“Never A Better Time to Visit”: Our Post-October-7 Trip to Israel

Dana, the kids, and I got back to the US last week after a month spent in England and then Israel. We decided to visit Israel because … uhh, we heard there’s never been a better time.

We normally go every year to visit Dana’s family and our many friends there, and to give talks. Various well-meaning friends suggested that maybe we should cancel or postpone this year—given, you know, the situation. To me, though, the situation felt like all the more reason to go. To make Israel seem more and more embattled, dangerous, isolated, abnormal, like not an acceptable place to visit (much less live), in order to crater its economy, demoralize its population, and ultimately wipe it from the face of earth … that is explicitly much of the world’s game plan right now, laid out with shocking honesty since October 7 (a day that also showed us what the “decolonization” will, concretely, look like). So, if I oppose this plan, then how could I look myself in the mirror while playing my tiny part in it? Shouldn’t I instead raise a middle finger to those who’d murder my family, and go?

Besides supporting our friends and relatives, though, I wanted to see the post-October-7 reality for myself, rather than just spending hours per day reading about it on social media. I wanted to form my own impression of the mood in Israel: fiercely determined? angry? hopeless? just carrying on like normal?

Anyway, in two meeting-packed weeks, mostly in Tel Aviv but also in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Be’er Sheva, I saw stuff that could support any of those narratives. A lot was as I’d expected, but not everything. In the rest of this post, I’ll share eleven observations:

(1) This presumably won’t shock anyone, but in post-October-7 Israel, you indeed can’t escape October 7. Everywhere you look, on every building, in every lobby, hanging from every highway overpass, there are hostage posters and “Bring Them Home Now” signs and yellow ribbons—starting at the airport, where every single passenger is routed through a long corridor of hostage posters, each one signed and decorated by the hostage’s friends and family. It sometimes felt as though Yad Vashem had expanded to encompass the entire country. Virtually everyone we talked to wanted to share their stories and opinions about the war, most of all their depression and anger. While there was also plenty of discussion about quantum error mitigation and watermarking of large language models and local family events, no one even pretended to ignore the war.

(2) Having said that, the morning after we landed, truthfully, the first thing that leapt out at me wasn’t anything to do with October 7, hostages, or Gaza. It was the sheer number of children playing outside, in any direction you looked. Full, noisy playgrounds on block after block. It’s one thing to know intellectually that Israel has by far the highest birthrate of any Western country, another to see it for yourself. The typical secular family probably has three kids; the typical Orthodox family has more. (The Arab population is of course also growing rapidly, both in Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza.) New apartment construction is everywhere you look in Tel Aviv, despite building delays caused by the war. And it all seems perfectly normal … unless you’ve lived your whole life in environments where 0.8 or 1.2 children per couple is the norm.

This, of course, has giant implications for anyone interested in Israel’s future. It’s like, a million Israeli leftists could get fed up and flee to the US or Canada or Switzerland, and Israel would still have a large and growing Jewish population—because having a big family is “just what people do” in a state that was founded to defy the Holocaust. In particular: anyone who dreams of dismantling the illegal, settler-colonial, fascist Zionist ethnostate, and freeing Palestine from river to sea, had better have some plan for what they’re going to do with all these millions of young Jews, who don’t appear to be going anywhere.

(3) The second thing I noticed was the heat—comparable to the Texas summer heat that we try to escape when possible. Because of the roasting sun, our own two pampered offspring mostly refused to go outside during daytime, and we mostly met friends indoors. I more than once had the dark thought that maybe Israel will survive Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and its own Jewish extremists … only to be finished off in the end (along with much of the rest of the planet) by global warming. I wonder whether Israel will manage to engineer its way out of the crisis, as it dramatically engineered its way out of its water crisis via desalination. The Arab petrostates have been trying to engineer their way out of the Middle East’s increasingly Mercury-like climate, albeit with decidedly mixed results.

(4) But nu, what did our Israeli friends say about the war? Of course it’s a biased sample, because our friends are mostly left-wing academics and tech workers. But, at risk of overgeneralizing: they’re unhappy. Very, very unhappy. As for Bibi and his far-right yes-men? Our friends’ rage at them was truly a sight to behold. American progressives are, like, mildly irked by Trump in comparison. Yes, our friends blame Bibi for the massive security and intelligence failures that allowed October 7 to happen. They blame him for dragging out the war to stave off elections. They blame him for empowering the contemptible Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. They blame him for his failure to bring back the remaining hostages. Most of all, they blame him for refusing even to meet with the hostage families, and more broadly, for evading responsibility for all that he did wrong, while arrogating credit for any victories (like the rescue of Noa Argamani).

(5) One Israeli friend offered to take me along to the giant anti-Bibi rally that now happens every Saturday night in Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. (She added that, if I left before 9pm, it would reduce the chances of the police arresting me.) As the intrepid blogger-investigator I am, of course I agreed.

While many of the protesters simply called for new elections to replace Netanyahu (a cause that I 3000% support), others went further, demanding a deal to free the hostages and an immediate end to the war (even if, as they understood, that would leave Hamas in power).

Watching the protesters, smelling their pot smoke that filled the air, I was seized by a thought: these Israeli leftists actually see eye-to-eye with the anti-Israel American leftists on a huge number of issues. In a different world, they could be marching together as allies. Except, of course, for one giant difference: namely, the Tel Aviv protesters are proudly waving Israeli flags (sometimes modified to add anti-Bibi images, or to depict the Star of David “crying”), rather than burning or stomping on those flags. They’re marching to save the Israel that they know and remember, rather than to destroy it.

(6) We did meet one ultra-right-wing (and Orthodox) academic colleague. He was virtually the only person we met on this trip who seemed cheerful and optimistic about Israel’s future. He brought me to his synagogue to celebrate the holiday of Shavuot, while he himself stood guarding the door of the synagogue with a gargantuan rifle (his volunteer duty since October 7). He has six kids.

(7) Again and again, our secular liberal friends told us they’re thinking about moving from Israel, because if the Bibi-ists entrench their power (and of course the demographics are trending in that direction), then they don’t see that the country has any worthwhile future for them or their children. Should this be taken more seriously than the many Americans who promise that this time, for real, they’ll move to Canada if Trump wins? I’m not sure. I can only report what I heard.

(8) At the same time, again and again I got the following question from Israelis (including the leftist ones): how bad is the situation for Jews in the US? Have the universities been taken over by militant anti-Zionists, like it shows in the news? I had to answer: it’s complicated. Because I live my life enbubbled in the STEM field of computer science, surrounded by friends and colleagues of many backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and political opinions who are thoughtful and decent (otherwise, why would they be my friends and colleagues?), I’m able to live a very nice life even in the midst of loud protesters calling to globalize the intifada against my family.

If, on the other hand, I were in a typical humanities department? Yeah, then I’d be pretty terrified. My basic options would be to (a) shut up about my (ironically) moderate, middle-of-the-road opinions on Israel/Palestine, such as support for the two-state solution; (b) live a miserable and embattled existence; or (c) pack up and move, for example to Israel.

An astounding irony right now is that, just as Israeli leftists are talking about moving from Israel, some of my American Jewish friends have talked to me about moving to Israel, to escape a prejudice that they thought died with their grandparents. I don’t know where the grass is actually greener (or is it brown everywhere?). Nor do I know how many worriers will actually follow through. What’s clear is that, both in Israel and in the diaspora, Jews are feeling an existential fear that they haven’t felt for generations.

(9) Did I fear for my own family’s safety during the trip? Not really. Maybe I should have. When we visited Haifa, we found that GPS was scrambled all across northern Israel, to make targeting harder for Hezbollah missiles. As a result, we couldn’t use Google Maps, got completely lost driving, and had to change plans with our friends. For the first time, now I really feel angry at Hezbollah: they made my life worse and it’s personal!

The funniest part, though, was how the scrambling was implemented: when you opened Google Maps anywhere in the north, it told you that you were in Beirut. It then dutifully gave you walking or driving directions to wherever you were going in Israel, passing through Syria close to Damascus (“warning: this route passes through multiple countries”).

(10) The most darkly comical thing that I heard on the entire trip: “oh, no, I don’t object in the slightest if the anti-Zionists want to kill us all. I only object if they want to kill us because of an incorrect understanding of the relevant history.” Needless to say, this was a professor.

(11) After my two-week investigation, what grand insight can I offer about Israel’s future? Not much, but maybe this: I think we can definitively rule out the scenario where Israel, having been battered by October 7, and bracing itself to be battered worse by Hezbollah, just sort of … withers away and disappears. Yes, Israel might get hotter, more crowded, more dangerous, more right-wing, and more Orthodox. But it will stay right where it is, unless and until its enemies destroy it in a cataclysmic war. You can’t scare people away, break their will, if they believe they have nowhere else on the planet to go. You can only kill them or else live next to them in peace, as the UN proposed in 1947 and as Oslo proposed in the 1990s. May we live to see peace.

Anyway, on that pleasant note, time soon to tune in to the Trump/Biden debate! I wonder who these two gentlemen are, and what they might stand for?