Dvora is scheduled to meet Aaron in Railway Park at 7:40 p.m., after she finishes recording a podcast. Aaron arrives early, finds a bench, and thinks about how to write the next chapter. Instead of just mentioning that he works out, he figures it’s better to write about why he started karate in the first place. Maybe he should weave in the neighbors’ shouting, craft an overarching theme of acquired violent tendencies? He records a voice note about this. 

He’s watching fit men jogging in pairs, people walking their dogs or rolling their babies in strollers, kids playing ball, old folks chatting lazily, when a boom echoes through the sky—the kind of multilayered echo you only get in the city. The joggers stop and the strollers look around. “How come there wasn’t a siren?” somebody asks.

“It must have been in another area,” somebody answers. “Close enough to hear the boom, but not close enough to start the siren for.” The dogs look up at their owners for reassurance that everything is fine. The owners look up for a similar reason.

A Wolt delivery guy stops by a group of girls who just got up from their bench not far from Aaron and waves at them enthusiastically. He takes his helmet off, exposing a face that is simultaneously animated and tired. “Are you Dalia Cohen?”

“Who’s Dalia Cohen? I’m Inbar Mymon.”

“Did you order Golda¹?”

“No no, I thought you’re Black².”

“I am not Black,” he declares while putting his helmet back on and goes on to search for, one can assume, Dalia Cohen.

Aaron turns and sees Dvora standing next to him, waiting patiently in order no to disturb his people watching. Her lithe body leans to one side like a cherry tree, and her hair, which started going white at a young age, just like Rabbi Eliezer’s, covers half her face. “He-llo!” she sings. 

He stands up and she wraps him in her long arms and he is like a puppy wrapped in long, safe fingers.

Dvora and Aaron met on the way to a writers’ retreat, a strange yet amusing initiative of a mutual friend that included mostly absentminded strolls through a forest, writing in notebooks, sleeping on the ground, and overeating. Aaron offered a ride on the Whatsapp group, she accepted, and by the time they arrived at the campground they were, as far as Aaron was concerned, good friends. He remembers the moment where she took his heart captive—they were looking at a billboard by the highway, something too stupid to remember, and she commented that that was exactly what Marcuse meant when he argued that advertisement was the propaganda branch of capitalism. That in itself didn’t win Aaron’s love—a lot of people around him quote philosophers he doesn’t know. The charming part was that she looked at him, saw that he didn’t understand, and explained. 

He thought at first that she was the same type of academic that he already knew, albeit nicer—until he watched her dance, and heard her sing. 

Dvora is a poke in the eye to anyone who neglects one part of themselves with the excuse that they’re developing another. She’s a modern dancer at a professional level, a stunning opera singer, the host of one of Israel’s most successful podcasts. She throws around names of “friends” like Rut Kener and Ya’akov Raz, and talks about them like ordinary people that she just happens to chat with. When she was younger, she dreamed of becoming Israel’s prime minister. She had many of the necessary qualities, but not all of them. 

“So listen,” she says after they’ve sat down and talked about stuff that’s not interesting enough to write for you here, “when I started studying law, I learned that the West Bank has military rule. I didn’t know that before. Military rule—that thing that you’d be traumatized by after just one month: that’s how they live from the time they’re born. How can they teach us civic studies in high school, yet we end up not knowing what’s going on over there? And I said to myself, Dvora, you are solving this thing, starting right now. We cannot allow millions of people to live like that. But then I saw the people that make up our government, people like Tzahi Hanegbi, who now says we should abandon the hostages because Hamas became too strong, when his party sponsored them.”

“Excuse me? They did what?”

“They didn’t fund them, but Bibi said explicitly, and there are recordings, that the Palestinian Authority³ must be weakened so that Hamas will grow stronger, because Hamas is also against the two-state solution.”

“Really? And here I was thinking I had no more hope left to lose.”

“I’m sorry I bummed you out.”

“You apologizing for bumming me out is like my eyes apologizing for showing me how ugly the world is.”

“But it is ugly. That’s the problem. We’re talking about a person who’s a murderer, under Marx’s definition of social murder.” She raises one eyebrow at Aaron, to see if he knows the definition without wasting even a single word, and he closes one eye to tell her that he doesn’t. She nods. “Ok, so Marx says that when a person is in a position of power, and makes a decision that will provide them with great personal gain but cause the death of a lot of civilians, it’s just as bad as any other type of murder, but we are much more lenient towards it than when a person decides to shoot someone with a gun. The consequence is the same, but when the damage is spread over a large population it’s harder to point the finger. It’s not that different from our operations in Gaza—fourteen hundred Israelis died, and it was horrible, really horrible; it shook me, and everyone who hears about it feel their own unique kind of shock. But when we hear that a thousand-something Palestinians died in bombings, we don’t even pretend they were all Hamas. We know we’re killing some people who only want to live and raise their children peacefully. 

“And we aren’t shocked by this. We don’t call the pilots animals. So ok, the pilot is in a situation where he supposedly has to drop bombs so peace can be restored. He isn’t doing it for himself. But the one who orchestrated the situation, who riled up the people, who knowingly allowed Hamas to grow, fully aware that they would end up killing Israelis, knowing that it would make Palestinian lives even more hellish—for him to then order our own fighter planes to rain death on them? 

“Every time an operation like this starts, think how ugly a person has to be to make such a decision—not to save anybody, but for money, loud and fucking clear. How could I be in the same room with those people? Work with them? Elbow⁴ them? Look at me: what elbows do I have?” She brings her elbows up in front of her face with effortless grace. 

“Look, you know what I think we should do with this country,” Aaron says, pointing with his chin over his shoulder, as if exile is just around the corner, waiting for them.

“I know, but how can I leave? This is also a time when the most beautiful things are happening.” There is actual hope in her voice.

“You mean that everyone’s showing up to volunteer? That beautiful Israel reveals itself under stress?”

“No. Listen to me, Aaron: that’s one of the things I hate most. I hate…” Her entire body shakes with the word. “That. The way we say that when we have a common enemy, we suddenly show the true Israel. Screw that hypocritical shit. I think it’s bad to unite for these reasons. It’s pathetic that the moment the war is over, people will go back to being assholes: driving like maniacs and cutting in front of each other in line and stealing my taxes and voting for Ben Gvir so he’ll beat up some lefties. To hell with that. But it’s so beautiful how we come together… Shut. Up.”

Aaron smiles, grateful to Dvora for showing him how stupid he was. “Bless your heart, Dvora. I’ve missed our talks.”

She pats his back. “My pleasure, good soul. But it’s not all that bad, yeah? That’s what I’m saying. It’s amazing that people who hated the protests met people from Breaking the Silence⁵ in the volunteer efforts organized by Brothers in Arms⁶ and discovered that not only are these people not devils, they’re also the salt of the earth. Did you hear what Brothers in Arms did? They created this infrastructure to bring food and clothes and blankets to families who’ve been evacuated, and food for soldiers, and even ceramic body armor. Whole HQ’s just to figure out who needs what and how to deliver it to them. The app they use to run all of this is something they programmed independently months ago to organize the demonstrations. Do you understand our soldiers are being called to the reserves and they don’t have ceramic armor, and it’s other civilians, that a moment ago were called traitors, sorting it out? And nobody raises their heads and realizes that the army and the government aren’t fucking doing their jobs. A government that, in a time of war, isn’t doing anything! The Ministry of International Relations is bankrupt, and it’s up to civilians to make posts in on social media trying to communicate to the world what happened here. Do you understand that? Do you understand how important it is that we don’t forget that? That we don’t let them distract us?”

A man approaches, limping, his neck at a crooked angle. He asks them how to get to Shanti Home⁷, and explains that since the accident, his memory doesn’t work like it used to. Dvora takes out her phone, looks for the way to Shanti, but she says that in order to find their way to this house of rehabilitation, she has to first figure out where they are. She doesn’t use GPS, she tells the man, because it degrades our navigational skills, and she wants to keep training hers. 

The wrecked man ignores this. “What’s taking so long?” he demands.

An impulse wakes in Aaron, to rise to his feet and add to the damage already inflicted on this man’s brain, but it disperses when he hears Dvora laughing. “I got it!” she says. “If that’s west, then you have to go down that street, and just keep walking straight until you see that you’ve arrived.” 

Aaron gazes at her in awe. If people like Dvora didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them. How else would we know the way?

Next: Nomads

1. An ice cream chain, named after Israel’s first and only female prime minister. ↩︎
2. A hamburger chain. ↩︎
3. The Palestinian National Authority, commonly known as the Palestinian Authority…is the Fatah-controlled government body that exercises partial civil control over West Bank areas “A” and “B” as a consequence of the 1993–1995 Oslo Accords. The Palestinian Authority controlled the Gaza Strip prior to the Palestinian elections of 2006 and the subsequent Gaza conflict between the Fatah and Hamas parties, when it lost control to Hamas; the PA continues to claim the Gaza Strip, although Hamas exercises de facto control. (Wikipedia) ↩︎
4. Israeli slang. The verb form of elbow means to fight for your place, probably coming from the experience of waiting in an Israeli line.  ↩︎
5. An Israeli non-governmental organization by veterans of the Israel Defense Forces with the intention of giving serving and discharged Israeli personnel and reservists a means to confidentially recount their experiences in the Occupied Territories. (Wikipedia) ↩︎
6. An organization of reserve men and women from various units in the IDF, operating as part of the protests against the judicial reform being promoted by the thirty-seventh government of Israel. (Wikipedia) ↩︎
7. A rehab organization, mostly for troubled youths and recovering drug addicts. Shanti—from Sanskrit, meaning external or inner peace. ↩︎