Between the Bullet and the Boulder: A Journey of Awakening
How a near-death experience on a desert mountain taught me about privilege, interconnectedness, and the radical power of compassion
The desert called to me, as it had many others—but answering that call nearly cost me my life. After six months in Haifa studying Hebrew and immersing myself in literature about the Holocaust, I craved the open wilderness, a space to breathe and reflect on the chaos and suffering that had shaped this land for millennia.
I write this as a reflection for everyone witnessing the genocide of Palestinians unfold daily. For everyone watching ICE kidnap Latinos indigenous to the Americas. To remind us of life’s fragility, the sacredness of each breath, and the profound interconnectedness of all beings.
Wind back to 2011, shortly after the Arab Spring swept through Tunisia and Egypt. I was volunteering in a small eco-village community near the Sinai border, not far from Gaza. Every morning, I'd unzip my orange tent and gaze at a mountain peak on the horizon, dreaming of watching the sunrise from its summit. Its triangular shape resembled the Pyramids of Giza, standing proudly amidst the rocky, orange shales of the Negev desert.
This mountain was typically an active training ground for the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), filled with tanks, soldiers, and warplanes. However, on Shabbat—the weekly day of rest—the public was permitted to hike. After weeks of anticipation, we woke at 3 a.m. one Saturday, packed our bags, and began our trek to the summit.
We reached the peak well before dawn, unpacked our gear, and awaited sunrise. Alan excitedly showed me a camera image filled with swirling ribbons of red light around our friends Anna and Yonatan, inexplicably vivid against the dark pre-dawn sky.
As I puzzled over this phenomenon, I noticed a red laser dot dancing across Alan's forehead, like a Hindu bindhi. I glanced down to see another on my chest. A line of snipers had their sights trained on each of us. Hebrew voices echoed across the mountain, commanding us not to move. Yonatan, an Israeli medic accompanying us, shouted back, urging the soldiers to lower their weapons.
They mistook us for infiltrators from Egypt and had sent soldiers to investigate. Our eclectic group—a Welsh builder, a young Israeli medic, a Dutch student, a Malaysian-American woman, and myself, an American college dropout searching for life's meaning—quickly convinced them we posed no threat.
As the adrenaline faded, I stepped onto a large boulder, which tilted beneath me. As I shifted my weight, it rocked back sharply, gouging a deep wound into my left leg. Pain shot through me, nausea rising swiftly. My vision narrowed, darkness encroaching rapidly. Panicked, I shouted, “I'm going to pass out!”
Then everything went black.
I found myself traveling through a luminous tunnel of swirling colors. A clap and flash revealed a silhouetted figure, framed in rainbows. Another flash and my friend Andrew appeared above me, shirtless, embracing me reassuringly. “It’s going to be alright, bro.”
Suddenly, consciousness surged back. Opening my eyes, I saw my friends’ tearful, relieved faces sketched in monochrome, gradually returning to full color as I regained my breath.
“I just had the craziest experience…” I murmured, eliciting laughter amid their tears.
Alan shook his head, eyes damp. “You bugger! Smashed your head on a rock and started having a seizure—choking on your bloody tongue. If it wasn’t for Yonatan you would be donezo. Thank God you managed to tell us you were passing out!”
Feeling slowly returned to my limbs, along with deep gratitude for their presence. “How long was I out?” I asked weakly.
“Three, four… maybe five minutes,” Yonatan replied.
With assistance, I stood shakily, drank some water, and Yonatan bandaged my leg. Hobbling down the mountain, I marveled at the irony—my brush with death wasn’t from a sniper’s bullet, but from a shifting rock.
In the quiet car ride back to our eco-village, I reflected on the privilege afforded by my pale skin, my American passport—how easily the misunderstanding with the soldiers was resolved… how ironic it was that it was the boulder that got me and not the sniper. I thought about the Palestinians living mere miles away, whose encounters with IDF soldiers ended tragically, without warning or justice.
My privilege felt like both a shield and a curse—a legacy of colonial violence, the poison of separation, the illusion of supremacy, the addiction to money, and a deep, unsettling disconnect from nature and humanity.
For years following that day, I dreamt of returning to this land to sit with Israelis and Palestinians—to support reconciliation, to witness their pain, and to foster healing. Long before October 7th, my heart called me toward this act of service.
Yet, speaking with friends on both sides who have been deeply involved in reconciliation efforts, it’s clear that now is not the time. Healing cannot come amidst violence. Peace and safety is a prerequisite—and today, peace seems distant. The horrific suffering continues unabated: deliberate starvation, constant bombing, systematic murder of medics, and enforced displacement into concentration camps along the border of Rafah.
My heart holds immense compassion for Israelis, their trauma, and the captivity of their own worldview that holds a unique cocktail of victim and perpetrator. But I grieve profoundly the trajectory that Israel’s government and international complicity has set in motion—a path of escalating violence, justified by fear and historic wounds, enabled by powerful lobbies like AIPAC and weapons manufacturers bottom lines.
Despite millions protesting globally, governments remain passive. Profit continues to outweigh the voice of the people and the mind of reason. Yet amid despair, the deepest lesson from my time in Israel resonates louder than ever:
Love your enemy.
In the heart of suffering, hatred multiplies. True liberation comes from breaking this cycle. Loving those we’ve been conditioned to hate is the revolution—it dissolves the illusions of separation and restores our shared humanity through relationshiop. It breaks the spell of the media machine that pins our identity against ‘the other’ and tells us we are broken—that we can buy our way to happiness and swipe our way through the rage...
In these days of increasing volatility, violence and chaos, may we find ourselves in the quiet cradle of a radical compassion that knows no bounds. May we find the safe space we need to grieve all that has been lost, and all the horrors that have been done—to our brothers and sisters, to our mothers and fathers—and to our planet.
May we stand for justice and eradicate systems of oppression with the same fervor that we throw consciousness and capital into artificial intelligence, decentralized finance.
But above all, may we stand for love in the most unlikely of situations—when it is easiest to hate and most compelling to perpetuate the cycle of violence ourselves.
Cover photo by Avi Theret on Unsplash