The 3-Weeks War?

Sorry for the dearth of posts today... between the fast, trying to keep up with what's going on, and taking care of Elianna, there simply isn't much time for blogging.

Updates from Jameel and Dave were going up throughout the day, and Meryl (and her cohorts) put up an astonishing number of posts. The first two are getting some much needed rest now, especially Jameel whose counter-terrorist unit was alerted to the possibility of a few terrorists in his community. EDIT: Olah Chadasha & Olah Yashan, however, seem to still be awake - updates are (and have been) available by them, as well... EDIT2: Olah Yashan also helps run the website The Daily TidBit, which is also giving continuous updates.

The feelings in Israel must be crazy... a relative of ours who recently made aliyah decided to finally write her first post on it:

A close friend relayed to me how emotional she's been! Driving through a machsom (IDF barrier) she handed the baby-faced soldier there a fistfull of lollipops, as this family always does, and the soldier's entire face lit up! She drove on and burst into tears. My kids wanted to know if it was because she thought he could be the next 'Gilad.'

Meanwhile, they still do all manage to go on with their lives and live every day (somewhat) normally. Tobie [hat tip: Irina] is moving to Israel in a month, and she sums it up for the rest of us:

I wish that I were there. I wish that I were already there, where I could walk outside and see how normal my life was, where I could take buses and watch the people milling about their daily lives. Where my fear would be the fear of every single one of my neighbors, and I could join them in facing it, shrugging it off, and moving on. Where I could bury my face against a building and remember that it was all worth it.

But this... it's like sitting outside an operating room. You don't know what's going on or how things are going, but every few minutes a couple of doctors come out and give hair-raising, conflicting, and vague descriptions of a loved one's surgery. And then twenty or thirty strangers sitting around you begin to analyze what that means and what will happen, and to critique the doctors' techniques, worrying that they might cause further harm. And you sit there, suddenly scared, and want to just push open the doors and come inside and sit beside the operating table, so that you'd be able to watch and be there as it happens. And maybe even help.

Kudos to Orthomom for her post today about being wrong on disengagement, though I'm not really sure that's necessary. It still speaks highly of her. Shame on DovBear for claiming that she shouldn't have, because

Pulling out of Gaza brought Israel *loads* of benefits, the freedom to act with impunity when rockets fall (and with the world's support no less) being just one of them.

Sorry. That's what I - and many others - were hoping would be the positives that would come out from something we were against. Israel did not take advantage of the opportunity to do so when the rockets started falling, and even with 3 soldiers captured, a number killed, and rockets falling on Ashkelon and Haifa, they are being asked to act "with restraint" - from the Japanese Prime Minister to Switzerland to the United Nations to Russia to France to even the United States [albeit on a smaller scale than the others]. It is clear that these supposed "benefits" of disengagement failed to materialize, and to claim otherwise is simply foolish.

Meanwhile, there are reports (unconfirmed) that the soldiers kidnapped yesterday are being transferred to Iran (Iran denies this).

Hashem Yerachem.