Not ‘hasbara’, a human story

In the early 2000s, between the cheerful years of the Second Intifada and the exploding buses, and the Second Gulf War and the gas masks, my mother’s brother came to Israel for a family visit. He came from New York, where he had immigrated, and with him came his wife – an American Jew – and his two toddler sons. Yonathan, his eldest, was 5 years old, his brother Itai was 2. I was 4 years old. They arrived in the summer, and our parents sent me and Yonathan to a local horse farm daycare. One day, when my American aunt picked us up from the camp, he started crying. He claimed I am a liar, that I am bluffing him. When my aunt asked him what kind of lie it was, he answered – “Omer says that there is a man named Saddam Hussein who hates us and wants to kill us all.”

This story was told to me two years ago. My American family came for another routine visit, in the background, the Netanyahu government is trying to disintegrate democracy. Huge demonstrations in Israel. Days of rage, days of disruption, rallies, and struggle. Between the beginning of the story and my introduction to it, 19 years have passed. During this time, Israeli society went through a war in Lebanon, three military operations in Gaza, three military operations in the West Bank, disengagement from territory, the fall of a Peace Summit, three waves of individual Palestinian terror attacks, 8 election campaigns, a global epidemic, a change of elites, a prime minister and a president who went to prison, and One Ruler that just refuse to let go.

During my uncle’s next visit to Israel, while he and his wife were sleeping in my room at my parent’s house, and while I was asleep in their house on the other side of the world, a Palestinian swarm burst into the agreed borders of my homeland and slaughtered approximately 1500 people. Most of them are citizens, peace-loving, left-wing, freedom dancers full of glitter and mud, and residents of socialist kibbutzim who worked throughout their lives to improve the bad situation of the Gazans vis-a-vis the government. They were slaughtered like dogs, burned, tortured, raped. Hundreds were abducted into tunnels dug for the transfer of artillery ammunition dug by Gazans who were employed in those kibbutzim with the aid money sent by European human rights organizations. A swath of land from my home was occupied by a hostile force that planned to reach its main artery.

My family sat at home for almost a month, biting their nails. They frantically folded laundry and watched the sights of the big world turn their backs on them. Huge joyous rallies in all the capitals, a widespread call to intensify the terror that is walking over them. In between they went to funerals and mourning days for those who were murdered. I was in America, in a relationship, trying to silence my Hebrew in public. Casually running into an angry mob of those I knew to be my rivals and those I considered my friends until five minutes ago. of Jews who called for the murder of Jews different from them, some of whom even have family ties from some distant history. One cousin landed in Jaffa, the other in Ellis Island – Cest la vie. I touched posters of people who were kidnapped from their beds, I heard the call to murder me from those who walked by me on the street and didn’t know that I was me. At this time my friends are fighting, breaking their limbs, breaking their backs, breaking their souls. I returned to Israel, I travelled, and I returned again.

Families broke up, friendships ended, and businesses closed. The social fabric dissolved more and more, the sea did not remain the same sea. This year, Five caskets were added to the high school I attended, and I’m probably forgetting some. Some were slaughtered, everyday people whose names I didn’t even know – but were part of the urban landscape. The instructor at the gym, the girl at the coffee shop, the guy who brings audio systems to parties. They were and now they are not. One of my former classmates, who studied with me in freshman year, and whom I had known my entire childhood, was killed by the explosion of a bomb planted by Hamas in a humanitarian corridor. The whole town came to the funeral. I will never forget his sister’s cry for the rest of my life. Some of my friends were close to him, they will forever feel the loss. Within all this loss, Some lost parts of themselves. One of them, a former classmate of mine from the 9th grade – a former basketball player who was known as “the strongest of the class” has been relearning to walk for several months now. And the only constant is escalation.

While the situation wasn’t always that bad, it wasn’t good either. Since 2020 every news broadcast is a special broadcast. As children, we watched the World Cup between the sirens. As toddlers, our parents were afraid to ride the bus for fear of exploding. And it doesn’t end there – it’s intergenerational. My grandmother, who was born in Haifa in 1928, used to talk about Jordanian snipers and the fear of walking in the street. On bending down and clinging to the wall to feel a little safer. She would tell about the Polish soldiers who once came to Israel, and how her mother – a refugee from Poland, a refugee like most of the Jews here – spat on the floor at the sight of their uniforms while they complimented her on her blonde child. And she is the one who managed to escape – the rest of her family did not. Their fate was the same as that of most of my predecessors and it would also have been my fate if I had been born under their circumstances. And not only the Holocaust of European Jews gave birth to refugees who came here – Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon – Jews were violently expelled from all of them, pushed into tents in the outskirts of the cities of a country that had just been established, and they had no choice. My uncle, now an old man, saw his friends explode from a few meters away in ’73, he was 18 years old. He is not the same person since then, and it is impossible to know or even imagine what kind of person he would have been if this had not happened to him – this is the story of his entire generation.

My cousin, a man who can only be attributed with good intentions, was almost killed on a routine patrol on the border of the Gaza Strip in 2012. A Hamas squad fired a rocket at the armoured personnel carrier he was in. The rocket penetrated the armoured car, penetrated its other side, and exploded outside. Another cousin, his brother, fell from a roof while chasing a terrorist. This is the price their generation paid for ongoing security operations, operations they had to perform with complete fatigue and sour sweat while their foreign counterparts learned, grew, and saw the world. These stories are the tip of the iceberg of the story of a typical Israeli family, even of one that “dodged the bullet”. After all, in all the turmoil in which they live – they are alive. And me? I am nothing more than a typical and average example of a person in Israel. Shit, I am an example of a lucky person in Israel, and I pray to God every day that it stays that way. This is the one place where I am religious.

That being said, I want to turn to a dissonance, to something unresolved that I simply don’t understand in the world’s view of us. In the world’s view of me. One of the strongest trends among all the changes that Western society is going through is the individualization of the worldview. The retreat to perspective. Both in Europe and in the Anglo-Saxon world, the young and global generations form a concept according to which people will never be able to understand the life experience of those who are different from them, of those who are not in their shoes. Attachments to ethnic origins, socioeconomic status, to gender attribution, and sub-definitions – all of these are prevalent among circles and circles that engrave on their banner the acceptance of difference, the right to shout oneself, to differentiate, to declare. Amazingly, these are the same people – and in perfect coordination – who are willing to crucify the Jews of Israel above every stage. And listen, I understand political criticism, and I understand a moral compass. For better or for worse – I don’t spare it from anyone. But I feel my peer’s character had been trashed. That my character has been trashed. And by People who consume our everyday life as TV headlines. That see our names and memories as numbers on a screen. That view bombs that shake my walls as twitter reports.

For us, the conflict that fills their Instagram has topography and geography and tangible landscape. Very tangible, From a moderate hill in near my home you can see the green line on one side and the sea on the other. On the right, those who want my harm, and on the left, the place where they want me. And that’s that. There is no more space. That’s where the map ends. A person who grew up in Nebraska, Manchester or Paris has no chance of understanding this. Those who didn’t go to middle school while opening their front camera and pointing it behind them to see that no one is coming to stab them in the back have no way of understanding. So show empathy, those of the outside. Try to think about yourself in our shoes, imagine how you would react in this reality – and not how you wouldn’t want to react. Think about what you would do, really, think about it. What I wouldn’t do is an easy one – everyone knows what they wouldn’t do, but what would they do? I’m not asking for love, or sympathy. Tonight we “celebrate” the change of the Jewish year, A year opened with our biggest disaster and ended in a bomb shelter hiding from a swarm of Iranian missiles. So I call on those who strive to contain one’s perspective and say – this is our situation, and our choices are limited, understand that.