Every time one enters Tiberias, one is reminded of how many times in recent years it was a microscopic example of the entire Israeli story. A city that received the breathtaking Lake Kinneret as a gift and rewarded it with an urban architecture reminiscent of what remains around Shifa Hospital and daily brotherly hatred among all segments of Israeli society: secular and religious, Ashkenazi and Sephardic, Jews and Arabs. To all this, of course, we can add crime and criminality that characterize so many places in the north, and the rather tough economic situation of most of its residents. A city that barely survives thanks to thriving domestic and pilgrimage tourism, and has not really been run for so many years, but oscillates between despair and hope, hoping to survive the great red quake that awaits it, after years of small tremors.
And yes, even during the most difficult war we have ever known, Tiberias can be trusted to provide it with the appropriate setting. Tiberias has always served as a city of refuge for the evacuees of the south. In each round, until calm arrived (or what we thought was calm), the southern evacuees were hosted on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. They even referred to it in terms of freedom.
But this time, the residents of the south who came here came with an entry date and have no idea when they will return, because no one can guarantee it. And they are not alone in this story, because the calm Sea of Galilee in this irrational November weather, one that usually attracts tens of thousands of tourists, has also been housing residents of the north who were evacuated from their homes in recent weeks. Residents of the South and North, our border guards, who meet in one small city. They meet around the city, talk, try to exchange experiences from what used to be, and feel that they share a common fate, which for them has to do with the fact that still in the center of the country they don't really understand what it means to live on the border itself. Nevertheless, in bombed-out Tel Aviv, they continue to live, while their routine has been shaken again, for the umpteenth time. But as a bystander, even if it is written painfully, there is a noticeable difference between the Israelis who were evacuated from their communities in the north and those who came here from the south. Between people who had already experienced trauma evident on their faces and those from the north who, thank God, were evacuated in time from the war zone.
IDF Spokesperson
At the entrance to the Lake House Hotel, its owner Reuven Elkes is waiting for us. On paper, his hotel should now be packed with tourists arriving for the Christian holiday season, and might have been greeted with some Christmas tree or Santa Claus hat. In practice, a sign was hung on the roof of the hotel congratulating the residents from the south and promising them that whatever they needed, they would get. "At least there are people in the hotel. At a time like this, it's also something, to see full rooms," says Reuven with a smile.
Indeed, in the hotel lobby it feels like we are in the middle of August, but only when you listen to the conversations do you discover what might have been forgotten for a moment. One of the residents asks Reuven for help in organizing her son's bar mitzvah party, which was supposed to take place in the south, and now they have to improvise a place again. "There's a synagogue, you have a hall and we'll do an event for it. We will also try to bring celebs he likes from Hapoel Be'er Sheva," he promises. She manages to let out a momentary smile, but one that is tinged with skepticism. Others say they didn't want to leave Kiryat Shmona at all, but the police left them no choice. On the bulletin board hang the activities for the day, and the surprising and happy announcement that the stars of the former Israeli basketball team will arrive in the afternoon to deliver activities for guests.
"I feel like a messenger"
We meet Daniel Hertz first. He's armed with a camera, "because I'm first and foremost a nature photographer." Although he was over 60, he looked young for his age. He is an Israeli who lived in Brazil for a while and was supposed to live in a Brazilian kibbutz, but he was born by the candlelight of the Argentines. He's a security guard at a security company in Netivot, and right now there's no work, so he leaves early in the morning for the Sea of Galilee to photograph the northern nature instead of the nature of the south. "Life by candlelight is a casino, sometimes Qassams trickle down from Sderot but we learn to live with it. This time, ten Qassams fell in the middle of the kibbutz. Still, I couldn't believe we had been evacuated. I never thought something like this could happen in my life. We said we had an army guarding us and went to sleep safe every night, but suddenly we discovered that there are other procedures in the army, that you can cross the fence without a problem."
What is certain is that everything he thought about his reality as a kibbutz native is no longer relevant: "Listen, it doesn't make sense to live 20 years from round to round. Does it seem logical to you that we live in the safe room, and they're on the other side, aren't they? Over the past 20 years, we have been accustomed to being the people who absorb and receive. It's totally delusional. I'm sitting here with you, and it seems abnormal to me that it's like that."
Daniel hangs out with his son's dog, who travels and returns to the south every few days. Along with Daniel is his mother, accompanied by her Filipino maid. A few days ago, the mother was bruised and needed stitches. This morning she goes for an inspection at the HMO in Tiberias. Ostensibly routine matters, only there really is no routine. "You meet people here who don't know where the candlelight is. I ask myself if we really live in the same country. In general, most of the public, until what happened, if you told them, 'The candlelight is in the south,' they wouldn't be able to tell you where we are on the map. Say, don't you see the news? I feel like I'm a messenger, that I'm walking around here explaining to people about the blow we received, trying to tell them how unbelievable this blow is. What, are we in the Holocaust where we didn't have a state of our own? This feeling that there was a decisive failure here, we residents of candlelight were screened. And we're another second line, so think about everyone we've lost on the front line. This failure and the fact that we don't know what will happen to us is something that is important for me to explain to people all over the country, but also to listen to what they have to say."
"We lost faith"
Yes, the residents of Candlelight were "overall" a second line. They managed to cope bravely and thought they would leave and return home after a short period of time, as has happened so many times in the past. But in the meantime, the house has become one big military base, and there is still no return date. So there is still milking duty, and from time to time some of the residents return to the war room and ask to volunteer. But the houses were taken by the army.
Some residents of Or Hanar stayed in Tel Aviv, but others chose the Sea of Galilee because they believe it is much safer than the center. One of them is Rom Spinzi, who comes to talk to us with Niv, his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter. His wife and two other children (a daughter and a son) are in the makeshift frameworks that we will get to later. "She's an Argentine snob like her kibbutz, so maybe she won't want to be interviewed, even though I'm also half Argentine," he explains with a smile. "I was born on Kibbutz Givat Brenner, and by candlelight I arrived following a match. After all, they told us it was paradise, with Qassams falling from time to time. But we told ourselves everywhere there is good and evil."
He is an engineering and management manager in Beer Sheva. He hadn't worked an hour since that Black Sabbath. On Sunday evening, the next day, the catastrophe came with the family, and since then they have not left, along with 450 other families. In the early days, they raised funds and organized logistics, and they didn't even have a minute to breathe. After the first two weeks, things stabilized, and then came thoughts about the future, but mostly about what had happened.
"We had a power outage throughout the Shabbat, and we had no messages on our phones, no news, and nothing reached the safe rooms. We had no idea the magnitude of the event. We were completely cut off, and all day Qassam rockets fell and full of red paint we don't know. They started talking about terrorist infiltration, and some trauma developed with us and the children. Since we got here our days have passed, but our time stopped on Saturday. As far as I'm concerned, now the days just pass. You know, the worst we thought, our scariest scenario over the years, was that a squad would enter a nearby kibbutz in the middle of the day and take over a kindergarten. No one imagined what happened. We have friends in Tel Aviv, and every time we met with them I would really convince them to come live with us, I was really an ambassador for Or Hanner. It was heaven with two percent hell, but hell has come."
He speaks confidently, but it's hard not to get caught up in his sad eyes: "Everything crumbled for us, everything they promised us in terms of security, they worked on us. I don't know what will make me go back there. If you tell me that from now on there will be soldiers on the kibbutz all day, is that what will give me security? Maybe even the other way around. We understand that we are here now, and we need to find a new community framework, because we will have to stay out of the kibbutz throughout the school year and it is impossible to live an entire year in a hotel. I always said that I would raise my children on the kibbutz, I had no doubt, even when I was single in Tel Aviv. I'm coming back tomorrow morning if they give me confidence, I think most of us are. If you ask here, you'll find that 95 percent of the residents will return to the kibbutz tomorrow."
Elad Barkai, who listens when his daughter illustrates on his hands, responds: "So we are among the five percent who will not return. I'm from Omer, my wife from Ashkelon, we went around all the kibbutzim in the south and fell in love with the candlelight. We love the community there, but today I don't trust anyone anymore. How do I get my son on the school bus? I don't see how I'll come back, even if I'm told that tomorrow the war ends. Here, we sit here and it is quiet, and Zichron Yaakov is quiet, what's wrong with living there?
"Leaving the kibbutz is easy, whoever wants to go will go. It's not difficult. We've been eating shit for ten years, and we've been eating shit in Sderot for 20 years, and we stayed there because we believed that what happened wouldn't happen, that there was someone watching over us. And we said no problem, we'll eat another round, even though no one ate the amount of rounds we ate. And we said you can't leave a house like this, you don't leave your home like that, but everything was true before Shabbat. Since then, I have not believed in the government or in the army. We are the most Zionist there is, so no one will say otherwise, but we have lost faith in the person who was supposed to protect us."
Recruited teachers
Next to the hotel is Rimonim High School, which deals daily with culinary activities. After two weeks in which the boys and girls from Or Hanar studied in makeshift conference rooms throughout the hotel, they were allocated real classrooms and kindergarten rooms. Here it was necessary to find who would teach the children for a few hours. Those who have already been absorbed into the education system (residents of Or Hanar stutter sadly when they say "were absorbed regularly until the end of the year") receive a daily routine, but must be absorbed into an existing educational framework.
In Tiberias, they rushed to recruit veteran teachers, who had in fact retired. And so, every day, teachers from the Golan Heights go back to the makeshift classrooms, with students they didn't know until two weeks ago. In fact, just to understand the absurdity of the country, there are no classes for children in the Golan Heights, because the buses are not protected and they are afraid that Hezbollah will bomb buses.
One of the teachers is Bina Pevsner, a well-known educator in the Golan Heights who only two years ago realized that her career as a school principal was over. She ran the Shorashim school in Natur in the Golan Heights, and lives in Kidmat Zvi: "It was clear to me that I was coming to teach here, and I said in advance that I would do everything voluntarily. That was important to me. Truth? I'm having fun. I've met great kids here, and I intend to do it as long as they ask me to."
We enter a meeting with third and fourth graders. Even if they haven't gotten used to their temporary home, and even if they're bored, the school routine in a different setting forgets for a moment why they're here at all. Bina explains to them about scorpions, and then they go for a walk on the shores of the Sea of Galilee and learn about the animals in the lake. The parents get a few hours of rest and the children leave the hotel lobby for a moment, admitting that "maybe it's time to go home."
The collapse of the idea
"The thing about leaving is not the physical departure, it's easy. There are ten places that will pick us up tomorrow. But the hard time leaving is saying, 'I had an idea, I believed in it, I believed I had confidence in it, and I don't believe in that anymore. I don't believe in people telling me that now we have a sense of security,'" Rom concludes before we return to the center and he and his family stay at Lake House.
"We have a WhatsApp group of all the guys, and we told ourselves a week before it all started, that it's actually appropriate now to have a week in the north, a little bit of Kinneret. Because we're used to dropping someone off in Gaza and telling us to evacuate, and that's without sirens or hysteria. We drive for four or five days, the employer doesn't bother us, and we go home. Then someone from this WhatsApp group was murdered and I said to myself, 'Can I ever go back to Zikim Beach that I love so much?' My feeling is no. Will a new fence restore my security? Jumbo Jay, who is from Kibbutz Or Hanner, summed it all up in the song 'Settle in the Kibbutz'. Listen to the song, the lyrics sum up the kibbutz experience."
Elad does not hide his despair before returning to routine: "Look, Hamas is eventually dealt with, in the south the situation will become clearer even if it takes longer. Look at the guys here from Kiryat Shmona, from all the places near the border. Can anyone provide them with security? They have a much bigger problem than we do because Hezbollah didn't deal with it. Just as we don't want to go home until we have security, they won't want either, so no one will think otherwise."
Daniel Hertz shakes his head in agreement: "It's really worrying, I'm very worried about the guys from the north. Hezbollah is sitting right on their house, and they are not offered any solution. What will happen to them in this situation?"
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