 Hi friends and subscribers, and welcome back to my YouTube channel, my name is Daniel Rosil. I got a comment here the other day asking a few personal questions, all of which I'm happy to answer. One of them was, are you an Israeli citizen? And the answer is yes. I immigrated to Israel under the law of return in 2015 and since then have held dual citizenship of both Israel and Ireland. The second and third questions were a little trickier to answer. Have you served in the IDF and if no, what are you doing to help out with the war effort besides making videos? This one's a lot more complicated. The short answer is that no, I didn't enlist in the IDF. I was offered the option not to serve and I took it. The reason for receiving that option in the first place had to do with a combination of factors. Firstly, I immigrated to Israel just short of my 26th birthday. At that point in time the IDF was only asking for six months of service for those aged 22 to 26 and shortly after the army announced that it would no longer draft immigrants in that age bracket at all. My guess is that they began applying the policy some time before it appeared in the news. In Israel, however, everything is possible if you try hard enough. So although my low health profile and age and lack of Hebrew probably made me a very unattractive prospect for the army to draft, I reckoned that if I pushed to be enlisted they might have had me. So my decision not to serve was I felt really that a decision and it's a decision about which I continue to have very mixed feelings. I felt that I could contribute very little to Israeli society in six months of army service as a back office worker and that the time could be better spent looking for my first job and improving my Hebrew. The army also offers very meager grants for conscripts and I was worried that I couldn't survive financially in Israel if I did join the army. The army suggested that I would be a good fit for the spokesperson unit, but that would have required signing on for a full three years, which again it was longer than I thought I could live on on my pretty diminutive life savings. I felt that my objective of living in Israel for the rest of my life would actually be better served by not joining the military for six months. Not having served in the army, however, is a decision that in some respects does haunt me. It's commonplace for Israelis to list their military service on their resumes. So when I'm interviewing for jobs, it's pretty hard to avoid having the conversation of why I didn't serve. The Israeli army is also famous for being an amazing way to integrate into Israeli society and to quickly improve your spoken Hebrew. Although I feel like I've dedicated a lot to living in Israel, I do sometimes struggle with the feeling that I haven't quite paid my dues as other Israelis have. When I hear of friends picking up their lives to serve in Gaza at the moment, it does make me feel even worse about that. As to what I do, well, volunteering options are currently available in abundance, although I've actually been surprisingly busy with work since this conflict kicked off. However, I have volunteered a few shifts in a logistics warehouse, purchased products from the south whenever I can, and taken part in some digital campaigns like archiving footage from October 7th. Everybody makes difficult life choices from time to time, and we're not always fully comfortable with the decisions that we took. That probably sums up how I feel about not joining the army here. Want to get more videos from me? Then please consider subscribing.