We anticipated this war, understood its importance, and knew this confrontation was coming, and still, nothing quite prepares you for the actual texture of living through it, even after 2.5 years that should have taught us everything.

Spending the night on the floor of a shelter with neighbors you’ve only ever nodded to in the hallway – elderly couples, people with disabilities, babies, children – the sound of strangers snoring a few feet away, displaced inside your own home, in your own city. There is no word for that specific kind of surreal.

And then my four year old son, without anyone asking him to, took his most beloved blanket, the one he won’t go anywhere without, and quietly covered a little girl he had met only hours before. The bonds that form in these moments are not ordinary. They are built from the one thing no missile can touch: the instinct to reach toward the person next to you. This is an inherent part of who we are. For Israelis, resilience is not something we choose. As October 7th reminded us, it runs deeper than any of us knew.

That sense of shared destiny extends beyond the shelter walls. The solidarity from Jewish communities in diaspora has been immediate, a reminder that this is not Israel’s story alone. Jews in Tel Aviv, in New York, in London, in Mexico City, alongside non-Jewish neighbors across the Middle East who understand this region firsthand, we are, in different ways, partners in the same fate.

The United States government made that partnership explicit, joining this operation not as a distant observer but as an active ally, with the clarity that this threat belongs to no single nation. That decision deserves to be named for what it is: a rare moment of political courage.

Which makes the silence from much of the Western world harder to absorb. The world watched the Iranian protests, witnessed the killings, the sexual violence, and still extended legitimacy to a regime that has never stopped threatening its own people and its neighbors. That familiar hypocrisy left a mark I have not been able to set aside.

But it also built something unexpected. Through colleagues at the Voice of the People, I began forming real relationships with Iranians in diaspora, across the US, the UK, and Switzerland, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. My husband is half Iranian, and that is not a footnote; it is the lens through which I understand everything right now — our past and our future, bound together. A nuclear-capable Iran is not an Israeli problem, and it is not an inevitable fate. It is a civilizational threat, and the people who understand that most clearly are those who have lived closest to it.

That coalition, built on shared risk rather than shared identity, is already forming. And that, against all odds, is where I place my hope, the beginning of a new, brighter Middle East.