Published: 13 December 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
When his wife was accepted for a scholarship in Jerusalem, MATI SHEMOELOF became anxious about living in his homeland again.
“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 leaving our home in Germany to spend 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. 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.
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 from Lebanon into Israel, or even a war with the Syrians in the north or who knows what.
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.
For 70 years, the Germans have not been sitting in shelters and do not know where the bunker is in case the bomb arrives. The whistling of the missiles was one of my formative experiences as a boy, an 18-year-old boy who enlisted in the army. Then again, I know there is no war in Israel right now.
