Under the same trembling sky

The planes woke me last night – I thought I was used to them by now, but these sounded different.

I bolted upright. I knew where they were headed.

We’d been holding our breath for weeks, coiled tight in expectation ever since Iran sent missiles at us, crossing invisible boundaries to mark out lines of fire. Every moment since then felt like a waiting game, a held breath, until tonight.

The sky roared.

I looked East towards the desert and my mind flew beyond borders to another woman in another land. Perhaps she, too, lies awake in Iran, listening to the distant thunder that isn’t thunder and fearing what comes next.

We are separated by so much—by politics, by walls of silence, by years of tension written into the fabric of our histories—but I imagine we both lie awake, staring at the same endless night.

I think of her, of the women like me, the parents and their children, the old men who buy flowers for their wives every Thursday, the teenagers just yearning for music and parties and maybe first love.

And I wonder if this mutual understanding, this delicate sense of each other across such a wide chasm, will ever be enough to break through the walls built by our governments, walls we didn’t ask for but now find ourselves scaling with wary hearts.

Last night, we hit military bases in Iran. I know this was about sending a message, about lines crossed and stakes raised. But I also know that missiles don’t discriminate the way we imagine they do.

I know that even if walls don’t crumble, people tremble, and lives are impacted in ways we may never fully understand. I can’t claim to know what it’s like for them, but I know what it’s like for ME enough to understand that, in the end, it’s people who pay the price—not policy, not power.

Most Israelis I know don’t want a war with Iran. We don’t want escalation. We want a chance to breathe, to build something better, even as we watch ourselves forced into cycles that seem inescapable.

We know that regimes are not the same as the people they claim to represent. We feel it keenly when we look across the line that divides us, recognizing ourselves in the quiet moments of others’ lives.

So here I am, awake this morning under this trembling sky, hoping this doesn’t become yet another story of war told by mothers to their children. There is nothing easy about hope in times like these, but I can’t stop myself from holding onto it—however thin, however fleeting. Because somewhere, across the night and then the dawn, I like to believe there’s another woman hoping, too.