Paul Bass Photo
Tzippy Shmilovitz.
The 5,591 miles separating New Haven and Tel Aviv got a lot farther since Oct. 7 for Tzippy Shmilovitz.
Since then, Shmilovitz worries if three hours go by and she doesn’t hear from her brother.
Her brother lives in Tel Aviv. Shmilovitz, who grew up in Israel, lives in New Haven, her base as a reporter covering the U.S. for Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yediot Ahranot.
Since Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7 and butchered and kidnapped over 1,000 civilians, and Israel in turn bombed and invaded the Gaza Strip, rockets have been fired toward Tel Aviv daily.
“Every day, every night,” Shmilovitz’s family hears sirens. “They’re in shelters twice a day.” So Shmilovitz keeps in constant touch.
She also keeps in touch with a lifelong best friend who lost three family members on Oct.. 7. The Hamas invaders entered a “peacenik kibbutz” called Be’eri and murdered three members of the friend’s sister’s family. Hamas has taken seven other members of the family hostage. The youngest hostage is 3.
“Guilt is a real thing for me as an Israeli who lives here and I know everybody’s there. You feel guilty,” Shmilovitz said Thursday during an appearance on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. “The country is in complete shock … You can compare it to 9/11.” (Click here to watch a recent WNHH FM interview with Palestinian-American Faisal Saleh.)
On the other hand, Shmilovitz focuses on keeping a level head — to do her job filing daily stories explaining what’s happening in the U.S. to Yediot readers back in Israel.
She traveled to Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., to report on a campus where a student was arrested for posting death threats against Jewish students. Thursday’s assignment: “Elon Musk reminding us that he’s an anti-Semite himself. … He turned Twitter into a Nazi haven.”
In coming months Shmilovitz plans to visit Israel to check in on her family and friends in person. Until then she, like so many others of Middle Eastern descent living abroad, is taking it “one day at a time.” And struggling to find hope.
“You’ve got to have hope. Otherwise what’s the point? Hopefully the kidnapped will come back and people can start grieving and heal, and maybe at some point we’ll have a leader that will decide: This doesn’t work. Let’s make peace,” she said.
“At the end, peace is the only way.”
Click on the above video to watch the full discussion with Tzippy Shmilovitz about the Israel-Hamas war, on WNHH FM’s“Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of Dateline New Haven.
"Let’s make peace,” she said. At the end, peace is the only way." Absolutely true, peace is the only way, but with whom? The Palestinian people, for sure! But, with Hamas and the Islamic Jihad - no.