‘People are so impressionable on social media.’  Zoe Ritz, 10th grade, Tichon Ramah Yerushalayim (TRY), Jerusalem

So we’ve only gotten one siren, and it was the first siren to go off, and it went off in all of Israel because nobody really knew what was happening or who was throwing the rockets, but other than that, Jerusalem has been really really safe and there hasn’t been any more sirens. There have been a few nights where we were, like, there could be sirens, because there were sirens in Tel Aviv, which is really close to us, but it’s been really safe in Jerusalem other than that.

It’s actually really ironic. We were in our Israel core course class discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and we saw the ultimatum that Hamas had given Israel, or Jerusalem specifically, about removing their troops from Temple Mount. And we were sitting in the class and it was almost six, and we were just continuing but we knew around six there could be news.

We had one of the news sources open and were just waiting for the headline to refresh, and at like 6:01 we heard ambulances which turned into a siren. And my teacher brought us all out of the room and into the hallway. We were all pretty scared, and the hallway was like the safe space that we were supposed to go to. We had a bunch of safe spaces and bomb shelters on our campus, and we basically sat in the hallway for a solid 10 minutes. It basically felt like forever, and I was really scared.

A lot of people were not as scared, but it was really scary not knowing what was going on and not knowing if there was going to be a rocket thrown near the city because at that time, the threat had been directed towards Jerusalem, so we didn’t really know what was gonna happen. Thank God nothing did happen where I was, but it was really really scary.

The situation feels a lot more personal.  Whenever I’m at home and I hear these things about Israel, I do care, but it’s not the first thing on my mind every waking second. But being here and knowing this is happening not far from me is really scary and like, I also think being in Israel I have a new perspective, and an inside perspective, which is really nice and I’ve learned a lot because I can see what’s going on. But at the same time it’s very frustrating with all of the misinformation that’s being spread around.

I would like to touch a little bit on the whole social media situation. It really is a big issue for a lot of me and my friends, we’ve been really frustrated about it. There have just been so many false claims being spread in these infographics that have such anti-Semitic undertones and false claims in them, and it’s really hard because it’s your friends and people you know don’t know any better but they’re posting them to help their political agenda and make them seem “progressive,” but like, people don’t know any better and you can’t educate everybody. 

It’s just super frustrating with the spike in antisemitism. The most annoying thing are the celebrities that are posting things and they don’t know what they’re talking about and have such big platforms. People are taking their word for it because they don’t know any better, and it’s just, people are so impressionable on social media.

Just please please please keep educating yourself on the situation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because I’ve learned a lot these past few weeks and I think it’s really important to know as much as you can in order to be able to make sure the right information is spread around. Also just have conversations with people and spark dialogue. I think that is really important in times like this, and yeah.

Interviewed by Caroline Kboudi for the Boiling Point