Made in Canada, forged in Israel

I was awakened the morning of October 7, 2023 by the air raid siren. My wife and I rushed our young children to our safe room as, we would soon learn, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust was underway just an hour’s drive south from my home.

Had I not made Aliyah to Israel 13 years ago, I’d likely have read news of the Hamas pogrom from the safety of rural southern Ontario, where I grew up. Many times in the following days, dominated by nation-wide shock and horror, I questioned my decision to move.

I’m a cultural hybrid. My upbringing in Port Burwell (a small cottage town in Ontario, on the shore of Lake Erie) could not have been more secular. No synagogue. No Jewish community. No instruction in Zionism. No Jewish friends. On the other hand, frequent visits to my grandmother’s and many relatives’ observant homes in Rehovot gave me an education and appreciation for Jewish holidays, and a feeling of close connection to the Jews’ ancestral home.

I had always considered my Jewish identity rather marginal in planning my future. So my choice to move to Israel when I was 19 was at first perplexing to friends and family. In truth, I was a miserable teenager in Canada – a high school dropout with shady friends and low expectations.

The Port Burwell shoreline. Free to use under the Unsplash License / Credit: Michael Krahn

As a teenager, reading history and learning about Israel and the Middle East drew attention to an overlooked facet of my identity. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact pull – perhaps inspiration, connection, purpose, or belonging. I realized that as a Jew, I belonged to an unfolding history, with its unique stories and appeal, with unprecedented (and ongoing) tragedies and triumphs. Whatever the rationale was, there was certainly a potent emotional component. There was nothing holding me back, and plenty – including a welcoming embrace by my extended family – pulling me forward.

Leaving my parents and sister (who would later make Aliyah as well), learning Hebrew from scratch, and starting life in a (sort of) foreign country nevertheless entailed a steep learning curve. I understood Israel in abstract terms, but I did not yet feel the charged socio-political baggage that comes with being an Israeli.

I have never regretted my decision. In moments of crisis, like October 7 and the surge of antisemitism in the West, I am reminded of the rich tapestry that connects the Jewish people across history and borders. This is not abstract – it’s the lived reality of every Israeli. And in this fact lies meaning and unity. It’s an unlikely coincidence that Israel consistently ranks within the top five happiest countries. Here, there’s no time for living without purpose or losing sight of what truly matters.

Had I stayed in Canada and gone on to an urban university, I wouldn’t have worried about incoming rockets, but I’d have been running a daily gauntlet of anti-Israel hatred. Could my former, loosely Jewish self have been vulnerable to such pressure? Would I have ended up on the “barricades,” clad in a keffiyeh, screaming “Globalize the intifada?”

Anti-Israel protest. Free to use under the Unsplash License / Credit: Aveedibya Dey

It’s a chilling but realistic fear, as many Hamas supporters are historically ignorant anti-Zionist Jews who believe Zionism has produced the worst settler-colonialist entity in the world. These young people, untouched by existential conflict, dream of changing the world through violence. This distant conflict offers them a theoretical “battleground” for their often-theatrical activism.

How grateful I am, in spite of the risks, to live in Israel, where I do not have to curry favor with antisemites to feel socially acceptable. When I compare the cosplaying revolutionary activism of students in the West with the journeys to adulthood of young Israelis, I see a gaping chasm.

In the West, particularly in North America and Australia, students cut class and use their universities as theaters for what they perceive as political combat. In Israel, universities closed as young soldier-students were deployed to Israel’s theaters of war.

In Israel, when the delayed school year did eventually start, grades suffered, as students were still in and out of military service and dangerous operational duty. On Western campuses, demonstrating poses little to no threat to the students’ grades, as long as they participate in the forms of activism approved by their highly politicized teachers, who are often themselves present at protests.

In the West, students in the “trenches” on their campuses know they will be home for the holidays. In Israel, many don’t know when they’ll come home. Some never return.

In the West, even though the protesters’ faces are often covered, they are perceived by observers as students, that is, as real people. But when witnessing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the news, observers often perceive IDF soldiers as “uniforms,” interchangeable cogs in a war machine, a war machine they have been relentlessly pressured to condemn as genocidal. They don’t think of these soldiers as individuals, or as students, which so many of them are.

For these Israelis in the IDF, the conflict transcends ideology. Defending their country is a matter of survival. Greater understanding of their challenges could maybe – just maybe – stimulate empathy.

The accounts that follow are the results of interviews with the new generation of young Israelis arising from the smoke of the post-October 7 battlefield. They are illustrative of the challenges young people here face these days, in trying, somehow, to balance life and military service in times of war.

Rockets from the Gaza strip fired at Israeli population centers. Free to use / Credit: IDF Spokesperson

On October 7, while honeymooning in Thailand, Maor and his wife heard the usual reports of rocket attacks on Israel. But as videos flooded social media, they realized something unprecedented was happening. “I felt horrible… knowing I’d likely be going into Gaza created a certain stress. My wife was very, very stressed,” he recalled.

By October 12, Maor was in Israel and on base. Following a two-week training period, his unit entered Gaza. “We were tense, it’s natural. As soon as you go in, you pay attention to everything, and your senses sharpen.” Their mission was to secure a neighborhood, search for Israeli hostages, and dismantle terrorist infrastructure. “Every day in the afternoon, Hamas terrorists popped out [of their hiding places] and fired AK-47s at us. We usually responded by calling in a tank strike on their location.”

Maor shattered his right hand during a mission and was sent for rehabilitation. He had until December 31 to recover before university began. “I could write and use a computer not perfectly, but well enough,” he said. In March, as the second semester started, Maor was deployed to the evacuated northern city of Metula. “It’s a battlefield, a ghost town, barely a soul in sight,” he recalled, describing the constant threat of Hezbollah’s rockets.

During downtime, he studied. “It was tough—operations made study times inconsistent,” he said. “I tried to attend all the lectures, but applying what I learned to assignments was challenging.” Nevertheless, Maor managed to finish the school year. Today, he’s back in civilian life, but with the knowledge that he could get called up again.

I asked Maor how he envisioned the school year of students in the West. He answered, “They live in a different bubble. And to tell you the truth, I would also be happy to live in a bubble in which you don’t have our worries, no wars, no reserve duty, and no risk of – God forbid – dying for your country.”

IDF soldiers conducting a nighttime operation in the Gaza strip. Free to use / Credit: IDF Spokesperson

Maya, 25, a medical student from Jerusalem, serves as a combat medic in a search and rescue unit in the Homefront Command. On October 7, shortly after realizing a disaster was unfolding, she received a call from her reserve unit commander ordering her to go to Be’er Sheva to gear up. “We didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know if I was going to be rescuing people from destroyed houses, or if I would need to sign for a weapon and go right into combat,” she said, adding, “It was a stressful situation.”

After the initial shock and training period, Maya’s unit settled into routine and standby duty. Seeking a more active role, she joined a commander course unit in need of medics and entered Gaza several times, providing first aid to wounded soldiers. Released from duty in January, Maya struggled with burnout as the delayed school year began. “Sitting down to study felt so insignificant after everything that had happened. My body was back, but my mind was still in Gaza,” she said of the rough transition.

During her second entry, Maya’s unit suffered a casualty within days. “We were called to the spot – it was a real battle zone. Soldiers to my left were taking fire, and returning fire. To my right, there was a wounded soldier.” Under fire, Maya and her team loaded the soldier into the APC and tried to administer first aid. I tried five times to start an IV, but there was no blood return. One time I did get a return, but when I put the needle in all the way, there was nothing.” Sgt. Major Dennis Yekimov, 33, was killed in that battle in Khan Younis, on March 2.

Maya was released again about a month later, restarting the decompression process anew. “After the second time I got out of Gaza, exams were coming up, I was still processing trauma and loss, but I had no choice but to study.”

Maya reflected on the anti-Israel campus protests that seemed so far detached from her reality. “A lot of these people have no understanding of this complex situation in the Middle East, […] or don’t even want to try to understand it,” she expressed with frustration. This sentiment is shared by many who have been at the heart of the conflict.

For Elia, a 23-year-old computer science student, from Rehovot in central Israel, this disconnect was equally palpable. By the time the delayed school year started, Elia had already served on Israel’s northern border during the war. He recalled, “No one knew anything. In those earliest days, you could believe anything. If someone told you tens of thousands of Hezbollah fighters breached the border, you’d believe it.”

The situation stabled somewhat, and the school year started at the end of December. Elia, like many others, spent his free time studying – often interrupted by duty. Eventually, he was released back into civilian life to continue his studies.

Elia’s heart beat rapidly when he got the call from his commander telling him, “We’re going to Gaza for 40 days.” He went back into class, then wondered, “What am I doing here? I’m going to war. Why am I sitting in class?” He drove home to spend time with his family and get ready.

He serves in a combat engineering unit, operating in a D9 bulldozer as the commander in a two man-team (driver and commander). In one of his entries into Gaza, his unit, in conjunction with reconnaissance paratroopers and armor, was tasked with re-conquering territory in Shujaiya.

D9 bulldozer (the kind in which Elia operates). Free to use / Credit: IDF Spokesperson

Around midnight on July 2, they began moving through the city’s narrow streets, searching for tunnels until 16:00. Exhausted after nearly two days awake, they set up defensive positions for the night. The next morning, they pushed deeper into the city. By afternoon, Elia heard increased radio chatter, nearby gunfire, and the words “Trophy opened,” signaling the vehicle’s defense system had activated. “Now it was real,” he thought someone had fired an RPG at one of the armored vehicles.

As tanks provided cover fire, Elia’s D9 breached a building where terrorists were hiding, exposing the interior. Recon paratroopers stormed in, engaging with gunfire and grenades. This brutal cycle of combat continued for over 10 hours.

After the mission, the combat group returned to its forward base in Gaza. The soldiers received the news that Cpt. Elay Elisha Lugasi, 21, a tank commander, had been killed when an RPG penetrated his tank. “We had even sat down for coffee the day before. The news was hard.” Following several more operations, Elia was released back into civilian life just in time to study for the finals.

“At first when I tried to study, I couldn’t focus. I had just been in combat; I was still processing everything. Calculus felt so disconnected from my reality.” He eventually got it together and completed his exams. Elia noted that at any moment, he can be called back, and his ordinary life is put on hold; “At any second, my life can just stop.”

“What are you doing here? Why don’t you move back to [whatever Western country you came from]?” These questions are familiar (sometimes irritatingly so) to any Jew who has moved to Israel from the West. But to be fair, they’re good questions.

Israel is a complicated place. Security concerns are acute. Societal fault lines run deep. This has been a long and bloody war, inevitably with civilians caught in the crossfire. There is vast destruction in Gaza. There’s political upheaval at home. The war has taken a toll on Israel’s image and on Israeli society itself.

Occasionally I muse about taking my family to a quiet little town in Canada and leading a low-stress life, far from the urban centers where antisemitism rages, and physically disconnected from the mortal risks attached to the current existential crisis in the Jewish-Israel saga.

Protesters calling for a return of the Israeli hostages kidnapped on October 7. Free to use under Unsplash License / Credit: Alexander McKenna

At such times, I recall the generations of my ancestors who survived the same hatred and barbarism that our people face today. But this time around, things are different. As an Israeli-Jew, you stand at an important moment in history, part of a resilient community that fights back against the depravity that has plagued Jews for thousands of years. Leaving might provide a temporary escape, yet part of my identity is woven into the fabric of this land and its people.

Israelis want to live and they want peace. Some of our closest neighbors unfortunately have other dreams. But through this struggle, or maybe, despite it, a shared sense of belonging and meaning has coalesced. You can feel it now, more than ever, in the wake of October 7. You feel it at Shabbat dinners. You feel it in conversations with strangers. You feel it when you walk past the ubiquitous posters of the hostages. You feel it when you hear the stories of the new generation of young Israelis arising from the hardships of the battlefield. It transcends politics and societal divides – and it generates unyielding hope.

Yes, I could pack my bags and head to Canada, but I doubt that I could ever truly leave.