A State in Crisis: Our Year in the Holy Land

Me

I haven’t been able to write in months – despite my desire to do so, having plenty to say, and an array of new notebooks I continue to buy, mostly when we travel. Partially it’s the logistical challenge of finding a spare moment between two young, active kids and a full-time full-on job. But mostly, if I’m being honest, I’ve become somewhat frozen. In time, in action, in reflection, in a state of micro and macro overwhelmedness. A mental state of lowkey survival mode is probably how I’d best label it. Getting through the days and onto the next.

One of Dalia’s friends recently wrote to me to say how much she enjoyed following our family’s adventures in Italy on my blog and how “it was a completely different energy than now.” Forcing my head over the sightline, I couldn’t but agree with this crystalline assessment. What energy, do I have any, who even am I now, will I be like that Italian guy again?! I’ve ebbed so much since Tivoli, Orvieto & Santa Marinella that I’m not always sure. (I won’t tell you that I tear up almost every time someone mentions our life in Italy to me). So I won’t mention it now either.

All of this to say, in writing, for the first time in months, I’m still here.

We have lived in Tel Aviv, Israel, since late August, 2023, and if all goes well, in another handful of weeks, we’ll be leaving – if not forever, then at least for my own good.

Us

Baby Elia was born in Rome in late July. It was always going to be a heroic endeavour to change countries so soon after that, but we managed. Five weeks after his birth, we took the four hour flight down the Mediterranean: had a cappuccino in our Roman neighbourhood in the morning, and hummus in Tel Aviv the same evening. The transition was a bit jarring but we slowly started to settle in.

On Thanksgiving weekend, a little over a month later, we decided to meet with Dalia’s brother and family in Cyprus, less than an hour from Israel. We woke up in our hotel room on October 7th, taking in the beautiful balcony sunrise, with only a vague appreciation of the chaos engulfing our new home country. We proceeded with our all-inclusive day, following headlines and work messages with an emotional and physical distance of people who have never known war or organized mass violence, and also recently lived a fairytale existence in Italy.

Unfortunately, inevitably, our protective bubble imploded almost completely when it was time to fly back on Monday, October 9th. We arrived well early for our short scheduled flight, as one does flying into a country newly at war. Although on a low-grade stress percolation, seeing our flight on-time on the departures board brought a certain amount of relief. What followed was likely the most surreal experience of my life and easily the most challenging day I’ve had as a father and husband.

As time ticked away and our check-in counter remained closed, I sought some assistance from somebody, anybody. As you might be able to imagine, a standard issue Canadian was no match for dozens of Israelis trying (actively) to understand what was happening with our flight. I was too patient, too polite, completely ignored. When I finally found someone from the airport who managed to look me in the eye, he said: “You’re flying into a war, no one knows what’s happening,” shrugged, glanced momentarily into my soul and let it be known that I was the crazy one for even inquiring given the circumstances.

Then I truly had a first in my 44 well-travelled years on this planet: our flight disappeared, without a trace. Approaching 45 minutes to scheduled take-off and with still no sign of life at the now police-cordoned check-in counter, our flight vanished from the board. No delay, no cancellation, no notification by email, no message over a loudspeaker, just the sudden non-existence of the flight we were paid and confirmed to fly home on.

I had no pre-programmed response or strategy for this situation, as our flight time came and went, while Dalia, our toddler and newborn circled the pile of luggage in the wide open hall of the Larnaca Airport. Hence began an approximate 12 hour meltdown of the nuclear reactor of my spirit that I’m pretty sure now, almost eight months later, still hasn’t fully been resolved.

With no cavalry on the horizon, I ran around the airport looking for an operational flight to Tel Aviv and like in a movie I never hoped to star in, threw down my credit card, in a soupy emotional mix of despair, anxiety, fear, adrenaline, utter disbelief and pure unadulterated stress. In any case, a new flight was found and booked and now the wait for whether and when it might take off was on. With four new boarding passes in hand, we crept through security and towards the gates.

From here, I’ll spare most of the trauma-inducing details but over the course of the next ten hours, amongst dozens of messages from people suggesting we try to leave Tel Aviv asap, we waited and waited and waited, saw the worst of more than one of our fellow passengers and at least in my case, questioned not only my judgement, but my sanity as a human person in a way I simply never have before in my life.

At approximately 4am, with a gorgeous zombie wife, adorable strung-out three year old and gratefully unknowing 2.5 month old, we boarded our flight, that was not shot down while flying into Israel almost exactly 72 hours after Hamas attacked. We landed as the sun rose, just less than a full day since we headed out for our 45 minute flight and about 22 hours since I had last slept. Emotional, physical, psychological survival state. Hanging on by a hair.

The main thing I remember about the next day and even the next full week is something I won’t ever unremember. In the afternoon, just as the boys went down for their nap, a missile siren sounded. We all went into the bomb shelter room in our apartment (that are, tellingly, a building requirement in Israeli homes). This was the surreal cherry at the heart of the surreal cake, staring at my wife with wild eyes, while she held Aleksander sleeping and I tiny baby Elia, considering what were the very unlikely chances that a missile would rip into the room putting us all into a final good night. ‘At least the boys won’t know what happened,’ I thought.

Approximately ten weeks removed from the gelato, prosecco, joy and general dolce vita of Italy, here we were, deep into something altogether different.

By the end of that same week, after a steady stream of missile sirens, including during a visit by Canada’s foreign minister, young families, including mine, were evacuated from the country. We were thankful and torn completely apart at the same time. Even as I write this, my stomach knots.

I don’t need to describe the abyss my life became after that because I’ve documented it in this very blog. And I will never fully know the challenge my recently post-partum wife went through for three months with a newborn and toddler in Canada, but I glean it still and don’t know how to forgive myself for not being there with them. Gratefully, the grandmas chipped in, the cousins took Aleksander out for his first halloween, and Elia started to crawl on the floors of our own childhood homes. I returned for Christmas and New Year’s and began to make up for lost time.

We stopped in Warsaw for a couple nights on our way back, met serendipitously with an old friend, absorbed all the charm of the old European style Christmas markets, and, of course, ate all my Polish favourites. I also did something that I’ve found myself doing on every trip out of Israel since: pretended that I lived in the other place – bought books and notebooks, made emotional investments in the alternative reality, imagined, meta-physically, that the relatively safe and uncomplicated place I find myself in is my forever home. Prayed, in a real way, that fate would intervene and the flight back would again disappear, maybe for good this time. Alas, pipe dreams, all for not.

We returned to our apartment in early January. I went back to work and Aleksander picked up at school. Dalia has since entered a motherly flow state that she is extremely fond of: hanging around with Elia in the morning before walking on leafy Rothschild Blvd with a coffee in hand, meeting Aleksander at the gate of his school and taking him to a nearby park or beach with his pals. I’ve been doing the needful at work, obsessing about secondary and tertiary fronts in the so-called war, trying to make the most of the extraordinary weather, and otherwise biding my time. The boys have been growing, expanding, bonding. We miss our connection with family, worsened by the difficulty and uncertainty of travelling here for visits.

I have to say that Tel Aviv is an extremely pleasant place to live with kids. It’s a human-scale, walkable, green city with a fabulous five kilometre city beachfront. The cost of daily living is breathtakingly high (Geneva high, an Egyptian diplomat said to me), people can be a bit prickly and now, maybe always, there’s lowkey existential tension in the air. But, in a vacuum, plenty of cities in the world would benefit from some of its features.

In the non-geo-political vacuum of the current moment, the most troubling thing for me about living here, in quite a bit of comfort, is that 75kms away, 40 or so minutes on a Canadian or Israeli highway, is Gaza.

Undergoing one of the worst documented experiences of human suffering of this century. My challenges here, however personally notable, would probably not even register for a Gazan person who is still somehow surviving to this day.

All the Rest of It

We arrived in Israel as neophytes. Neither of us having any personal connection to the place but intrigued to learn more and swayed by a number of positive recommendations about its lifestyle. Before leaving Italy, upon telling a colleague he should come visit, he responded, instinctively, sternly, that he would never step foot in the country. I suppose that was a pretty clear omen of what we were getting ourselves into.

As a shameless non-expert, I won’t bother any grand analyses on the current situation, even though I spend much of my waking life forming and reforming my own takes. All I can really do is offer some anecdotes from life within Israel for a non-Israeli in one of the darkest and most difficult chapters for the Middle East of this generation (if not beyond).

As I was pushing through my own issues in the autumn, Tel Aviv was quiet, solemn and on edge. Posters for the kidnapped, yellow ribbons, handcuffed teddy bears came to dominate the public space. Many Israelis carried rifles, in line for cheeseburgers, at parks with their kids, on the boardwalk in their swim shorts. All in all, it was far from the young, carefree, beach vibey city of September. I’ve previously shared how odd it felt for me doing ‘normal’ things as bombs rained down on Gaza.

As time went on, and particularly after the brief ceasefire in November, the city and its people regained their pace. To the point now, where an alien visiting the city for the first time wouldn’t notice too much out of place. Not too long ago, an Israeli colleague, in the kitchen over coffee, said: it might feel normal but everyone here is broken. I have to say, that as a newcomer, that brokenness isn’t altogether obvious to me from the outside. Israelis are resilient, tough and for better or worse, normalized to tragedy. From what I can see, they’ve largely reclaimed their lives, grieved and continue to grieve their losses, passionately protest for their political views, and hope, along with me, for peaceful lives, from the mundane everyday level, all the way to the international sphere.

In the lobby of my work building, there’s a poster of some 100 or so of the hostages taken on October 7th. Initially by happenstance and now intentionally, I try to really look at one of them each time I pass. Look at their age, their names, appreciate their smiles and the joy they usually show in the photos, try for a second or two to construct their personalities, what they were doing in life, how they had lived, how they hoped to continue to live. 35 year old scruffy overweight male, 84 year old grandma, 57 year old divorcee, 19 year old idealist. The young women hit me the hardest because it’s not too hard to imagine the suffering that they might be enduring. It’s easy to mentally expand from the kidnapped to their families, neighbours, former classmates. Israeli society feels like one big high school where everyone is connected by at most two degrees of separation. It becomes obvious quickly that it’s not hyperbole to say that everyone in this country has personal connections to the atrocities of October 7th and its aftermath.

In my best reading of the people here, I surmise that they haven’t been able to detach their gaze for a moment from the eyes and outcomes of their hostages. And in that singularity of focus haven’t opened their view to the scale and depth of tragedy that has been brought to bear on the Gazan people, also men, grandmas, families, doctors, humanitarians, children.

There’s a real duality between how the world largely views, with horror, the brutality of the campagin in Gaza, and how living here, within commuting distance, there is no outward evidence of it. And this isn’t Russia or China where real information is hard to come by or trust. Maybe they don’t want to know. But it feels like they really should. Israelis seem genuinely baffled at how the world has moved on (or forgotten) October 7th so quickly as it still has their rapt attention. They can’t quite incorporate that the world has ‘moved on’ mainly because the violence following October 7th has come to overshadow the violence of October 7th.

The videos of gleeful, gloating, dare I say arrogant, Israeli soldiers destroying lives, homes, mosques, schools, stores, hotels, memories, pretty much anything they seem to feel like, leaves any conscientious person aghast. The incomprehensible number of dead, injured, displaced, traumatized. The scale of absolute destruction. The children under the rubble, in body bags, in pieces, covered in burns, amputated, orphaned at 7 years old, taking care of baby siblings, eating grass, crying, shattered, silent, frozen, disappeared.

Times 15,000.

Take that in.

And then take it in some more.

Then don’t drop your gaze from it.

I’m the opposite of the person who relishes in squeamish videos and yet I watch what the children of Gaza are going through. I break a little every single time and yet I do it again and again. Because it is my responsibility to bear witness at the absolute very least.

And so this is what it’s like, living in an eminently livable place, an hour away from the world’s freshest mass graveyard. Conflicting, difficult, morally contradictory, like nothing I’ve ever done before and will hopefully never do again.

For this reason, as well as the ongoing possibility of further conflict, I asked to leave here and my employer agreed. We’ll be moving to Shanghai this summer and I couldn’t possibly be more excited. It’ll be a big change but hopefully it’ll be stable and we can just be a family in a normal way for the next three years. I cynically joke that knowing my recent luck, China will begin an invasion of Taiwan five weeks after we arrive. Hopefully it doesn’t go down that way but if it does, God forbid, I’ll have some more clearly defined red lines about putting family before all else.

Jerusalem Postscript: A sign of hope, a sign of the times

One of the only places I feel entirely comfortable and at ease in Israel is in the Old City of Jerusalem. In many ways, I feel like the only reason we ended up here at all is to experience this ancient, historical and singular city. We’ve been four times already and are planning another visit next weekend. Last time having spent the night to wake up early within its magical walls. Having kissed the tomb of the Risen Christ on both Catholic and Orthodox Easters.

Jerusalem is the best of what the ‘Holy Land’ could be. Different religious and cultural communities living side by side, sharing paths, passing each other’s children, for generations, for centuries, for millennia. Even coming from Rome, Jerusalem represents something from even another level of the highest possibilities of humanity, of humanness. It’s humbling to just be there. For us, that’s obvious as Christians, but no less obvious for Jews and Muslims. Sacred.

Yet even in this miraculous place, reality intrudes. Israeli police presence is visible and significant. Young Israelis, dressed like robo-cops, shaking down even younger (mostly Muslim) men, dressed in t-shirts and shorts, in often demeaning ways (from my lived experience). Settler homes in non-Jewish quarters with kids jumping on rooftop trampolines surrounded by barbed wire fences and oversized Israeli flags.

Even in this holiest of holy places, it’s impossible to escape entirely what this place has become: a paradise on Earth for the powerful and integrated, and something of the inverse for the rest.

I don’t know if I’ll ever come back here again, and I’m still not as far gone as my colleague in Italy, although I now better understand where he was coming from. I certainly can’t envision a return at this point. I don’t want to be too intimately reminded of the personal struggle I endured here and can’t see myself returning until Palestinians live on the land with an equal expectation for justice and personal (familial, communal) security as Israelis. I think that’s possible in my lifetime and then maybe I will return. Spend a few nights in Jerusalem, safely see Bethlehem and Nazareth in the same day, take a surf lesson in Tel Aviv, and watch the sunset from a reconstructed Gaza beach front.

Sadly, I’m not holding my breath.

Shalom Israel.

Good morning Shanghai!