On the surface, life appears to have returned to normal for the residents of Israel's north, following Saturday's unprecedented border incidents triggered by the launch of an Iranian drone from Syria into Israeli territory.
Schools were open and local residents went back to work as usual. In fact, if it weren't for the debris of the downed F-16 fighter jet, one might almost have been able to forget that the north had just experienced one of the worst security events to transpire there in recent years.
Below the surface, however, tensions were evident.
"On Saturday morning, we woke up to sirens and immediately entered the secure room," Meir Biton from Avivim, a moshav on the border with Lebanon, said. "We were in suspense all day, and we decided not to take risks and also sleep in the secure room tonight."
"For our peace of mind, we decided to sleep in the secure room all week. Listen, Hezbollah is celebrating opposite us, and today, too, the atmosphere is very tense," he said.
The infiltration of an Iranian drone into Israeli territory was the first instance in which the Iranian forces in Syria initiated a military confrontation with Israel directly and not through Hezbollah. But Meir and his friends from Moshav Avivim say they saw signs of Iran's burgeoning presence as far back as Oct. 2010, when then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received a royal welcome in the Lebanese village of Maroun al-Ras, located roughly 1 kilometer from the border with Israel.
At the summit of the mountain there, opposite Avivim, Ahmadinejad dedicated a mosque – an exact replica of the Dome of the Rock Islamic shrine on Jerusalem's Temple Mount, built with funding from Tehran.
"Now I realize that in all those days when I saw construction on the mountain, I was really seeing Iranian soldiers and not Hezbollah members, as I thought," Biton said.
Seven and a half years have passed since then, and today, the mosque is concealed by new structures, among them a fancy hotel catering to pilgrims to the site.
"They did not just build a mosque, they built up a city and in a very short time span," Biton said. "Every weekend, they hold loud prayers and play them on deafening loudspeakers that violate our Shabbat peace. I think that when the much-discussed war in the north begins, it will break out from here."
For residents of Moshav Alonei Habashan in the Golan Heights, the sound of explosions has been a matter of routine ever since the civil war broke out in Syria. In Golan Regional Council communities, bomb shelters have remained open for the past seven years. Some residents have even taken it upon themselves to prepare for a breach in the relative quiet since the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
Alonei Habashan residents Yiscah and Yaron Dekel said they had started locking their doors and had installed one central switch for the electric blinds to save time in case they were ordered to "go dark."
According to the Dekels, many residents had gotten dogs because a senior IDF official had once noted that terrorists who infiltrated settlements in Judea and Samaria had avoided the homes of dog owners. They said this was the reason they kept geese, which are territorial in nature and shriek when anyone approaches, in their yard.
Metulla council member Ravit Sandler described sharp transitions from routine to emergency.
"Yesterday we woke up in the morning and heard a siren and ran to the secure room, but three hours later, we were back sitting on the swing outside in the yard and looking at the Lebanese landscape, which again seemed pastoral. But it is precisely these transitions that allow us to live here."
