The Dreamers' Club

September 2021 · Athens

The wind in the Ancient Agora carried the smell of corn roasting over charcoal on the carts below. Alex sat on cold marble steps looking out over Monastiraki Square. He was no longer the excited tourist photographing every painted wall. After a few months in the city he had learned to notice the wrinkles hiding beneath the colours.

In the evenings he kept working at the small bar in Psiri, mixing cocktails for adventurous tourists and local students. That was where he met Lena – a Greek musician with dark brown eyes and a guitar always on her back. She touched the strings as if she were talking to the world, and he found himself swept along by her sound.

"You don't have to keep running all the time," she told him once, after a gig on Ermou Street.

"I'm not running," he smiled. "I'm just… looking for somewhere to breathe."

"Sometimes the breath comes when you stop looking," she answered, in a voice both soft and firm.

Between his shifts and Lena's rehearsals, Alex built himself a quiet routine: conversations with her about politics and economics, short trips to the nearby beaches, a few customers who became friends. But on certain nights, in the small bed in the flat in Psiri, he felt a pang. Longing for his family, and for the sense of belonging he had left behind.

One evening, as he came back from a meeting at the university with Israeli and Lebanese students, Natalie video-called him. Her face on the screen was half worn out by the base, half excited by the new world around her.

"You look shattered. Is everything all right there?"

"It's… intense. Sometimes I feel like I'm swallowing all the rage on the internet. But there are surprising moments too. There's a boy from Gaza, I follow his videos. He talks about football as if it's philosophy. I'm almost certain he's a Hapoel fan. He doesn't say."

Alex smiled, and his eyes softened. "Football really can be philosophy. Maybe he reminds you of me a bit?"

"Maybe. But more than that, he reminds me there are people there who think, who wrestle with things, who love. Not just news and slogans." She stopped, and her gaze dropped. "You know, sometimes I ask myself what I'd think if I'd been born there. About the girl who's typing up reports right now on posts about freedom and war. How do you even draw borders in the soul?"

Alex was silent. The wind blew around him, as if urging him to answer.

"The borders in the soul are less clear than the lines on a map. Sometimes I think we're all prisoners of the stories we were told. But if we listen to the other side's stories, maybe we'll break free. They're people like us. They get screwed by politics too. I'm sure if I sat down right now with your Gazan football philosopher, we'd be friends in a second. And if he's not a Hapoel fan – five minutes with me and he will be. Maccabi and Beitar are too racist for him anyway. So it's Hapoel or nothing!"

Natalie laughed, and didn't tell him the name. Nor that the boy had once sent her a friend request, and that it was still waiting on her phone. Alex had promised friendship to a "philosopher" with no name. He didn't know the philosopher already had a name, and a face, and that his sister knew both. He would forget this conversation. Natalie wouldn't.

October 2021 · The base

Natalie began to open up to friends in the unit. She found herself sitting up through long nights with Noa, a soldier from Jerusalem from a national-religious family, who had started studying psychology even before her service.

"You look like someone trying to understand everything to the bottom," Noa told her, "and it's burning you up from the inside."

"Maybe. I just find it hard to separate the screen from the person behind it. I see their eyes between the lines, looking back at me. Sometimes our work here feels like trying to read poetry in a broken language. I'm missing something human in the middle of the search for 'threats'."

"Emotion can mislead," Noa declared. "If we get attached to a profile, we develop empathy for it and the logic of our analysis goes wrong. It can make us fail at the job."

"Don't you think what we do also makes innocent civilians there hate us? And then want to hurt us?"

"The history of the Jewish people has brought us to a place where we have no choice but to defend ourselves by every means. Natalie, they want to kill us. Yes, there are good people there, I'm sure, who'd be happy to live with us in peace. But most of the people in Gaza want to destroy Israel. Do you understand that?"

"I'm sure they say exactly the same about us. And I don't want to destroy them, and I don't know many people who do. Maybe the whole problem starts with the wrong picture each side has of the other? There were times, before we were born, when Israelis walked around Gaza freely. Went shopping, drank coffee."

"Natalie, you're naive. The lovely stories from back then are comforting fairy tales. From the day we were born our lives have been in danger. Getting on a bus meant being afraid of a bombing, we got used to sirens and rockets, we all know someone who was murdered. We're up against a terror organisation that wants to drive us out of our own country. There's no peace with them."

They were silent for a long time after that.

She also had Shiran, a soldier with a sharp sense of humour, who kept reminding her there was life outside the screens. They met in the evenings on a bench behind the dining hall and swapped stories.

"You don't have to let them break you," Shiran said one evening.

"I'm trying. But sometimes it feels like I'm carrying around all the anger of the people I read."

Shiran shrugged. "Anger doesn't belong to you. Let it go back to its owners."

Autumn 2021 · Shati camp

Mehran spent his weekends on the roof, building a small antenna out of old bits of metal in the hope of improving the reception. After the war he was determined to make something new out of the wreckage around him. The channel kept growing. People sent him maths questions; others asked for explanations of team formations and for more authentic videos from Gaza. A student in Italy invited him to join an online study group.

In the evenings his friend Hisham came round with a small radio, and they sat together on the roof talking about distant dreams.

"Do you really think you'll be able to leave one day?" Hisham asked.

"I don't know. I'm still one of those idiots who believe there'll be peace. That I'll drive to Tel Aviv with my wife, and the Jew from Tel Aviv will come to us in Gaza to eat hummus." Mehran smiled. "But I have to believe there's something beyond what we can see from here. If I don't believe there's hope, what stops me joining Hamas and becoming a martyr? What keeps me sane, still wanting to learn? Why would I even want to talk to the world outside, if I don't believe we'll be free one day?" He looked at the sea. "I'll be at Bloomfield yet, for the derby against Maccabi. Sure, we'll probably lose that derby. I'm jinxed, I'm from Gaza. Luck isn't something that follows us around."

He didn't tell Hisham what was under the stairs. In the plastic bag behind the gas canisters, the flare and the orange smoke grenade from the fishing boat were still waiting. The house had shaken in May, and they had survived. He was saving them for Gate 5.

They looked out to sea, where the waves seemed to speak a language without borders. They wanted to be the generation that walked out free. But all around them hatred, fighting and constant incitement had taken deep root – from every side, from everyone with an interest.

In September, after six security prisoners escaped from Gilboa Prison, a few scattered rockets were fired from the Strip again, and Israel responded with strikes. Mehran stood at the broken window, which still hadn't been replaced since May, his hands pressed on the crumbling concrete sill, his eyes scanning the sky. His father laid a hand on his shoulder.

"It's a broken balance, habibi," Ahmed whispered. "But we have to hold on to what's ours."

Mehran, seventeen now, had already been through it all. "Hot Winter", "Cast Lead", "Pillar of Defence", "Protective Edge", and now "Guardian of the Walls" – the operations were part of a routine that came round every few years, ever since he was born. Cat and mouse, chicken and egg. Anyone can choose how to see it, but it's a wheel that never stops turning: Israel strikes Gaza in response to Hamas rockets, which are fired in response to the killing of Hamas commanders, which comes in response to attacks in Israeli cities, and so on. Response upon response, breeding revenge upon revenge.

He felt the rift inside him: the wish to be part of the homeland, to defend the land and the houses crammed together like cells in a broken hive; and against it, the fear – fear of the fighting that steals lives, of the missiles that come without warning, of a reality that bends the will like a dry branch.

"I want peace, Dad," he murmured. "But how? Everything hurts."

That night he curled up under a thin blanket and watched a pirate stream of a Hapoel basketball game. The red light that crossed borders. But even there the colours looked faded to him, like a dream dissolving.

26 November 2021

And then came another variant: Omicron. Creeping like a shadow, more contagious than anything before it. The World Health Organization gave it a name, and within a day Israel announced it was closing its skies to foreigners again. The world trembled once more.

Natalie stood in the queue for the booster, the air cold and sterile as an operating theatre. The needle went into her arm like a memory from the start of the year, from the first dose, when she was still at school. "Breath as a weapon," she whispered to herself, and felt the suffocation – from the pandemic, from the screens, from everything. She wanted to protect Israel, and the future she dreamed of. But she was afraid of what this fighting, even the kind behind a screen, was doing to the soul.

"We're losing ourselves," she told Alex on the phone that evening, and her voice shook.

These months had laid bare the deep cracks. Mehran had lost an uncle and found a voice. Alex had seen destruction, and chosen to look for an embrace somewhere else. Natalie had fought, and worried about the future. The collective cracked a little more. But the dreams – thin, painful – stayed connected, like a red thread running through the dark.