Since it was more than one mile from the border (although under two kilometres), I felt that I was justified in assuring my parents that the kibbutz I visited for a long month decades ago was “miles away” from the rocket launches on the six o’clock BBC news.

Every night, we listened to the rockets fall. The one night that all was quiet, no one could sleep. Still, the most danger I fell into that summer was from the heat, high waters, and the inappropriate appetites of some men. One evening I sat on the hillside with my arm around a friendly Doberman who had planted himself between my body and that of a boy who had tried to separate me from the herd. I felt safe.

The day that we did stumble into no-man’s land by mistake, we thought we had landed on another planet. Flat earth stretched into the distance as we shuffled sheepishly back under the domed canopy of the trees, giving thanks for the absence of patrols at the crucial moment of error.

Mostly, I worked in the rubber boot factory, wiping the glue off the seams at the end of the assembly line, dipping my rag into an open vat of acetone and coming out singing, with a chemical headache swinging its way in for the afternoon. But I had a little high-school German, so occasionally I was relieved instead to join the little old ladies in the Community Room, setting up for something or another. They spoke a mix of German and Yiddish. I tried hard to understand their instructions and to avoid staring at the blue numbers tattooed on their arms, and they laughed at me.

The kibbutz is under an evacuation order now. The dog and the old ladies are long gone; I wonder who the boy grew up to be. I wonder how pain can be revisited again and again, suffered and inflicted in a never-ending cycle. I wonder what it will take to disrupt the process, where war has become a lullaby, its absence an anomaly.