Explaining to my American friend why I’m staying in Israel
Israeli volunteers work to collect and distribute donations and food for citizens in the country’s south at an emergency center in Tel Aviv, October 2023. Photo by Tomer Appelbaum/Haaretz
This article originally appeared on Haaretz, and was reprinted here with permission. Sign up here to get Haaretz’s free Daily Brief newsletter delivered to your inbox.
I was a teenager when the second intifada began. In those days, I traveled every afternoon to the conservatory in Kfar Sava. Five days a week, I studied art there. The bus stop was next to the Arim Mall and the 561 was my regular bus. When buses started blowing up on a regular basis all over the country, I asked my mother the obvious question: Would she be willing to drive me instead?
Her answer was unequivocal: Life goes on as usual. Fear has its place, but it will not dictate how we live our lives. Altering our routine is like handing a victory to those who are slaughtering us. I was angry with her response, but I accepted it.
I kept going to ballet classes even as the fear that I would get blown up, or that something would happen to my family and friends, was ever-present. In those days, my father was frequently called to the sites of terror attacks. As an officer in the Israel Police, he was often among the first forces to arrive on the scene. His eyes and his soul took in everything that was subsequently censored and not shown on the evening news.
At 3 A.M. Monday – because who can sleep at night anymore? – I found myself recounting this “long-ago” history to an American friend who lives in North Carolina. I told her this because she asked me why the hell my family and I were remaining in our home now.
Why the hell were Israelis, like her neighbors, getting on planes to fly to Israel? What was so screwed-up in our psyche that we couldn’t bring ourselves to just get up and leave this place? “You must see this as some kind of mass psychosis, as an act of madness,” I said. “I’m terrified by it, and I admire your courage,” she replied, “but if not for your own sake, then do it for your children’s sake.”
Logic would seem to be screaming the same questions, but I’m just not cut out to heed such advice. When we spoke, when I tried to understand and to explain to her and to myself just what it is in my DNA and that of so many others that won’t permit us to even consider such a thing, I thought about the shame that Gil Regev, a pilot in the Yom Kippur War, talked about – the shame that he would feel if he let down his friends and comrades. I thought about the helplessness and the guilt, the terrible guilt that is eating away at my friends and relatives who are abroad now, while their hearts and their families and all they hold dear are here in Israel.
I thought about the bloody chain of events that rests on the shoulders of everyone who was born in this country, about my grandmother who lied about her age in order to fight in the War of Independence, and about my grandmother who came here from Iran with nothing, as her mother tenaciously attempted to build a new life here. About their stories, and others’ stories, which are the traumas that have shaped us all since infancy, and about those that shaped us afterward.
We also spoke about my and my husband’s close relatives, who more than six years ago picked up and moved to other places to build a life there. A life with 12 months of maternity leave, and kindergartens with children of numerous nationalities, and functioning social services, and well-mannered people, where cars aren’t always honking, without an exorbitant cost of living, with laws that protect tenants’ rights and, most wonderful and important of all – without wars. Without air-raid sirens and security tension, and safe rooms and stairwells to huddle in, and with loads of peace of mind, and children from whom certain sights needn’t be hidden, and who needn’t become familiar with some of the terms that we have to use all too often.
In order to conclude our conversation with a drop of optimism and hope, I told my friend about the incredibly heroic men and women who displayed unbelievable fortitude, and about the heroism embodied in the mass civilian mobilization of support. About its spirit and strength.
Our collective trauma as a society is deeply etched within every single Israeli, no matter his or her age. The dimensions of this petrifying and mind-boggling catastrophe are still being revealed, and we cannot know what the future will bring.
Yet today, when I tried to convince a relative to accompany his frightened daughter, a mother of three young children including a 2-month-old infant, who wanted to find a flight out of here as soon as possible, we both shed tears of understanding when he said, “I just can’t leave.”
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