A Wider Bridge to close

The longtime activist who was in Israel last month when the war with Iran began has returned to Washington, D.C.

Marty Rouse traveled to Israel on June 6th with the Jewish Federations of North America. The five-day mission ended the night before the annual Tel Aviv Pride Parade was scheduled to be held.

Mission participants met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog and several LGBTQ activists in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They visited the Western Wall. nova music festival Nir Oz, a kibbutz in southern Israel, is less than a mile from the border with the Gaza Strip. Mission participants also visited the city of Sderot, about a mile from the Hamas-controlled enclave, a veterans rehabilitation facility, a new LGBTQ health center, and the Israeli LGBTQ Equality Association Aguda in Tel Aviv.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed more than 360 party-goers and kidnapped dozens more at a music festival at a campground near Kibbutz Reims, about 10 miles southwest of Nir Oz. The militants have killed or taken hostage nearly a quarter of Nir Oz’s residents. They also took control of the Sderot police station.

Tel Aviv Deputy Mayor Chen Arieli spoke at the mission’s closing party on June 12 at the Sheraton Grand, a hotel overlooking Tel Aviv’s beachfront.

Rouse and other mission participants were scheduled to stay in Tel Aviv in preparation for the Pride Parade scheduled for the next day. He and another mission participant, Gordie Nathan, of Palm Springs, California, had checked into a less expensive hotel nearby.

“We said goodbye,” Rouse recalled when speaking to the Washington Blade in D.C. on June 24. “We went to the hotel, got a warning and then all hell broke loose.”

Early on the morning of June 13, Israel launched airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear and military facilities.

Rouse said mission organizers instructed him and other participants who remained in Tel Aviv to meet for breakfast and dinner at the Sheraton Grand. Israeli airspace was closed in anticipation of an Iranian counterattack, and authorities canceled the Pride parade.

He said he went to the bomb shelter at least twice each night for three nights.

During the war, Israel’s Home Front Command typically issued a warning about 10 minutes before an expected Iranian missile attack. Sirens then sounded 90 seconds before the expected collision.

Rouse and Nathan walked to the Sheraton Grand on June 13 when the Home Front Command issued a 10-minute warning. They arrived at the hotel within minutes and staff escorted them to the air raid shelter.

“Just walk slowly and you’ll be fine,” Rouse recalled. “There was a 10-minute grace period, so everything was fine at the time the alarm went off.”

Rouse described the Sheraton Grand Shelter as “bright” with Wi-Fi, television and air conditioning. He was watching live coverage of an Iranian missile attack on an Israeli television station when he saw it hit his apartment in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan.

A 74-year-old woman died and her boyfriend was seriously injured.

“I go to the TV just to watch,” Rouse recalled. “Suddenly, I saw on TV a bomb fly over Tel Aviv, land, and explode. It landed and exploded.”

“I thought, ‘Okay, this is real, so I was scared,'” he added.

Rouse said the hotel bomb shelter where she and Nathan stayed after the mission was far less comfortable.

“It was dark, humid, hot and very uncomfortable,” Rouse said. “You felt really alone.”

Rouse and nearly all other mission participants who were in Tel Aviv when the war began departed Israel on June 15. They boarded a bus and headed to Amman, the capital of Jordan, about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Tel Aviv through the West Bank.

Rouse described the trip, which involved driving across the Jordan River and arriving at the Jordanian border crossing, as “like a field trip.”

“When you walk into this room, you’re not in an air-conditioned airport, you’re in a hot, humid, cramped place in the middle of the desert with people crammed together and big, loud, loud fans and pictures of military personnel on the walls,” he said. “It felt like Casablanca.”

Rouse said Jordanian authorities took the mission participants to customs in groups of 10. The Amman-based Jewish Federation of North America liaison, who previously worked as a tour guide for A Wider Bridge, an organization that “advocates for justice, counters LGBTQphobia, and combats anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred,” worked “behind closed doors” to ensure everyone could enter the country.

“It took a really long time,” Rouse told the Blade.

The mission participants arrived in Amman a short time later. They checked into a hotel and then had dinner at a restaurant.

“I feel safe and in Amman now,” Rouse recalls. “We sit outside and have a beautiful dinner.”

Shortly after Rouse and the other mission participants began eating dessert, an Iranian missile passed over Amman. They entered the restaurant, waited a few minutes, and then boarded the bus back to their hotel.

“No one was openly panicking, which surprised me,” Rouse said.

The group was scheduled to fly from Amman to Cairo on June 16 at 11pm local time (4pm ET). Before leaving for Jordan, I visited Jerash, the ancient city north of Amman.

“[The Jerash trip] In fact, we stopped caring about the whole thing,” Rouse said.

Representatives from the Jewish Federations of North America met Rouse and other mission participants at the Cairo airport once the plane landed. Rouse arrived at New York’s JFK Airport on June 17th.

12-day war ends with ceasefire announced by President Trump

President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire on June 23, ending the 12-day war.

Three days earlier, the United States launched airstrikes that hit three Iranian nuclear facilities. The ceasefire took effect hours after Iran fired a missile at a US military base in Qatar.

Iran says the war has killed more than 900 people in the country.

Associated Press memo Iranian missile kills 28 people in Israel. One of them destroyed Tel Aviv’s last gay bar on June 16th.

The war broke out less than two years after October 7th.

The Israeli government announced that Hamas militants launched a surprise attack on the country on October 7, 2023, killing about 1,200 people on the same day. The militants kidnapped more than 200 people.

The Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry says Israeli forces have killed nearly 55,000 people in the enclave since October 7. Karim Khan, chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who was killed by the IDF last October, were among those who committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and Israel.

After returning to the United States, Rouse said, “I’ve never felt so comfortable with someone else.” Rouse affectionately referred to Nathan as her “bomb shelter boyfriend” and even questioned Nathan’s reaction to the missile alert.

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to put on socks and shoes,’ and I said, ‘Really? You’re going to put on socks,'” Rouse told the Blade. “The fact that I was so nervous, the fact that putting on socks could change the direction of my life, made me feel like I couldn’t believe I said that to him.”

Rouse was quick to add that Nathan helped her stay calm.

“If I was alone, those nights would have been long enough,” Rouse said. “Being with people you know is a completely different feeling than being alone.”

Rouse also praised the Jewish Federations of North America.

“JFNA has sprung into action and begun considering all options to get us all home safely,” Rouse said. “It was all a matter of logistics. Staff worked around the clock to locate us and mobilize to bring us back to the United States. This was an incredible team effort, and on behalf of everyone, I would like to express our deep gratitude for your dedication to getting us home safely.”