As Israel braces for attack, ordinary citizens fear that Netanyahu has destroyed a country and a dream

I was waiting at a light-rail station when a very old woman in a sun hat approached me. She wanted to go to Bnei Brak.

But the train line she was waiting at did not go there. I looked at the map and pointed to a station where she might switch.

“I can’t see,” she said. “You’ll have to read it to me.”

I told her that her stop was the fifth, and that it would be announced. Her stop was Ben Gurion, named after the leader who had insisted on a state at any price.

“But I can’t always hear,” she said. “You’ll tell me.”

She sat next to me, even though I had many bags, and there were numerous empty seats. She told me she had been in Petach Tikvah to pay a shiva call. “He was my friend, he was 99 years old,” she said.

“I remember when they rode horses here,” she told me. “Now the train — I can’t run fast enough to catch it.”

“You don’t have to run,” I said. “Every few minutes there is another train.”

She told me that at the shiva , photos were shared from 60 years ago. “I said — ‘do you know who this is?’ And no one recognized me!” she laughed.

I asked her how she felt about the possibility of a wider war. “We used to be better than they are, we used to be good,” she said. “Now we are the same.”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” she continued. “He destroyed the country.”

By now I have spent enough time in Israel to know that “he” means Benjamin Netanyahu. He destroyed the country, she said, but that doesn’t really capture it, because in Hebrew, every word has layers of meaning.

What she said was hu machriv et hamedina. That word — machriv — “destroying” — is related to churban, or destruction. It’s the specific word used to describe the destruction of the Second Temple, and it’s also the word used in Yiddish to describe the Holocaust.

The word has mournful and tragic resonance, especially as Tisha B’Av, which marks the Churban or destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, approaches. Too many people have told me they fear Iran will choose this most somber day on the Jewish calendar to attack.

These days, the word machriv is everywhere.

All over Tel Aviv, there are posters with the prayer for the imprisoned, which is now the prayer for the hostages. Many of these prayer posters now have a sticker of Netanyahu superimposed on them, with the same phrase this lovely old lady paying a shiva call used: Machriv hamedina, destroyer of the state. Destroyer of the country.

For Israelis, that word, hamedina, or “the state” is not just the State of Israel, but the dream of the State of Israel. I’m pretty sure that’s what my seatmate meant, that he was destroying the dream, since she herself was undoubtedly older than the state itself.

“I’ve lived through wars,” she said, when I asked if she was scared.

I asked if she would be okay with the three-minute walk to where she needed to switch trains.

“If you can’t figure it out, ask someone,” I said. “But choose carefully.”

“Always,” she said, smiling. “Look how I picked you. What would I do without you?”

“Choose someone with chen, ” I said, a Hebrew word that means grace and charm.

“Always,” she said, as I showed her how to press the green button to open the door, and she slowly walked out.

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The news reports don’t include all the sweet old ladies, paying shiva calls in 90-degree heat to people who lived for nearly a century — who grew up with an Israel of horses and idealism and now fear that a leadership is destroying the country from the inside.

The media shows tattooed young people at demonstrations, crowding public spaces and blocking highways, but it doesn’t go to porches and train stops and shiva calls to interview the wrinkled old ladies who agree with them.

As the train went on, a news alert flashed on my phone. The government was warning Israelis to avoid Israeli and Jewish locations abroad, including Chabad Houses and kosher restaurants, and to not wear identifying marks.

If my seatmate couldn’t run to the light rail, I thought, she wouldn’t be able to run to a bomb shelter either. My friend in Petach Tikvah has a friend who had pregnancy complications that left her with a limp. “It’s hard for her to run down the stairs to the shelter,” she had told me earlier this morning, over coffee.

Thoughts of her friend’s bad leg are what keeps her up at night, as she listens for the sirens that she is certain are coming. It’s the kind of thing many Israelis are thinking about, as heads of state negotiate, and Hezbollah moves equipment and leaders out of Beirut, and the US and UK tell their citizens to take any flight out of Lebanon, even if it’s inconvenient.

Tonight, between news updates, I will hope my seatmate can see and hear her way to wherever she needs to go, whether it’s a train stop or a bomb shelter. And if not, I hope someone with chen will help her.