A Parent and a Patriot
"Leaving Israel during a war felt like relief at first. But stepping back into a normal world raises an uncomfortable question: What does it actually mean to love your country?"
By Joanna Landau
Founder, Reputation Nation
During the Gulf War, I was in boarding school in England. My brother was there too, while my parents were living in Israel, near Tel Aviv.
When the Scud missiles started falling, we watched the images on television from the school common room, thousands of miles away. I remember feeling deeply worried about my parents, extended family and friends, watching the footage of missiles hitting the area where they lived and realizing how little control we had over any of it.
At some point I called my mother and said something that felt perfectly logical to me at the time:
“There’s a time to be a patriot and a time to be a parent, and now is the time to be a parent. Please come to England so we’re not worrying about you.”
And they did.
What I remember most clearly from that period is that my mother never seemed entirely comfortable with the decision. She was grateful to be with her children, of course, but there was something uneasy about having left Israel during a moment like that.
At the time I couldn’t really understand it. If you can leave a war zone, why wouldn’t you? Now, decades later, I think I finally do.
Two days ago I left Israel with my younger daughter. The sirens, the shelters, the constant tension had begun to take a real toll on her. She wasn’t coping well with it and wanted to get out of the country. I had already been planning to travel abroad for a conference and then a Passover vacation with my husband (in Israel) and two other children (in the U.S.) joining later, but under these circumstances I decided that if leaving would help my youngest feel safe again, she and I would go.
Our departure was as smooth as you could expect under the circumstances, but even writing that makes me feel weird — what world are we living in that leaving under missile fire can be “smooth”??
We left Tel Aviv at 1am and flew to London via Athens. I remember breaking the journey into small milestones in my mind, almost like a checklist designed to keep anxiety under control:
First get in the taxi and reach the airport without a siren interrupting the drive, which would have meant pulling over and lying on the side of the road somewhere. Check.
When we arrived at the terminal I felt relatively calm. Inside the building there are shelters, and everyone knows exactly where they are. If something happens, you know what to do. Check.
But boarding the plane was different. Sitting on the tarmac, exposed, waiting for takeoff while knowing that a siren could sound at any moment was a strange feeling. If that were to happen, there would be nowhere to run. You are simply sitting there.
Once we took off and seven or eight minutes passed, the plane left Israeli airspace. I held my daughter’s hand and looked at her face as she realized we were out. She was smiling with relief, and I felt a rush of exhilaration that we had managed to get away without incident. Check.
In that moment the relief was overwhelming, even though I knew I had left my family, friends and colleagues behind. For a few hours the sense of having escaped the immediate danger was enough.
But the feeling changed once we arrived in London.
Stepping out of the airport into a world that was functioning completely normally felt strangely disorienting. People were going about their day, traffic was moving, shops were open - anyone up for a musical?
The war that had shaped every hour of life in Israel seemed almost abstract here.
Our taxi driver asked where we were coming from, and when I said Israel he told me his mother was Jewish and that he felt almost honored to be driving us given what we had been through. It was a generous reaction, and he was also remarkably clear in his support for what Israel is doing against Iran and in the broader regional conflict.
It was a warm welcome to London.
But later that evening, after some rest, my daughter and I went out for dinner and I suddenly felt something shift. I was sitting in a restaurant ordering a steak, then walking down Regent Street among people shopping and laughing, while I knew that back home my family and friends had gone in and out of shelters six(!) times that night .
The relief of leaving began to give way to a sense of discomfort. In a strange way, I realized that part of me would rather have been there with them.
And suddenly I understood something about my mother that I hadn’t understood during the Gulf War: Back then, I couldn’t grasp why she felt uneasy leaving Israel even for our sake. Now I could. Because when you feel deeply connected to a place, distance during difficult moments doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like absence, not to say abandonment.
Which brings me to the question of patriotism.
Israel has a very unusual relationship with that concept. I don’t know many countries where airlines organize flights not just to evacuate tourists, but also - and as a priority - to bring citizens back into the war zone. Yet that is exactly what is happening right now, with Israelis around the world boarding flights home even while missiles are flying and sirens are sounding.
At the same time, Israel remains a country deeply divided politically. Many of the same people returning home right now are also the ones protesting the government every week. And yet a recent poll shows that 80+ percent of Israelis support this war.
That combination is not accidental.
In Israel, patriotism does not mean agreeing with your government or approving of every decision made in your country’s name. It means something closer to what we experience within families: You can be furious about certain choices, deeply critical of leadership, worried about the direction things are heading, and still feel an unwavering attachment to the place itself.
When I look at parts of the discourse in the United States, I’m struck to see a different dynamic emerging, especially among younger generations. Disappointment with government policies can easily turn into rejection of the country itself, as if the two cannot be separated.
On the other side of the political spectrum there is a more isolationist version of patriotism, the idea that a country should care only about itself and let the rest of the world fend for itself. I get the sentiment, but it has no connection to reality in a globalized, networked world. We are all connected.
Honestly, neither take on what it means to be a patriot strikes me as particularly convincing.
The version of patriotism I see in Israel is more complex but also more resilient. You can argue fiercely about politics, protest the government, criticize policies, and still love the country enough to want to be there when things are hard.
That is the kind of relationship I want with my country.
Not blind loyalty, and not permanent disappointment either, but something closer to what we accept within our families: the freedom to criticize, the responsibility to care, and the instinct to show up when it matters.
Even when being far away feels safer.
JOANNA LANDAU is a global branding expert and author of the REPUTATION NATION column on Substack.
Am Yisrael Chai 🙏🇮🇱❤️💞
As an American Jew with Israeli cousins who live in Tel Aviv and friends who live elsewhere in Israel, I think I get it.