Analysis of pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses
I am an Israeli-born Jew and MIT graduate from the class of 1985. My family has long roots in Israel and first immigrated to what was then part of the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s. I was four years old when the Six Day War broke out. I still remember the weeks preceding the war. I was too young to understand what war meant, but I could feel the overwhelming fear. It hung in the air, and I have often used the cliché that it was so thick you could cut it with a knife. I don’t remember the war itself; I was in a bomb-shelter, but I am told I would not stop crying because I wanted my doll. Two years later, my immediate family immigrated to the United States. When the Yom Kippur War broke out, I was safe, living in a Boston suburb, but my cousin was badly injured.