I Have a Chance

June 2021 · Gaza

After the war, Mehran found refuge in words. He wrote in his diary every night. Through a friend of his mother's he came to Amira, an art teacher who ran a writing workshop for teenagers at one of the community centres still standing.

"You write as if you're trying to mend what's broken inside you," she told him after the second session.

"Maybe. Or I'm trying to find a way that won't destroy me completely. Maybe I'm building myself another character, so I don't have to live only this reality."

"Speaking through a character you invented is still speaking from yourself," she answered. "Sometimes that's exactly how you say what's hard to say."

She saw a rare talent in him, an independent creative ability, and so she pushed him to grow curious about more and more fields – ones that might, one day, open a future for him outside Gaza.

"I've started following basketball too, not just football," he told her, a spark in his eyes.

Sport was his way of expressing his masculinity. He was shy and introverted, and almost never spoke to girls his age. On the pitch, even through a screen, something in him lit up. He loved winning as the underdog, and Hapoel were the eternal underdog. On the forums he read how the club's basketball team had collapsed, and how the fans themselves had rebuilt it in the fifth division under the name "Hapoel Ussishkin" and climbed with it, league after league, until it was back in the top flight, almost a decade ago. He loved that story more than any trophy. Little by little this team too drew his attention, until he fell in love with it as he had with the football team.

One evening they stood on the roof of a building, looking at the lights flickering on the sea.

"Do you think there's a future here?" he asked.

"There's a future anywhere someone is willing to dream of it," said Amira. "Even if it's only a line in a poem that opens up your imagination."

July 2021 · Math Gaza

After that conversation, Mehran opened a YouTube channel. He called it "Math Gaza". Solutions to maths problems, match analysis, short videos of life in Gaza, all in a light, humorous style, in English and Arabic, with touches of Hebrew and a wink.

He kept his love for Hapoel, and for Israeli football in general, hidden from the channel. Hamas didn't tolerate that kind of behaviour, and he feared for his life.

The comments began to arrive from every corner: in Arabic, in English, in Hebrew, and in languages he didn't know. "Knowledge is the only thing they can't block," he wrote in the channel description. The subscribers grew – fifteen hundred within a few weeks, a number that felt to him like a full stadium – and the small criticisms turned into digital hugs.

In August the Delta wave reached Gaza. The school year opened anyway, in the middle of the month, with masks, crowded classrooms and a new rumour of closure every week. Mehran's world shrank even further, but inside this prison there was a window. At moments the screen was a magic gate: he saw himself crossing borders, saw something he had made reach places his body never would.

But the loneliness remained. Even with all the comments and the appreciation, he knew that real life – touch, smells, voices – was missing. Knowledge is power, but also a burden. And a screen, however beautiful, does not replace freedom.

August 2021 · Tel Aviv

The summer passed, and her call-up drew closer. Natalie stood in front of the wardrobe sorting out her kit. Every item marked a transition: from ordinary life to a world of intelligence, of long hours in front of screens and of lethal decisions no one sees. Her heart was pounding – not from fear, but from confusion, between her conscience and the wish to serve.

She opened her laptop, and the video call with Alex began. On the screen: a crooked smile, eyes lit by the freedom of Athens. He was sitting on a small balcony with a cup of espresso, in the golden light of a Greek sunset. Behind him came street noise and someone practising the bouzouki.

"So it's final? You're really staying in Greece? Not even Bennett will bring you back?" she asked, in a low voice full of envy and worry.

"What's it like there?" she added. "It looks like a dream, Alex. The sea, the bars… everything looks so simple for you."

"Simple from the outside, maybe," he answered. "But inside… there's a noise that never stops."

He fell silent for a moment, and blinked, as if the pages of an old memory were turning of their own accord.

"Noise? What do you mean?"

"From the army. Sometimes I still hear the engine of the APC, the shouting on the radio. Even the smell of the dust. You know, I didn't tell you everything when I came back."

Natalie leaned forward. "Then tell me now. Before I go into it myself. I need to know what I'm going into."

Alex scratched his stubble, hesitated, and took a deep breath. "It's not just the fear of combat. It's the fear of what you become there. There were moments I stood facing someone – a kid, almost your age – and I had to decide in a split second whether he was a threat. Those decisions get stuck in your body. Even when they're right, they carve something into you. In the end we're fighting human beings. And there they turned me into a robot with no feelings."

"But you chose to serve. Doesn't that mean it was all right?"

"I chose because I thought we had to defend ourselves. And you're right, sometimes it's necessary. It's our country, the place we were born, the place that gave Mum and Dad a home. Israel is my country, and when it needs me – I'm there. But there's another side too. The side where you see too much, do too much, and turn into a machine. When I left for Athens I thought I was running away from it. But it hasn't gone. It just changes colour."

Natalie said nothing. She looked at the folded uniform on the chair, then back at the screen. "I'm scared, Alex. Not of the marches, not of the weapons. I'm scared of losing something of myself. Of not being who I am now."

"That's the right fear. It means you're going in with your eyes open. You don't have to let the uniform define you. Remember who you are there too – with your friends, with whoever you're going to be. Build yourself boundaries." He sipped his coffee, and his look softened. "I wish someone had told me that before I was called up. I'd have been less lost when I came back."

"Then I'll tell you something back. You don't have to stay a prisoner of what happened. You're already choosing differently. Even if it's only sitting in Athens right now and talking to me."

A thin smile spread across his face. In the distance there was applause, and someone singing an old Greek song.

"Maybe that's why I'm staying here a bit longer," he said. "To learn to be something more than an ex-combat soldier."

"And I'll hold on to what you taught me – not to lose myself. Even in uniform."

The call went on for long minutes more. The small laughs came back, but beneath them something else was flowing: the understanding that both of them carried a great responsibility, and that each of them would have to discover again who they were – inside a life that kept demanding courage, and tenderness too.

Late August 2021 · The base

The first morning at the base was wrapped in the milky light of late summer. The bus from the central station left a trail of dust behind it, and Natalie stepped off with a black backpack, new fatigues and a determined look that hid a storm. She went through the gate, showed her ID, and felt the doors close around her – sealing her inside a new chapter.

After a short course she was posted to a small room in a grey concrete building. Screens surrounded her on every side, small lights blinked, and keyboards waited for her fingers. The job was clear: monitor social-media chatter in Gaza, translate from Arabic, flag suspicious content. That was why they had picked her: the Arabic she had taken as her major at school, sharpened on the short course until she began to hear the slang in it too. Every message that passed before her eyes was a piece of a huge puzzle.

"It's not like reading the news," her commander, a young woman with tired eyes, warned her on the first day. "Understand that there are real lives behind the screen. Someone is sitting there, on the other side."

The work was quiet on the outside and loud on the inside. Eight hours a day she read anger, despair, and sometimes raw violence – and unexpected moments of gentleness too: poems posted after sunset, photos of cats on rooftops, girls complaining about strict parents. She was required to analyse it all with a cool head, but her heart soaked up every word.

At weekends, at home, she tried to explain it to her parents. "It's not just texts," she said one Friday evening in the kitchen, over a cup of tea. "They're people's eyes, only without faces. I read their posts about wanting to kill us, and then I come home and read our posts about wanting to kill them. Everyone wants someone to die, and nobody wants to be dead."

Irina stroked her hand. Vitaly only nodded, his eyes on the table, as if looking there for a comfort that wasn't there.

And yet there were moments when the screens lit up a point of light. One account held her more than all the rest: a channel called Math Gaza. A boy from Gaza who solved maths problems with humour, and analysed football as if it were philosophy. In the third video she watched, she recognised the face – from the tiny profile picture – and then the name: Mehran. The same Mehran who had sent her a friend request in March, after the game against Haifa. "Not shot."

The request was still waiting. She hadn't accepted it. She hadn't deleted it either. A small grey button, between "Confirm" and "Delete", that stayed where it was.

Every time she opened one of his videos, her heart settled, as if someone were reminding her that the world still had a delicate texture besides hatred.

You mustn't contact him, she reminded herself again and again. The procedures were clear: you don't make contact with anyone on the other side of the map. And still, something nagged at her – not the risk, but the proof that there, behind all the harsh posts, lived people who simply wanted to think, to play, to learn.

Once, on a night shift, an old post from May came up in front of her, with no name and no picture. Someone had written about an uncle dug out of the rubble by hand, and about one sentence he had screamed there: "He didn't do anything." There was no threat in it. She read it twice. Something in the rhythm of the sentences reminded her of the boy from the videos – or maybe she only wanted it to. She didn't flag it, and moved on to the next post.

At night, when the base sank into a heavy silence and she was left on shift, she sometimes looked out through the small window, searching for a distant point of light. Sometimes she imagined Alex in a café in Athens. Sometimes she imagined Mehran in front of a computer in Gaza, uploading a new video. She didn't know that their names would one day collide. But something in her already understood that they shared a thin thread – a thread stretched across every border.

The days passed. Natalie developed a cold, almost professional skill at separating emotion from the task. But at night an unease remained: every line she read, every image she flagged, was someone's story. She was walking a tightrope – between guarding security and guarding her soul.