“The Same Script, A Different Setting:” The Double War Experience of Ukraine-born Migrants in Israel
This article, based on a longitudinal study involving in-depth interviews, examines how veteran immigrants living in Israel and born in Ukraine experience the proximity between February 24, 2022, and October 7, 2023, and the overlap of the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel. Within the context of their double war experience, these immigrants navigate and compare the wartime realities of their home and host countries. This comparison, grounded in cultural translation, serves as a symbolic resource through which they process and interpret their experience. Before October 7, they used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an interpretive lens for the experience of the war in Ukraine; after October 7, they turned to the war in Ukraine to make sense of the war in Israel. This dynamic comparative process shapes and reflects their interpretations, sharpens their political consciousness, and becomes integrated into existing Israeli repertoires of comparison. In this way, comparison, which is at once an interpretive and political act, serves as a tool for locating oneself in the Jewish-Israeli ethos and the national narratives that shape it, while simultaneously serving and expanding them.
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