November 25, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-25

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

---

I jump when a series of beeps sounds near my left shoulder. It's my family's air monitor. For a tiny box, it's loud.

We look at the numbers. The particulate matter in the air is extremely high, even with the windows closed and all the fans running.¹

The online monitors around the area aren't reporting much unusual, except for one, several towns away, that is equally high. It's been bad all weekend. We don't know what's causing it. It might be a fluke. It might be someone burning trash. It might be the war.

Since my family at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers keeps the Sabbath strictly, they haven't heard much news about the hostages that were released on the first day of the truce. I tell them some of the highlights that I can recall without looking at a screen. Over a dozen of our citizens were released, including several groupings of mothers, grandmothers, and children. One of those released had been reported dead, but isn't. About a dozen people from Thailand were freed. And the one caregiver who had become a household name has been returned.²

In the evening, the media reports on reunions. The front screen of the news page I follow most has a rotating gallery of our hostages reuniting with their families. Its lead article has images and video of their return.³ The local news site shows a boy who was released, walking in the hospital at which he will stay for a couple of days.⁴ The Bangkok Post speaks with a mother whose daughter was freed.⁵ And Al Jazeera reports on one of the 39 prisoners that we released in exchange.⁶

The functioning parts of our government, or the civil organizations who are handling what they don't, have developed guidelines for handling the hostages upon release. The hostages' health plans have forwarded their records to the people in charge, to help in the initial health checks and their stays in the hospitals. A forum, organized online, is coordinating it.⁷

Each hospital has set aside a separate area for them, to keep their privacy. We can expect that lots of people will want to get to them and speak with them. A hostage released several weeks ago spoke with the press the next day. It didn't go well.

There are rules now for how soldiers, doctors, and others are to interact with the children and women. The Times of Israel goes into detail about this.⁸ There are further guidelines for how social workers and lawyers will work with them once they go home (though some of their homes may no longer exist).⁹ Other media looks at other angles of what will happen.¹⁰

A common thread runs through all these guidelines: Don't cause the released children any additional trauma.

A doctor who examined several of the children says that they're in relatively good health, though they have lost weight.¹¹

He warns about Refeeding Syndrome, where giving an undernourished person food too quickly can be harmful. My father told me about this: When he and fellow soldiers liberated the concentration camps in World War II, some of them let the victims eat normally right away. Many of those victims died, since their bodies could no longer handle that much food.

At the end of the Sabbath, we perform the Havdalah ceremony and turn on our phones. There's more news, though not everything that we expect.

The second wave of hostages hasn't been released yet. There appear to be arguments over details of how the aid trucks came in across the border. One unnamed official on our side is quoted as saying that if they aren't here by midnight, the ground assault will resume. Everyone is scurrying about behind the scenes trying to fix things. Meanwhile, about a hundred thousand people are holding a protest in the next city over, demanding that everyone be returned now. It doesn't look like that's going to happen.

We look at news of how things look across the border. It isn't good. Civilians have been killed at a horrifying rate. We've been using massive bombs to hit the city, not the smaller ones that the US used in Mosul and elsewhere. Experts claim that we need the larger bombs to destroy the tunnels. The New York Times quotes the UN as saying that, since the start of the war, more women and children have been killed across the border than in two years of Russian attacks in Ukraine.¹²

A harrowing report from CNN documents a video blogger's posts from there over the course of the war, including her final message. She and her family died in a bombing soon afterward.¹³

We discuss this information, and continue to look for news. My family says that they hope that our army isn't motivated by revenge. The hostages aren't the only people dealing with trauma. So are many, perhaps most, of the people fighting. And we tend not to use our best judgment when operating out of pain, fear, and rage.

I leave the House relatively early, bearing a container of baking soda. I have been wearing my sandals too consistently, including in the rain. My nose tends to be six feet above them, but even I can tell that they need to be deodorized.

I hear a mix of voices as I head into the park. Coming around the bend, I see a pack of teenage boys in the playground. They're too large to climb or slide on the equipment there. They just use the gear as props, as they practice how to lean on it casually and hope to look cool.

When I leave the House, the numbers on the air monitor have gone down a bit. I don't smell any smoke outside. It's too warm for fireplaces and too chilly for barbecues. That's good. As meditation teachers have told us, when there's this much stress in the news and in our lives, we have to be able to breathe.

---

Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.