Family Time

A few weeks ago, I eased myself into my seat on a flight from New York, where I work, to Israel, where I live with my family. Boarding was already delayed, and I anxiously peered out of the small window portal, wondering why it was taking the crew so long to load the luggage. My seatmate also had a case of the shpilkes, his left leg bouncing up and down as he repeatedly checked his watch. Turning to me, he grumbled: “They need to take off already! Supposedly, the war with Iran is gonna start tonight! I can’t get stuck here, away from my wife and kids in Jerusalem!”

For weeks, especially since early January when the Islamic Republic of Iran brutally crushed the largest anti-government protests in its history, America had been building up a formidable arsenal of aircraft carriers, fighter jets, batteries, and bombs. Another round of war between Iran and Israel, and now between Iran and America, seemed inevitable. So we needed to get home to Israel to hunker down with our families.

At last, the flight attendants closed the doors and began to pantomime what to do in case of an emergency as the plane taxied down the runway and sped off into the night sky. As long as we took off, my seatmate and I reasoned (somewhat unreasonably), we’d be able to land at Ben Gurion Airport and make it home in time for the first missile attacks.

The recent bouts of fighting between Israel and Iran have had a strange, special effect on the fabric of Israeli life, especially family life. Until 2024, Iran fought Israel through its proxies, primarily Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah’s rocket and drone attacks, which were mainly aimed at Israel’s north, could be relentless and frightening, yet they somehow remained within the realm of what Israelis considered normal, at least for wartime along the northern border. But beginning in April and September 2024, when the Islamic Republic sent two enormous volleys of missiles and attack drones at Israel, and then in June 2025, during the so-called Twelve Day War when the two nations battered each other bloody, the dark domain of the possible expanded.

Iran’s ballistic missiles are astonishingly fast, traveling the nearly two thousand kilometers to Israel in about ten minutes, and they’re exceedingly powerful, as they’re outfitted with heavy warheads that can decimate entire buildings and damage whole blocks. To be blunt, it’s scary as hell.

The kinetic realities come with a set of social and familial shifts. Israelis are not known for following rules, including directives from the IDF’s Homefront Command. But with the Iranian threat, it’s different. When the IDF detects a missile launch from Iran, shrill pre-warnings blare urgently from cellphones, like an AMBER alert, or an earthquake warning. The accompanying text (in Hebrew, Arabic, English, and Russian) is equally alarming:

Extreme alert! Alerts are expected in a few minutes. Find the best protection around. When receiving an alert, enter the protected space until further notice.

Anywhere from five to eight minutes later, loud sirens wail, signaling the need to enter a protective space, which could be a MAMAD, the Hebrew acronym for a reinforced room in one’s home (for those, like us, who are lucky enough to have one); or a MAMAK, a safe room for an entire apartment-building floor; or a MAMAM, a space for the whole building. And then there’s the neighborhood shelter (miqlat tziburi), where the whole block piles in. Terrifying images of devastated impact-sites, which appear regularly on social media feeds, remind everyone of how high the stakes are. Even Israelis who regularly dismiss warnings about rockets from Hamas or missiles from the Houthis in Yemen rush to take shelter when an Iranian warning threatens.

The days and hours before the last rounds with Iran were something like the frenzied moments before a blizzard or hurricane, when families rush to the supermarket to stress-buy toilet paper and bottled water. Surprisingly, there are hardly any attempt by locals to evacuate. Just the opposite, in fact: People who were abroad when Israeli airspace shut down try to get seats on “rescue” flights that, as safely as possible during wartime, repatriate citizens. Of course, that doesn’t mean the returnees are actually happy to return to the bombardment. But it’s better to sit in a safe room with your family, even in fear and trembling, than to watch the war from a distance, knowing that loved ones are in danger and there’s nothing to do about it.

More than anything now, wartime is family time. Grown children, normally off in university or working their first jobs, come back home as if it were the holidays. With all the stress of trying to juggle missile alerts with Zoom meetings for work or school, there’s still plenty of together time, and endless hours of bickering and boredom.

As with the COVID lockdowns, the kitchen comes alive with new projects and at odd hours. This time, at least in our house, it’s not sourdough bread or whipped coffee but time-consuming and delectable Middle Eastern dishes, like sabzi—an aromatic Persian stew—or an Iraqi beetroot kubeh soup. However, the real moments of camaraderie and crankiness aren’t to be found in the kitchen but in the MAMAD, when the sirens and alarms summon everyone from their bedrooms and private corners to this reinforced “family room.”

If it’s the middle of the night, you stumble into the safe room with eyes half shut, desperately demanding silence, in the distant hope that you might be able to fall asleep after everyone’s phones ding again with the “all-clear.” But before that happens, the wail of the sirens will have to stop, the waiting period of ten minutes will need to commence, and the thud of Israeli interceptors taking out the Iranian missiles will be registered through the vibrations shaking the room and the “pushes” from war apps and news updates.

During the day, our safe room feels different. We might catch up on the little that we’ve been up to, or play silly games together on our phones. My favorite is “make-a-meme,” where we rewrite the texts of memes to match our situation (usually, the gags are family in-jokes). For a minute, it almost feels like a nice vacation where we finally can spend quality time together—until we get another alert that tells us to remain sheltered in place: Iran has sent another volley of missiles, and this time, they’ve coordinated with Hezbollah.