Cappuccino and Ballistic Missiles

[This article was originally published in City Journal, a public policy magazine and website published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research]

By Adam Zivo

A deafening blare erupted from my phone at 3 am, warning me to follow government instructions “in preparation for a significant threat.” Unlike the usual air-raid sirens in Israel, which send voluntary notifications, this one was mandatory. Across the country, millions of others were simultaneously awoken by a screeching device. For many, it was clear what this meant: war had broken out with Iran.

Rumors had circulated for days that Israel was on the precipice of striking Tehran. Earlier that week, the GPS had stopped working in parts of the country’s south, allegedly near some military infrastructure, and the United States had abruptly withdrawn its embassy staff from Iraq. The Trump administration had given the Islamic Republic 60 days to negotiate a new nuclear deal, and, with that deadline having passed the previous day, it dawned on us—as we rubbed the sleep out of our eyes—that this boundary, unlike its predecessors, was going to be enforced.

I was staying in an older midrise apartment in Tel Aviv. The dingy basement bomb shelter was a metal coffin the size of a studio apartment, with dust-encased concrete floors, a smattering of forgotten debris, and a thick, submarine-like door. As the building’s residents descended the stairwell and gathered in the alleyway adjacent to the shelter entrance, they compulsively checked their phones: top Israeli and American officials were confirming the preemptive attack. A heavy awareness set in that history was happening.

“This is the big war. It’s going to be really big,” said my next-door neighbor, a burly man with his hair in a bun. Soon after, the air-raid siren rang and our phones simultaneously buzzed with more alerts, indicating that we had 90 seconds to find safety. Into the coffin we went. The door shut. No one seemed particularly scared—just irritated or anxious. Hardly any reception was possible inside, but those who could catch a bar or two of data scrolled their phones relentlessly. A Brazilian woman in a tasteful dress, who had brought a glass of white wine to the shelter, lent me her phone so that I could let my mother know that I was fine. Within an hour, the alert subsided and everyone returned to the alleyway. A limbo. Shortly after, with nothing happening, we all returned to bed. I took one last glance inside the shelter: it was as if nothing had happened.

This was, thankfully, an underwhelming and auspicious beginning to the war. Israel’s opening salvo had crippled the Iranian regime and robbed it of its capacity to rain hellfire upon Israeli cities. The enemy’s air defenses were obliterated, its military command largely decapitated, and over a third of its missile launchers destroyed. Whereas Iran had initially planned to retaliate with 1,000 ballistic missiles—an outcome that the Israeli government estimated would have caused thousands of civilian casualties—it ultimately sent only a small fraction of that amount, leading to 28 deaths. So, over the next 12 days, urban Israeli life continued with a peculiar, liminal normalcy. Public gatherings were banned, and most businesses were shuttered under an official state of emergency; yet the cafés and beaches remained full. The quotidian rhythms of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where I stayed, persisted.

Normal life, including sunbathing on Israel’s beaches, continues amid the conflict. (Ilia Yefimovich/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Photo)

The atmosphere was dreariest on the first morning because of the uncertainty. The streets of downtown Tel Aviv were nearly empty. The few pedestrians I could see were, for the most part, carrying home small stockpiles of supplies, walking their dogs, or fleeing to small towns with luggage in tow. No one wanted to stop for interviews. “If we’re going to die, we’d rather die with our friends,” said a young woman, as she and her boyfriend hurried off. Elsewhere, three young Russian expats—two men and a woman—sat on a bench, smoking a joint and grinding cannabis.

Iran had sent more than 100 drones toward Israel almost seven hours earlier, and their arrival was imminently expected. Having spent most of the past three years in Ukraine, I was struck by the feeble scale of the attack. The Russians regularly send far larger drone swarms to kill Ukrainian civilians. Was the Ayatollah truly this weak? A passerby advised me to stock up on water for my bomb shelter, so I went to a nearby grocery store. It was busy but not overcrowded, with a small line of exhausted customers clutching baskets of essentials. I bought a six-liter pack of water and lugged it home.

The drones were all intercepted, thankfully, and, by noon, parts of Tel Aviv had returned to life, having recovered from a sleepless night. Many of the cafés on Allenby—one of the city’s main streets and a nexus of hipster culture—bustled with young Israelis. At Chachos Café, a popular bohemian haunt, a man played his guitar on the sidewalk, while women in pastel leisurewear gossiped and sipped coffee. My package of water prompted a few bemused glances: “I didn’t know what to expect,” I sheepishly explained. One patron, Benjamin, said that he had visited a grocery store the previous night, after the alarms had subsided, and found it filled with drunk gay tourists who had been evicted from the local bars and clubs. Some seemed high on drugs. They had come for Tel Aviv Pride, as the (now-canceled) parade had been scheduled for what would become the first day of the war.

One block down the street was Nabi Yuna, another popular café that usually annexed the sidewalk with a row of baroque couches, faded and softened by the sun. Crowds always lounged there: playing board games, spilling their enthusiasm everywhere.The beach was a short walk away. On the first afternoon of the war, this atmosphere persisted. Two muscular men—Tamir and Daniel—drank coffee on the patio and said that they were having a “weird Friday.” Daniel had slept through his mother’s panicked phone calls at 5 am. “I assume that there is a personal responsibility to make sure that we have whatever we need if something does happen, but we’ve been here before,” he said.

In both cafés, patrons said that October 7, and two years of war with Hamas and Hezbollah, had inoculated them against panic. They were fatalistic: this conflict was inevitable, they thought, so what else could one do but live as normally as possible? To fall into despair would concede victory to Tehran. To be ataraxic—joyful, even—was an act of defiance. This dynamic was similar to what I had witnessed in the streets of Kyiv, Odessa, and Lviv: banality-as-resistance. “Don’t jinx this,” said one man, after his friend said that he had expected a more forceful counterattack.

Buzz! Screech! The alarm blared again the second night: stay near a shelter. Again, everyone gathered in the alleyway. Minutes later, sirens called out—in the sky, on our phones—and into the coffin we returned. We waited for stragglers. A heavy metal clank: the door latched shut. It was crowded and hot. Old men left their shirts unbuttoned. Some of the women had brought a mat to cover their piece of the floor. We heard booms: flat and dull, like thunder filtered through concrete and metal. People looked up, and then to one another. So the Iranian response had come. A religious man, perhaps a rabbi, read from the Torah and prayed. No fear—just concern and anticipation.

Then, quiet. The active alarm ceased: stay vigilant. The tension released with a collective exhale. We returned to the alleyway to breathe fresh air. Everyone was on their phones. The alarms blared again—a second wave!—and down we went, to repeat the process. And so it went that night, across several waves, up and down, until, at last, our phones informed us that it had ended and we returned to our apartments and fell back asleep—a strange kind of sleep: both deep and alert. The next morning, we learned that, while more than 90 percent of the missiles had been intercepted, the suburbs of Tel Aviv had been hit. Footage of the damage circulated, and there were some casualties. Yet the cafés served their cappuccinos, and the thumps of volleyballs pattered on the beaches.

For the next few days, we made several visits to the bomb shelter each evening. It became routine. An initial alarm urging recipients to stay near a safe place was usually followed by sirens minutes later. For most people, following safety protocols was not hard because bomb shelters are ubiquitous in Israel. All residential and industrial buildings are legally required to have them, and denying anyone access to a shelter, even in a private residence, is forbidden. While not invulnerable, these structures are sturdy. The Israelis I spoke with during the war were quick to note that most of the people who died in the Iranian strikes hadn’t, for whatever reason, been inside a shelter upon impact—the exception being an unfortunate incident, in the southern city of Beersheba, where a missile had landed almost directly on a safe room. Nothing is invulnerable. But so long as you sought safety when asked, your chances of dying were infinitesimal. This, in turn, fostered a calming feeling of agency: the effects of the war were not entirely beyond one’s control.

People quickly became acquaintances inside the bomb shelters. This phenomenon was not unique to Israel, by any means: sociologists have long observed that friendships form most easily amid unplanned, repeated interactions in settings that encourage some degree of vulnerability. My aunt had a similar experience during NATO’s bombing campaign of Serbia in the 1990s and fondly remembered this wartime intimacy. The Times of Israel even published an article satirizing the “10 People You’ll Meet in Your Bomb Shelter.” Their archetypes included ponderous philosophers sitting on tiny chairs; tech bros armed with protein bars (they will inevitably monetize the war with an app); livestreaming social-media influencers (I blushed); and benevolent grandmothers, who, bearing Tupperware, feed and adopt anyone in their vicinity.

I became friendly with an Israeli woman, Hadar, after she offered me a space on her mat. We followed each other on Instagram, and, upon scrolling through her account, I learned that she was a dance instructor who enjoyed snowboarding and rock climbing. Her life, as documented on social media, bore no relation to the tired, gray-shirted woman in the shelter. I didn’t see a contradiction but was emotionally unable to grasp this double life. I bumped into her on the sidewalk one afternoon and experienced the same disbelief that a student feels upon seeing his teacher outside class.

On the third day of the war—a Sunday—Tel Aviv’s seaside boulevard was congested with pedestrians awash in golden light. Luminous in the sunset, couples lounged intimately on the concrete bleachers that faced the waters. Josh, a young American man visiting the country with his family, said that his friends and relatives in the United States were much more nervous than he was. “You wait your ten minutes, or you wait for your ‘all clear,’ and then you get back up,” he said. Elsewhere on the boulevard, a woman in a red hat, smoking a cigarette, asked: “What are you going to do? The world stops for you to possibly die? For you to possibly lose people?” Her eyes scanned her surroundings: “What’s the point of living, then? I live here, and I made the choice to live here and I want to live here.”

That night, a ballistic missile landed on Allenby, just by the beach, exploding approximately 850 meters from where I was staying. The rumble in our shelter was considerable, and videos of a blazing nighttime fire circulated on social media. As dawn broke and the threat of further strikes receded, I walked toward the impact site. Most of the glass in a hundred-meter radius—maybe even more—had shattered. Jagged shards were ubiquitous, crunching beneath the shoes of onlookers. Apartment windows were cracked or missing pieces: residents could be spotted behind some of them, surveying the damage and sweeping away what they could. Several buildings were half-destroyed. A high-rise apartment across the street had sheets of concrete torn off its lower exterior, revealing the structure’s metal ribs. Dozens of storefronts had been ruined, their frames cracked, collapsed, or shaken out of place, like open mouths without teeth. Closer to where the missile had struck, one mostly saw twisted metal—bars and sheets, normally indomitable, shredded to ribbons.

Disbelief and concern were evident, yes. But terror? Despair? Not really. “This doesn’t scare us. This is just part of the day,” said a young man as he praised Tel Aviv for its beauty and accepting culture: “This is the price we have to pay to live here.” Crowds gathered at the perimeter of the impact site. Volunteers and spectators: photographing, filming, memorializing. In one cluster, a woman, wearing shorts and flipflops, sat and wept on the steps of a building. Her two young sons, who seemed not older than ten, shared a phone below her, and together they watched its screen placidly, transfixed, cocooned in juvenile innocence, while anguish contorted their mother’s face. She seemed so alone. She hung her head in her hands, covered her face, and then gazed at something invisible. One of her sons looked up at a blue-vested official who stood beside them. Shortly after, they were led away, protected, to some unknown place.

Local residents and rescue workers huddle in a bomb shelter during a missile strike. (Avishag Shaar-Yashuv/The New York Times/Redux)

Half a kilometer away, underneath the Dizengoff Center (Tel Aviv’s largest shopping mall), a tent city was established for the duration of the short war. I was not there and interviewed only one of the organizers, Ronen Koehler, shortly after the ceasefire. He took me to the reinforced garage, four floors underground, where a few errant tents remained. A heap of mattresses, reaching as high as the ceiling, sat abandoned against a wall. He described how, in the first days of the war, he and other volunteers had moved hundreds of these mattresses and an equal number of cheap tents into this space. For many Israelis, particularly the elderly and parents with young children, making several rapid trips to the shelter wasn’t feasible, so the garage became their overnight home.

To make these stays bearable, volunteers established a “kids’ corner” and brought games and books. The place gained a reputation as “the coolest shelter in the country, ever,” said Koehler, thanks to laudatory social-media posts and press coverage. Visitors flocked to it. A jazz band played live music one night. On another night, volunteers organized a silent disco: people danced together while listening to wireless headphones, united by a DJ and light show. Younger Israelis who lived alone began staying overnight as well, despite having their own safe rooms at home. They feared that, if their buildings were struck, no one would know to rescue them beneath the rubble. Being surrounded by a community helped them sleep at night.

The omnipresence of Israel’s public bomb shelters—whether in apartment basements or shopping-mall garages—meant that the war was often experienced communally. And this proved a source of strength. There is something reassuring about chats, sighs, and knowing glances—to see your own experiences mirrored back at you, and to project your sympathy outward and catch its reflection. Even getting annoyed with other people is grounding in its normalcy.

To make a comparison: in Ukraine, where public shelters are scarce and less stringently regulated, hiding from explosions is often, but not always, a private affair. In high-rise buildings, some people can retreat to their garages and find community there. Hundreds, if not thousands, of Ukrainians slept in Kyiv and Kharkiv’s metro stations at the beginning of the war, but this practice faded after the first few months. (It is, however, making a comeback in the capital, owing to Moscow’s ever-growing drone swarms.) For many people in Ukraine, the choice is between staying in one’s apartment—ideally, in a hallway far from windows—or waiting in the stairwells. The latter option provides scant protection—certainly far less than Israel’s near-impregnable shelters—so many elect to stay in their residence. In doing so, their trauma is, to a certain degree, kept atomized. A lack of physical infrastructure begets a subtle spiritual gap.

Days passed. The attacks dwindled. I left for Jerusalem, which was mostly spared of Iran’s bombings, to stay with an elderly woman who generously invited me into her home. She didn’t want to be alone. Inside the shelter, and then outside. Inside. Outside. Sleepless nights. Quiet streets. Near the grocery store, a young woman played a harp one morning. Sirens. Sirens. Sirens. And in Tel Aviv, the seaside boulevard was trodden by thronging, laughing crowds, with volleyballs briefly eclipsing the sun. A missile explodes somewhere and walls collapse in its immediate vicinity, leaving a sphere of destruction. Yet it is small, in the grand scheme of things. Elsewhere, in most of the city, there is life, heaving and celebratory and insistent, refusing domination.