It’s a beautiful, cloudless day. The temperature is a perfect 75 degrees, and the December sun is causing me to sweat as I cut another clementine from the tree and put it in the bag draped across my body.
That’s when I hear a distant boom and rumble from artillery just about 25 miles away in Gaza. I pause, look up and shudder to think that I may have been a sonic witness to some kind of brutal attack.
But I’m not in this clementine orchard to report on or witness a war. I’m at a moshav (agricultural co-op) in Klahim, Israel, as a volunteer to help the farmers harvest a fraction of their citrus groves. It’s work that would have been done by the Thai workers, but they all left the country following Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
I’m there because I needed to see and understand for myself what is going on in Israel after the attack and during the ensuing war. Like most American Jews, I couldn’t stop reading the news after Oct. 7 and was constantly searching for more information. Even Jewish news outlets weren’t helping me understand what Israelis were experiencing and thinking. I needed to see it for myself.
I discovered that the Jewish National Fund was organizing volunteer missions to Israel. I looked into it, signed up and booked my flight. Two weeks later, I was in Israel. I was there to listen, learn and suppress any temptation I had to judge.
That last part wasn’t easy because I’m not blindly supportive of Israel. I’ve never been able to reconcile how a country that was founded to give a homeland to a people who had been persecuted in diaspora for 1,800 years could become oppressors of another population that has no homeland.
Despite my misgivings, I still have a love for the country. I lived there after college, working on a kibbutz, and have visited multiple times because I find the country inspiring and because I have family there. It is a vibrant, innovative, warm and incredibly creative culture.
Because of this mixed bag of feelings, I needed to go.
After my volunteer group finishes picking the clementines and oranges, we are shuttled to the village of Ofakim, one of the places attacked by Hamas terrorists Oct. 7. A city councilman recounts the story of what happened that day, how many of his friends and neighbors died. He also says that nearly three months later, there aren’t enough mental health resources to help people.
We walk through the now-empty house of Rachel and David Edri, a couple who were held hostage in their home until 3 a.m., where Rachel cooked for the terrorists. The rooms of the house are scarred with bullet holes, and blood smears the stairwell wall and the floor in one of the bedrooms. I wonder whether the bullets were shots the terrorists fired when they entered the house or they were from the Israeli rescuers? Surely, the blood is from the terrorists, since Ofakim’s police force ultimately killed them, saving the couple’s lives.
A few days later, my group of 70 volunteers join about 30 Israeli volunteers at an army base near Tel Aviv, where we are placed on an assembly line, filling boxes with nonperishable food for the Israel Defense Forces soldiers in Gaza. In less than three hours, we fill 4,000 boxes.
That afternoon, we go to the Tel Aviv Expo, where we talk with survivors of the Nova music festival and tour the haunting exhibit they curated to commemorate the 360 people killed there and the dozens taken hostage. One of the festival organizers explains that Nova is part of an international movement with members in South America and Africa. It’s a movement that embraces peace, tolerance and environmental stewardship. And yet, she says, since Oct. 7, she has heard nothing from her peers in other countries. She and the other Nova participants say they need time to recover, that the exhibit is part of their therapy. And they will dance again.
The country is experiencing a collective depression, a doctor at Ramban Hospital in Haifa tells us before we distribute care packages to health care workers and patients. I hear this sentiment over and over from taxi drivers, shopkeepers and my family, whom I visit after the volunteer mission ends.
Posters of the hostages are everywhere in Israel. Hanging from almost everyone’s neck are dog tags with the name of a hostage and the simple message: Bring them home. More than anything, that seems to be what Israelis want most.
Yet as the fighting in Gaza continues and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza grows larger, many Israelis are finding ways to overlook the horrors and justify Israel’s actions so they aren’t morally complicit in the devastation.
They believe that everyone in Gaza is part of Hamas. This point is driven home by a reservist from Halutzim, a kibbutz founded by a few hundred Israelis who had been removed from Gaza during the 2005 disengagement. The kibbutz is wedged between Gaza and Egypt. Palestinians from Gaza worked there alongside the Israelis. The reservist says some of those same Gazans helped the terrorists Oct. 7. Never again will he trust a Palestinian, he says.
Israelis feel isolated and view other countries’ condemnations as further proof that the world is antisemitic, holding Israel to a different standard than other nations. This makes no sense to people like my uncle — my left-leaning uncle — who explains to me one evening that there is no such a thing as Palestinians.
He called them “Arabs” because, he says, there was never a country called Palestine. He says no one lived in a territory before the 1880s and that those who did had no “real” ties to the land, no sense of place, nor history. He says it was the Jews who brought Arabs to the country because the Jews were building the place and making it thrive and the Arabs needed the work. He mentions the Jews’ biblical right to the land.
This isn’t just my uncle’s truth, a lot of Jews believe this. As an outsider, I can kind of see why they have to believe it. To accept a different history creates a moral dilemma for a people with thousands of years worth of generational trauma, when we were the persecuted people.
My cousin, a middle school teacher, takes me to the airport for my trip home. She tells me that in the first week of the war, one of her former students, a 19-year-old, was killed in the fighting. Then, a few weeks later, one of her colleagues’ sons was killed in Gaza. My cousin says that she can’t sleep and has trouble focusing. She can do only the bare minimum to keep going.
I ask her what she makes of what is happening in Gaza. She says she’s saddened by it. But then she adds that she has to believe that this war will serve a higher purpose, that it will have some kind of meaning and accomplish something for the state of Israel.
She says she has to believe that, otherwise the deaths of those two soldiers she knew were pointless.
