Small Rebellions

Spring 2020 · Tel Aviv

The first lockdown turned Tel Aviv into the empty corridor of a museum: light pouring in through high windows, and no one there. The city that had always prided itself on never stopping was given a forced break. People were afraid. The news never stopped counting the dead. Every step outside was a dangerous act, and every social gathering became a small rebellion, a secret hiding behind locked doors.

Alex, a rebel by nature, enjoyed the restrictions as if they actually strengthened his freedom. He drifted between friends' flats and closed cafés that leaked low light through their shutters, looking for whatever human warmth was left. He met girls on Tinder, looking for passion and new experiences. He knew it was dangerous. But that freedom, even when it was fake or hiding, was as vital to him as air.

Natalie, unlike her big brother, lived in complete obedience. Mask on, two metres apart, a hundred metres from home and not a step further. She moved between Zoom classes and her bedroom like an automated system. Every step calculated, every contact with another person measured in seconds. She saw the world through the window of an empty bus or through her computer screen, following the rules and feeling fear pushing her from behind.

Mehran, in Gaza, lived under a double restriction: obedience on the outside and an endless curiosity on the inside. He wanted to understand, to check, to rebel – but the place he grew up had taught him to keep that inside. He looked at the world through a weak screen, listened to the murmurs of the camp, and imagined the voices that went unheard – what was happening an hour's drive away, and yet so close to his heart.

Late April 2020 · Jaffa

Alex's flat was a typical Jaffa flat: high ceilings, peeling walls, and a small balcony overlooking an empty street. The street below was still, as if all of life had been squeezed into small windows that peeked at the world without touching it.

Four friends sat in the living room. An old wooden table, a half-empty bottle of arak, and on the TV an old match from the public broadcaster's archive. No real crowd, just the commentator shouting into the void – the sound they loved to hear.

Alex lit a cigarette and looked at the other three. "Tell me, don't you feel like football is the last religion we've got left? There are rituals, there are prayers in the form of songs, there are even saints. And there are the players we still haven't forgiven after twenty years. Except with us, sometimes the rabbi blazes it over an empty net."

Yonatan raised an eyebrow. He made no secret of being a Maccabi fan; they were good friends despite the rivalry. "You see it from where you stand, Alex. You go to the terrace, you burn your throat, it's a different experience. I'm an armchair fan. I watch from home, I swear at the screen. I laugh when a player misses an open goal, and that's fine by me. Why turn it into a religion? For the extremists? It's entertainment, not holiness. It's a game."

Amit sat up straighter than anyone. He loved to argue, even when he didn't fully believe what he was saying; he just loved to start a heated debate. "Entertainment? It's not entertainment. It's your identity. I grew up in a settlement, among people who saw football as something marginal, 'too secular'. For me Hapoel isn't just football, it's protest. It's taking a political side on the pitch. It's not a game, it's a statement."

"Protest, yeah right." Ofir, who always spoke the loudest, made the sound of a fake spit. "I don't come for statements. I come to shred my throat, to trample Maccabi, to screw Beitar, to jump in the stand and feel alive. For me it's a little battlefield. My tribe against theirs. It's not God and it's not identity. It's the moment you burn yourself up with two thousand other lunatics who feel exactly like you."

Alex gave a tired smile and rolled another joint. "Look at you. Yonatan watches football on the sofa with popcorn, Amit sees ideology in it, Ofir sees a fight. And I'm telling you – it's a modern synagogue."

"But if it's really a religion," said Yonatan, almost teasing, "how do you explain that I don't believe at all? I support Maccabi, yes, but if we lose I get on with my life. It doesn't break me. What does that make me? A heretic?"

"First of all, you're Maccabi, and you lot usually win, you sluts." Amit banged his glass of arak on the table.

"Sons of whores!" Ofir jumped in, having heard "Maccabi" and caught fire.

"Exactly," Amit went on. "You're a heretic. A real fan lives and dies with his club. If you lost, something breaks inside you. Someone who watches a game and carries on with his day as normal isn't a fan – he's a consumer. Maccabi are customers. Hapoel are the faithful."

Ofir lit a cigarette at the other end of the table, and the smoke spread between them. "Alex, don't confuse things with ideologies. I've seen you at Bloomfield cursing your own players. Where was the faith then? Ever seen anyone curse a priest in church? In the end we're all the same, chasing adrenaline. Religion, protest, entertainment – excuses. The truth is we're addicted to a feeling you can't find anywhere else."

"But think about the crest," Alex cut in. "It's like the Holy Ark. Anything with the crest on it becomes sacred. And people make piles of money from club crests, exactly like from religious symbols."

"Not true," Amit burst out. "It depends how you choose to see it. The crest can be commercial, but for me it's still what it stands for. Tradition. Loyalty. Something the heart holds on to even when the corporations steal it."

Yonatan smirked. "You're clinging to an illusion. In the end you'll see it the way I do: a beautiful game, nothing more."

Ofir finished his glass in one gulp, and his voice rose almost to a shout. "A beautiful game? It's blood! It's dirt, it's shoving in the stand, it's taking a slap from a cop just because you sang too loud. Anyone who sees it as a beautiful game hasn't understood a thing."

A silence fell, the kind the pandemic was very good at making: an empty street outside, and a room full of tension inside.

Alex looked at the three of them and whispered: "So what happens if it collapses? If this religion disappears, the way the old religions crumbled?"

Amit, without a second thought, leaned back. "What always remains will remain. Us. The collective. Even if it's broken."

May 2020 · The One

In May, The One opened, and for Alex it was a breakthrough.

Four rebellious Tel Avivians opened it quietly, before the government had even let bars reopen, far from the eyes of the authorities. An underground place on Mikveh Israel Street: dark wooden taps, walls with photos of Julio Iglesias, dim light from hanging lamps. You got in only with a code passed from mouth to ear, and through a heavy curtain that swallowed the street noise every time the door opened. The whole room felt like a different kind of breathing, as if the city itself had left its doors outside.

One of the four was Maor, a Hapoel fan Alex knew from the terrace, and that was how he got invited. It moved him. It felt like approval from a man who counted on the terrace.

Alex went down the stairs with a hesitant smile. He knew every entry was a gamble, and every new face might expose him. But that fear was part of the thrill, part of the feeling that he was alive and not just existing. Around him were people of his kind – those who didn't believe what they saw on the news and chose to keep living and to rebel against the government's decisions. There was something of freedom fighters in that gathering.

"Aren't you scared?" asked a young guy who had just come through the curtain and stopped beside him.

"Scared?" Alex smiled. "That's part of the fun. If you weren't scared, you wouldn't be here."

But inside, he really was scared. Scared of being caught, scared of the consequences. And deep down he knew this place had become a home – a place where a small rebellion was the only way to feel free. And sometimes, between one glass and the next, a thought crossed his mind: "Maybe the whole world is right? Millions of people really are saying it's a pandemic like nothing in a hundred years. Maybe I'm just banging my head against a wall?"

Alex celebrated his twenty-second birthday, on 7 May, at The One. It started as an illegal gathering at his flat. The stories going up on Instagram drew more and more friends, and at some point Maor replied to one and told him to come and celebrate at the bar. Everyone moved into the back room, the one they called "Half". Maor brought a bottle of whisky as a gift, and in the background played a song by Lea Ketamine, the ultras' own fan band, and Omer, who had come up from Kfar Aza specially, threatened to plug in his speaker and put on Eviatar Banai if anyone changed the song. Yigal, a well-known promoter and DJ in the city, sat restlessly at the bar. He was from Gate 11, Maccabi's end, but chose to stay quiet – maybe out of respect, maybe out of caution.

The One quickly became the centre of forbidden meetings. Even the local dealer simply started sitting there every night, once he realised all his deliveries were going to the same address anyway. It was a scene in its own right. In fifty years, Alex was sure, there would be a documentary about Tel Aviv in the corona years, and it would tell this story: small loves, deep conversations, tension and adrenaline.

26 May 2020 · The Ben-Gurion home

This year already stood in the shadow of a pandemic that had taken its bite out of the world, but when George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis on 25 May, and the next day the video spread across the networks like fire, something deeper broke.

Natalie sat in her room, her eyes fixed on her phone screen glowing a cold blue. The video played again and again: a Black man, his face pressed to the asphalt, saying "I can't breathe", while a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, pressed his knee into his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. George Floyd. The name stuck in her throat like a thorn, and anger flooded her like a hot wave.

It wasn't just a distant event in Minneapolis. It ignited Black Lives Matter protests across the world, among the largest America had seen since the civil rights movement of the sixties, and exposed cracks of racism and hatred in every corner.

Natalie, who had always been the quiet rebel, suddenly became active, as if that fire were burning inside her.

"It shocks me," she told Alex on the phone, and her voice was sharp as a knife. "And it's not just there. It's here, in Israel. With the Ethiopians, with the Arabs, with anyone who doesn't 'fit'. I have to do something!"

She shared the video on Facebook and wrote a long post: "Racism is a poison that seeps everywhere. Enough police violence!" Her friends responded, but it wasn't enough for her. Four days later, when Iyad al-Hallaq, a young autistic man from Wadi al-Joz, was shot dead by Border Police officers in Jerusalem's Old City on his way to his special-needs school, she no longer had to explain to anyone why "here too". She talked to her mother in the kitchen, explained, argued, became a small lighthouse in the dark.

June 2020

At the end of May the restaurants reopened, with restrictions, distancing and forms. Natalie went out for the first time, wearing a mask and with the feeling that entry anywhere was a privilege that could be taken from her at any moment. She was sure of her path, but felt alone – helpless against the freedom others had taken for themselves.

"I just want to feel like I have a life," she wrote in a story from the restaurant in Tel Aviv, with Maya, who had come up from Nirim for the weekend at her aunt's.

"It's weird how much I missed hearing people talk and make noise," she told her friend, watching like a little girl as the waitress took an order at another table. "I got to know every bench within five hundred metres of my house these past two months. I follow every page of everyone who's ever baked a cookie. I honestly felt like I was on the edge of losing my mind."

"And they say there'll be a second wave," Maya replied, frustrated. "And another lockdown. And I heard that even when there's a vaccine, we'll need several shots and then another one every year." She rolled her eyes. "At least here nobody gets up in the middle of dinner to run for the safe room."

"As far as I'm concerned they can inject me on the first of every month," Natalie said firmly, "as long as they let us live normally. I want a concert. I want to go bowling with friends."

"For now," Maya laughed.

Football came back at the end of May, to empty stands. In the Shati camp, Mehran found secret ways to screen Hapoel's matches for the neighbourhood kids. One small screen, but he saw much more in it: a little hope inside Gaza, order inside chaos, light inside a darkness that never ended.

"Hapoel isn't Jews," one of the kids told him with total confidence. "Maccabi is Jews. Hapoel is great, Maccabi is crap."

Mehran gave him a huge smile.

At the entrance to the camp, Fatma and Ahmed talked about the restrictions, the fears, the medicines that were running out. Every sentence of theirs was an attempt to build a thin wall against a storm. And the weariness in Fatma's eyes stole a little of the optimism even from the children.

Mehran's home was no longer as calm as it had been. His mother, working at the hospital, was on the edge of collapse from the workload. His father sank into depression, convinced the end of the world was near, drew closer to religion, and spent most of his time at the mosque with his friends. Mehran, the eldest, took charge of the home and of Jana and Reem, his little sisters. Together with a friend from school he went from house to house helping elderly women with their chores. Mostly to keep himself busy – but it genuinely did him good.

"This is what God is testing," he said, when he saw his father coming back from the mosque just as he himself was going out with a bag of hummus he had made for the old neighbour. "Who comes to help people, and who only looks after himself at a time like this."

Late June 2020 · Omri

For Natalie, the social isolation of the pandemic was destructive in ways that would only become clear years later. At sixteen she was supposed to be discovering independence, building relationships, testing boundaries. Instead she sat alone in her room seven hours a day, pretending to listen to Zoom lessons while mentally cataloguing everything she was missing. In the online classroom she found less education and more power games: who's present, who's absent, who manages to seize the moment.

Her rebellion came out in conversations with older guys online. Students, soldiers on leave, and sometimes married men who offered attention – and danger, in equal measure. Those conversations were her only escape from the suffocating routine.

"I'm talking to this guy, Omri," she told Maya on the phone, late at night, when Nirim had gone quiet. "He's twenty-five and he's got a motorbike."

"That's not safe," Maya warned. "Older men want different things."

"Maybe I want different things too," Natalie replied, testing how rebellion felt in text messages.

The thing with Omri lasted three weeks, all of it on WhatsApp, and made her feel sophisticated and worldly. When he suggested meeting, she panicked and blocked him for a few days out of sheer anxiety. But the experience taught her something: danger is addictive in ways that safety can never compete with.

Summer 2020 · The economy

The pandemic's economic destruction became personal for all three families. In Israel more than a million people registered as unemployed that spring, most of them on unpaid leave, tourism collapsed, restaurants closed for good, and the informal economy that had kept people like Alex afloat evaporated overnight.

Alex started working for delivery apps, fighting the feeling of suffocation every day. His pharmaceutical side business actually grew, as demand for anti-anxiety pills soared. He wasn't proud of it, but he was pragmatic about survival, in an economy that left young people with debt and depression.

Vitaly sold the car to cover the rent and the bills. Irina kept working from home, but her salary was cut by thirty per cent. The stability built over almost thirty years of immigrant determination began to crumble.

In Gaza the impact was different – not collapse but a compression of circumstances that had already been impossible. Unemployment, among the highest in the world even before Covid, climbed further as the crossings closed and international aid dwindled. Ahmed lost even the little income from his lessons, when families could no longer pay even the minimum. Fatma kept working, with expired medicines and equipment that should have been replaced years earlier.

The al-Ghazi flat became a neighbourhood centre: Mehran helped children with homework, Fatma gave informal medical advice, and Ahmed taught maths in exchange for whatever families could give.

"We're becoming experts in the economics of scarcity," Mehran joked with his mother, as he calculated food portions that would last until the next aid delivery.

"Scarcity makes people creative," Fatma answered. "But creativity doesn't cure diabetes or set broken bones." Then she smiled. "We're used to wars and to bombing. They gave us a good training camp for a time like this. Wallah, habibi, this is nothing for us. What's a pandemic to us? We're Gazans, ya habibi."

The world around them was spinning. On the news they showed a priest sprinkling holy water on the faithful with a water pistol, from a distance. Luxury restaurants became toilet-paper outlets, as the whole world went mad over it. Patients lay in isolation for weeks, and their families saw them only through glass. Human touch slowly faded from the world. Pictures of funerals with no one there crushed the heart. People's patience snapped, and a single sneeze in the street became as threatening as a weapon. And on the bright side – the situation brought, for a while, a relative calm between Israel and Gaza. That calm didn't last the summer.

July 2020 · The Ben-Gurion home

In Tel Aviv, the pressure in the Ben-Gurion home was getting to everyone.

"This world is going mad," Irina said at her laptop, her eyes scanning old code, her hands pressed to the keyboard as if every line were a response to disaster. "And I'm not willing to explain Soviet politics or viruses to the children. We're here to survive."

"To survive, or to be alone?" Vitaly shot back sharply. "You know why I always talk about surviving? Because we came out of Russia. Me – and people like your family from Ukraine. You know what it is to live with hunger, with political earthquakes."

Irina sighed. "You're confusing survival with education. I want the children to learn to feel, not just to live."

The tension was as thin as spring ice. Here, between the crowded rooms, between the smell of borscht and the noise of screens, a conflict woke up again that had been sitting in both their stomachs since the day they came to the country. They had met thanks to the immigration, but the ego of their homelands, after the Soviet Union fell apart, had settled deep in their souls. Vitaly demanded discipline and survival. Irina insisted on feeling, on education, on acceptance. Russian against Ukrainian, politics against emotion, fear against hope. Every evening the politics came back to the table: Vitaly fuming at the screen, Irina analysing the news and the border closures.

"You don't understand!" Vitaly shouted. "Our lives have always been a war! We know how to survive!"

"Vitaly," Irina said one evening, quietly but sharply, "you insist on your rules as if we were in a camp in Siberia. Our daughter turns seventeen next week. She isn't marching through a forest in the cold. Give her room to breathe."

Vitaly's face hardened, his hand gripping an almost empty glass of vodka. "Irina, I'm not raising them like children. I'm preparing them for a world that's ready to devour them. You think anyone will be waiting for them with biscuits?"

"It's not about the world, Vitaly," she smiled sadly. "It's about how they live their lives now. Not just survive. Alex, Natalie – they need space. Not just anxiety."

The argument went on for hours. Natalie sat on the sofa watching them, understanding too early the depth of the rift between her parents – a crack you can't see, but it seeps into every decision in the house. Their history – wars, uprooting, suffering – carried cracks of fear, love and hatred all at once.

The streets of Tel Aviv no longer looked like themselves. The asphalt was hot from the sun, but people were blown from side to side like paper in the wind, looking around with no confidence. From Rabin Square rose the shouts of the self-employed and the small-business owners whose livelihoods had collapsed, and from Jerusalem, outside the prime minister's residence on Balfour Street, came pictures every night of a protest that only kept growing, like drums setting the heart an involuntary rhythm.

One Friday evening, when Alex came for dinner at his parents', he and Natalie sat in her room. Screens on, but both of them were staring at the window, eyes searching for meaning between the streetlights and the shadows of the trees.

"It's like the city itself is screaming," Alex whispered, almost to himself.

In the kitchen Vitaly and Irina stood facing each other, without many words. Vitaly, strict as ever, held a cup of coffee that trembled slightly, his eyes on the street like a commander looking for danger. Irina folded her arms across her chest.

"You don't understand what they're going through," she said quietly. "Every screen, every report – a war." She didn't want to fight him. Only to open his eyes, to show him that the children's world was not the world he had known.

Vitaly exhaled, his eyes still on the window. "I understand," he said, and his voice was like snow beginning to thaw. "But I also know how the world weans itself off pain. And it's hard. I won't lie."

The words fell like stones into a stream. But the stream was not calm at all. The home became a small shelter, a bubble that protected them from the outside – and also widened the distances between them.

July 2020 · The One

In early July, as the numbers climbed again, the government shut the bars and clubs once more, and The One went back to being what it had been from the start: underground. That was where Alex got friendly with a girl called Dana, who laughed at all the tension.

"You know we could get caught any minute," she whispered, glancing around.

"I know," he answered. "But it feels right. More right than anything before. There's something here that sends a message. I don't feel like I'm partying. I feel like I'm protesting." There was a spark in his eyes.

"And will you get vaccinated? When there's a vaccine?" she asked.

"No. Will you?"

"My parents have already said I'm getting it, I've got no choice. And I already feel like it's wrong, like they'll implant a chip in me or something. I don't know who to believe anymore. On one hand I've got an eighty-three-year-old grandmother, and I don't want her to die because of me. On the other hand I don't believe what they say on the news."

"First of all, sorry to tell you, your grandmother is going to die at some point. And not because of you. That's life. At her age any illness is dangerous, because her immune system works less well than ours. But come on – we're dealing with brainwashing here. Do you know anyone who died of corona?"

"Personally? No. But a friend from my course told me that–"

"Told you." Alex cut Dana off decisively. "It can't be that they tell us there are so many dead, and none of us knows a single person who died."

The conversation broke off. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Moshe, a veteran of Tel Aviv nightlife, nodding him towards the storeroom.

"A line?" Alex asked Dana.

"Well, what are we doing?"

"Coke, I think. I hope."

He ran a hand over her knee and got up from his bar stool. Moshe was waiting at the storeroom door and pushed aside the bead curtain to signal them in.

"What are we doing?" Alex asked, for Dana's sake.

"We're going to Jerusalem to burn down the Knesset!" Moshe answered at once.

"Great. And which drug's getting us to Jerusalem tonight?"

"There's coke, there's K, and there's doctor. What'll it be, good Jews?"

All eyes turned to Dana.

"Let's do coke and a bump of K, yeah?" Alex smiled. "That's how we get to the Knesset."