There Is No Such Thing as a Regular Israeli Family
In the comfortable boardrooms and lecture halls of the West, a dangerous, slanderous narrative has taken root: the idea that Israel is a European colonial project, an alien imposition on the Middle East. From my recording studio in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, I recently spoke with someone whose very existence dismantles this myth.
Eden Achituv is a mother of four living in Retamim, a small religious community in Israel’s Negev desert. To many in my community in Tucson, Eden and her husband Netanel are dear friends—former shlichim (emissaries) who taught our children and brought the soul of Israel to our desert. Today, they live in a different kind of desert, one overshadowed by what is often called a “ring of fire”—the constant threat of missiles from Gaza and Iran and the shifting loyalties of neighbors.
When the world screams that Jews should “go back to Poland,” they are not just being antisemitic; they are being historically illiterate. While Eastern European Jewry were not considered European, even more so, Ashkenazi Jews do not share DNA with non-Jews in Europe, rather with their fellow Middle Eastern Jews who all descent from ancient Israel; Eden’s family story is the origin story of the majority of Israelis. Her family roots do not trace back to Warsaw or Prague, but to Morocco, Tunisia, and Syria. Her father made Aliyah from Morocco at the age of 13, arriving with almost nothing but an ancient, unbreakable connection to his ancestral homeland.
“My family and Netanel’s family are not from Europe,” Eden told me. “We feel like we are continuing the same story—the story of the Torah, the story of Abraham. We are just another chapter in the same book.”
This “chapter” is currently being written in fire. In Eden’s community of 150 families, 90% of the men have been called to reserve duty over the last two years. While the West debates the “proportionality” of Israel’s defense, mothers like Eden are living in a reality where a morning siren means automatically ushering four boys into a safe room, only to watch her husband immediately don his uniform and head into a search-and-rescue mission.
What is most striking about Eden is not her fear, but her lack of bitterness. She spoke of her years working as a guide even connecting with neighboring Bedouin daycare centers, inviting Arab teachers into her home for Maqluba dinners. She spoke of a neighborly “kite morning” planned by a nearby kibbutz on October 7th—a symbol of peace that was met with the most horrific slaughter of our time.
Recently, her own community faced a small but stinging betrayal when a local lookout point—a place of quiet and beauty—was burned by neighbors from a nearby Bedouin village. The response of the Retamim community was not a call for vengeance, but a call for creation. For three weeks, the community’s teenagers worked alongside adults to rebuild the lookout, plant new trees, and pave a new road.
“We want to be a light,” Eden explained. “It’s a choice how to live and how to act. We choose a different way.”
This is the “Truth on the Ground” that rarely makes it into the global headlines. It is the story of a people who have been colonized, exiled, and stripped of their rights in every corner of the globe, only to return to their native soil and respond to destruction with the planting of trees.
The West often views the Middle East through the lens of a “clash of peoples,” but as our conversation made clear, it is a clash of values. It is a struggle between a civilization that celebrates the young generation for its willingness to sacrifice everything to save a life, and a set of proxies—led by the Iranian regime—that subjugates human life to the service of a death cult.
Eden calls her family “regular.” She is wrong. There is nothing regular about raising children to be a “light unto the nations” while under a ring of fire. There is nothing regular about a family that loses everything in the Diaspora and returns to the desert to make it bloom.
As we concluded our talk, Eden shared a message for the Jewish people in the Diaspora who feel isolated and afraid. “We are all in the same boat,” she said. “We get strength from you, and we hope you get strength from us. B’Ezrat Hashem, the end of the story will be good.”
If we want to understand the future of the Jewish people, we must stop looking at the maps drawn by politicians and start looking at the lookout points built by the teenagers of the Negev. That is where the real story is being told.