Dancing under fluorescent lights: Defiance and joy during wartime

Check the news or refresh your feed, and you’ll likely see a story of escalating military confrontation. Analysts debate strategy, officials issue statements, and headlines provide updates in real time.

The facts are serious and fast-moving. But from my vantage point as an American-Israeli currently living in the United States, I know there is another layer to this moment—one that rarely fits into breaking-news alerts. And that is the story of Israeli resilience under threat—something I’ve experienced firsthand and am now witnessing from thousands of miles away.

As I now live in a quiet suburban neighborhood in the United States, unlike the bustling Jerusalem streets where I lived for most of the past decade, I used to be the one reassuring worried American relatives that even during conflict in Israel, life, while disrupted, continued. During most conflicts in the past 20 years, when sirens sounded, Israelis sought shelter. Then, they promptly returned to work, school, shopping and coffee shops. The rhythm of ordinary life bent but did not break.

My first encounter with this reality happened in the summer of 2014, during “Operation Protective Edge,” Israel’s operation following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teen boys. I was participating in an entrepreneurship program, joining Americans and Israelis when the national siren rang. Instead of spiraling into fear, my group calmly walked to the bomb shelter, formed a circle, and with everyone’s arms around the person next to them, began singing Rabbi Nachman of Breslov’s tune “Kol Ha’Olam Kulo”: “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.”

We weren’t afraid. We were grounded and resilient. I learned a lot about Israelis from this first bomb shelter experience; in the face of fear, we choose togetherness and life.

Now I occupy a strange in-between. I am Israeli and American at once. My physical location says one thing, and my nervous system says another. Like many expats, have been checking the news incessantly—refreshing headlines and reading updates at odd hours, tracking sirens and interceptions.

From here, scrolling through headlines and social media, it is easy to see only darkness: loss, grief, devastation. The images that travel across oceans tend to be the most catastrophic ones. War reduces a country to its trauma in the eyes of outsiders.

And yet, when I speak to friends and family in Israel, I am reminded of the resilience I felt during my first experience in an Israeli bomb shelter and many times after. Israelis gather in shelters with their families and neighbors, and turn potentially frightening spaces into communal ones.

In recent days, my phone has filled with videos: children grinning and twirling in Purim costumes; teenagers dancing in municipal shelters; adults singing together, arms slung around each other, much like I did in 2014. I saw a viral video of a couple getting married in a bomb shelter—onlookers crammed into a concrete room under fluorescent lights, smiling, clapping and blessing the bride and groom as if the walls themselves were witnesses to something holy, rather than simply shielding them from harm.

There is something instructive about joy under fluorescent lights—not staged joy or dismissal of danger, but the kind that insists that love will not wait for quieter days. It’s true resilience, navigating reality while tired and grieving, yet choosing to live fully within the constraints.

It’s easy to frame Israel through the lens of suffering at the moment and to let headlines flatten it into a place defined by war. But Israel is not only a place under threat. It is a place of stubborn, defiant life.

It is parents turning shelters into playrooms. It is the cafe owner setting up a free coffee station in a municipal shelter. It is the pet-shop owner handing out treats to dogs sleeping beside their owners who are trying to doze between sirens.

One of the things I miss most about living in Israel is this refusal to suspend life. There is an unspoken understanding that waiting for perfect safety is not an option. If you wait for calm to begin living, you may wait forever.

Being back in America has forced me to confront my own posture. From afar, it is tempting to sit in dread—to consume news as if vigilance itself is protective, to let anxiety masquerade as solidarity. Watching my friends, I am reminded that solidarity can also look like something else: building joy and resilience where you are. Strengthening community where you stand. Refusing to let fear have the final word, whether rockets in Israel or antisemitism in the Diaspora.

This year, watching from thousands of miles away, I am learning again what I once knew more instinctively when I lived there: Israel is not only where war happens. It is where life insists on itself. Where people sing and dance, despite all odds. Where love shows up in concrete shelters under fluorescent lights.

We, those living outside of Israel, should learn to do the same.

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