Several days ago, in an opinion column at Walla News, Yair Golan called for an end to the war, and even claimed that at this point our soldiers are dying in vain. Naturally, he wouldn’t mention the horrors taking place in the Gaza Strip as a reason to stop the war. Moreover, he concluded saying, “This is no ideological or political controversy”.
This phrase does not stop haunting me.
This whole past year of our lives has been colored by ideological and political controversy. Every single step of the way, every decision, choice and loss in our personal lives are descendants of an ideological or political controversy. The fact that a politician - whose entire role is to bring such controversies to the surface, explain them to the public and struggle for his side of the conflict – concludes an important political message in an attempt to sweep the essence of it under the rug is offensive, insulting.
Radical leftists, my ideological mates, have become pariahs during the past year. The political decision to speak and come out in public against the war since its very first phases has turned out lives into sad, lonely ones.
In one of the first demonstrations against the war, in November 2023, I came out with a sticker saying “Seek peace and pursue it” and yellow ribbons tied to my hands. The usher stopped me before proceeding and politely suggested I take off these markers, lest they arouse violence. It was unimaginable that seeking peace or using color to call for freeing Israeli hostages – would be considered an invitation to violence. But that is what happened.
Foreign friends, not from here, asked me what conversations at the office sound like. There were none. Within days of October 7th, it became clear that almost no one could be addressed rationally. Hatred, rage and anxiety took over the discourse and filled it with terminology that I had formerly heard only in books about the Second World War. Everyone wrapped themselves with Zionist insignias – Star of David necklaces, Chai, and stickers saying “Together we’ll win”; relatively sane people began speaking in pure military jargon of annihilation and destruction; peaceful residential quarters were filled with men peacocking around exhibiting their weapons.
Since the first days of the war in the Tel Aviv area (not the front) I was not afraid of missiles and alarm sirens but rather of the public atmosphere and how I and my children would survive it. It became impossible to escape.
The doctors’ protest Whatsapp group against the regime coup was suddenly glad with the bombing of Shifaa Hospital. When I dared to write against it, my direct boss asked me to withdraw because his son was fighting there.
Descriptions of October 7th events flooded the internet in the first few weeks, filled with wrong and exaggerated descriptions that one was forbidden to try and refute. Every attempt, even among scientists, of speaking about the data themselves (published everywhere) was seen as treachery, self-hate, auto-antisemitism. Attempts to speak of what was happening on the other side, about exaggerated aerial bombings and the indiscriminate killing of civilians were taken with real killjoy or indifference. Senior doctors whom I had esteemed, who had cared for Gazan children for years, shrugged their shoulders and said they had no empathy, their gaze hollow.
That’s how it happened – social ties were disconnected en masse. I left Whatsapp groups, stopped coming to social events, quarreled with some of my best friends, and greatly lowered the flames of many social ties. I reduced my social life to a very restricted group of people, most of them from my core family. My unconscious choice to run my everyday disconnected from any social life, including only work and childcare, made the routine very easy at the side of the madness that has taken over here. It took a long time until I realized its price.
At the same time, my academic life was impacted. I do not suppose it is now possible to attend an international professional conference as an Israeli with a target on her back. I see no point in sending a scientific article to an international journal and have chosen to invest my time in “political” writing rather than in the medical writing expected of me. Finally, every profound multi-team discussion of an ill child, as doctors hold anywhere in the world, chokes me and is a reminder of the medical team members in the Gaza Strip who are working in darkened conditions and endangering their lives, and not managing to save the lives of thousands.
May I clarify that I have no intention of complaining about my own situation. I am not a party to the real effects of this war: my family relations have not been physically hurt, my family has not been displaced, my property is unharmed and my livelihood contained. But political and ideological controversies and the decision not to give up my opinions or identity within the ongoing public storm have altered my life, and nor for the better.
One cannot live in the State of Israel post-October 7th without our lives being affected by politics and ideology. A politician who does not realize this betrays his work and tries to sell us a fairy tale that could never hold in this region. One cannot conduct one’s life inside an indescribable, daily catastrophe and retain one’s humanity without the personal and political uniting.
Dr. Michal Feldon is a pediatric rheumatologist.
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