Every day, thousands of students take the subway and the bus to get to class. And every day, it is the same old bus driver, subway advertisements and scenery. For these students, it’s an average morning routine. But imagine one morning when someone steps onto the bus and detonates a bomb right then and there. Before anyone can utter a cry for help or speed-dial on their cell phones, all the passengers are dead and all that one hears is the sirens of ambulances racing through the streets.
Sound familiar? Maybe in newspapers or on CNN but certainly not here at U of T. For many students, it is hard to imagine a situation such as the one described above because it almost never happens on campus or in Toronto. But for students living in Israel, this is not a CNN top story or the latest developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict. This is their life and their reality.
“When a suicide attack takes place [in Israel] and people are killed, after a few hours we clean the blood and that’s it. Life goes on,” says Amir Frayman. He continues, “If we sit in our houses and we don’t go out and we don’t go to school or to work, it’s like the terrorists have won and this is exactly what they want.”
Ayelet Gordon agrees. “You have no choice. What are you going to do? [The attacks have] become so frequent that saying I’m not taking a bus is saying ‘okay I give up’…come and attack us and I don’t think any Israeli is willing to let that happen.”
Ron Teicher explains, “It’s not actually a war like World War II where people are sitting at home and airplanes are bombing. People live their normal lives, but every now and then, you’re facing a terrorist attack. Think of 9/11 happening twice a week. That’s the kind of reality we live in. It’s not happening every minute, it’s not happening every day. We still live our normal lives but every now and then, attacks happen and we have to live with that.”
Amir Frayman, Ayelet Gordon and Ron Teicher are three students among many young Israeli students who have come to Canada to speak about the realities of everyday life in present-day Israel. They are part of an organization called Israel @ Heart, which was founded by a private individual in New York who feels Israel is unfairly portrayed by the media.
In the current unstable political situation in the Middle East, students most often get news updates by reading the papers or watching the news. However the media can distort the actual realities of a given situation and blow it out of proportions. Views on the conflict in Israel generally swing from very pro-Israel, such as Fox News in the U.S. and the National Post in Canada, to the more liberal media outlets and Al Jazeera that portray Israel as the aggressor.
The aim of Israel @ Heart, therefore, is to educate students in different countries about the realities of Israel. By having Israeli students come in and share their stories, students from Canada, U.S., Europe and Asia can get a different perspective and a more complete picture, not just the 10 second clips of battle grounds and tanks on the evening news.
“Most of the young people get their knowledge about Israel from the media…and what you see on TV is only a picture. It’s not the feeling and not the smell. It’s not the real insight of how things are in the field. When they see an Israeli soldier arresting a Palestinian or an Arab, they just think, oh those Israelis just want to kill and that’s not the whole truth. We are here to tell the whole picture because we are the people in the field. We live there and now here is our story. It’s not TV, it’s the real us,” says Frayman.
Teicher gives an example to illustrate Frayman’s point. “When you see [an Israeli soldier] stopping an ambulance, that looks terrible on television. But you will never see what I see. I was actually standing at a checkpoint and I stopped an ambulance. The ambulance carried a 60-year old doctor, a woman with two children under the age of five, and the ambulance was full of explosives. So what you see is the soldier stopping the ambulance and the children, but unfortunately you don’t see the explosives that I’ve found. And that’s what [TV] chooses to show you and I don’t know why.”
All three of them have completed their military service in Israel. Frayman specialized in bombs, Gordon in intelligence and Teicher in field combat. Frayman, now 26, Gordon, 21 and Teicher, 27, are moving on to the next chapter of their lives. Frayman works as a research aid in the Inter Disciplinary Centre in Israel, Gordon is preparing to start college next year, and Teicher hopes to finish his degree in law and business management in the near future. Yet the duty of serving their country always comes first no matter what stage of life.
“You always have the option of making a career out of it, but many people want to go to college, get a family and start a life. So your life starts and the reserve duty interrupts that. It doesn’t matter what stage of life you’re at and it doesn’t matter if your wife is having a baby, you pick up and leave,” says Gordon.
Teicher simply puts it, “When duty calls, you have to drop everything.”
Despite their double lives, political instability and attack threats, one thing is obvious. For Frayman, Gordon, Teicher and many of their fellow Israelis, life is to be enjoyed and life does not stop regardless.
Israelis are resilient and they love to travel. According to Teicher, Israel could have one of the greatest cities in Europe if it weren’t for the conflicts. “Tel Aviv is like mini-New York actually, big sky scrapers…tons of bars, places to go out, great DJ’s, theatres and concerts. We have gay parades and love parades. There’s a lot going on,” describes Teicher.
“We have deserts, beautiful beaches, snow, the Dead Sea and all these panoramas,” says Frayman.
But Frayman, Gordon and Teicher all stress the misconception about Israel and Israelis needs to be addressed. “It starts from the most ridiculous questions. I was asked once whether I prefer a donkey or a camel to get to work…just from the very basic ways we live our normal lives all the way to bigger issues on Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” says Gordon. Frayman adds, “Students in the U.S. actually asked me whether I live in a tent, or if we have Gap or Old Navy in Israel. They think Israel is just one big desert. But we are here to tell you we are from Israel. We are just like you, the same.”
