This is part of our series on young voices in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last week, America Tonight profiled 16-year-old Farah Baker, whose live tweeting of the war around her made her a sudden spokesgirl for Gazan youth. Read her story.
With an ear-to-ear grin, Sara Merson bounced up and down on the stage of Israel’s “The Voice.” Her rendition of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” had passed muster; come the fall, she’d be on the show, broadcast to more than 1 million Israeli homes.
The judges just advised her to return a little more “spiced up.”
Two weeks later, Merson, 22, had shed the summer dress and baggy denim. With long hair and dark-rimmed eyes – invoking Fiona Apple or Alanis Morissette – she sang a stripped-down cover of Matisyahu’s hit “One Day” from the inside of a bomb shelter in the southern Israeli town of Ashdod.
Merson’s music video, which has now been viewed more than 100,000 times on YouTube, is more than a pretty appeal for peace. It also features scenes from Ashdod, where Merson lives, including the wreckage of a gas station struck by a Hamas rocket last month, and her boyfriend's family fleeing to a bomb shelter amid rocket attacks.
"This is so real and this is so near me. My boyfriend was supposed to get his car washed that morning," she explained. "We decided to take the train, so we decided to get the car washed a different day, but he would have been there."
Merson, originally from Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., moved to Ashdod last year. Unlike the locals, she said she isn’t war-worn. The first big rocket attack to hit her town threw her into such a panic that she said her boyfriend nearly called an ambulance.
"It was just like the loudest boom you'd ever heard," she said. "I thought I was having a nervous attack."
Rocket sirens go off in Ashdod several times a day. Those 45 seconds she has to get to the shelter are the only times she leaves the house, Merson said.
So when she turned to social media and saw commentary that that there wasn't any real danger for Israelis, she said she felt compelled to do something.
How is it #IsraelUnderAttack when that f***ing country starting bombing #gaza first......nobody is dying in Israel...they're celebrating....
— Salam ✨سلام (@GetALifebruh) July 24, 2014Why aren't loads of people dying in Israel if the rockets were being launched from gaza
They're just using that as excuse to take over gaza
— i follow back bc ily (@NarryMyDream) July 28, 2014“People were saying how, 'Nobody's really dying in Israel, nothing must be happening, they must be making this up,’” Merson explained. "And I felt as though… it's almost my duty to share what's going on here.”
Merson says what's happening in Israel would never be tolerated in America.
“I’m coming from a place where this is unheard of,” she said. “So, no I don’t get sleep, because that rocket, maybe it won’t [be intercepted by] the Iron Dome that time, maybe it will fall on my house, maybe it will kill me.”
She acknowledges her plight likely won’t ignite much sympathy, compared with more than 1,800 Gazan casualties. But a key difference, she said, is that the Israeli army, unlike Hamas, isn’t trying to target civilians.
“Sending rockets to my house – I’m not firing weapons and I’m not storing weapons,” she said. “Why are you trying to kill me?”
Merson won’t apologize for the sophistication of Israel’s defense system, saying the Iron Dome has saved “thousands upon thousands” of civilian lives. And she says by storing rocket launchers and weapon stockpiles in civilian areas, Hamas has used their own people’s lives as “a pawn” to gain international sympathy.
“The Israeli government values their citizens’ lives so much,” she said. “And it seems, on the other hand, Hamas values killing Israelis more than they value their own citizens’ wellbeing.”
She believes that's a reality that isn’t being depicted in international news, so she's stopped watching it altogether.
“A vast majority of Americans, they see pictures of these poor civilians on the Gazan side – and I say that, because they are poor civilians on the Gazan side – and they see these injured children," she said. " All they see are the injured people. They don’t see the full picture."
Merson’s video was picked up by the Times of Israel and a host of pro-Israel blogs. Matisyahu himself, the Jewish-American music star, shared it online with his millions of followers. Merson became a sudden darling of the Israeli cause, a feat all the more remarkable considering that it wasn’t until four years ago that Merson thought much about Israel at all.
Then, she went on Birthright. The program, funded by philanthropists and the Israeli government, has sent hundreds of thousands of young Jews, mostly American, on a free 10-day trip to Israel, fostering connection to the Jewish state in a population that had become increasingly critical of it.
Birthright offers different kinds of trips, from Orthodox to secular, outdoorsy to "rainbow" – catering to young Jews who are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. But participants visit many of the same places, including the Golan Heights and the Dead Sea, accompanied by Israeli soldiers who around the same age. The regular tour does not include Gaza or the West Bank and participants meet few, if any, Palestinians.
Like most people who take the trip, Merson said her Birthright experience changed her life.
Sara Merson
“I came here not really knowing about the country, thinking it was this land of Moses with deserts and camels everywhere,” she said. “It really introduced me to… these warm people that are surrounded by neighbors that hate them, and they still want peace with them and they still try so hard.”
Merson returned to Israel every summer and became a pro-Israel activist at the University of Florida. When she graduated last year, she moved to her boyfriend’s hometown of Ashdod to teach English. She sees herself in Israel for a long time to come.
Though Merson is clear to identify herself as an American, she also refers to the Israeli government as her government; she doesn't see it as a contradiction.
"I'm an American citizen, but as they say, Israel is the home of the Jewish people," Merson said.
The chorus of Matisyahu’s ballad is pure Kumbaya:
All my life I’ve been waiting for
I’ve been praying for
The people to say
That we don’t want to fight no more
There will be no more wars
And our children will play
But in the final title card of her video, Merson thanks the Israeli army “for continuously protecting and defending” her adopted country.
Merson is no peacenik sticking flowers into gun barrels. While she wishes for peace, she believes fiercely in the need for Israel to defend itself. That puts her in the company of the vast majority of Jewish Israelis. According to a recent opinion poll, just 3 to 4 percent of Israeli Jews agreed the Israeli army had used excessive force. Protests have been sparse. One veteran pollster said she hadn’t seen this kind of consensus for more than 20 years.
And just two weeks after making her music video, two weeks more war-worn and with so many ceasefires broken, Merson said she already feels that she was "a little naïve."
“There was one time, it was like OK, ceasefire’s starting at 3 o’clock and at 3:05, I’m in the bomb shelter, because they sent rockets,” she said. “And these ceasefires are for their people, they’re humanitarian ceasefires to allow trucks of goods to come in for their people and they don’t care.”
“This one day is getting further and further away,” she added. “I don’t know exactly when it would be and I hope it will be in my lifetime. I hope it will be in my children’s lifetime.”
Asked what her “one day” would entail, Merson didn’t dig into the hornet’s nest of the blockade, settlements or land swaps. She doesn’t believe Israel is the one that needs to change.
“I would hope that one day Israel’s neighbors would not call for its extermination,” she responded. “…One day would also see the world responding to Israel and seeing them as this brave, great country that really does want peace.”
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