Rikki Nouri came to the U.S. from Israel eight years ago for school. She has since married and settled in the Pacific Northwest. Nouri shares what she hears from friends and family in Israel, and what it’s like living so far away from this conflict.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Yesterday we talked to a Portlander who grew up in Gaza. He’d come to the US to study, and he ended up making a life here. We’re going to bring you an Israeli perspective today. Rikki Nouri came to the US nine years ago for school. She has since married and she decided to settle in the Pacific Northwest. We talked yesterday. I started by asking her if she could tell us what happened to her family on October 7th.
Rikki Nouri: October 7th is a disaster for the entire Israeli society, for the entire Jewish people around the world. It hit really close on my family. My husband’s aunt Adina Moshe was kidnapped on October 7th, and she watched Hamas kill her husband in front of her eyes. She’s 72. She was in captivity. You can imagine how it feels to wait for your loved ones [to] come back from hell.
Miller: She spent, am I right, 49 days in captivity before she was released?
Nouri: Yes. She spent 49 days. And fortunately she was among the first people that were released. But she does share, after she recovered and [was] able to share more, the abuse, the neglect, things that were happening there. It’s really, really terrifying. And the family is still very much involved in the release of the rest of the hostages. Adina herself, she says “My life is not the same. My house is burned and ruined. My kid’s house in the kibbutz is ruined. My husband is murdered. And my friends are still in captivity.”
The magnitude of over 1,300 people murdered, innocent civilians, in one day, over 250 people kidnapped, from their house, from their bed, from the kibbutz, from the Nova music festival. So it was supposed to be just another Saturday, Shabbat Day. And it became a hell for the entire Jewish people around the world.
Miller: What have you heard from your family or your husband’s family or friends about daily life in Israel right now?
Nouri: Life is just terrible. It’s like a nightmare that keeps replaying. It brings us memories of all the horrors that the Jewish people needed to suffer. I can say when I heard about it the first time, I was thinking “this is the Holocaust all over again.” So of course, this is not like the Holocaust, but it certainly felt like that, it certainly brought in that trauma again. People even talk about pogroms before the Holocaust that are coming back in nightmares.
There is constant missiles going on in the south from Hamas, and in the north from Hezbollah. So people live in that fear. They have to go through a security check every time they go to the mall. And they have to live in fear and be ready to run to a safe room in 15 seconds every single day of their life, day and night. The whole missile attack has been way worse since October 7th and the escalation, reaching all the towns almost in Israel. There are hundreds of thousands of displaced people that don’t have [somewhere] to live.
Miller: October 7th was unprecedented as a terrorist attack in Israel but not unprecedented as one example of terrorism in Israel. What did you experience growing up, in terms of either terrorist attacks or threats of terrorism?
Nouri: I have some memory of what life was before terrorism started. [The] First Intifada started when I was around seven years old. Up until then, I feel like the relationship with the other people around, everything was more peaceful. But when I was about seven, the First Intifada started. We were kind of getting used to [living] in constant fear. Stones and rocks would be thrown at us and in the cars all the time. Burned tires, suicide bombers.
The closest that it hit to me was when I was in first year of high school. I was taking a bus to Jerusalem where my high school was, a public bus, in Israel, most cases we don’t have school buses. I remember it very, very clearly like it was today that it was bus number 18 that I was supposed to go to take to school got bombed by a suicide bomber. There were kids there, there were elderly, there were American civilians, by the way. It was just the bus that I was supposed to take. I took the next bus. And a week and two days later, the same bus, number 18 got bombed. It was Purim. I’m sure you know that Purim was celebrated there recently too. And we were arriving to high school in costumes, all sad and crying and scared. And those buses were bombed by Hamas. So Hamas has haunted me since childhood up until now.
Miller: But now you’re almost 7,000 miles away. What has it been like for you to be so far away from your friends and your family and your country of origin at this time?
Nouri: It’s very difficult. But I don’t feel the distance. Because I feel for me, for the people who live here that are from Israel and for a lot of the Jewish people around me, we feel like it happened to us right now. Not even almost six months ago, right now. So the distance was nothing. It feels as if it happened to us. My life is not the same anymore. I couldn’t just go on and live my life as I did before. After like 24 hours of being in shock, in agony, in a huge confusion, I started to act. I went into an act mode. I became an activist, I started to advocate for Israel. Because I guess I was shocked from the backlash.
And only a few days after this huge massacre had happened, we started to feel the backlash. We started to feel in the universities, and around us, hatred. And it was so shocking. It felt like a [betrayal.] I hear from Jewish friends that they feel betrayed by their friends that are not supporting them.
Miller: What are examples of the backlash that you felt from the beginning, from early on?
Nouri: As an employee in Portland State University for like seven years, and not asking “how are you doing?”, although they know that I’m from Israel. Not trying to support. I heard from a lot of people that workplaces, not all the workplaces obviously, ones that work with maybe a lot of Israelis were more supportive, did not take a lot of interest. And even that I share that my family got murdered and kidnapped, I didn’t get…
But maybe this is not so much about me. I feel actually that this part maybe is even harder for the Jewish population that is here, that is in support and love Israel, that they started to be criticized by their friends. It’s either people ignored, or criticized and didn’t understand. We are getting this treatment, either like a silent treatment, or a treatment of you’re a Zionist. And people say it like it’s a curse. As if it’s supposed to be a curse. So if someone will say “oh, I love French cuisine, I love the French culture,” it will be considered something good. But if someone says “I’m in support of Israel, I like the Israeli cultural innovation,” even if they are not Jewish, they are being blamed. “You are a Zionist.” As if it’s a curse.
Miller: Can you tell us about the rally that you took part in last month on International Women’s Day?
Nouri: Yeah. You can see [there] too see some sort of deterioration. When we rallied the first time, there was a lot of security threats, and a lot of people tried to stop us. But it was relatively still safe.
Miller: That was back in October?
Nouri: Yeah, back in October, just about a week and a half after the massacre. But we continued to act. And on March 8th, International Women’s Day, we protested Hamas sexual violence against women, the brutal sexual violence in masses that was done next to their relative even, to watch. And there is footage of that that was shown to journalists throughout the world. And we were shocked by the silence of international women’s organizations, of human rights organizations, that did not talk about it and said that it never happened.
So just about three days before we rallied, the UN finally acknowledged that this had happened. But we planned before that, and we went there, and there was a huge what people would call counter protest. But it felt more like terrorism. There were people, more than us, although we share the location just last minute for security, and they were shouting at us and cursing and calling us white racist Zionists, and slurring. We had a deescalation team that was assaulted by them a lot. The police, fortunately, was there, Portland Police Bureau. And they assaulted the police as well. And it just kept getting worse and worse and worse.
We didn’t have a second of quiet in this rally to just listen to the silence. We were peacefully, silently protesting with signs. And we needed to be surrounded by the slurs, the flags, the signs calling us racist, and all of those stuff throughout an hour and a half of a rally. And when we finished, there was a Jewish woman that went to her house, she was escorted by volunteers from the de-escalation team that we have as we did for anybody that didn’t have a friends to couple with. And she was assaulted and harassed by the supposedly counter protesters, surrounding her and attacking her and the volunteers that protected her.
It’s just horrible. We feel like walking the street while Jewish shouldn’t be a safety hazard.
Miller: So what goes through your mind when you see images of the scale of destruction in Gaza right now?
Nouri: It’s heartbreaking to see the scale of destruction in Gaza. It’s heartbreaking to see lives that [have] been taken on both sides. It’s really, really sad. Like I say, any person is not perfect. I myself [am] not perfect. Israel as a country is not perfect. So I’m not saying that there was not ever in the past mistakes that were done. I’m not saying that in the Cold War there are no mistakes occasionally that might happen. Recently something like that happened, and the government has taken responsibility and say “yeah, this was a huge mistake, we need to investigate that.”
The difference between, if we compare a terrorist group like Hamas, and Israel, which is a democratic country, is that we don’t want to cause unnecessary dying. We don’t want that. We want to win the fight that they started, for the sake of defending our people, and their people, as much as we can. Whereas they, as a terrorist organization that is as brutal as ISIS, what they want is to kill as many Israelis as possible. This is something that you can see on [the] Hamas website. They attack civilians and children on purpose.
Miller: Does anything give you hope right now for a lasting peace?
Nouri: This is a very, very difficult question. Because I for one, and I know a lot of people in Israel, I don’t hate Palestinians at all. I don’t have a hatred. I was voting left wing my entire life. I was always hopeful.
One of the most brutal things about October 7th is it has taken the dream of peace. Because we don’t believe that after this brutality, maybe two, three generations afterwards, will be able to live peacefully next to each other. I don’t know. Because the entire society is terrified, and has went back to the defense mode. Our own existence is at risk and it’s becoming escalated by the fact that our mere right to exist keeps being questioned. We are, as Jewish people, even around the world, even here in Portland, we are tired of justifying our mere right to exist in safety, and Israel’s right to exist. And the world is only talking about the suffering of the Palestinians. So it just feels unbalanced. It feels like we are deserted by the community. And what they’re doing, they’re just making Hamas stronger to keep the hostages, and to keep the war.
Miller: Rikki Nouri, thank you very much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Nouri: I really, really appreciate you inviting me, and thank you very much. Have a great day.
Miller: Rikki Nouri is a Portlander who grew up in Israel. You can find my earlier conversation with Mohammad Usrof, who grew up in Gaza, on our website – opb.org/thinkoutloud.
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