Hamas announced that in exactly one hour, they would destroy Tel Aviv. That was Saturday about 8 p.m. — just in time for the evening news.  Perhaps those weren’t the exact words. Maybe Hamas said it was going to send a new kind of missile, or an unprecedented barrage of rockets that would finally trump the Iron Dome. It didn’t really matter. Hamas had never warned us before hitting us, so this was something new. All week long, I had been walking around Tel Aviv with a tight little knot in my gut, knowing that at any moment that horrid whoop-whoop would fill the air and I would have to run.  The first siren of this conflict went off while I was walking down Ben Yehuda St. last Tuesday afternoon, carrying a roasted chicken home for dinner. The second came Wednesday morning, just after I had returned from walking my dog. I was on the phone with my mother in California, and when I heard the first tones of its wail rise up, I dropped the phone so hard I thought it might crack.  Since then, we’ve had one or two sirens a day, which is nothing compared with the sirens in the cities on Israel’s periphery, where sleep has become a cruel joke. I know that it’s also nothing compared with the pummeling happening in Gaza; it is nothing compared to the Lebanon war, or the fighting of Yom Kippur in 1973, or of any intifadeh, ever. But I am tired of being told it is nothing, because when Hamas threatened to flatten Tel Aviv on Saturday night and all I could do was sit on the sofa with my husband and wait for that wretched wail to once again rise up and tell us to run, what I felt was most certainly something.  At 9:04 p.m., the sirens did wail, and once again we scooped up our dog and ran to the shelter. They say that 10 missiles were lobbed at Tel Aviv at once Saturday night, more than the city has seen since the Gulf War, but the Iron Dome knocked them all out of the sky. We stood underground with our neighbors, all of us jumping with each deafening “boom” of interception.  Later, when the hungry had returned to their dinners and the thirsty had flocked back to the bars, I would go into the kitchen and, hands trembling, drop a soapy glass on the floor. My husband, hearing the glass shatter, would come in and take a look at my palm.  “Don’t worry,” he would say into the now-still night. “It’s nothing.”  Debra Kamin is an American writer based in Tel Aviv.
Debra Kamin, an American writer based in Israel, writes that while her experiences may pale in comparison to others, constantly waiting for the next warning to run for her life is very real and very scary.