Ido Azulay is not reassured displaying information about the air power and intelligence of his country, Israelby mobilizing 100 planes to surprise attack thousands of Hezbollah missile launchers in Lebanon. On the contrary, it irritates him. There have been nearly 11 months of low-intensity warfare between the parties around the historic city of Acre – 36 kilometers from the border with Lebanon – which was awakened this morning by air raid alarms, a direct rocket hit and the intercepted explosion of another that left windows and the remains of blinds on the ground and, in several houses, traces of shrapnel. Like most of the north of the country, he feels aggrieved. “What am I? A second-class citizen? We have had fear in our bodies all this time, with a routine of bombings and they don’t care. And now, when the rockets were about to hit Tel Aviv, is this when we launched a preemptive strike?” “For us, no, but for them, yes?” he says in the modest hairdressing salon of his friend Tomer Itaj, slightly damaged by shrapnel.
The three 24-year-old friends recount, today with particular anger, the phrases that are usually heard in the area, especially in recent months. One, from Yagin Azulay: “The government is leaving us sold out.” The three voted in 2022, during the last elections, for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party, 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? For us to remain silent like poor things with all this uncertainty that affects our bodies and the way we earn our living?” says Ido Azulay.
Acre was not evacuated because 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 heritage that houses a fortified citadel inhabited by Palestinians. These are the descendants of those who remained during the Nakba (the exodus of some 750,000 Palestinians) seven decades agoand today they share the city with the Jewish emigrants that the state has transferred to the new zone. On the contrary, they lead parallel lives, except when they degenerate into ethnic clashes, as in 2008 or in 2021.
It is in these simple dwellings built for Jews without great resources that the rockets launched from neighboring Lebanon this afternoon highlight a double sense of discrimination. As part of the north, it must withstand the threat of dozens of daily projectiles (although Hezbollah has not directed its attacks against civilians and Acre has only been targeted in recent months in very exceptional ways) without the army invading Lebanon with blood and tears. fire, as it did with Gaza. And because of its Sephardic origin, compared to Tel Aviv as a stereotype of Ashkenazi privilege, — Jews of central or eastern European origin —, in an origin gap that has not yet been filled in Israel.
Even if The Prime Minister is a political animal who has just regained his popularity While everyone considered him cushioned, Netanyahu stumbled on Sunday with the feeling of forgetting the periphery in relation to the center of the country, where Tel Aviv and the highest salaries are located. The prime minister rubbed salt in the wound and drew the ire of regional leaders in the north by calling the surprise Israeli attack “Peace for Tel Aviv.” This is a play on words with Peace for Galilee, the name of the second invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, after the failed attack by the Palestinians on the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom.
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Choosing this name for the operation after almost 11 months of daily attacks concentrated in the north is “the culmination of the Israeli government’s disconnection with hundreds of thousands of citizens,” reacted the heads of the three government councils in the region, Moshe. Davidovitz, David Azulai and Giora Zaltz. “From now on, we are ceasing all communication with all members of the Government until we obtain a complete solution for our residents and our children. Prime minister, ministers, members of the Coalition, government representatives and all state employees, wherever they are, we have not been interested in them for ten and a half months. From now on, we are no longer interested in you. Do not call, do not come and do not send messages. “Until now, we have managed on our own,” they said in a joint statement.
A “total war”
The “solution” they are asking for is here the euphemism of what the three friends clearly pronounce: “A total war,” in the words of Itaj. “War, war, of course,” in those of Ido Azulay. “It is better than uncertainty. “I would put on the uniform tomorrow to enter Lebanon.”
A political agreement to keep Hezbollah's elite forces away from the border, like the one negotiated by France and the United States, or a ceasefire in Gaza to also calm the Lebanese front, as the Cairo mediators are seeking this Sunday, is it not already serving them. “Since October 7 [de 2023, día del ataque sorpresa de Hamás] It is not an option to live with Hezbollah on the other side of the border. Place. The date of October 6 was, let's say, acceptable. Not today,” Yagin Azulay summarizes.
This is the general feeling in northern Israel. Despite the unpredictable consequences for the Middle East and Hezbollah's stronghold, only open war will allow people like Gershon Maté to sleep peacefully and the tens of thousands of people evacuated since October to return to their homes without fear.
Maté, 33, immigrated to the Jewish state from India in 2014, “never” thinking he would find himself in such a situation. Even with the shock in his body, he goes from room to room in his house to say that the attack caught him sleeping with his wife in the room of his two children, aged eight and four. “So that they get used to staying in their bed, not in ours,” he explains.
Then the air raid alarms sounded, they grabbed the little ones and ran to the shelter: “I didn't even have time to get out of the house. “We heard the explosion at the front door.” He points to the broken glass on the child's bed on his cell phone. “If we took another 15 seconds, imagine what would have happened to him,” he adds, with his wife next to him sweeping the last glass off 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 whose feet one can see the pieces of fallen blinds and glass. Neighbors and onlookers came to comment on the traces of shell fragments on the walls and to touch the metal parts 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 strength,” Maté acknowledges. “But I will return home when everything is settled. I have a rental contract to respect. What is the alternative? Also, is there a place [de Israel] Where can we go where someone can give us a 100% guarantee that a rocket won't hit us? No.”
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