A land of paradoxes
Israel has been at war since October 7, when Hamas gunmen invaded and butchered 1189 people. The drums of war are also beating on the Lebanese border, in Israel's north.
What’s the mood like in Israel during the war? I recently spent two weeks travelling around Israel, visiting its biggest cities and most important religious sites, trying to figure out what makes its people tick.
From Ben Gurion Airport, I caught a spotless metro train to Herzliya, a coastal city of 100,000 in the geographic heart of the pint-sized nation of nine million people. Named after Theodor Herzl, one of Israel’s founding fathers, Herzliya is Israel’s wealthiest address, home to embassies, start-up business parks and insane villas that sell for up to NIS100 million.
My hotel, the Sharon, was the first resort property in the country, having opened in 1948, the same year Israel declared its independence. Soon after, every single one of Israel’s neighbours attacked – the first of nine existential wars the country has had to face. Yet Israel survived, as did the Sharon. Today its rooms are all privately owned and occupied, though some can be rented on Airbnb.
The view from my balcony took in the Mediterranean coastline and its golden-arched beaches, a marina crowded with superyachts and the glittering Tel Aviv skyline, 10 kilometres to the south.
Another 70 kilometres further south, the war raged in Gaza. But you wouldn’t know it here if not for posters bearing the faces of the 110-plus hostages still held by Hamas wallpapering the boardwalk, staircases and shopfronts.
“The war is far from here,” said my Airbnb host, Asi, who like many Israelis I spoke with, would give only his first name.
On October 7, he said, he sat on the same balcony, watching Hamas rockets fly overhead and the return fire from Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system. He did the same thing in April when Iran fired 330 missiles and drones at Israel.
“I didn’t run to the bomb shelter [every building in Israel is required to have one] because I believe every rocket has an address. Some people go to sleep and never wake up. So what?” he said, in the way of the Sabra, a term for Jews born in Israel taken from the Hebrew word for the prickly pear, a fruit with a thick, thorny skin and sweet, soft interior.
I spent a weekend in Herzliya exploring its suburbs, where not a blade of grass is out of place, and people-watching at beach bars bustling with customers of all colours – many of whose grandparents came here to escape antisemitism in North Africa, Europe and the Levant. Some were wielding machine guns, on weekend leave from compulsory military service, while others smoked joints. Marijuana is decriminalised in Israel.
My next stop was Tel Aviv. Founded in 1909, it’s called the White City for the 4000 buildings designed in the Bauhaus architectural style.
“The White City of Tel Aviv can be seen as an outstanding example of the innovative town-planning ideas of the first part of the 20th century,” UNESCO writes.
Tel Aviv is not polished like Herzliya. It’s raw, edgy, covered in graffiti and murals, a European-Middle East hybrid with a slick Miami-style beachfront underscored by skyscrapers. Electric vehicles buzz around the city and the pedestrian traffic, especially on weekends, suggests a population greater than the official number of 500,000. Every year in the second week of June, half that number of people alone attend the annual gay pride march in Tel Aviv, the largest in Asia – although this year it has been cancelled because of the war.
From Tel Aviv, I took a train packed with civilians and soldiers to Haifa, a port city of 300,000 some 90 kilometres to the north. As we pulled into the station, the carriage filled with the sound of notifications from Tzofar, the Hebrew word for “horn”, an app that warns of incursions into Israeli airspace.
I pulled out my phone. An air-raid siren has been triggered in the Lower Galilee, 20 kilometres east of Haifa, in response to one of around 5000 anti-tank missiles and drones that had been fired into Israel by Hezbollah, an Islamic militant group in Lebanon, since October 8.
Another sign that the war was much closer in Haifa: the map app on my phone showed my location as Beirut-Rafic Al Hariri International Airport. The Israeli Air Force, I learned, had been scrambling GPS signals in the north to disorient Hezbollah drones and, as a joke, redirecting them to Lebanon’s only operational commercial airport.
Without GPS, I had to ask locals for directions to my hotel. Israelis are helpful but brisk, and certainly not keen on small talk with strangers.
But once they get to know you, they treat you like family, a by-product of a collective society rooted in 1930s-style socialism in which the group is more important than the individual. That afternoon, when my camera malfunctioned, I took it to a repair shop. The owner and I ended up chatting for hours, though it took only minutes for him to open up about the cost of the war.
“All three of my children have been diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression,” he said. “In your country, children worry about getting lost in the park. Here they worry about terrorists coming into their bedrooms at night, killing their parents and taking them to Gaza.”
“We are in pain. Truly in pain,” his wife told me that evening after he invited me to dinner. “We have been paying an unbelievably high price since October 7.”
Haifa was visually intriguing, Israel’s San Francisco, a gentrified historic city where centuries-old villas are overshadowed by skyscrapers assembled like dominoes on the slope of Mount Carmel.
About halfway to the top lies the Baha’i World Centre and Garden and its grand golden-domed shrine: headquarters for Baha’i, a religion founded in Iran more than a century ago that preaches unity and the intrinsic value of all other religions.
The Baha’i are an integral part of Israel’s multicultural tapestry, which includes two million Palestinians: Arab-Israelis who can vote and have the same rights as everyone else. There are also 180,000 Christians living in Israel and 250,000 Druze, an Arabic-speaking ethnoreligious group that are persecuted elsewhere in the Middle East. They are deeply patriotic towards the Israeli state, serve in the military and like all sections of Israeli society, are paying a heavy price because of the war. In July, 12 Druze children were killed when a Hezbollah missile struck a football field in the Golan Heights in Israel’s far north. I bought stuffed grape leaves from a Druze at a food truck at a bus stop in Haifa who wore an Israeli military necklace engraved with the words “Bring them home now” in solidarity with the Israeli hostages in Gaza. He does not smile. “His nephew died fighting in Gaza,” one of his customers said.
After Haifa, I visited the Old City of Akko (aka Acre), a 5000-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site and one of the oldest ports in the world, where I stayed at Nzar Khoury For Hosting, a guesthouse owned by a man who introduced himself as an “Palestinian Israeli”. The guesthouse is also the owner’s home, a penthouse apartment with a large viewing terrace overlooking the ancient Akko Lighthouse and redundant tourist boats bobbing in the blue water of the port’s marina.
Sixty-five kilometres to the south, I visited the Roman theatre, hippodrome and other ruins at Caesarea, the 2000-year-old capital of Roman Judaea. The beaches, gardens, gift shops, cafes and small museums of Caesarea city were busy with school groups and at sunset, when the air cooled, couples and families strolled along the promenade.
From there I caught a train that tunnels through a dry mountain range to my final destination in Israel, the eternal capital.
For more than 2000 years, Jerusalem has been one of the world’s most important pilgrimage sites. Like Tel Aviv, it is mostly white as all buildings must be faced with Jerusalem stone, a mix of limestone quarried in the Judean Hills that reflects the sun.
In the 19th century, following the launch of Nile and Palestine package tours by Thomas Cook and Son, non-pilgrims started visiting Jerusalem to gaze at the architecture. But it wasn’t until the 1950s that Israel began welcoming a wider variety of tourists, even those from countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia that ban Israelis from visiting. In 2019, 4.5 million foreigners visited Israel, before the number nosedived during the pandemic. After October 7, it nosedived once again, with international arrivals down 80 per cent in the first quarter compared with the same period last year.
“Normally we are booked out at least one week in advance,” said the receptionist at my hotel in downtown Jerusalem. “Now tourism is so low you can just walk in – like you did.”
After checking in, I rode by light rail to the Old City of Jerusalem. Surrounded by four kilometres of walls built 500 years ago by order of Suleiman 1, when Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire, the Old City is the most fought-over piece of real estate on Earth.
In the first 19 years of Israel’s existence, Jordan controlled east Jerusalem and all of the Old City. The city was reunited in 1967 during the Six-Day War, when Israel pre-empted an invasion and defeated the combined armies of Jordan, Syria and Egypt, and later annexed east Jerusalem.
I entered the Old City through the Damascus Gate and walked along the narrow winding alleyways of Via Dolorosa, believed to be the path Jesus walked to his crucifixion at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Dating back to the fourth century, the church, with its dimly lit subterranean staircases and a great domed basilica covered with frescos, is as grand as St Peter’s in Rome.
I continued to the Jewish quarter, passing the Tower of David – a medieval citadel now housing a museum that chronicles Jerusalem’s history – and shops and market stalls displaying prayer shawls, rosaries, hand-painted ceramics and religious knick-knacks.
Normally the old city would be crowded with tourists at this, or any, time of the year. But there were only a handful now and the Arab stallholders were bored and depressed.
“The only time things have been this quiet before was at the start of COVID,” one tells me. “Business is down 95 per cent.”
I then passed a security checkpoint and walked down a steep flight of stairs to the Western Wall, a 500-metre limestone wall that was part of the larger retaining walls of the ancient Jewish Temple. There, men in black suits and hats belonging to the ultra-Orthodox Charedi Jewish sects prayed with all their might.
Most Charedim are exempt from serving in the Israeli military. But Israel’s parliament is now debating a bill that seeks to change that. “If we stop studying the Torah,” a Charedi teenager tells me, “Israel will be destroyed.”
Israel is a deeply paradoxical nation. Per capita, it spends more on defence than any other country but also has more museums per capita than any place else. Its people are traumatised by the events of October 7 and the failure of their once-vaunted military to protect them. But Israelis are ranked fifth in the UN World Happiness Report 2024. And they still hold the dream, however improbable it may now seem, of forging a secure and lasting peace with all of their neighbours.
“We are sad, we are worried. There was another bombing in the north less than two hours ago,” says Marissa, an unemployed Israeli tour guide in Jerusalem. “But we are alive. I go to the beach, I go to restaurants, I go to concerts. We know how to live with bad situations in Israel.”
Ian Neubauer is a freelance journalist and photojournalist.
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