Living in conflict: Students in Israel speak out

    This is the first article in a two-part series that will explore the conflicts in Israel and its effects on students. This installment will focus on students who are either from Israel or who are currently studying in Israel and their lives amidst war; the second piece, which will run later this week, will discuss how the events in Israel affect students at Tufts.
    When the stars began to appear, marking the end of the Sabbath on December 27, Boston University freshman Amy Woogmaster was preparing to board her plane to Israel; Bat Yam Yeshiva student Jonathan Ganzarski was on Jerusalem's famous bar-filled Ben-Yehuda Street; Rochester University junior Bat-Hen Sayag was in her Jerusalem apartment watching television. Aside from the 130 Qassam rockets firing into southern Israel and the Israeli Defense Forces' military operation launching in the Gaza Strip, it was an average Saturday night.
    Sayag explained that although Israelis have not become callous to the violence that threatens their everyday lives, there are only so many ways in which one can take precaution when the danger zone is at home. Stay away from Sderot and other frequently bombed territories, keep out of the old city in case of rioting, change your bus routes, avoid public transportation — these are all warnings that Israeli residents and visitors hear regularly and frequently choose to take into account. But at some point, daily life must — and does — go on.
    "Honestly, I don't feel like I'm living through a war," said Sayag, who lives in Jerusalem and is relatively remote from the recent attacks. "Two years ago when we were at war with Lebanon, I felt it. But now it's far away from me."
    But for those who live in the south, home to Israel's border with Gaza and the target of over 3,000 Qassam rocket and mortar shell attacks over the past year, life has been more significantly altered. People live under the highest warnings and know that the sound of a siren indicates that they have 15 seconds to run to the nearest bomb shelter before a predicted attack.
    And the sirens are not an unfamiliar sound.
    "Life in the south is almost non-existent — they spend half the time there in shelters," David Kashi, a student at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya said.
    Kashi, whose cousins are students at the Ben-Gurion University in the southern city of Be'er-Sheva, explained that life in that territory has been put on hold for college students. "The university there is closed, and my cousins are home, waiting to go back to school and finish the semester," he said.
    Sarah Belfer, an American student at Barnard College, visited Israel over her winter break despite the rapid breakdown of the six-month cease-fire and the declaration of war. While she remained in Jerusalem for the duration of her trip, Belfer's friends and family in Yavneh were much closer to the conflict.
    "One of the times the siren went off [in Yavneh], my friend was in her car on the way to a doctor appointment," Belfer said. "She said she had no idea what to do, as she really didn't know where the closest shelter was. She just got out and lay beneath the car on the ground — waiting."
    Israel is a relatively small country, and if students like Belfer and Kashi are not directly affected by the fighting, then friends, family or acquaintances typically are. And in many cases, even areas that were once deemed safe from attack no longer guarantee that kind of invulnerability.
    Still, those in Israel breathe in and move on.
    "As the missile range grew, my area of restriction grew," Ganzarski said. "But my day-to-day life is completely the same."
    As they have shown, those who wish to visit Israel from abroad will not let the bloodshed stop them. For non-Jewish foreigners, however, the decision is potentially more difficult since their tie to the land is less potent and the danger no less severe. Belfer was faced with this dilemma in her layover in Rome.
    "There was a family behind me [in] line, and I heard the mother say to the rest of the family, ‘I met a guy on the flight who is going from Rome to Israel!' I thought to myself, is this crazy?" she said.
    Hesitations aside, Belfer made it to Jerusalem confident that in spite of all the violence, now is the time to visit. "It's really important to go to Israel during challenging times in order to show solidarity," she said.
    Woogmaster, who also spent her break in Israel, agreed. "It is important to be in Israel and to stand side by side with the Israelis who have to be there," she said. "I landed in Israel the day after the war broke out, and all I felt was happy — happy that I would be there during this crisis."