James
Sorry for the lag time, I have been very busy with Torah study and family time using up all the hours in a week. We are three days from Rosh Hashanna as I write this, the day the whole world is judged for the year (this Saturday). This past year has been tough on Israel but reinforces the reason I have chosen to live here. Our defeat on the military side is largely due to an incompetent army chief of staff and Kadima party cabinet appointments who were recognized even at the election to be incompetent in security issues but were massively supported by the media. Most of the ground combat was outside of useful information for SurvivalBlog so I will skip reporting on that. The way that almost one third of the nation rode out the war was to simply relocate. Israelis opened their homes to strangers in a way that we always have, I can still see the sparks of Abraham our father in even the most secular Israeli.
This rocket war was a big surprise to the inhabitants of our third largest city of Haifa. A major city was mostly empty for several weeks without a breakdown in civilization. The lesson to learn is that you need to find a place where the vast majority people have a true and deep feeling of family and a deep seated moral code who are willing to go to even painful ends to help out others, even if they are strangers. It would be an important goal of any survivor to place themselves in such a community since even TEOTWAWKI [4] would not destroy the society. – David in Israel