Metula. Shlomi. Kiriyat Shmona. Margaliot. These were small, quaint towns before October 7, 2023. Today, they are barren landscapes, where abandoned farms are inhabited only by livestock and chickens. The people are almost all gone. Hundreds of thousands have been forced to flee.

Since October 8, the Iranian proxy Hezbollah has been attacking Israeli communities and military posts along the border on a near-daily basis, and an eerie quiet has replaced the hustle and flow of everyday life.

But Hezbollah isn’t content with merely destabilizing the border communities. Since Jerusalem’s muted response to Iran’s unprecedented April 14 attack on Israel — when Tehran launched more than 300 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles at population centers all over the Jewish State – the Lebanon-based terrorist organization has steadily expanded the depth and scope of its operations.

On June 2, a barrage of rockets launched by Hezbollah at Katzrin, the largest Israeli community in the Golan Heights, set off dozens of wildfires that engulfed 2,500 acres of land. On June 5, the Iranian proxy wounded at least 11 people in an armed drone attack on the Druze Arab village of Hurfeish.

Israel’s reaction to this escalation has been to try and contain the growing Hezbollah threat with strong words and predictable action.

Israel was prepared for “very intense action in the north,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi added that the military is “approaching a decision point.”

Despite the pledges to act, Israel’s attempted containment of Hezbollah — the same failed policy implemented for years to cope with Hamas until October 7 — has little support up north. A growing number of towns, ones that don’t share a border with Lebanon, are now being bombed.

Israelis sitting in front of their television screens see that the Home Front Command’s list of areas where red alert alarms are activated is increasing daily.

And with Hezbollah’s theater of operations expanding, Israeli territory is effectively shrinking.

As a result, many residents of Haifa — Israel’s third largest city with a population of close to 300,000 — believe that it’s only a matter of time before they are ordered to evacuate their homes.

I moved to Haifa with my wife and four children from Jerusalem two years ago. The skyrocketing cost of living in Israel’s capital, the city’s limited job base, and the eternally expanding real estate bubble in Jerusalem forced our family’s hand.

We got a second lease on life when we moved to Haifa. It’s a lovely place on the Mediterranean Sea, where Jews, Arabs, and Christians intermingle easily. People here are grounded by the things that matter in the long run: earning a living, supporting their families, enjoying an occasional day at the beach, and planning for the future.

If Jerusalem is where tensions always seem to be at a boiling point, our city is where you can get away from it all by visiting the Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa if you’re into archeology, exploring the gorgeous Baha’i Gardens, or taking in the stunning view of Israel’s largest port from Louis Promenade on Mount Carmel.

But Haifa is now the next in line to be attacked by Hezbollah. Ours is a life being lived in limbo. We continue to work. Our children continue to go to school. But the red alerts are multiplying: my cousin living in the northern coastal city of Nahariya — about a 30-minute drive from Haifa — now regularly hears bombs overhead, forcing her and her family to run to their home’s safe room; my wife and her workplace colleagues in Acre — 25 minutes by car from where we live —  are constantly hearing sirens; virtually every afternoon, my kids come home from school with updates about another classmate whose father has been called up for a second tour of reserve duty — this time in the north.

We have entered a period of threat and waiting. This is similar to the “Waiting Period” (hamtanah in Hebrew) that Israelis lived through two generations ago. During the three weeks of the hamtanah in 1967, Arab nations promised to annihilate Israel. Jerusalem mobilized the country’s reserves. Israeli morale plummeted, catalyzing a political crisis that led to the formation of Israel’s first unity government on the day before the war.

Today, it’s a bit less than three weeks before Tisha B’Av, an annual day of mourning for tragedies that have occurred across Jewish history.

The hamtanah ended when Israel responded to the imminent threat to its survival by launching a pre-emptive strike that led to victory in the 1967 war of annihilation that was about to be launched against it. At the time, the Israeli strike destroyed more than 90 percent of Egypt’s air force. A similar air assault knocked out the Syrian air force.

Today, Israeli leaders are considering whether they should launch a pre-emptive strike against Hezbollah. Many believe they should.

Based on Hezbollah’s modus operandi, anything short of a rapid reestablishment of the preemption doctrine could well lead to Israel having to abandon the Galilee and other parts of the north. At this rate, people will soon be talking about a Kfar Saba envelope in addition to the one in Gaza.

It would be a damned shame to have to leave it all behind.

Gidon Ben-Zvi is an accomplished writer who left Los Angeles for Jerusalem in 2009. After serving in an Israel Defense Forces infantry unit from 1994-1997, Ben-Zvi returned to the United States before settling in Israel, where he and his wife are raising their four children.

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