A letter from Israel

You can rely on taxi drivers the world over to deliver blunt opinions. Unusually for Israel today, my taxi driver is a Netanyahu supporter. He has lost family in the war with Hamas. ‘Our minds were broken’, he says of the 7 October atrocities, ‘but now we are fighting back’. This, I soon discovered, is a common sentiment in Israel. Netanyahu remains deeply unpopular, but the war on Hamas is the one policy of his that the vast majority of Israelis back.

I ask the taxi driver if the pressure from the US and the rest of the outside world to hold back is having any effect. ‘No’, he says, ‘nobody likes us now, but they will respect us when we win’.

The south

My two-week stay in Israel began in Tel Aviv, at the main station, Savidor. It looks like a normal rush hour, except for the fact a large proportion of the commuters are in army uniform. Many look ridiculously young – just kids, really. Their uniforms often don’t fit very well. But there are also serious-looking men and women in smarter uniforms, all carrying submachine guns. This is what a nation under arms looks like.

From Tel Aviv, we head to Ashkelon, just north of Gaza. This is the terminus, as the line further south runs too close to the Gaza border to be safe. On arrival, the train empties and I am surrounded by soldiers waiting to be picked up and deployed. It’s from Ashkelon that I meet the taxi driver, who takes me further south, to Sderot.

As I’m being driven through the military checkpoint at the entrance to Sderot, I hear the boom of Israeli artillery. The intermittent barrages will become a permanent feature of my 10-day stay in the Gaza Envelope, the towns and villages of Israel that run to the east of the Gaza Strip.

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