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