Exodus inverted

By Rebeca Permuth de Sabbagh

I had never even heard of Larnaca — and now, here I am as a result of a twist of fate, in this Cypriot city whose name eerily translates to the word sarcophagus, unwinding from a war while waiting for a connecting flight back home to Guatemala.

A couple of weeks ago, I came to Israel for five days to attend my daughter’s graduation. I was a little sad it would be such a short visit. Be careful what you wish for. What started as a short celebration trip turned into something much longer, after we were caught in the middle of what would become known as the “12-Day War.”

On June 13th, I was supposed to fly back home. I was already at the gate, ready to board, when the airport was suddenly evacuated following Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Living through those 12 days was like a crash course in Israeli resilience. For the first time, I wasn’t just reading about a war in Israel — I was living it.

Wars can drag on indefinitely. Not knowing how long we’d be stranded, we began exploring options to return home. Friends who were also visiting Israel began hastily leaving. With airspace closed indefinitely, our choices narrowed to three: leave by land through Jordan or Egypt, or by sea via Cyprus.

Each option felt like a spin of the roulette wheel. Some people made it out smoothly. Others were charged thousands of dollars halfway through the trip. Some were mistreated and wished they had not taken that option.

As a family, we decided,  all things considered,  that we felt safer staying in Israel — even with Iranian missiles falling — than risking one of these uncertain routes. We hoped we’d eventually be able to leave the way we came: on a commercial flight from Ben Gurion Airport.

In those uncertain days, we learned that the only thing we can truly control in a situation, particularly in this volatile Middle East, was our attitude towards it. My friends back home asked how it felt to be living through this. “Like the pandemic, on steroids,” I answered. But unlike the pandemic, when we were supposedly “all in the same boat” — or as a meme recently put it, not in the same boat but the same sea, with some swimming, some in rafts, others in yachts — there was at least a sense of global solidarity. This time, that wasn’t the case.

I chose not to read the news. Seeing how much of the world openly wished for your destruction was a far cry from the pandemic’s shared goodwill, when people wished each other health and safety.

As the war intensified, and we found ourselves running to the bunker every couple of hours, I began to wonder: had I put my family in danger by not insisting we leave earlier, like so many who were now writing to us from the safety of their home countries?

At one point, I shared my exact location with family members in Israel. They already knew I was in Tel Aviv, but earlier that morning — after a series of explosions even shook the bunker — I felt compelled for obvious reasons, to let them know the exact location.

Eventually, the airspace reopened. The war had ended, with a ceasefire promising to hold for some time, so we boarded a flight to Cyprus. It felt surreal that a mere 40 minute flight could so starkly separate us from the war we had lived through only hours earlier. And yet, something inside me kept troubling me: the feeling that I had escaped Israel.

While my Israeli family and friends were relieved we made it out, I couldn’t shake some sort of guilt. This constant state of fear, volatility, and uncertainty — is their daily life.

Yes, I got a crash course in Israeli resilience; but it can’t end there. It’s not that Israelis are somehow wired and built differently to endure this. It’s not fair that the water in their bathtub has been boiling for so long that, from the inside, they’ve adjusted to it. Meanwhile, Diaspora Jews, we put one foot in and recoil — it burns us.

Israel and Israelis deserve better.

At one point, I considered crossing into Jordan. Israelis aren’t allowed in there. But I could go — because I hold a Guatemalan passport that hides my Jewish identity. But if it is not available for them, it did not feel right nor safe for me either.

“Let my people go,” we once shouted to Pharaoh. And yet there I was, seriously contemplating also an inverted exodus from the Promised Land — through the very land where we were once enslaved.

What would I answer if asked whether I was coming from Israel or Palestine? Would I take off my Star of David necklace? Remove the yellow ribbon supporting the return of the hostages? After October 7th, I told my daughters to avoid going to places where they would have to hide their Judaism — where even ordering an Uber was risky because of their clearly Jewish names. And now, was I ready to break every one of those rules?

Today, the Israeli passport has become a pariah in the world of travel documents. Sure, I could get by, but would I really play that card — at the cowardly price of using a foreign passport, but hiding my true Jewish identity?  

On the plane to Cyprus, I looked up the country’s population breakdown and felt relief upon seeing that the majority is Greek Orthodox Christian. This is how Jews travel these days. Still, just days earlier, a terrorist plot had reportedly been foiled — an attempt to bring even more pain to the thousands of Israelis and Jews seeking temporal refuge here. It was a somber reminder that, in the wake of calls to globalize the intifada, Jews aren’t truly safe anywhere. And perhaps most devastating of all: after October 7th, not even in Israel.

It’s hard to reconcile that while thousands of Israelis were trying to return to their country — most to support it in any way they could — a similar number of us Diaspora Jews were trying to get out.

Of course, not all of us are Israeli, and not all of us live there. But now more than ever, raising our voices should be the bare minimum.

Golda Meir once said, while raising funds in the US for the creation of the State of Israel: “I ask you not to give until it hurts. I ask that you give until it feels good.”

As difficult as this experience was, I would go through it again — if it means even a few more people understand that this is the daily reality for Israelis.

Israel can’t be only the place that takes us in when fragile Latin American democracies collapse, the country that shelters us when European regimes turn openly antisemitic, or the land that welcomes us when failing economies back home leave us suffocating.

If we count on Israel as our life insurance policy, then we in the Diaspora can’t afford to just be fair-weather friends. We must be willing to pay the premium. 

Am Israel Chai.