Hope is my toxic trait

Life in Israel in 2025 is not so much “living” as it is “continuous emotional resistance training.” Every day begins with a small psychological negotiation: Do I check the news before or after coffee? Either way, you lose — you’re just choosing the flavour of loss.

But loving this country?
That part is insultingly easy. Even when everything else feels like a group assignment no one prepared you for.

People abroad think living in Israel is one sweeping act of resilience. It’s not. It’s keeping a straight face while your phone pings with a headline about a stabbing and a supermarket sale at the same time. It’s answering a work email while wondering if the thud you heard was construction or geopolitics. It’s functioning at a level that would qualify as a nervous breakdown anywhere else.

And still, you love this place with a loyalty that borders on unreasonable.

The threats around us aren’t theoretical. Hamas still treats civilians like currency; Hezbollah has the strategic imagination of a cornered rat; Iran behaves like a bored pyromaniac with a grudge; and the Houthis… well, the Houthis appear deeply committed to proving that you don’t need accuracy to be a threat, just enthusiasm. These aren’t opinions. They’re established behaviours with footnotes.

So yes: living here is hard.
But loving Israel? That part is instinctive, involuntary, borderline biological. It’s the one thing here that doesn’t require effort.

What does require effort is coping with the “everyday things,” the ones that don’t make headlines. Your friend’s child drafted straight from bagrut. Another teacher quitting because the salary is an insult disguised as a job offer. A neighbour’s face looking slightly too drawn when they say they’re “fine.” The way you track every ambulance siren without meaning to. The way your body tenses at certain notifications. The way you laugh too loudly because the alternative is crying into your salad.

We call this functioning. It’s more like coping theatre.

Humour helps — but not because anything is funny. Humour here is a national medical device. A defibrillator. The thing that shocks you back into your body long enough to get through the day. Israelis joke about catastrophe the way other cultures joke about the weather. It’s not denial. It’s emotional triage.

Meanwhile, the political situation resembles an ever-expanding escape room run by people who keep losing the key. Leadership swings between paralysis and circus, depending on the hour. But even this chaos, as maddening as it is, doesn’t erode the thing underneath — the love of the place itself. You can be furious with the system and still completely committed to the land. Israelis do this balancing act so routinely we should get university credit for it.

What wears us down is the pace. The relentlessness. The need to swallow ten emotions before breakfast just to be marginally functional. There’s a national intimacy to our exhaustion. We all recognise the look in each other’s eyes. The tiny, weary telegraph that says, “How are you holding up?” followed immediately by the mutual understanding that nobody actually has the capacity for the real answer.

And still, we stay.
Not because we’re martyrs or heroes — we aren’t.
We stay because leaving would feel like amputating something essential.

This is the part people outside will never quite understand: the difference between living here and loving here. Living here demands stamina, humour, flexibility, caffeine, and a level of emotional compartmentalisation that probably shortens life expectancy. Loving here requires none of that. It’s the one thing that comes easily.

Sometimes I think the real Israeli miracle is how quietly we break. How politely. How privately. We fracture in the shower, in the supermarket queue, behind the wheel, in the elevator — then wipe our eyes, adjust the facial expression, and continue as if nothing happened. The country doesn’t give us room for dramatic collapse, so we collapse delicately, like people with manners.

But even in the collapse, there’s hope. Not poetic hope. Not inspirational hope. The feral, stubborn hope that refuses eviction. The kind that survives on fumes and principle. The kind that looks impossible from afar but feels obvious when you’re standing here.

Living here is hard.
Loving Israel isn’t.
That’s the paradox that holds us together.

Because for all the chaos, all the fear, all the exhaustion, this place still feels like the only place that makes sense in the ways that matter. Not the easy ways — the essential ones. The ways that tie you to history, community, identity, memory, stubbornness, defiance, and the quiet understanding that belonging is not always comfortable, but it’s always worth it.

So yes — living here will wear you down. But it will also build you in ways you didn’t ask for and can’t undo. And when the day is too heavy and the news too sharp, the love is what remains steady. It isn’t effort. It isn’t duty. It’s simply home.

And that’s why we keep going. Not because we’re strong. Not because we’re resilient.
But because the hardest part of living here is still easier than imagining ourselves anywhere else.