Under the Iron Dome: Pocatello woman describes life in Israel as war rages
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NORTHERN ISRAEL – The regular explosion of Hezbollah’s ballistic missiles intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defenses overhead have melded into everyday life for Hanna Geshelin, a 78-year-old Idahoan who moved from Pocatello to Israel in 2017.
While the world commemorated the first anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack with protests and vigils, Hezbollah ratcheted up its attacks on northern Israel.
“To ‘celebrate,’ Hezbollah has been attacking since last night,” Geshelin related to EastIdahoNews.com. “I am temporarily at a friend’s home because she has a safe room, and I do not.”
The increased missile bombardment arrived after the death of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah and exploding pagers that injured 3,000 Lebanese citizens in September.
Geshelin spoke with EastIdahoNews.com at length via Zoom, warning that if sirens roared, she would cut off the conversation and head for cover.
Residents have five seconds after an alarm to find shelter in a safe place to protect themselves from falling shrapnel and missile debris, which can rain down for up to 10 minutes following the implosion of an incoming missile.
The worst attack in the history of the state of Israel
On Saturday, Oct. 7, 2023, Geshelin, an orthodox Jew, was celebrating the Sabbath and the festival of Simchat Torah when a woman told her, “We’re at war.”
“The little synagogue that I was going to is in a community bomb shelter,” she said. “So we went downstairs, and we heard the sirens going off. … The missiles came from the north from Hezbollah, and they haven’t stopped.”
Later that evening, she learned several thousand Hamas fighters had crossed into southern Israel, killing 1,200 Jews, Arabs and Christians at a Nova music festival near Kibbutz Re’im.
“They just mowed people down, and they raped people there, and they took over 200 people as hostage, including the youngest (who) was 10 months old or 9 months old at the time,” Geshelin said. “This was an absolutely unprovoked attack, and it had been planned for quite a long time.”
In response, Israeli forces invaded the Gaza Strip, killing 41,900 Palestinians, wounding 97,300 more, decimating the Palestinians’ infrastructure and health care system, and causing a humanitarian crisis, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
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Geshelin said the war has impacted everyone she knows.
“There’s a girl from my community who was taken hostage. As far as we know, she’s still alive, so her picture is all over town,” Geshelin said.
One of her current sewing students was best friends with Shani Louk, a 23-year-old whose unconscious, broken body was paraded in the back of a truck.
“She was absolutely tortured before she was killed,” Geshelin said. “So it’s very, very close to us. Everybody knows somebody who was either there or was killed. It’s a very small country, so everybody knows everybody else.”
As of Monday, 112 living hostages have been exchanged for Palestinian prisoners, 97 remain in Gaza (including the bodies of 33 or more individuals) and the bodies of 37 hostages have been recovered, ABC News reports.
So far, 800 Israeli civilians, 346 Israeli Defense Force service members, and 66 police officers have been killed in the conflict, according to ABC News, citing the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In recent weeks, Israel has launched a second-ground campaign into Lebanon.
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“(On Oct. 1), Israel started a ground campaign to get rid of Hezbollah, and at that point, things started getting a lot tenser up here,” she said.
On Sunday evening, her community experienced four attacks in nine hours, she told EastIdahoNews.com.
“It’s really hard to sleep … and then we hear the booms. We hear the Iron Dome shooting … missiles down,” Geshelin said. “We have to hide from the shrapnel.”
She does not believe a two-state solution is viable or the correct diplomatic course of action to pursue.
“You cannot have a neighbor whose charter, their constitution says the No. 1 goal is (the) destruction of you.”
From Idaho to Israel
Geshelin said she has always been a strong supporter of Israel.
Her grandmother emigrated from Ukraine to the United States around 1883, hiding inside a laundry chest to escape the Russian pogroms against the Jews. Later, as a nurse, she moved to what was then Palestine to assist many of the children that were dying in the region from malaria.
Geshelin lived in Israel after college from 1968 to 1969, studying Hebrew for 15 months shortly after the Yom Kippur War.
Then, in the 1970s, Geshelin lived in Pocatello for seven years. Raised a liberal Jew without much religious influence, she said she had two devout Christian friends and members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who inspired her to look deeply at her religious background.
“I admired their religious convictions, their Christian convictions and their Mormon convictions, and I decided to look for that kind of thing in Judaism,” Geshelin said. “So kudos to eastern Idaho for putting me on this journey with my religion.”
Later, following a divorce in 2010, she moved back to Pocatello for another seven years to care for her aging mother.
“It’s a very comfortable place. I like small-town living,” she said. “It’s very hard to be an Orthodox Jew, which is what I am. I find the LDS very comfortable for a Jewish person to live with. Our basic values are very similar – family, honesty, modesty and putting God first – all of those things are what traditional Jews focus on.”
For work, she taught English as a Second Language (ESL) to foreign students preparing to attend Idaho State University, operated a sewing school and substituted in Pocatello-Chubbuck School District 25.
“Ninety-five percent of our (ESL) students were from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which was a real experience for a Jewish girl,” she said. “What was very interesting to me was that I look a whole lot more Arab than the average Idahoan. So the students – a lot of them – would ask me, ‘Are you sure you’re not an Arab? You look like my grandmother.’”
She said they respected that she dressed modestly, never wore pants, and covered her hair.
“It was an eye-opener for them and an eye-opener for me,” she said.
One day, her mother told her, “I want you to go (to Israel). I want to die knowing that you’re where you want to be.”
So, in 2017, Geshelin moved back to the Holy Land, where she feels comfortable and at home, though she struggles with speaking Hebrew.
“I found a small community that’s in the mountains like Pocatello,” Geshelin said. “It’s small, and it’s friendly. It’s more like Pocatello was when I lived in Poky in the ’70s, where even if you don’t know people’s names, you recognize their faces.”
Before last October, no missiles were fired near her town, and she even picnicked with friends near the border.
A time of war
Today, the situation is vastly different.
She has compiled a list of 62 husbands or children from her small community who are fighting in the war.
“A very, very close friend of mine, one of my first friends here, her son was one of the first to die,” Geshelin said. “They had three lovely, lovely little boys, the oldest of whom at the time of his father’s death was 6 1/2. … We all have lost people.”
Women in the town provide hundreds of home-cooked meals every week to soldiers on the front lines, and schoolchildren across Israel write cards thanking soldiers for their sacrifices.
“We believe this is a just war,” Geshelin said. “We believe that we are doing what we have to do to protect ourselves. We cannot have any more land taken from this very, very small place.”
All Israeli men and women, with some exceptions, are required to complete national service in the military.
“This isn’t a volunteer army,” she said. “The people are drafted. They have to serve.”
In northern Israel and many other parts of the country, she reports “tremendous support for the army, (and) there’s tremendous support for (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu, who at least, at last, is standing up to American pressure.”
She believes a ceasefire would provide Hamas and Hezbollah the opportunity to rearm.
“I think when a country is attacked, it can do anything at all to protect itself,” she said. “This is a defensive war. This is not an offensive war. … We’re defending ourselves against people who want to kill us and who have tried their best to kill us.”
She believes Israel has the right to act independently to protect its people and ensure its national security.
“The feeling is very strong. We need to be less reliant on the United States and on the West, and we have to just be much more taking care of ourselves,” she said.
She does not claim to know what the future holds for the Middle East. While the bombs rattle overhead and conflict rages about her, she said she trusts in God and in her Orthodox Jewish faith.
She blogs regularly about her experiences, the war and life as an Orthodox Jew at www.tantehannawrites.com.
“Why don’t I come back to Idaho?” she asked, laughing. “Because this is my people, and this is my home.”
