I’ve never wanted to visit Israel; I’ve rarely felt Jewish, apart from moments when people hated me for it, or I felt shame for it. When Bibi Netanyahu cut off water and power in the war’s early days, I wrote an article decrying his acts; I attended protests and stayed silent when friends insisted Israel shouldn’t exist. But six months into the war, I boarded a flight for the Holy Land.
“If you have any empathy, you’ll know what to write when you get there,” a man at my local coffee shop said, snapping his wallet shut for emphasis; it was decorated with the Palestinian flag.
Days later, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Samuel, an Arab Christian told me, “People need not pay the bill for their government,” I understood he wasn’t speaking just about Israelis, but Palestinians too. “We want peace.”
Maybe we have a harder time separating people from their government in democracies and maybe the weekly protests in Israel aren’t enough to convince us otherwise, but Netanyahu has less support today than George W. Bush did when the United States invaded Iraq. Israel is under threat, not just from foreign enemies, but from its own government.
With Iran’s recent attacks, Netanyahu poses even more danger. But it’s the people of Israel who took shelter when the missiles struck — Hayfa, who runs a cooperative for Palestinian women, Awni, a Muslim man who insisted that Jews and Muslims get along, and Mika, a Jewish woman who told me with a shrug, “the alarms went off and I went into my son’s room and just laid on him. ‘Mommy, what are you doing’, he asked. I told him, ‘I don’t know.’ ”
Israel is a nation in recovery. Most of the evacuees have returned home, other than those displaced from the border with Lebanon due to ongoing attacks from Hezbollah. In Tel Aviv, shops are open, and families sit at cafes. Along the avenues, photos of Israeli hostages are taped to benches and trees; stickers telling Netanyahu to “go home,” decorate light poles. Signs of normalcy are underscored by a mixture of unease and mourning.
On the six-month anniversary, I took my coffee at a café near Hostages Square, where I met two IDF soldiers just returned from Gaza. “You don’t know the Middle Eastern culture, and so you try by Western eyes to judge what’s happening in the Middle East, and you’re wrong — you have no idea how it works,” they told me.
I thought back to my conversation with Dan Miran, whose son, Omri, is a hostage in Gaza. “Can you take a baby from an animal?” he’d asked. “Of course not,” I answered, not understanding his point. “Imagine if that animal tried to get his baby back, and all the other animals in the jungle said to him, ‘What are you doing? Stop it.’ ” I couldn’t imagine. “I’m just trying to get my baby back,” he said.
We don’t understand Israel; we attack the people rather than challenge the government. We don’t bother to know its diversity or learn its history.
“People think Hamas is like Black Lives Matter,” Or Tom, from Tel Aviv’s LGBTQ Center told me. “But it’s not; it’s a terrorist organization. I can be empathetic to Palestinians and empathetic to Israelis; it doesn’t have to be in a clash. But when people say, ‘from the river to the sea,’ they’re saying there’s no place for us here.” I thought of the man back at my local coffee shop. Across the ocean, we’d picked our teams. Here, they lived with the consequences.
That night in Tel Aviv, I sat on a nearly empty beach, staring out into the Mediterranean with a Jewish Israeli man. “Netanyahu’s government is supported by the settlers and the religious right, but they’re not the majority. We need to stop financing them. We need to find a solution with the Palestinians,” he said.
I asked if he’d ever leave Israel. “If Netanyahu keeps power, if we turn into a dictatorship, I’d leave because that would be the end of Israel. But where would I go? The world hates us. I’m safer within Israel than I am outside of Israel, even if Iran attacks.”
Iran has attacked. While we pepper social media with hate, Israelis brace for missiles and Gazans face a growing crisis. I cannot imagine waking every day, knowing my son is held hostage, and I cannot imagine rocking my starving child amidst the rubble. In the West, we want it to be simple, but it isn’t. It’s war.
Lutz is a freelance writer focusing on international affairs, climate change, development, and health.
