While I was on a Birthright trip to Israel this past December, a six-month ceasefire agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians ended, and violence ensued. Almost immediately, shells and rockets from Gaza started falling into the neighboring Israeli towns. Although nobody was killed, 60 rockets fired in one day is hardly a minor event. Incidentally, there were eight Israeli soldiers traveling with our group, which gave us a taste of what it would be like to be an Israeli citizen of our age.
What first surprised me about the Israeli soldiers was how similar they were to us. Given the differences in our environment and upbringing, I was expecting there to be some sort of insurmountable cultural boundary between the soldiers and the students in my group. That was not the case. The soldiers shared our sense of humor and did the same things we did for fun.
But when the rockets and shells started flying into the Israeli towns neighboring Gaza, I got to see one area in which our worldviews fundamentally differed.
At one point, the students in my group realized that we didn't know what towns the soldiers were from. When asked, one of the female soldiers said, "Sderot! Where the bombs are. Woot!" and then did a little dance.
It blew me away that she was able to poke fun at the fact that her hometown was being bombed. If a similar incident were to occur in the United States, I know I would be hysterical.
We as American citizens are removed from global politics to a much larger degree than we would like to admit. What these soldiers live daily, we can only read about in the papers. And, as far as I could tell, this close exposure to conflict didn't negatively affect their well-being or their happiness. When I saw their reactions to the bombs, it made me realize how oblivious I had been to how the world really works outside of the United States.
Yes, there have been attacks on American soil in the past century. Sept. 11th and Pearl Harbor are the first two that come to mind. And the Cuban missile crisis was a serious threat to national security. Still, it doesn't feel like America's status as a nation has been challenged in recent memory. Given our history of relatively sound national security, we know that personally involving ourselves in world politics is not necessary for our safety.
I'm not saying it would be better if we lived in a country where global politics came knocking on our door. One thing about America that I'm sure none of us wants to give up is that we can have relative faith in the safety of our borders. But just because we have the ability to ignore the outside world and be confident in our well-being doesn't mean we should enjoy that privilege by basking in our ignorance.
We are global citizens as well as American citizens, even though it sometimes does not feel this way. It isn't convenient or easy to conduct ourselves as international citizens, but we have an obligation to make sure that we stay a part of the world, and not just a part of our country.
I know that I am guilty of this laziness as much as anybody else; it is too easy to get caught up in our own lives here, and lose perspective of what's happening abroad.
But events that occur outside our borders inevitably work their way into our lives at home. And we can only really put these issues into perspective when we're comfortable with them, and can talk about them, instead of simply being shocked by them.
I hope I never to have to joke about the bombing of my hometown. But I also hope to one day be familiar enough with global politics to understand the life experiences that lead to such a joke, instead of just wondering how someone could make light of something so horrible.
