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In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, residents volunteer and keep kids at home as streets and supermarket shelves empty out
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Al Hambra Deli, a neighborhood cafe and wine bar in Jaffa, would usually expect to be bustling on this Thursday night, the beginning of the Israeli weekend. Located on Jerusalem Boulevard., one of the city’s main arteries, it’s right on the path of Tel Aviv’s recently opened light-rail system, and not far from a soccer stadium.
But this week, its doors have been shuttered. A sign greets passersby: “Beloved neighborhood, half of us are in the army and half are protecting our homes. We love you and are waiting to return, Staff.”
It’s a mood felt throughout the city and others in Israel’s crowded central region: Five days after an attack by Hamas killed and wounded thousands in the country’s south, streets in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are chillingly quiet aside from sirens warning of incoming rockets. Schools are closed and residents are yearning for ways to help as they cope with the physical and emotional fallout of the massacre and the war Israel is now fighting against Hamas in Gaza.
Earlier this week, supermarket shelves emptied out as authorities recommended that Israelis stock up on three days’ worth of food. Shufersal, the country’s largest grocery chain, set limits on purchases of bread, bottled water, milk and eggs.
Details of the atrocities in the south continue to emerge, and 300,000 Israelis have been called up for reserve duty. Rockets continue to target Israeli cities, and Israeli airstrikes hit Gaza, as the country girds for what will likely be a prolonged conflict.
“We live in a permanent state of fear,” said Inès Forman, 29, a French-Israeli writer, describing the last week in Tel Aviv. “I feel anxiety and fear in my body every second that I am awake.”
Forman has committed herself to spreading news on social media about Saturday’s massacre. Many of the Instagram posts on her profile are about art or literature, but the images she’s shared over the past 24 hours are of a different kind: widely circulated clips of reporters describing the scenes they’ve encountered in towns on the Gaza border, and photos and video condemning Hamas and its supporters.
“We are working on fighting fake news… basically all day” she says of her new routine, keeping a schedule that involves waking up and starting at “five or six until very late at night. Yesterday, I finished at around one” in the morning.
On Thursday, Forman attended the afternoon funeral of her friend’s younger sister, Shira Eylon, 23, who was presumed captured until her body was discovered in the woods on Wednesday amongst those who were murdered at the massacre at the music festival outside Kibbutz Re’im.
“My beautiful and pure fairy — today you received wings. I love you forever,” her older sister wrote on Instagram, announcing her death.
“There is not anyone who doesn’t have a loved one who’s either been killed, someone who they know, a friend or a loved one, or injured, or taken captive” said Melanie Landau, a 50-year-old Australian-Israeli therapist living in the Baqa neighborhood of Jerusalem. “So many people are on the front line and just worried about their loved ones.”
Many residents have left Tel Aviv, traveling abroad or to an area of Israel farther from Gaza, and have listed their apartments on spreadsheets coordinating housing for refugees from areas in Israel’s north and south that have been evacuated. Several people described the normally crowded city as a “ghost town.”
Some Tel Aviv residents have relocated within the city. Lotte Beilin, a 30-year old British-Israeli news producer, is staying in a friend’s apartment because her own building is older and doesn’t have a bomb shelter. The city streets are “so quiet you can hear a pin drop.”
There are more “uplifting” moments too, Landau said, adding that “the sort of resilience and strength of the human spirit” has been on display this week.
Throughout the country, many efforts are underway to collect needed supplies for the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who arrived at their bases lacking some critical resources.
Lee Mangoli, a 32-year-old Canadian-Israeli yoga teacher in Tel Aviv, recalled that “on Sunday we started to come out of shock and I realized I needed to take action to help myself.” She met with a friend and started collecting food and other “basic amenities” like shampoo and socks for soldiers.
Very quickly, she says that their small project “exploded with money coming in from abroad… and we are dealing with a lot of requests from a lot of different bases that cost money.”
While there have not been any issues raising funds, her group has run into difficulties sourcing the supplies. “We are not finding the goods anymore. UPS and Fedex are not delivering to Israel” and certain much-requested items like Leatherman utility knives have been nearly impossible to locate. “I could buy 200 and have soldiers to give them to but nobody has them,” she said.
For others such as Becky Schneck, 36, a physical therapist and mother of four young children, the burden of her husband’s call-up to reserve duty on Saturday, in addition to the closure of schools until further notice, has been too overwhelming to consider volunteering for the war effort.
“I am so busy, I don’t even want to think about it too much,” she said. “I do not have the emotional capacity to deal with everything going on in my house and also everything going on in the country.” Neighbors in her community of Tzur Hadassah, outside Jerusalem, have stepped up to deliver food to families like hers.
While Masa Israel, an umbrella group for gap year programs, said shortly after the massacre that none of its 5,700 fellows were harmed, at least one program has closed — the Yahel Social Change Fellowship, which engages its participants in social action and volunteering across Israel.
“With a heavy heart, the Yahel board and staff have made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend the Yahel Social Change Fellowship until things calm down here,” announced Yahel’s executive director, Dana Talmi.
Others are pressing on. At the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, staff “are doing the best we can… [going] into overdrive to support our students as much as humanly possibly,” said Meesh Hammer-Kossoy, the dean of students. “Pardes is pretty serious about running” in spite of the war. Of the approximately 80 students studying year-long, 18 have joined classes via Zoom from abroad.
“We are resolutely gathering for regular prayer and trying to study as best as we can,” she said.
Landau said that many Israelis are engaged in “a battle of consciousness.”
“There are a lot of people getting overexposed to a lot of the imagery and I think that is part of the battle,” she said. “Not to lose faith in humanity and not to be pulled in by that.”
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G7 Statement Will Not Mention ICC Warrant for Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a memorial ceremony for those murdered by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and those who fell in the “Iron Sword” war, at the Knesset, the Parliament, in Jerusalem, Oct. 28, 2024. Photo: DEBBIE HILL/Pool via REUTERS
A joint statement of Group of Seven foreign ministers is set to avoid mentioning the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite an effort by the Italian hosts to find a common position on it.
Italy, which currently chairs the G7, said on Monday it wanted to try to forge a common position about the ICC arrest warrant at a two-day meeting it hosted in the spa town of Fiuggi and which ended on Tuesday.
A draft of the final statement due to emerge from the discussions, reviewed by Reuters, did not directly name the ICC and its decisions.
“In exercising its right to defend itself, Israel must fully comply with its obligations under international law in all circumstances, including International Humanitarian Law,” it said.
“We reiterate our commitment to International Humanitarian Law and will comply with our respective obligations,” the statement added, stressing “that there can be no equivalence between the terrorist group Hamas and the State of Israel.”
Last week, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence chief Yoav Gallant, as well as a Hamas leader, Ibrahim Al-Masri, for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict.
The move was strongly criticized by the United States but other states including Britain and Italy did not rule out that they could make an arrest if Netanyahu visited their countries.
Israel condemned the ICC decision as shameful and absurd. The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, which launched the Gaza war with its invasion of and massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7, praised it as a step towards justice.
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Israel’s Chief Rabbinate Promises More of the Same Flawed Policies After Election
Header of an instruction from Israel’s Chief Rabbinate for how to observe Shabbat during the war with Hamas. (Photo: Screenshot)
While the world’s attention has been focused on the American election, there has been a far less publicized, but still significant, election in Israel for the Chief Rabbinate.
After months of wrangling, the election was finally decided, with left and right fighting about egalitarianism, and who should sit on the electoral committee.
I have always been a rebel and disliked authority and power — particularly when it is associated with religion, from which I expect a higher level of ethics and morality than elsewhere.
And yet, I am constantly disappointed. When people achieve authority, they tend to make decisions based on preserving their power, rather than the moral criteria. That is why religion and politics are two very different areas of human activity that really ought to be kept apart.
Sadly, they rarely are.
Israel’s Chief Rabbinate controls important levers of income and authority — from marriage and divorce, to conversions and kashrut. It also provides extremely well paid and plentiful easy jobs for Orthodox boys (less so for the girls), and like all bureaucracies, is very bureaucratic.
This is fertile ground for corruption, and indeed unpopularity. Yet there are some wonderful, honest, devoted and impressive rabbis serving in Israel’s rabbinate today.
The tensions that we have witnessed in Israel between ethnic groups, the right and the left, secular and the religious, the Supreme Court and its critics, and the different voices within them, illustrate the near impossibility of reconciliation and compromise.
Caught between conflicting interests comes the Chief Rabbinate, whose courts run parallel with secular courts. It’s a government agency of great power and reach that is unpopular with many sectors of Jewish life in Israel today, for good reason.
Candidates for the Chief Rabbinate who are not approved of by the Haredi world stand little chance of getting elected. As a result, some Chief Rabbis have been convicted of crimes, and others were suspected of crimes. And the only criterion seems to be getting enough Haredi votes.
In the early years of the state, most of the state rabbis were committed to the cause of a Jewish State, even if they wouldn’t necessarily call themselves Zionists politically. The Chief Rabbinates performed very well given the constraints. Over time, the institution, like most others in Israel, was slowly infected by a bureaucracy of entitlement, laziness, and incompetence.
At first, the Haredi community simply ignored the Chief Rabbinate. Their religious and sometimes charismatic leaders and authorities were not elected or appointed. They emerged as natural leaders. They had their own standards and attitudes towards Israeli life. But then the Haredi community increased, and it saw opportunities.
The salaries of community and local rabbis were very attractive, and you didn’t have to have a secular education. Increasingly the Haredi world entered the rabbinate and over time, have come to dominate it, so that the moderates have largely been undercut.
This year, the Sephardi candidate got through easily in a predetermined election that saw yet another member of the Yosef dynasty intent on keeping it in one family. The Ashkenazi Lau family also tried to maintain their grip on the position, but could not gather enough support. The Ashkenazi election came down to two candidates. Eventually Rabbi Kalman Ber from Netanya was elected by 77-58. He defeated the more open and impressive Rabbi Micha Halevi of Petach Tikvah, who had support from the Religious Zionists.
Both rabbis have good reputations and claimed to be moderates. At the induction ceremony, they spoke of embracing all sectors of Israeli life, to support IDF soldiers, visit army camps, and comfort the families of kidnapped Israelis. Rabbi Yosef concluded in English with a Trumpian declaration that resonated with the audience: “We will make the Chief Rabbinate great again!” Chief Rabbi Ber echoed this commitment to unity, expressing the vision rooted in Rabbi Kook. “My greatest mission is to bring about unity among all parts of the people,” he said.
I have heard this before from Chief Rabbis across the world. Music to my ears. But given human nature, they rarely live up to their campaign promises. In Israel, as the winning candidates were elected thanks to Haredi votes, I cannot see any change in matters of law or the culture of the rabbinate. Any hope for a new era will once again be brushed under the carpet. And nothing will change. The only saving grace is that Chief Rabbis are only elected for 10 years. I pray I am proven wrong.
The author is a writer and rabbi, currently based in New York.
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Revealed: Palestinian Authority Shows That Hamas Steals Money From Gaza Civilians
Palestinians gather to receive aid, including food supplies provided by World Food Program (WFP), outside a United Nations distribution center, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, Aug. 24, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa
How ironic is it that while the International Criminal Court (ICC) decided last week to blame Israel for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is placing the blame on Hamas.
A reporter from official PA TV stationed in the Gaza Strip reported that Hamas steals 28% of Gazans’ salaries, as well as other money transfers:
Official PA TV host: “There are other crimes that are being committed against the civilians [in Gaza]. They are being financially extorted through [Hamas’] deduction of part of their money.
In other words, every employee, whether he is a PA employee, a state employee, or works for any other source, or someone who even wants to receive a transfer from his relatives abroad — they must pay a heavy sum…” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Nov. 13, 2024]
Later in the story, a PA reporter revealed that the sum was 28% of employees’ salaries:
Official PA TV reporter in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza: “There is no trade in cash. The cash is worn out in the central and southern areas [of the Gaza Strip], and even in the north.
The [only] ones who have cash are certain groups. If you want to receive your salary in cash of more or less good quality, they [Hamas] deduct part of your salary. The deducted sum is 28%. They deduct more than a quarter of the salary.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Nov. 13, 2024]
An editorial by the official PA daily also criticized Hamas for continuously stealing the humanitarian aid that Israel is letting in for the benefit of Gazan civilians:
The aid that is arriving there [in the northern Gaza Strip] after many hardships … is exclusively controlled by the Hamas militias and others, until it arrives in the greedy free market of commerce that craves forbidden profit. [emphasis added]
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Nov. 10, 2024]
The editorial pointed out that the survival of the Gazan civilians is no longer connected to “surviving the missiles of the Israeli fighter jets,” but is simply a struggle of “seeking a loaf of bread at a sane price”:
The suffering of our people in the northern Gaza Strip is no longer the suffering of surviving the missiles of the Israeli fighter jets and drones and is not the suffering of seeking refuge, rather it is the suffering of seeking a loaf of bread at a sane price, and a cigarette at the cost of 1 [Israeli] shekel. [emphasis added]
Throughout the 2023 Gaza war, Palestinian Media Watch has exposed Hamas’ unscrupulous theft of international aid meant for Gazan civilians, turning the humanitarian efforts into terror support to sustain its war against Israel.
The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article was originally published.
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