Haviv Rettig Gur
Every word. Israelis and Westerners are living in two different mental universes. Maybe that's why they, like our enemies, don't understand our resilience, our young people, our sense of solidarity and duty to each other.
Melissa Chen
Now that we’re out, I can speak freely about some of the things I’ve learned having accidentally found myself in a war zone, hunkering down with Israelis and other tourists in Tel Aviv shelters: - I appear to have underestimated the power of trauma bonding - Israelis’ insistence of living as normal of a life as possible under the most abnormal conditions is truly something to be in awe of - there’s this thing you can do where you enter a liminal space of half-sleep so you straddle the awake world and the sleep world so you never miss a siren - your high cortisol + adrenaline levels become a new baseline and your awareness of it fades away - every barrage is a game of Russian roulette. Knowing your life is at the mercy of both technology and fate permanently changes the chemistry of your brain cells - there is something truly clarifying about being in a shelter while hypersonic missiles dance overhead. You look at the person you’re in the shelter with - is this the one I want to share the terror of imminent extinction with? Have I lived well? Did I treat my family and friends right? Have I forgiven? - while I was afraid on several occasions, I still consider it the privilege of a lifetime to witness history in the making - the frisson of real danger cannot be replicated in our safe, prosperous societies back home. It is invigorating and forces one to jettison all utopian and luxury beliefs - it’s inspiring to see young people exhibit qualities that in the West hasn’t been seen since WWII - resilience, duty and sacrifice - the delta between what was going on in the kinetic war and the information war was observable; too many lies were spread in the fog of war which were far too easily believed (some big account confidently asserted that 1/3 of Tel Aviv was destroyed, which I could see with my own eyes was clearly not the case) - there is a lot more diversity of opinion inside Israel than is apparent from the outside - the shared, bedrock consensus that has been hammered into the consciousness of Jews because of their deep history and sense of self is a great strength the West sorely needs to emulate