As war rages, Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd, players reflect on Summer trip to Israel, Mideast

Multiple security guards, all military veterans, sandwiched them. On tours, walks through town and even in restaurants, at least one guard would be in the lead, and one would follow the group. On the road, at least one sat at the front of each of the team's two buses.

“We thought, for us, it was probably a little bit of overkill,” UA coach Tommy Lloyd said at Pac-12 media day in Las Vegas last week. “But when we went into Palestine, that was a little bit different. We got some glimpses of it.”

On just the second day of their trip, less than two months before Palestinian-rooted Hamas militants from Gaza attacked areas of southern Israel to trigger a war that has already resulted in a reported 2,000-plus deaths, the Wildcats rode a bus into the West Bank to visit Bethlehem.

There, they walked through near-empty streets to visit a church over where Jesus was believed to have been born, an experience many of them cited as a highlight of their trip, then ate lunch at the family home of their Palestinian Christian tour guide.

On the way back to Jerusalem, they were stopped at a checkpoint by machine-gun-toting Israeli border guards, who hopped onto their buses briefly to scope things out before giving the Wildcats the green light to move on through.

If it hadn’t already, the seriousness of their need for security sunk in at that point. The Wildcats were surrounded by safe hands, but in an uncertain area.

“They were trained professionals,” Lloyd said of their guards. “Their heads were up. They were like a good point guard, always looking when no one else was looking. You just want to be like, `Hey, relax a little bit’ but that's obviously more of a part of their society than what we’re used to as average Americans.”

The Wildcats likely would have been safe even if their route through Israel had included the date of Oct. 7, when Hamas militants launched their attack on Israeli towns near the Gaza border. The closest the team came to the current war zone was about 20 miles, as they skirted northwest on Aug. 13 from their float in the Dead Sea to their hotel in Tel Aviv, which was about 40 miles north of the Gaza border.

And, as it turned out, the Arizona basketball team was actually much closer to a tragedy during its 2017 tour of Spain, when the Sean Miller-led Wildcats were clustered in a hotel just four blocks from where a terrorist drove a van into pedestrians along Barcelona’s famed Ramblas, killing 16.

“Unfortunately, it's sad that that's the world we live in now,” said Lloyd, referring to UA’s 2017 trip. “And you can go to a shopping mall in America, someone can show up with a semi-automatic gun … innocent people, it's horrible. It's horrible that that's become common in our world. As a society, we all need to do better.”

But knowledge that the Wildcats would have likely avoided danger this time, too, hardly made news of the Hamas-Israeli conflict any less unsettling. In fact, the Wildcats’ recent visit, having brought them newfound familiarity with the region and its cultures, may have only added to the shock.

During breakout interviews at Pac-12 media day on Wednesday in Las Vegas, seniors Oumar Ballo and Pelle Larsson both grew silent initially when asked their thoughts on the conflict.

After a few moments, Ballo spoke up.

“Everyone is alert about what's going on,” Ballo said. “All we can say is we hope there's gonna be peace, that they can find peace and forgive each other. I'm just gonna pray for them.”

Lloyd said his wife has been giving him a “play-by-play” of what has been going on, a disheartening diversion from his attempts to prepare the Wildcats for a season that begins on Nov. 6.

“It's hard to watch,” Lloyd said. “I'm not well-versed enough in the history in the religious battle going on but it just breaks my heart that good, innocent people are being impacted by this.

“We went there and had an amazing experience. Great people, beautiful people, beautiful country, life-changing experience. Then it really hits home when something like this can happen.

"Over there, they were kind of talking about it, but it was hard for us to grasp. And then two months later, it's happening. So it's hard to watch.”

They may have been talking about the threat of conflict but, in a sense, that’s been the case for centuries in the region. One of the things that Wildcats were told during a visit to Jerusalem’s Old City was how of layers upon layers of people with different backgrounds would claim the area, only to be ousted in some future century by people of another religion.

But the Wildcats also saw how those different layers of culture and religion weaved the unique fabric of the area today, one reason why New York-based former hedge fund manager Daniel Posner founded the Athletes for Israel, a group he said paid for the "vast majority" of the Wildcats’ trip.

Efforts to reach Posner for this story were unsuccessful, but he told the Star on Aug. 12 during the Wildcats’ practice at the Jerusalem YMCA that he aimed to broadcast a more positive message of Israel via athletes who visit and tell their stories.

“Everybody just wants to focus on the peace issues or if there's fighting issues,” Posner said. “Let's focus on all the amazing things that are happening in Israel. That's really the goal for Athletes for Israel.”

Posner also was instrumental in directing Arizona and Kansas State players on their respective tours to the United Arab Emirates and Abu Dhabi’s Abrahamic Family House, which celebrates the 2020 normalization of relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.

Perhaps chillingly for both sets of Wildcats, the fact that Saudi Arabia appeared to be nearing a similar relationship with Israel has also been speculated to be a root cause of Hamas’ decision to attack Israel.

“A big part of our trip was supporting the Abraham Accords, and I know they felt like they were close to getting a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia,” Lloyd said. “Then, for this setback to happen, it’s just, it's devastating.

As Posner explained his mission outside the glass enclosure of the gym where the Wildcats were practicing in Jerusalem on Aug. 12, he took a look around inside the three-story structure, which is divided into different areas for different types of workouts, done by different groups of people.

“We read about all the conflict, but you come here and you say, `Wow, this works,’ “ Posner said then. “Like, I'm in a gym at the YMCA. If you go to the gym over there, you'll see Arabs working out with Jews, working out with Christians. Some people are dressed from head to toe, because they want to be modest, and there are other people wearing bikinis in the swimming area.

"It just all connects. Everybody gets along. Not to say that people don't have differences. But we respect each other's differences. I really wanted to be able to people to see that. I wanted more people to see it.”

The Wildcats saw it. But now, from half a world away, they are seeing something else entirely, a horrific new chapter in the region's history, and it’s tearing up their souls.

“We were very fortunate to have that experience, and to see what it's like gives you more in depth,” senior wing Pelle Larsson said. “But as Oumar said, we just want peace. What we saw when we were there was peace, and that's all we want. For them and for the world.”