Posted on December 8, 2023
Hi! My name is Itai Ohel Gallili, and I’m a 17-year-old from Jerusalem. I feel distant from the present situation specifically here in Jerusalem, the city in which the “situation” is volatile even when we aren’t at war. Too distant. There are almost no sirens here, even though there are sirens on an almost daily basis in many areas of the country. School has resumed and the streets don’t look so different from how they looked on October 6th.
Because of this sense of distance, within a few days of the massacre I started to volunteer at any place I could find. Upon arrival at a hotel that was hosting evacuees from the Gaza Envelope, I was able to help with hospitality duties, I donated blood for the injured, I traveled to greenhouses to help farmers. Nothing is enough and I still feel like my life is too similar to how it looked two months ago. I can’t stop thinking: How can it be that my troubles are limited to submitting school assignments when there are youth my age who lost their entire families, or who were kidnapped into Gaza, or who were murdered?
Despite this, I understand that we should all aspire to my [relatively safe] situation, and that there’s no logic to comparing myself to people who have suffered such immense tragedies. If we relinquish living our daily lives, that would be a victory for Hamas, because their goal is to disrupt our regular lives here. I hope that a day will come when we will be able to return to living our lives as we did before the slaughter, with the same sorrows and the same joys, and maybe then we can begin to think of a new path towards peace.
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