July in Israel
The Iran thing canceled my June trip, which was fine because I’d been drilling Hebrew conjugations since January anyway, rolling those impossible gutturals around in my mouth until they felt less like sandpaper, and when the next itinerary came I grabbed the earliest date like it might evaporate. Everyone told me I was insane—Israelis themselves were saying this was the most dangerous time in modern Israeli history—but I’d never been outside the States and this felt like something I had to do before the world changed completely.
This is how I found myself on an Arkia Airlines redeye in July sitting next to a Navy reservist who codes for some Tel Aviv startup between his monthly Gaza patrol shifts, and he’s giving me restaurant recommendations while recounting war stories like I would my college years, and I’m thinking this is my first glimpse of a country where normal doesn’t mean what I thought it meant. The teenagers behind us are chattering about American summer camps—the reverse exodus, Israelis heading to the Catskills while I’m flying toward their miracle—and this kid won’t stop asking me about everything from Accutane’s mechanism of action to whether Americans really learn languages as badly as everyone says.
The thing about traveling to a country at war is that life insists on being ordinary. In Jerusalem I met Aryeh Yonatan and Rafi at Mahane Yehuda where vendors sell pomegranates in seventeen languages and the air smells like fresh bread and exhaust fumes, and Aryeh tells us he lost his beautiful green jacket at this bar three months ago, the one with the pixelated Peaky Blinders artwork that looks like it was designed by someone’s drunk cousin. So naturally I ask if he’s ever tried asking for it back—he hasn’t—and he walks up to the gorgeous barista and gets it immediately, then loses it again thirty minutes later when we’re out clubbing. I saved it, wore it for one photograph where I look like I’m borrowing someone else’s life, which maybe I was.
At the boureka stand this guy spent ten minutes explaining in patient Hebrew that sesame seeds mean cheese, peppers mean potato, and when understanding finally dawned across my face he kissed my forehead like I was his slow but beloved grandson learning the world’s most important lesson. This is what I mean about ordinary life: a tank driver sits across from me in a kitschy Tel Aviv bar for American expats, aged twenty-two with those thousand-yard spaces between his jokes, showing me videos of accidentally fender-bendering his tank into another kid’s tank, telling me about dogs in Gaza that have learned to eat dead bodies, about commanders barely old enough to vote, about pulling out of a war they might not win, with hostages still wasting away in tunnels that only exist to imprison them as bargaining chips made flesh. He rescued a puppy but had to give it away to an Israeli family. Between stories he sips a Gold Star and shows me photos of his friend escorting the Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem to pay respects at a bombed church—one guy in full Catholic regalia, the other in combat gear, both posing for the camera like it’s the world’s most surreal photo op.
The Brazilians from the other Taglit group adopted me at the Israel Museum because I was wandering alone and they needed someone to take photos, and I’m speaking Portuguese I don’t know to kids who explain things in English while their guide drones on about pottery shards and ancient coins. One girl looks exactly like Mikey Madison so we create this running joke about pretending she’s actually the actress, which works until she gets tired of me asking for autographs. The Russian techies are reddit-nerdy, the French kids obsessed with oldies, the British ones complete assholes, and our token Israelis join halfway through: one laid-back and intelligent, another timid and carrying October 7th in her pockets, one who tells Europeans she’s from Malta rather than deal with their assumptions, and another who looks like a Swedish DJ and whose parents are venture capitalists and supermodels but who turns out to be the most down-to-earth of all of us, vaping his way through the Promised Land with startling grace.
Friday night in Jerusalem the sirens go off and we descend into bomb shelters like it’s just another part of Shabbat dinner, and I’m thinking this is not how I imagined my first trip outside America would go. The Houthis sent rockets that got intercepted before they could deliver their message, and most people barely look up from their conversations because this is what resilience actually looks like—not heroic speeches but ordinary people refusing to let terror interrupt their hummus, and I’m sitting there trying to process that I’m in an actual bomb shelter while my friends back home are probably arguing about parking spots in the Mission.
Jets scramble overhead at the Dead Sea, racing toward Yemen, and I’m floating in water so salty I can’t sink, reading war news on my phone while biblical mountains turn black under their shadow.
At Yad Vashem the children’s memorial destroys me completely. There’s this video loop of young voices singing Hatikvah before they learned what hopelessness looked like, these sweet innocent sounds rising in the darkness while their faces glow on screens like ghosts, and I’m crying alone while tour groups shuffle past because no one else seems affected and the guide maintains that professional distance between tragedy and tourism. It’s always the children that break me, not the blood or violence but these tiny voices singing hope songs they’d never live to finish. The dates on military headstones at Mount Herzl read like countdown clocks: 2006, 2005, 2004—boys younger than me, younger than my brother, buried in soil they died defending.
Shalev stands before us at the Nova site carrying October 7th in his eyes like shrapnel, describing how he hid under a Bedouin farmer’s house while Hamas terrorists searched for survivors. “Where are the naked Jews?” he heard them calling—he wasn’t wearing a shirt when he escaped—and his words carry the weight of those who’ve gained memories they wish they never had. His black eyes briefly lock with mine, and I see that they don’t belong to a twentysomething but instead a Holocaust survivor, his body rejuvenated, with sixty years of aging to go until his testimony becomes croaked whisper. The sound of controlled explosions echoes across fields where kids once danced to electronic music under desert stars, and now it’s a memorial to joy interrupted, to futures cut short by ancient hatred.
Five shekels buys me a glimpse through binoculars at Gaza, smoke rising from places that used to have names, used to have families, and this elderly Russian guy tells me I should join the IDF. I wonder what my soft San Francisco tech bubble life has prepared me for this terrible landscape, and there’s this strange vertigo of standing at the edge of a war that’s happening right there, close enough to see the smoke, close enough that the old man thinks I could walk into it.
In Sderot, right next to the border, people go about their business as if rockets aren’t a daily possibility. Markets open, children play, lovers hold hands, because this too is being Israeli: refusing to let fear become the organizing principle of existence.
The cats in Israel are incredibly friendly and I pet many of them, hoping I don’t get fleas. At the Kotel I meet a kid from the Five Towns who went to HANC and knows someone from home—the diaspora folding back on itself in impossible loops. Two older religious American guys armed with enormous rifles chit-chat while pigeons coo overhead, and when I joke about “Kfar Rockaway” they chuckle like I’ve told them the best joke in years. In Yafo I become an unofficial photographer for an Israeli-Taiwanese couple, my Hebrew and Mandarin tangling together like DNA strands while I try to direct their poses, language becoming this three-way dance of translation and miscommunication and sudden perfect understanding. At Masada I bump into a girl from high school at the bonfire—the world compressing to the size of a candle flame—and we’re sitting on the same mountaintop where Zealots chose death over surrender, warming our hands over flames that could have been burning for two thousand years.
In this country chapstick is clear lipstick and Ethiopian soldiers serve alongside Ashkenazi reservists without anyone batting an eye because minor differences in minhag dissolve into irrelevance when survival of Am Yisrael trumps everything else. Hostage posters paper every surface—trees, benches, billboards, touchscreens—faces of the disappeared haunting every corner with their insistent presence, yellow ribbons fluttering from antennas like some desperate semaphore. A ballistic missile impact site in downtown Tel Aviv sits like a broken tooth among apartment buildings, and pedestrians walk past as if urban warfare were just another fact of life, like traffic or inflation or the price of avocados.
I’m not only bringing back to San Francisco the new Hebrew slang rolling around my mouth like treasure (though there’s plenty of that too). I’ll bring back with me actual faces: the barista who returned a lost jacket, the vendor who kissed my forehead when language barriers finally fell, the twenty-two-year-old tank driver showing me puppy photos from a war zone.
And perhaps forever burned in my memory is that moment in the children’s memorial at Yad Vashem, crying alone in the darkness while those sweet voices sang Hatikvah on an endless loop, feeling the crushing weight of all that innocence snuffed out before it could bloom. I stood there surrounded by the faces of children who would never grow up, never fall in love, never learn Hebrew or argue about politics or rescue puppies from war zones, and for a moment the hopelessness was absolute.
But then I think about the eyes of the timid girl and Shalev and the tank driver—all these young people who’ve been forced to grow old too fast, who carry themselves with the gravity of those who’ve looked directly into the worst of humanity and somehow emerged more human, not less. In their faces, worn by sirens and rocket fire and things twenty-two-year-olds shouldn’t have to know, I’ve glimpsed the cruelest paradox: that sometimes the only way to honor the dead is to become more alive. That those tiny voices in the darkness weren’t singing a lament—they were singing instructions.