The following was hard to write - and this is an understatement. It will probably be difficult to read, also. If you don’t want to read about feelings of war and trauma or the situation in the Middle East overall, please don’t. You don’t need to.

Like an ant on a tree, I started climbing on a different branch after the events of October 7th, 2023, or “Black Saturday,” as Israeli media dubbed it. I didn’t know it back then, as the change was too slow and too big to grasp. It’s only now that I reflect on what I wrote and what I talked to people around me about since then, over a period of months, that I understand I’m not the same person.

Up until that day, my life in Israel was the past, and my life in the US was the present. Most of my family members are still in Israel: my father, my aunts, my cousins, a few friends, and many memories. The life I left there was of a different person, someone who didn’t just speak a different language but also lived in a different culture, had different beliefs and values, and had different kinds of friends. It was another life.

I’m jumping ahead of myself here, but it seems like a good place to mention that many of my values and beliefs conflict with my past life and with Israel in general. I grew apart from that, and while I miss some people and part of the culture, I feel this is a healthy distance for me overall.

Past and present collide

What Black Saturday did was create a wormhole that brought past me into the present. The separation line melted away, and with it, the familiarity and stability of my reality here in the US. I felt I existed in two places at once, both past and present. It’s hard to describe and exhausting to remember. Most of all, I hated being dragged into this confusing mind mess without a choice or a say in the matter.

To understand how something like this happens, let me share a memory with you. Let me take you back to The Gulf War.

I am 11. My sister, my mom, and I are sitting on the floor in my sister’s room. This room, the smallest in our apartment with only one window, was the dedicated “sealed room”: it’s a room sealed with sheets of plastic, duck tape, and wet towels under the door to create makeshift protection against chemical weapons. At the time, everyone in Israel had one.

The Air-raid sirens in the background, a wave pattern of ups and downs, were reflected in my mom’s heavy breathing. She reminded me of a terrified animal. I couldn’t see her eyes since they were behind a gas mask; mine were too, and so was my sister’s, with additional plastic covering meant to protect younger children from gas. My mom slowly worked the panic-menaced logic in her mind, thinking out loud if she should inject me and my sister with Atropine. Atropine came in plastic single-use syringes, which were meant to be used if we were infected by nerve gas. It is not meant to use as a preventative; the side effects can be really nasty.

Fortunately, we managed to talk my mom down, and Saddam Hussein “only” launched explosive warheads with his Scuds into Israel. But the memory remains, and with it, the feeling of total helplessness when all you can do is to sit, trapped in a room, and do absolutely nothing while missiles explode around you and shake the windows of your home.

I have this memory and a few others, but I’ll save you from those. The reason I’m bringing this up is to set up the stage for the reaction to such severe helplessness. The reaction is what I (and I believe many Israelis and Palestinians) would call “survival mode.” It’s when the planning and stargazing part of your brain shuts down to a narrow tunnel vision of what’s happening right now, this moment. Once this happens to you as a result of an event like I discussed above, this can happen again from time to time out of the blue. It’s not a matter of choice. It happens out of reflex. I discussed this in a previous post, and at the time, I wondered why I was reflecting on it. Well, here’s the answer. Mind’s working in mysterious ways and all of that.

Fear is the mind killer

A couple of days after Black Saturday, an entire country full of people switched into survival mode after the initial shock. What Hamas did that day was not something I can put into words, but I can still feel it. My family over there felt it. And the other survivors of families near Gaza, who were slaughtered in ways even animals aren’t butchered, felt it. Let me emphasize that I am not capable of feeling or even having a taste of what those survivors went through. I believe the human brain shields us from such things with denial and other methods to protect us from going insane, which some of these people probably did. All I go by is a hunch of a feeling.

For days and weeks after black Saturday, a whole country reacted out of a narrow tunnel vision of the need to survive. There was nothing else; no plan, no strategy, and no revenge. There was just a boiling, overwhelming rage and pain.

Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much thinking since then. No long-term plan and no strategy. The whole thing reminds me of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan and Iraq on a smaller scale. But we’ll get there.

I was here, in New York City, when the demonstrations started, when people on the left - my left, my people - started chanting a slogan that came directly from the mouths of Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad, and other such terrorist organization who wanted to exterminate the Jews since 1948 onward. I don’t think (or I don’t want to think) people knew what they were saying exactly. I understand the point, and I understand what they were trying to achieve, but the extreme demonstrators' actions pushed me away toward the right. I did not want my opinions to change, just as I didn’t want my Israeli past to come back, but sometimes life punches you in the face for a wake-up call.

Despite all I felt and what I still feel, I understand. I wish I hadn’t, and I wish I could just be “pro-Israel” or whatever. It would simplify things. But I simply cannot accept what’s going on to Palestinians today, in Palatine, in their own homes, when bombs fall around them, and their windows are shaking, thinking if the next explosion is going to be the last sound they’ll ever hear. And this is something that drives me further away from friends and family who lean more toward Israel. I know a few Israelis like me, and most of them have left Israel for similar reasons I’m happy to be where I am today. I don’t think there are many of us.

What Hamas did is one thing, and Israel’s immediate reaction is something I still support. But we are almost a year into this mess, with no end in sight and just more bloodshed, most of which belongs to people who have no choice but to stand in the way of IDF’s bombs.

This is where I want to stop for now. I understand this is a sensitive topic for many people. Thank you for reading.