“This is the New Israel”

Email Dispatch from an Israeli in Tel Aviv (Oct 14, 2023)

And now for something a little different.

As the rest of the world struggles with difficult questions such as what is the correct ratio of shells dropped to civilian casualties, is the answer different if the casualties are Jews, and whether ALL the Jews in the world are colonizers who deserve to die in the name of freedom for Palestine or only those born in Israel – we here in Israel have been busy doing other things.

Namely, a revolution.

Or perhaps revolution is not the correct word. It's more like a civil takeover? Perhaps we need a new word to describe what's happening right now, but it's pretty amazing. And it seems to have the government concerned, which is fine by me.

I saw something today that, for the first time in a while, filled my heart with hope.

I told you I've been throwing myself into volunteering and charity work like there's no tomorrow, and was already diagnosing myself with some kind of PTSD donation disorder, but today everything clicked into perspective. What we're doing here is founding the new state of Israel. We have given up on our government. They are less than useless. We're building our own Israel, according to our own values, and helping ourselves.

It started on Saturday, when too many Israelis realized, to their horror, that the army wasn't mobilizing in earnest. The military response was bizarrely slow. Not enough troops were situated in the south to respond to the massive inundation of generously armed, well prepared militias who lacked any compunction regarding who they killed and how. They came in like they were shooting in a video game, and the unarmed civilians were helpless targets. Though Israelis are raised on the myth that the military is all powerful, it was hours and hours before units began arriving at the captive villages, hours before the airforce mobilized, hours, it seemed, before anyone in government woke up to the fact that we were under unprecedented attack. So the people under siege used their phones and social media accounts to BEG for assistance – and private citizens responded. EX military men came in commando style to rescue their relatives, and on the way, kill some terrorists, carry out the injured, come back to seek out more neighbors they could help. They didn't wait for the order, they just showed up.

It continued the next day when it became clear that the Minister for Transport, Miri Regev, who was in Mexico at the time, wasn't doing anything to assist with mass transport for hastily-recruited reserves. So Israelis set up their own carpools.

Then it turned out that all the various rescue and relief forces who had been working all day and all night and all day again were hungry. So citizens mobilized to send food. And the survivors who were evacuated from the ruins of their villages needed a place to retreat to, so Israelis opened up their homes, their rental properties, their hotels – while the Ministries that might conceivably be responsible for housing or welfare dawdled.

And then the blood drives started. People stood in line for hours, waiting to give more blood than anyone was equipped to deal with.

Then donation drives. At first spontaneously, people showed up at central squares with bags full of blankets, towels, clothing, toiletries. The donations kept coming and coming, while the government seemingly slept, not taking calls, not making press appearances.

Then the Startup Nation woke up. Apps were hastily programmed: rideshare apps, apps to share information about missing relatives and cross reference them with footage from Hamas, apps to collect donations, apps to match requests for help with donors.

It then turned out that military equipment was lacking: either outdated, or caught up in the red tape of warehouses, not reaching warriors fast enough – and civilians started crowd sourcing for protective vests, helmets, water packs, shoes. Meanwhile the government was mostly occupied with blaming military high command for the previous day's fiasco.

And so it went. Civilians helped civilians, with absolutely everything. Locating and releasing family members who had been locked in their shelters for 24 hours and more, locating and retrieving family members lying injured in fields, flushing out terrorists, locating bodies. Providing transport, food, and gear. Creating networks for information to flow. Taking in evacuees. Providing them with basic needs.

Finding mental care workers to start helping with their trauma, mapping their needs. And the government? Who knows what they were doing. Looking for someone to blame.

As Ministers hid and dragged their heels, it became apparent that the only people actually doing anything useful on the home front were civilian volunteers. Reporters were the only ones who could debrief the public; in some cases, reporters became rescuers. And the volunteer networks with the fastest, most effective response were the organizations that had coalesced over the past nine months to lead protest rallies.

So here we have the very organizations that Bibi's government had been smearing for months as "anarchists", "divisive", "traitors", taking over more and more of the actual operation of the emergency. "Bonot Alternativa" (women building an alternative), the women's group who'd staged demonstrations dressed in the red cloaks of "The Handmaids Tale"; "Kaplan Force", and above all "Achim LaNeshek" (brothers in arms) ex military rally organizers are just some of the networks that have turned their efforts from protest to civil organization.

Social media influencers stepped up to the plate, creating social media campaigns that went viral far before the Minister for Information, Galit Distel-Atbaryan made her first public appearance. On Wednesday, Distel-Atbaryan tried to claim credit for a hashtag - HamasIsIsis  - that had been the brainchild of a lifestyle and travel influencer on Twitter, @EllaTravelsLove. Distel-Atbaryan was then fully "dragged" on social media, and on Thursday, she resigned her position.

Israelis in general are sick and tired of the government ministers, who showed up too late, to do too little. In clips that have been going viral since Wednesday, Minister of Economy Nir Barkat is confronted in a hospital by a furious relative of a patient, who demands he get down on his knees and rend his clothes in penitence; Environment Protection Minister Idit Silman (whose resignation toppled the previous Knesset) is booed out of a separate hospital by an enraged nurse; Transport Minister Miri Regev runs out of a third hospital, chased by an incensed patient relative who pelts her car with a cup of coffee.

The Israeli government has not yet caught on that by inaction and abandonment, it has rendered itself irrelevant. They think they're still fighting for their public image. Their public image is dirt.
One of my favorite activists, Yael Sherer, is a good example of how the government has lost control. Yael Sherer is an indefatigable champion for the rights of rape victims. Her lobbying for acute rooms for rape victims in hospitals and for collection and testing of rape kits, among other things, gained her one of the great honors bestowed on national heroes: she was invited to be a torch bearer at the 74th Independence Day celebration. Yael noticed that no representative of the Israeli government had attended a single one of the funerals for soldiers who fell in the recent battles. (The official response from government PR office is that, at times of war, the government is not obliged to send a representative. Touching.)

Yael felt that perhaps in her status as torchbearer she could stand in as a dignitary at these funerals. She simply showed up. Soon she was being invited to multiple funerals a day, and asked to take position in the front row. She turned to some of her fellow torchbearers, and they opened a WhatsApp group to which they invited torchbearers, winners of the Israel prize and the Nobel prize, and retired judges from the Supreme Court, and divvied up the many funerals between them. On Thursday morning she received a phone call from the head of the Ceremonies Committee of the Knesset, a Mrs Liat Shimoni Konitzky, who started berating Yael for inviting Supreme Court judges to military funerals. "Why are you working for (Supreme Court President) Esther Hayut?" admonished Shimoni Konitzky. The Supreme Court has been targeted and demonized by the current administration, in the context of the judicial coup they were attempting to pull off. Shimoni Konitsky demanded that Sherer hand over the full spreadsheet of self-selected dignitaries and which funerals they were planning to attend, to which Sherer responded by telling her off in language so deliciously colorful that it may well become the stuff of legend.

In other words, the Ministers and MPs, though doing nothing, are still trying to claim honors. "They are not worthy of this nation," said one bereaved relative in a passionate clip, and more and more this seems to reflect public sentiment. Social media users have been changing their profile picture to the word RESIGN. Recent polls, too, show a drastic drop in public support for Bibi and his government.
The Israeli people, on the other hand, are showing up. And oh, how they are showing up. Suddenly everyone is an activist. Shops and cafes – closed to business – are setting up as collection points for donations. Neighborhood residents are volunteering: drawing lists, sorting, organizing, transporting.

Donations for soldiers at the front and for evacuees all over Israel. Artists are giving free performances. Writers are uploading free books and giving free workshops. Hairdressers, masseuses, yoga teachers, acupuncturists are showing up at hotels that have opened their doors to evacuees and offering their services for free. All my WhatsApp groups have morphed into mutual assistance and volunteer raising platforms. On the group formed for my highschool reunion, one member manages a list of mental health professionals and therapists offering free care for trauma victims, another is arranging visits to the evacuated kibbutzim to seek out and care for abandoned pets and livestock, one is working with evacuees at hotels. Everyone, it seems, is doing something. Except the government.

Everyone. Including the Israeli Arabs, who are also running blood drives and donation drives and cooking food for soldiers and evacuees. Everyone, including Eritrean Asylum seekers – one of the most disenfranchised groups in Israeli society, whose petitions for asylum have famously been ignored for years, and who now are showing up in large groups at the donation collection points, wearing turquoise shirts for the Eritrean uprising, and assisting as teams with the heavy carrying; they too, belong.

All week long I've been immersing myself in this kind of social action. I hardly recognize myself, but the activity focused on helping others is the only way I feel I can survive these times. And everywhere, people are coming together. We haven't paid full price at a single shop where we've bought donations in bulk – baby formula, light bulbs, tooth brushes – as soon as the clerks realize who we're buying for, the price goes down. The driver of a mover's van asked permission to embrace a friend who had donated a refrigerator, thanking him for the privilege of participating in this act of giving. At the complex we took for our pet project – four newly built but as yet unoccupied apartment buildings which the contractor has opened for evacuee families – the parking lot was chaotically overrun with boxes of donated appliances and goods, and everyone in town, from neighbors to the local troop of scouts, seemed to be involved in cataloging, sorting and distributing the goods. Yesterday a truck pulled up and a shop owner from the nearby Arab town pulled out 20 new kids' bikes to give to the children of the evacuated families.

And today I got to see for the first time one of the larger headquarters run by Achim Laneshek at the Tel Aviv Expo fairgrounds. I could barely believe my eyes. Boxes as far as the eye could see, but all impeccably organized and labeled. Dozens and dozens of volunteers, all collaborating in an orderly fashion, directing the line of cars that kept pulling in to deposit more and more donated goods; while at the other end, fulfilling "orders" and matching requests for donations with volunteer drivers who transport the goods to their beneficiaries.

And I realized: this is the new Israel.

Screw the government. Who needs them.

If they had a bit of sense, they'd retire right now, and let the volunteers take over.

The volunteers would probably also do a better job directing military efforts.

They would undoubtedly do a better job negotiating for the dozens of hostages still held by Hamas. We're the ones who care. The government acts like they've already written the hostages off, given up on even the pretense of trying to rescue them.

Netanyahu may not realize it, but his time is over. He is not my prime minister. He has become irrelevant.

We are the people who will rise from the ashes. And our new Israel will be better.

Shabbat shalom, #gili_from_telaviv

Sent from my iPhone