Ido Azulay is not reassured by the display of air power and intelligence information from his country, Israel, by mobilizing 100 planes to bomb thousands of Hezbollah rocket launchers in Lebanon. Rather, it irritates him. He has been in a low-intensity war for almost 11 months between one side and the other in the neighborhood of the historic city of Acre – 36 kilometers from the border with Lebanon – which was awakened this morning by anti-aircraft alarms, a direct hit by a rocket and the explosion from the interception of another that has left glass and remains of shutters on the ground and, in several houses, marks of shrapnel. Like almost all of the north of the country, he feels aggrieved. “What am I? A second-class citizen? We have been living in fear all this time, with a routine of bombings and they do not care. And now, when the rockets were going to go against Tel Aviv, is that when we launch a preventive attack? “Not for us, but for them, yes?” he says in his friend Tomer Itaj’s humble hair salon, slightly damaged by shrapnel.
The three 24-year-old friends are now particularly angry at the phrases that are often heard in the area, especially in recent months. One, from Yagin Azulay: “The government is selling us out.” All three voted in 2022, in the last elections, for the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud, which has a stronghold in Acre, but they regret it. “Right now, if I had him in front of me, I would ask him: what do you want? That we stay quiet like poor people with all this uncertainty that affects our bodies and how we earn a living?” says Ido Azulay.
Acre has not been evacuated, as it lies outside the border strip closest to Lebanon. With 50,000 inhabitants, it was – in better times – one of the most touristic cities in Israel, thanks to the Crusader legacy housed in a walled citadel inhabited by Palestinians. They are the descendants of those who stayed during the Nakba (the exodus of six million Palestinians), seven decades ago, and today they share the city with the Jewish emigrants that the State relocated to the new area. Rather, they lead parallel lives, except when they degenerate into ethnic clashes, as in 2008 or 2021.
It is in these simple residential houses built for Jews without many resources that the rockets launched from nearby Lebanon bring to the surface this afternoon a double feeling of discrimination. As part of the north, the one of enduring the threat of dozens of projectiles a day (although Hezbollah did not direct its attack against civilians and Acre has only been targeted in very exceptional months) without the army invading Lebanon with blood and fire, as it has done with Gaza. And because of its Sephardic origin, compared to Tel Aviv as a stereotype of Ashkenazi privilege, -Jewish originating from central or eastern Europe-, in a breach of origin still to be healed in Israel.
Despite the fact that the prime minister is a political animal who has just regained his popularity when everyone thought he was dead, Netanyahu has stumbled this Sunday on the feeling that the periphery has been forgotten in relation to the centre of the country, where Tel Aviv and the highest salaries are. The prime minister has rubbed salt in the wound and earned the ire of regional leaders in the north by christening the Israeli surprise attack “Peace for Tel Aviv”. It is a play on words with Peace for the Galilee, the name of the second invasion of Lebanon in 1982, after the failed Palestinian attack against the Israeli ambassador in the United Kingdom.
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The choice of such a name for the operation after nearly 11 months of daily attacks concentrated in the north is “the culmination of the Israeli government’s disconnection from hundreds of thousands of citizens,” the heads of the three government councils in the area, Moshe Davidovitz, David Azulai and Giora Zaltz, reacted. “From now on, we cease communication with all members of the government until we obtain a complete solution for our residents and our children. Prime Minister, ministers, coalition members, government officials and all government employees, wherever they are, we have not been of interest to you for ten and a half months. From now on, we are not interested in you. Do not call, come or send messages. We have managed on our own until now,” they said in a joint statement.
A “total war”
The “solution” they are asking for is here a euphemism for what the three friends clearly say: “A total war,” in the words of Itaj. “War, war, of course,” in the words of Ido Azulay. “It is better than uncertainty. I myself would put on my uniform tomorrow to enter Lebanon.”
A political agreement to remove Hezbollah’s elite forces from the border, such as the one being negotiated by France and the US, or a ceasefire in Gaza to also calm the Lebanese front, as the mediators in Cairo are seeking this Sunday, is no longer enough for them. “Since October 7, it is no longer an option to live with Hezbollah on the other side of the border. Period. On October 6, it was, let’s say, acceptable. Not today,” Yagin Azulay sums up.
This is the general feeling in northern Israel. Despite the unpredictable consequences for the Middle East and the strength of Hezbollah, only open war will allow people like Gershon Mateh to sleep peacefully, and the tens of thousands of people evacuated since October to return to their homes without fear.
Maté, 33, emigrated from India to the Jewish state in 2014, never thinking he would ever find himself in such a situation. Still in shock, he shows room after room in his house while telling how the attack caught him sleeping with his wife in the room of their two children, aged eight and four. “So they would get used to staying in their bed, not ours,” he explains.
Then the air raid alarms went off, they grabbed the children and ran to the shelter: “I didn’t even have time to leave the house. We heard the explosion at the front door.” He shows the broken glass on the child’s bed on his mobile phone. “If we had taken 15 seconds longer, imagine what would have happened to him,” he adds, with his wife sweeping up the last pieces of glass from the floor and finishing packing the suitcases with clothes.
They will spend the night in a hotel, like all the residents of the building, at the foot of which fallen pieces of shutters and glass can be seen. Neighbours and curious people have come to comment on the marks of shrapnel on the walls and to touch the metal pieces of the interceptor, inside the small crater it formed when it fell.
“Everyone knows that we are in a war situation and that the government is not using all its force,” admits Maté. “But I will return to the house when everything is settled. I have a rental contract to respect. What is the alternative? Also, is there somewhere [de Israel] Where can we go where someone can guarantee us 100% that a rocket won’t hit us? No.”
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