Being Israeli Abroad Has Become Embarrassing. You Don't Talk About It
How could I move back to Israel? Israeliness has become a mark of Cain abroad – and coming back home is no relief
If I lived in the late 19th century and wanted to get from the East Coast of the United States to Ottoman Palestine, the trip would have taken around four weeks. It involved a steamship, trains, a ferry, another train, a wait at Marseilles and then a ship across the Mediterranean to Jaffa. Four weeks in transit is a fairly reasonable stretch for acclimating from one world to another.
In 2026, the trip from Boston to Israel takes just 10 hours on a plane. That transition is so short and sudden. The body takes a couple of weeks to adjust, and the soul may take even longer.
I spent 11 months abroad, not long at all. Still, the clouds of cigarette smoke at the exit from Ben-Gurion Airport's departure hall, the broken sidewalk and the empty planters still managed to surprise me with their aggression. It's hot here, and also neglected, dirty and full of shouting.
I'm also tempted to turn the drive through the streets of Tel Aviv into a metaphor. Tel Aviv's innards are exposed, spewing roaches and rats, as the city undergoes renovation. I found myself trying to navigate through a city I thought I knew like the back of my hand, but getting nowhere. And one question kept nagging at me: How is it possible to come back here?
I went abroad to study for a year at a program for journalists run by Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Before I left, I was flooded with warnings from every direction.
This isn't the time to be an Israeli abroad, certainly not at an American university, I was told. Young people are demonstrating wearing kaffiyehs on campus lawns. There's antisemitism, anti-Israelism, pro-Palestinianism. You'll have to explain yourself – to defend Israel. Or attack Israel. Hide any identifying markers. Or add markers. Don't talk in Hebrew. Apologize in English.
Explain that there are also liberals here, that not all of us hate Arabs. That we're entitled to it – the Bible, Herzl, the Holocaust, October 7. That there's no partner for peace. That there is a partner for peace. End the occupation. And what will you say about the genocide?
During my year in Cambridge, I never encountered any antisemitism. Nobody yelled "From the river to the sea" at me. But more than once, it was clear how much being Israeli was an obstacle. As soon as that fact is pointed out, silence reigns.
The bottom line was clear: It doesn't matter who you are, which newspaper you work for, who you voted for or whether you're willing to regard Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide.
There's something much worse than overt clashes – avoidance, being ignored, revulsion that seeps in under the surface. Slowly, the signs began appearing. An academic forum where people avoided talking with me after I said where I was from. An art project about life in Israel during wartime that miraculously disappeared from the advertising.
Even more surprising was that my colleagues in the program, American and international journalists, avoided any in-depth discussion of issues related to the war or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general. Even when the United States was directly involved in what was happening – for instance, when the cease-fire agreement in Gaza was signed and the Israeli hostages were released under pressure from Donald Trump, or when the Americans and Israelis attacked Iran – it was hard to find anyone, out of 22 American and international journalists plus a few spouses who also worked in this field, willing to hold an open discussion about it.
Gradually, I realized that nobody was really interested in talking about this headache known as Israel-Palestine – or at least, not with an Israeli. For some, it seemed too far away, complicated and not necessarily intriguing. It's also possible that some of my colleagues in the program wanted to talk about it but feared saying the wrong thing. And others, out of politeness, tried to hide their full-throttle loathing of Israel today.
I've also considered the possibility that my social skills simply aren't good enough, so I couldn't know what led to my sense of a chill.
But the bottom line was clear: It doesn't matter who you are, which newspaper you work for, who you voted for or whether you're willing to regard Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide. You're still an Israeli, and Israeliness has become a mark of Cain. It's as embarrassing as a skin disease or an unpleasant odor. You don't talk about it and you keep a safe distance.
This was a real shock, and it drove me out of the Platonic cave in which my view of Israel's reality had existed. Our problem isn't that people hate us but that many are no longer even willing to take the trouble to understand what is happening here or whether and how it's possible to help us solve it.
Israel is a rubber dinghy that used to be tied to the ship of the liberal Western world. But the rope connecting it has torn, or was intentionally cut, and now it's floating on the ocean as the ship gradually drifts away. Float on your own, you and your total victory, the world is telling us. Work things out for yourselves, or don't. Who cares?
I can no longer separate myself from the Israeli story. My personal life has disappeared; all that remains is the political. The army's mass killing of Gazans, the Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, the racist legislation, the insistence on a regime of Jewish supremacy – none of these thoughts will leave me in peace from morning to night, it seems. This is who I am.
No more repression, no more daily life takes place under this dark cloud and forgets its existence. This is all there is. This is who I am in the eyes of the people around me. I saw my ugly reflection in their eyes, I smelled myself through their nostrils, and I was shocked.
Then I came back to Israel. But the cataract that blurred reality and enabled my apathetic existence had already been removed. Once you've seen yourself through others' eyes and realized that because you're Israeli, there's no way to view you but the spectrum between repulsion and pity, it's bizarre to return to that cozy cave.
It's very tempting to withdraw into ourselves and be only with each other. Neither the dirt in the streets nor the aggression on the roads bothers me, but the forgetfulness and acclimation do – that descent back into the necessary self-love and apathy, into a political struggle that takes place in the space between the left that wants a Jewish state and the right that wants Jewish supremacy.
Don't sink into it, don't get used to it, I keep telling myself. And don't forget what you've understood, even if, after six weeks on the coast of Palestine, that pleasant, soporific feeling of belonging threatens to once again take over your mind.