Canadian dispatches from Israel at wartime: Like father, like daughter By Aron Heller | Freelance, Thursday, 26 Jun 2025

Published in The Canadian Jewish News.

One of the defining memories of my youth is the 1990 Gulf War, and the subsequent Iraqi missile attacks against Israel early the next year. I was 14, and I distinctly remember the drama of waking up at night to the sounds of air raid sirens warning of incoming Scud missiles. In a haze, I would rush to our bomb shelter, put on my gas mask and wonder if Saddam Hussein had deployed his chemical weapons against us.

The attacks generated plenty of fear and disruption – but no chemicals and very few casualties – and in just over a month it was over, remaining etched in my mind as a singular teenage experience.

I still reflect upon that time as an exciting, rather than anxious, episode that sparked my interest in geopolitics and likely influenced my eventual career choice of journalism. From the confines of our shelter, I would listen to the breaking news on a transistor radio and try to decipher how close the missiles were getting. Upon returning to school, I penned a spirited first-person essay for my English class about the ordeal that became my first foray into news writing.

Little could I have imagined that 35 years later, my oldest daughter would be experiencing her own defining missile attack experience at roughly the same age. Now that the rumbling jets overhead have fallen silent and a ceasefire seems to have taken hold (at least for now), it is my fervent hope that one day she will be able to look back at the 12 days of attacks from Iran with the same, albeit somewhat twisted, sense of nostalgia that I do about those that arrived from Iraq. Perhaps this too will merely remain a colourful memory of her youth?

Honestly, I’m skeptical. The Iran of today is not the Iraq of yesteryear, and she is simply growing up in a far more dangerous world.

The war adventure of my youth was an aberration from an otherwise mostly insulated childhood in Israel. In my formative years in the 1980s, there was relatively little violence on the Israeli and Palestinian front, and Iran and Iraq were busy fighting each other. This prompted my first lesson in Mideast politics when, inspired by sports and Star Wars, I naively asked my father who we were rooting for in that latter showdown. He dryly responded: both.

He was right. Once their eight-year war was over, Iran and Iraq each finally had the bandwidth to focus their ire on a greater adversary: us. Looking to break a U.S.-backed coalition, Iraq began firing missiles at Israel in the first Gulf War and then threatened to do so again in the second Gulf War a decade later. All the while, Iran was busy building a nuclear program and establishing a ring of extremist militant proxies that posed a far greater threat to Israel. (That inspired a second memorable regional insight from my father. Following George W. Bush’s hasty post-9/11 assault on Iraq, he suggested that if the Americans were already hellbent on bombing radical Mideast nations that started with the letters IRA, they might as well go alphabetically).

Still, all of this had very little impact on my daily life growing up in Israel. For my daughter, though, it has been entirely different. I first had to shuffle her to safety as an infant during rocket attacks from Gaza in the 2014 war, so this risk has been ever-present for nearly her entire life. Back in 1991, Israel was a sideshow, and the missiles were a diversion. However, in the past decade, we have become the main event, as the primary targets of projectiles from Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq and Iran.

Objectively, we are far more protected. Since the 1990s, reinforced safe rooms have been required in all new housing and the country has expanded its network of bomb shelters and invested heavily in early warning systems and public readiness. Israel has also developed a multilayer missile defense system that provides unprecedented interception capabilities.

But from a cognitive (and a child’s) perspective, Israel has been constantly under threat for a very long time. Sadly, my daughter knows it. As her political awareness has expanded with age, she often expresses a sentiment that it seems as if the whole world is against us.

For my daughter’s generation, a reality of sirens, missile attacks and disruption has been normalized. Since Oct. 7, 2023, it has almost become a way of life.

A child from her school was abducted to Gaza on that horrible day and she has since experienced frequent mad dashes to nearby shelters to escape rocket attacks. Once, while waiting for a bus home after school, she didn’t even have time for that and had no choice but to lie face down on the hot pavement as sirens wailed. She then heard a loud explosion and picked up her head to see smoke billowing from an impact in the distance.

In retrospect, my teenage wartime experience was exciting because it was unusual, and it also had a clear beginning and end. For my daughter, though, it’s been more of the same – only worse. And despite Israel’s sense of victory after this latest war, and optimism of a broader long-lasting shift in the Mideast, there is still so much uncertainty about what lies ahead. It’s enough to make any parent truly worry about what kind of future awaits his or her children.

Being a parent inherently involves the ageless and global plight of concern for one’s offspring. But in Israel, it is far more visceral and present. Mandatory military service is always on the horizon and there are just too many people in your immediate and extended circles who have been harmed.

Lord knows, my parents worried a lot about me, too: as a soldier in the army, as a civilian amid bus bombings, as a journalist covering war and terror. But their worry never seemed to translate into an existential angst for the long-term wellbeing of the country or shatter their faith of continuing to live in it.

My parents chose to make Israel their home and they told my siblings and I that as American, Canadian and Israeli citizens we would be able to make our own choices on the matter when we came of age. Despite my many deliberations, I also eventually lay down roots here, just as my siblings have.

So, it was with a heavy heart that during a recent rude middle of the night awakening to sirens, I heard my 13-year-old daughter offhandedly remark that if she were ever to have children, she would raise them elsewhere.

That stopped me in my tracks, taking me back to my own adolescent ambivalence. All I could do at that moment was repeat my own parents’ words and tell her that when she is older, she too will be able to make that choice on her own. I just hope that by then, Israel will have recovered from its nadir of recent years, and there will still be a legitimate choice to be made.