It has been 10 months of war in Israel with no end in sight.
The days following October 7 were the worst of our lives. There was endless grief and trauma, and it became a regular occurrence to hear sentences from friends and neighbors like “My cousin died at Nova” or “My friend from school is a hostage.” There was an average of three rocket sirens in Tel Aviv almost daily. In a city that isn’t well equipped with bomb shelters, showering felt like a safety hazard.
There was a devastating sadness everywhere. Our streets were plastered with hostage posters, half of our cities felt empty because so many reservists were called up, and there was a looming fear that Hamas terrorists were still on the loose, biding their time to attempt another attack on civilians.
It was devastating all around, and for those of us who are olim (immigrants), it was coupled with enormous pressure from our families to leave Israel get back to our home countries. I received more phone calls than I can count from friends and family, begging me to get on a plane and leave before Hezbollah and Iran became more active in the war.
I was considering it at one point, especially since friends began boarding planes to get out of Israel. I started to question if I was being irresponsible for staying. Besides, I wasn’t in the army; I was simply a civilian. How could I have helped anyway?
Not a 'weakness' to flee
Many, both olim and native Israelis, left for fair and understandable reasons. It is not a sign of “weakness” to flee to safety when such a level of unprecedented terror and barbarity occurred just an hour’s drive from where most of us live. Yet the thought of leaving felt worse than running into a shelter from rockets. Besides, I was too busy volunteering and traveling to kibbutzim as a journalist to report and document what had happened.
How could I leave when my country needed me? How do I get on a plane when so many of my friends in Israel can’t because they don’t have a second passport? It might not have been the most logical move, but I stayed.
I wasn’t the only one. An estimated 330,000 Israelis, civilians, and reservists, as well as olim and Sabras (native Israelis) from all over the world, had rushed back to Israel to help the Jewish state in its time of need. There was a collective understanding that if the Jewish people don’t have Israel, then we have nothing.
Staying in Israel after October 7 meant I experienced more pain than I had ever felt in my life, but I also saw acts of kindness and unity that exist nowhere else in the world. The way Israeli society rallied and went above and beyond for one another was beautiful and made the whole situation easier to digest.
Volunteers would work together daily to gather supplies, pack them, drive them to bases, and feed and entertain soldiers. Individuals visited hospitals to entertain the wounded soldiers and victims of October 7. Dizengoff Square, where a fight over a mehitza (prayer partition between men and women) erupted on Yom Kippur, became a hub for anyone who needed to grieve. People who were strangers came together to sing, hug each other, cry, and heal.
At one point, I stood outside the apartment of a friend returning from the Lebanon border. He got 24 hours of leave, and he was letting me use his army vest and helmet, which, as a journalist, I was required to have to enter the Kfar Aza kibbutz, which was utterly devastated by Hamas. As we stood outside his building, I noticed an elderly lady staring at both of us but paid no attention to her.
My friend, still in uniform, was preparing the plates in the vest to make sure they were bulletproof, and out of nowhere, the lady grabbed my friend’s hand. I was initially alarmed by what she was doing and ready to pull her off, but then I noticed her eyes were filled with tears. She took my friend’s hand away from the vest, placed a 200 shekel note in it, kissed him on the cheek, the tears still in her eyes, and walked away.
It is a memory of this war that I will never forget.
There was collective trauma, but there was also collective healing, and I don’t think leaving Israel would have made me feel safer or better about what was happening to us.
AS I write this now, more reports are coming in about the impending attack from the Islamic Republic of Iran, stating that they intend to punish Israel for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh. The reports keep getting more alarming, but Israelis are still going about their day, sitting in coffee shops, going to work, running errands, and seeing their friends.
Many are asking us why we would stay in a war zone, and it is a fair question. The answer might not be a logical one, but the reality is that Israel needs both its army and its civilians. I think about the War of Independence and how so many Palestinians fled their homes because Arab leaders told them to return after the war was over.
Maybe if they stayed, they would have had a real chance of a Palestinian state.
The Islamic Republic and its threats are just one of many in the long list of entities that want to eradicate the Jewish people. They will not succeed.
Those of us who choose to stay in Israel during these times do so because this is our home, and we have decided we will not allow terrorism to dictate our lives. I may not have grown up in Israel, but to me, there is nothing more Israeli than that.
The writer is a social media activist with over 10 years of experience working for Israeli and Jewish causes and cause-based NGOs. She is the co-founder and COO of Social Lite Creative, a digital marketing firm specializing in geopolitics.