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This week marks the one-year anniversary of the start of last summer's Gaza war. On Thursday, Facebook pushed one of its "one year ago today" images to my News Feed. The picture was of people sitting at a popular café near my house.
At first I didn't remember why I took that photo. Then it came back to me. I snapped it during the first days of the war, attempting to show—at that time—how unaffected the people of Tel Aviv were by the war.
The war has been pretty much forgotten for most of the past year. However, reminders of the conflict suddenly sank in this past week, penetrating Israelis' consciousness.
One of the major television channels produced a widely watched series on "Operation Protective Edge"—one year later. This week, a memorial service was held on Mount Herzl for the Israeli soldiers who fell during the fighting. Still, nothing quite reminded Israelis of the war and its aftermath as much as Thursday's revelation that two Israelis were being held by Hamas in Gaza.
The news had been censored until Thursday, when at the behest of the newspaper Haaretz, the courts agreed to remove the gag order. The fate of the two captives, an Arab Israeli and an Israeli of Ethiopian descent, remains unknown, with Hamas denying that it is holding them. However, the story quickly turned into a controversy over why this information had been kept from the Israeli public for 10 months.
Some claimed the ethnic origin of the captives allowed the government to keep the story quiet. On Thursday night, the story developed a life of its own, when Israel's Channel 10 broadcast a tape of Lior Lotan, the government's representative on matters involving missing Israelis and a member Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's staff) warning the Ethiopian family not to criticize the prime minister.
Lotan further cautioned the family that if they voiced their complaints publicly, the prime minister would not do anything for their son. By the end of the evening, after a storm developed on social media, Lotan was forced to apologize, and Netanyahu was scheduled to meet with the family July 10.
While past events in Gaza were on Israelis' minds, the major topic of discussion this past week focused on economics. A new agreement between the government and companies that have the rights to oil and gas exploration of the large fields off Israel's coast is one of the most hotly debated issues in the country and has triggered weekly demonstrations in Tel Aviv. The "saga of oil and gas" also resulted in one of the first political defeats for the new Netanyahu government.
Also in the news, one of Israel's largest supermarket chains, Mega, asked a court for bankruptcy protection. The owners have proposed a reorganization plan that would keep it going as a functioning enterprise, but whether Mega's reorganization will be accepted by its creditors is in question.
Israel does not have the Chapter 11 reorganization option that exists in U.S. bankruptcy law and gives companies breathing space to regroup. Meanwhile, the chain seems to have lost the support of its workers. As one woman told me last night, "They do not care about us. Why should we care about them?"
While workers at Mega were concerned about where their next paycheck was coming from, those lucky enough to have money to invest were more concerned about financial default in Greece and the plummeting Chinese stock market. Both Greece and China were the subject of more than a few discussions on the streets of Tel Aviv this week.
Question: What was not a topic of discussion? Answer: The Iran nuclear talks taking place in Vienna. I brought them up in friendly debates about the major events of the week. Friends would politely shift the conversation to questions surrounding the oil and gas agreement, the Greek debt talks or even the Chinese stock market.
Bringing up the nuclear talks with Iran in Vienna, I was met with blank stares, a reaction I found fascinating. After all, it is Israelis sitting here in Tel Aviv who theoretically would be the target of a future Iranian bomb. But I imagine that after hearing about the Iranian threat for nearly 20 years, Israelis have decided that whether or not an agreement is reached in these never-ending talks is almost irrelevant to their lives.
If an agreement is actually finalized in Vienna in the coming days, or if the talks end in failure, Israelis will likely pay more attention. However, for the moment, other, more immediate events continue to dominate their concerns.
Historian Marc Schulman is the editor of historycentral.com