Barring anything dramatic and unforeseen, here’s our plan for this week:
MONDAY (today): We look at what’s brewing in the chock-full headlines, plus some glimpses of popular “culture” that give a sense of where Israelis are.
TUESDAY: A recent lengthy Facebook post got a lot of attention, so much so that many responses to the post suggested to the author that he publish it as an article. Whether he will, I don’t know, but I reached out to him to request permission to share it in English with our readers, and he kindly agreed.
WEDNESDAY: With Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur just around the bend, we hear from one of the most important rabbinic voices in Israel, Rabbi David Stav, once a candidate for the position of Chief Rabbi, about how he thinks we ought to be directing our individual and collective thoughts at this pivotal time in Jewish history.
THURSDAY: We return to Israeli music. English is permeating Israeli culture everywhere, and not everyone thinks that’s so great. Hatikva 6, a band whose work we’ve highlighted before, has a song about the “problem,” and we share it with our readers.
Next week, of course, is Rosh Hashanah eve (Monday), Rosh Hashanah (Tuesday and Wednesday) and the Fast of Gedaliah (Thursday). So it’ll be a very short week. We’ll begin on Sunday with a podcast with Iddo Geffen, a fascinating, award-winning Israeli novelist whose newest book has just appeared in English.
And then at the end of the week, we’ll see what’s transpired.
Yesterday afternoon, Sunday, this was the headline on YNet. The amalgam of issues that it raises is a good reminder of the myriad issues Israel’s government and people now face:
LARGE HEADLINE: Getting closer to the decisive moment: a ground invasion alongside the hostages, and a suggestion to leverage the Qatari attack.
SMALLER HEADLINE: As the American Secretary of State is about to reveal the new stances of the USA and Qatar, preparations for Chariots of Gideon B [DG-the name of the new, planned invasion of Gaza City] have been completed and the IDF is at the gates of Gaza. In the meantime, the resistance flotillas are on their way to Gaza and the increasingly hot Judea and Samaria could well escalate. All of this when in the background lies next week’s vote at the United Nations on the creation of a Palestinian State.
The attempt to cut off the head of Hamas’ leadership in Qatar was, perhaps, long overdue, but it was also a spectacular failure. As great a success as was the beeper operation, Qatar was (except for the fascinating technology that Israel used in the attack) worse than a dud.
Israel not only failed to fill anyone who mattered, and not only exposed a deep rift in the security establishment (the Mossad absolutely refused to kill the Hamas leaders on the ground in Qatar), but Israel has also — obviously — enraged Qatar. It has at least annoyed Trump, who sees Qatar as an important ally—and perhaps more than annoyed him. Yes, Qatar has been funding Hamas for years, but it did that with Netanyahu’s express approval, and since October 7, it has been Qatar that has been the intermediary in hostage negotiations.
That role may well be over. Is there anyone else who could assume it? If there isn’t, what happens to the hostages?
That’s the background for this headline on N12, which appeared online at just about the same time that the YNet headline above did — on Sunday afternoon.
LARGE HEADLINE: Qatar’s fury at the United States, and the chances that still remain for a breakthrough in the [hostage] negotiations.
SMALLER HEADLINE: Doha’s attempt to “leverage their humiliation” to get Trump to put more pressure on Israel.
If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.
In the meantime, this post (my thanks to Micaela H Z for her sharp eye in finding it!) is interesting. The post says that the photo was taken in Jerusalem. If you know a bit about Jerusalem and its history, you know that a building with this exterior, not with Jerusalem stone, was one of those buildings that received an exemption from the Jerusalem stone requirement, usually in the early 1950’s, when housing was tight and buildings had to go up quickly.
Sadly, many of those buildings have remained low cost housing and not a lot has been done to them. So here, you can see the pipes added in the intervening decades … presumably some A/C and replaced boilers, etc., all dangling from the side. The clothing hanging outside the window means the family likely doesn’t have a dryer, though that’s not 100% certain.
In any event, what’s really interesting about this photo is the two handwritten signs, the white one above and the brown one below. Here they are, enlarged, with a translation below.
WHITE SIGN: The hostages are still in Gaza because Netanyahu doesn’t want the war to end.
BROWN SIGN: We love our neighbors above 🖤 but the hostages have not returned because Hamas is a barbarian terrorist organization.
One of those cases when both are true. And when Israelis actually manage to engage in some civil discourse, without dissing each other, and without shooting each other.
Finally, though his sordid story hasn’t gotten around outside Israel all that much, Likud Knesset Member Hanoch Dov Milwidsky, who happens to be the Chairman of the Finance Committee, has had some rather unfortunate appearances in the press, and they have nothing to do with finance.
Fortunately for Milwidsky, Israel has a quick news cycle, so the fact that Netanyahu appointed an accused rapist to head the Finance Committee, over the objections of his own Likud MK’s who pleaded with him not to do it, has mostly vanished from the news.
Vanished …. from the news, yes, but not from Israeli social media. The story is sordid and sad, but at least the little skit that made its way around Israeli social media affords a bit of humor (about a not-funny-at-all subject) with which to wrap up today.
