“What’s changed in Israel since October 7? Everything – everything has changed”

 

Gila and Brian

A conversation with novelist Gila Green, interview #1 of Conversations with Canadian-Israelis

by Brian Henry

July 28, 2024

Note: This interview has been somewhat condensed and edited for clarity.

Brian: Gila, wonderful to see you online! For our talk, I’d like to start with your basic biographical information. Then move to two big questions: What’s changed in Israel since October 7? And, what do you want Canadians to know about Israel?

Gila: Thank you for inviting me to this interview series. Particularly now. It’s no secret that Jewish writers – no matter what they believe or who they are or where they live or what their background – are being excluded from so many spaces. So particularly now, your invitation is very much appreciated.

My name is Gila Green. I’m originally from Ottawa. My family’s been in Ottawa for a number of generations. My great-grandparents moved there from Quebec. So I have deep Canadian roots which I think shows up in a lot of my writing, no matter how far away I am.

I didn’t actually make aliyah. I’m an unusual category, a citizen born outside the country, because if you have an Israeli parent, you’re automatically a citizen. So I didn’t get any of the rights or benefits that people who make aliyah get when they come.

My father’s from Jerusalem and his family has been in Jerusalem for a number of generations. His family came to Israel from Yemen in the early 1880s, as part of what was called the First Yishuv or the Old Yishuv.

My mother’s an Ashkenazi Canadian lady, whose parents' first language was Yiddish in the home and eventually English at school. They always spoke a lot of Yiddish and my grandmother spoke French as well – she was from Montreal.

My husband is South African, so I’ve been to South Africa and I lived there in the last year of Apartheid. Lately it hasn’t seemed the most welcoming environment. [The South African government has aligned itself with Hamas.]

I have five children, a son and four daughters, three of whom are married. I teach English as a foreign language at the Jerusalem College of Technology. My students are mostly regular day-to-day wonderful Israelis, and they’re often Russian or French or Ethiopian. There’s been an increase in French students. Given what’s going on in France now [with rising antisemitism], there have been more French olim [immigrants].

And I’m also a writer, an editor, and a novelist. My fifth novel is officially out on Amazon and I have a sixth novel that will be available for pre-order in September.

Beit Shemesh

I currently live in Beit Shemesh, and I’ve been here for 25 years. Beit Shemesh is smack in the middle between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and overlooks the Judean Hills. It didn’t start off that way when I moved here, but today it’s a very ex-pat community.  It’s basically thousands of Americans. Also, Canadians, Australians, Brits, South Africans – any English-speaking country you can think of.

I do a lot of freelance editing. I have many clients in North America. My clients are everyone, but they tend to be disproportionately Jewish writers, on the whole spectrum, anything from ultra-orthodox to completely secular – I hate these terms, but what can we do? We’re stuck with the limitations of language. I enjoy my work because I get to meet and work with different kinds of writers and hear stories their stories.

So, I teach, edit, write and mother ---and in what order depends on the day.   

Brian: Switching to right now, so what’s it like in Israel, post–October 7? How have things changed or how does it feel different? 

Gila: Everything has changed, but it’s a hard question because we’re still in it. It’s like someone comes to me and they want to write a book about a turbulent divorce and I ask when did you get divorced, and they say, two months ago. I say maybe you should come back in a year.

Brian: Or seven.

Gila: Exactly, because you’re so close to it, it’s going to sound like a rant or a woe-is-me or a revenge book, but it’s not going to come across in a way people are going to appreciate what you’re saying.

Sgt. Yonatan Aharon Greenblatt z"l

I mean literarily right now as we’re talking, there’s a funeral of a soldier, Sergeant Greenblatt, z”l (here), who died of his wounds, whose sister is in the same grade as one of my daughters. His funeral is going on right now on Mount Herzl. 

But I think a lot of illusions were exposed for people. I would say that was the biggest thing. The average Israeli believed we had a certain amount of physical security, and that clearly isn’t true.

No matter where you were standing on the political spectrum, people didn’t believe we would be in that kind of physical danger in our own borders.  So that’s extremely threatening.

The second biggest shock – given the brutality of what had happened – people were shocked by the international reaction, by the lack of empathy, by the lack of support. 

Brian: As we’re talking today, there may be an all-out war with Hezbollah starting tomorrow. It’s closer right now than it’s ever been in the past ten months. And looking to the future, the main enemy is not Hamas or Hezbollah, it’s Iran, and that threat is going to be around for a while. Are people re-calibrating, thinking this is going to be a long haul?

Gila: I’m trying to find things that everyone would agree on, no matter what they thought on October 6, so I think everyone would agree they feel suddenly exposed and insecure and they were shocked by the international reaction. The absolute lack of empathy for all the rape and sexual assault – that when it comes to Israelis, decrying rape somehow depends on context. 

I think it’s the same thing with Iran. I think Israelis would like more international recognition of what a global threat Iran is to everybody.

People can’t see or don’t want to see or it’s not in their short-term interest to see that these are global threats and you can’t confine them to Israel. Whether you agree with Israel or not, they’re still global threats.

Also, I think a lot of Israelis want to get it over with – no more terrorist groups on our borders, not the north and not the south. People feel they’ve sacrificed so much, and they’re in so deep, and they’ve lost so much already. We’ve got 70–80,000 people evacuated from the north. They’re internal refugees in their own country. I don’t think people have been able to even understand the number of wounded. People talk about deaths, but there are all these injured people.

The war seeps into everything, so Israelis would like to get it over with. A ceasefire that leaves these groups intact and the situation unchanged will only be temporary, so what is the point? They will regroup and, God forbid, the next October 7 will just be worse.

Israelis certainly would be grateful if more people would look at our fight as part of a global international thing, rather than a localized conflict. But I guess until you really get people between the eyes, they prefer to see it as over there.

Brian: I guess the rest of the world is still in October 6.

Gila: You can’t blame them. October 6 is a much better place to be. So, people will stay there until they see this is really global. Like, the shipping – who’s in control of international shipping? Why are we letting small clans of very aggressive people control international shipping?

Brian: I know the American, British and French have formed an alliance to supposedly take care of the Houthis who have closed down most shipping in the Red Sea, but all the alliance is doing is reacting when another ship is shot at. They’re not attempting to resolve the situation. (More here.)

Gila: Correct. So why is everyone only in reaction mode? What are they waiting for? What has to happen?

Brian: Good question. We’ve got Ukraine. We’ve got Israel. We’ve got Taiwan next. And what’s got to happen? I don’t know.

May I ask, how old is your son? Is he in the army? Is he going to be? Is he post-army?

Gila: My son is post-army. He’s twenty-six. Of course he could be called up for reserve duty.

I have a son and two sons-in-law. They’re all post-army, but they’re in reserves. My son-in-law was up in the north twice on reserves and I can tell you he’s supposed to go back in November, but he already got a notice yesterday to stay on alert because we don’t know what the reaction is going to be. [We’re speaking the day after a Hezbollah missile attack on Israel killed 12 children on a soccer field in Majdal Shams. More here.]

Children killed in Majdal Shams by a Hezbollah rocket fired from Lebanon

This whole interview could be different if it was tomorrow and probably if it was a week later, and if it was last week, we’d be talking about how a drone could be fired from Yemen and go through a window and murder a sleeping person in Tel Aviv. But who remembers that?

Brian: Because that was a whole week ago.

Gila: Yeah, that was a week ago. But no one’s talking about that because now already we have twelve murdered children on a soccer field. The pace is going so fast.

So, my son-in-law got an alert yesterday and most of his friends got alerts, too.

My other son-in-law is a musician, he’s a drummer, he was in the Israeli army band, so he doesn’t get called up in the sense that drummers are not particularly in demand in war time. But he has been spending an inordinate amount of time going base to base to keep up the morale of the soldiers.

As a musician, as a DJ, he’s constantly been on the Gaza border. They have a lot of these morale evenings, especially units that have lost a disproportionate number of soldiers, like units who were there on October 7.

It’s less now but at the beginning of the war he was going around endlessly to different hotels where evacuees [from the Gaza area] were being held, to keep up their morale.

Everybody here is doing something. The volunteerism is sky high, whether it’s making food or picking fruits and vegetables because there’s such a lack of agricultural workers.

And people are trying to have a normal life with their kids. We still have a seventeen-year-old – you can’t just fall to pieces. They’re next in line. My daughter has already had her draft notice, and she already has a date to go into the army next year. They’re very aware they’re not far behind conscription age, so you need to keep spirits up for them.

The war is in every aspect of your life – your writing, your teaching. You have students, female students, who are going in and out of the army. They’re on reserves and you’re trying to help them. There is no reason for them to fall behind in their degrees, so you’re trying to help them compensate.

Also, you have male students who have been away, and a lot of catch-up programs for them so they don’t end up a year or two years behind in their degrees.

Or students whose husbands are in the army and they’re home with one or two kids.

You say, what has changed? Everything’s changed. Every aspect of my work has changed. I don’t know if the student in front of me has been out of her home for nine months, if she lost someone close to her. I don’t know if she has someone kidnapped in a tunnel. But I still need to teach the course. I need to make compensations. My students might be in and out. They might be paramedics. They might disappear suddenly and then come back.

In my writing, some stuff I wrote in the past seems frivolous and irrelevant.  In With a Good Eye, [Gila’s most recent novel], the father has PTSD from Israeli military service. I thought that was going to be secondary, because the mother suffers from narcistic personality disorder. I thought that was what people were going to be focusing on because narcissism has become a word today. Instead, it’s, what’s with this father? Are these memories real? 

The memories are real, even though it’s a fictional book. I took those memories from my father and his PTSD. He’s 88 and doesn’t think he has PTSD, because it’s not something you were educated about in his time.

So really everything. Even how many candles you light on Friday night. You know everyone’s lighting an extra one. Things very concrete have changed.

Brian: What do you do to recharge, to keep up your resilience, your strength?

Gila: I personally needed to do something. Not that long ago, I completed a course as a volunteer for a national sexual assault hotline. Those calls have really gone up since October 7, because sexual assault was such a mass part of what happened. I have the advantage of being able to answer in English, which was a real shortage. Though I am fluent in Hebrew.

So that was one thing I did. It really took me out of dwelling on myself. Instead of thinking about myself, I was thinking about other people.

And I try with my husband to have normal days. Once a week we go to the beach or a movie. I think it’s really important. Even if you think, what am I doing in a movie? Who wants to be in a movie now? It’s good for the kids to project normal life.

I think it’s good for the neighbours, too. They’re like, “Oh, you went to something?”

You can’t watch the news all the time. It’s changing so fast. You can’t control it. You can’t do anything about it. It’s like when we were all in Covid. They’re telling you this many people are hospitalized today. This many are on ventilators today. This many people got infected today. You can’t watch that all day.

So ironically, we’re going out a little more. I’ve probably gone to the beach more this summer than I went all last summer, which probably sounds counter-intuitive. But it’s really important to go, look at the sunset, look at all these little kids playing. Especially the kids – they’re just having fun, they’re so young.

Brian: What do you want people in Canada to know?

Gila: I would like Canadians to know their voices are appreciated. We do hear them. It would mean a lot to me if Canadians would get themselves better informed. Try to read sources that are out of their comfort zone, out of their echo chamber. It’s really important.

Increasing aggression, hostility – whatever side you’re on – it’s not helpful. The whole concept of sides is absurd; it’s not a soccer game. The whole paradigm has to change. The whole winners, losers – has to change. That’s a tall order but I think people can do it.

Anything Canadians can do toward progress in reducing hostility, no matter what they think about right or wrong, and encouraging non-violent solutions. Because when they encourage more aggression – people actually get killed. It’s not a video game.

So, to stand there and scream, even if you’re convinced you’re 1,000% right and think you’re going to be rewarded in some seventh heaven, it’s so not helpful.

The children who died last night were Druze children – they were Arabic-speaking. People who are kidnapped in tunnels right now, they’re Bedouins, they’re Muslims, they’re Jews – they’re from all over. Stop pretending anyone is going anywhere.

Canadians in particular have the example of Quebec and English Canada. Many such models have been proposed for the region. I want Canadians to promote the Abraham Accords and their expansion (here). To promote freedom for Iranians who want to live in a democracy and not under a cruel dictatorship. To distinguish between states that hold democratic elections and terrorist groups who hold their populations hostage. To understand that Iran is prepared to fight down to the last Houthi, Palestinian, Lebanese – that it’s a proxy war.

Black-and-white thinking is so unhelpful. Not only that, it’s actually costing people’s lives. I know there haven’t been wars on Canadian soil for a long time. It’s difficult to go all the way back to World War 2 and remember, but war is a living hell. It’s a nightmare. If you’ve touched by it at all, you know it’s not something you want for you, for your children, for anyone.

So, if you want to help, you need to advocate for human solutions, people solutions for human beings. I don’t want to sound arrogant or patronizing, we just really have to remember we’re talking about human beings, not cartoons in a video game.

Brian: I think that people in Canada protesting the war, they’re not protesting Hamas – they’ve kind of forgotten that Hamas exists – they see themselves as wanting peace not war [or some do], but what they’re asking is kind of simple: just stop.

Gila: Right. It’s too simplistic. Let’s just stop. And re-group and re-arm and do this again next year.

Brian: And in the meantime, what about all those people still held captive in tunnels?

Gila: We need much more out-of-the box, not recycled thinking. We keep saying the same things over and over: two states, stop the war. There’s been 70 years of war.

My great-grandfather was dragged off to the Turkish army under the Ottomans. Then there was ’48 [the War of Independence] and my father was a twelve-year-old here, and then he was in ’56 [the Suez War], and he was in ’67 [the Six Day War]. My brother was in the first Lebanon War [1982].

These are complicated issues. You can’t just snap your fingers and make them go away. We’ve been hearing these same things for decades and they don’t work. You really need people who are prepared to look at things differently and look for a regional future. And not try to pinpoint one single magic solution. So okay, the war stops today. And so what? Everybody re-groups and starts again next year.

It's like saying, we’ll plow the snow today, as though winter isn’t coming again. It needs to be broader than simplistic solutions.

***

Gila Green’s latest novel, With a Good Eye, is available from Amazon here. Visit Gila’s website here. And read a short essay by Gila about her difficulty with “sensitivity readings,” which weren’t very sensitive to a Jewish author here.  

This piece was originally published on the Canadian Zionist Forum.

Read more of my pieces here (and scroll down). ~Brian