Joshua Hoffman's Future of Jewishnewsletter is by and for people passionate about Judaism and Israel.
In January 2013, I moved to Israel. Tel Aviv, specifically.
A few weeks later, on what felt like an ordinary day, I walked down the stairs of my apartment building on my way to a café to get some work done. The moment I stepped onto the street, I saw a crowd - 40 to 50 people - held back by police tape. No one could pass.
“What’s going on?" I asked someone nearby.
“There’s a chefetz chashud," he said.
Chefetz chashud means “suspicious object" in Hebrew. At the time, I had no idea what that meant. I hadn’t yet started the Hebrew courses offered by the Israeli government to new immigrants like myself. When I did begin the course a few weeks later, they taught us that phrase early on - because it’s something you need to know in Israel. It comes up often.
Immigrant language courses in other countries typically cover the basics. In Israel, they also have to teach new immigrants the vocabulary of terrorism and war. These are some of the words they taught us, as part of the formal curriculum at a government-sanctioned Hebrew school: milchamah (war), mivtzah (military operation), neshek (weapon), ekdach (gun), miklat (bomb shelter), piguah (terror attack), p’tzatzah (bomb). In this and last year's war, there is mamad (reinforced room).
What chefetz chashud meant in practice was this: Someone had left a bag on the street or at a bus stop. The bomb squad had to come in to detonate it. Most of the time, it turns out to be nothing - just something someone forgot. But too many bombs had been hidden in bags like that by Palestinian terrorists. So they don’t take chances.
After about 10 minutes, the police removed the tape. People moved on. The street returned to normal, as if nothing had happened.
A few weeks later, when I picked up my immigration packet from a government office, they encouraged me to order a free gas mask.
Why?
Because all Israelis are encouraged to have one - a policy that dates back to the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on Israeli cities amid fears they might carry chemical warheads.
So I ordered a gas mask, and a man came a couple of days later to deliver it. People in other countries order coffee or toilet paper online. I ordered a gas mask. That’s Israel.
As I got to know Tel Aviv better, I started noticing something else: memorials. Everywhere. Plaques, markers, small monuments commemorating Israeli civilians murdered in terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings, stabbings, shootings, car rammings. Outside restaurants and clubs, along walkways, at bus stops. You can’t walk more than half a kilometer without seeing one. There are dozens, and that’s only in Tel Aviv.
A few months later, at a popular shopping center called Sarona, two Palestinians illegally entered Israel from the 'West Bank' disguised as haredi Jews and killed civilians eating at a restaurant.
In 2014, I experienced my first war: Operation Protective Edge. It began with the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank. Events escalated quickly, and soon I was living through a seven-week conflict - at the time, one of the deadliest between Israel and the Palestinians in decades.
The rocket sirens were relentless. By the end of the war, I had developed a mild form of PTSD tied to the sound of those sirens. Motorcycles (common in Israel) began triggering the same physical reaction. My body would freeze, tense up. It felt uncontrollable. It bothered me enough that I left to Europe for 18 days just to reset.
But here’s the thing: In Israel, this is considered normal. After periods of war, people carry these reactions with them. They absorb them, integrate them, move forward. In the wars that followed, I did the same.
Sometime later, my friend Alon (an American-Israeli I knew from our time together at San Diego State University) was visiting. We planned to meet on a Friday night after Shabbat dinner. Around 9:30 p.m., I had just gotten home to change before heading out when he called me in hysterics.
“Dude, there’s been a shooting," he whispered, because he was in hiding from an active shooter still on the loose. “I didn’t see it, but I heard it. I’m in a random apartment building with a bunch of people. Everything’s shut down."
The shooting had taken place at a bar directly across the street from the apartment I had lived in when I first moved to Tel Aviv - the same building from the beginning of this essay. I used to go to that bar two or three times a week. My girlfriend at the time worked there. The people murdered that night could have been me, or her, or any of our friends.
Another girlfriend of mine had been a medic in the IDF. She mostly served in the West Bank. She told me that IDF medics treat anyone who is injured - Israeli, Palestinian, anyone. That’s IDF policy.
She also told me that Palestinians would routinely throw rocks and Molotov cocktails at her unit. One time, they dropped a refrigerator from the second or third floor of a building onto her medic vehicle. She told me that if she had been one meter closer to the impact, she wouldn’t be alive to tell me that story. We never would have met. And she told me that was “normal" - just another day on the job.
On October 7th, I woke up to sirens at 7 a.m. in my apartment in Tel Aviv. Almost all of my Israeli friends - in their mid-to-late-30s, many with young children - were called up for reserve duty. They didn’t hesitate. They showed up.
It was admirable. It was also terrifying.
Some of them serve in combat units. Some were deployed to Gaza and Lebanon. For months, multiple times a day, I checked Israeli news sites, scanning the lists of fallen soldiers cleared for publication - just to make sure none of my friends were on them.
Thankfully, none were. But that feeling, the dread every time you open the news, is something I had never experienced before. For born-and-bred Israelis, it’s just another part of life.
A few months before October 7th, someone connected me for a business meeting with Jon Polin, the father of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage on October 7th and ultimately murdered in captivity in Gaza. I remember texting Jon while Hersh was still in captivity, telling him I was thinking of him and his family. And then, months later, texting him again - this time to offer condolences. That was not something I could have imagined when we first met.
Also a few months before October 7th, I went on a date with a young woman from Herzliya. We didn’t see each other again. On October 8th, I saw a photo circulating on Facebook of a young woman who looked strikingly like her. I couldn’t quite place it.
A few days later, it hit me. It wasn’t her. It was her sister. Both of them had gone to the Nova music festival near the Gaza border on October 6th. Both were among the 378 people murdered there the next day by Palestinian terrorists.
I’m telling you these stories because this is Israel. It’s not the version so many people across the world see flattened into headlines or filtered through social media. It’s not Netanyahu. It’s not Ben-Gvir or Smotrich. It’s not judicial reform. It’s not the constant noise of Israeli politics. It’s not a Right-wing or Left-wing governing coalition. It’s not the imperfections of Israeli democracy or society.
This is everyday life. This is what Israelis have been living under - incessant terrorism - for decades. These are just my experiences. There are countless others.
My former business partner made documentaries about two earlier attacks. One was the Misgav Am hostage crisis in April 1980, when Palestinian terrorists infiltrated a kibbutz in northern Israel, took toddlers and babies hostage in their sleeping quarters, and turned a nursery into a battlefield.
The other was the Bus 300 affair in April 1984, when four terrorists hijacked a civilian bus traveling from Tel Aviv to Ashkelon, forcing it toward the Egyptian border before Israeli forces stormed it.
The list goes on. It is long. And it is brutal, even barbaric. These attacks deliberately target civilians. They violate every basic humanitarian principle. That is the Palestinian strategy, and it’s been their strategy for decades. They don’t value human life, especially if it’s Jewish life. They don’t care if you’re a soldier or a civilian. Because the point is fear, not victory for the sake of statehood.
Some argue this violence is simply a response to Israeli “oppression" or “occupation." That framing ignores a deeper reality: Rejectionism and antisemitism in the region did not begin in 1948, when the State of Israel was founded. They predate the State of Israel. Rejectionism and antisemitism have been features of Arab and Muslim societies for centuries. Arabs and Muslims are taught that they cannot make peace with Jews, engage in genuine diplomacy with Jews, and respect Jewish rights. Jews are only tolerable when we are dhimmis (second-class citizens).
The Palestinians are both Arab and predominantly Muslim, so you can do the basic math. They don’t want a Jewish state anywhere near them. That’s what they’ve been taught beginning at the youngest of ages. Some of them are smart enough to rise above this brainwashing; most, sadly, are not. So the cycle of violence persists.
From Israel’s vantage point, every major Israeli security measure - every barrier wall, every operation, every policy - emerged in response to sustained violence. Israel even pursued peace efforts in the 1990s with the Palestinian Authority, and again in 2005 when it withdrew from Gaza. What followed were more attacks. More wars. And ultimately, October 7th.
Many Israelis have come to a difficult conclusion, not out of ideology, but out of experience: that there is no viable peace partner in mainstream Palestinian society, because there has never been one. Israelis are no different than any other human being; we use past information to make future decisions. We use deductive reasoning. We use well-refined instincts.
For my first few years living in Israel, I actually couldn’t comprehend the conclusion that peace is not possible with the Palestinian Arabs. I was a naive American who thought peace was always possible. Then I experienced Israel firsthand for several years, and I too have come to the same conclusion.
It is a conclusion based on logic, not Disney-like fairy tales. It is a conclusion based on lived experience, not theoretical arguments. It is a conclusion based on life-and-death survival, not academic debates.
Yet much of the world resists acknowledging this. Doing so would require assigning responsibility - not just to Israel, but to Palestinian Arab leadership and society. Instead, Palestinians are often stripped of agency altogether, infantilized to no end, and reduced to passive victims. That doesn’t help them; it traps them.
Today, Yom Hazikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day), we mourn our fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. It is an incredibly painful cost, but it is the cost of having a state. Just last week, Israel marked Yom Hashoah (its Holocaust Remembrance Day). That is the cost of not having a state.
Both days are tremendously sad, and they are also very revealing: Far more Jews have been killed in periods of statelessness than in the decades since 1948. That, too, is part of the reality. And it is a blessing, even if it’s in disguise.