"The War is the Least of My Problems;" Reflections of a Returning Resident on D-Day and a Heartfelt Ode to Israel's South

That's not to say the war isn't a problem, believe me.

I finally got my voice back, after two plus weeks of being sick from not sleeping in Tel Aviv for the first three weeks of this war against the IRGC, so am now at that perfect Demi Moore-esque level of hoarseness, and just needed one more good night's sleep...

But Iran made sure that didn't happen with this morning's "rise and shine" missile attack. I was just impressed that I woke up for it, as that is my biggest fear - that I won't.

Sure, the phone blares air raid sirens in advance that missiles are coming, followed by the famous "bugubugubugubugu" that you will have to hear in my "16 Candles" video to truly understand - and then your phone does the real siren sound at the same time as the outside siren blares - which is loud.

Warnings and Ballistic Missile Alerts

But we are on week five of sirens at all hours of the day and night - at 2am, 4am, 7am...and if you can't fall back asleep easily, (me!) - then when you finally do, you might truly be zonked out. But today I spent my day on another pleasurable task - a hundredth unsent draft to my estranged family entitled "In the Event of my Death," as now for eleven years I have been trying to solve this unsolvable problem of who will handle things if and when the worst should happen - and now that there are missiles every five minutes - it feels like the right time to tell these humans on the other side of the world - that I must be buried in Israel - and outside. And I recently learned that this isn't so simple. In fact, it's a bit like rocket science, so despite my other "friend" yelling at me for the past hours about obsessing over something so ridiculous - (I can pretty much guarantee he has emergency contacts who would know where to toss him - not to sound insensitive of course) - but truly - my mother's friend was recently buried in a colosseum-like structure outside Tel Aviv, which was like going into a dark indoor place and finding her at the bottom of a "stack" - almost like she was put in a drawer - and this was traumatizing for me and her other two friends visiting. "But what do you care? You'll be dead!"

Well, I do care. I've spent my life searching for calm - a home - and a place to rest - and came very close to finally finding it on this second move back to Israel - but I didn't find it. In fact - it was snatched away in the worst way imaginable, so do I really not deserve a small patch of grass for eternity?

I dare say I do. For the past six months, I have hopped around Israel watching other people's dogs, as they go away happily to get married and have family trips and all kinds of other things I used to do as well - and I pretended that in one of these random dog sitting towns, I would suddenly find a random part of Israel that I wanted to call home.

But that was silly and I knew it before I began. Because this move back to Israel wasn't random - it wasn't "Oh - I will just go back to Tel Aviv and find some random sales job," - the last time I moved here wasn't random either - it was to make Israeli PR a real thing - in English - on TV - which I saw as our weakest point. (Was I right or was I right?) After months and months of trying to do what I moved here for back then, I realized there were no such jobs available - and I ended up in - get this - the online poker industry - where I managed to meet - (get this!) - my German boyfriend.

Poker star Chris Ferguson and I at the WSOP 2007 in Las Vegas (NOT my boyfriend)

So, I had moved to Israel to help the country and meet a Jewish guy, and then I left after working a random job in gambling with a non-Jewish German. It was so funny that I started to write a book about it, "but who the hell are you?" my mother kindly exclaimed. "You're not famous - so you can't write a memoir." So, I put my head down and my tail between my legs, which made it uncomfortable to write - and then watched "memoirs by nobody" take over the literary world, because my instincts had been dead on, but my decision to share them with my family had been dead wrong.

Now - this move was different, and even more Zionistic than the first. It came after I flew into the initial war weeks after October 7th, an attack that woke me out of a nine-year stupor in North America, that began with my mother's death and quickly turned into a tsunami of loss of a brother, a niece and a nephew for reasons that still remain unknown. Grudges and toxic dynamics played a role, which for me, had meant my entire life up to that point had been a lie - and every major decision ever made (including quitting professional ballet training and leaving Israel) - fruitless.

I stewed in that reality for nine years, trying to fix it solo for eight of them, and inviting these now-strangers to various meetings to work it out - but was repeatedly denied and rejected.

So on October 7th, I was now in Charlotte, North Carolina, and had just gotten home from the Farmer's Market, and had about an hour to kill before working the last concert of Live Nation's season - Luke Bryan - when I turned on the news and wondered, "Why is Wolf Blitzer working on a Saturday?"

And then I saw the headline - "Citizens of Israel - We Are at War."

For the first time in ages, I was reminded I was Israeli, and felt my long-lost identity rise strongly to the surface. As I watched the hostage families on TV beg for our help and assistance, I found myself physically moving closer and closer to the television, until I realized that I couldn't actually climb inside of it to help.

Hadas Kalderon of Kibbutz Nir Oz, held pictures of her two (formerly) kidnapped children - Sachar and Erez.

And that was when I realized that I needed to come back. And I had no fear of the war. How could I have fear of the war?

Terror to me was not having an emergency contact since 2015. What could be scarier than that?

So, on November 16th, 2023, I landed in Tel Aviv for the first time in eleven years, where the gorgeous woman at the airport stared at my very, very, very expired Israeli travel document.

"Ken...ani yoda'at..." I said in very rusty, barely remembered, never-great-to-begin-with Hebrew I hadn't used in more than a decade. (Yes...I know.) "But my mom died, and she was Jewish and nobody called, and the families on TV...and I needed to help, and I'm going to write - and - slicha. Slicha." (I'm sorry. I'm sorry).

And to my surprise, I looked up and she was crying, too - just me and her in the empty Ben Gurion airport, and she even said, "Toda." (Thank you). And my heart began to fill...and then I met the lady on the train, and she said not to stay in Tel Aviv, but to go to Eilat or the Dead Sea where the families were staying...where the October 7th communities were evacuated to, and that sounded like a good idea, but also like something I had no idea how to do. And then I stepped out of the train station into my Tel Aviv - my home of five years in my 20s - and the unrecognizable silence - the heavy thick sadness that drenched everything - didn't phase me, as this was exactly the way it should be. Everywhere.

I was home. This ever-elusive idea I'd spent my life chasing, always had snatched away after far too many sacrifices...and I realized....

I'd had it twenty years ago...and oh no, how many years had I lost?

(Just 15). I got into action for the first time in a decade. This website was built, I found my way to Hostage Square, and found I had the nerve to approach the brothers, aunts and best friends holding the signs of their beautiful family members and friends - stolen by Hamas.

Interviews were scheduled. Comprehensive pieces were written. Children were released from the hands of the Hamas terrorists who had stolen them. Volunteering in Hostage Square. Meeting visiting trauma writers. Talking to tourists from France, Australia, everywhere - trying to escape the hate that at that time - still surprised us.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, sat that lady from the train... "Don't stay in Tel Aviv...the survivors are in the south..." Yes, but how. How?

And then - a series of miracles happened - from writing about Itay Svirsky, Z"L, to meeting his best friend, to meeting the man I had most wanted to meet when stuck in America watching TV - Mr. Tom Hand, originally from Ireland - all three - from Kibbutz Be'eri, now considered the Auschwitz of October 7th.

Me and Tom Hand

At Disney World with Emily Hand, former hostage

I rented my first car in Israel - (why not during a war?) - and actually made my way to the Dead Sea, where I met Mr. Hand (and his amazing daughter Emily), and I then got a private tour of Kibbutz Be'eri, and since that day in February 2024, my heart stayed exactly where it stopped beating - in front of the house that Itay Svirsky Z"L was taken from, after witnessing the murder of his mother. It stopped beating for his friend by my side, it stopped beating for the community and it stopped beating for myself - as I felt something I'd never felt quite this profoundly - purpose. Divine purpose and a sudden mission to tell these stories often and loudly, to anyone and everyone. This was going to be my life's work.

Itay Svirsky, who was taken hostage on October 7th and murdered in Gaza on Day 99. Both of his parents, Rafi and Orit, were also murdered in their homes on October 7th, 2023

Itay Svirsky's grave in Be'eri on February 17th, 2026, which should have been his 41st birthday.

I came and went for the next year and a half as I still had rent to pay in the US and had nobody to help me shut down my "life" there, but the move was being planned, and I was sure I would easily find my way into this kibbutz, to help rebuild it, to tell their story, to continue using the depth of my own pain to describe their grief and agony to the world.

I was now going to have the true Aliyah experience that I wished I'd had the first time. The pioneer experience, the "community" one - and as I imagined it, I felt the inner craving, for peace, for calm, for belonging and to be with a group of people who understood the worst of the absolute worst - and they would accept me, because they already were - because I understood them, their grief and the black hole in their soul that felt like it would never refill with anything other than darkness.

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Yet - this isn't what came to pass, and though the details matter little, what does matter is that for the past six months, (after returning to Israel to live 11 months ago), I have been feeling as though the south may not want me, and though the south is a big place and I certainly hadn't yet tackled all of it, this was just my feeling, and it was discouraging.

I had no understanding of how a kibbutz worked, and learned everything "on the fly" and after it was too late. I also wasn't wanting to live on just any kibbutz, but in the areas that sustained the worst of the October 7th attacks. In other words, I had essentially taken on the most impossible challenge of all - yet I was determined, and my heart was in the right place. "I wouldn't even think of trying to infiltrate one of those kibbutzim now," said a woman I met in Tel Aviv last year. Infiltrate.

That's the same word used when Hamas broke into Israel. Was I "infiltrating"?

Surely not. All the same, I decided to take a break from the south, and reluctantly returned to the "center," to Tel Aviv and its surroundings, and began an exhausting way to live for free: dog sitting. Jumping from place to place, while normal families and couples traveled somewhere exciting - and I lived in their home and walked their dogs. And this was okay, and I saw some nice places, but the fear arrived - that I could end up taking some meaningless job in Tel Aviv again, selling something I don't care about, and why live in Israel if I am going to do something I don't want to do? When I have heaps of passion to do exactly what I had been doing for two years for free? So, I signed up for a film class, despite my sort of "homeless" or at least "transitional" state, to learn editing skills that would help me make videos and do less writing, and this course would also help me to make a proper documentary. And I have made one, with a hostage family from the south, and am now working on making it longer before I submit it to film festivals. But as proud as I am of myself for continuing to do the work I came here to do, the weighing problem continued to get heavier - where was I going to live?

And then...the war started...and the dog sitting was going to stop. Trips were canceled, and moving around was unsafe. The center, too, was a nightmare - with ten missile attacks a day - at all hours, day and night. My experiment in the center had only proven to me that my heart was still in the south, hands down, no questions asked, and I had moved back to this country to help the south, so I needed to continue pursuing this goal, despite its unforeseen challenges. I needed to not give up on it, as the things I was hearing in Tel Aviv were becoming more and more irrational. One friend said, "But you were not a hostage, so why do you care? These stories don't need to be told. There were like - two Holocaust movies forty years later. Who cares?"

Um. Okay.

"You are one of so few people who make Aliyah with a clearly defined purpose," said a far more reasonable woman I met in Be'ersheva, Israel's largest city in the south, after I had returned at last for a visit. "So why would you now consider anything but living in the south? You belong in the south."

I...belong...? And she pushed and she sold and she encouraged me to seriously consider Be'ersheva. So, I did. I moved into my apartment less than a week ago, but since returning I've had another morale-busting experience, and it sort of...shot the wind out of my sails, just as I'd boarded the boat. I have read other similar stories from people who packed their bags and raced to Israel following the October 7th attack, and I recently sometimes want to shake Israelis, gently of course, but shake them nonetheless.

Because we know what you have been through, as much as we possibly can. We may not have been there on the day, so we can't empathize with your exact experience, but we empathized enough to drop our good jobs and our nice apartments and do more than click on a "donate" button. We moved back to Israel during a war (and then another war, and then another...) because your pain was feelable all over the world. It seeped through the glass of our HD television screens and radiated into our very being - for those of us who truly had the capacity to tune in and never change the channel.

To the very few of us abroad who did more than pay attention, but who raced here to help, we did so because we are you. You are our hearts - you are our souls - and you became our reason to be. Use us.

Put us to work.

Embrace us, as we struggle to read the signs and can't make basic phone calls and are thrilled if we understand even half of a full sentence on the news.

Because just like in the early days when your grandparents came here from all over the world and built these communities that bring you so much pride - that is us, now, the new hardcore Zionists. The world is squeezing us out, we felt it out there - the hatred of us and the hatred of you and the hatred of this tiny but incredible little country, the land of which is taking the impact of ballistic missiles - and we came - and we are staying. We left there for a reason, and we came here for a reason, and... That reason is you - our love for you.

To peace in Israel, freeing the people of Iran and finding a small patch of grass that will accept little old me, a random single person who loves this tiny spec of land more than anything. Amen.

Beautiful Kibbutz Nir Yitzchak, where I volunteered with twelve 1-yr. old babies for three months

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Melanie Preston is a Jewish writer who returned to Israel immediately after the October 7th terror attack to meet the affected families and tell their stories to the world. To support her work, her writing and her shaky new life in Israel, click here to contribute to her GoFundMe. All donations, no matter how small, will be used for bare bones expenses during this highly intense war. With gratitude and love from Israel - wishing all of us Shalom.