Bulletins and News Discussion from June 24th to June 30th, 2024 - Waiting for War - COTW: Lebanon

I just returned yesterday from a business trip to Israel. Some anecdata to share:

• the flight there was three-quarters full; the return was entirely full. Lots of families on both. At passport control on the US side of the return most of the people on the flight went through the Israeli passport line, not the US passport line. So it was mostly Israelis leaving, not tourists.
• news in Tel Aviv does not show much about what is going on in Gaza. The nightly news was more focused on the fires at the Lebanon border and the death of multiple IDF soldier in a Rafah attack. Nothing really about the counter-attacks and communal responses.
• there are protests almost nightly in front of the IDF headquarters and many nights in front of Netanyahu’s personal residence in Jerusalem. The protesters are mostly the secular types (or “State of Israel” types as defined in the Pappe piece linked here yesterday).
• even the secular types are rabidly racist against anyone deemed ‘arab’. Was subjected to a six-hour tour of Jerusalem organized by work where the tour guide ranted about ‘the arab mindset’ and went to great pains to point out how Israel was not an apartheid state because a single muslim woman was working as a tour bus driver. Israeli execs at company dinner made multiple casually racist comments about employees at a vendor with Persian surnames being arab terrorists (the vendor and employees are canadian, didn’t matter).
• People in Tel Aviv are partying and behaving like nothing bad is going on. If you had been there since last October and were only exposed to local news I doubt you’d have any idea of how bad the situation in Gaza really was. And this feeds into the paranoid/delusional mindset around ‘the arabs’ and ‘antisemitism’.
• the touristic industries have completely collapsed. There were no lines in Jerusalem for the big religious sites, we walked right into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and there were maybe 30 people inside the entire complex and no real lines on the tomb and site of the crucifixion. The tour guide said it had been like this since the war started and many in his line of work had gone bankrupt.
• most of the big tourist hotels are being propped up by direct payments from the government in exchange for housing settlers from the north who were evacuated. Our hotel, right on the Tel Aviv beach, was at least half full of these people who had been living there full time for months. On the weekends Israelis from outside of Tel Aviv would fill up the hotel for beach going but during the week it was empty except for the housing. We only realized this because there were tons of children during the week who were being shuttled to and from schools and it didn’t make sense that would be happening for tourists.
• as an American what stood out to me was the lack of homeless people in Israel because this is utterly inescapable in the US. I guess I’m glad my taxes are ensuring people somewhere are staying off the streets but it made me angry that my taxes are being used to prop up a foreign social safety net at the expense of mine here. The housing market in Tel Aviv is grossly overpriced relative to wages. Most of the people I talked to wanted to immigrate to the US for the higher salaries.