Published: 10 February 2023
Last updated: 5 March 2024
MATI SHEMOELOF and his family grapple with some uncomfortable feelings about returning to the land of his birth.
“I don’t want to go to Israel,” I shouted.
“It is your culture, and your daughter needs to know it,” my wife responded.
She was right, of course, but it’s a long story. Two months ago, my wife was accepted for a postdoctoral scholarship at a research institute in Jerusalem. It would mean spending one year in Israel.
She was happy and, at first, I was also happy. We celebrated the news with champagne. Then, one day, I showed her the latest news from Israel on the internet. In Jerusalem, IDF troops clashed with Palestinians in Shuafat during the hunt for the East Jerusalem shooter. It was frightening.
I started looking for reasons not to go. "Where do you want to send our girl to school?" I asked my wife. I said the language barrier would be a problem for her. She answered that it would be only first grade and the Hebrew our daughter speaks would be good enough.
So, we visited Israel to see for ourselves the state of the country. We agreed our daughter would attend a bilingual school in Jerusalem, where she would study with Palestinians and Jews. She would learn Hebrew and Arabic. It would be so different to my school experience, when I spent 12 years in school in Haifa without a single encounter with the city’s Palestinian population.
My wife, the German, smiled at me. She knows all my anxieties and was not moved by them.
In the weeks we spent in Israel, my fears grew. I was afraid that a war would start, and my daughter would have to sit in a shelter for the first time, and I would have to explain to her that it was the Arabs (Hamas) who were sending Grad missiles from Gaza into Israel, or Hezbollah launching bombs from Lebanon into Israel, or a war with the Syrians in the north or who knows what.
