Mothers
Mothers of soldiers don't sleep when they're in Gaza. Even if you managed to fall asleep around 3 a.m., you're too conscious to survive the sunrise with your eyes closed. You haven't been on social media since it all began, but it peeks out of the cracks, and images of soldiers praying among giant bulldozers on the beach in Gaza mingle with images of the slow-moving tank, and you wonder maybe it's there now.
5 am. Messages with names are always released at 6. You think you've seen the red military shoes he always brazenly wears off in the middle of the living room—and you open your eyes. The house is empty. First Kislev. Cold. Mothers who have been drifting off sleep for six weeks are watching the weather change, awake to any changes this transitional season. It's colder in the morning than at 11 p.m. Maybe it's better to sleep in long pants in advance. If they knock on the door, it's best to be prepared for any scenario.
Soldiers on their way to Hamas outposts in Gaza, photo: uncredited
women
Even young women in this war can't close their eyes, even before the testimonies we understood what we were seeing. We were shocked by white jeeps galloping freely through the streets of Ofakim, we had trouble digesting the begging calls from our kibbutzim homes, but when a brief spotter was photographed from behind, the stain on our pants made it very clear to us what had happened there before. Don't tell us, we're there. And she stands in the heart of Sodom, pulled by the hair from the trunk on the front seat, the mind understands and the uterus contracts.
The families of the abductees, the tragedy of the abductees, photo: Gideon Markowitz
The message with the names is always released at 6. Mothers from whom sleep has been drifting for six weeks are waiting for the soldier to knock on the door but don't want to hear someone knock for such an hour. Maybe it's better to sleep in long pants, in advance. Prepared for any scenario
Since the beginning of the war, gynecologists have reported an unprecedented wave of patients complaining of pain and cramps in the lower abdomen, and of frequent, prolonged, seemingly unexplained bleeding from the uterus. We identify and hurt from our most personal place, every mother over a grave, every pregnant woman whose loved one was killed, every soldier who desecrated, every child they couldn't find and whose toys were buried without her.
One of the expressions of this feminine identification is the fashion of spontaneous weddings - we identify with those who have not had time to realize their love, we do not want to stay with half our lust in our hands, we are too romantic to die before or to be widowed as single. At the moment of truth, a bridal chair and reception don't do that to us at all. Something in our national consciousness was experienced in a particularly gendered way this time. Never before have so many women been hurt on so many battlefronts. of life.
Abigail, 3 years old, abducted lover,
Our hair, our bodies, our clothes, our home, our children. They left us nothing. The traditional belief that there are cultures that despise feminism but respect us in an ancient way has also vanished. My grandfather agonized until his last day over whether the Nazis first removed his mother's gold tooth and then murdered her, or let her die and only then abused. And I find myself praying, despite the shock of the rape of corpses, that I wish they had died earlier. The female Sisterhood has been bleeding for six weeks. We are the most unprotected flowers in the world.
The funeral of Yossi Hershkovitz z"l. Orphans, Photo: Haim Goldberg-Flash 90,
The funeral of Yossi Hershkovitz z"l, photo: Haim Goldberg, Flash-90
uterus
Sleepless nights meet a woman giving birth in captivity. I can still feel the stitches from my eldest soldier's birth. The body remembers everything. A stranger will not understand, and only women are not strangers. Is it real? The mind denies, and you begin to chew on these impossible words. How is birth in captivity?
Filthy cellars, endless humiliating situations, on what basis can such a birth take place? I don't want to think about what they're doing there with the umbilical cord. And why did I hear there was a birth and I didn't hear about a baby? Imagine the baby, I command myself, there must be a baby, there are stories of births in Auschwitz that actually gave hope.
But even Auschwitz seemed less threatening to me, and where is my grandfather with the number on his hand who will prove otherwise or be disappointed by the Jewish naiveté that commits suicide every day? He still saw the funeral of the Dee family members on television, and when the father shouted "Am Yisrael Chai" over three bodies in the cemetery in Kfar Etzion, after a killing confession was held in the Jordan Valley, Grandpa found a way not to choke on tears: he took into account how many were murdered every day in Auschwitz and how many were murdered here, and took comfort in the fact that we had not yet bypassed the horrors of the Diaspora.
If he were here to follow the exponential pace of the unfortunate women, he would be dead.
I don't want to think about what they do with the umbilical cord. Even Auschwitz seemed less threatening to me, and where is my grandfather with the number on his hand that would prove otherwise? If he were here to follow the exponential pace of unhappy women, he would be dead
Female soldiers
Halacha says that some of the man's obligations in his marriage are up for debate, but there is nothing to say that he must redeem her if she is captured. A woman in captivity terrified the sages. It is not clear whether she is being abused, or because of the well-known excuse "not to interfere among the kots" (assimilation), but it seems very irrelevant when you look at Tractate Kiddushin. On the other hand, when you look at Telegram, you think it was written yesterday.
Moshe Ben-Simhon
My daughter enlisted in the last month, along with many others. I don't want her to be in any position that puts her at the front against an enemy. Never. Girls are smarter than boys, it's not a defiant or abusive sentence, it's a fact. Women will benefit the army in setting strategy, women are in great shape, women do not need permission from men to serve wherever they want and be in whatever space they see fit. But it's easier to abuse us. We have to weigh this figure for ourselves, because as the business goes, whoever promised his little girl before bed that this would be the last war thought she had already fallen asleep.
The family of Sergeant Major (res.) Raz Abulafia, at the funeral in Rashpon
Abduction of the observer to Gaza, screenshot
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