Only weeks ago, we, the residents of Abu Dhabi, received the first jarring alert on our phones, notifying us that a missile attack was imminent. It came unexpectedly at past 2am, sending me flying out of bed in a panic and bolting to the windowless hallway in my ground-floor apartment. I would soon put a stool and a spare charger there, my passport handy, my bags packed and sitting by the door for a quick exit. I’d become accustomed to listening to explosions that would shake the walls and resonate in my bones. And yet, I felt oddly safe in what the BBC called “the front line,” the United Arab Emirates.

I am a university professor, newly retired. Although my home campus is in New York, a visiting position in Abu Dhabi began in 2018. I hold a Golden Visa from the UAE that expires in 2032 -- which means I am a legal resident. And even though I have closed up my apartment, given away my furniture and sent my clothes back to the Hudson Valley, when the time comes, I will renew my visa.

Abu Dhabi is one of the few places I have ever felt at home, secure in the embrace of the desert air, so unlike my birthplace in New York. Palms line the streets. Holy basil and thyme proliferate in the man-made gardens. Egrets and herons emerge from the mangroves, sailing into the blue air. The Ghaf trees stay green and the bougainvillea blooms all year. This is a place where resilient plants take root.

On the Friday before the invasion of Iran, I was at the Moses Ben Maimon synagogue in Abu Dhabi, a place I’ve frequented on and off since its opening in 2023, after the Abraham Accords initiated diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE. It is just such bedfellows, I think now, that makes Abu Dhabi a prime target for attack. When I arrived, the synagogue was cordoned off with several layers of security, the parking garage closed, soldiers standing at the perimeter in combat gear, assault rifles strapped across their chests. My friend Michael and I handed our Emirate ID cards to the guards, and our names were recorded. “We’re on the books now,” I remarked. Michael raised his eyebrows as we walked through the metal detectors.

I am as Jewish as I am Christian, having parents in both traditions. What’s more, I spent thirty years studying and practicing Sufism in Morocco and France, publishing works on mystical Islam. I am an ethnographer of religion. It is my job and my raison d’être, a witness to what it means to stand between cultures and religions … and to listen across differences. In a sense, I epitomize what the Abrahamic Family House represents: the meeting of all three religions of The Book. In my case, they meet not in an architectural triad of synagogue, church and mosque, but in my body and its practices.

My attachment to Abu Dhabi remains strong, despite warheads colliding above the city and drones that threatened to set residences afire. The government sent alerts every time a missile entered the airspace and another when residents were free to return to our normal lives. Benevolence and sagacity seemed to reign. I think of all those in Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and in other places, subsisting under constant threat without food or shelter and with little or no warning of attack. By contrast, in Abu Dhabi it was warm, food was plentiful and delivered to the door. We had the internet. It could’ve been much worse. Still, war is war. I waited for the airports to reopen so I could leave.

The first week there was no word at all from the US government. Then they simply said to get out on a commercial flight as soon as possible. But the airspace was closed and flights were grounded, so there was no way to follow this advice. The interceptions of missiles and drones sounded like bombs I’d only heard in movies. I began to feel like I was in a movie, a bad one, waiting for an evacuation that would not come. After the New York Times reported that a plane of US evacuees had landed in the US, however, I became proactive. One plane? There were 50,000 Americans in the UAE. I signed up for the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program (STEP) through the US Embassy. I contacted my congressman, whose office responded immediately. The State Department did not.

Days later, however, the phone call finally came. At 15:00 local time, I received a call from Washington telling me to pack my bags and be ready to leave in the next few hours. Someone, the woman said, would call me with the details of when and where, but it would “certainly be today.” In a tizzy, I re-packed my bags, called my rental car agency, contacted my apartment superintendent telling him I had an emergency evacuation and had to leave some of my furniture behind. Then I sat ready to leave, waiting for the call.

It never came. Not that day, nor the day after.

It’s hard to sleep when you expect to be woken and told to rush to the airport in the middle of the night. Sleeplessness produces anxiety. Time changes shape. The following morning, I spent hours on hold with the airline, trying to find an earlier flight than the one I had booked. French and Romanian friends reached out to their embassies on my behalf. Nothing worked.

Until March 7th, while I was with a friend and happened to glance at my email. I had received a message from the Department of State. “Your flight is now expected to depart Dubai…. Please arrive at …Al Maktoum International Airport (DWC)] at 18:00 local time.” They had sent the email at 16:00 but it was now 17:15. They had said I’d get a call. DWC is 90 minutes away without traffic, and I’d have to find a taxi. Didn’t they know that Dubai is not Abu Dhabi? There was no way I would make that flight. I wrote them so and resigned myself to fate.

My Iranian friend in the US warned me to be careful. “The war,” she told me by text, “is as you know escalating and the Iranian government is unpredictable. They might do anything, truly anything under the sky, to survive this war and stay in power. Please follow your gut feeling.”

Fear clouds intuition however. I felt safe in Abu Dhabi, but the panic of my loved ones abroad was infectious. And who knows what might happen in war? Surely my Iranian friend understood her government better than I did. But I certainly did not understand my own.

I do know that the UAE can shield its citizens and residents because they have money to buy the technology to shoot down those missiles and drones. And no doubt they buy them from the United States. But would the US protect me as Abu Dhabi did if the situation were reversed, when the US Federal government does not give its own citizens the most basic healthcare, when they are killing Americans on the street for exercising their First Amendment rights? Is the federal government securing synagogues in the US, or mosques, churches or schools for that matter? I’m not confident in the benevolence of my government to protect me. In the UAE, I am.

I did not leave Abu Dhabi because of the war, or because I felt vulnerable in the synagogue. My departure was planned months before, though I would have kept my apartment had it been possible. It looked over an estuary and the mangroves beyond. It was a balm to reside in this young nation with its museums, islands, dolphins and dunes. I have dear friends and colleagues with whom I have rich conversations. I left Abu Dhabi because my grown children live in the United States. In this last phase of my life, proximity to them is my priority.

It is a privilege to be a global citizen, the kind New York University and other schools in Abu Dhabi are educating, multi-lingual students from all over the world, students now relocated to hotels because an American campus is a target. But the ability to be global can be withdrawn through a single decision -- like the one to enter a war on Iran, an illegal war without Congressional approval, a war that caused Americans in the UAE to linger in limbo for far too long.    

I will miss this place, both desert and archipelago. And while flights have resumed, and I have taken my leave, a part of me resides in Abu Dhabi.

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Author of the memoir, Taking Leave, Deborah Kapchan is Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University. After six years in Abu Dhabi, she now lives in the Hudson Valley.

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