Airports make me cry now. As soon as I step foot in Ben Gurion to leave, something in me gives, and the floodgates are opened to so many of the thoughts and feelings I instinctively tamp down on in my day-to-day life. I have traveled quite a bit this past year. To visit colleges in the US. To meet with activists fighting for ceasefire and freedom for all. To see family. It’s a luxury. These days, everything in my life feels like perverse luxury.
I live in Jerusalem, about a 2-hour drive from an unfathomable atrocity. It feels like the drive should be longer. It feels like it’s getting farther away each day. Each day the brutality and horror stretch further, infinitely distant from my quiet front yard with a view of the old city, and my sweet cat Tony who came with me over two years ago from New York. Our house sits overlooking the Valley of Hinnom. Maybe it’s fitting that I find myself living on the edge of a symbol of divine judgment and reckoning.
In the warm sun with the city bustling around me, it feels like what’s happening in Gaza is on another planet. A dimension where the rules of mercy and compassion and restraint are non-existent. But it isn’t. I have a little heart symbol in my Google Maps in the north of the Strip. It’s where an amazing activist, colleague, and friend used to live with his family before they were wiped off the Earth by an Israeli airstrike on the 30th of October, 2023. It’s only a 2-hour drive. I’ve checked.
I’m originally from California. If you, like me, grew up in the US public school system, at some point in your history classes you asked yourself, or maybe were even prompted, “What would I do if I was an average person in Germany when fascism took hold, when hateful rallies and mobs became common-place, when neighbors, families, children, were rounded up and shipped away?” Everyone gets to contemplate this question, and many times, people get to indulge in the fantasy that they would have stood up for what is right, would have not gone silently along with a powerful evil. I never thought I would live to so blatantly confront this question in my own life.
I try to make myself a force for something good here. I fundraise and bring money to my friend across the green line who has over 60 family members in Gaza. I’ve lost track of how many of his cousins, uncles, nieces, and nephews have been killed by Israeli strikes, (most likely using US weapons), since we started fundraising to get them basic supplies early in 2024. Five people murdered in December alone. Each time Musa updates me that another person has been brutally taken, small pictures of their faces stare out at me from my WhatsApp screen — insultingly flimsy memorials for the magnitude of what was lost. Of what was ripped from their family. The horror of it, the urgency to raise money for the remaining family and children, has become a dull grey roar behind my eyes. Constant and piercing, numbing my senses. Like the drone of a war plane.
It’s impossible to process what even one family has been through. Let alone hundreds of thousands. Outside of the constant airstrikes, the ongoing mass population transfers, and the farce of “humanitarian zones” (where no one was guaranteed safety from bombs), death from starvation and sickness is beyond what the mainstream public understands—even abroad, outside of the censored and slanted mainstream media in Israel.
But I am not in Gaza. I am here in the Valley of Hinnon. With a car and the right license plate colors and ID card to move freely. So I move freely. I visit friends in Masafer Yatta, an entire region in Area C of the West Bank with thousands of Palestinians at risk of being ethnically cleansed under the brutal expansion of Jewish settlements backed by the state. The violence and harassment by military and settlers since the 7th of October has increased exponentially. I have stood beside my friends and their children as military raids swept through their village in the dead of night. Guns with mounted flashlights panning across our faces, searing our eyes. Young men blind-folded and made to kneel in the dirt beside me. My friend begging soldiers, to no avail, not to bring the dogs into the house and scare his two young toddlers. One of his children, at 4 years old, has developed a stutter after the constant military raids and settler incursions. One night another friend from the village told me she wishes she could take the children back into her womb to protect them from the cruelty of life she has had to experience.
We’re in a “ceasefire.” Though I barely had time to hear the relief from Musa before my friends in Masafer Yatta began messaging about settler attacks, shut downs of entire Palestinian cities, and gates blocking them from leaving their villages. I go to protests. But the anti-war block that dares to oppose the brutality against Palestinians in addition to fighting for a hostage/prisoner exchange is small and faces more police violence than the larger segments. In the months following October 7th, family members of hostages were given some level of sacred recognition in public space, but fairly quickly they were harassed and detained and arrested alongside the rest of the protestors. Last year such instances were news, these days it’s simply a part of the landscape.
My work is focused on bringing Jewish internationals into activism here and helping facilitate deep and crucial education about history and the current movements fighting for a better future. I believe that diaspora Jews have a crucial role and responsibility in fighting for justice in this place, and I believe that to sustain that role and that activism, it’s imperative for some amount of people in the movement to be directly connected to the people that live here rather than looking on from abroad. But I would be lying if I told you I fully understand what it means to bring people to the land at this time.
I’ve thought about what it would mean to move back to the States. My life would get better in some ways. I wouldn’t have a go-bag that I keep ready at all times in case of a serious regional escalation. I wouldn’t live 2 hours from a black hole of horror and death that I feel powerless to stop. I would be nearer to my family —an incredible and resilient family whom I have made deeply anxious over this past year and a half, even as they reiterate over and over that they trust me in my decisions to stay. I wouldn’t be surrounded by a society that is utterly blind to the destruction and misery unfolding in Gaza. There’s no way to live here without unconsciously absorbing levels of normalization and dehumanization. If I left, I could feel less implicated in the atrocities being committed here.
But I would still worry for all my friends here, just from a greater distance. I would be leaving a community so deeply rooted in humanness and courage that they have sustained my sanity and resilience despite an ocean of unfathomable grief. Like my friends in Masafer Yatta. My brave, brave friends in Tuwani and Umm al Khair and Susya. Like my fellow activists, Palestinian, Israeli, and international, who fight for what they believe in despite the odds. I would feel less implicated in this tangible violence if I left, but in reality, I would be moving back to a place that has supplied the majority of the weapons that have made this nightmare possible. I would be returning to a nation that is similarly normalizing the atrocities in Gaza, but with thousands of miles between myself and the truth. I would lose my ability to see my friends and their families in person, and that is a sacrifice I cannot make.
If I left now, I would feel like I’m not only abandoning people, but abandoning hope. I have plenty of hope left to spare. This type of hope doesn’t take the shape of some vague, happier vision of the future, it takes form in human faces. Connections here are simultaneously the most powerful and the most fragile bridge I’ve ever had the honor to tenuously step across. I can’t tell you fully what it’s like to make and hold friendships under this level of power imbalance and segregation. Only that it’s a web of contradictions that I wouldn’t give up for anything. As of now, the future feels unknowable to me. But the people around me are knowable, and grounding, and fill me with courage. It’s a hope born not out of default optimism, but out of obligation— the obligation we all hold to continue to show up for one another. Otherwise known as friendship. Otherwise known as love.
It’s because of the people that I stay. Because of the beautiful, brave, compassionate, despairing, enraged people around me, and the hope that they give me. And I will no sooner abandon that hope than abandon the miraculous community who see past the black hole of this world, to a different world, a shared world. Where children live and have freedom, and history is taught how it really happened, and Palestinians for the first time since 1948 will have the right not just to live, but to grieve everything that happened without bracing for the next atrocity. And Jews here will move past the brutal legacy of displacing the oppression of their past onto another people.
Oftentimes, imagining a better future amidst the depths of violence and carnage can feel perverse. Especially when not everyone has access to that imagination. Certainly not when they have lost loved ones, or are barely surviving. Not when they have been killed, their futures taken from them by bullet or bomb. But hope is one of the most powerful tools in the world, and those fortunate enough to have any access to it are obligated to use it for good.
