Gil Zohar

Sheltering in train stations

Another day, another missile alert: Israelis sheltering at the Herbert Samuel Hotel miklat. The writer and his wife take refuge there, but their dog, Max, won’t leave home. (photo by Gil Zohar)

Those who think history doesn’t repeat itself may wish to WhatsApp my 97-year-old mother, Joyce, to discuss how millions of Londoners like herself sheltered in the British capital’s Tube stations during the Blitz and later in the Second World War. The Luftwaffe bombings traumatized her and her two younger sisters, Anita and Renee. Today, the same “rain” of terror is falling across Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem.

In Tel Aviv and in the neighbouring cities of Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak, nine underground stops on the Red Line of the Light Rail are open 24/7 as public bomb shelters, including on Shabbat, when there is no transportation service. Some denizens of Greater Tel Aviv have taken to sleeping on the station platforms overnight rather than returning home after each all-clear alert.

At the time of writing, the Red Line is not operating. Commuters from Jerusalem to central Israel have been temporarily required to change trains at Ben Gurion Airport before continuing to Tel Aviv.

Not surprisingly in a country where kvetching is the national sport, some people have complained that not all the underground stations have been opened to serve as protected spaces. The Ministry of Transportation has published a list of stations deemed safe, which the frantic hordes may freely enter when the missile alert screams.

The Carlebach station – named after Esriel Gotthelf Carlebach (1908-1956), the Leipzig, Germany-born pioneering journalist, founding editor of the daily Maariv, and cousin of Berlin-born troubadour Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach – has not been opened, as it is not considered suitable as a secure shelter for engineering reasons.

In the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Yerushalmis are also taking cover underground. While all the stops on Jerusalem’s single tram line are on the surface, the Navon Train Station – which is 90 metres below street level and was designed to function as a nuclear bomb shelter – is now serving its secondary purpose apart from transportation.

Home Front Command (HFC) and Ministry of Defence officials have praised the Israeli public for its resilience in quickly reaching a safe place to shelter when the siren goes off.

Israel updated its national building code in 1992 following the Gulf War the previous year, when Saddam Hussein rained Scud missiles down on Tel Aviv and Haifa from Iraq. Previously, zoning laws had required condominium apartment buildings to incorporate a basement bomb shelter, but the threat of heavier-than-air poison gas attacks made those shelters potential death traps. Thus, gas masks were distributed, and every apartment in new residential buildings is now required to have a reinforced and sealed security room, called a mamad in Hebrew. Typically, these are a bedroom protected with extra thick concrete and equipped with a steel door and heavy shutters. A wet towel placed by the door makes for a reasonably airtight seal. Some newer buildings have been designed so that the area around the elevator shaft and stairs serves as a protected miklat (shelter) for the entire floor. It’s a uniquely Israeli way of getting to know one’s neighbours.

The number of fatalities has been miraculously low in the night-and-day barrages from Iran and Lebanon since the current war started on Feb. 28. At press time, 28 people – including two soldiers – had been killed in the hundreds of missile and drone attacks targeting civilian regions in the Jewish state. More than 400 ballistic missiles had been launched. No information has been released on the number of drones fired.

Nine Israelis were killed and more than 40 injured in Beit Shemesh on March 1 when an Iranian missile hit a residential neighbourhood, destroying a synagogue and collapsing the adjoining bomb shelter. The shelter was in a pre-1991 building that had been retrofitted.

A Thai agricultural worker in central Israel and four Palestinian women in a beauty salon in the village of Beit Awwa, southwest of Hebron, were killed on March 18 by debris from an Iranian missile. Barrages employing cluster munitions have hit multiple locations – including near my home in downtown Jerusalem. More than 100 residents in Dimona and Arad were wounded in missile strikes on those two southern cities March 21; most were not in bomb shelters, according to an HFC investigation.

Train service has been interrupted at Tel Aviv’s Savidor station and in Holon, where, as well, several buses were damaged. Military censorship prohibits publishing the addresses of hits.

photo - Max prefers to stay home when the sirens sound — Max prefers to stay home when the sirens sound. *(photo by Gil Zohar)*

On March 15, Israel Railways reopened the train stations in Hod HaSharon-Sokolov, Bnei Brak, Rishon LeZion HaRishonim and Dimona, which had been shut down when the war began. Full service resumed on the lines from Herzliya to Ofakim, and Herzliya to Jerusalem. While the latter stops at Ben Gurion Airport, service at the international air hub remains greatly reduced. Some travelers are choosing to take a bus to Amman, Jordan, or Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to fly abroad. The situation remains fluid.

For my wife and me, four overseas guests at our Pesach seder have had to say “Next Year in Jerusalem” because their flights have been canceled. We live in a charming stone building in the city centre, which was built in 1886 and has neither a miklat nor a mamad. When the siren sounds, we head to the Herbert Samuel Hotel across the street. There, the synagogue two floors below ground level doubles as the reinforced space. Last Friday, as the Sabbath approached and the air raid alert rang, a guest was playing the violin, serenading those present with the strains of “Shalom Aleichem.”

And what of our dog Max? The poor mutt refuses to leave his comfort zone – our unprotected apartment. With every second meaning the potential difference between life and death, we leave him to lie on the sofa and howl at the sirens.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide who lives in Jerusalem.

Pesach cleaning

photo - The notes are carefully removed from the Kotel — The notes are carefully removed. *(photo from Gil Zohar)*

The Kotel – the last remaining part of Herod the Great’s vast Second Temple complex – got a spruce up ahead of Passover. As is tradition, volunteers took to the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City to remove hundreds of thousands of the small prayer notes to God tucked into the cracks of Judaism’s holiest site. The papers are ceremonially buried at the ancient Mount of Olives cemetery.

The cleaning tradition is repeated at Rosh Hashanah, to keep the Kotel from becoming too cluttered. The notes are carefully removed using sticks that have been dipped in a mikvah (ritual bath), the whole process overseen by the Wall’s official rabbi, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinovitch. This year, there were no worshippers or visitors at the Kotel due to restrictions on gathering in large groups amid the US-Israeli war with Iran.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide who lives in Jerusalem.

Garden City of Tel Aviv

Liebling Haus’s exhibit Life, Plant, City: 100 Years of Geddes’ Plan for Tel Aviv’s Garden City, which documents how Sir Patrick Geddes’ vision continues to shape the city’s urban fabric, includes multidisciplinary works by dozens of artists (photo by Yael Schmidt / Liebling Haus)

On April 11, 1909, 60 families gathered on the beach north of Jaffa to draw lots for the parcelization of the sand dunes they had purchased north of the ancient port. This moment in Israel’s history has been much mythologized, but one thing is clear – those garden suburb pioneers were clueless about urban planning. They turned their backs on the site’s most notable feature – its iconic Mediterranean beach.

The village that the founders initially named Ahuzat Bayit (Homestead), now called Tel Aviv, grew haphazardly, house by house, with an interruption during the First World War, when the Ottoman Turks expelled the newly established town’s Jews. In 1921, following the arrival of the British during the war and the replacement of their military rule with a civil administration, the growing suburb was granted township status separate from the neighbouring Arab-majority city of Jaffa.

It became clear that the township’s slapdash growth needed to be regulated. Into this planning chaos stepped Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a Scottish-born polymath who was at once a biologist, sociologist, landscape theorist and pioneering urban planner. The 62-page plan for Tel Aviv that he drew up a century ago remains among the most important documents in the history of the city. Liebling Haus – an architectural and cultural centre located in downtown Tel Aviv – recently opened the exhibit Life, Plant, City: 100 Years of Geddes’ Plan for Tel Aviv’s Garden City. It documents how Geddes’ vision continues to shape the city’s urban fabric, featuring not only archival materials but multidisciplinary works by dozens of artists and other contemporary interpretations of Geddes’ ideas and reflections on the city’s future.

photo - Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was a Scottish-born polymath who was a biologist, sociologist, landscape theorist and pioneering urban planner — Sir Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was a Scottish-born polymath who was a biologist, sociologist, landscape theorist and pioneering urban planner. (photo from shbt.org.uk/knowledge)

In 1925, Geddes – who earned a reputation for his urban planning in 18 cities in British India – was invited by Tel Aviv’s mukhtar, Meir Dizengoff, to prepare the first master plan to guide the town’s growth. (Tel Aviv achieved city status in 1934.)

Geddes believed that cities were living organisms, shaped by the interplay of nature, society and culture. This holistic approach – unusual for its time – made him particularly attractive to Zionist leaders, who envisioned Tel Aviv as both a future-facing modern metropolis and a cultural project rooted in Jewish history.

His plan was deeply influenced by the Garden City movement, but Geddes adapted it to the climate and social context of the Levant. It emphasized shaded streets to mitigate the Mediterranean heat, wide boulevards that encouraged airflow and social life, and parks and squares as communal anchors. Human-scale residential blocks were arranged around shared green spaces and courtyards.

Geddes’ plan expanded Tel Aviv north from its early neighbourhoods to the Yarkon River. It was delineated by the Mediterranean Sea to the west and what is now Ibn Gabirol Street to the east. Into this flat and featureless space, Geddes laid out a skein of streets with a clear hierarchy. Main north-south and east-west arteries allowed for speedy movement across the city. Secondary streets were narrower and designed for local circulation. Small residential lanes fostered neighbourhood intimacy. The goal was to create a walkable city that balanced efficiency with livability.

photo - On display at Liebling Haus: One of the artworks inspired by Sir Patrick Geddes’ century-old plan for Tel Aviv — On display at Liebling Haus: One of the artworks inspired by Sir Patrick Geddes’ century-old plan for Tel Aviv. (photo by Yael Schmidt / Liebling Haus)

The plan also contained what later scholars have identified as anarchist or cooperative elements. It emphasized worker-led housing blocs and resisted speculative land practices. These ideas resonated with the social and economic conditions of Tel Aviv in the 1920s and 1930s, when workers wanted architecture that reflected their egalitarian values.

Although Geddes’ plan was not executed in its entirety, its core principles shaped the development of the White City, which was recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003. By the 1930s, Tel Aviv had some 4,000 white Bauhaus-style buildings constructed within the distinctive blocks, boulevards and public gardens Geddes laid out.

Bauhaus was a school of arts, crafts and architecture that operated in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The rise of the Nazi party led to the shuttering of the academy. Some 60,000 Jews left Nazi Germany and Austria for Mandatory Palestine, including architects who didn’t study at the Bauhaus school but were greatly influenced by its style. There, they created a revolutionary, streamlined architectural style that suited the modernist ethos of Zionism.

Tel Aviv’s amalgam of Bauhaus (also called International Style) buildings arose from an accident of historical coincidence: first came Geddes’ town plan; then the wave of mass aliyah triggered by the Nazis’ ascent to power in 1933, which triggered an urgent demand for housing; and, thirdly, the International Style’s lack of expensive decorative features made the cost of construction relatively low. No decorative tiles or ornamental plasterwork meant cheaper construction that could be executed by less-specialized craftsmen.

For the Yekke newcomers, many of whom had to leave significant assets behind, cheaper housing that didn’t sacrifice style was a major draw. The streamlined design with porthole windows, curved walls and balconies was a snub to the values of Central Europe, which the newcomers had barely escaped.

Liebling Haus, built in 1936, is an example of this architectural era. While not designed by Geddes, it manifests the urban environment his plan envisioned. The house’s clean lines, functional design and integration with the surrounding streetscape reflect the synergy between Geddes’ urbanism and the architectural modernism that followed. The Life, Plant, City exhibit runs to May 31.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide based in Jerusalem.

Last hostage home

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lays a wreath at Ran Gvili’s funeral in Meitar on Jan. 28. (photo © Amos Ben Gershom / GPO)

Yasam (Israel Police Special Patrol Unit) Master-Sgt. Ran Gvili z”l was buried on Jan. 28 in his hometown of Meitar. The last remaining hostage from the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, his body was brought back to Israel on Jan. 26. After 843 days, the clock in Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square stopped ticking, and the displays of the kidnapped at Ben-Gurion Airport and the National Library of Israel were removed. For the first time since 2014, not a single Israel Defence Forces soldier or civilian is being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.

Two years, three months and 20 days after Gvili, 24, fell in a battle at Kibbutz Alumim near the Gaza Strip, the hero was given a fitting military funeral. Thousands of police officers, IDF soldiers and residents stood in silence along the streets of the Beer Sheva suburb as the funeral procession passed.

The service was attended by President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Police Commissioner Daniel Levy and Sephardi Chief Rabbi David Yosef, alongside senior political and security figures. The sombre ceremony was the first funeral of a hostage from Oct. 7 attended by the prime minister.

Netanyahu eulogized Gvili: “He considered his injured shoulder meaningless because he believed with all his heart and strength that the security of the state rested on him and the shoulders of his comrades.

“He saved lives – many, many lives,” said Netanyahu.

The prime minister also announced that a new town, Renanim, would be established near Meitar in Gvili’s memory.

Addressing the family, Herzog apologized on behalf of the people of Israel, saying: “I’m sorry we were not there for him. I am sorry that, along with so many other families, you had to wait so many long, agonizing days for the return of your loved one.”

He added: “Without hesitation and without asking, again and again, [Gvili] said, ‘Here I am,’ and went into the line of fire to protect us.”

When the attacks began at 6:29 a.m. on Oct. 7, Gvili was at home, where he had been recovering from a broken shoulder sustained in a motorcycle accident. As news began trickling in of kibbutzim and cities near the Gaza frontier being overrun and their residents massacred, he decided to join the battle. Though on medical leave, he reached for his gun and his uniform, and went to help.

His father, Itzik Gvili, told Ynet News that his son “just put on a uniform and said to me, ‘Abba, I’m going.’ I said to him, ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ and he answered, ‘What do you think? Do you think that my friends will fight alone? I’m going to help them.’ He didn’t ask me. Rani can’t be stopped.”

Driving west toward the carnage at the Nova music festival, Gvili rescued an estimated 100 people fleeing the rave. He then engaged in a battle with dozens of Hamas gunmen near Kibbutz Alumim, killing 14 terrorists before being fatally shot when he ran out of ammunition. At 10:50 that morning, he texted friends that he had been shot in the leg.

For months, Gvili’s family held out hope that he was alive and being held hostage somewhere in the Gaza Strip.

His mother, Tali, told Haaretz in November 2024 that the family had received photos from Oct. 7 showing him arriving unconscious at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, and later in Zeitoun on the back of a motorcycle, “but they aren’t conclusive … in this situation, hoping for a miracle feels reasonable.”

Gvili’s body was recovered by IDF search teams following a months-long intelligence operation. Under combat conditions in the northern Gaza Strip, some 700 bodies were disinterred at al-Bats Muslim cemetery in Shuja’iya and Gvili’s was identified by IDF dentists after carrying out the forensic examination of 249 corpses. Many noted that the word ran (singing) has a numerical value in gematria of 250. Gvili was still wearing his uniform, and he was buried in it rather than in shrouds as is customary for civilians.

According to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, “Ran had a passion for motorcycles, enjoyed gatherings with friends, cherished moments with his sister and brother, and relished playing the guitar while sipping lemon arak.”

Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide based in Jerusalem.

Facing a complex situation

The Gaza Strip is currently divided between the Israeli-held zone (green) and Hamas territory (red). (Screenshot from Channel 14)

More than 25 months after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre and the consequent multi-front Middle East war, and more than one year after Israel and Hezbollah reached a ceasefire agreement on Nov. 27, 2024, Israel faces a complex geopolitical and security situation.

In the north, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) is engaged in continuous covert and overt operations to prevent Hezbollah from rearming and regrouping. The Shi’ite terrorist militia has been dealt multiple blows, first by the Mossad’s twin attack Sept. 17-18, 2024, nicknamed Operation Grim Beeper, in which thousands of hand-held pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah operatives exploded across Lebanon and Syria. On Sept. 27, the terror group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated in his Beirut bunker. On Nov. 23, the IDF eliminated Haytham Ali Tabataba’i in a missile strike on the Lebanese capital – Hezbollah’s chief of staff had been designated by the US Department of State as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist in 2016. Washington was offering a $5 million US bounty for information on him.

Though diminished, Hezbollah is not a spent force, according to Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute who specializes in Iran, Turkey and the broader Middle East. Writing in the National Security Journal, Rubin notes that, notwithstanding the targeting of its senior leadership, Hezbollah’s financing – diaspora-linked laundering from Europe, Africa and South America and new backing from Turkey – remains resilient. He cautions that, unless Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun cuts off the money supply and disarms Hezbollah by the year’s end, the country will slide into a renewed insurgency. Trained by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in guerrilla tactics and bomb-making, Hezbollah will resume its terror campaign attacking Lebanese armed forces’ vehicles with IEDs (improvised explosive devices), said Rubin.

Israel has made a huge investment to literally alter the landscape of its 120-kilometre-long northern frontier into a formidable physical barrier, and to blow up cross-border tunnels. Similarly, during the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon from 1985 to 2000, several strategic mountain peaks were bulldozed to no longer loom over the Upper Galilee. However, the fiasco of Oct. 7 has shown that static positions provide limited deterrence against lightning strikes by well-trained guerillas.

In the Gaza Strip, Hamas – an Arabic acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamia (the Islamic Resistance Movement) – also refuses to disarm. There, too, the situation remains unclear, complicated by Israel’s assassination of the terrorist group’s leaders: Yahya Sinwar, his brother Mohammed, Mohammed Deif, Marwan Issa and Ismail Haniyeh.

image - On Oct. 22, the terrorist-linked group Samidoun hosted a panel discussion in Athens with a newly released top Hamas operative — On Oct. 22, the terrorist-linked group Samidoun hosted a panel discussion in Athens with a newly released top Hamas operative.

In October, Israel released nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners and detainees as part of the first phase of a US-brokered ceasefire and hostage deal with Hamas. In exchange, Hamas released 20 living Israeli hostages. On Oct. 22, the terrorist-linked group Samidoun hosted a panel discussion in Athens with the newly released top Hamas operative Abdel Nasser Issa. Known as a student of Hamas’s notorious chief bombmaker Yayha Ayyash (1966-1996), aka “the Engineer,” Issa was serving two life sentences for his involvement in two suicide bombings in 1995 that killed 20 Israeli civilians and wounded more than 100.

On Nov. 24, Palestinian Islamic Jihad turned over a coffin with the remains of Dror Or. Staff Sgt. Ran Gvili and Sudthisak Rinthalak are the last two people murdered on Oct. 7 not yet returned. Rinthalak, an agricultural worker at Kibbutz Be’eri near the border of the Gaza Strip in southern Israel, was among the more than 40 Thais killed and 31 kidnapped in Hamas’s attack.

Also in November, a flight of 153 Gazans landed in Johannesburg, after departing from Ramon Airport near Eilat. Shimi Zuaretz, a spokesperson for Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) – the Israeli body that runs civil affairs in the West Bank – confirmed that the Palestinians transited through Israel “after COGAT received approval from a third country to receive them.” That third country was South Africa.

Some 200,000 Gazans are currently living in limbo in Cairo, unable to either find a destination in which to settle or to return to their homes. Together with the estimated tens of thousands of combatants and civilians killed in the Gaza war, these numbers indicate the ongoing depopulation of the destroyed coastal enclave.

image - Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition faces a mounting campaign to reestablish Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. The poster above reads, “It’s time to settle in Gaza! Let’s start now! Hanukkah 5786!” — Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition faces a mounting campaign to reestablish Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. The poster above reads, “It’s time to settle in Gaza! Let’s start now! Hanukkah 5786!”

With an election on the horizon in the first half of 2026, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition faces a mounting campaign to reestablish Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip. Daniella Weiss, head of Nachala Movement Israel, whose stated aim is to settle further into Judea and Samaria, wants to begin Jewish settlement in Gaza within “months.” According to Weiss, more than 600 families – more than 2,500 people – had already registered for an initiative to settle in new beach towns.

Many Israelis fault Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s unilateral withdrawal of 9,000 settlers from Gush Katif in 2005 as the catalyst that allowed Hamas to seize power from the Palestinian Authority two years later. In turn, that violent coup laid the way for the catastrophic Oct. 7, 2023, attack on cities and kibbutzim bordering Gaza.

The Gaza Strip’s 365 square kilometres are today uneasily divided into Hamas- and Israeli-controlled sectors. Israel will not allow Türkiye or Qatar to send troops to monitor the ceasefire, nor are any other countries keen to send boots on the ground. US President Donald Trump envisions a $500-million military base near Qiryat Gat, called the US Civil-Military Coordination Centre, to assist in Gaza’s future governance and patrol of the territory.

photo - The Israeli Defence Forces have killed Muhammad Abu Shaar, the Hamas terrorist who broke into Adi Vital-Kaploun’s residence on Oct. 7, 2023, and murdered her in front of her young children. He recorded himself with Adi’s babies in the same room she was killed as a Hamas propaganda video — The Israeli Defence Forces have killed Muhammad Abu Shaar, the Hamas terrorist who broke into Adi Vital-Kaploun’s residence on Oct. 7, 2023, and murdered her in front of her young children. He recorded himself with Adi’s babies in the same room she was killed as a Hamas propaganda video. *(internet image)*

Clan and Bedouin tribal groups in Gaza are engaged in a violent internecine struggle with Hamas. And the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper reported on Nov. 15 that IDF commandos on motorcycles are targeting Palestinians who participated in the abduction and holding of Israelis during the Oct. 7 attack. Among the Mujahideen Brigades terrorists gunned down in Khan Yunis was Mohammed Abu Mustafa, who kidnapped Shiri Bibas and her children Kfir and Ariel from Kibbutz Nirim on Oct. 7. Also recently eliminated was Muhammad Abu Shaar, who broke into Adi Vital-Kaploun’s residence at Kibbutz Holit and murdered the Canadian-Israeli woman in front of her 4-year-old son Negev and 4-month-old toddler Eshel. Shaar then recorded himself holding her children in the same safe room where Vital-Kaploun was murdered.

Troops of the elite Nahal Brigade captured six Hamas gunmen who surrendered after a 24-hour search that followed the IDF’s collapsing of the tunnel in Rafah where the terrorists were hiding, forcing them to emerge from a shaft, the military reported. The men were taken to Israel to be questioned by the Shin Bet Klali (General Security Service). A photo released by the IDF showed four of the operatives in the army’s custody, hands tied behind their backs, next to an armoured vehicle.

“At the end of a 24-hour pursuit, all 17 terrorists who attempted to flee the underground terror infrastructure in eastern Rafah were either eliminated or apprehended,” the IDF announced. At least 30 Hamas terrorists were killed trying to flee from tunnels in Rafah last month.

photo - Last month’s winter rain flooded Gaza’s tent encampments — Last month’s winter rain flooded Gaza’s tent encampments. (photo form IDDEF)

Environmental issues are also impacting the complex situation. Last month’s winter rain flooded Gaza’s tent encampments. In Iran, a severe drought has depleted the reservoirs that provide its capital city, Tehran, with drinking water.

Symbolizing the Ayatollah regime’s crumbling control, on Nov. 12, protesters garbed in military uniforms of the Shah’s regime unfurled the banned pre-1979 lion and sun Pahlavi national flag in a Tehran metro station. Commentators have posited that the next revolution may come soon, if the taps run dry.

Gil Zohar is a journalist and tour guide based in Jerusalem.

Vive la différence!

French is one of the main languages one hears on the streets of multicultural Jerusalem today, along with Hebrew, Arabic, English and Russian. More than 2,170 French Jews moved to Israel in 2024. The number in 2025 is projected to exceed 3,000. The wave of aliyah – driven by antisemitism and violence targeting Jews – has resulted in the establishment of scores of new patisseries, boulangeries and charcuteries – all kosher. Seen here is Foodies on Yoel Moshe Salomon Street. Nearby is Napoleon, one in a cluster of gourmet restaurants in Kikar Hamusica (Place de la Musique), established by former Parisian Laurent Levy, who is building Le Grand Hôtel.

Flawed drama popular

A scene from Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, which screens at the Vancouver International Film Festival Oct. 9-10. (still from film)

Bethlehem-born filmmaker Annemarie Jacir’s historical epic Palestine 36 had its world premiere Sept. 5 at the Toronto International Film Festival. It screens at the Vancouver International Film Festival Oct. 9-10.

While Jacir is an accomplished filmmaker and spokesperson for her people, her flawed drama is unlikely to bring clarity to events then – or now.

Shot in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan, and incorporating colourized archival footage from the 1930s, Palestine 36 tells the story of the Arab Revolt against the British Mandate from 1936 to 1939 through the eyes of Yusuf, played by Karim Daoud Ananya. Other stars include Jeremy Irons, Hiam Abbass and Liam Cunningham.

Depicted in Palestine 36 are characters like British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope and anti-insurgency experts Maj.-Gen. Orde Wingate and Sir Charles Tegart. Alas, they are all depicted as cartoon characters protecting Britain’s imperial interests even as they violently suppress the revolt and implement the emergency measures acts still used in Israel today. While Wingate was a Bible-quoting, onion-chomping eccentric, Jacir’s depiction of his behaviour and absurd haircut are egregious.

What struck this reviewer most was the lack of nuance about Arab society in 1930s Palestine. (At the time, Jews called themselves Palestinians while Arabs avoided that name.) The country’s foremost leader in the years before the bloody revolt, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, does not appear in the film. Nor does rebel leader Fawzi al-Qawukji. Both escaped the British dragnet and made their way to Iraq, where they staged a pro-Nazi coup in 1941, then fled to Berlin during the war. Their bitter rivalry is well documented.

Since neither man graced Jacir’s film, there was no need to explain the clan divisions, mutual contempt and assassinations that characterized Palestine and prevented the country’s Arabs from uniting. A militant Muslim triumphalist and genocidaire, al-Husseini aimed to destroy Palestine’s Sunday People once he had dealt with the Saturday People. Perhaps surprisingly, given that Jacir is Christian, this detail was omitted. Instead, the film falsely gives the impression that, rather than being marginalized, her co-religionists fought alongside their Muslim neighbours as equals.

The natural hero of Izz ad-din al-Qassam is also missing from Palestine 36. A teacher from Syria who bravely faced the British soldiers and their bloodhounds until hunted down in the Galilee, al-Qassam’s name graces the missiles today’s Gaza terrorists lob at Israel.

Typical of Jacir’s striving for accurate details while omitting the big picture, she depicts British customs officers in Jaffa Port uncovering a barrel of smuggled Mauser rifles, but fails to mention the guns’ German source. Indeed, there’s the rub of this movie – while correctly pursuing the policy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Palestinians’ alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy is not part of the story.

Judging from the 10-minute standing ovation at Roy Thompson Hall, such a huge omission is unlikely to spoil the impact of Palestine 36 in Vancouver and elsewhere. In Pallywood – and the rest of the film industry, for that matter – facts can’t stand in the way of a good story. Indeed, Zionist mega-hits like Exodus and Cast A Giant Shadow are both kitsch films with a huge impact. Palestine 36 is likely to join them.

Forgotten music performed

Through a chance conversation with a curator at the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum, conductor and composer Leo Geyer came across musical scores composed by concentration camp prisoners during the Holocaust. June 3 to 7, at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre, the music Geyer documented was played for the first time in 80 years. (photo from Sky Arts)

In 2015, London-based musician and composer Leo Geyer was commissioned to write a tribute honouring British historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who had recently died. Visiting Oświęcim, Poland, to better understand the Holocaust historian’s research, a chance conversation with a curator at the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum led Geyer to a trove of forgotten musical scores composed by prisoners who had been forced to perform in the SS-run orchestras in the Nazi concentration camp, where more than 1.1 million died in gas chambers, mass executions, torture, medical experiments, exhaustion and from starvation, disease and random acts of violence.

The deteriorating and fragile sheets of music, written in pencil, were faded and ripped. Many had burn damage. Intrigued, Geyer devoted nearly a decade of detective work to studying the documents and filling in missing gaps, and the music formed the basis for his doctorate at Oxford University. From June 3 to 7, at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre, the music Geyer documented was played for the first time in 80 years, to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945. The opera ballet included the unfinished scores that Geyer completed and choreography by New York-born choreographer Claudia Schreier.

“The musicians took incredible risks to make brazen acts of rebellion. When good news of the war [of the Allies’ June 6, 1944, D-Day landings] reached the men’s orchestra in Auschwitz I, they performed marches not by German composers but by American composers,” Geyer said in an interview with France 24’s daily broadcast Perspective.

The guards couldn’t distinguish between a Strauss waltz and a John Philip Sousa march.

The musicians “would also weave in melodies from Polish national identity such as St. Mary’s Trumpet Call (a five-note Polish bugle call closely bound to the history of Kraków). We also know of secret performances [that] would take place, which would principally encompass Polish music, but we also know Jewish music was performed as well,” said Geyer.

The story of the orchestras at Auschwitz was popularized by Fania Fénelon, née Fanja Goldstein (1908-1983), a French pianist, composer and cabaret singer whose 1976 memoir Sursis pour l’orchestre, about survival in the women’s orchestra at the Nazi concentration camp, was adapted as the 1980 television film Playing for Time. The orchestra, active from April 1943 to October 1944, consisted of mostly young female Jewish and Slavic prisoners of varying nationalities. The Germans regarded their performances as helpful in the daily running of the camp in so far as they brought solace to those trapped in unimaginable horror. As well, the musicians held a concert every Sunday for the amusement of the SS.

Geyer explained that the SS organized at least six men’s and women’s orchestras at Auschwitz, and perhaps as many as 12. The groups principally played marching music as prisoners trudged to the munitions factories and other industrial sites, where they worked as slave labourers, he explained.

“Musicians had marginally better conditions than other prisoners,” he noted. Nonetheless, he said, “The vast majority of the musicians and composers did not survive the war.” Most of their names are lost. Geyer was able to track down the composer of one unsigned composition by comparing the handwriting to a document found at a conservatory in Warsaw.

Adding poignancy to the performances in London, the musicians played from copies of the original scores.

“We poured our heart and soul into these performances,” said Geyer. “I am neither Jewish nor Romani. But I am human.”

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

* * *

A replica of Auschwitz

Due to conservation issues, the Auschwitz Memorial and Museum no longer permits the filming of movies at the historic site. Using advanced spatial scanning technology, the museum employed a team of specialists, led by Maciej Żemojcin, to create a digital replica of the Auschwitz I camp. The project was recognized at the Cannes Film Festival.

Museum spokesperson Bartosz Bartyzel told Euronews Culture that the replica was created “out of the growing interest of directors in the history of the German camp.”

“The Auschwitz Museum has been working with filmmakers for many years – both documentary filmmakers and feature film directors,” he said. “However, due to the conservation protection of the authentic memorial site, it is not possible to shoot feature films [there]. The idea to create a digital replica was born out of the need to respond to the growing interest in the history of the Auschwitz German camp in cinema and the daily experience of dealing with the film industry. This tool offers an opportunity to develop this cooperation in a new, responsible and ethical formula.”

– GZ

Parshat Shelach Lecha

On June 21, at Ohel Yitzhak in Nahalat Shiva, Gil Zohar celebrated the 57th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. (photo Gil Zohar)

Man plans, God laughs, goes the Yiddish aphorism. For the last half year, I have been diligently learning the trope of Parshat Shelach Lecha (the Torah portion meaning Send for Yourself) to celebrate the 57th anniversary of my bar mitzvah, which I had when I was a boy in Toronto. My wife Randi and I had planned a kiddush at the historic Beit HaRav Kook synagogue near our home in downtown Jerusalem. We are members there, and enjoy the leadership of Rabbi Yitzhak Marmorstein, formerly of Vancouver’s Or Shalom. Alas, the war with Iran started. In accordance with the Home Front Command orders against large public assemblies, the shul closed. And so, we considered canceling the simchah.

While all but Jerusalem’s most essential businesses were locked down tight as a drum, the wartime defence regulations allowed synagogues near a bomb shelter to keep their doors open, with limited attendance. Hence, Ohel Yitzhak, the Sephardi synagogue in our courtyard in Nahalat Shiva, built in 1888, remained open. And so, we switched the venue from the former home and yeshivah of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) – the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine – to the equally historic synagogue where Ben-Zion Meir Uziel (1880-1953) – Kook’s Sephardi counterpart, who served as nascent Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi until his death – used to pray.

The illustrious Sephardi landmark, resembling a house of worship in a mellah in Morocco, is close to the Herbert Samuel Hotel, which opened its miklat (bomb shelter) to the public as well as hotel guests. So, on June 21, undeterred by the spectre of a ballistic missile salvo, I was called up to chant Maftir and read the Haftarah.

What’s it like when the air-raid sirens sound nightly and warplanes roar through the starry sky? Lori Nusbaum of Toronto, who came with her son, Ryan De Simone, for my second bar mitzvah, has been posting on Facebook:

“The 3rd night in Jerusalem and the 3rd siren alert went off; it was 4:35 a.m. Sleep is hard. You don’t want to be in a deep sleep and miss the [cellphone] notifications so you try to have ‘one eye open.’ There’s something strangely intimate about being in a smallish space with a bunch of strangers, some in bathrobes, carrying pillows and blankets, wearing slippers, with sleep still in their eyes. You aren’t sure if you should make eye contact or not. It’s nighttime, so conversation is not really happening. I think we all want to keep sleep in our brains, hope we can go back upstairs quickly and close our eyes for a peaceful rest of the night.”

Like many guests at the synagogue, Lori found my wartime bar mitzvah intensely emotional. “My somewhat unaffiliated son had an aliyah at one of the oldest shuls in Jerusalem,” she posted on Facebook. “Our friend, whose bar mitzvah we came to witness, literally took the tallit off his back to wrap around my son so he could go to the bimah. With tears in my eyes, so many emotions washed over me. Too many to describe adequately. This is what Israel is all about. The people who in the middle of a war come together, pray, help each other and celebrate life together. And give you the proverbial shirt off their back.”

The grim situation in which we find ourselves today parallels the Torah reading of Shelach Lecha (Numbers 13:1-15:41) and its equally pertinent Haftarah (Joshua 2:1-24).

Returning after 40 days of reconnoitring the Promised Land, the spies sent by Moses reported: “We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit [showing a huge cluster of grapes hanging from a stave, today the symbol of the Ministry of Tourism, proudly worn by every licensed tour guide]. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.”

Then, Calev ben Yefune shushed the crowd declaring, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

Ten of his fellow spies (all except Joshua) disagreed – “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are” – and they spread a slanderous report about the land they had probed. Misunderstanding the many funerals they had witnessed because of the plague God had sent so that the spies would go unnoticed, they said, “The land we explored devours its inhabitants. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there [the descendants of the giant Anak]. We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Grasshoppers? They might as well have called the Jewish people cockroaches.

In the words of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz”l, this dibbat ha’aretz (slanderous report about the Land of Israel) is the language of fear and demoralization. They are big, we are small. They are strong, we are weak. They do not fear us, but we fear them. We cannot prevail.

Was this, in fact, the case? As the Haftarah makes clear, the 10 scouts could not have been more mistaken. A generation later, Joshua bin Nun too sent two spies – the same Calev, and Pinchas ben Zimri. They slept on the roof of a house belonging to Rahav the prostitute, which formed part of the walls of Jericho. Hearing about the spies, the city’s king ordered his soldiers to arrest them, but Rahav hid them and misdirected the guards. What is more interesting is what she tells the spies of the feelings of Jericho’s residents when they heard that the Israelites were on their way:

“I know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is in heaven above and on the earth below.”

Like contemporary Gazans and Iranians, the people of Jericho were anything but giants – they were terrified of us. The spies of Moses’s day should have known this. They had already said in the song they sang at the Red Sea: “Nations heard and trembled; terror gripped Philistia’s inhabitants / The chiefs of Edom were dismayed / Moab’s leaders were seized with trembling / The people of Canaan melted away.”

How did 10 of the spies so misinterpret the situation? They misunderstood Moses’s instructions: “Alu zeh b’Negev v’alitem et ha-har” – ascend (alu) through the south, and ascend (va’alitem) the mountain. The word “ascend” (aliyah in Hebrew) also means to overcome. (When Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “We shall overcome,” he was citing this verse.) The spies lacked the faith that the land would be theirs, despite God’s promises, and 39 years of wandering in the desert followed.

The Jewish people, in Israel and the diaspora, experienced a crisis of confidence in 1313 BCE following the Exodus from Egypt, on the eve of entering the Promised Land. Not so today. We have no such hesitations as the Israel Defence Forces battle the regime of the latter-day Haman in Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies. Our response is to follow Moses’s instructions: “Alu.” Ascend. Overcome. Make aliyah.

To that end, I invite you to celebrate Parshat Shelach Lecha with me at Beit Ha Rav Kook (9 Rabbi Kook St.) on June 13, 2026. Next year, in peaceful Jerusalem.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.

The Sussita’s short history

Sussita entrepreneur Itzhak Shubinsky driving a Sabra Sport car, from the newspaper Barkav, in the 1960s. (photo from Haifa City Museum)

For a trip down memory lane, cruise over to Haifa’s City Museum at 11 Ben-Gurion Blvd., in the German Colony, to see Sussita: The Exhibition. The display, which continues until May 25 (the opening was delayed by Hezbollah rocket fire from Lebanon), documents Israel’s failed automobile industry during the early decades of statehood.

Alas, the doorways of the museum’s 19th-century Templar building are too narrow to permit restored examples of the fibreglass shell cars to pass through. So, on hand is a stripped-down version of a Sussita, and a trove of fascinating documents and photos. Missing are full-size examples of the Carmel truck and Sabra Sport roadster that Autocars Co. Ltd. assembled at its Haifa workshop and then in the city of Tirat Carmel.

The exhibit was curated by Yifat Ashkenazi, together with filmmaker Avi Weissblei. The latter produced the 2020 documentary Desert Tested, which told the Sussita’s story.

Like Shai Agassi’s Better Place electric car company, which went through almost $1 billion in venture capital before declaring bankruptcy in 2013, Israel’s ultimately insolvent auto industry never thrived.

image - A Sussita Autocars Co. Ltd. advertisement in the 1960s, featuring its “5 Road Champions!” — A Sussita Autocars Co. Ltd. advertisement in the 1960s, featuring its “5 Road Champions!” *(photo from Haifa City Museum)*

The Sabra’s aerodynamic curves evoke the glamour of early James Bond films. Nonetheless, even though they were jump-started by foreign firms, Haifa’s car business never quite managed to compete with Detroit.

Discussing Autocars’ 1966 Sussita at carsurvey.org, one classic car aficionado noted: “What things have gone wrong with the car?

Almost everything! It was a very cheap car made of a fibreglass body attached to a very simple welded pipes chassis, with a Triumph engine. The car was unstable, seriously dangerous, unreliable and very badly built.”

Folklore has it that camels liked to munch on the cars’ fibreglass body. But the relative paucity of dromedaries in 1960s Israel makes the truth of this story doubtful.

Founded in the mid-1950s with assistance from Britain’s Reliant Motor Co., Autocars initially assembled quirky but popular three-wheeled micro-cars. The first four-wheeled blue-and-white vehicle, the Sussita, was also designed by Reliant.

The Sussita, meaning mare in Aramaic, developed a reputation as a reliable workhorse. By 1960, Autocars was exporting the cheaply priced car – available in estate, van and pick-up models – to the United States and Canada. Rebranded as the Sabra – a genus of cactus originally from Mexico that had become a descriptor of native-born Israelis – the car sold poorly in North America due to its inferior quality.

That year, in 1960, Autocars’ owner Itzhak Shubinsky spotted the coupé Ashley GT at London’s Sports and Racing Car Show. Changing business strategy, he purchased the bodywork moulds and created the Sabra Sport, which made its debut at the 1961 New York Motor Show. The roadster car was also sold as a hardtop coupe. Fewer than 150 were exported to the United States, while a similar number were sold in Belgium.

Reliant also launched the car in Britain. Anglicizing its moniker to Sabre, the prickly cactus morphed into a swashbuckling sword.

image - Advertising for the Sussita: “You bought Sussita, you were not wrong” — Advertising for the Sussita: “You bought Sussita, you were not wrong.” *(photo from Haifa City Museum)*

Expanding production, in 1961, Autocars introduced the Carmel, named for the mountain that defines Haifa. The car featured a 1,200cc Ford Cortina engine mounted in a Reliant chassis.

By 1965, Autocars declared bankruptcy and was taken over by Britain’s Leyland-Triumph. Revamping the product line, the following year it introduced the Gilboa, a four-door version of the Carmel. In 1967, it produced an off-road, front-wheel drive utility called the Dragoon.

But the red ink continued to spill. In 1971, Leyland severed its ties with its Israeli subsidiary. Three years later, Autocars was bought by Rom Carmel Industries, which brought out its Gilboa-based Rom 1300.

Sputtering along, in 1978, the company was purchased by the Netanya-based foundry Urdan Industries. Restyled again, the Rom 1300 became the Rom 1301. But declining sales could not be reversed, going from a peak of manufacturing more than 3,000 cars annually during the 1960s to just 540 cars rolling off the assembly line in 1980, the last full year of production. In 1981, the plant shut its gates.

For more about the exhibit, visit hcm.org.il/eng/exhibitions/11128/sussita.

Gil Zohar is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.