January 2nd, 2009: It's a strange New Year in Israel.

On the last day of last year, my plane touched down in Ben-Gurion Airport, bringing me back home to Israel after two weeks of traveling and trekking through SouthEastern Turkey. Three months and eleven days before, I had walked through customs to begin my work as a Fulbright scholar. I was nervous then, unsure of the world that I would enter, the people I would meet, the issues I would begin to understand and invest myself in. This time, the uncertainty was of a different variety. Only days before, Israel began it's airstrike on Hamas in Gaza, the drizzle of rockets into Israeli border towns became a downpour, and images of wailing Palestinian mothers, horrible horrible bloodeshed, and faces distorted by anger and fear began to monopolize the media. We had watched it all on little tv's in Turkish villages, the only foreigners around, unsure of what was being communicated and what the narrative was behind it all. This time, I walked out the airport doors into a world that I thought I was beginning to know but which had become more obscured to me than ever.

It was on the way home that the sms messages started coming in. "You're not in Be'er Sheva, are you?" My friend Jeffery Donenfeld had come back from Turkey with me to spend a few days in Israel, and we had decided to head to Jerusalem rather than to the Negev town that I have been working in. We were driving through the hills of Jerusalem in our shared mini-sherut as two rockets fell on and outside the city I'd been living in. The sirens went off and no one was harmed.

New Year's under the circumstances was difficult to engage with. New Year's has never been a significant celebration in Israel, as Israelis had already usured in the new year by the Jewish calendar on the holiday of Rosh Hashana several months before. Walking through the streets in Israel, you are more likely to be wished "Sylvester Sameach" (Happy Sylvester), after the patron saint of the Gregorian Calendar New Year's Day, emphasizing the celebration's Christian underpinnings.

On New Year's eve of 2009, Jeffrey, my British-Israeli friend Michael, and I caught a sherut to Tel-Aviv and followed a "peace on all sides" protest march through the streets of the city. 100, maybe 200 people marching and banging drums, chanting in Hebrew, and asking for an immediate end to the violence. The reactions were mixed. Some argued, most walked by, heading to the plans they had already made. The crowd stopped only once, pausing to count down the last seconds of 2008 in Hebrew. "Happy New War." We walked to the side, unsure of where we fit, what to think, how to engaged. We ended the night back in Jerusalem, sitting with my friend at the DJ station of a little cavernous bar as the first hours of the new year drifted in.

Life in Jerusalem carries on as before. More soldiers are about, and East Jerusalem has been under strikes and boycotts. Things feel a bit more tense, a bit more subdued. I'm continuing my work as I can, but it's difficult now. Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem is closed. Some of my meetings have been canceled. I'm off to chair the most important organizing meeting my project has seen yet. We'll see who is able to come and what we are able to conclude...