KINSELLA: Israel's move on Iran means the world is a safer place

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We were beside the border with Gaza, in Israel’s south, when the artillery shell hit. The explosion was pretty big, and it landed behind where I was standing.

I was there with a mostly American film crew to shoot our documentary, The Campaign. It’s about the propaganda war against Israel and the West. At the moment the shell exploded, I had been relating how Hamas took out communications and warning systems on October 7, 2023.

The explosion shook the ground, and members of the crew dove for cover. I didn’t really think about what I did, until afterwards, when one of the film’s producers sent me the clip of the moment.

I didn’t move. I just stood there. Kind of dumb, I know, but I figure I had become an unofficial Israeli at that moment.

I know this from spending several weeks in Israel over the past year. When you are there, sirens go off pretty regularly, and everyone starts to hustle — or, increasingly, stroll — towards a bomb shelter. The shelters have lots of different names: Mamad, miklat, merhav mugan, migunit, and quite a few others. Like, you know, the Inuit have many different words for “snow” — because there is so much of it.

If there is a better example of language reflecting day-to-day reality, I don’t know what it is. In Sderot — where Hamas slaughtered 53 people on October 7, many of them senior citizens using canes and walkers — the parks have fashioned play structures into bomb shelters. Just about every bus stop, across Israel, doubles as a shelter. Most homes have one. And when you check into your hotel, the staff will tell you the locations of the pool, restaurant, fitness room and the bomb shelter. Not always in that order.

In Israel, everyone you meet, too, has an app on their phone showing when missiles and rockets are incoming: They’ll you show the screen, and it’ll be filled with red blobs, representing red alerts. They get thousands of those every single week.

Meanwhile, up north, your phone’s GPS will be jammed and stop working, because the signal can be used to guide suicide drones, UAVs, explosive drones, and cruise missiles. The Houthis, Hezbollah, the Syrians and the Iraqis have used those signals in the past to try to kill more Jews.

So, at any time of the day, you’ll be standing or sitting somewhere, and you’ll hear some noise far overhead, like fireworks. That’s Israel’s Iron Dome at work. It was created to intercept short-range rockets and artillery shells. The Dome is a comfort, but it doesn’t always succeed: On the sunny morning of May 4, my partner was heading to Tel Aviv’s New Gurion airport — driven by a Yemeni cab driver, no less — when a Houthi ballistic missile penetrated the Iron Dome.

The missile hit just 75 metres from Terminal 3 at the airport, where several dozen Canadian kids had gathered for a flight — I knew this because a terrified Montreal lawyer friend let me know his kid was there. My partner somehow got to the airport. When she arrived, she said workers were sweeping up shrapnel and dirt on the road beside Terminal 3. I asked her what people were doing, and about her flight status.

“They’re calm,” she said. “They’re all acting like it’s normal. And El Al flights are still going to fly out.” So that’s how she got out — delayed, but not grounded.

“A missile hits the airport, everyone is chill. Imagine if that happened in Ottawa or Toronto or Vancouver,” I said to her, from the bomb shelter I was inside, in Jerusalem. “They’d shut down Canada for a month.”

But that’s Israel. That’s life there. You are always living under a Sword of Damocles, one in the shape of a ballistic missile, crafted by Iran for the Houthis. Or one of the legion of proxies that have sworn to wipe out “the Zionist entity.” It’s normal, almost.

Not many people in the West, however, noticed a perceptible change in normal Israeli life happened on Thursday of this week. On Thursday, for the first time in 20 years, the International Atomic Energy Agency censured Iran for refusing to cooperate with its inspectors. Iran promptly announced it was going to build a third uranium enrichment site, and get better centrifuges, so it could get a nuclear bomb faster.

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Donald Trump’s negotiations — wherein he was reportedly getting ready to settle for the same nuclear proliferation deal with Iran that Barack Obama had, and which Trump had torn up — had failed. So Israel had to act, and Trump knew it. And so Israel made her move.

What does it mean? It means the world is a safer place, today. The No. 1 sponsor of terrorism has lost much of its ability to drop the ultimate weapon on us.

For Israel, it means life goes on. When you are living in the shadow of death, as Israelis do every day, the shadow never completely disappears.