No, really. Us Israelis, we should put our hands down…

I made Aliyah six and a half years ago. Life in England was beautiful, and boring. I wanted a new adventure. I wanted to live in a kibbutz, as I’d wanted when I first visited Israel, aged 16. And I wanted to help work for peace.

Three weeks after arriving in the land of milk and honey (not the best description for a vegan, but I’ll let it go) Corona struck. I’ll try to describe to you my shocked state of mind at the time. I thought we had brought the virus. I thought we had made it happen. I believed, at the start, it wasn’t anywhere else, because in England they were still in denial, and behind us by a good couple of months. In fact, I still don’t know all the virus’ jargon in English. I only learnt it in Hebrew.

What followed was a couple of years of on and off education, lessons on zoom, no school, some school, community projects, learning on line, chaos and unpredictability.

In my six years in the country, I don’t think school has once begun when it was supposed to, either due to Corona, teacher strikes, or missile strikes. People act here like all strikes are equally inconvenient, but I’ll get to that later.

Then, Corona dwindled almost to nothing. There were vaccines, and all sorts of preventative measures. It looked like life was set to go back to ‘normal’, although whatever that was in Israel, I didn’t know. I’d never experienced it.

I thought other people had.

There were a few months of fighting to save democracy, and then, suddenly, but apparently quite predictably, 7th October happened, and life could never be ‘normal’ again. That simple. Pre-Shoah. Post-Shoah.

People’s hearts are broken. People’s lives are taken. People’s hopes are torn from them. All in a few hours of one day. And the wars just keep on coming. Wars that last days, weeks, months, years; it’s all the same to us. We have an app on our phone, know what to do when the siren goes off, are pre-warned, have the public........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)