Gaia Zano ’23

Posted on November 3, 2023

Since the start of the war, I have primarily tried to keep myself busy. I volunteer. Today in Israel, everywhere you look there’s a place to help out, and a line of people who want to lend a hand. I continue to study, because in the area where I live there aren’t, at the moment, missiles. I work out [exercise], because that helps my anxiety, and I bury myself in Twitter, listen, read, and become irritated by the nonsense of people for whom the connection between themselves and the war is completely random.

A thought that always accompanies me in recent weeks is of that of one of my friends who is at the front, who was inducted into combat duty last year. On the morning of October 7th,she was on her base near Gaza. They [the terrorists] didn’t gain control of her base, but she lost friends, people with whom she worked. My friend, perhaps the best person I know, is awesome, friendly, full of sensitivity and compassion. She is being forced to see horrors; she is being forced to fight and to protect herself and others. For my friend, it doesn’t matter what happens now – she won’t return as the same person at the end of the war. The loss of innocence, that she and the entire state experienced collectively, is the thing that I have been mourning since the start of the war.

Israel is currently in mourning. It feels like wherever you look, you see death. My school has lost seven alumni since the start of the war. Each person who was murdered was so good, so full of life.