Gimme Shelter

By Maya Sela – Host of ‘מה שכרוך’ (Ma She’karuch) on KAN Radio
(Original Hebrew text below – הטקסט המקורי בעברית מופיע בהמשך)

Maybe I’ve lost my mind. I have no desire for a foreign passport, and I don’t want to escape.

On October 7th, I sat alone in my apartment in Tel Aviv and thought that the Hamas Toyota I just saw on TV might be on its way to me. ‘It’s just a shot away,’ Mick Jagger sings. I have no weapon and no license for one. But if I had a weapon, I would use it even without a license. I tell a friend I need to get a gun. ‘You know how to use a gun?’ he mocks me.

A friend who has escaped writes, ‘I’m buying you a ticket now, come to us.’ They live in Tuscany, in Paradise. I appreciate the invitation, but it never crosses my mind to accept.

I must be crazy.

There’s no one there to protect you, I thought to myself, this is the moment you’ve been preparing for your whole life. This is the apocalypse from the movies you’ve seen and the books you’ve read, the apocalypse from the fears you’ve feared. There is no government, no army, no police, no father, no mother, no husband, no bomb shelter, no refuge.

I thought I would be holding my daughter, imagining her as a child, and I would take her and run to the sea, down to Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv, where I would know what to do. I don’t know why in my imagination it’s always the sea. Maybe because my mother always saw the sea as a solution to melancholy, or maybe because of Amos Kenan. His hero, in The Road to Ein Harod, seeks to escape Tel Aviv and the military cult that has taken over the country. He wants to join the rebels in Kibbutz Ein Harod. He needs to get from Tel Aviv to Ein Harod and he writes, ‘There is only one option, only by the sea. The land route is out of the question.’ In my imagination, I always save my daughter, there is no other option. But the years have passed and other possibilities are now revealed, things I never imagined are happening live in front of me. I call my daughter during the sirens. ‘Where are you? Did a missile fall on your head? Were you scared? Don’t be afraid, nothing will happen to you, my daughter.’ ‘Okay, Mom.’

On October 7th, I googled how to make a Molotov cocktail.

If they come to me, they will slaughter me, that’s clear, I will die a thousand strange deaths, these are very cruel people, and I am here alone, without a government, without an army, without police, without a father, without a mother, without a husband, without a bomb shelter, without refuge, but not without a fight.

I’ll throw a few Molotov cocktails at them before they manage to sink their teeth into me. Meanwhile, I watch the horror unfold live like someone watching their own skin being flayed, or like the man I once saw on the news having brain surgery while awake and playing the violin as the surgeon probed his brain.

Seneca the Stoic suggested living without fear and without hope. This is my mental training for the coming months, without fear and without hope. But dismissing fear is much easier than abandoning hope. I tell myself, at worst, you’ll die, big deal. Just like thirty years ago, I said, at worst, we’ll get divorced. But hope is problematic, hope is hard to get rid of. Getting rid of hope means stop dealing with the future, living only in the present, and I am no Zen nun. Around me, the rush to board planes, escaping the apocalypse. Sometimes they call and say, ‘come!’- but I don’t want to go anywhere else. My shelter is here, even when it’s invaded, burning, abandoned. I must have lost my mind.

I don’t know why I think I’m in a shelter, that here is the shelter.I think of blaming my father, it’s always a good strategy. He’s been dead for eight years, but I carry him with me, we walk together, talking, though silently (I am after all a woman contemplating a Molotov cocktail.)

There is a police station across the street. Sometimes I look at the men gathered outside from my window. They are young and strong, the uniforms validating their masculinity. You might think I’d see them as a solution, but I look and think these men won’t protect me.

‘Look at this,’ I say to my father, ‘I’m still looking for a man to protect me, but now it’s no longer metaphorical.’

And my father says, ‘When was it metaphorical? It was never metaphorical, you just didn’t understand where you were living. You never understood anything. I talked to you a thousand times about the Jewish attempt to be universal, we saw what those cultured people did to us, and you see them now. Not that I’m so impressed with our culture here,’ he says, shocked by what’s happening but not hysterical.

I know what he would say now. ‘Stay calm, stand tall, cross the bridge when you get to it, why think about what hasn’t happened yet. Turn off the TV!’

I turn off the TV and think, lucky he’s dead and doesn’t see what’s happening. No government, no army, no police, no husband, no bomb shelter, no refuge. He says I’m childish. ‘You’re the parent now, you see what’s happening, the heartbreak is yours, my old thoughts are now yours. You are the danger.’

He concedes that the Israeli mental landscape has changed, but advises me, nonetheless, not to get depressed, saying, as always, that Israel is not a widow. My father preferred to be the danger then the other possibility. Meanwhile, the Israeli army wakes from its slumber like a Sleeping Beauty asleep for a hundred years, awoken by a poison kiss from the neighbouring prince. This wedding will be a blood wedding. The army is entering Gaza and doing what armies do.

I’m at home. The poet Nathan Yonatan wrote, ‘Home is a place that if you must return to, a door is always open for you,’ my mother used to tell me that. I’m at home, if someone comes to kill me, I’ll throw a Molotov cocktail at them. It’s not just that I have nowhere to go, I also don’t want to go anywhere.

When my daughter was in first grade, she started noticing the cars of the other parents in her class. They were fancy, luxurious, shiny. One day she asked, ‘Mom, why don’t we have a jeep?’ And I said, ‘Look, we don’t have a car at all because we live in Tel Aviv and we don’t need a car.’ And I continued, (because I didn’t want to do Life Is Beautiful like Roberto Benigni’s; I think children should live in reality): ‘Even if we needed a car, we wouldn’t have one like theirs because we don’t have money like they do.’ And my six-year-old daughter said, ‘How lucky that if we don’t have money, we also don’t need a car.’ That’s what I remember now. How lucky that if I don’t have anywhere to go, I also don’t want to go. I’m at home.

A Molotov cocktail always sounded sexy, guerrilla fighter too. The global left gets excited by unregulated violence, ideas spread in academia, and t-shirts with Che Guevara’s face. They still love their old theories about colonialism and liberation, they love how they look in the mirror, radicals forever, it’s their fountain of youth. My father would probably say, ‘Look at this bacchanalia.’ An Israeli cultural theorist suggests on Facebook -that we should go to the Gaza border, wave a white flag, and just surrender. He wrote this in the early days before the Israeli army entered Gaza.

I don’t even need to invoke my revisionist father to deal with such stupidity, but my father pops up even when I try to fight my Oedipal tendencies, saying Jews have an autoimmune disease. I notice he restrains himself from saying ‘I told you so.’ I appreciate his restraint. I have enough on my plate, and he knows it.

The Molotov cocktail is an improvised weapon, simple and easy to make: all you need is a glass bottle filled with a flammable liquid, fuel, or alcohol, and a rag stuffed into the bottle’s mouth. The weapon is activated by lighting the rag and throwing the bottle at the target. Without fear and without hope, I examine my liquor cabinet. There’s vermouth, gin, Campari. I can make a Negroni, but I’m saving the alcohol for a rainy day. Now is not the time to indulge. I need glass bottles at hand.

On October 30th, I read a report on one of the websites: ‘A resident of Kiryat Haim was arrested on suspicion of setting up a factory in his home to produce Molotov cocktails. The suspect, 36, hoarded 62 Molotov cocktails and two kilograms of sulfur. On December 8th, another report about the suspect, who was anonymous and now has a name. Nathanel Cohen, a 36-year-old handyman from Kiryat Haim. Married and father of one, he turned his home into a factory for the production of Molotov cocktails. To the charges againsts him – manufacturing weapons – Cohen responded: ‘It’s to protect my life and the lives of my children.’ Cohen was eventually arrested, charged with  manufacturing weapons during wartime. I was impressed by the sudden efficiency of the police and the courts, such sleight of hand, like this little con man on the Eilat promenade. I understand Nathanel Cohen, he and I had the same idea, he’s just more practical than me.

I wonder who snitched on Nathanel Cohen. And decide to tell someone about my plan to make a Molotov cocktail.

‘You will make a Molotov cocktail?’ he says, bursting into laughter as we sit in my kitchen, and like a lazy, uninspired soundtrack, the siren sounds again. I get up and say, let’s stand in the bathroom.

No government, no army, no police, no father, no mother, no husband, no bomb shelter, no refuge.

We walk there, seven steps. Walk leisurely, not running – he asks how I concluded that it’s the safest place? I say ‘I did calculations.’

‘Oh, you did calculations, okay, that sounds serious.’ We both know that if a missile lands on the building, we’re done. I remember that twenty years ago, I already wrote about this moment.

‘Winona says: 

Find a man for the war, 

he won’t protect you but at least 

you’ll make love. And I say 

I want to be a normal woman 

abandoned during the war.’

I think about the foolish young woman I was then, the one who wanted to be a normal woman. I put my arm in his arm and we stand there like that, in the bathroom, engagé.

Translated from the Hebrew by William Kolbrener

Gimme Shelter