moment. Just two weeks ago, when a siren was heard in the Galilee, and an unidentified aircraft penetrated Israeli skies as it crossed our northern border, we remembered that everything might return. An aircraft penetrated Israel from Syria; it could have been loaded with explosives and hurt the population. Clearly, in such an instance the response from the Israel Defense Forces would be harsh; our planes would bomb terrorist headquarters, hitting them hard, and Nasrallah would take his missiles out of the bushes and aim them at Israel from Kiryat Shmona and southward. The commemoration of a decade to the Second Lebanon War brought me back to those days. I was a student at a hesder yeshiva, which combines yeshiva study with shortened military service, in Kiryat Shmona at the time. I, like many others, received a Tzav 8 emergency draft order prior to Israel's entrance into Lebanon, and a few days later, when the war continued, we were sent back to the yeshiva for service that was just as important in those days, assistance to the IDF Homefront Command. My friends and I made sure to bring equipment and food to the people in the shelters. We helped with social cases that weren't receiving assistance because city employees -- as in other local municipalities in the area -- were overloaded with work. Clearly, a local authority is not prepared to function in wartime; its central role is to provide services during peacetime. The entire yeshiva enlisted in the cause, turning into a war room for the benefit of the municipality and the Homefront Command. At a certain point, after two weeks of nonstop work, students from the hesder yeshiva in the southern town of Mitzpe Ramon came to Kiryat Shmona to allow the boys to get out for a while. When the war began, no one imagined it would take the IDF such a long time to defeat Hezbollah and that the citizens of Israel would become hostages in the fighting. At the end of the war, the Kiryat Shmona hesder yeshiva received an award for excellence from the IDF for its performance during the war and the way in which it mobilized for the sake of the homefront. I am not writing these things in order to brag. I believe that anyone that could help helped; anyone that would have been in our place would have done the same thing. This is how we were raised; this what the then-heads of the yeshiva, Rabbi Zephaniah Drori and Rabbi Yisrael Kirstein -- who arrived at the city at the most difficult of times -- taught us when the Katyushas became almost routine: to be a part of the great human tapestry that has the privilege of defending the State of Israel on its northern border. The honor goes first and foremost to the people of Kiryat Shmona and the communities in the north, who have lived for decades in constant fear of sirens that might disrupt their lives at any moment. The thing is that the country has no way of protecting its homefront without established and organized emergency reserves, and hesder yeshivas play a part in these reserves, the social nuclei around the country play a part in this reserve. As someone who now works at a hesder yeshiva in Kiryat Shmona and is active in the Community Foundation branch in the city, it is clear to me that in order to better contend with the reality of a hit to the homefront, the country has an interest in strengthening and building additional reserves so that they will be at our disposal in times of need. No one knows when the next round of fighting will take place, no one knows where we will be hit, but the faster the Homefront Command manages and recovers from the next hit, the more steadfast Israeli society will be and the more tenacious IDF soldiers and commanders will be when they strike back at the enemy. The preparation work needs to be done today, and the sooner the better.
The Second Lebanon War: Remember the homefront
מערכת היום
מערכת "היום“ מפיקה ומעדכנת תכנים חדשותיים, מבזקים ופרשנויות לאורך כל שעות היממה. התוכן נערך בקפדנות, נבדק עובדתית ומוגש לציבור מתוך האמונה שהקוראים ראויים לעיתונות טובה יותר - אמינה, אובייקטיבית ועניינית.
