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They sing.
At the stupid o’clock
when
even Sun
hasn’t
got up yet
but only opened its eyes,
stretched out and yawned
these irksome creatures already
tweet
chirp
peep
sing
their dumb happy songs
and don’t
let me sleep.
I live in Canada, many miles away from Israel and Gaza. I am a committed Jew however, ensconced in thought everyday about my fellow Jews fighting a war for our people.
I’m very much aware, and repeat this regularly, that our Israeli brothers and sisters are on the frontline for all Jewish people, everywhere. On Yom HaZikaron, we are extraordinarily thankful for that reality. My boy is going off to university at 18. Yours is going into the laneway and hollowed out buildings of Gaza.
We’re fairly new here, so we don’t really know that many people. And we don’t know this family. But it’s as if we do. We caught our breath at the time when we heard that the soldier whose name was cleared for publication was one of our own, a local boy, 21-year-old Staff Sgt. David Sasson. David, who was a fighter in the Israel Defense Forces’s Oketz Special Force Counter Terror K9 Unit, was reportedly killed while on his way to search a building in Southern Gaza where his unit had identified terrorists.