Sleeping through the War

When I was 17, I boarded an airplane for Tel Aviv. I have a vague memory of a group leader, a better memory of my fellow teenaged travelers, and an even better memory still of the night I watched the sky light up along the horizon from the balcony of an Israeli family’s apartment in Nahariya.

“Let’s go,” said one of the boys from the family hosting the dinner, and we got up, and we walked calmly down eight, maybe ten flights of stairs until we were in the building’s bomb shelter. I was with another American girl from my group. We sat together, trying to understand what was happening. Oh, we had the facts of it easy enough, we just didn’t know what we were supposed to do with those facts. A few hours later there were all clear sirens and we got in a car and went back to the kibbutz where we were learning Hebrew and working in the apple orchards and becoming one with the Jewish people in ways our parents had probably not intended.

A few days after that, it happened again. We were in the orchards on a hot day, and there was a siren.

“Let’s go,” said the farmer, and we followed him to a bunker where we waited, tucked down between the walls of hot concrete, drinking water and gossiping about the doe eyed Israeli boys and working on our Hebrew. After that, we slept in the shelters, quiet and dark, every night for a week, maybe longer, stacked on triple high bunk beds, drinking soda, chattering with the kibbutznik kids who were close to us in age. We traded our California university t-shirts for their blue work shirts and traded our mix tapes of top 40 pop for their Israeli pop, and nothing about it felt dangerous. Someone found the shell of a rocket in the fields not too far from where we’d been bunkered down and for days, it was on display in the cafeteria and we would touch it, expecting it to feel hot, and we were glad we had not seen it fall.

War broke out in earnest, and Anwar Sadat was assassinated, and I kept extending my return date. Between hitchhiking around Israel and the West Bank and the ready availability of work that included housing and three plus meals and beer money, I stayed and stayed. Some of those doe eyed Israeli boys put on uniforms and went to the border, and the doe eyed Israeli girls picked up guns too. I fell for an English boy who was dodging Britain’s crippling unemployment and stayed and stayed and stayed. We went south; I remember hitchhiking to the beach in Gaza — I don’t remember more than some big ships off shore, tar sticking to the bottom of my bare feet as I walked on the sand. Before that I had been to Jericho and Bethlehem, I remember having tea with a Palestinian family, the men formal in their white shirts, the women smiling, and we spoke Hebrew because it was the language we had in common. I remember hitchhiking back from town alone one hot afternoon — an Arab farmer picked me up and lectured me on safety before dropping me just a five minute walk from where I needed to be, wishing me blessings in Hebrew and Arabic. Later, some Arab workers moved into the block where we lived, and we did not get along so well as I had with the Arabs I’d met thus far, but these workers were young men with whom I had no common language and there always seemed to be sardine cans on the porch after they’d eaten.

It took me a good long time to realize that I had been living in a war zone. We were not hungry, we slept at night just fine, our days were sometimes interrupted, but then, we would go back to business as usual. I lived like this for months, nights in the bomb shelter, work in the morning, afternoons at the swimming pool, unless the sirens rang, and then, back to the shelter where it was cool and dark and there was always someone fun to talk to. I’m puzzled by how non-plussed I was by this situation, though everything seemed in place to make sure that we would be just fine. When there were no shellings, I went out into the world, to the beach, to Jerusalem, I chattered with the Arabs in the markets in my increasingly fluent street Hebrew, and rebuffed the continual, annoying, and sometimes aggressive advances of the doe eyed Israeli boys who were remarkably good looking, but after a while, so very obnoxious. “Don’t be such a baby,” said one boy to me, on a beach in Tel Aviv, “come home with me!” When I replied that I wasn’t interested, thanks, he continued to berate me for my childish ways of refusal until I packed up and left the beach. There’s nothing unusual about this story, it happened all the time. They were persistent.

Many years later, here in Washington State, I met a crusty back country guide who had served in several peacekeeping missions in the Middle East. When I told him I’d spent some time  there, he eyed me warily. Then, with obvious hesitation, he asked me what I thought of that part of the world. I considered it, I visited the dusty memories of my time there.

“It’s complicated,” I said, “and I’m not sure anyone who says they know how to fix it has ever been there.”

My guide lit up and insisted on shaking my hand. “It’s very nice to meet you,” he said, “I never meet anyone who has any understanding of the Middle East.”

“Oh, I don’t understand it.”

“Exactly!” he said.

Israel has changed since I was there. I hear many of the kibbutzim have been broken up into single family land holdings. There is that awful wall and the tunnel from Gaza that seems like something from a dystopian science fiction story, but is real. Sinai, where I happily whiled away days lolling on the beach and nights in a grass shack — a literal grass shack, this is not a metaphor — is Egypt now, I can’t even bear to look at the pictures of the development there. I made two, maybe three trips to Sinai, once with a doe eyed Israeli boy who spoke excellent Arabic — his mother was Moroccan — he would buy bread for us from the Bedouin and stand around joking with them. He’d be naked except for his sandals, while the Bedouin were draped head to toe in black, standing next to their big Mercedes. They would talk and laugh about I don’t know what. Once I went to Sinai with a girlfriend and the boy three shacks over would bring us coffee every morning, thick boiled Turkish style coffee, he did not want anything at all, which we did not believe until we met his stunning girlfriend. He just had made too much coffee.

To see Israel tear itself apart calls these memories up and puts them right in front of me. There was a huge peace movement when I was there, Peace Now, they were called, and they were seemingly everywhere. Every time we were in the city there was a march, or they were on the TV in the kibbutz community room. I believed peace was possible, in spite of the rockets hurled over the borders right into the fields where I was working. It is much, much easier to believe in peace when your life is not utterly disrupted by war, when everything around you is designed to make you feel like you will be safe, no matter what.

I claimed my time in the war zone like a medal for a while, I would declare that the reason Americans are so eager to fight on other fronts is that because most of us know nothing of what it means to be at war. “I slept in shelters,” I would say, “I watched the boys walk away from the fields to put on their uniforms, I watched the girls pick up their guns.”

But I didn’t know from war then, and, thankfully, I don’t know now.

I am sure it is much easier to fight for peace when you sleep well at night, even when you are in a war zone.

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This story won a 2015 Solas Best Travel Writing Award. All the winners are here.