Impressions of Israel
Everywhere you go there are stickers, posters, banners, and ad hoc memorials to fallen soldiers.
I arrived in Israel four days ago. It is my first visit since the catastrophic October war began and I was anxious to connect with our embattled homeland.
From the moment I stepped off the plane it became clear to me that Israel has changed. The airport was eerily quiet. Few tourists have been arriving causing devastating impact on an already fragile post-Covid tourist industry. Israel’s normally multi-billion-dollar tourist sector has been hit hard by the ongoing war. Most tourists visit for short periods of time, mostly for short visits to the South, to bear witness to the devastation the Hamas onslaught wrought on the vulnerable communities in the Gaza envelope and to pay respect to the hundreds butchered at the Nova music festival.
Few tourists are coming for leisurely tours and summer holidays, and the tourist sector is struggling with yet another massive disruption to the industry not long after the devastation caused by the Covid pandemic. Many in the industry have abandoned their professions and have re-skilled in other sectors to rehabilitate their finances. I visited Caesarea, usually teaming with tourists, and found it eerily quiet.
Everywhere you go there are stickers, posters, banners, and ad hoc memorials to fallen soldiers. You can’t walk more than a few meters before you come across stickers printed by bereaved families eulogising their lost children with statements like: “Your happiness will never be taken away from you” with a photo of a smiling youth lost in battle. Others read: “We don’t have another country and now it is my turn to protect her”. You see soldiers walking around armed and you look at their faces and realise they are just children: boys and girls, not men and women, fighting to defend their families and communities. Their youth snatched away from them by a force of pure darkness and evil.
But even though Israel is clearly hurting, she is far from broken. Last night along with thousands of Israelis, I attended an Idan Raichel concert in Jerusalem. The crowd came to stand together and sing and celebrate life. Despite the palpable pain in the music, at no time did Raichel say a hateful word about the sadistic enemy Israel is facing.
At one point he noticed a lady in the audience, and he explained who she was, choaking back tears as he described attending her grandson’s funeral where he had listened to her eulogise her grandson in French as she does not speak Hebrew. Idan explained how despite her inability to communicate in Hebrew, those in attendance understood her immense pain and loss. He asked one of his singers to tell her in French that her courage and strength had given immense strength to those who heard her, and he thanked her.
Where in the world do you attend a concert where the audience, a diverse group of people, religious, secular, young and old, come together during a horrific war to show their love of life, their determination to proudly stand together united in a shared goal: the defeat of pure evil. At the end of the concert, Raichel asked the audience to sing the Hatikvah. The entire audience stood shoulder to shoulder and sang the Hatikvah, a prayer for hope in a time of deep national pain and despair.
Anna Pasternak is the director of The AJN.
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