The view from here

Rain in Tel Aviv, and a breath of hope.

I woke up this morning in Tel Aviv to a sound I’ve never heard here before: rain. It took my groggy senses a moment to register what it was. Then my phone buzzed with a text from a journalist friend. “There’s a deal!” she wrote.

I’ve visited Israel several times since the pro-democracy protests of summer 2023. Each time, the mood among most of the people I know here has ranged from bleak to despondent. In May 2024, when I first attended one of the weekly Saturday protests held on the plaza outside the Tel Aviv Art Museum—now known as “Hostages Square”—the public despair felt overwhelming. In speeches broadcast on huge screens and audible for blocks around, family members of the hostages begged Netanyahu to end the war and bring their loved ones home. Graffiti around the city called him a liar, a traitor, and worse.

Glimpses of a nation in crisis

Last Saturday night, as talk of the deal was in the air, I went to the weekly protest again, wondering if this one might be the last. One speaker estimated that 200,000 people were there; the newspaper Ha’aretz gave a more conservative count of “tens of thousands,” but regardless, the square was packed. By now, only 48 hostages out of the original 250 remain in Gaza; many are known to be dead. Speaker after speaker praised Trump for bringing the latest deal to the table and implored Netanyahu to comply with it.

Left: the scene at Saturday's protest. Right: the clock counting the time the hostages have spent in Gaza.

This morning, as the rain petered out to a drizzle, the square filled up again. Journalists were interviewing anyone willing to speak into a microphone. One woman, wearing a paper replica of Trump’s head, was carrying a giant heart-shaped balloon. A reporter asked her what the meaning of it was. “To show all the love he gets from the people. He deserves all this love,” she replied.

“Not Netanyahu?” he prodded her.

“Netanyahu did everything he could to make this deal not happen,” she replied. “It’s amazing to see the relief in the eyes of everyone. It’s a historic day. Trump deserves the Nobel Prize.”

Listening in, I experienced the cognitive dissonance that I’ve felt more or less constantly since arriving in Israel for this latest visit. I’ve been mainly in Tel Aviv, which looks and feels much the same as always: filled with Israelis riding buses, sitting in cafes, going to the beach, and in general living their lives, even as the aftershocks of October 7 are everywhere. The protest signs and graffiti have only grown angrier: “10/7 BECAUSE OF YOU,” reads a poster bearing Netanyahu’s face. In a public bathroom, the usual admonition not to throw garbage in the toilet is plastered with hostage memorabilia: yellow stickers counting the number of days in captivity, a yellow ribbon printed with the message “Until the last hostage [comes home].” “Bring them home!” someone has written in English.

Left: bathroom graffiti. Right: anti-Netanyahu stickers on a bulletin board advertising events in Tel Aviv. The one on the top left and middle right reads "Bibi is betraying the hostages."

Meanwhile, a catastrophe is taking place in Gaza, only 40 miles to the south. As Ruth Margalit wrote recently in The New Yorker, it is impossible to enjoy the bounty of Tel Aviv without thinking of the Gazans, so near, who lack everything: food, clean water, medical care. At the same time, the distance—physical and psychic—between Israelis and Palestinians feels almost impossible to breach. Gaza may be only a short drive away, but when I put the name of a city into Google Maps, the app “can’t find a way there.” “Can you hear the war?” a friend in the U.S. asked. I can’t, of course—only in my head.

Via the international media, one does hear voices from Gaza—some brave enough to publicly call for an alternative to Hamas. What do people in Gaza hear? At last Saturday’s protest, Einav Zangauker, the mother of hostage Matan Zangauker, screamed so piercingly into the microphone that for a moment I wondered if her voice might reach her son and his captors. Before delivering his speech to a nearly empty room at the United Nations, Netanyahu ordered loudspeakers to be set up in Gaza; he addressed neither Hamas nor the suffering civilians, as some imagined he might, but (rather belatedly) the hostages. Perhaps soon we will know how many were still alive to hear him.

As I watched the scene at Hostages Square this morning, Saul Steinberg’s iconic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” came to my mind. The image, which has been reproduced and imitated in countless ways since it first appeared on the cover of The New Yorker in the mid-1970s, shows a radically foreshortened landscape: the blocks around 9th Avenue are drawn in detail, while everything beyond the Hudson River barely registers. I always thought it poked fun at the typical New Yorker’s assumption that the city sits at the center of the world. But now I wonder if it’s a commentary on humankind in general: no matter where we are, we all see the world from our own compressed perspective.

Last February, I wrote in this space about my horror at the ceremony in which Hamas handed over the bodies of dead Israeli hostages; I was particularly disturbed by the presence of Palestinian children there. A friend pushed back privately—and correctly—on a sentence in which I implied that young Palestinians’ hatred of Israel might be mainly caused by Hamas propaganda rather than Israeli violence and repression. As a Jew with friends and family in Israel, it’s hard to put myself in the place of those who celebrate the massacre of October 7 as legitimate resistance. And as an American who does not feel any love for our president (to say the least), it’s hard to put myself in the place of Israelis and others who see him as perhaps the only person who could have made this deal happen. But if we cannot hear voices that challenge us, then we will always be the New Yorker with blinders on, stuck with the view from 9th Avenue.

Rain was falling last February on the day of that horrific hostage release, falling on the living and the dead, on the crowds of Palestinians in Khan Younis watching the grim convoy bearing the coffins depart and the crowds of Israelis who lined the streets to watch it enter. Today, rain fell again, the first soaking rain of the season. It fell in Israel, and it fell in Gaza, and then the sky brightened.