Yesterday I went to the grocery with my family and the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about how such simple gestures can become an inconceivable, surreal privilege: swiping a card, tasting a fruit of summer, making jam, buying what you need and what you like, planning dinner with your loved ones.
If every war is horrifying, and the war in Ukraine frightened us because it struck in the heart of Europe, just a step away from our homes, Gaza is unimaginable, a history book we all thought we had already studied.
We had said “Never again.”
When I was a little girl, learning about World War II at school, I kept asking myself: why did no one do anything? Why didn’t they rebel, or run away?
“It was a world you cannot understand,” an old man told me once, a man who had lived through war as a boy.
“A world you can’t even imagine”.
And it’s true: with today’s TV, internet, and newspapers, it’s hard to imagine what it was like to live in a village, waiting for days or weeks for a piece of news—vague reports, whispered voices on the radio, too scattered to grasp what was really happening. It was impossible to form a clear vision of the world.
But now we do know. We see too many images—perhaps they’ll only serve in court, as evidence, to make sure we remember and condemn.
We don’t need images to face the horror.
There are still places in the world where people die of hunger.
In Gaza, someone has deliberately decided to let people die of starvation and this is a crime against humanity.
You, who will study the war in Gaza in schoolbooks—
You, who will speak about it to the world,
Because you will be a survivor—
You will tell this.
You will say that it wasn’t about people not understanding. It was about decisions made by governments.
Because sometimes governments are more powerful than individuals and they use their power to crush them.
And yet, the human being—who resists like a snail, capable of rebuilding itself entirely—does not give up.
Even with a single small gesture, people add a drop of color every day to the grey sea of indifference.
A few days ago, people took to the streets of Tel Aviv for an anti-war protest, organized by Standing Together: Israelis, young people, women and men who don’t want to accept or be complicit in their government’s logic.
They were there to say: there is a new generation opening its eyes.
Today, an Israeli broadcaster revealed that entire truckloads of humanitarian aid were destroyed or hidden—some still sit there, under the scorching sun, waiting to be delivered to Gaza.
Something is shifting.
And perhaps transformation can only happen this way: from within.
Just like in the great revolutions of history, it begins in one cell, one thread of tissue—
Then slowly, a new sap spreads.
A new awareness.
It starts small and hesitant,
But becomes unstoppable.
It creates a new network, a new skin, covering the old bones
with a meaning we’ve never dared to imagine.
In the meantime,
we cannot stop feeling.
Our hearts keep beating.
Humans among humans.
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