In October the fighting with Hamas largely stopped. Gaza was demolished and its people were thrown back into the claws of its indigenous overlords. Israel was reeling from two years of war and a government that prepared for its continuing assault on civil society long before the ceasefire was signed. This is what occupied my mind at the time. But my body had its own response. It sensed relief. Some of the anxiety lessened. And I found myself realizing that we’d shifted from familiar fears to ones we had not yet imagined. The promise of another round of fighting with Iran was already in the headlines. Everyone—in Gaza, in Israel, across the world—was left looking at the damage and trying to figure out how to continue from here knowing another war was coming without knowing when.
Looking back, I recall a very hot August afternoon in the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market, when I felt a specific kind of spiritual deadness that made life feel both not worth living and not worth dying over either. I imagined that this is what a random day in a Communist Bloc nation might have felt like for average persons, who neither had hope that life would improve any time soon nor desired to leave and lose contact with the only place they called home. In Israel, private life seemed to have little or nothing to do with the larger reality taking shape under state auspices. Each of us remained somehow committed to living out the day, the week, the month, the year—all without any sense of where we were going as a nation, a society, a people.
This is life in a state that has systematically corrupted and usurped the natural fabric of civil society. Intolerable events unfold as if they were routine. Palestinians in Israel die by the hundreds and thousands, victims of a violence that has been allowed to grow by a government that is filled with more criminals than politicians. The Jewish population absorbs its own notable losses, many having been sent to fight and die in a war that lost its strategic relevance in its first weeks. It’s hard not to see that the campaign of oppression directed at Palestinians has been a coordinated effort in which both the Netanyahu and Hamas Regimes are complicit—the campaign serving to keep both in power. In Israel, certain Jews are allowed to evade the draft, and are even given greater benefits and incentives than those who willingly go into the army—the same government sending some Jews to die while helping others dodge the draft. This same government is ceding de facto control over large swaths of the country to criminal Palestinian gangs while using the pretext of Palestinian terror to annex the West Bank and to pass on Gaza to other rulers. Of course there have long been criminal gangs and terrorists around, both Israeli and Palestinian. But now they operate on the same plane as the regime that governs the nation.
In April 2023, I wrote about a metaphorical prison being built around us by reality itself, and called the ability to keep a life being lived under life-sucking circumstances a life that was meaningful the Czechoslovakia effect. I wrote the essay a full six months before the October 7 attacks—though it was only published in September of that year, a warning of the catastrophe to come. I’d written it at a time when my wife and I contemplated moving to New York for an extended period, and I remember telling her, while we were in New York for a visit, “If you want to leave the country that you more or less know, I suggest we leave by August, before there’s some dramatic event.” It wasn’t prophetic. It was just reading the news and taking it seriously. When defense chiefs and secret service heads said that internal social tensions were regarded as glaring signs of weakness by Israel’s enemies, I simply took them at their word.
What I didn’t fathom at the time was how much energy it took to just get by in the society that Israel had become, how tired it left you, and how anxious—less for yourself than for your children. On the one hand, you were living with an unprecedented degree of cognitive dissonance that made life feel emptied of its meaningful contents. On the other hand, the only time and place when life felt like it was worth living was in small moments of reprieve—with friends or family who had similar feelings. We felt, many of us, that Israel was quickly moving toward authoritarianism and, in all likelihood, a long, grueling, brutal, and unfathomable conflict, even if we didn’t know what it would look like. And after two years of grueling war—with the major fighting stopped in late 2025 and the body experiencing a degree of relief—the mind is not reassured. It continues to be anxious, knowing that the government exploits our sense of relief to strengthen its own grip on power and to plan what may well be another round of atrocities.
We didn’t leave—neither before nor after the October 7 attacks. And I can’t say that our decision was disconnected from the rise of antisemitism across the world. The reality is that many people who are focused on the destruction of Gaza dismiss or glorify Hamas’s role in the war, while identifying the Netanyahu Regime with all Israelis and all Jews, even those living far away from Israel or its vocal opponents in the country. This gross and crude oversimplification makes it difficult to be an Israeli in today’s world—and it’s not a position in which I would want to place my children.
But there is something else to our decision to stay—the sense that you can’t exonerate yourself simply by putting distance between you and the crimes committed in your name. Neither in our own eyes, nor in the eyes of the world, are we able to wash ourselves of the evils committed in Gaza—particularly and especially because of the interconnectedness of the Netanyahu and Hamas Regimes. We are gripped by a logic binding these entities together—the evil of Hamas and the evil of Netanyahu are intertwined in codependent ways, leaving us to feel that no decent resolution is possible, and that an end to this perverted relationship requires one side or the other to be utterly vanquished. The genocidal intent of Hamas is comparable to the genocidal intent of the Netanyahu Regime. As genocide scholar Martin Shaw wrote after Hamas’s October 7 attacks, the Netanyahu-Hamas is a war of “asymmetrical counter-genocide.” In the end, for one belligerent to win, the other has to cease to exist. It’s terrible to say—or even to think.
A real reckoning will eventually come—but those who speak against the evils today will likely pay the price tomorrow. In cases of mass denial and psychosis, acknowledging reality can be fatal. In post-Nazi Germany, the Allies sidelined anti-Nazis who’d risked their lives during the Third Reich to work with low-level Nazi officials and criminals who were more useful and compliant in the shorter term. Just in 2025, the Institute of Contemporary History Munich-Berlin and the Leibniz Center for Contemporary History Potsdam published the results of a six-year study—for now only available in German—showing that Konrad Adenauer’s chancellery included a work force with a large majority of former Nazis. The paralysis that for many Israelis characterizes the present moment has much to do with our sense that we have been powerless to prevent what has been done by our leaders, and that we could no more stop or obstruct the destruction of Gaza than Americans are able to stop ICE agents from separating immigrant children from their parents, or to prevent the Trump administration from violating American law and attacking the capital of another country without congressional authorization.
It must feel good to believe you are on the right side of history. That’s how Israel’s leaders feel—much like its enemies and haters. Writers, artists, and other intellectuals around the world speak with manifest conviction and moral authority when they condemn Israel and its people. In staking their claim they are often reluctant to concede that the historical reality to which they bear witness is considerably more complicated than they can allow. In Israel, those who grieve for what has been done in Gaza have no recourse to the sensation that they are in the right. Those of us who have spoken against the atrocities perpetrated by our government are a beleaguered minority—not an ethnic or religious minority, but a social and cultural minority, surrounded by many fellow-citizens similarly heartsick but unwilling to speak openly because of loyalties to family or friends. We are in search of ways to convey some of the strangeness of our experience, to explain why, though we are Israeli, we don’t feel “Israeli,” feeling more like “Jews in Israel.”
A couple of months before the fighting stopped, I was at a bat mitzvah where I spoke to a local philanthropist who supports efforts to maintain what little is left of Israel’s democratic character. I told him a little about the essays I was writing for Salmagundi and he asked, “Do you think your approach is balanced?” Apparently he believed there was more virtue in “balance” than in considering what this moment in history might actually be about. For the sake of this “balance,” he informed me that people on “the other side” of the political spectrum would surely blame me for “bias.” I was not surprised that he was uninterested in thinking about countless civilians picking their way through ruins created by the IDF. Yet he also ignored how emissaries of the Netanyahu Regime were inciting against the families of hostages being held in the tunnels of Gaza. Speaking to him felt hopeless and so I left him to maintain “balance” as Israeli society crumbled around him.
Living in these times means being morally, socially, and emotionally compromised—waiting for the horror to end and for the world to retreat from the destructiveness that has possessed its every corner. At the same time, as a parent, you try to give your children the sense of security that all kids—including those in Gaza—deserve. It seems hypocritical to speak of giving your kids a sense of security when fathers from their school and kindergarten have fought in this war. I can think of one or two who, mostly out of feelings of revenge, likely relished their actions. Our proximity to those who authorize or commit war crimes leaves us feeling guilty and humanly diminished. Yet many parents we meet in the kindergarten are as appalled by the war our country has been waging as we are. Not long ago a kid from kindergarten came to play with our neighbor’s kid, and the visiting kid kept smacking the bushes in our courtyard with a stick. We both asked him to stop, but he kept smacking the leaves, and I finally commented to our neighbor that there was something strange in his desire to hit greenery. “I guess it’s how it is,” said our neighbor, “when your dad is killing people in Gaza all day.” I was shocked by the directness of her response. And while I tended to agree, I felt we had to avoid projecting onto the boy what we assumed were his father’s crimes.
Will people like us have a chance to rebuild what’s left of our world at some point in the future? Right now, that idea feels like a fantasy. We are privileged, like a lot of people we know, to maintain a semblance of daily life. There is no way to compare our experience to what happened and is happening in Gaza. We also know that the kind of oppression we see in Israel is nothing compared to what Gazans have endured since Hamas’s violent 2007 takeover. But one suffering is not comparable to another. The kids being separated from their parents in ICE holding units are not suffering like Gazan children, but that doesn’t make their terror any less significant. Kids have no sense of proportion when it comes to living through horrors. Their joys and fears are proportionate to their imaginations. As their parents, we try—and often fail—to encompass the full reality of their panic and confusion.
Years ago, when I began to read the books of Israeli writer and child Holocaust survivor Aharon Appelfeld, I felt the intensity of his emotions as if I had experienced the Holocaust myself. I, too, had to live through a number of experiences that included separation from parents, physical violence, and emotional neglect. Reading him, I realized that when you are living through the Holocaust as a child, you don’t know that it’s the Holocaust. You only know that you’re hungry, or tired, or lonely, and you just want someone to give you whatever you need to feel safe and loved. If there is anything sacred in the world, it’s this desire, and this is the desire I try to tend to when I get up each morning, face my children, and do whatever I can to make them feel safe and loved. We are surrounded by forces that want to suck out every bit of meaning from life. Yet we have to keep those forces as far away from our children as possible.
For some people, keeping these forces at bay means physically removing their children from the place where they have taken hold. This summer, we met an Israeli couple in Greece who had, at the outset of the campaign against Hezbollah in September 2024, relocated with their three kids to a small seaside town where they already owned a vacation home. They enrolled their children in school and kept them from visiting Israel—though it is a short two-hour flight from Athens and they themselves return on a regular basis for work. We spoke at length about life in Israel and about their lives in this tiny town. We were in agreement about the danger of exposing our kids to the realities we faced as Israelis, including what it meant to be part of a collective committing war crimes, but the fact was that we were visitors in this place, and they had lived there for almost a year. They were contending with what it meant to be Israeli abroad while we were contending with what it meant at home.
For me, this encounter was like entering into an alternate reality that showed what it would be like to take our children from Israel to some other place. The family we met spoke no Greek, and yet there was a logic in their wanting to keep a low profile in this small town on the sidelines of history, rather than moving to some big European city where their children would face the threat of being targeted for their ethnic or national identity. As the father told me, he preferred to sit in this historic maritime town while waiting to see where the tides of war took the world.
The mother was less settled. She was relieved not to be in Israel as all this madness took place, but also afraid that public opinion would turn not only against Israelis in general, as was happening in some circles, but also against children like their own who had left Israel—even in this small town. And she talked about the kids feeling homesick. She said that living there was a little like being stuck in a perpetual vacation, which is fun at first but gets old after a year. We saw that their kids were overjoyed to meet ours—to speak and to play in Hebrew. Their house was relatively small, good for vacations but not built for everyday life, so they were doing a minor renovation to add room. Overall, it felt to us like she was stuck in a state of limbo where she was both restless and unable to move, living a kind of in-between life that, I imagined, many Russian emigres may have lived in Berlin in the 1920s. Except that instead of frequenting dark alleys and bars, they sit in sunny tavernas as sail boats enter and exit the local port.
The most powerful sensation that this chance meeting left me with was a feeling of the deep divide between what this couple needed to do to give their children a sense of security and what we needed to do for ours. We had to create a bubble inside the madness that was Israeli society. They had to harness creative forces to give their kids a sense of meaning and cohesion while in a reality that functioned like a perpetual bubble. We had to push things away to keep our girls steady and sane. They had to push things together to keep their kids somehow connected to meaning. Meeting them felt like witnessing an unstable mirror image of what we were experiencing. There were three children on each side who needed support—and whose parents were doing their best while knowing that reality was quickly overtaking their every effort.
***
I can understand the logic in laying low and observing where the global winds of war may blow. Yet I have a difficult time imagining myself enrolling my children in a Greek school. But then again I recall the image of Albert Einstein as he appeared in Oppenheimer, walking around Institute Pond in Princeton, where he settled in 1933. If Einstein chose to respond to a world hurtling toward war by finding himself a pond to walk around, maybe this is what we should be doing as well. This is the fantasy—yet Einstein’s flight from Europe did little to mitigate the destruction that erupted there and then spread throughout the world.
Leaving serves to save the person who leaves, not the people who stay. Many anti-Nazis who stayed in Germany were tortured or executed. Many Spanish Republicans who fought against Franco in the 1930s suffered and either died or lived in fear throughout his long dictatorial rule. For such people the prospect of flight was surely powerful, and yet many of those who had the means to escape chose to remain. No doubt they wrestled with the kinds of questions I ask myself, wondering what is left to us as moral beings despite the state’s corruption of our culture and society.
As someone whose great-grandfather fled the Bolsheviks, traveling from Ukraine to Georgia only to get caught up by the Soviet Union five years later, and whose father left the Soviet Union for Israel only to move to the United States seven years later, and who himself decided to return to the country of his birth despite his own deep reservations about its political and military actions, I am constantly asking myself these questions about staying and going. For decades, I blamed Vladimir Nabokov for staying in Berlin until 1937, four years after Hitler’s rise to power, during a time when the Nuremberg Laws were already in effect and he had a Jewish wife and child. But I think I am beginning to understand—one day at a time—that after experiencing his emigration from the Russian Empire to Weimar Germany, it was not simple to uproot himself and his family again. And after moving to Paris, the Nazis caught up with them again, and they barely managed to flee to the United States in late May 1940, leaving over a week after the Third Reich invaded France. I had always wondered how Nabokov could have hesitated for so long and almost fallen prey to the Nazis after fleeing them once. Today, I understand that survival is not always people’s first priority when they have to make fateful decisions.
The other writer I think about a lot is Czesław Miłosz, especially his seminal book of essays, The Captive Mind, which examines intellectual and moral dilemmas in postwar Poland. As a Polish poet and a socialist member of the anti-Nazi resistance, he joined the diplomatic corps of the People’s Republic of Poland, which, he admitted, allowed him to escape the political pressures of living and writing in Poland without fully renouncing his language and his country. When even this possibility began to close, irrevocably, he defected, becoming what he did not want to become—an émigré. As part of the state, he still believed he could contribute to the future shape of society. When he saw that nothing he might do would be effectual, he did what he could to save his own soul.
As a parent, I don’t always have the same freedom. I have to balance what my children gain by being taken out of this madness with what they lose—the only sense of belonging they’ve ever known. I know because I, too, lost this when I immigrated to Los Angeles as a child. In America, I was often regarded as a symbol or instance of something, and somehow I felt this at a time when I could not have put that feeling into words. As an Israeli, and as a Jew, I learned that my very identity—who I was—was a social and sometimes also physical liability. I became a target not for who I actually was, but for what I represented to others. To expose my own children to an antisemitism driven by revulsion at atrocities we actively oppose entails a kind of moral calculus that I cannot—even with a degree in applied math—pretend to solve.
Yet Nabokov and Miłosz were not politicians or activists who solved moral problems either. They upheld above all the obligation to be honest, to acknowledge their own misgivings and to explore the dark side of our common humanity. I don’t believe for a moment that such writers would have found a satisfactory way to reconcile the horrors of Gaza with a commitment to everyday domestic existence in a country like Israel. There is no way to feel good about the life that is left to us here.