First Time Here? Readers suggest starting with the expanded Gaza Explainer in #133 and #120.
Tags: 10 Min Read; Yom HaZikaron; Relief
Updates:
The section below on the Druze of Syria was expanded post email release.
The number of U.S. attacks on Yemen in #174 was revised post email release.
Strong winds blow just now in Israel. They have most of the day. Fires have closed Highway 1 between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Train service is on pause from Jerusalem and also in the Zichron Yakov area. Buses are being rerouted. I was to go to Jerusalem for the evening, but am so far stuck in Tel Aviv.
Protests in Tel Aviv & Jerusalem continue. They come in small, medium and large sizes.
A small one I have attended a number of times is a Friday Night kabbalat shabbat/protest outside the house of Bibi senior-and-special aide Ron Dermer.
Mr. Dermer is widely known as a not-very-nice-man. He assiduously avoids meeting families of hostages, though one was forced on him recently. He spoke at the families the entire meeting.
I figure: He is of the type that "loves to be hated." E.g. the protest outside his house does not give him any kind of pause. Rather, the twists of his psyche morph the protest into a justification of his position.
I figure we are protesting to send a message to his kids (who we sometimes see through the window) and the Shabak [Israeli FBI] agents who stand guard watching us.
Because we are on a small residential street, and operating without a permit for a gathering, there were two new twists this past week: One of us kept the crowd to under twenty people. Extras were asked to go down the block a bit. And when we got to the names of the hostages, we didn't read them, rather we sang them to the melody of HaTikva:
Read
If you are sick of accounts of the day of October 7, skip this.
I recently discovered an aspect of the UK Parliament: "All Party Working Groups."
This is not an official publication of the House of Commons or the House of Lords. It has not been approved by either House or its committees.
All-Party Parliamentary Groups are informal groups of Members of both Houses with a common interest in particular issues. The views expressed in this report are those of the group. This report was researched by the staff of the APPG UK-Israel.
The UK Parliament has an "APPG" -- All Party UK-Israel Parliamentary Group that recently published a report on the October 7 attack. The full report, available on their site, is 315 pages long.
Journalist Jonathan Foreman wrote a summary, about 10 minutes' reading, that appears in the May 2025 edition of Commentary. Read online here or the PDF here.
In one line: The IDF of today is not the IDF of our imagination: It changed over the past 20 years, in terms of ground combat for the worse.
Dept of The Invisible
Items invisible in the Western media. (Now combined with the Postmark concept, to help consolidate topics by locale.)
Lebanon
Lebanese MP to Hezbollah: Hand over your weapons or leave us and go form your own state.
Pierre Bou Assi, a Lebanese Member of Parliament from the (Christian) Lebanese Forces party:
We insist that Hezbollah must hand over its weapons within six months. We want to build a state.
If they don’t want to hand over their weapons, let them take a piece of land and leave us alone.
We don’t want to continue being tied to a religious party whose ideology is connected to Iran.
They should not stay here to exploit us. I am not a guest of Hezbollah.
As a Christian, as a member of the Lebanese Forces, as a Lebanese citizen — I am not a guest of Hezbollah.
“Bargaining chip, weakness card…” [language Hezbollah uses to justify its existence as an armed group] — this can’t go on.
We want to build a state. We want to live.
Above: 3 min w English subs.
Hussein al-Attar, a Lebanese Shiite living in Canada, addresses Hezbollah and its supporters following the IDF’s attack in Beirut earlier this week. This is a good representation of the discussions occurring now within Lebanon.
Syria
New Syrian Regime At The U.N.:
The Syrian Foreign Minister, in his first speech at the UN General Assembly, uses Jews to demonstrate the openness of the "new Syria:"
"[Syrian] Jews returned to their country [Syria] for the first time after the fall of the Assad regime and visited their synagogues."
In other Syria news:
The grave of a Jewish scholar of yore was raided.
And in Qardahah, Syria: "Unknowns" dug up the grave of Hafez Assad, the father of Bashar Assad, the ousted Syrian president, and his body has now been relocated to places unknown. Video below.
Back in Syria
A multi day gunbattle has been going on between Sunni militants, including members of the regime, and Druze militias. There are fatalities. Muslim fanatics are on social media posting incitement clips calling on all Muslims to kill unbelievers (specifically the Druze).
The head of the Druze community in Israel, Muafak Tarif, calls for Israeli intervention to prevent a massacre of Druze in the Damascus area.
The Israeli government announced a policy to support the Syrian Druze.
There have been a few Israeli air strikes on regime elements in the Damascus area:
Above: Syrian regime tanks and armored vehicles on fire as a result of Israeli air force attacks on Tahnaya.
The Lebanese Al-Mayadeen newspaper reports that the mosques in the Eastern Ghouta area of Damascus have announced a general mobilization and are calling on everyone who can carry weapons (Sunnis) to come to Tahnaya and Jaramana (the Druze areas).
Ethnic cleansing campaign of the week… Not what this region needs, and not what the new Syrian regime has promised the world (in spite of their already-forgotten massacre of Alawites just some weeks ago.)
Israel’s attacks in Syria have always been to defend Israel. Israel’s intervention in a “Syrian domestic matter,” however, is new. It can be seen from a few angles:
Israeli Druze are been model citizens and participate in all spheres of life. I read that the highest high school test scores in the country are found at the Druze Girls High Schools. Israel is acting to protect the brethren of Israeli Druze.
IDF action is geopolitical: Keeping the Syrian Druze strong creates a counterweight to the Sunni fanatics now running Syria, preventing Syria from becoming a Muslim-Brotherhood style state.
Or _____________ ?
I now see that Druze in Israel are demonstrating in protest of Druze deaths in Syria at the hand of violent sectarians. Israeli Druze blocked highways near Acre and Karmiel. (Haaretz) This may make Israeli action in Syria to protect the Druze the surface of its relationship: Druze communities have volunteered for the IDF since the founding of the State, and have fought (and died) in the wars of today. Is there an implicit social contract that Israel would now protect Syrian Druze, as the fall of Assad itself was an Israeli victory?
Does the victory over Assad and/or an Israeli “social contract” compel Israel to deploy military force within Syria to protect the Syrian Druze? Walid Jumblatt, leader of Lebanese Druze, is suspicious of Israeli intentions vis-a-vis the Druze of Syria. Jumblatt does not trust Israel. (Israel’s disastrous intervention in Lebanon in the 1980’s may inform his perspective.) Another Lebanese Druze leader, Wiam Wahhab, points out that the alliances and hostilities between Sunni, Shia and others are so messy that Israel’s protection of Druze is to be welcomed.
Iran
Explosion and Fires at Bandar Abbas Port
Note that in March, American media reported the Iranian cargo ship "Jeyran" departed China for Bandar Abbas carrying 1,000 cubic meters of ammonium perchlorate, a material used in rocket fuel production. Highly explosive stuff.
Above: CCTV footage, which recently surfaced, reinforces the assumption that the explosion was caused by human error -- a forklift driver. Additionally:
Ebrahim Rachai, spokesman for the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee in the Iranian Parliament:
According to the information accumulated so far, the explosion at the port of Bandar Abbas did not occur as a result of an external (foreign) actor. According to testimony from the port, there was negligence and failure to observe safety procedures at the site.
A few days after the port explosion:
A large fire broke out at the public transportation terminal in Naziabad in southern Tehran.
Palestine Square, Tehran
Iranians praise the Houthis' achievement - the “drowning” of the F-18 from the American aircraft carrier Harry Truman
The Hebrew says:
This time, the miracle is in our hands: Your [Israel's] destruction is near.
The Persian says:
God’s hand is above their [America’s] hands / The cry of Yemen became the words of God.
Yemen
The US military's ongoing campaign against the Houthi rebel group in Yemen, launched on March 15, has encountered significant setbacks, primarily due to the loss of American drones, which have hindered key surveillance operations, CNN reported on Friday, citing US officials familiar with the situation.
US officials had initially hoped to establish air superiority over Yemen within 30 days of launching the campaign, setting the stage for a shift to "phase two," which would involve more aggressive surveillance and targeting of Houthi leadership, the report noted.
However, reports of repeated destruction of MQ-9 Reaper drones, used for gathering intelligence and conducting surveillance, have delayed those plans.
“We are aware of the Houthi reports that these MQ-9s have been shot down,” a US defense official told CNN. “While hostile fire is likely a probable cause, the circumstances of each incident are still under investigation.”
Without boots on the ground in Yemen, the US military heavily depends on drones for surveillance, battlefield damage assessments, and tracking Houthi activities, officials said.
By one measure, Houthi capabilities have been degraded: The number of alerts in Israel from Houthi missiles. These are down from March.
But in April there still has been about one a week, somewhere in the country.
Gaza
There are demonstrations against Hamas and asking for the war to end.
There are also protests on social media that while the markets are stocked with produce and food, merchants suddenly no longer accept 20 shekel notes. One clip I saw indicated 20 shekels for a kilo of tomatoes, which is about the same price as in Jaffa.
On April 25, the UN World Food Program officially announced that all the food in its warehouses in the Gaza Strip had run out.
Despite this, many Gaza residents received a text message on their phones today announcing that they are invited to receive food packages from the United Nations World Food Program tomorrow.
And the Hamas warehouses are always full...
About Hamas Use of Hospitals
Gazan sources today published a summons for interrogation received by a Gazan resident from Hamas' Ministry of Interior (aka Hamas' "internal security" aka the Hamas Stasi), requiring him to appear for questioning inside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, in the southern Gaza Strip.
Even the ministry's stamp says they are located in the Nassar Hospital.
West Bank
Hussein al-Sheikh has been named the next leader of the Palestinian Authority. It has been observed that during the second intifada, that al-Sheikh was been directly implicated in facilitating deadly suicide attacks. Has al-Sheikh clearly accepted the current and future existence of a Jewish state? (I don’t know one way or the other, but first hand involvement in terrorism is deeply problematic.)
Israel
Replacing the 200 shekel note: There is some discussion that Israel could undermine Hamas' grip on the Gaza economy by replacing the current 200 shekel notes with a new color. The 200 shekel note is the largest banknote in circulation, worth about US$54.
The Gaza economy runs on cash, almost exclusively in Israeli shekels. Hamas continues to hold enormous reserves of cash and food.
Reportedly, many merchants in Gaza now refuse to accept 10 shekel coins (US$2.70) out of a fear that they are being counterfeited.
Yom HaZikaron
As I write this, it is Yom HaZikaron -- Israeli Memorial Day for fallen soldiers. I have kept a tab open for the last week, not knowing if it was relevant to this blog. It is about the defense of the Zikim military base on October 7 (there is also a beach and kibbutz of that name, all nearby -- my sister lived on the kibbutz in, I believe, 1985).
This photo, from an article about the defense of the Zikim base (full article, PDF here)
These soldiers all died in combat on October 7. They were all members of a mixed gender combat company. One paragraph from the IDF report:
Captain Abudi was killed by terrorists at "Station V." 1st Lt. Moses quickly replaced him, sending forces to evacuate the wounded and assisting in the fighting. She was killed by sniper fire at around 8:35 A.M, and was the last fatality at the base.
A 15 minute video: Tank Perez – Heroes of Nachal Oz. (It has some squishy propaganda at the end, but is a summary of one battle.)
Relief Area
Alef: How to bring peace to Gaza
Bet: First Watermelons, Now Sheep
A ship carrying sheep capsized off the coast of Aden in southern Yemen.
Nimble Yemenis with boats quickly arrived to pull the sheep out of the water.
Gimmel: Odd Facts About Israel Dept (non fiction)
(Cherry picked from this list.)
The Israel Postal Service has a special Letters to God department, for all the letters arriving in Jerusalem from around the world addressed to God. They are opened and placed into the cracks of the Western Wall in Jerusalem.
Workers remove handwritten notes placed between the ancient stones of the Western Wall, in Jerusalem on September 15, 2024, before the holiday of the Jewish New Year. Photo by Yonatan Sindel/Flash90
Tel Aviv has only had one snowstorm in its history. In 1950.
Israel recycles nearly 90% of the wastewater it creates. This makes it the leading nation in the world for water recycling. By comparison, Spain, the next largest water recycler, recycles only 20% of its water, while in the United States, only 1% of wastewater is recycled.
Israel has its very own Stonehenge, an ancient stone circle called Galgal Refa’im (wheel of ghosts) with massive rock walls that jut 8 feet into the sky. The stone structure is around 5,000 years old and is made up of some 42,000 tons of basalt stone. It was discovered only in the 1960s and to this day remains one of Israel’s greatest mysteries.
In 2024, the most popular baby names in Israel were Mohammad for boys and Avigail for girls.
Israel is home to the largest known dog cemetery of the ancient world. More than 1,400 dog skeletons, most of them puppies, were found at the Ashkelon site. They were buried sometime in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE, and even now, no one knows why.
Dalet: Haredi’s Choice
(right to left)
Haredim:
Draft into the army and receive nothing. or Do Not Draft into the army and receive a ton of money from the state
Hey
(On that topic...)
Minister Goldknopf was assigned to attend the Yom HaZikaron ceremony at a military cemetary as the government's representative
I thought it was a joke...
(Because Rabbi Minister Goldknopf is part of the Haredi block preventing the Haredi from being drafted. Here he is:)
Vav
Zayin: Bnei Brak -- Fabulously Inclusive Now?
(A very religious city. Also poor.)
(Hint: No, Bnei Brak is not suddenly gay friendly… they just designed their municipal flag that way…)
Chet
Tet: Seen At Tel Aviv Sabich Stand
Yod: On a Taxi
Side note: In conversation the other night, I mentioned that Israeli taxi drivers had successfully organized to keep Uber out of the country. They built their own app, so riders get Uber-like service, but the transportation monopoly, and decent taxi-driver livelihood, are preserved. Compare this to the destruction of what is, essentially, a public transportation system by Uber. My interlocutor, a silicon valley guy, didn’t see it. All he sees is the stock market win that Uber represents to “The Valley.”
I see the stock market win too. But I also see the “destruction” in the “creative destruction” of a development like Uber. Israel’s socialist roots, everyday social activism and high level of political participation kept taxi drivers in the game. The drivers of New York, Seattle and San Francisco, lacking those ingredients, didn’t have a chance.
The cost of living topic is... quite alive. In under three years I have seen bus fares go from 6 shekels (US$1.62) to 8 (US$2.16) - a 33% increase. That said, part of the transportation fare reform included a drop in the age for unlimited free public transportation. Now everyone aged 67 and up rides free. The reform, (named "Transportation Justice") lets everyone who lives in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood get a monthly pass for %50 off (the monthly passes are already a great deal for regular riders). To qualify, you just need a water bill or other document with your name and address on it.
The fish stall I frequent in the shuk has a new Friday afternoon feature: Ceviche
The Ceviche chef is ready and has a tipsy assistant offering shots of Arak to get you in the mood.
Below: The trilingual menu at the fish stall:
Arriving at Ben Gurion just after Pesach, I had my usual meditation of the Arrivals board:
And a special shake of the head at the vending machine:
The Hebrew: Kosher for Passover
To Peace—and doused fires!
Raf
(Thank you A.K., M.T.)