On Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, my son is coming home from the army to stand by a soldier’s grave on Mount Herzl. No fallen soldier’s grave is without a soldier. They stand straight, sentinels of respect and life, as the sirens sound at 11am for two minutes.

My husband and I will accompany him. We are clinging to every minute we can be with him. He started basic training a few weeks ago, and we miss him. Our other son is serving in Lebanon, a combat medic. We haven’t seen him for weeks.

This is not the first time we have stood by fallen soldier’s graves with our sons on the Day of Remembrance. The cemetery is green with pines and cedars. Since October 7th the graves are now familiar to us. There is our dear friends’ son, Daniel Peretz. There is our children’s school principal, Yossi Hershkowitz. There are neighborhood boys, whose mothers I see at the local coffee shops.

The cost of this land that bears the towering pines and cedars is steep. We pay with our children’s blood.

And yet why is it we come to Israel?

Ten years ago, my husband and I moved to Jerusalem with our four boys. I said I did not want to leave one day with one suitcase and fifty dinars, as my grandparents had fled Iraq in 1951. More than that, I wanted to be part of Jewish history.

“How can you go? Your boys will have to serve,” People said. Our boys were small. Who was thinking of the army?

When my oldest son’s draft letter arrived I wrote a poem called, This is Why We Need Peace Now.

I tried to hide my tears as we drove along Paratroopers Road to Ammunition Hill, to drop off our son for his first day as a paratrooper.

I thought I understood the cost of return. I had taught Ezra and Nehemiah. I held onto one image: the Babylonian exiles returning and rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem with a hammer in one hand and a sword in the other.

And yet, I could not stop my tears.

Sometimes I think what helped me survive my childhood was the Bible. I was the child of immigrant parents who carried the silence of Iraqi Jewish refugees. I grew up with Hungarian Holocaust survivors sharing stories of survival and loss at our Shabbat table over cholent and t’bit.

I was eight or ten in the back of a car with two girls, daughters of my father’s Italian friend, listening as they joyfully described Christmas and all the presents they received. I thought how lovely it must be to not be Jewish.

I found comfort in the Hebrew words of the Bible stories. In the Hebrew God I spoke to before sleep when I recited the Shema: God is one, and you must love Him with all your heart.

I was looking for love.

As I grew older, I realised one of the great silences in our home was Israel. I don’t remember my mother calling herself Israeli, or my father speaking of himself as an Iraqi Jew who came through Israel. They didn’t speak to me in Hebrew or Judeo-Arabic.

They didn’t tell me about sandy tent floors, more-than-one-hour-long walks to school, or the day my mother bought a Coke for Lebanese soldiers at Rosh HaNikra and spoke to them in Arabic.

When we went to Israel to visit my mother’s parents it felt like we entered a new world we did not have the language or context to understand.

My maternal grandmother Najia, only spoke Judeo-Arabic and a little Hebrew. My grandfather, Solomon, could speak English like the British, quoting Shakespeare, learned in Baghdad.

I did not understand why they were so sad.

We stayed in their two-bedroom apartment, and slept on the red Persian carpet on the lounge floor. There was shutters closed in the day, one television channel, no Cadbury chocolate.

“This is a second world country,” I told my younger brothers.

I was a child. I did not understand what it had cost them to come here as refugees. Yet I loved being in a country of Hebrew from the Bible. Of Shabbat where no one shouted from passing cars as we walked to synagogue, “F***ing Jews”. Where there was more than one type of kosher cheese. It felt like a miracle of belonging.

There were many things I did not understand about the land. Israelis loved hiking and camping. My parents never took us. Only later did I understand what tents meant to my father — displacement.

Who is this God whom I must love?

If we have to love Him, does that mean He loves us?

The word love did not appear in my parents’ English. 
Perhaps that is why I kept searching for it.

And then my husband and I, with our four boys, came to live in Israel. Israelis asked why I would leave Australia. I said Zionism.

I was not thinking of Theodor Herzl.

I was thinking of Zion.

My 86 year old neighbor, Shulamit from Mosul says for over two thousand years, Iraqi Jews, like her father, dreamed of coming to Israel. Despite the tent camps and rationed black bread, she was happy growing up in Israel, safe as a Jew.

My son’s best friend started his military service with a desk job in the mornings and playing baseball for Israel in the afternoons. His dream was to make the Olympic team. After October 7th, he switched to Tanks. He is now serving in Lebanon.

Mothers share what they are taking to sleep at night, to function. They pop pills: Nerven, St John’s wort, Xanax. What works? At one point pharmacies ran out of antidepressants.

On Azza Street, an older woman with a short sharp haircut shouted at me, “You don’t love your son.” I lost my breath.

Hammer and sword. How to protect against missiles and chants of “Death to Israel”.

For Yom HaAtzmaut, as a birthday present, I had large street signs printed in blue and white. אין ימין אין שמאל רק ישראל No Right, no Left, only Israel.

Israel is the name given to Jacob after wrestling an angel. Israel means to struggle with God.

Last month I was surprised to read that Israel ranks the eighth happiest country in the World Happiness Report. After October 7, after almost three years of war. How could that be?

I think of my eldest being blessed by Arnold Clevs, a Lithuanian Holocaust survivor, who survived 11 camps, his hands resting on my son’s head.

author and friend Izabella Tabarovksy said in a birthday blessing to Rawan Osman. The garden grew still. Russian, Lebanese, Arab, Iraqi, American, Israeli. Each of us knew, in our own language of loss and return, what she meant.

Iraqis write to me wanting their country free of militias and radical terror. I want for them what we have struggled to build here: a country rooted in family, protection, and love

My paternal Iraqi grandparents taught me to love Israel despite how hard life was for them here, before they left for Australia in the late 1960s. It was the Zion Babylonian captives wept for. They taught me to sing Zion’s songs. They understood Israel was a small nation, but the biggest family. A Middle Eastern family where everything isn’t always fair, but there is love, laughter, and good food.

Years later when they died, those same grandparents chose to return to Jerusalem and be buried on Har HaMenuchot, the Mountain of Rest.

I live here now with my husband and four sons. Under the same Judean winds.

I love my son and my country.

This post first appeared on Sarah Sassoon’s Substack Picking Lemons 

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