This is part of a series, “Uprooted.” Each column is a curated monologue from an individual among the tens of thousands of internally displaced Israelis during the war with Hamas who were evacuated from the country’s northern border and the Gaza envelope.
I was born and raised in Kiryat Shmona in the 1970s. My childhood there was challenging, but I wouldn’t change a thing because it made me who I am today. My parents immigrated from Morocco in their youth, and I was the family’s translator from Moroccan to Hebrew and vice versa.
Most new immigrants kept to themselves and didn’t leverage pluralism. They lived in survival. I remember it bothered me that the only high school in Kiryat Shmona, Danciger, had a melting pot of students, but most of the educational staff came from kibbutzim, moshavim or smaller religious groups to save Kiryat Shmona. That was how it was framed.
My childhood passed in the shadow of Katyusha rockets. That was life. When I was in second grade, we spent long months in shelters (us and David Broza, who came to perform). Every shelter always had the same families, and for me as a young girl, that was fun and also “sterile” in a security sense. It was a uniting communal family experience and also a safe place from everything that happened behind the scenes in everyone’s homes.
Saturday, October 7
My husband Meir woke me up on Saturday morning and told me something was happening in the south. We turned on the TV and followed the events and then for an hour, I messaged with friends in Kibbutz Be’eri and Kibbutz Erez. I told them to get in their cars and come to us, and they answered, “How can we get in our cars? We can’t move!”
I told Meir that we need to think of how we can help. It was always my instinct. But when the girls woke up, I understood that my desire to contribute nationally wasn’t realistic.
My youngest daughter (19-year-old Tomer) is in the middle of her military service in the Border Police. At the time, she was healing from a knee injury and messages started flooding her company WhatsApp group. She wasn’t allowed to go in and they wouldn’t approve her joining them. Two months after the war began, she returned to combat service.
Doron, 21, woke up close to noon. She was an explosives instructor in the Combat Engineering Corps and taught soldiers how to identify and disarm explosives (with an emphasis on tunnels). Suddenly, she went into a spin of, “Why are you still here? Gather your things, we need to get out of here fast.”
We had been focused on the national distress and hadn’t even thought of evacuating. We packed things for two or three days, picked up my mother and Meir’s mother from Kiryat Shmona, and drove. A few hours later, Doron’s boyfriend, Alon, who lives with us, got called up to reserve duty. Four days after that, she got called up too.
Where did you go?
To a hotel near the Sea of Galilee. The official evacuation order came from the regional council on October 16, and then the military evacuation order was issued as well. I have been a member of the local emergency team since 2006, and the day we got the order, I went to the command center in Metula, joined the team and the council head, David Azulai, and together, we managed the evacuation. Within a few days, 80 percent of Metula’s residents evacuated to three hotels next to the Sea of Galilee.
Azulai had an epiphany to allocate the residents to hotels by “sub-communities.” In the first hotel, there were families with children up to sixth grade; in the second hotel, young people and anyone who wanted to evacuate with pets; and in the third hotel, the older citizens. The hotels are close to each other.
My job was to create a schedule. I understood that this was going to go on for a long while, and I knew that people needed authority, empathy and an organized presence. They needed normalcy. On October 18, two days after the evacuation order, I had an organized weekly schedule for education, lectures and culture, and it is still ongoing today, especially in the older citizens’ hotel.
The hotels were difficult for the rural people who had chosen the countryside as a way of life. We started with 89% of people evacuated to hotels and are now left with 17%. The rest of the residents found residential solutions near the Sea of Galilee so that they were not too far away from the kindergartens and the primary school that we set up in Tiberias. The high school students learn in Har Vagai High School, which evacuated to Kibbutz Ginosar.
How did you feel in the first few days?
As a mother, I felt that I needed to worry primarily about my family unit. As a social activist, I wanted to contribute to my community.
As soon as we entered “wartime routine,” I handed off my job in the hotel and knew that another public role was waiting for me. In my career, I instruct organizations in processes of change, and there were, of course, many lost organizations.
Nowadays, I support the Education Ministry’s Society and Community Department. Right now, we’re leading a process intended for the organizations and institutions that work with children and youths to update the language they use and adapt it to the challenges we’re facing. We’re checking what worked and what didn’t in the first days of the war to create a glossary that will be used in the next crisis, and there will be a next crisis because Israel will continue to be a Jewish democratic model in the hostile Middle East and we need to be ready.
In this sense, I want to say that the first people to react were the local authorities — both those who evacuated with their towns and those who received evacuees — and the informal civil organizations, like youth groups. These were organizations with less bureaucracy and an adaptive, reactional and speedy model for change.
The welfare system, for instance, took a while to react despite having contingency plans in place in case of an emergency. Everything flew out the window because no plan realistically worked.
One of the exciting things that is happening now is that the local authorities, which suffered from being undervalued before October 7, have now revealed their strengths. Their contribution in directing and handing out resources without asking who would repay them was huge.
We saw this in Tiberias, Netanya and Eilat. I’m mentioning these three because they all took in thousands of uprooted people immediately and they were previously considered weak. At the peak, Tiberias had some 12,000 evacuees, while the city numbers 50,000 residents.
The second job I’ve been enlisted to is supporting the Eshkol Regional Council in the fields of education, culture, sport and community building. There, I’m exposed to things beyond the evacuations like people who experienced irregular incidents in their family units and need to manage the consequences for a long time.
Maslow in collapse
In the first month, I understood that the big issue was evacuating families, disconnecting them from their homes and communities, and coping with extreme uncertainty. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs was weakened. One after the other, beliefs that we had leaned on, like a strong IDF, were pulled out from under our feet.
There has been a personal subversion in the lives of the uprooted, and then on the communal Maslow hierarchy and the nation’s Maslow hierarchy. In order to build new bases, you need to begin personally. People who don’t find security in their inner dialogue, won’t find security in the world.
And how are you?
That’s a question I need to think about. My instinct is to check in with myself and see how I’m feeling. I do that after I look around me at my family unit and my community.
The world’s societies can be split in two around a variety of subjects: Those who like hummus and those who like tahini, lovers and haters of coriander, those focused on the problem and those focused on the solution.
Let’s say we’re in a swamp. My instinct is to respect the swamp, recognize it, and even embrace it for a moment, but some people would grab goggles and dive in and there are those who are focused on getting out of the swamp and taking as many people as possible with them.
You don’t have any stronger feelings?
There is fear and shock, but they’re not part of my personal space, they’re in the north and in Israel’s communities. What will become of us? I have intense feelings of love, romantically, for Meir and the State of Israel. Meir is worried that if ever the two came into conflict, he would lose.
Anyone who lives here and has seen communities outside of Israel as much as and to the depth that I have experienced and managed them understands that the national project is still in diapers. Israel was established by youths who were tired of being refugees. They gave future generations a gift and, in the most basic terms, a home. But the home’s foundations have been subverted.
I’m getting sidetracked for a moment, but this is important for me to say: Our history is long. Throughout it, Israel saw Jewish sovereignty twice — during the First Temple and during the Second Temple. Both times, the sovereignty ended after 75 years. The third 75 is the disintegration of our home, meaning that our national project is still to strengthen the foundations of the people, the nation and the state.
How did we allow ourselves to reach this level of polarization? It’s possible we lived in a fantasy where our home was safe, so we allowed ourselves to fight. I’ll say it another way: When people are facing an existential threat, they don’t have the privilege to fight amongst themselves.
Israel is a Jewish democracy in a hostile and aggressive Middle East, and that isn’t going to change. When I say hostile, I don’t mean the enemy is making faces from behind the fence. It attacks when you’re not ready, and we need to work with that, which is why I’m saying the national project has not been completed.
I raised my daughters to be first and foremost strong, robust and opinionated women in a complex reality, but they know that there is no such thing as not contributing to society and the community. That is the standard.
Daily life
We were in a hotel for two months, and then we rented a house in Rosh Pina. We’re barely ever in it. Tomer is in military service, Doron was called up again, Meir is on reserve duty, and I’ve been traveling around the country.
Meir was a communications officer and is currently working with computer systems that synchronize information from the army to civilian authorities. Every day, he leaves in the morning to work at the command center in Metula and comes back in the evening. His business isn’t growing right now, and I assume we’ll feel the economic cost in a year.
Where else do you feel the evacuation?
Mainly in casual and incidental discomfort. Last week, I asked Meir to bring our potato masher from our home in Metula. I bought one, two, three. None of them have worked for me. At the end of the day, people want the things they’re used to at home.
On the other hand, despite the discomfort, I’m aware that we’re learning an incredible lesson as a family unit. There’s no point in fighting it, it’s here. My responsibility is to recognize the advantage.
We evacuated from a 360-square-meter house in Metula to an 87-square-meter house in Rosh Pina after two months in a hotel. In the hotel, you sit around like a couch potato, and the cleaning and sheet changing are done for you. I felt out of place, but I was busy with other people and what they felt and needed.
For 12 years, I managed an international organization and wasn’t in Israel for a total of seven months a year. I’m used to hotel rooms and pulling clothes out of a suitcase. It’s not fun, but it didn’t bother me. The girls and Meir were also okay with it because they would join me on my travels.
The house in Rosh Pina doesn’t have room for all the things we’ve collected, so we had to bring only what was essential, and as I said, we left the potato masher behind.
What do you miss?
Mornings at home. I miss going out on the balcony with a cup of coffee and seeing our promised land spread out at our feet, beautiful and peaceful. I’m very worried about what will happen to the north.
Before October 7, east Galilee was the weakest place in Israel in socioeconomics, education, medicine, average salary, beds in hotels per capita, and the list goes on. I’m not making it up, it’s the data.
Forty-five thousand evacuees from east Galilee have put down roots somewhere else. Who will come back? Those who don’t have enough money. Those who have a mortgage they cannot get out of and who cannot sell the house they just bought. Even if they can sell their houses at a lower cost, what could they buy at such a low price and where?
And what about the younger generation? For years, the north has been seeing negative emigration. Fifty to 60% of youths leave. In Metula alone, out of a grade of 28 kids, maybe only four remain.
The 22-year-olds who just finished fighting in Gaza look to the north, and what do they see? A beautiful view is not enough. There is a social race they need to run to get an education and a good income.
The youngsters who were evacuated to a hotel in Netanya order face cream and get it from Wolt within minutes. Until now, they literally lived on the border, but now, with the state’s sponsorship and funding, they were moved to a training camp for leaving the periphery. They’re now experiencing the advantages of living in the center of the country with state funding. Why would they return to the north?
Given the data, are you still optimistic?
I suffer from over-realism, but I am optimistic we can stop the negative emigration from the north. It’s all on paper, though. No one knows what reality we’ll be going back to.
After five months of being uprooted, we understood that there was no estimate for going back. Maybe tomorrow morning, there will be a mobilization of Hezbollah’s Redwan Forces who are evil incarnate. Do you think they’re sitting on the border just to scare us? To them, it’s “From the river to the sea.”
Will you go home?
Of course. I’m not sure my daughters will, and I won’t ask them to. They understand the national task of going back to Metula, but they wouldn’t sacrifice themselves for it, and I would. They won’t go back if it’s not explicitly clear that they can go to bed without someone coming into the house and slitting their throats as they sleep.
And you’re not scared?
In the end, everyone is scared. The question is what carries more weight. The question of who will go back to Metula if not me, scares me more.
What gives you strength these days?
The potential for positive post-traumatic growth after the war. People are in crisis now. Will we become fixated on the trauma? If enough people went on the air and said that we’re all traumatized, that would be a shame.
I have two close friends who experienced trauma — Adi Gabai from Re’im, whose son Amit Gabai was murdered on October 7, and Ayelet Boyum from Be’eri, whose son Inbar and husband Gil were murdered in the awful massacre. They’re certainly traumatized.
I refuse to put thousands of evacuees in the same category. We’re in crisis, uncertainty, and uncomfortable. It’s a long way from here to trauma. Even Ayelet and Adi who lost those dearest to them, say that whoever is still alive should live and contribute.
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