Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv’s luxury hotels lined the beach, each with hundreds of rooms, most of them booked year-round. Almost every commercial street corner held a kiosk selling everything from the nation’s two dozen newspapers to snacks and, in some neighborhoods, tiny bags of locally grown marijuana and more costly Lebanese hash, a world standard since the time of Abraham. Banks and post offices punctuated every avenue, along with supermarkets and tiny owner-run groceries in the side streets. Most service businesses operated from early morning to late in the evening, perhaps a hundred never closing, remaining open 364 days a year—Yom Kippur being the exception—and for the privilege paying a municipal fine every week for keeping open on the Sabbath, just a cost of doing business.

Once a buzzing maze of heavily trafficked streets, boulevards, and highways, Tel Aviv was a walker’s city, its ambiance a meld of New York, Paris, Nice, and Warsaw, with just enough of every other city in the world to make living there at once fascinating, complicatedly pleasant, and maddening. Half planned, half chaotic, it was a city of Bauhaus architecture, shortcuts, secret destinations, tiny parks, and favorite cafés. All it lacked was public toilets, but with so many cafés, no one complained.

Now Tel Aviv is one big public toilet. The cafés are closed, the offices empty but for squatters, and the only traffic on the streets is pedestrian, filling the roadways in search of food, drinking water, and news. Rumors fly the ghetto’s twelve-mile length in less than an hour, all propelled by fear, hope, and desperation.

In the six days since Yigal Lev took over as prime minister, much of this changed. There are still no commercial establishments in operation, though every street corner is an ad hoc market where jewelry and watches are bartered for tiny plastic bags of moldy flour. No buses or jitneys run, and bicycle traffic is light, largely because Tel Avivians never really took up bicycles as a mode of transportation—most apartments are too small to store them. But in those first few days, a change came across the face of the ghetto: the ratio of fear to hope was altered. There is now just a bit more of the latter than the former. Not much more, but enough to make a difference.

Yigal’s people managed to open the schools (which of course are flooded with the entire country’s students, so that classes normally overcrowded with forty pupils now hold a hundred, each school running at least two shifts—why not, all the nation’s teachers are available). The new government has re-established rudimentary policing, with former cops and former gangsters working together. That neither group has uniforms—the regular police early on got rid of theirs to avoid arrest, or worse, by the conquering armies—is not much of an obstacle: armbands with the large Hebrew letter mem, for mishtara (police), suffice. Most cops had kept their side arms; the hoodlums had their own. Public latrines are dug in parks, the stinking piles of human waste buried. Each block is compelled to establish its own voluntary workforce under the authority of street captains designated by the new government, most of these newly appointed officials functioning well enough, especially when they are female. It appears Jewish men are historically accustomed to being bossed around by females; even the most surly remains disinclined to sock a woman.

Almost immediately a sense of civic responsibility takes hold, aided in good part by the knowledge that there is no one else to do the work, that the next street already looks like humans live there, and that there is precious little else to do.

Yigal’s choice of Misha Shulman as chief of police (or chief enforcer, as he likes to think of himself) goes a long way to make this happen. Just as the Arab invaders borrowed the blueprints of the Nazis, so too does Yigal take a page from lessons learned in the Warsaw Ghetto: this time, among the Jews, there would be no factions, no competing ideologies, no separate armed groups.

To accomplish that with a normally fractious Israeli population, already viscerally subscribed to political parties with different aims and desires, calls for the application of indiscriminate force. Misha’s gangsters and a select group of former cops—a good many are former members of the Border Police, head-busters who were known to strike first and ask questions later—take on this mission with an enthusiasm that the population both welcomes and fears.

In the first twenty-four hours on the job, Misha’s specially designated Motivation Squad motivates forty-seven civilians on the spot—no trial, no appeal, no compunction. Whether the ignored prohibition is as small as pissing in the street or as large as displacing a family by force in order to take their corner of some miserably overcrowded apartment, the punishment is the same: a severe beating in full public view.

Mistakes are made, perhaps personal scores settled, and when the area is gray, even the most motivated of the Motivation Squad find themselves wishing to pause. But any pause, any deviation from orders, anything other than drumhead justice administered quickly and on the spot, would have sunk the ghetto into pathetic and fatal dissolution.

Yigal’s greatest challenge in re-establishing civil order in Tel Aviv and creating hope among its forlorn residents is logistical. Without printing presses, without radio, without loudspeakers, there is no effective way to bring word of what is to be expected from the population to the population. His cabinet has no idea. The army’s best minds come up with nothing. Professors of communication from Israel’s top universities never faced such a problem.

At the end of the day, and it was indeed at the end of the day, in bed, like every Jew from Abraham forward, Yigal asks his wife.

“Town criers,” Judy says.

“There’s already enough crying,” he tells her, confused by the term.

“Silly,” she tells him. “Get a lot of guys out there hollering out whatever message you want.”

He considers. “The ghetto is too big. Too much territory to cover.”

“Pony Express.”

“Horses? There’s not one in the city that hasn’t been eaten.”

“No, no. It’s a chain. One messenger brings the message to—I don’t know—five others, then they spread out and contact five more, and so on until—”

“On foot? Baby, I don’t have enough people strong enough to walk the city, much less run.”

“Kids on bicycles,” she whispers, then turns over and falls asleep.

In the three days that follow, Tel Aviv does not become paradise, but it is no longer hell. Its population continues to starve, but with dignity.

ASYRIAN LIEUTENANT WATCHES as his men frisk two Bedouin for arms. He is in charge of a reconnaissance patrol belonging to the Syrian Army’s Security Corps—an especially feared group built on the lines of the Nazi SS, even down to its uniform. They wear the same double lightning bolt shoulder patches.

“What is your name, filth?” the lieutenant asks almost conversationally.

“Abed Abu-Kassem of the Ghawarna, your lordship.”

“And you, piece of shit?”

Cobi offers only a weak smile.

“My mother’s brother’s son’s cousin, sire. He speaks not.”

“Shy?”

“Your lordship,” Abed says. “He is unable.”

“And neither of you with papers?”

“No, my lord. As I explained, we were robbed of them. We journey to Ramle, there to sell the dates in our bags. That we may purchase papers. That we may have them, because we were robbed of them. Thus we journey to Ramle, to sell dates.”

The Syrian officer comes so close Cobi can smell the stink of his uniform. “And why is this unable to speak? Does it not hear?” The lieutenant moves behind Cobi and cocks his pistol just behind his head. “It hears. It heard that.”