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David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, once said: "In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles." I didn't see any miracles during a five-day visit to the country, my first, early in July, but Israel did look like it could use some.
The country I got a glimpse of was under intense pressure. The day after I arrived, Israel Defense Forces raided a Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin in the West Bank, a move that put the country on edge and triggered Hamas reprisal attacks. Meanwhile, tension was building over the proposed overhaul of the country's judiciary by the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite large, angry protests, part of the overhaul aimed at limiting the power of the Israeli Supreme Court passed the Knesset on July 24.
I'm a London-based journalist and went to Israel as part of a group organized by ELNET, the European Leadership Network, a pro-Israel nongovernmental organization, founded 15 years ago, in the words of its website, to strengthen relations between Europe and Israel "based on shared democratic values and strategic interests." They promised me a warts-and-all trip to different parts of the country and the chance to meet a wide range of people, including politicians, soldiers, academics, policy experts and local journalists. Newsweek paid my expenses. The following are some snapshots from my visit.
'A Tough Neighborhood'
On July 4, the IDF raid on the Jenin camp dominated both Israeli and international news. Twelve Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed. But that all seemed to be far from the minds of people at the Western Wall in Jerusalem that day. By 10 a.m. the temperature on the stone-paved square outside the old city's Temple Mount had soared to 90 degrees.There was an almost party atmosphere among the Jewish families thronged to celebrate bar and bat mitzvahs. The sound of drums and clarinets and singing filled the air, while men and women and the boys and girls coming of age approached the wall to pray.
The next day, as I headed to Tel Aviv, a news alert on my phone informed me of a terror attack there. A pickup truck driven by a Palestinian man rammed into pedestrians near a bus stop. He then got out and stabbed someone in the neck. Eight people were injured, including a pregnant woman who lost her baby. The 20-year-old assailant was shot dead by a passerby. Hamas later claimed responsibility for the attack.
The news—and my proximity to it—set my teeth on edge. I had the same sinking feeling I experienced after the terror attacks in London on July 7, 2005, and the Westminster Bridge and London Bridge attacks in 2017. But after those horrors, I remembered, London didn't skip a beat.
Neither did Tel Aviv. When I got there that afternoon, the golden sands that stretch along its Mediterranean coastline were packed with beachgoers playing volleyball. Kayakers and paddleboarders splashed in the sea. Families strolled in front of the tourist hotels that line the shore while young people zipped up and down the waterfront on rented electric scooters. Bars and restaurants did not appear to suffer for trade. It was like hanging out on a nice day in Venice Beach, California; like nothing had happened.
"Israel is an extremely robust country," Tel Aviv resident Dr. Ilan Samish, chief executive of foodtech startup Amai Proteins, told me. "We live in a tough neighborhood.... [We have] known periods of terror worse than what is going on now.
"Overall, Tel Aviv is a very safe space," he continued, before drawing a comparison with time he spent completing postdoctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia: "There, I couldn't let my kids go out after 10 p.m. The chances of something bad happening to them are much lower here than they are in other major cities like New York and London."
The Smiling Caterpillar
The Legacy Heritage Park of Good Wishes in Sderot, a city of about 30,000 in the southern district of Israel, is a typical children's playground. There are swings and a climbing frame, benches and shade trees. There is also a 40-foot-long concrete tube painted to resemble a smiling caterpillar, a great place for a game of hide-and-seek. It also doubles as a bomb shelter. The city is less than a mile from the border with Hamas-ruled Gaza and is a frequent target of missile attacks.
I visited the morning after five missiles were fired at Sderot in retaliation for the IDF raid on the Jenin camp. Over the past 20 years, The Sderot Foundation, a community organization, says 12,000 Hamas rockets have targeted the city. As one local told me, "The whole town is in a perpetual state of PTSD."
When the attack siren goes off, residents have—at best—15 seconds to take cover. Most homes have a reinforced room, often a child's bedroom, that acts as a bomb shelter. Businesses and restaurants are festooned with signs pointing to their shelters, and there are concrete shelters beside every bus stop. Parents in their cars stop, put their kids on the ground, lay on top of them, cover their own heads and pray.
Despite the constant existential threat, the city is a magnet for young families. Just 45 minutes by train from Tel Aviv, it is less expensive than Israel's pricey tech and cultural hub. Huge tax exemptions and health care subsidies are added attractions.
Most incoming rockets, like the five fired the night before, are intercepted within seconds by Israel's Iron Dome missile defense system. The missile battery on the outskirts of Sderot consists of two launchers, an armory and a couple of bell tents.
One of the female soldiers there was jaded beyond her 19 years. She, like her fellow recruits, was on her mandatory two-year military service, which begins at age 18, except for the ultra-Orthodox, who are exempted. She and her comrades get no advance warning when Iron Dome rockets are fired, and she says it took her two months to get used to the noise they make. Did she do anything to prepare mentally for her role?
"I think the therapy comes after," she told me, an M5 assault rifle hanging off her shoulder.
'My Country is on Fire'
For some Israelis, the biggest threat to their democracy is not the ongoing conflict with Hamas, in Gaza to the south, and Hezbollah, in Lebanon to north, but the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his religious-right coalition government, especially the judicial reform he has pushed through the Knesset.
The reform's main aim is to curb the Supreme Court's power to void decisions made by elected officials by ruling them "unreasonable." Opponents and even some members of the media have labeled the proposed changes a "coup" that would eliminate necessary checks and balances. Unlike the U.S., for example, Israel has only one parliamentary chamber and does not have a written constitution.
Hanoch Dov Milwidsky, a member of the Knesset for Netanyahu's Likud Party, however, told me that the "reasonability" standard is antidemocratic and insisted the reforms will put necessary checks on the judiciary.
Netanyahu himself has said: "Court independence and civil rights in Israel will not be harmed in any way." It appears that few outside of his ultra-Orthodox coalition supporters believe him. Opponents of the new law rushed to ask the Supreme Court to hear challenges to it as soon as it passed, and the Court said it would do so in September. That raises the possibility of a constitutional standoff in which the Court strikes down a law expressly designed to limit its power to strike down laws. What happens after that is anyone's guess.
"My country is on fire right now," Gal Salomon, co-founder and executive chairman of healthtech company CLEW, told me. He remembered the initial uproar about the reform proposals in January. "We wake up one up morning and, you know, the entire country was changed completely."
Rallies against the reforms have been going on since then and got bigger following the bill's passage on July 24. Protests were staged everywhere from the streets of Tel Aviv to Ben Gurion Airport and the floor of the Knesset. Despite being peaceful (although Milwidsky claimed they got more extreme), demonstrators have faced police water cannons and stun grenades. The protests have been supported by people ranging from retired military chiefs, reservists and Israel's national labor union to its medical association, legal experts and business leaders like Salomon and Samish.
Samish says the judicial reforms have created an uncertainty that is spooking investors. Startups are a big driver for Israel's economy, and account for 15 percent of exports and 18 percent of GDP, according to business group Start-Up Nation Central. Some 85 percent of funding comes from abroad, mostly the U.S. In July Samish secured $10 million in funding for his seven-year-old company, but new startups are failing to attract backers. Investment in the high-tech sector is down 70 percent this year.
"While the world is doing business to business, business to business is not happening in Israel," he says. Samish has threatened to pull his company out of Israel if all the reforms proposed by Netanyahu's coalition are eventually passed.
Ruth Wasserman Lande, a former member of the Knesset with the centrist Blue and White Party, says there is a legitimate need for reform but has called for more frank, transparent and inclusive talks regarding them. She told me: "It would be a shame on democracy to ignore the public anger."
Critics of Netanyahu and his governing coalition fear that if all aspects of the judicial review are eventually passed, key political appointments will be stacked with ultra-Orthodox hard-liners. That would come at a time when Israel's Supreme Planning Council is approving more Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It signed off on a record 12,855 housing units in the West Bank in the first half of 2023, according to left-wing group Peace Now.
Another Likud Knesset member I met, however, Tsega Melaku, who emigrated to Israel from Ethiopia in 1984 at the age of 16, complained: "The majority of the media coverage of the problems facing Israel is antisemitic."
'All the Hope I Need'
"The only solution that I see right now is two states," Salomon says. "We have to let [the Palestinians] go."
The chances of a two-state solution anytime soon, however, seem slim. Hamas has repeatedly said it wants the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel has repeatedly said it does not negotiate with terrorists, and Hamas and Hezbollah are designated terror groups by Israel and the U.S. Department of State.
Public support for a two-state solution is falling. It dropped from 43 percent in September 2020 to 33 percent among Palestinians and from 42 percent to 34 percent among Israeli Jews, according to a January 2023 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah and the International Program in Conflict Resolution and Mediation at Tel Aviv University. Among all Israelis—Jews and Arabs—39 percent back a two-state solution, the lowest level of support since the surveys began in June 2016.
There are some glimmers of optimism, though. Tel Aviv's independent global news network i24 News, which launched in 2013, broadcasts not in Hebrew but English, Arabic and French. Unlike other national news channels, its ebullient CEO Frank Melloul told me, i24 hosts representatives of Hamas as well as Israeli politicians and commentators, so viewers can hear both sides and make up their own minds.
After a while, he started to notice something. "At first, the guests would simply walk to their cars and go home," Melloul said. "Then, after a year or so, they would talk together on their way to the cars. Then they would go and have a cup of coffee and, a while after that, sometimes even share a meal."
Knesset member Milwidsky says agreement with the Palestinians is needed but says it will have to be accomplished with less help than usual from the U.S. "We have to do it within ourselves," he told me. "One of the main issues this government needs to do is glue the nation back together again. How do we find this common ground that we lost?"
Middle East expert Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian Jew who arrived in Israel via the U.K. in 2004, says the U.S. is distracted by the war in Ukraine, its rivalry with China and its own domestic headaches. "The Middle East thinks it should be the center of the world, but we need to look after ourselves more," he told me. Still Javedanfar is hopeful of an eventual reconciliation, however slow and painful that may be. He says he is buoyed by the protests, which themselves are a form of dialogue.
"Look at the demonstrations. In democracies, people don't like to demonstrate because they go to vote every four years. [The protests] give me all the hope that I need [to know] our democracy is going to survive."
Paul Rhodes is Newsweek's deputy publishing editor. Follow him on Twitter @MrPaulRhodes
