By SHANNON O. WELLS
To the extent that one can establish routine when the foreign country you’re visiting becomes an active war zone, Ilia Murtazashvili thought — hearing the 15-minute warning siren during a June visit to Jerusalem — he knew the drill.
One evening, however, the professor in the School of Public and International Affairs was caught off guard while in his 10th floor hotel room. Iran was retaliating with ballistic missiles and drones after Israel attacked its nuclear facilities on June 13.
“The Israeli home front defense gives a 15-minute warning for those large drone attacks once they’ve been launched, because they’re kind of slow moving, and then they give a three-minute warning to get to shelter right away,” he explained of the protocol once a drone attack has been detected.
With a three-minute shelter warning typically following the first detection siren, Murtazashvili was confident he had ample time to reach the spacious, well-accommodated basement shelter.
“I was taking my time. But what had changed is that now they had just given the three-minute warning,” he said. “I looked out the window, and I see the missile defense is active. It looks like fireworks. I was there looking at what people were seeing on CNN.
“I was like, ‘All right. Maybe I better hustle and get to the to the stairwell and go downstairs,’ you know?”
Murtazashvili said Israel’s missile defense system made him feel “relatively safe” even when attacks took place, usually at night.
“The hotel is very solid, but I can tell you a number of our colleagues, when the first air raid sirens went off, would just go into the lower levels of the hotel and just take their stuff down there,” he recounted. “They would stay there the whole night.
“It kind of reminded me of our friends who are in Ukraine, in Kiev. You’ll have people sleeping in the subway, because there’s so many attacks overnight,” he added. “We were in a situation where it was very tense.”
Murtazashvili, who weathered several days of tension and bombings before he was able to get a flight home from Jordan, shared some of his uniquely eye-opening and intermittently frightening experiences with the University Times.
He was in Israel as part of the Academic Exchange program, which brings faculty members from around the world to Israel. Seminars and gatherings provide opportunities to share different perspectives on Israel and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
“The goal of the program is for people to come away from that and kind of understand the complexity of some of the challenges confronting Israel and confronting the Middle East,” he said. “And also to build good collaborations and partnerships going forward.”
The violent conflict between Israel and Iran began with Israel launching surprise attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities on June 13 as an extension of the long-running Gaza war. In retaliation for Israel air strikes that damaged Iranian air defenses and nuclear facilities, Iran launched hundreds of ballistic missiles and explosive drones.
On June 24, Israel and Iran agreed to a ceasefire mediated by the United States and Qatar.
‘Tough situation’
Murtazashvili’s fatefully timed scholarly journey started with a few days in Tel Aviv and learning about the ravages of the Middle East conflict.
“We went around to different parts of the country (including) the Gaza envelope. We visited with some of the survivors in one of the kibbutzes that was attacked by Hamas. We visited with survivors of the attack on the festival site,” he said of the 2023 massacre by Palestinian militants in which 364 were killed and dozens taken hostage.
“We went to the Golan Heights. We went to the border of Lebanon where there was a big concern that … Hamas or Hezbollah was going to attack from that area.”
His first night in Jerusalem coincided with Israel attacking Iran’s defenses.
“At, like, three in the morning, the sirens started going off. … We were now in the situation (and) had to change up what our plans were,” he said. “Obviously the security situation changed a lot. For a number of days, it wasn’t clear how anybody would leave.”
Recalling the tense atmosphere, Murtazashvili said the old city section was closed off, with police and Israel Defense Forces officers telling tourists and those wanting to visit the Western Wall or to pray that they could not enter.
“People were shouting at each other, but it was definitely cut off,” he said. “During the day, there was not a lot of people on the streets. It was a lot of tension. A lot of people were worried about people who were abroad (who) couldn’t come home. It wasn’t clear how people were going to leave.
“There were a lot of people there who were on the birthright trip. They were taking boats to Cyprus and other places just to try to get out,” he added. “It was a tough situation.”
Murtazashvili also noted that those in the northern parts of Israel didn’t have as many sheltering options during Iranian attacks.
“People are getting killed In Israel, and there was a lot of concern about civilians in Iran as well. That was kind of like the situation we were in,” he said. “And we didn’t really expect that you kind of go from doing this act, where you’re going around talking to people, learning about Israel, learning about the Middle East conflict, building all these great relationships, and then you’re in the middle of a war, you know? It was an unusual situation to be in.”
Life goes on
The unusualness Murtazashvili experienced involved not only danger and fear, but an abiding desire to achieve a sense of normalcy amongst the madness. The basement bomb shelters, he found, were comfortable and spacious enough to accommodate — improbably enough — some aspects of regular life.
“Israel also has a really systematic approach to providing for security and safety during missile attacks,” he observed. “What I didn’t anticipate is there were a lot of people who, even when they were in the shelter, continued to do what they were doing before they went into the shelter.”
That included getting married.
“We’re eating at this nice restaurant, and then the air raid sirens go off at eight o’clock at night,” he said. “We go down to the shelter, and one of my friends … the two of us went down into the shelter, and we’re just kind of standing there. And then in comes a bride, at her wedding, and she was literally right next to us.
“The bride comes down, then comes down the groom, then the family circles around them, and they start singing and dancing,” he recalled. “And for 40 minutes they sang and danced, and we were in the wedding. The celebration was amazing.
“It was 40 minutes where you wouldn’t have known you were in a bomb shelter. It was one of the most festive times I’ve ever been at in my entire life. And then the air raid (siren) goes off, and everybody goes back up to the hotel and keeps dancing and singing. They didn’t miss a beat”
Every floor he visited in the hotel revealed a range of situations and emotions.
“On the eighth floor, there might be a family with some kids. The kids are shivering and crying, right? The parents are looking stressed out,” Murtazashvili said. “You go down a few more floors, there’s some kids singing and dancing. A few more floors down, the party has come from the restaurant, and they have a bottle service in the stairwell.”
One night in one of the hotel’s lower levels, he encountered a woman with two babies.
“And two of my colleagues were holding the babies so that the mother didn’t have to hold the kids,” he said. “These professors are in a bomb shelter holding these babies so the mother can take a little bit of a rest.
“You come away from that thinking there’s all sorts of problems and challenges, and it’s terrible to have war. But then you see the sense of community and people working together,” he added, “and that gives you a sense of optimism despite all the bad stuff that’s happening.”
Getting out
Despite the turmoil, the Academic Exchange continued with its program.
"Some of the guests in Jerusalem met with us in person, in the secure area of the hotel, and others met on zoom," Murtazashvili said. "We also were in Israel longer than expected, so we were able to spend time together as a group, but the program continued."
Around 10 of Murtazashvili’s Academic Exchange colleagues took the first option to escape Israel, through Jordan in West Asia.
“Four of us decided to stay in Jerusalem,” he said. “We were going to wait and see whether El Al airlines would open up again and have some flights back. But after three or four days of waiting on that, it was pretty clear that El Al wasn’t going to open up for a while."
Because Israelis can’t cross at the border with their passports, Murtazashvili took a chartered minibus with an Israeli driver and a Jordanian guide from Jerusalem to Amman. They crossed the Jordan River on the Allenby Bridge near Jericho.
“There were hundreds of taxis and cars in line by the time we got there when the crossing opened at 10 a.m.,” he said. “We were able to use the crossing closest to Jerusalem because nobody in our group had Israeli passports, but none of our Israeli colleagues could go with us.
"We had to go with Jordanian passport holders.”
Lines at the border were lengthy.
“Because we were with this Academic Exchange, we basically had the kind of service that you get for VIPs, like, for diplomats,” he said of arriving in Amman and staying at a hotel.
Noting the “different vibe” in Jordan, Murtazashvili watched folks video recording missiles flying overhead after the air-raid sirens went off around 7 in the evening. After a couple days, he was able to fly home via Royal Jordanian Airlines.
“And it was smooth sailing from there until I got to JFK during a thunderstorm, and all the flights coming back to Pittsburgh were canceled,” he noted.
Eventually finding a Jet Blue flight, Murtazashvili made it back to Pittsburgh by around 5 a.m.
“I thought, ‘One more thing for this adventure, to have the flights canceled.'"
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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