The Rainbow and The Sniper
A true story of awakening on the border of war—where water remembers, the land grieves, and nothing is separate
I didn’t come to Israel to lose my life—I came to find it… And yet, as I glanced down at the red laser dot on my chest I somehow knew that I was exactly where I needed to be.
The sniper shouted out across the desert in Hebrew, commanding me not to move.
So I sat—on the rocky shale slope of the mountain—closed my eyes and laughed at the absurdity of it all.
My search for meaning and truth that took me so far from home.
My life held in the tension of a young Israeli soldier’s trembling index finger.
Rewind ⏮️
A few weeks earlier, I had arrived in a remote neighborhood of 25 families near the border with Sinai, not far from Gaza. I was volunteering as part of a grassroots eco-village movement, helping build sustainable homes out of straw, earth, and stone.
My housemate was a 55-year-old Welsh stonemason named Alan who affectionately called me “Nosebag!”—insisting I ate so much he’d need to tie a horse’s feedbag around my face just to keep up.
It was the kind of humor that helped the desert heat feel more forgiving.
Alan had been hired by a local neighbor named Doodie to build a stone wall around their house, and I’d agreed to assist. But when we tallied the numbers, we realized Alan had mistakenly agreed to several weeks of skilled labor for less than a single day’s wages back home in the UK. He’d misjudged the conversion rate between British pounds and Israeli shekels.
When I confronted Doodie about it in broken Hebrew, the exchange didn’t go well.
He and his wife bristled at being challenged by a 20-year-old American volunteer. They told me I was no longer welcome. “The agreement was made,” and insisted I leave.
Alan simply shrugged. He’d finish the job for pennies on his own.
Fuming, I trekked back across the dunes in my scuffed yellow boots, kicking up clouds of sand. Stripping down, I stepped into the outdoor shower. Cold water burst over my skin, but it did nothing to calm the fire in my veins. I relived the encounter over and over.
It wasn’t the words themselves, but the entitlement behind them—the unspoken but deeply felt layers of power, privilege, and trauma.
I hadn’t been hurt. I hadn’t lost anything. But I was enraged. And confused by the intensity of it.
If I felt this way, I thought, how must Palestinians and Arab Israelis feel?
What does it mean to live on the same land for 600 or 700 years, where every olive tree has a name, every fig grove a memory?
What does it mean to welcome refugees off boats, survivors of a genocide, and then watch as your own home is slowly taken from under your feet?
The frustration cracked something open in me. My sense of self began to dissolve, as if I could suddenly feel the aches and fractures of the land itself—on behalf of everyone who had ever called her home.
The temperature of the water dropped as the heat from the sun finally escaped the shower head.
Rainbow 🌈
I opened my eyes and saw it: a perfect circle of a double rainbow emerging from the shower spray, surrounding me in a loving embrace.
The timing, the angle, the silence—it was miraculous.
The sun beamed through the slatted roof above and transformed each droplet into a dancing spark of colorful light. I waved my hands through the halo, breaking it and watching it reform, again and again.
Luminous bands of color danced around me like a memory, sang like a song.
And then the tears came.
A cascade of realizations poured through me as if the water itself had been holding a message my entire life, waiting for my heart to be cracked open wide enough to hear it.
We are all made of water. The earth is made of water. It holds everything together. It remembers all things—and through it, we are cleansed.
I had known this in my mind. But in that moment, I felt it in my bones.
The sensation of oneness became more than a spiritual concept. It became the basis of my human experience.
I sobbed.
For the atrocities of the Holocaust and the occupation of Palestine.
For the Muslim children buried in rubble and the Jewish children murdered at knife-point.
For my neighbor and my friend, for myself and for all of humanity.
And I cried for the Earth—her grief rising in my chest like waves crashing on dry desert soil.
It was then that I understood something far deeper:
Colonization isn’t just a story of conquest or territory—it’s the severing of our relationship with the living world.
When we erase Indigenous peoples, we erase the very memory of how to live in sacred reciprocity.
And in doing so, we don’t just destroy the planet—we destroy something within ourselves that knows who we truly are.
Standing in that rainbow, I was not separate.
I was the land, the water, the grief, and the song.
The line between my pain and the world’s pain dissolved. I could hear and feel it all.
The cry of a mother and her child, abandoned in the desert.
The crack of a pharaoh’s whip.
The bloodshed of a firstborn son.
The cattle cars rolling through the countryside.
The pillars of black smoke.
The live streaming genocide.
Next: Part II – The Sniper and the Mountain
It would never have occurred to me that just days later, Alan and I would walk up the mountain behind our little straw bale house and come face to face with a sniper’s barrel.
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Cover photo by Leo_Visions on Unsplash