Alma Klemes ’16

Posted on January 12, 2024

My name is Alma Klemes. I am 25 years old, and I am a student at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, studying visual communication. I was born in Moshav Mata and grew up in Jerusalem, where I still live now.

The truth is that something happened that I never imagined would happen to me. In recent years, I had spent a lot of time thinking deeply about and developing my political opinions. I succeeded in distancing myself enough that I was able to get a good perspective on what is going on here, in this land where we live. Jerusalem is a place where the conflict becomes intimate. I grew up in a Jewish-Arab school, and I did national service instead of the army. In general, I chose much of my path a bit in opposition to what I saw as generally accepted. I was comfortable in my ideology. I protested everything. I blamed everyone. And then came the 7th of October.

From the distance that I am at now, the 7th of October seems like a small point on the horizon. At first, I woke up in Tel Aviv to the sound of a siren. My partner was determined to get out of bed and quickly run to the public bomb shelter. I was certain that it was just a drill, and I tried to convince him to stay in bed. The second time that we heard the siren, I understood that it was not a drill, and that maybe this morning the missiles really were reaching Tel Aviv.

At 10am, I drove to get my friend that lives close by and does not have a bomb shelter in her building. Afterwards, I made us all shakshuka (an Israeli dish with eggs and tomato sauce), and we watched TV. I felt like the photos I was seeing were taken from a movie, and the people in the photos were actors. Slowly, the shakshuka party broke up, and everyone went home. My partner and I took our bed out of our loft, so that that night, our race to the bomb shelter would be less difficult.

Only three days later, we left our apartment to buy eggs and milk. When we got to the supermarket, the shelves were empty. It was getting close to evening, in a medium-sized supermarket in South Tel Aviv with rotting vegetables, where the sirens had already ceased. Not many people were out on the street, and sometimes we saw unusual sights, such as people who took their dog for a walk wearing a bicycle helmets, or a couple who left the house with COVID masks, in the spirit of the apocalypse that was happening.

I knew that I would feel most of the weight of the situation only once I finally agreed to go home, to my parent’s house on the moshav. I am the oldest child, and I have three younger brothers. One of them was enlisted in the army at this point, and my father had taken him to the army base already, on Shabbat afternoon. Several weeks later, he told us that from the base, they quickly boarded a bus that took them to the Gaza envelope area, where battles were taking place to save the kibbutzim. My brother is shy and introverted, tall and handsome. His presence gives a sense of security. He didn’t want to scare my mother with terrifying descriptions of death, so he called home when he could and claimed that his missions were secret.

When his thoughts became overwhelming, he began to share things that he saw and heard, but still with few words. This is my little brother, who serves in a special unit of the army, and we worry for his physical and mental health. When he returned from battle, he spread out all of the many gifts he received – donations that were sent to his battalion. He showed us the laundry bag with a hand-written inscription from the kibbutz that had done his laundry, somewhere in the north where he had been that week. He did not tell us which kibbutz.

In the beginning, my brother who is older than him, but still my younger brother, was not enlisted. When I agreed to come home, my mother told me that on that Shabbat afternoon, while I was making shakshuka, he tried on his red infantry boots, which had been in the car since the day he was released from the army. He also packed his military kit bag, putting in a few light, comfortable clothes, but not a lot, because he assumed that most of the time he would be wearing his army uniform.

Everything was ready, next to the front door of the house, but they didn’t call him up to the army reserves. He stayed at home for ten days and tried to force them to enlist him. He called everyone he knew, but the enlistment percentages were too high, so they wouldn’t let him go back to the unit that he served in when he was doing his regular service. The last night that he was home we fought, and I yelled at him, but my heart was also broken. I thought, how sad it is, that this is what masculinity looks like now, that this is the way his worth is measured, that his effort to prove something could cost him his life.

The next day, they called him from a different unit and asked him to come to the training base, and he went. We said goodbye on the phone, this time with no yelling, but with sensitive words that I tried to say in a light-hearted tone, so that he would not be alarmed. I told him that I am nothing without him, that he should take care of himself and just himself. He said thank you, and that he had to get out of the car to get gas now. Bye.

Since that day, everything was compressed into one period of time, that was neither a day, nor a week, nor a month. I do not remember what happened each morning, or what was different between Sunday and Friday. Whether I felt a little different each morning, or whether I was able to fall asleep that evening. I spent a lot of time on the sofa imagining horrible stories that seemed tangible and closer than ever before. Every song on the radio seemed to me to be playing at the funeral of one of my brothers. Every news flash seemed like it was the one where they reported on a soldier from Givati in reserve service, who left behind a sister and two brothers, a mother and a father. Life turned into a collection of moments, before and after. Will this be the last moment of my life as I knew it, just one second before my reality would be turned upside down? I could hold on to a good mood only by a thread. My mood would turn bad from a phone call from my mother, who just wanted to know where I was, but my thoughts had already wandered to images of mourning.

Among all the scary things I imagined, I was most scared to imagine my brothers coming home. And one day it simply happened. One brother came home, and the other brother returned to training. A date was set for my return to university. I returned to live in my apartment with roommates in central Jerusalem. My life went back to how it was before, but the fear never left me.

Today, now that my brothers are no longer at the front, I am beginning to think about what my job is in this war. Maybe my job is to protect Israeli culture and civilization, in the civilian part of Israel. Maybe my job is to call for the end of violence, so that everyone’s brothers can quickly return home, healthy and whole. I haven’t yet decided, but these thoughts come to me all the time, every day.

I have never felt so much part of the mainstream and at the same time so opposed to it. This position could be seen as an effort to remain on the fence, to feel ambivalence. But it is really not. I feel all the most extreme emotions within me. On the one hand, I have an urgent feeling that we must defend ourselves, that everyone in Israel deserves to feel safe. On the other hand, I know that there are other answers to these questions, and that violence and destruction is not the only way. That we must also start to listen to what women have to say and suggest, in our efforts to solve this horrible problem that we are in the midst of. I want security, and I also want an original alternative. I refuse to feel part of the mainstream, but I also enjoy every minute of it.