Escape from the Middle East

I woke early on Friday, February 27th to a cloudy day in Jerusalem. I had arrived the night before from Cyprus, where I’d spent a few days exploring beaches and ancient ruins. It had been quite relaxing and I was looking forward to my final weekend reconnecting with family I hadn’t seen in a long time, eating some of my favorite foods, and revisiting places that felt familiar. I had lived in Jerusalem when I was 18 years old and therefore felt very sentimental about wanting to revisit my favorite spots after a long time away.

That morning, my cousins were picking me up for a day in the countryside near Beit Shemesh. After we parked off the main road, we hiked out to a field covered in anemone (calanit) flowers. Israel’s national flower, sometimes called the “blood of the Maccabees”, was in full bloom, and it was stunning. We set up a picnic with hummus, falafel, pita, and salads, passed around small cups of Turkish coffee, and caught up on the seven years since we’d last seen each other. The earlier rain had cleared, leaving a bright blue sky. There was no cell service where we were. In many ways, we were insulated from what was about to come. It felt like a perfect day.

Reluctantly, we packed up and headed back toward Jerusalem. Sitting in traffic, my phone reconnected and the news began to come through. There was a message from the U.S. ambassador recommending that people consider leaving Israel on commercial flights that day. In the car, we talked about the possibility of something happening that weekend. Still, it felt improbable. There had been weeks of back and forth around negotiations—why now?

Jerusalem is a city unlike anywhere else on earth. By mid-afternoon on Fridays, everything begins to shut down for Shabbat. Shops close, buses stop running, and a quiet settles over the city. I briefly looked at flights leaving that night, but it felt too late, too complicated, too extreme. It seemed unreasonable to upend my plans when so much was still uncertain. I was scheduled to leave in less than 48 hours anyway. So I did what people do when they don’t want to believe something is about to happen: I carried on. I went to dinner, had a wonderful evening with family, and let myself be reassured by the calm confidence around me that nothing would happen.

The next morning, I overslept a bit, as dinner had run late. I had just finished talking to my husband and was getting ready to grab some breakfast in the hotel lobby before heading to a nearby synagogue. That’s when the first alerts began. I had downloaded the missile warning app the night before, mostly at my cousins’ suggestion. Now my phone was buzzing, and I found myself half-dressed, heart pounding, grabbing clothes and shoes. I ran down to the shelter (yes, even though everyone tells you not to run). In that first moment, it did not feel real. There was a lot of confusion as all the guests from the hotel gathered together exchanging information.

While we waited for the all-clear, the news began to trickle in that Israel and the U.S. had attacked Iran. Somehow, my friends and family outside of Israel were getting updates faster than I was, even as I was living through it in real time. That was the moment the trip divided cleanly into before and after. What followed was a day of making strange choices and continuing to question them. Sirens went off again and again. I debated whether to walk to the Old City for lunch with my cousin, then decided it wasn’t safe since I didn’t know where the shelters were along the way. Eventually, I met up with a friend as we were both alone, and we decided to walk somewhere closer for lunch. Even though it meant leaving the hotel, I had no food on hand as nothing was open on Shabbat, and somehow I felt safer being with someone else.

On the way, we were pulled into a synagogue where people were taking shots, eating, and carrying on as though incoming missiles were just another part of the day. That was one of the strangest things about Jerusalem in those hours: the normalization of the unacceptable. By afternoon, we were playing Settlers of Catan, eating lunch, and periodically being interrupted to go to the bomb shelter with my friend’s friend and her two small children.

That evening, when things quieted for a few hours, I went out to get food and do my laundry. It felt almost absurd to be thinking about clean clothes in the middle of it all, but flights were already being canceled, and I no longer knew how long I might be there. It suddenly felt important to be prepared, even in small ways. That night, the sirens came at midnight, 2:00 a.m., 4:00 a.m., and 6:00 a.m.

By Sunday morning, I was exhausted. It’s very hard to fall back asleep when you have adrenaline coursing through your body from the sirens. I managed to sleep another hour or so before getting a text from my husband with an article about flights leaving from Taba, Egypt. At first, I could barely think clearly enough to deal with it: I was just too tired.

I think a lot of people, in those first few days after the war started, believed traveling through Egypt would be dangerous. I certainly did. It felt like a preposterous idea. But while huddled in the bomb shelter at 2:00 a.m., a couple of Hungarian tourists staying at the hotel mentioned their embassy was escorting them to Egypt for a flight home that day. Hearing that made it feel less extreme somehow. I looked up flights and saw one for Monday afternoon. I had no idea how I would get to the airport, but it was more than 24 hours away, so I assumed I’d figure out something. In a panic, I booked the ticket, knowing that if it was already in the news, it would likely sell out. It did shortly after.

I had hesitated once already. I did not want to do it again.

I started working backwards to figure out how to get to the flight. I knew I needed to reach southern Israel that day to make the flight the next afternoon. A friend shared the name of a transport company running people to the border. I called. The man told me they already had a transfer leaving from Tel Aviv and that if I could confirm immediately, they could pick me up in Jerusalem by 11:00.

It was already around 9:30am. I hadn’t eaten, hadn’t brushed my teeth, hadn’t really started the day. But I said yes.

I threw everything into my bags as fast as I could, without care or order. Then the sirens went off again, which made me grateful I hadn’t waited to pack up. When the driver messaged that he had arrived outside the hotel, I rushed through the lobby, handed over my key to reception, and climbed into the shuttle.

I was so grateful that I had snacks, water, and some cash on hand, as I always do when I travel. In our rush to reach the border, there was no time to stop, and with missiles overhead, it wasn’t safe to stay on the road any longer than necessary. While in the car, I booked a hotel in Taba, on the Egyptian side of the border, for that night. The rest of the plan: where I would sleep the next night, how I would get home from Athens, was a problem for my future self to figure out. I was operating in survival mode, putting one foot in front of the other and solving one problem at a time.

The border crossing itself was a mess. On the Israeli side, it was relatively straightforward but on the Egyptian side, it was disorganized and tensions were running high. I had to repeat my nationality and destination over and over to various guards. Some tourists were forced to provide bribes to the agents working the various immigration stations. At one point a guard held onto my passport and called over a superior. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on, and every time I reached another checkpoint, the same thing happened. What was wrong with my passport? It was the most afraid I had ever been entering a new country (and I have traveled to over 50). A lot of the other travelers that day were getting into arguments with the Egyptian authorities. I saw one take a German tourist’s passport away from him and threaten not to give it back because he was being ‘disrespectful’. I kept my head low and tried to be as agreeable as possible.

Eventually, they let me through.

The shuttle service I booked dropped me at the hotel before heading on to Sharm El Sheikh, a three hour drive further south through the Sinai (I later heard from one of the other travelers that she had ultimately been left by herself on the side of a road in the dark by the Egyptian driver to fend for herself when he couldn’t find the hotel. Can you imagine?).

Meanwhile, it was like I had entered another universe at my Taba hotel. It was an enormous complex, but it seemed like there were only a handful of tourists. It was the off season afterall, not quite warm enough to enjoy the beach or the enormous pool. After getting to my room, I wandered the eerily quiet promenade in search of food, forgetting for a moment that it was Ramadan and that nothing would be open again until after sunset.

I hadn’t had anything to eat all day besides the assorted snacks I had traveled with. Thankfully that evening, I was able to enjoy a delicious Iftar (Muslim break fast meal), complete with a huge buffet of Egyptian dishes and listened, faintly, to distant booms across the border. I was safe, technically—but only just.

The next day, I hired a taxi to drive me to Taba airport, which appeared out of nowhere after 45 minutes through the empty Sinai desert (and after a 45 minute wait for the police to clear a caravan of tourist vans). The hotel staff and Egyptian border agents hadn’t believed me when I said I had a flight from there, as the airport had only reopened the day before. Somehow, the authorities had gotten it up and running, and the departure hall was packed. It was complete chaos.

I waited four hours just to get a boarding pass, wondering the entire time whether I would actually make it out. There was no food, no water, internet or cell service. Children ran around the departure hall while their parents tried to make sense of what was happening.

By the time I reached the gate, the sun was already lowering. There were rumors the airport couldn’t operate in the dark because there were no runway lights. Boarding was delayed. Bags were loaded slowly. Once on the plane, the captain announced the airport would be closing in 30 minutes and that we needed to get off the ground immediately. I sat there watching the light fade, feeling the tension build with each passing minute, unsure whether we would actually leave. I searched the eyes of the passengers around me—somewhere between pleading and disbelief. Would the plane take off? What would happen if it didn’t?

I sat there with knots in my stomach, watching the sky darken, unable to believe any of it would work—until it did.

When the plane finally lifted off the ground, I burst into tears.

The release of all the tension I had been holding onto for days washed over me. I had been trying to keep it together, but suddenly I could feel everything at once. I didn’t care that I was in a public space. We were all travelers who had each gone through our own version of something harrowing to get on that plane. Each of us had taken a leap of faith to be there.

We landed in Athens, and I felt like I could kiss the ground. My bags arrived. I went through passport control. The American embassy had set up a desk offering assistance, which felt almost ironic at that point. Here, now, you want to help me get out of a war zone—when I’ve already made it out?

I took a taxi to a hotel. When there was an issue with my booking and I explained where I had just come from, the staff upgraded me without hesitation. That night, I sat down to a quiet dinner—beet salad, risotto, a glass of wine—and felt, for the first time in days, a sense of stillness return.

And almost immediately, a sense of guilt.

Why had I been able to leave when so many could not? My heart hurt for the family and friends I had left behind. For me, this would one day be a powerful travel story. For them—and for so many others across the region—it was the beginning of a conflict they could not simply walk away from.

What has complicated this story for me ever since is not just what happened, but the fact that I was there at all.

I know what Israel represents right now in much of the world, and I understand the judgment that can come with choosing to go there. I had my own reasons. I wanted to see my family. I wanted to visit places that had been very important to me from my time living in the country as a teenager. I wanted to bear witness to what it was like there now, during and after the war. How had it changed, and how had it stayed the same? I wanted to remind myself of what gets lost in the story when a place is reduced to headlines and ideology, when you look beyond the black and white, right and wrong. None of that erased the danger, and none of it made the politics less complicated. But I went anyway, and that’s on me. I don’t regret it for a moment.

I’ve carried a lot of anger toward the U.S. government for how the situation was handled. If they knew they were initiating a war, why weren’t evacuation plans already in place? Why, when I reached out on the first day, was I told there was no plan, while other governments were already escorting out their citizens? I try not to dwell on it. I’m safe. With help, I was able to afford my way out. But it’s sobering to confront the limits of what you assume your government will do for you. As someone who travels often, I always believed that safety net existed. Now I understand more clearly: when it matters most, you are largely on your own—or reliant on the people who love you.

Even though it was only a few days, it’s crazy to process what that environment did to my body—the sleeplessness, the hyper-awareness, the constant low-grade panic every time my phone started buzzing uncontrollably with it’s deafening warning sound. Even that small glimpse of life organized around shelters and alerts made one thing very clear: no one should get used to that. The fact that people do is not proof that it’s bearable—it’s proof of how much human beings can normalize something terrible when they have no choice.

If there’s a silver lining, it is this: I proved to myself that when something goes wrong, I can gather the strength to do the hard thing. Not a sense of invincibility, but a quieter confidence in what I’m capable of. Through it all, I wasn’t overcome by fear, because somewhere deep down, I trusted I would find a way forward.

And I did.