Random Thoughts on Everything
Feeling English in Tel Aviv: A City at War
Gone are the days when men endlessly asked me for the time on Tel Aviv beach, dropping into a comfy crouch on the sand when they realised I spoke English. Did I have a boyfriend/a light for their cigarette/plans for that evening? Or perhaps I knew their cousin Ari living in West Hampstead.
At Heathrow Airport, El Al security staff now presume their passengers in these troubled times are Israeli. ‘You speak Hebrew?’ they ask swapping from one language to the other without hint of flirtation. They peer first at my passport, and then my husband’s. The vibe is one of skepticism. ‘You don’t have another?’ They ask, flicking through our documents before passing them over to a senior member of staff for closer examination. ‘And what is the relationship between you?’ We have reached the place where our differing surnames always prompt a frown. ‘Married,’ I say, and hearing this they look sympathetically toward my husband appreciating his forbearance. The man is a clearly a mench for allowing me to do his packing but not officially share his name. At the departure gate it’s the same official, ‘Where is your husband?’ they ask me, as if I might have murdered him and disposed of his body in the nearby Pret a Manger rubbish bin. I shrug and smile enigmatically.
On arrival, Ben Gurion Airport is quiet. I grimace at the self-check-in camera, grab the small, flimsy card that it spits out and race after my husband’s very much alive and marching, feet. He’s a man who likes to be first in any queue and we speed down the literally slippery slope to passport control. Here, the obligatory, ‘is it your first time in Israel?’ makes me want to share my raucous FZY summer tour. The wow of a 6am wake up as the sun rose over Jerusalem’s old city below. My kibbutz trip post college, maggots in the vegetables, spiders in the banana fields, a row about the peach I ‘stole’ from the communal kitchen. The August when I fainted in a Netanya grocery store and my friend insisted a muscular stranger carry me back to our seventh floor apartment. Pesach ‘87 the family bumped up at EL AL’s expense to BA first class (long story), me clutching our newborn, our mother’s-help (covered in chicken-pox scabs) holding hands with our four year old. April 1990 Ichilov Hospital, my now three year old son with a split lip, both of us sobbing a river in A&E. I feel cheated to think that customs have no computer record showing my decades of arrivals and departures. Where are all this century’s weddings, bar mitzvahs, births and parties, the many dinners, the huge seder nights, time with friends on Banana beach, all those matzo bries and big family teas?
In Tel Aviv the autumn days are warm and honied. The fine, sandy grit of a long, weary summer coats the streets. Birds are singing, the sun shines, and beautiful girls sit at coffee shops. They sip iced chai lattes, discuss yoga class, their babies and relationships. They ask each other where is the nearest shelter, ready to make the minute and a half run should a siren shatter the calm. Around the city, building sites are surrounded by cranes. They litter the landscape like monstrous aliens, their steel heads rising, dipping, feasting on glass and concrete. Near to our house, crows scream in the eucalyptus trees, soar in a blur of widow’s weeds and chase across the deep blue sky. Airforce jets thunder far overhead, invisible. On Rothschild the traffic stands still, trapped by works for the city’s Light Railway. Car horns blast. Bikes and scooters ignore red lights and one-way signs, their riders swap road for pavement, zipping past without care. We weave through crowds in the Carmel market, its alleys abundant with ripe goods and dank, unknowable puddles. When the sirens do wail we are almost at the beach, exposed in scrub-land between a dog park and children’s playground. There is no shelter. The Iron Dome, already in action, is striking rockets overhead. Beneath exploding booms we run, joining others to press ourselves against the sides of a huge stone monument, scant protection that’s unlikely to survive a hit. The obligatory ten minute wait over, people peel away. Our walk to the beach resumed, we pretend it was fine, no worries we say to each other … fibbing. Later, when our electrician tells me everyone in Tel Aviv can find safety in a shelter, I explain where we were. ‘Ahhh,’ he says, ‘unlucky.’ He looks up, swipes the air and strikes his head. ‘Shrapnel,’ he says, ‘it falls … you’re dead.’
Despite us being a couple of soft northwest Londoners, we quickly adjust to the peculiar reality of war. The bottle of water in our safe room remains unopened … no-one gets that thirsty in ten minutes … but we do have occasion to sit and wait the minutes out on two unfolded chairs. Life feels abnormally normal for a country bombarded by 26 thousand rockets in the year since October 7th. Saved from destruction by its brilliant Iron Dome technology, Israel carries on, busy with everydayness. But when we make a purchase in a favourite shop the sales woman wipes away a tear, and choked by emotion she thanks us for being amongst the few still flying there. We leave moist eyed and walk the dusty streets home knowing that everyone we pass has a connection to the reservists, to the injured, to the hostages taken, to the survivors and the fallen. Many here are peace-seekers who cling to their beliefs wanting a solution, asking questions that have no answers. Stunned but not silenced, they are surrounded on all sides by the brutality of a hate they surely don’t deserve and cannot understand. ‘Houthis?’ they say, ‘Iraqis, Iranians, Qataris, Turks? The Dutch, the French, the literary world, all of Berlin, much of London, the world’s university students? What did we ever do to harm them?’
Instagram: @s.i.royston
In 2023/24 I was lucky to be chosen as one of the Genesis Foundation’s ten emerging writers. My debut novel is called The House in Mile End: romantic betrayal, Jewish East End gangsters and a mystifying legacy are woven together by a box of love letters from the 1920s. All I want for Chanukah is an agent.
Below is my guest Substack post On Being Jewish Now…
Thank u
Wonderful writing - great to read!!!