The Gaza War 2023: My Story
Hello all,
I figured I might as well write out my experiences, emotions and thoughts as the “Simchat Torah War” rages on. It’s been consuming my thoughts and causing my stomach to knot thinking of all of the deaths of innocents. Babies killed or kidnapped. Israelis at a music festival being slaughtered out of nowhere.
It’s been especially hard since I’ve been away from home. My husband and I were visiting family in Toronto and are currently in Denver, waiting for a flight back. We don’t know when we will get home. We don’t know if flights will be cancelled. Everything is unsteady, difficult and horrifying.
I would like to share my own story of how I experienced the evolution of Hamas running Gaza, and the many operations of the Israeli soldiers fought and died for. It started in 2004, when I spent 10th grade in Israel.
I had only been to Israel once in my life when I got help from my parents to spend high school there. I was raised very Zionist, and had dreams of what Israel was supposed to be. To me, living in Israel while finishing high school was a dream.
However, being in Israel without family was so much harder than I expected. I hated going to school, which was hard to avoid as I was sleeping 300 meters away from the building. I lived in a dorm on a Kibbutz near southern Israel called Kibbutz Yavne. I didn’t speak more than 5 words in Hebrew. It was intense, shocking, and overall, an interesting experience.
A few months after the school year started, Israeli’s government decided to give Gaza, which was within Israel’s borders, over to the Palestinians living there. This would happen summer 2005, after the school year (for me) was over.
That means any Jews who had grown up and lived there had to leave their homes and find somewhere else to live. This deal was made to promote peace in the Middle East. The Palestinian Authority was very adamant that once they got a city, then there would be peace. No more terrorists blowing themselves up on crowded busses. No more smuggling illegal weapons. No more random stabbing attacks.
As a 15-year-old Zionist, I had no idea why this decision was being made. To me, it seemed like Israel was giving this random people rights to land that we had won. Displacing Israeli citizens seemed unfair to me. In fact, I had a whole conversation about my opinion with a soldier who was being called up to enforce the move.
I hitchhiked a lot during my year. Sometimes it was safe, like leaving the kibbutz. Sometimes it was unsafe, and I didn’t care. Still, I had some sense. Once, while waiting for the bus to Jerusalem, a guy stopped his car and urged me to get in his car. People rarely stopped on their own (I wasn’t looking for a hitchhike, a sign in Israel which is shown by a pointer finger pointed at the road) and I was immediately wary. “Please, come in,” he insisted. “Where are you going? I can drop you off.”
I began to feel even more uncomfortable. “Look, I’m Jewish,” he said, as if a strange man picking up a young teenager would be ok as long as he was Jewish. “I can show you my ID.”
I just smiled and said no.
Anyway, meeting this soldier was so random. I think I was trying to get back to the kibbutz and the soldier noticed my bright orange ribbon I had on my backpack. These ribbons meant that we opposed to government’s ruling to pull out of Gush Katif (an area including Gaza) and we wanted Jews to live there still.
“I see you are against the evacuation,” the soldier said, after we exchanged names and I ensured he was going in the direction I needed.
“I just don’t get it,” I told the soldier in my broken Hebrew. “Why would you willingly give up a land that we won in the war?” (I did not sound this elegant. I probably just said “I don’t understand,” which is a phrase I learned very quickly after living in Israel for a few months.)
“I have to follow the army’s orders,” I remember the soldier saying. “I don’t have a say in it.”
And that’s true. Soldiers follow whatever they’re told, whether they are opposed to it or not. I think it was then I decided I would not do well in the army. I hated people telling me what to do. And if I had to do something that I morally opposed, I’m not sure I would have the same attitude as this soldier.
After that year, I went back to America to ultimately finish my high school diploma in a public school, after bouncing around 3 religious Jewish high schools (a story for another time). However, after spending a year there, I felt connected. I had never felt at home like I had in Israel. There was something captivating about the land, and the people. Every person felt like family. (Except the occasional creepy man).
And, as many people feared, a terrorist organization took over Gaza and the people living there. They started pouring money into weapons and bombs. And just two months later, a slew of kassam rockets were shot out of Gaza into southern Israel. Another bigger attack happened four months later. And in the late summer of 2006, two soldiers were killed and one kidnapped into Gaza. This 18-year-old soldier was treated brutally as a prisoner for over 5 years. And in return for his safety, the Israeli government agreed to release convicted terrorists that were held in prison.
I wasn’t in Israel at the time, but social media was plastered with this poor kid’s face. I cannot imagine what his family and friends went through. And hearing about the current 100+ people who were now kidnapped, it makes me sick.
When I officially became an Israeli citizen (made aliyah, as people say) in 2011, Gaza was brought back into my mind as a flotilla was caught off the coast, bearing weapons for the terrorists in Gaza. This was six years after Gush Katif, and I imagined, although wasn’t sure, that if Gaza was still being ruled by terrorists and all money was going to weapons, that people were not living happily or safely there.
Since my aliyah, there have been countless more operations in response to attacks and more kidnappings by terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. I’ve lived through rocket attacks on cities far away from Gaza, like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I’ve been in a hospital in Tel Aviv during a rocket barrage and panicked as I helped my friend (along with her IV) into a saferoom. I’ve been near attacks that never turned into operations, where innocent civilians were stabbed or run over.
Terrorists attack indiscriminately. Their hatred drives them to kill, and they do not care about age, race or even religion. They have killed Muslims by launching bombs into apartments that they assumed Jewish people lived there. They have killed their own people by placing women and children in vulnerable areas during Israel’s army attacks. They think death is the greatest gift they can give to their people.
This recent war has been truly horrifying. But looking back, it is a sad story that I could have seen coming. And I know it is long coming, but I just have one thing to pray for: peace.
