DISPATCHES FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Before we left Miami, we taped over the Maccabi logo and Magen David on my daughter's backpack. I did not want to invite problems the moment we stepped off the plane. I also made sure my Uber displayed my first name only, and made a note of which neighborhoods to avoid. You note these things, tuck them away with your passport, and move on.
London was our first stop, and it surprised me. We were central and the city felt orderly and calm, almost deliberately removed from the news cycle I'd been tracking for months. It was all clean streets and civil crowds. Golders Green, which I followed closely from the states, was a different city entirely. In the months before we arrived, four Hatzalah ambulances had been torched, two Jewish men stabbed, and a man attacked on the street for speaking Hebrew. Then a massive fire broke out at Kosher Kingdom, the largest kosher supermarket in Europe. Thankfully it was electrical, but the community's first instinct was fear, and that reflex tells you everything about the climate there. Jews are leaving Golders Green. I didn't see one kippah or visibly Jewish person in London in over a week. The community that built itself there over generations is doing the quiet math and drawing the obvious conclusion. Westminster might as well have been a different country.
Paris held its own version of the same paradox. We stayed near Le Marais, the historic Jewish quarter, and the neighborhood felt almost festive, a tourist draw as much as a community. The visibly Orthodox residents moved through it like figures in a diorama, distinct enough from the surrounding city that they almost read as a feature of the arrondissement rather than inhabitants of it. Caricatures. I know that the reality for French Jews is considerably stickier than the scenery suggested, that the emigration numbers tell a story the cafe tables don't. But the surface was so intact, so picturesque, that the dissonance took a moment to register. I noticed Ottolenghi sauces stacked in the French grocery stores, which made me think of his London restaurant, which we walked past and found nearly empty. He was smart to have diversified into retail. Being Israelis a liability that good politics and a celebrated career don't fully offset in certain markets.
I checked the airline every day to ensure the airspace was open, since the skirmishes with Iran and Lebanon threatened flights. We didn't remove the tape from the backpack until we were on the flight to Israel.
There hasn't been a single siren since we arrived. I downloaded the Homeland Security app and had my sister-in-law give me a refresh on protocol as soon as we landed, but it's been blissfully quiet. I have the safe room stocked anyway, water and blankets and chargers lined up, because it's just irresponsible not to be prepared. I lost my mind last week when I realized one of the kids had taken the extra charger from that room. It's one thing to sneak the charger from the kitchen, but from the safe room? Idiocy.
What struck me first about Israel, since it's been 16 months since my last visit, was that construction has finally resumed. The cranes are back! But the workforce has shifted in ways that take a moment to absorb: Israel has been issuing visas to Chinese and Indian laborers to fill the gap left by the suspension of Palestinian workers. Their presence is visible throughout the day, coming off shifts in droves, riding the buses, or just sitting at the beach. It's entirely logical and quietly jarring at the same time, one of those small markers of how completely the last two years have reshuffled ordinary life.
Our town of Atlit also feels quieter than I remember. A good portion of the small businesses in our two local plazas have closed and not come back. The ones still open are managing, but the texture has changed in the way things change when people have absorbed a sustained blow and are still deciding whether to rebuild or move on.
What everyone talks about, without exception, is Trump. Where is he? Where is Rubio? Why did he send Vance? Why is that guy alway smiling, even when they refuse to shake his hand during talks? Is the memo the real deal, or does Trump have something up his sleeve? Israelis are not given to dependence or hand-wringing, which is precisely why it is striking to watch an entire country's sense of security hinge on the temperament of one man in Washington.
What's also unsettling? There are memorial stickers everywhere. Soldiers' faces on the train ticket kiosks, on falafel shop doors, on park gates. I sent a photo to my friends yesterday and wrote that it still doesn't feel normalized, even though by the math of it, it probably should. You walk past several sticker walls in a single block and feel every one. What happens when it rains, or the sun fades them: are these stories just supposed to disappear? I need to find a photographer to document the phenomena before it’s gone. Israel has always refused to let its story end, and the same should hold true for these individual tales.
Am Yisrael Chai