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Should we believe that it's over? Last night, at 01:40, and again at 03:15, we were awakened by preliminary alerts, neither of which developed into get-to-your-safe-rooms sirens. Tzippi had seriously considered sleeping in the safe room but I guess she gave in to my preference of a more comfortable bed. Of course I almost always immediately fall back to sleep and she doesn't, but even had we been in the safe room she probably wouldn't have slept well. When we woke up in the morning, about 09:30, we learned that a two week ceasefire was already in place, and we're certainly not complaining that throughout the day it's been quiet.
The specific nature of this ceasefire is far from clear. The report was that it includes Lebanon, but Israel has continued its war there throughout the day and Netanyahu tells us that the ceasefire doesn't compel Israel to stop its activities there. This evening he delivered a message to the country (on prime time television, and without questions from journalists, of course). I don't think he mentioned total victory, but he did tell us that Israel achieved great goals in the war, adding that he's ready at any time to return to fighting if that's called for. I'm sure that he wants to continue, but he'll need a green light from Trump, and much to his consternation, it seems that Trump is tired of this war and simply prefers to declare victory rather than to keep fighting. As I write this a reporter is telling us that according to Trump the ceasefire doesn't include Lebanon. She then added that as things look now it's only a matter of time until fighting resumes. Considering that Iran apparently does think that the ceasefire includes Lebanon, chances are good that she's right.
Pesach vacation ends tomorrow, and as things stand, other than in the far north, schools are set to open tomorrow. That's a decision that was only reached this evening. Until the ceasefire it wasn't even clear if schools would partially open on Sunday. In general it seems that most restrictions, like gatherings of no more than fifty people, are already being lifted. I'd anyway intended to go to the college tomorrow which had been closed for Pesach. I could probably work from home, and I'm not even sure there's much that I really have to accomplish there, but frankly, more than actually working, I'm most interested in getting back into some sort of routine.
For much of this war, and particularly during this past week of Pesach vacation I did have a routine. For a few months I've been digitizing the audio cassettes in the archives, slowly plowing through them. With the war and lots of time and few specific tasks that I had to attend to, I decided to try and finish the job, and probably dealt with the last fifty of about 125 tapes during the week. Most of the tapes were 45 minutes on each side (some were 30, others an hour) so altogether I now have about 200 hours of mp3s with an Excel spreadsheet identifying what's in each (including a report on about 15 that for various reasons didn't work). Truth be told, the chances that people are going to be interested in listening to these are pretty limited, even though some of them have very interesting interviews, but for the archives this was an important project. This was primarily grunt work - the sort of thing that didn't demand too much focus. Just right for a war that seriously limited our ability to concentrate.
Because Tzippi doesn't have to get up tomorrow morning, while I'm getting off relatively early to the college, I took the first shower and I'm soon to bed. Each night for the past five weeks we've wondered whether we'll be awakened by an alarm, and we're really not sure that it won't happen again soon. But at present it looks like we'll sleep without that stressful worry.
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