I go to work as usual but wake up every night around 5 a.m. from a new nightmare. In my dreams, I run away from bombs and look for shelter. In my dreams, I try to protect my family from the terrorists who just entered our village. I never lived in a village, but it's clear and vivid in my dream.
I go to the gym every day, and up there on the TV, I see my home starring the news, my 5,664-mile-away, tiny little homeland, and it is everything everyone is talking about. You'd get one local news item for each of the 4 Israel-Hamas war items. I go to the gym like before, but my heart is now pacing differently when I hear the name "Israel" and the word war. It's so personal, and as an immigrant, so gut-wrenching.
I eat my meals as usual, but then a notification from my news app or social media draws me right back in. It reminds me of my 241 homemates who have been held hostage since this thing started. It feels like 10/7 was ages ago. I went through so many emotional phases since it all started, but for them, time froze. They're just there, God knows what a day looks like. God knows how these 7, 8, and 13-year-olds spend a day without a screen, a toy, a good meal, their parents, and their friends. We think about their present and worry about their future and if they even have one.
They look like my homies. All of these people. The elders look just like my grandmothers and older uncles; the women are my friends, cousins, and aunts. The survivors and those who were murdered at the rave are literally my best friends. They are me every other weekend. They look like me, they party and dress like me, they watched the same TV shows growing up as I did, we went to the same restaurants and met many of the same people. They worked with me or served with me in the military, and even if I've never met them before, I can feel them in my bones and relate with them with my essence. They are my homies, and they were butchered. And I saw it all with my own eyes.
The pictures and videos are said to be soul-damaging. They are. The looks in the eyes of the live and the dead. The posture of the bodies, the sound of the hostile vehicles driving our streets, and the terrorists shouting and gunshots whistling. The pictures of IDF uniform laying on the ground holding a body but not a head. I wore these clothes. I know their texture, I have them in my closet. I slept in these for years. These outfits are personal to me.
I am out in Manhattan, walking past "Free Palestine" or "Cease Fire" all day. I think about the holocaust, I think about being Jewish. I feel misunderstood, I feel unseen. I feel what I have been feeling as a queer person in this world for years, times 100. I can't make them not hate us, I probably can't make them understand the facts better. I can only try. I can try, but I do it for me and my folks. During this impossible time, I need to remind myself that my country is the good guys even if my fellow liberals disagree. Even if my favorite artists go against my family. I know my country and our values. We are the good guys here. I know we are, it is me, it is my homies that we're talking about. I am the IDF and the homefront, I am the raver and the kid in the Kibbutz. We only want to live in peace. We had to settle on some land; there was no alternative. We needed a country. We wanted to share it with whoever wanted to join and make it better, modern, and progressive. We built a little wonder from nothing, in a time shorter than many live people's age.
They called us colonists, but we had no other state to colonize for. They call us war criminals, but we are fighting terror. They call us out as if we're their size, they forget there are 1.9 billion Muslims and 2.3 billion Christians and most of the world's countries are theirs. We are just 16 million people in this world, and we only have one land.
I am sad, but I am hopeful. I trust us and our ability to rise from any ash. I hug my own and encourage them to defeat our enemy once and for all. I send love and compassion to all innocent souls and wish the world will be as one, with a safe home for each and every one. I whole-heartedly believe that in the end redemption will come.
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