Attack on Hezbollah angers northern Israel: ‘When the rockets are going to hit Tel Aviv, that’s when we launch a pre-emptive strike?’

Ido Azulay is not reassured by the display of air power and intelligence information deployed by Israel to launch a surprise raid with 100 aircraft to bomb thousands of Hezbollah missile launcher positions in Lebanon. Rather, he is irritated by it. Low-intensity warfare between the two sides has been ongoing for almost 11 months in the neighborhood of the historic city of Acre, 36 kilometers from the Lebanese border, which was awakened early Sunday morning by anti-aircraft sirens, a direct rocket hit, and the explosion caused by the interception of another projectile that left glass and the remains of shutters on the ground and shrapnel marks on several homes. Like most of the north of Israel, Azulay feels aggrieved. “What am I, a second-class citizen? We’ve lived in fear all this time, with routine bombings, and they don’t care. And now, when the rockets are going to hit Tel Aviv, that’s when we launch a pre-emptive strike? Not for us, but for them, yes?” he says in the humble hair salon of his friend, Tomer Itaj, which is also slightly damaged by shrapnel.

The three 24-year-old friends are now particularly angry at the phrases that are often heard in the area, especially in recent months. One, from Yagin Azulay: “The government is selling us out.” In the last elections in 2022, all three voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party, Likud, which has a stronghold in Acre, but now they regret it. “Right now, if I had him in front of me, I would ask him: What do you want? That we remain quiet like poor people with all this uncertainty that affects our health and how we earn a living?” says Ido Azulay.

Acre has not been evacuated as it lies outside the border strip closest to Lebanon. With 50,000 inhabitants, it was — in better times — one of the most popular tourist cities in Israel, thanks to the Crusader legacy housed in a walled citadel inhabited by Palestinians. They are the descendants of those who stayed during the Nakba (the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to create the State of Israel in 1948), and today they share the city with the Jewish emigrants that Israel relocated to the new area. Or rather they lead parallel lives, except when they degenerate into ethnic clashes as in 2008 or 2021.

It is in these simple residential houses built for Jews without many resources that the rockets launched from nearby Lebanon brought a double feeling of discrimination to the surface on Sunday. As part of the north, that of enduring the threat of dozens of projectiles a day (although Hezbollah did not direct its attack against civilians and Acre has only been targeted in very exceptional circumstances over the past few months) without the Israeli army invading Lebanon as it has done with Gaza. And also because of its Sephardic origin, as compared to Tel Aviv as a stereotype of Ashkenazi privilege — Jews originating mainly from central or eastern Europe — in a rift of descent that is still to be healed in Israel.

Although Netanyahu is a political animal who has regained popularity when everyone had written off his political career, on Sunday he ran up against the feeling that the periphery has been forgotten in relation to the center of the country, where Tel Aviv and the higher salaries are. The prime minister rubbed salt in the wound and earned the ire of regional leaders in the north by christening the Israeli surprise attack “Peace for Tel Aviv.” It is a play on words with Operation Peace for Galilee, the name of the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, after the failed Palestinian assassination attempt against the Israeli ambassador in the United Kingdom.

The choice of such a name for the operation after nearly 11 months of daily attacks concentrated in the north is “the culmination of the Israeli government’s disconnection from hundreds of thousands of citizens,” the heads of the three government councils in the area, Moshe Davidovitz, David Azulai, and Giora Zaltz, said. “From now on, we cease communication with all members of the government until we obtain a complete solution for our residents and our children. Prime Minister, ministers, coalition members, government officials and all government employees, wherever they are, we have not been of interest to you for ten and a half months. From now on, we are not interested in you. Do not call, come, or send messages. We have managed on our own until now,” they said in a joint statement.

“Total war”

The “solution” the leaders are asking for is a euphemism for what the three friends in Acre bluntly demand: “A total war,” in the words of Itaj. “War, war, of course,” in the words of Ido Azulay. “It is better than uncertainty. I myself would put on my uniform tomorrow to enter Lebanon.”

A political agreement to remove Hezbollah’s elite forces from the border, such as the one being negotiated by France and the U.S., or a ceasefire in Gaza to also calm the Lebanese front, as the mediators in Cairo are seeking, is no longer enough for them. “Since October 7, it is no longer an option to live with Hezbollah on the other side of the border. Period. On October 6, it was, let’s say, acceptable. Not today,” says Yagin Azulay.

This is the general feeling in northern Israel. Despite the unpredictable consequences for the Middle East and the strength of Hezbollah, only open war will allow people like Gershon Mateh to sleep peacefully, and the tens of thousands of people evacuated since October to return to their homes without fear.

Maté, 33, emigrated from India to the Jewish state in 2014, never thinking he would ever find himself in such a situation. Still in shock, he gives a tour of his house while explaining how the attack caught him sleeping with his wife in the room of their two children, aged eight and four. “So they would get used to staying in their bed, not ours,” he explains.

Then the air raid alarms went off. They grabbed the children and ran to the shelter: “I didn’t even have time to leave the house. We heard the explosion at the front door.” He shows the broken glass on the children’s bed on his mobile phone. “If we had taken 15 seconds longer, imagine what would have happened to them,” he adds, with his wife sweeping up the last pieces of glass from the floor and finishing packing the suitcases with clothes.

They will spend the night in a hotel, like all the residents of the building, at the foot of which fallen pieces of shutters and glass can be seen. Neighbours and onlookers have come to comment on the shrapnel marks on the walls and to touch the metal pieces of the interceptor missile, inside the small crater it formed when it fell.

“Everyone knows that we are on a war footing and that the government is not using all its force,” says Maté. “But I will return home when everything is settled. I have a rental contract to respect. What is the alternative? Also, is there anywhere [in Israel] we can go where someone can guarantee us 100% that a rocket will not hit us? No.”

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