I am packing a bag. Underwear, socks, T-shirts, jeans, shorts, a toothbrush. I don’t know when I’ll return home. In my mind, I call up memories from the 2006 war, and how I travelled through the same pastoral surroundings I now live in, aflame.

The car waits in the shaded olive grove. Deep within the trees, in the early evening haze, I think I see a giant, white iguana sprawled on the ground. It seems to raise its eyeless, mouthless head, its translucent, limbless body shifting, lurching beneath it.

I look again; a plastic bag.

I throw my bag in the trunk, next to my banjo and a pair of boots.

As I drive south, putting kilometers between myself and the Northern border, lightning flickers ominously on the horizon, and the words of a Palestinian friend echo in my mind. “What did you expect?”

I didn’t expect teenagers and children and the elderly to be snatched from their homes, raped, their dead bodies paraded through the streets.

The tears well up again in my eyes, my heart pushes against my throat.

I oppose the occupation and my government because I see human life as sacred.

“This is what decolonization looks like,” an Instagram story from an anarchist-leftist collective I follow posts triumphantly. I unfollow them.

I oppose Hamas because I see human life as sacred.

This is not what decolonization or freedom-fighting looks like. This was not done in the name of freedom and the sanctity of human life. If Hamas’ actions are a victory to take pride in and to celebrate, 50 years of oppression and occupation are equally a cause for jubilation.

“It’s time to raze Gaza to the ground,” an Israeli friend’s Facebook status echoes in my mind.

I grind my teeth and hold the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles whitening – is human life not sacred to anyone else?

My village’s WhatsApp group is abuzz with messages – the border fence with Lebanon has been breached. Behind me, the hills echo with the booms of detonating ammunition, the buzz of helicopters and fighter jets.

Yesterday night, I stood unarmed at the entrance to the village, a flashlight in my hands shining into a thick darkness, impotently waving down cars in a pathetic pantomime of security.

Our government has abandoned us.

I drive faster, a light drizzle covering my windshield in muddy teardrops.

I have never felt more alone.