Dispatch from Tel Aviv

(My son and I on the beach in Tel Aviv before the missiles started flying)

So much for my travelogue idea.

We were supposed to fly back to New York tomorrow but that is not happening now. Early on Friday morning, we were awakened by an alarm in our hotel room in Tel Aviv that we needed to take shelter immediately. Israel had just begun bombing Iran.

The most unsettling part of the day was waiting for the Iranian response. When it finally came a little after 8 PM last night, it was almost a relief that the wait was over. (I’ll leave it to trained therapists to explain why that is. I am just reporting what I felt.) The interception of the Iranian missiles and drones was incredible to watch. We were having dinner on a rooftop when the alarms went off and we saw a few shot down before heading down to the shelter.

Last night was exhausting, although not particularly anxiety-inducing. Alarms went off every few hours, so we would have to make our way to the bomb shelter of our hotel. Needless to say, no one has gotten any sleep in the last few nights. We assume more of this to come tonight.

Israeli airspace is still closed, so we do not know when we will be able to leave. One option is to take a cab to the Jordanian border and then another from the other side of the border to the airport in Amman. The other thought is to ride it out in Tel Aviv until the airport reopens. It’s just a question of where we would prefer to get stranded if the situation changes quickly and planes in Jordan get grounded again.

You might be wondering what the American government is doing to help us get home or even to communicate with us. The answer is nothing. When I contacted the embassy on Friday, I received an email that they were closed for the day. More on that another time.

As for the larger geopolitical issue here: It is unclear how much Israel can accomplish in Iran on its own. While its sophisticated intelligence and military operation is surely impressive, Israel has not destroyed the Iranian nuclear program and it probably cannot without the help of the United States (and even then, I am not convinced). The only way to prevent Iran from going nuclear in the next months is either to come to a diplomatic arrangement, which seems impossible at the moment, or to have wholesale regime change. Israel cannot accomplish regime change without the United States and neither Donald Trump nor any American president since George Bush would engage in a war to promote regime change in the region. (Think of all the blood and treasure we spilled in Afghanistan for two decades, only to see the Taliban back in power.) So, I don’t know what a successful mission looks like here.

I do want to raise one thing before I go. When I posted on BlueSky yesterday that we were under missile fire, the bulk of the responses I received were along these lines:

The reason we are in Israel is so that my son could be bar mitzvahed at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, which is at the foot of what has been the holiest place in my faith tradition for thousands of years. (It was a lovely ceremony, by the way.) But when an American citizen gets told that this is “karma” and that “your people” both caused and deserved this, I can only assume that the people to whom this refers are the Jews, since I am not Israeli.

That is antisemitism, pure and simple. Be better.