The late summer’s afternoon skies of the hilly kibbutz, which lay at the foot of Mount Carmel in the northwestern side of the Jezreel Valley, were suddenly filled with supersonic jet fighters and helicopters on Tuesday, September 17. Evening fell on this small, rural community and its paths started to fill, as every night, with stray cats and porcupines searching for underground roots and corms in the gardens. The jackals began to howl, and the kibbutz dogs howled back in response, as they regularly do. The loud choir sounded as though it were unrestrained and in close proximity.

The sonic boom these planes make when traveling faster than the speed of sound is common in this area because of the nearby Air Force base. But as darkness fell on the 346th day following the October 7 attacks, the news was abuzz with a cunning intelligence operation across Lebanon and parts of Syria that had caused the explosion of pager devices belonging to Hezbollah members. This attack, which resulted in the deaths of nine people and wounded 2,800, succeeded a series of attacks on Hezbollah initiated by the IDF. It seemed like the opening shot of a long feared and yet anticipated campaign, which shifted the nerve wracked, general attention from Gaza in the south to Lebanon in the north.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah called the pager attacks a «declaration of war», almost unwillingly playing into the hands of the government in Jerusalem (and especially its leader), which for various reasons seemed to want an escalation on the northern front, sometimes against the better judgment and recommendations of the operational echelon. But most of all, the situation seemed like a whirlwind of events with no one in charge. Israel was experiencing two simultaneous chronologies that led to a stalemate: on the one hand, an increasingly bloody escalation of events; and on the other hand, there was nothing really happening. The hostages in Gaza were still being buried alive, there was no ceasefire, none of those in charge took responsibility for the unprecedented catastrophe of October 7 – there was no closure in sight. On Twitter (X) axios and CNN journalist Barak Ravid wrote that U.S. officials told him «they recognize Israel’s ‹de-escalation through escalation› rational and agree with it, but stress this is an ‹extremely difficult calibration› that could easily go out of control and lead to an all-out war.»

On Wednesday evening, September 18, the Israeli army continued the operation with explosions of thousands of two-way personal radios used by Hezbollah members in Lebanon. In the evening, a few dozen people gathered in the foyer of the Bialik House museum, the former home of the Hebrew national poet Hayim Nahman Bialik in the center of Tel Aviv. They came to hear a lecture titled «Imagining a World without Israel». The eclectic, orientalist Art Nouveau architecture of the Bialik House had sought to become «Hebrew» architecture in 1920s Mandatory Palestine.