After 3 years of an intense bachelor’s degree focused on economics, math, and sustainability, and a gap year (also in Maastricht), I wanted to continue studying, but a subject for my soul. Bar Ilan University offered an English MFA programme in creative writing, and by making Aaliyah to Israel (immigration of a new or returning citizen), my tuition fee would be covered (my luck with scholarships had dried up for UK and American programmes). It was also a chance to connect with family I’d only visited in summer vacations, regrasp the language, and immerse myself in the culture that makes up half my genetics.
The summer before my university started, I visited Auroville for a month and South Korea for two weeks. My flight was from Seoul to Tel Aviv, with a transit in Warsaw on October 8th, 2023. On October 7th, my father called me from Ashkelon, Israel.
“No one knows the full details yet, but there was a terrible massacre like never before. You can’t come to Israel.”
He was staying in Ashkelon, Israel, in his mother’s house with his sister and nieces. He sent me a picture from the balcony: a landed missile 500m away, blazing flames gorging on cars, a thick trunk of solid black fumes rising up to penetrate the sky.
And it wasn’t over. Hamas were roaming the streets and every citizen of Israel was told to be on house lockdown until further notice. I imagined the missile landing on my grandmother’s house; I imagined Hamas infiltrating her apartment; I imagined if someone I knew had been killed or kidnapped, and I texted the Israeli Aurovillians I knew were in the country, all the while thinking, “it could have been you. It could have been someone you know. The danger isn’t over”.
There is an immense amount of sadness, and a twisted sense of gratitude that it wasn’t someone I knew who was murdered or kidnapped; that it wasn’t my grandmother’s house – housing most of my family – that had been bombed. The immeasurable amount of anxiety and worry I spent on my family would be unbearable if it solidified to grief. I inundated my father with texts, and if he didn’t answer within 5 minutes, my imagination overreacted.
“Daniel, I can’t be on my phone when I’m sleeping. Let me text you if there are any changes.”
He told me to first focus on my immediate reality. Like, where do I go? I was very fortunate to have family and friends in Europe. From Warsaw, I booked a ticket to Madrid where my stepmother graciously and generously hosted me, before I spent a month in Maastricht. The next question was: what do I do now that my Israel plans are disrupted?
It is difficult to translate the emotions and thoughts I lived through at the time. There are myriad layers of reality to peel through. With regards to the immediate future, I thought about myself. What do I do about university? Is Israel still an option? Why is the rent for my 1-year contract dorm being sucked out of my bank account every month whilst there is a war? What do I do with my life? Am I wasting it every day that I don’t make a concrete decision and plan? If I apply to a university in Belgium (which I started doing as a backup plan) that would still only start next year. What do I do this year? I was hanging around as a visitor in Europe – it wasn’t my life. Truly, I felt a deep restlessness and earnest craving to stabilise and anchor my life, working at personal progress and development; I felt like a ghost lingering in Europe, unable to host any corporeal form, and thus unable to do anything meaningful.
On the other hand: none of that matters. If you are physically healthy and safe, your worries are first-world problems. It is easier to remember that when disaster and danger is at your doorstep, or your family’s doorstep. It is easy when one recalls the ongoing trauma of Israelis of October 7th and its consequences, and the daily traumas of Gazan civilians facing famine, destruction, and traumatic grief that no civilian should go through.
Time-skip to December and the university informs me that the first semester begins at the end of the month. Now I really needed to make a decision: study in Israel amidst a war and an atmosphere of suffering, or linger aimlessly through life for a year?
There was a lot of indecision and hesitation. I talked to many people in Israel to gauge how life was there. I don’t know that I have rational answers to the decision I made – there are some choices in life that cannot be logically explained through words and arguments; you let your intuition and instinct guide you. I can say that I do not regret my choice to move to Israel to study.
Of course, there are an incredible number of challenges, and one can compress them into the question: how can one live in a place where so many contradictions are realized?
The news is constantly on the war, social media on the daily horrors lived by Gazan civilians, the streets are pasted with the faces of the kidnapped, and the sirens have become a too-familiar sound. At the same time, I am able to make new friends, go out for lovely dinners, buy lattes and attend my lectures. As an English major in university, I may also enroll for free in the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certificate programme to be an English teacher. My teacher teaches us how to teach English as a second language. She also asks about us and our life, and she tells me I am welcome to talk to her about anything – it must be hard to adjust to this new country; I am always welcome at hers for Shabbat dinners whenever I feel like. I don’t even really know her, but that is the hospitality of Israelis.
Sometimes during her lessons, she mentions the time and place of the next protest for the hostages to demand of the government a ceasefire deal and an end to the war, or asks us to take a minute of silence for them. She always has a yellow ribbon pinned to her clothing, the symbol to call for the release of the hostages, even as she teaches us the difference between the first and second conditional; even as she humorously role-plays a student with an attitude whilst one of us role-plays the teacher and diffuses the classroom situation.
“But you know she suffered a personal tragedy on October 7th,” says my classmate a few months later.
No, I didn’t know. Because how can that be a reality for my teacher and she still has the strength to come to class and teach us trivial things like gamifying the present simple into ‘Guess Who’? But I realized – my teacher isn’t special. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who lost a family member or friends – not only in Israel, but also in Gaza. It’s a hierarchy of hell; are we all suffering being in a country where we need to run to bomb shelters every other day? Not as much as those who need to endure their own losses, and those they are grieving for.
A harrowing truth of the world is that trauma and atrocities, in Israel or Gaza or elsewhere, will test humans to draw on a certain inner strength, and remind humanity that humanity still exists. My English teacher is the only person I’ve met first-hand who has touched my heart. I also know there are countless people, in whichever location, who must do the same. These figures of hope, who could so easily cave to the outside world forcing zero-sum game polarisation, hatred, and selective sympathy – because that’s the easy thing to do – instead turn to empathy and peace for all as driving solutions, and continue to do their bit in making the world a better, more compassionate place.
It is these people who inspire me to draw on my own inner strength and empathy, to not be swept up in the extremist polarisations taking over the world, and to recognize humanity in humanity behind social, moral, cultural, and racial appearances.