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OAN Commentary by: Richard Pollock
Monday, February 2, 2026
For many Americans, Iran and Israel seem very far away.
But the citizens of both countries now face an historic waiting game.
And for Iranians and Israelis this frozen moment is also about survival.
We’re in a frozen moment.
Will the United States order its growing armada to decapitate the Iranian leadership? Will Iranian drones and Chinese and Russian weaponry be able to successfully hit American forces?
And will the Iranian mullahs, in their continuing madness, launch their own ballistic missiles against the Jewish state as well as against American forces? Will they assault their own people again, or will the top mullahs flee to Russia?
Unfortunately, at this moment, we really don’t know very much about the Iranian sentiment on the street. We do know they now live in an open-air prison.
We have read reliable reports that large parts of Iran’s population have been deeply shaken by the mullah’s wholesale murder of protesters, mainly the young, and of countless others languishing in prisons. We also don’t know Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s has carried out his original orders to execute some of the protesters.
The Iranian people have little to be thankful for except for the fact that two days ago the European Union finally decided to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. It took as many as 50,000 Iranian deaths to finally move the EU.
Btw, for the record, the first Trump administration designated the IRGC as a terror group in April 2019.
But if we move on to the country of Israel, we can obtain a reliable picture. Israel is an open society – the only truly free society in the entire Middle East.
So, at this moment, I would like to turn to two fellow Substack columnists. In their separate ways, they can tell us about the emotions inside the Jewish state.
What they have to say is illuminating and very human.
The first columnist is David Bender, a veteran reporter who describes himself as an “ever-recovering journalist.” He lives in the spiritual Israeli city of Tsfat in northern Israel. Tsfat is one of the four righteous cities of ancient Israel.
So, what does David hear, see and feel?
He introduces his latest column with the following observation: “There is a particular kind of silence in Israel that only seems to arrive before ‘something’ might happen.”
He writes, “like the volume knob on daily life has been turned down, while the background hum of history gets louder.”
Bender compares the waiting game with the famous Jewish account of the night of Passover.
Then, the Jews in Egypt had to wait throughout the night before leaving at dawn for their historic Exodus.
Bender writes, “Then as now: a night of watching. Not a metaphor. A condition. A country braced for a preemptive strike, a retaliatory strike, or the kind of escalation no one fully controls.”
As the American military armada masses outside Iran’s the borders, Bender ruminates, saying, waiting for something to happen “create the atmosphere Israelis know too well. History clearing its throat.”
He continues his mediation: “We are still crossing. Still watching. Still living inside a long night that has not yet resolved itself.”
Now a word about the life in Israel today that you won’t find in many places. I now turn to my other fellow Substack colleague, Gavriella Zahtz.
She turns to the quaint subject of bomb shelters titled, “Ballistic Missile Preparations.” As she writes, “It’s getting to be the season for assessing sheltering from ballistic missiles options.”
As it turns out, in Israel, there are many flavors of bomb shelters.
You didn’t know?
I remember last year choosing an Airbnb guesthouse in Israel. Many boasted that they had bomb shelters. Where else in the world might you find that advertisement? Maybe in the Ukraine.
Anyway, in Israel it turns out you have many bomb shelter options.
Zahtz explains that as an Israeli, you can have a customized bedroom size bomb shelter or a closet bomb shelter in your apartment. You can decide that you can join a shared shelter that’s no more than 90-seconds away. Or you can go to a community shelter that’s usually a garage or a free-standing concrete shelter.
It also appears that there are make-shift shelters for little children where “Mr. Turtle” is actually a bomb shelter for little kids caught in the playground during an alert.
This is the Israeli experience as I sit safely in DC.
Yet Gabriella’s final words in her column are philosophical as she and her fellow Israelis await the next chapter of history.
She says, “I’ve taken two rounds of ballistic missiles on the beach. I spent my first hour of Iranian ballistic missiles alone in a closet with a window that was definitely not a safe room as the entire building shook. I will take these next rounds somewhere surrounded by love and I will likely be cooking wherever that is.
“But for sure— 100%—wherever I will be, in an optimal or suboptimal sheltering situation…I will be home. And there is no place else I would rather be.”
G-d bless the courageous Iranian and Israeli civilians as they face the unknown.
But note: their future also will become our future.
(Views expressed by guest commentators may not reflect the views of OAN or its affiliates.)
Richard Pollock is a former New Left activist and was a roommate with Chicago 7 defendant Rennie Davis. He understands New Left strategy and tactics. For four decades, Richard was an investigative reporter based in Washington, D.C. Among his positions, he served as the senior investigative reporter for the Washington Examiner, the Daily Caller News Foundation, and at OAN. While at OAN he served in the Washington, D.C. bureau and hosted its investigative reporting specials. He is semi-retired and his posts from D.C. can be read on Substack.com
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