Israel: A Personal Account

A year and a half ago, an editorial by Najlaa Alzaanin, “Gaza: A Personal Account,” was featured in this paper in response to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. This terrorist attack, wherein Hamas and Palestinian civilians broke into Israel, resulted in the brutal deaths of 1,200 civilians; young children were burned alive in their homes, ranging from babies to Holocaust survivors, were taken hostage.

She said that the conflict didn’t start on October 7th. It was the culmination of decades-long “relentless oppression” of Palestinians. And she’s right - the conflict didn’t begin on October 7th. Yet nobody understands that that’s equally true for the Israelis, that we too have been relentlessly oppressed for the last 76 years.

I was born not too far from Alzaanin, at Barzilai Medical Center in Ashkelon, 21.2 km from the Gaza Strip. This hospital was hit by a rocket strike by Hamas on October 8th, 2023, and sustained significant damage.

I spent most of my childhood between apartments in Ashkelon and houses in Kibbutz Zikim, a village 1 km from the Gaza border, where the booms of rocket strikes and the wails of sirens were commonplace. On October 7, 2023, at Zikim Beach, 19 civilians were killed by Hamas terrorists. This was where I learned to swim.

My sisters and I slept in the bomb shelter attached to our house. On a biweekly basis, we would return home to our windows destroyed by a nearby rocket attack. Our walks around the neighborhood were interrupted by rocket attacks and the infamous “Tzeva Adom,” or Colour Red—the sound of the rocket siren every Israeli child grows up hearing.

Depending on where you live, you have a certain number of seconds to get to the nearest bomb shelter before the rocket hits you. Where we lived, we had fifteen seconds.

On several occasions, we didn’t make it to the bomb shelter in time. We would resort to getting down on the ground with our hands on top of our heads to protect ourselves against glass shards and pieces of iron that Hamas put in their homemade rockets, rockets made using pipes meant as humanitarian aid. And we would pray it would miss us.

Many car rides, walks, and bicycle rides were interrupted in this way. Not everyone I knew was so lucky to escape them. When we were both three, my neighbor and playmate Rom Gertel didn’t make it to the shelter in time. His house was hit by a rocket and he was rushed to hospital bleeding from the face with critical injuries.

My family was evacuated once in 2008 after Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip and began bombarding southern Israel with rockets.

This was my daily reality before immigrating to Canada in 2011. I came from a left-leaning kibbutz who believed in peace and a better life for the Palestinians. We would sing “Noladeti L’shalom,” I was born for peace - only to be bombed day and night.

Far worse was the reality of my parents, who narrowly survived the First and Second Intifadas. My mother chose not to cross the street one fateful afternoon and survived the Sbarro restaurant suicide bombing, although not without serious PTSD.

Five months after we immigrated to Canada, our house was destroyed in a rocket attack in the dead of night, an attack which would have killed us.

But I am not asking for your sympathy. No amount of tears can bring back anyone from either side of the conflict. What I am asking for is understanding.

On October 7, 2023, my family personally lost seven friends. A friend of ours in Kibbutz Beeri lost eleven members of their family that day. My family was evacuated from Kibbutz Zikim to Jerusalem; my grandparents, who survived the Holocaust and fled pogroms in Tunisia, were in and out of the hospital because of stress.

But October 7th was not the beginning of this conflict for either side. We have lived the past twenty years under constant rocket attacks in the South, the past forty years under constant terror attacks, the last 76 years in war. And before the re-founding of Israel, we spent one thousand years in exile from our homeland, persecuted everywhere we went.

Yet despite this “relentless oppression,” we do not kidnap 9-month-old and four-year-olds and strangle them one month later with our bare hands, as was the fate of Kfir and Ariel Bibas. We do not dance in the streets when innocent Palestinian civilians are killed or hand out candy. We mourn them in a way the rest of the world cannot, because we know exactly what it means to live in this conflict.

I conclude this article by offering my sincerest condolences to Najlaa Alzaanin and any other students, faculty, or staff who lost people to this conflict. I know from my personal experience as an Israeli that this will never bring them back, but I pray that this will not be the fate of our children. That they will be born in peace in their homelands.

But understand that Hamas -- the terrorist group that in their charter calls for the extermination of all Jews, that steals its own people’s humanitarian aid, that uses civilians as human shields, that oppresses both Jews and Arabs -- cannot be part of that future. And understand that Jews, whose historical, religious, and genetic connection to the Land of Israel cannot be erased, must also be part of that future.

This article was submitted to the Xaverian Weekly by an outside contributor