New York, January 30, 2012—Ella Kraus was six years old in 1991, the year every Israeli learned to don a gas mask and listen for the air raid sirens. She remembers her kindergarten teacher's hurried instructions; she remembers the feel of the mask on her face; and she remembers sitting with her classmates in suspended animation, waiting for the bombs and the anxiety to pass.
Violence never becomes common. People learn to live with it – or, more aptly, to function despite of it – but it's effect on normalcy never fully subsides, remaining like an uncomfortable background noise casting a pall over everything.
And so, from a young age, Ella developed a healthy distaste for war. It wasn't until a few years later, though, that this distaste would grow into a sense of urgency for change.
When Ella was ten, her father was called up for reserve military service. She remembers watching the news one evening with her mother when a story broke about a Palestinian man who forced his way into a Jewish family's home and murdered a young woman. Ella went to bed that night, after locking her windows and door, afraid of what lay beyond in the dark.
But her fear wasn't insular or selfish; as she lay in bed, Ella took the difficult step of placing herself in another's shoes, made even more difficult when so much in her young life had taught her that the other was the enemy. "Even now, I can remember thinking that my father is in the army and some little Palestinian girl is probably afraid of him the same way that I'm afraid," she says, remembering back to that night. "No one should live this way, with this fear."
Flash forward 16 years and both Ella and her unknown Palestinian counterpart still live with the specter of the conflict. In her final year at Sapir College, studying marketing, Ella, now 26, chose to attend a school located near Gaza in part to confront and challenge hear fears.
Her first year at college was eclipsed by Operation Cast Lead and, while she's aware of the suffering of innocent Gazans, there is no mistaking the unease in her voice when she discusses living within range of rockets fired from Gaza. "You have to keep your eyes open, to be aware at all times. When there is a siren, you drop everything and run," she says. "It affects everything you do: when you choose a seat, you sit near the door; when you're having lunch outside, you don't sit in the middle of the field. You make sure there is always a safe place."
Living three kilometers, just over a mile and a half, from Gaza – literally within the shadow of the conflict – has given Ella a greater appreciation for the anxiety and suffering it breeds and is what initially inspired her to join OneVoice in 2011. She has since completed the leadership training program, was involved in launching the Two-State Solution Caucus in the Israeli Knesset and has participated in OneVoice presentations in Sderot and on her college campus.
Ella wants to go into politics when she graduates, first as a political aid and eventually as a Member of Knesset. When asked if there is anyone currently in Knesset that inspires her or that she'd like to work for, though, she hesitates for a moment.
This delay – not being able to immediately point to a single MK who inspires hope – speaks to a political crisis within Israeli society that Ella knows well. She grew up on a kibbutz near Rehovot; the small collective society and shared values the kibbutz fostered extended to the political realm as the mentality of shared responsibility led to widespread political engagement. People from the kibbutz, she remembers, would attend demonstrations together.
"It's changed, on the kibbutz now," Ella says. While her parents and two siblings still live there, the atmosphere of inclusion and discourse has narrowed considerably in the past 10 years. "These conversations are much tenser than they once were. People are tired of the conflict. People are apathetic, they don't want to deal with it. Growing up, we would go to peace demonstrations as a group, but I'm not sure if people would still go anymore. They have lost the hope we seemed to have had."
While the air raids that seem to have followed her certainly haven't made her life less stressful, they have imbued her with a deeper understanding of the conflict and a valuable sense of urgency. "No one needs to be used to this way of life. It's not something anybody deserves, not us and not them," she says, reflecting on the minutiae of daily tolls the conflict demands of people. "We need to talk with people, to get people involved, to ask more questions, to ask why nothing is happening, why nothing is changing, why we have lived like this for so long, to demand that something changes. We need to break the apathy."
