My job was to prove intuition right.  I gave names to experience.  This is “power and control.”  This is “isolation”.  This is “deception”.   I told women, “You are in the trenches now, but you will not be here forever.”  I think it helps to imagine fear, separate and objective. That was my job, to isolate them from their isolation, for a moment, to help them to see, if only in words, that they are not, as they believed and had been told, completely alone.   I remember a storm that turned night on the afternoon and forced all of us into the basement, around the buzzing weather radio.  

Afterwards we emerged together.  We witnessed the day renewed: a yellow evening, a rainbow over the parking lot, and the children running the hallways, shouting, it’s morning!  But there came a day when buzzing the doorbell filled me with anxiety, when the unknown awaiting me choked me up, and it was very hard, but I quit.

“To understand my relationship to our conflict, you must see our memorial day,” the law student explains. “Everyone knows someone who has died for Israel.”

The air raid sirens sound and everyone stops. Cars stop and drivers exit, classrooms go silent, shoppers stop shopping, walkers stop walking, restaurants close.  During those same air raid sirens, she was carried down into the bunker as a girl. 

On the beach, we listened to the sea’s foamy afternoon movement, the cries of children, the soft whaps of paddleballs.  

“What would happen if the IDF just stopped for a day?”  I asked.  “Hypothetically, say they all just left on a short vacation—what would happen?” 

“Israel would be wiped off the face of the earth.”

When in Israel, I did not approach the borders.  I did not come close to touching the blurry periphery.  In spite of the guns and the imminent threat and the bloody images, I felt safe as I do in my kitchen.  I try to explain to the law student.  My country is not like your country.  Most of us, we do not see our military.  Most of us do not fight our wars.  We do not see guns in the gas stations.  We do not see our nuclear submarines drawing borders in every ocean.  Most of us, we do not know what the catch is.  Most of us, what we see, we see through a screen.