The Return of the Native

I’m back in New York. Exhausted. It feels like I was gone for a month, not 6 days. It was a little bizarre this morning to read the New York Times about what’s happening in Gaza when I was sitting in a room at the Ambassador Hotel in East Jerusalem, not even a week ago, in meetings with a Fatah member and a pre-eminent Palestinian pollster hearing their thoughts about Gaza. Now I’m so very far away from the convoluted world into which I was submersed.

Waking up this morning with my husband, eating breakfast, getting on the subway and coming to work...my life is so radically normal. It’s easy to understand how Israelis feel when the world is focused on the plight of the Palestinians - as evidenced by the abundant, violent news headlines - when all they’re doing is eating breakfast and trying to go about their day with a sense of normalcy. But of course, their world is far from normal. Some Israelis choose to ignore the conflict that stares them in the face every day. Some embrace it, fight it, give their lives to find a path to peace.

"Normalcy" is something we in the States take for granted…after all, our wars are fought across oceans, not in our backyard.