Next to me is a little boy sleeping in his father’s arms. He looks about the same age as the boy I nannied last summer; his hair is the same shade of brown, and in their Paw Patrol socks, even his feet look the same. These boys are just three years old and their lives are already radically different. The boy I nannied will likely never experience the fear of knowing someone wants to kill him or see the inside of a bomb shelter, whereas the boy next to me dozes in a shelter for the third time tonight as rockets explode overhead.
It’s officially ‘wartime,’ and no one can stop talking about Instagram. Thanks, Mark Zuckerberg. I’m constantly bombarded by misinformation spread by the Hadids and their fellow Hollywood co-conspirators both online and in real-life conversations, painfully false infographics about the so-called ‘ethnic-cleansing’ of Palestine, and the fact that for most of my friends, this week is just like any other. They haven’t thought twice about remaining one minute’s running distance from a bomb shelter and for the first time since stepping foot in this country, I’m slightly envious of them. The feeling doesn’t last long as my jealousy is cured by a spoonful of my favorite hummus that I bought the day before as a coping mechanism.
I high-five my roommates once I finish my speed-shower and throw on some clothes. I’ve single-handedly beaten Hamas by making it through a shower and getting dressed without a siren. Victory is, in fact, mine.
I’ve never seen Rothschild Boulevard so empty. Tel Aviv feels like a ghost town and any minute I expect a ball of tumbleweed to roll past my feet. But I’m still standing at the center of one of Israel’s busiest cities, its residents are just too afraid to step outside. Quarantine flashbacks anyone?
Someone revs their motorcycle engine and I jump. People in the apartment next door gift the neighborhood with the sound of drunken karaoke and my heart skips a beat. I can’t listen to music because every note sounds like a siren, not to mention the fact that I’m afraid I won’t hear an actual siren if it goes off. The circles under my eyes have become a fabulous shade of black because lately, I’m lucky if I manage to stay asleep for more than a couple of hours at a time.
I’m thinking about how I need to find an apartment in DC, when it occurs to me, for the first time in my life, that maybe I shouldn’t wear my Star of David necklace when I move back to America. Will it really put me in danger? I can’t imagine that it will, yet (at the risk of reviving a COVID-era tagline), these really are unprecedented times.
The Tzevah Adom sirens are blaring for the second time during brunch and as I climb the stairs to shelter, I see that one girl has refused to allow Hamas to interrupt her meal. She’s sitting on a step with a plate of pancakes resting on her knees, a fork in one hand, and a phone in the other. Us Gen-Z kids are another breed.
John Oliver and Trevor Noah spout illogical nonsense about how this isn’t a fair fight because not enough Israelis are dying and I feel more abandoned by them than I do by my own friends who have neglected to check in on me. I like to say I don’t believe in regret, but that’s how I’m starting to feel about the minutes I wasted pouring over the Last Week Tonight website trying to get tickets to see the show live. Looks like I’ll have to redirect my efforts to SNL.
Whenever a siren goes off, I am overwhelmed with both anger and sympathy for the people in the Gaza Strip. My natural nationalistic tendencies kick in when I know that the country I love is under attack and my instinct is to hate whoever is behind that terror. But then I think about how afraid I am, even with the protection of the Iron Dome and a shelter to sleep in, and how that fear must be exponentially amplified for those in the Gaza Strip who aren’t so lucky. My heart is torn in two different directions with no proposed method for sewing it back together.
Isn’t it interesting that the world’s celebrities, comedians, and Instagram activists couldn’t stand to see the people of Gaza mistreated when the Israeli government could be scapegoated as the sole executor of their misery? Yet now, while life in Gaza is still unbearable at the direct hands of Hamas, no one online seems to care. Trust me, I’m the last person to play the anti-semitism card, but what a coincidence that the world only cares to comment on freeing Palestine when they think the Jewish State is solely to blame for its imprisonment.
For the first time in my life, I don’t want anyone else to be ‘woke.’ I don’t want to hear from the masses of social justice warriors I often identify as my peers or from the uber-liberal politicians I idolized back in the States. I believe that there are enough smart and capable Israelis and Palestinians to share their advice on how to move forward and I trust their input more than I do the people halfway across the world who get to move on from the Middle East as soon as they click ‘post.' In short, I don’t want to hear from anyone who hasn’t had to run into a bomb shelter in the last two weeks.
If you’re excluded by the group listed above, you may find that opinion close-minded. But you probably don’t know what it’s like to feel the earth shake from rockets exploding above or in the place you call home. And you’ve probably never had to call and text your loved ones to make sure they didn’t get killed by shrapnel as they took the calculated risk of going grocery shopping.
Just as my heart breaks for my Israeli brothers and sisters, so do I cry for the innocent people in Gaza. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to live in inhospitable conditions as refugees in your own homeland. Hamas is a terrorist organization that takes advantage of its people’s vulnerability, and it’s a crime against humanity I hope to help resolve in my lifetime. This fact should go without saying, but apparently, we’re not expected to feel empathy for one another. When did we get so cynical?
I am by no means an expert on Middle Eastern politics and I didn’t write this with the hope that it will solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this is my story, these are my experiences, and I reserve the right to share them. I believe it’s important to see how more than one thing can be true at the same time and to hear from those living through conflict; I hope my voice will be one of many that you read in an attempt to understand what’s really happening here. I’m a Zionist, American Jew living in Israel, which comes with a heavy bias. But I hope you don’t allow that fact to invalidate the experiences I’ve shared above. Instead, I hope it encourages you to seek out additional firsthand accounts and use the totality of information you find to formulate a more informed opinion.
I will never be the same after these past two weeks, and neither will the little boy who lives in my building. Sleeping in a bomb shelter didn’t seem to faze him, yet my heart aches with the knowledge that his innocence is irreparably damaged. In just three years of life, he can no longer believe that the world is a good place, full of only good people. At his age, I thought the world existed for my enjoyment and that grownups were there for my protection; the notion of death didn’t even exist in my head, let alone my own death at the hands of terror.
Post a Comment