Choosing Life in Israel, by P. David Hornik (a columnist at Frontpage Magazine, a contributor to Pajamas Media, American Spectator, and elsewhere), is a collection of essays vividly describing the author’s life in Israel with all its attendant regional whiplashes. Its trajectory veers like a roller coaster ride from the wildly delicious to the deeply terrified. From personal ups and downs to heart-stopping high drama, its quick pace leaves one breathless. The author’s compelling voice projects a rich tapestry of experiences living on the front lines of the Middle East.

The book is broken down into two highly readable sections. Part One deals mainly with the ins and outs of daily life in Israel with its multifaceted challenges. Its nine stories are interwoven into concise and entertaining segments,  not without cold doses of reality smacking the reader across the face. One such episode is particularly emblematic of what it means to live not only in Israel, but in Jerusalem; the epicenter of international fixation, bordering on fanatical obsession.

From “Mistaken Random Terror in Jerusalem:”

…just down the street from me, George Khoury, a 22 year old student of economics and international relations at Hebrew University who was out jogging, was shot dead by terrorists from Al-Aksa Martyr’s Brigades, part of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement… The “impersonal” nature of most terrorism… is its most chilling aspect… and killing him because (supposedly) he’s a Jew — is that personal or impersonal? Indeed, the Martyr’s Brigades was quick to apologize once it found out its error. Its commander called George Khoury’s father, the well known East Jerusalem lawyer Elias Khoury… and that the group considers George a “Palestinian martyr.”

Adding considerable angst to a father’s normal bereavement, Elias Khoury’s father, Daoud Khoury, was also murdered for being in the wrong place at a most unfortunate time. Visceral flashbacks surely must have resonated through Elias Khoury’s being. But when it comes to Islamic-sustained terror everything is flipped on its head. Even though he lost his father due to a booby-trapped refrigerator placed by the same Fatah terrorist outfit in the heart of a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem, his reaction to his son’s and father’s death evinced “moral” equivalency: “The Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades are individuals who are trying to impose their way on everyone… this act was carried out by a group that undermines the cause of Palestinian justice… I am against all violent attacks against innocent civilians, whether it be against Israeli or Palestinian civilians.”

Well and good, except for the fact that Israeli security forces take great pains to spare the lives of Palestinian civilians, often at unfathomable costs to its own soldiers and citizens alike. Those who invariably become “collateral” damage are accidental victims of legitimate counter-terror operations. Most significantly, many Palestinian casualties are strategically placed (by their leadership) in close proximity to bomb factories etc., in anticipation of an international hue and cry when the dead and maimed are paraded before the world’s cameras. More to the point, the author elicits many such examples of bloody jihad waged all over the streets of Israel, seemingly with no end in sight. Consequentially, P. David Hornik demonstrates, even when bereaved, Israel’s minority population is unwilling to condemn terror for what it is: murderous jihad.

Segueing to Part Two, the reader lands even more squarely in the heart of the hottest conflict in the world, aptly titled “Israel’s Struggle to Survive.”

Part of the richness of Choosing Life in Israel lies within its many paradoxes. In one fell swoop one can be swept up with pride when reading about the efficiency of Israel’s Defense Forces as it engages the enemy, though mostly in “reaction” to sustained terror on its citizens, instead of pursuing an initial offensive doctrine. This is absolutely the result of political “strategies,” as opposed to military readiness. To be sure, for the most part, the IDF is a well-oiled machine, and its special forces are second to none. At the same time, the reader cringes with embarrassment, bordering on acute distress, witnessing many hard-fought battles evaporate into nothingness as Israel’s political leadership reflexively turn battlefield victories into one “concession/peace” gesture after another. An unsustainable vicious cycle is played out, year after year.

Specifically, “How Not to Defeat Hamas” illustrates heartburn-worthy renditions of appeasement, while exemplifying the above dichotomy. “From the beginning, Israel has always fueled the Palestinian Authority’s war against it — quite literally. It provides the Palestinian Authority with key supplies like electricity, water and, through Dor-Alon Energy Company, even with gas and cooking gas…. Last Wednesday, though, Dor-Alon announced it was suspending supplies due to unpaid debts. Yet, by Thursday, the company said it was resuming supplies after P.A. chairman Mahmoud Abbas promised to send payments within 10 days.”

I received the following letter from someone who was interested in making aliyah who wasn’t sure they could:

Dear David,

I’m interested in moving to northern Israel. My wife is in love with the atmosphere there.

We have 2 children, ages 5 and 12, and even though I’m 67, I’ll have to work until they’re grown. I’m a physician in Internal Medicine. I was told that there is a need for physicians in the north. Please write me back.

Thanks,

Wanting to make Aliyah

Here is how I responded:

Dear friend,

If my writings are in any way inspiring you to make the move to Israel, I am glad. Northern Israel is a great place. I grew up there, from age 11 to 21, and I too have very fond feelings for that region. Its green scenery and mountainous terrain are beautiful. I can appreciate your wife’s attraction to that area, and I believe that there is a home waiting for your family there – you just need to find it.

From what I understand, Israel today is actually lacking doctors – and if that is true, you would be welcomed as a professional here. There are hospitals in Tzfat, which is very close to Rosh Pina, but they are also in Haifa, Nahariya and in Puriya near Tiveria. Israel has four major medical providers, Leumit, Kalalit, Meuchedet and Macabee. All four have their own clinics spread out around the country. In Israel’s national health system, every citizen is covered by a basic medical plan and has the choice of becoming a member of one of the major medical providers’ basic plans, then can add on additional services according to his or her needs.

So you will find medical clinics in all of the larger towns in the north as well as elsewhere in Israel. The north – considered to be peripheral because it’s further away from the major Tel Aviv population center – might actually be in greater need of doctors. You could try contacting the medical providers directly and asking each where you might be needed the most.

But I strongly suggest that you consult with Nefesh B’Nefesh. They seem to be doing a very good job of counseling Olim and helping them make good decisions on the path of establishing them in their new lives in Israel. If I am not mistaken, NBN has a program specifically meant to encourage Jewish families to move to the north, and they also provide job counseling. Hopefully, they can help you reach out to the medical providers who really need you and make a perfect match.

I am glad for your children’s sake that you are planning to make this move now. From my own experience, this is a wonderful opportunity for them to make an easy transition into a new language and society. Young kids have a way of quickly adapting to new surroundings and they are quick to pick up the language. I believe that they will look back and thank you for moving them to Israel now.

This isn’t Cpl. Dina Ovadia’s first Passover in Israel. Slowly, slowly she seems to be moving away from her Egyptian past and becoming further ingrained in her Israeli present.

Instead of thinking about her bittersweet childhood in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, Cpl. Ovadia fills her time with her army service and in preparing her home in Rimonim, in Samaria, for the Passover holiday. Today it is possible to say that she is far more Dina Ovadia than she is Rolin Abdallah – the name her family gave her as a security measure for a Jew living in an Arab country. But Dina herself grew up totally unaware of her Jewish heritage.

Dina is telling her winding, unbelievable story for the umpteenth time, but her eyes still well up with tears. Ovadia, now 22, left her family home in Alexandria for the last time as a young and curious 15-year-old girl. All she wanted was to fit in.

“Everyone always looked at me as though I was something different, the ugly duckling in the class. They asked me why I dressed the way I did, and why I spoke with my parents during the breaks, and why this and why that. I myself didn’t understand where it all came from. But I always had friends,” she says in impeccable Hebrew with a slight Arabic lilt. “I didn’t have a religious background in Christianity or in Islam. I never knew what I truly was. My parents didn’t keep the [Jewish] traditions, and I always assumed that we were secular Christians.”

Dina’s childhood detachment from her heritage gives unique meaning to every Shabbat candle she lights now and to every Jewish holiday that she did not know. And Cpl. Ovadia’s story is the Passover story, thousands of years old, expressing itself again in the 21st century.

“I have surely seen the affliction of My people that are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their pains” – Exodus 3:7

Rolin in Arabic means gentleness, but Dina was first and foremost a curious and rebellious child. She felt she had a right to belong, but she didn’t know where.

“I studied in a Muslim school. I started to grow up and learn the Koran, and then I already started to ask myself, ‘Why am I learning this?’

“I reached a stage where I got really into it, studying for tests, memorizing passages. At school they asked me to start wearing a veil to my Koran lessons. I didn’t like the idea – as a girl it seemed ugly to me,” she smiles. The disagreement led to her parents enrolling Dina in a private Christian school, where she was more at ease. “It was really fun and I felt freer,” she says.

Dina recalls how she tried to find herself among the troubling mix of religions. “We had a mosque next to the school, and the girls would go there to pray. I told this to my mother, slightly anxiously, and she was very angry. They forbade me from doing it again. I remember that I was hurt, and I started to tell them that because of that they won’t like us, and that I wouldn’t have any friends. It was the anger of a child. During Ramadan I would escape to my friend’s houses, and I even fasted on one of the days, because I always wanted to belong to something and I didn’t have a clear answer for what I was,” Dina explains.

When she told her parents that she had tried praying in a church, that didn’t make them any happier. They distanced her from every religion, without giving an explanation as to why.

The turning point occurred on a day like any other. Dina was studying for a history test, her brother and cousin were playing on the computer upstairs, and her mother, aunt and sister were also at home. Suddenly the sounds of shouting and shattering glass cut through the calm routine. “I really panicked, and immediately I thought that because we were different they had come to our house. I went outside and saw five masked faces – they were Salafists.” Five bearded men in robes, with clubs in their hands and rifles slung over their shoulders, broke through the electric iron gate at the entrance to the grand family home and demanded to know where the men of the house were. Their explanation was as simple as it was incomprehensible: “A’lit el’Yahud” – a Jewish family.

“I thought, ‘What the hell!?’ I didn’t understand why they were saying that we were a Jewish family. Anyone who was different, the stranger, was always called ‘the Jew.’ I was certain that they were mistaken. They entered the house. My mother said that the men weren’t there, and they threw her into the corridor, she slammed into the pillars, and she fainted. I started to scream – I was sure that they had killed her. And then I saw two of them going up the stairs. I heard shots. I was sure that they had murdered both my brother and my cousin.”

The Salafists went down the stairs and told the Abdallah family that they had a few days to get out of the country, and that in the meantime they could not leave their home. They threatened that if the children went to school, they would be kidnapped. Only then did they leave.

Luckily, the whole family escaped injury. The armed men shot at the boys’ heads, missing deliberately in order to scare them. “I think that today they would have just killed us all,” she says. From the moment of that home invasion, Dina’s life became entangled in a complex loop, while the two irreconcilable edges of her life began to unravel. “The Salafists would encircle the house in their vehicles, shooting into the air. That month even the school didn’t call. I slept with my mother – I was terribly afraid. My father told me that they are just thieves despite the fact that they didn’t take anything. ‘Jew’ was really a kind of swear word, he said; but I couldn’t believe him.”

A few days later, her grandfather gathered all of his family together and he revealed the truth. “He explained why he kept us from other religions and told us that we were Jewish, and we that we had little time to leave Egypt. He told us we were going to Israel. I remember the little ones at home were excited about it, but I wasn’t. I started crying and was so disappointed. I told him I did not want to move to that bad country. I rebelled against it.”

Dina knew very little about Jews as a child. “In school they always taught us to hate Jews and Israelis,” she says. “Let’s take Koran class for example. I would be sitting, taking a test, and would read a verse that said you need to kill Jews. I also remember during the Second Intifada, all the TV programs I watched that always said that Israelis are bad. I cried over the story of Mohammed al-Dura.

“My grandfather did his best to explain to us that they’re not bad, that we have to understand that in war, that’s what happens. At home we were always taught that all human beings are equal and you have to respect them for who they are, no matter what their background. In school they taught us that Israel is the enemy. They would say when I grew up that I would understand. During the Intifada I was even at demonstration, waving the Palestinian flag. It never even occurred to me that I was Jewish.”

The Jewish stereotype present in Egypt was similar to what was taught in the darker racial theories of the early 20th Century. “I knew that Jews were scary, were murderers, had big noses, ears and had beards. On television you would always see babies burning in Gaza, things I’ve never seen in Israel, but that’s what we thought.”

Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which I gave to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give unto them and to their children after them.’ – Deuteronomy 1:8

Before this dramatic turn of events, Dina tried to understand where all her friends had disappeared to. They hadn’t even called to say hello throughout the whole month.

“I had a really good group of friends,” Dina says. “We lived really close to one another, and we used to sleep over at each other’s houses. I begged my mother to go and see one of them, and in the end she let me go. I knocked on her door. She opened it, made a face and slammed the door on me. What my grandfather told me passed through my head at exactly that moment: we grew up together and just because she heard that I was Jewish she doesn’t accept me anymore? That really hit me. I said: I know that the Jews are bad, but look; I’m not bad. By this time, I had totally broken down. Right then I realized that this wasn’t the right place for me. They couldn’t accept me for who I was.”

Modern Exodus

The day of Dina’s aliyah was tinged with the sadness of leaving her house and turning her back on where she grew up.

“The whole situation had made me feel a lot of hatred, and I realized that I had nothing there,” she says. “It turned out that my uncle, who I thought had run away to France, had actually made aliyah to Israel and had enlisted in the IDF. In Egypt there is a mandatory conscription law, and when the authorities began to investigate, they found out the truth, and my family bore the consequences. But this moment was about to come regardless of any connection to my uncle.

“My parents understood that their children were all growing up, and that they no longer had answers to our questions. We didn’t take anything with us except our clothes. We just left our house exactly as it was. On that same day I saw how my friends were looking at us while we were packing our things, so I just closed the blinds. I finally understood that this wasn’t my home. It was as if Egypt itself was closing the blinds on me.”

After a brief flight to Istanbul and then on to Tel Aviv, Dina suddenly found herself in a land that just a month before she had felt so far away from, mentally if not physically.

“I was scared,” she says. “Who was going to welcome us? What if they didn’t like me? When I got off the plane all I saw was people smiling at us, and that made me so happy. My uncle, his family and the rabbi were waiting for us and smiling. It was weird – I didn’t understand the language, but I felt at peace, and from somewhere my friends’ rejection of me gave me strength – the strength to change myself.”

The family settled in Jerusalem, and Dina and her relatives joined a religious school. “I so badly wanted to fit in, but the first time I read the siddur, I was holding it upside down,” she laughs. Dina’s new beginning wasn’t free of difficulties. “One day I was walking down the corridor at school, and one of the girls said, “Hey, Arab girl!” and she and her friends started a fight with my cousin and me. Not a very nice welcome.”

After high school, Dina began her military service as an assistant Army Radio reporter on Arab affairs. She then moved to the military police for a short period, and finally joined the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, where she helps run new media in Arabic on a variety of platforms, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Her sister Sima is set to join her in the Spokesperson’s Unit, and her brother is currently doing a selective Air Force course.

This article, lightly edited, was written by Florit Shoihet for the IDF Website

Community is one of the concerns that many people consider when they scout out their potential new home in Israel. They are wondering if they will make friends and find neighbors who speak their language. Who will fill in for the lack of nearby family? Who will they spend their holidays with? Will they find help and support, while adapting to their new surroundings? Will their kids make friends?

Some people choose to start off in a place where they know that many Olim have settled before them. Some towns are known to have a high number of Olim from English speaking countries. Places like Efrat, Raanana and Neveh Aliza are some of them.

Although these are legitimate concerns, there are conflicting opinions on the value of starting off in an English speaking atmosphere. On one hand, it does offer a soft landing into the expected culture shock. Yes, you are coming from Western countries into a westernized Middle Eastern country. You will need some time to adjust to the weather, language, and societal issues – and it is nice to have people nearby who can relate to what you are going though, and who speak your mother tongue.

But do be aware that you might be paying a price for the comfort that you seek. Rents might be higher in some of the towns mentioned, but that’s not the only disadvantage. If you condition yourself to get by in English speaking surroundings, will you be stunting your integration into the Hebrew speaking society around you?

When I was a teen growing up in Maalot, the father of a good friend of mine was a man who had come to Israel from Morocco thirty years earlier, but who was know to all as “Oleh Chadash.” Due to his putting off learning to speak Hebrew for many years, when addressed by someone in Hebrew, he would say “Oleh Chadash” and excuse himself from the need to take part in any conversation. He had already achieved an important position in a local government agency, but still, his earlier procrastination in learning the language was not forgotten. Don’t be afraid to speak – even in broken Hebrew. Israelis will appreciate your effort, and will help you along.

Admittedly, though, community is important. It is one of the factors that has brought many people – Israelis and Olim – to come to live in the small towns of Judea and Samaria. In these places, the concept of community is very real. Everyone knows everyone, and although each family is responsible for our own homes and well being, we hold many common interests. People take an active part in local committees and events.

From the outside, many Yeshuvim in Judea and Samaria might look similar, but actually, each one has its own very special footprint, its unique micro-culture, and you, by making your home there, will be a part of forming that society.

The Hebrew term “Aliya” literally means “elevation.” The term is widely used in the Jewish culture to describe being called up to recite the blessings on the Torah reading in the synagogue, as well as to describe immigration of Jewish people to the land of Israel. Each of these Aliya opportunities is considered to be a great honor.

In Jewish thought, the land of Israel is considered to be higher than the lands of the other nations. The diaspora is considered a punishment – banishment from our homeland, the special land singled out from among all others in the Bible and allocated by God himself for a nation which was also singled out for a special mission: to be a light unto the nations.

Some ponder the reason God Almighty would give this land, of all others, to the people that he loves so much. Could he not have picked one with at least some natural resources? The Arabs got the oil, the Africans precious stones and metals. What does the land of Israel have to offer?

With that in mind, the special connection of the people of Israel with their homeland is a phenomenon which is hard to explain in rational or pragmatic terms. But the fact remains that for 2000 years, the Jewish people retained their devotion to their land in a manner unique throughout all humanity. There is no other people in history that survived an exile for so long, while retaining their national identity and yearning to return to their homeland.

The Jewish people spread our in a diaspora which reached every location in the world. Three times every day, all through that time, we would turn towards the holy capital city, Jerusalem, and pray that God would have mercy on us and allow us to return to our land and rebuild our country and again live as a sovereign nation.

This new blog is about Aliya and living in the land. I will use this platform to share my own experiences and enthusiasm about this wonderful historic opportunity, as well as to discuss the unique challenges in making Aliyah and some practical aspects, in hopes of encouraging other Jews to make the move and return home to Israel.

Please feel free to ask questions.

Are you thinking of moving abroad? If so, you’ve got a lot to think about. Moving to another country isn’t only about booking a one-way ticket. What about taxes, work permits, and other legal considerations? In the second part of this week’s Goldsteinon Gelt podcast, Doug finds out what you need to know when he interviews Darlene Hart, chairwoman of the U.S. Tax & Financial Services Group.

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Broadcasting from the departure terminal of Newark Liberty International Airport while waiting for his flight home to Israel, Yishai talks about his experiences during his recently finished North American tour. He specifically talks about the difference between living a Jewish life in the United States and in Israel and how although he enjoyed spending time with his family while in New Jersey, Israel truly is home. Be sure to listen in!

Yishai Fleisher on Twitter: @YishaiFleisher
Yishai on Facebook

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Yishai makes his way back to Florida to speak to Hadassah of Valencia Reserve. Yishai kicks off by talking about how American Jews need to look past any fear that they see regarding Israel and see the truth. He talks and ends discussing having famed journalist Christiane Amanpour visit his Mount of Olives home and the true reason why Amanpour did not use the footage that was filmed.

Yishai Fleisher on Twitter: @YishaiFleisher
Yishai on Facebook

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