I've been back home for a week now, although, truth be told--I feel like I'm living in two time zones; the only thing is the one I'm actually living in--not virtually living in --Brooklyn, not Tel Aviv--is completely safe from the war being fought now between Israel and Hezbollah. But still, it's hard to leave in the middle of the story and after a month in Israel, I had to leave in the middle. In going through my emails for July, I came across an email I sent, with much urgency, to an editor I was working for telling him to change my copy. I had just filed a story about the Israeli complacency toward events along Israel's southern border and in Gaza where Israel was bombing Hamas without much public Israeli attention, since most attention was focused on a brewing sexual scandal revolving around Israel's president (a second sex scandal--this one involving Israel's Justice Minister also recently hit the Israeli press)--when I walked into a store in Jerusalem where there was a television on reporting that two soldiers had been abducted on Israel's northern border. I knew what that meant and I emailed the urgency to my editor: everything had changed. Update the copy. But now, when I look back at that email, I can't believe that so much time has passed--and the questions arise: what happened? Is Israel losing? And what next?

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