LIFE DURING WARTIME
Being dispatches from the ground in Tel Aviv, from a New Yorker making Aliyah to Israel in late 2024.
[What follows: regular reports 'from the ground' in Israel (from late August 2024 onward), in the form of a Manhattanite's POV of what it's like to live here in the homeland, beginning a little over 10 months into the war that begin on Oct 7, 2023.]
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INSTALL ONE, August 31, 2024
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WHAT HAPPENED TO CLAPPING ON LANDING? My Aliyah flight via El Al last Tuesday from NYC to Tel Aviv (I didn't trust a plane without its own guns), departed a mere 8 hours after 100 Israeli jets destroyed 1000s of Hezbollah missile launchers in Lebanon. Iran and Hezbo had been threatening revenge for over a month to retaliate for Israelis' killing of Hezbollah's most senior leader to date in Beirut, Fuad Shukr—which itself preceded the assassination of Hamas' #1 "Ismail Haniyeh" by mere hours in a hotel in Tehran—but when we El Al passengers landed in Tel Aviv on this day, after another bloody military miracle (300 of the Shi'ite enemies' rockets again resulted in no Israeli fatalities), no one on the plane clapped in joy, even though the landing was successful and, had literally, flown through a war zone. And yet, since 1968 I must have landed in Ben-Gurion airport 7 or 8 different times, and each such touchdown had been accompanied by an outburst of joy, a unanimous clapping by all on board these flights. But today's landing heard no such applause.... You could be forgiven for thinking you'd just landed in Atlanta for all the non-reaction in the cabin. Has 25 years of Netanyahu's prime ministership plus the (now) 10 month+ long war drained the joy (and generated this silence) from even the most optimistic on-board Zionists? Had Ben-Gurion's anxious, decades-long-yet joyous crusade become blasé in the eyes of those arriving in 2024? Was there to be no more clapping from the Jews now: now that their dream had darkened so in the eyes of Gentiles around the planet in the 2020s? Worst of all, has the last 10 months' war so exhausted the lovers of Zion that they could no longer be bothered to 'put their hands together' for this latter day miracle by latter day saints? Instead of kissing the ground, I dragged myself off the plane, a bit depressed.
I'd been a film and theatre maker in New York for 50 years, until OCTOBER 7, 2023 hit many of us like a hurricane. As a politically liberal, (secular) Jewish film and theatre producer, I'd lived in Boston and Paris, 'til on my 23rd bday I moved to the East Village of NYC as punk rock was 3 years into its ascendancy; a new song "Rapper's Delight" was boom-boxing by my street-level window; No Wave and indie cinema were being reborn around Alphabet City; and the art scene around Haring, Basquiat and Schnabel was exploding. Since my nose did bleed when I went north of 14th Street (love that cliche), I found myself spending New Year's Eve '79-to-'80 with the likes of 3 (now) dead artists—Andy Warhol, Harry Smith and Allen Ginsberg. .... But where in this 25+ year-old, Manhattan-spun head of mine was any awareness of the real status of the state of Israel, about to enter its 100th year of epic struggle of being born, after which it was then trying to be safe evermore?
For me the answer was vintage diaspora 1980: I was an oblivious, screened-off, downtown NYC Jew who in my twenties preferred the Voice, the SoHo News, The New Yorker, even Punk Magazine over (at a minimum) an English-language Israeli daily— Yes, when I was 12, I was in Jerusalem for a year, a member of my professor-father's family at Hebrew U (it lasted a semester and a half), a year when I fell in love (yes), and made lifelong Israeli friends. But on returning to the USA, I fell into the post-punk bohemia which (by default) felt like home: a hipster's dream of film parties, Danceteria, short films, shorter romances, and disorienting substances to numb everything else.
I was last 'scared' for Israel when, as a 17 year old, I read and listened as 1973 happened. But in 2002, producing theatre on Broadway, I had the good fortune to find the unproduced play "Golda's Balcony" while the Second Intifada was starting in full earnest. I produced the show on Broadway for 4 years straight. And then I changed.
The play was an extraordinary one-woman show (perhaps the most difficult monolog written for anyone, man or woman in the last 100 years) in which Tovah Feldshuh played 44 characters in 80 minutes—including Golda Meir—as not only the Yom Kippur War was dramatized with mind-snapping brilliance by writer William Gibson ("The Miracle Worker"), but so, too, somehow, the entire story of Israel was TOLD from 1880 to 1973—one hundred tear-strained yet miraculous years woven into rapid-fire dialog with a deftness I have yet to witness IN ANY PLAY, whether a one-man show (here the genius, Tovah Feldshuh, literally did an 80-minute solo) or a large cast film or musical (yes I'm talking about you Fiddler and Schindler)—which led Elie Wiesel at an early preview in 2003 to approach us backstage, weeping, to tell us that "we had done the impossible: that not only had we had told the once-a-millenium story of Israel's rebirth without propaganda, but "AS ART". With Mossad security hirelings tearing tickets—and 'wanding' everyone who entered the theatre on W. 44th before each full house—I was 'changed' over the show's next 4 years on Broadway and on National Tour into some kind of born-again Zionist. And it was then, in the 'oughts', 20 years ago, that I first felt compelled to escape the walls of my Manhattan womb as soon as possible.... the Jan-March 2023 nationwide marches protesting the "judicial reforms" were invitation enough, though I didn't act until October 7, because it was THEN, after Israel's most life-threatening moment since 1948, that I no longer saw the point of being anywhere but my real home, LIVING in the land of milk and honey.... which in my mind, perhaps I never really left?
So here I am, end of August 2024, having done the deed, made genuine Aliyah, living in TLV, AirBnB. Will I be here half a year? More? I can't tell: I have two successfully-grown young-adult children back on the eastern seaboard, and a very busy artist wife back in New York I miss terribly... but I must—NOW—during this war, I MUST march, volunteer, vote and endeavor to understand (the alternative is just ignorance) the wildly diverse points of view of my fellow Israelis (POVs which no matter what you read, or hear, are none the less heavily veiled from those of us in the diaspora)... and then share what I'm learning with all of you. (For starters, the right wing is STILL actively trying to defang the Supreme Court BEFORE an official inquiry is being/has been made into why Israel took their eye off Gaza in the first place....) I'm no journalist (= a storyteller in real time), but I've made my bread telling stories that have already taken place and then gotten mounted for others to see..... But history is right now, and I feel no choice but to do this right now. I hope it's worth your time: I know it'll be worth mine, if only to grasp it better, a little, by being forced to write it down. Thank you for reading.
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[NEXT INSTALLMENT: Abba Eban wrote about 1943 as the Holocaust was approaching British Palestine. We now know it never made it (thank you Monty), but the Arab-British 'partnership' which took its place wasn't much more than a bad screenplay that had to be re-written, with blood, into a film with a happy ending. Is the 21st century of 1943 threatening to loom again? Are clouds of hatred gathering, and must we seek shelter as Jews... or else? Is that why I'm here, seeking a second passport? How is it conceivable that the rapists, murderers and kidnappers from Hamas are admired by far too many on this planet? What explanations of any kind explain this blindness to evil—and how is this quasi-canonization of killers on the part of campus protesters, national leaders and the international press NOT the most nauseating act of gaslighting since 1930s Deutschland?]
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INSTALL TWO, coming in 1-2 days
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SO WHY HAVE LARGE NUMBERS OF THE GENTILE WORLD DRUNK THE KOOL AID?