The War on Zoom

In this story...The war on Zoom. I’m Joanne Greene.
It started slowly, tentatively. Those of us living outside of Israel had joined a zoom call to support our friends, fellow writers with whom we’d been meeting virtually since the start of Covid. We’d become a community and had been present, to hold one another through tough times – the loss of a grandchild, the end of a marriage, the crime of a brother-in-law, the passing of a beloved grandfather, the horrors of October 7th. We’re Writers Near and Far, mostly living in the U.S. and Israel, with origins ranging from Italy to South Africa. We are women, celebrating the joys and milestones in our lives, juggling relationships, and health concerns, triathalons, and flower beds, and all the while creating beauty, when we find the time and the inspiration, with our words. 
But this meeting was different. Five of us showed up to listen, to nod empathetically, to give our exhausted friends, who’d been running in and out of safe rooms in the middle of the night for a week, as the Iron Dome beat back many of the ballistic missiles Iran was shooting at Israel. One by one, four of us entered the Zoom room from Israel, all relieved to share both the horrors and the tender moments they’d been experiencing. For Dori, this was it. Born in Israel to an Israeli Yemenite mother and an American father, Dori had been drawn back to her native land after October 7th  yet now, after two years of the atrocities in Gaza and now this second war with Iran, she is finished, fed up with this government. When her mother recovers from surgery, she’s taking off, again, with no firm plan. When asked if they, too might be ready to give up on Israel, at least for now, the others all shook their heads. 
“I chose to move here from South Africa,” said Gaby, “and I’m committed to remaining in this, my homeland.” 
“Let me put it this way,” said Stephanie, who shuttles back and forth between her home- town of Berkeley, California, and Jerusalem, where three of her six children have put down roots.
“In Berkeley, I wear a baseball cap to cover my hair and hide my Star of David under my shirt. Here, I proudly wear my head scarf and Magan Daveed. That difference, the tacit permission to be who I am here means everything to me.”
Traveling each year between the city of her birth, Philadelphia, and Tel Aviv, where she currently resides with her husband, Caroline has often considered leaving Israel, perhaps for Rome or elsewhere.
“But not now,” she says on our call. “I’ve considered leaving for personal reasons but not because of war.”
And then she grabbed her cell phone, a look of alarm on her face, and abruptly jumped from her seat and out the door.
We were stunned, at first, knowing full well that this could happen at any moment. We concluded that a siren had gone off, leaving Caroline seven minutes to grab her phone and head across the street to the underground parking garage which was now serving as her safe room. She and her husband had been sheltering in a room in their building, but this parking garage was less claustrophobic. Her dog could run around with the other dogs. There was even food being provided on one of the floors. Israelis are nothing if not adaptable, practical, built to survive. Apparently, this siren had only gone off in Tel Aviv, which was why the other Israelis remained on the call.
I kept looking at Caroline’s square, the rooms we’ve come to know in each of our homes. Not having time to close her laptop, we were watching her room grow darker as the sun was setting. She, we assumed, had fled to relative safety. It was eerie to see her empty room and know that bombs were flying. Her empty room enabled us to share the horror of war in real time.
Two of Caroline’s adult children live in the U.S. and are unlikely to return. What does that mean for her future? She doesn’t know. Gaby lives on a kibbutz in the northern part of Israel and shares that s