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 deep gutturals around in my mouth until they felt a bit less like sandpaper, and when the next itinerary came I grabbed the earliest date as if it were about to 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 that 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 all sorts of languages and the air wafts of 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 so he walks up to the gorgeous barista and gets it immediately, then loses it again thirty minutes later when we’re out clubbing. I save it, wear it for one photograph; where I look like I’m borrowing someone else’s life, which maybe I was.
At a 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. 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, commanders barely old enough to vote, and the fear of pulling out of this war that they may not win, with hostages still wasting away in tunnels that only exist to imprison them as bargaining chips made flesh. He tells me that he rescued a puppy but had to give it away to an Israeli family. Between these 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 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 all of a sudden I’m speaking the few Portuguese I know to kids who explain things in English back to me 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 her; which works until she gets tired of me asking for autographs. At the bonfire in the Bedouin tents, I meet the other children of the Galut; the Russian techies who are reddit-nerdy, the French kids obsessed with oldies, the British ones complete assholes. Our token Israelis join halfway through the trip: N., who is a lean, laid-back, and intelligent Mizrahi; Y., a timid girl from Modi’in with bad English; R., who lies to Europeans that she’s from Malta, but probably doesn’t need to since she’s beautiful, and I., my favorite of the bunch, because he looks like a Swedish DJ and his parents are a venture capitalist and supermodel respectively and yet he turns out to be the most down-to-earth of all of us, vaping his way through the Promised Land.
It’s Friday night in Jerusalem and the sirens go off, so we descend into bomb shelters like it’s just another part of an average Israeli 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 these ordinary people are refusing to let muqawama 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 a professional distance between tragedy and tourism. It’s always children that break me, not 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, 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 black eyes briefly lock with mine. I peer deeply into them, 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 of horrors becomes again a croaked whisper. The sound of controlled explosions echoes across the fields of Re’im, where kids once danced to electronic music under desert stars, and now it’s a memorial to joy interrupted, to futures cut short by an 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 whether my soft San Francisco tech bubble life has prepared me for this terrible landscape. 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.
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 in on itself like a Möbius strip. 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 all year. In Yafo I become an unofficial photographer for an Israeli-Taiwanese couple, my Hebrew and high-school Mandarin tangling together like DNA strands while I try to direct their poses. At Masada I bump into a girl from high school at the bonfire, 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 it 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, capara). I’ll bring back with me some faces: that barista who returned a lost jacket, the vendor who kissed my forehead when I understood his Hebrew, 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 sprout. I stood there, surrounded by the faces of children who would never grow up; never fall in love; 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 Israeli girl, Y., and Shalev and the tank driver - all these young people who’ve been forced to grow old too fast, who carry themselves with such grace, despite having looked directly into the worst of humanity. Somehow, they’d emerged more human, not less. And in their faces, worn by sirens and rocket fire and things twenty-two-year-olds shouldn’t have to know, it’s like I’ve glimpsed the cruelest of paradoxes: 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. No. They were singing instructions.