About half an hour after the summer high school program I oversee arrived in Israel in late June, sirens and phone apps blared with an alert for an incoming missile from Yemen.

It was a moment we had prepared for as educators charged with keeping the participants safe, and we all filed into the bomb shelter without incident. This siren was also in many ways a wake-up call, a real alarm. And it was an alarm that we almost didn’t have the opportunity to experience: Just a few days earlier, with the country’s closed airspace amid war with Iran, we and many other educational organizations were far from certain that we would even be here, as we examined both the safety and logistical feasibility of a summer program in Israel for American youth.

Now, weeks later, as the program draws to a clos

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