The sound of male voices chanting the Sabbath liturgy was not something I expected to hear during a Saturday stroll on a quiet residential street in central Tel Aviv. It had been a rigorously secular city when I lived there, during the first decade of this century. Delicatessens that sold pork charcuterie were far more common than synagogues, and the Sabbath was for sleeping late, sitting in cafes or lying on the beach. All this was still the case for the vast majority of the city’s residents. But something had changed during the 14 years since I left the country; there was a new subculture living in the city. In neighborhoods that for decades were populated almost exclusively by secular liberals who made their livings in the arts, journalism and academia, there was now a noticeable presence of people who dressed in the style that identified them as religious-nationalist West Bank settlers. The sight was incongruous and inexplicable, since Tel Aviv doesn’t have the institutions and amenities to support their lifestyle, like yeshivas and synagogues, and there aren’t many kosher restaurants. It took me some time to understand the significance of their presence.
Once, people dressed in the style associated with ideological settlers — the men wearing large crocheted skullcaps and an automatic pistol tucked in the waistband of their jeans, the women wearing elaborately wound headscarves and almost invariably pushing a baby carriage — were a rare sight in Tel Aviv. When one did see them, they looked awkward and out of place, like dusty farmhands visiting the slick city on their day off. No longer. Now they radiated confidence and entitlement as they strolled along the city’s main commercial arteries, past restaurants and cafes that served nonkosher food they would not eat, boutiques that sold immodest clothes they would not wear, past the sex shops, the head shops and the posters announcing DJ sets at clubs that opened at midnight. They seemed not to notice or interact with any aspect of their surroundings.
During the Second Intifada, when Israel’s politics and culture began their lurch to the right, Tel Aviv acquired a nickname: the Bubble. It’s fallen out of use, but when it was a popular cliche the term referred, depending on one’s worldview, either to an island of effete leftists who were out of touch with the majority of the country, or to a queer-friendly, bohemian bastion of sanity, secularism and cultural creativity. There is even a 2006 movie called “The Bubble,” featuring a star-crossed love affair between a Palestinian man and a Jewish man who, when he’s not hanging out with his friends in their shabby-chic apartment on Tel Aviv’s then-edgy Sheinkin Street, is working at a hip record store that sells vintage vinyl or attending a rave against the occupation. In a classic bit of cognitive dissonance that seems inexplicable to outsiders but completely normal for Israelis, he also serves his annual reserve duty at a West Bank checkpoint — though he feels really, really bad about it. The checkpoint is where he first locks eyes with his Palestinian lover, who finds a way to come live with him in Tel Aviv. Ensconced in the apartment, they are embraced by their liberal friends until — spoiler alert — the Palestinian decides to become a suicide bomber. The film is about as awful as you can imagine and deserves the excoriating review published by Haaretz. But it was popular in Israel, and it did serve a purpose in exposing the blind spots and benign racism of Tel Aviv’s well-meaning liberals, though that was surely not the director’s intention.
For many years, the conventional wisdom held that Tel Aviv was impervious to the messianism and hypernationalism that were convulsing the region. More accurately, the city, which strongly resembles Beirut in its commitment to clubs, culture, cafes and the beach, is a very pleasant place to be a liberal, Hebrew-speaking Jew. But that is beginning to change. The Bubble has been invaded, not just physically by the religious-nationalist settlers, but ideologically by a syncretic Middle Eastern version of the authoritarianism that is spreading rapidly in the United States and Europe, combined with a Jewish version of the messianism that characterizes the pro-Trump Christian nationalists.
Since there has been no visible increase in the number of Tel Aviv’s synagogues, religious schools or kosher restaurants, I thought at first that the settlers strolling the streets were visiting from Jerusalem or the West Bank. But on the Saturday that I heard men praying, I realized they weren’t visiting; they lived there. Peeping through the window of a ground-floor apartment, I saw a living room that had been repurposed as a shtibel, or informal gathering place for group prayer. Bookcases holding volumes of Talmud lined the walls, and prayer books were stacked on folding tables. A strip of plastic Israeli flags hung over the door frame. Tricycles and colorful plastic toys were scattered in the enclosed courtyard, and the smell of warm food wafted from the kitchen window.
This particular apartment building, in a rectangular Bauhaus style that sparkled white in the Mediterranean sunlight, had once been the home of friends who frequently served nonkosher dishes like pork and shellfish when they invited me for Friday night dinner. I am pretty sure they’d never entered a synagogue in their lives, though, like all well-educated Israelis, they knew the Hebrew Bible well because it’s taught in public secular schools as literature. My friends did not have a religious ceremony to mark the bar mitzvahs of their children, one of whom later had gender-affirming surgery. In all this, they were representative of their Tel Aviv milieu. Their reflexive hostility toward religious people in general and religious settlers in particular is also very much the norm, and speaks to one of Israel’s great societal fissures. Standing on the sidewalk, I texted my friend: “Did you know that there are religious settlers living in your old apartment building?” Her response was a single syllable: “Yuck!”
Nearly everyone I asked said that they had noticed the increased presence of settlers in Tel Aviv but seemed not to understand when they moved to the city, or why. Several leftist and liberal publications had published articles about the phenomenon, but the story had not penetrated the mainstream news cycle. My impression was that people felt as though the settlers had just appeared one day, as though teleported from the West Bank. An acquaintance described visiting her parents one Friday evening in the north Tel Aviv neighborhood she’d grown up in and knew as entirely secular; now, she was disconcerted by the sight of religious families, dressed in white for the holy day in accordance with local custom, flowing out of their apartments and strolling in groups. “They were everywhere!” she said, in tones of astonishment. She hadn’t noticed them moving in and had no explanation for their presence. They didn’t seem to work in Tel Aviv or to be building synagogues. Later, I realized that they chose to pray in the at-home shtibels, the informal gathering spaces, because building a synagogue in Israel requires applying for a municipal license and government funding. This could attract attention from the media, leading to protests from secular neighbors. Once they had established a large enough presence, they would have the legal right to demand government funding for certain amenities, like religious schools and synagogues.
An incident that occurred on Sept. 24, 2023, less than two weeks before the Oct. 7 attack, showed the rising tension between religious and secular residents of Tel Aviv. It made the international news cycle and might have been a tipping point, if attention had not been diverted to Gaza. It was the evening of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, when observant Jews fast and pray, acknowledge their sins and ask for forgiveness. Israel more or less shuts down every year on Yom Kippur: For 25 hours, the airport is closed and broadcasting services go silent, while public transportation stops and cars traditionally stay off the roads, except in areas that are majority non-Jewish. In Tel Aviv and the rest of Israel, nonreligious people — Jewish and Palestinian citizens alike — have their own, secular tradition of enjoying the one traffic-free day of the year by strolling and bicycling in the middle of empty roads.
But on Yom Kippur eve in 2023, a group of religious settlers organized a public prayer service in the middle of Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Square; crucially, they divided the space into separate seating for men and women, per Orthodox practice. Because Tel Aviv municipal law prohibits gender-separated public prayer, the organizers tried to circumvent the ban on a physical barrier, which the Supreme Court upheld, by delineating the sections for men and women with Israeli flags hung on bamboo poles. Secular people gathered around to protest, with some activists stepping in to remove the ad hoc barrier. An altercation soon erupted and the police arrived, but in videos of the incident that I watched online they seemed to be at a loss and deeply uncomfortable at the prospect of arresting Jews wrapped in prayer shawls on Yom Kippur. I was confused by the whole incident. Halacha, Jewish religious law, prohibits travel on the Sabbath and holy days, which is why observant Jews live within walking distance of their synagogues. Why had all those people come to Tel Aviv for Yom Kippur and where were they going to sleep? It didn’t occur to me that they might live in the city.
One friend, a prominent documentary filmmaker who had been following the influx of Jews from the West Bank, told me she had become acquainted with one of the settler women in her neighborhood and, through conversations with her, gained some insights: “They’re targeting the capital of liberal Israeli culture,” said my friend, adding that secular people didn’t understand what was happening. “They [the right wing] cannot bear the existence” of Tel Aviv, she said. The city was anathema to their vision of Israel, which was theocratic, antidemocratic and deeply opposed to liberal ideas. When I asked if I could interview my friend’s settler friend, she answered: “She’ll never talk to you. Not a chance. They don’t talk.”
Tel Aviv is a very expensive city. Rent for a small, unrenovated apartment is double what I pay for twice the space in Montreal, while grocery prices are two to three times higher. Housing for Jews in West Bank settlements is far cheaper, because the government subsidizes purchase prices and mortgages for settlers. How could these families afford to live in Tel Aviv? The answer is that they are funded by government ministries that collaborate with right-wing political parties to funnel tens of millions of dollars per annum of public money to support groups of settlers, many of whom are third-generation residents of the West Bank, to settle inside Israel. The groups are called Garin Torani, which means “Torah nucleus.” They are centrally organized, highly ideological and very motivated.
In 2015, The Marker, a prestigious daily financial newspaper owned by Haaretz, published a feature article on the Garin Torani, based on a report published by Molad, a liberal think tank. According to the Molad report, as of 2014 there were about 52 Garin Torani scattered around Israel, with 10 in Tel Aviv alone. There are certainly far more today. Each is a registered association with a tax ID number and the stated mandate “to strengthen Jewish and Zionist identity in the State of Israel.” Each receives a substantial budget amounting to tens of thousands of dollars per annum. Officially, their mandate includes providing social support for marginalized Jewish people who live in economically deprived communities, but in practice the settlers are either embedding themselves in prosperous secular areas or moving into “mixed” Arab-Jewish cities like Lod (known in Arabic as al-Lidd), where local Palestinian residents, who are citizens of Israel, say they are an aggressive, violent presence.
During the 2021 civil violence in Israel, which involved clashes between Arab and Jewish citizens, armed settlers established a “command center” in Lod and roamed the city, in several cases shooting at Palestinian residents with live bullets. One of those bullets killed Moussa Hassouneh, a 31-year-old father of three. The incident was recorded on video, but the government attorney declined to prosecute, while the Palestinian men who killed 56-year-old Yigal Yehoshua when they threw a cinder block at his car were sentenced to between 12 and 14 years in prison.
Tamer Nafar, the Palestinian hip-hop artist, was raised in Lod and lives there still, with his wife and small children. During the May 2021 riots, he filmed a terrifying sight from his apartment window: In a parking lot across the street, at least 20 armed settlers were roaming around with a police escort. Some had been bused in from the extremist settlements in Hebron (al-Khalil). Nafar posted the video, accompanied by English-subtitled audio of his phone call to the police, on his Instagram account. As a tax-paying citizen of Israel, he told the phone operator at the emergency call center, he wanted to know what they were going to do to protect him and his family from the settlers. The phone operator grew audibly irritated with him for demanding to know why the police were allowing the settlers to move about freely in a residential area when there was a curfew. Was he supposed to wait in his apartment until the armed settlers attacked them? Were the police going to send help? No, they weren’t going to send anyone; Tamer and his family were on their own. Jewish citizens have largely memory-holed the events of May 2021, but for Palestinian citizens they are a live trauma.
The settlers did not invent the term and concept of Judaizing territory under Israeli sovereignty. Successive Israeli governments, left and right, have, since the establishment of the state in 1948, tried to increase the Jewish population in the Galilee by building new towns, like Upper Nazareth, that were theoretically meant to be exclusively for Jewish residents. The policy never really succeeded; today about a third of Upper Nazareth’s population is composed of Palestinian citizens of Israel. For all the official policies that have created a highly segregated population, total separation is demonstrably impossible.
Nowadays, Israeli liberals consider the term Judaizing to be distasteful and racist, but it’s still in use. The landlord of the last apartment I lived in before leaving Israel was a Jewish man who had bought the place as an investment. The apartment was in a “mixed” building in Jaffa (Yafa in Arabic) and it was a rare find — affordable, spacious, well-located, with a balcony overlooking an enclosed garden. Just as I was about to sign the contract, the landlord asked me why a “nice Jewish girl” like me wanted to live among Arabs. He was in his 70s and wore a white tank top that exposed his hairy shoulders and stretched over his sagging belly; we were sitting on the balcony of his apartment in the middle of secular, liberal Tel Aviv. I looked up at him, pen in hand, and hesitated: Should I walk away from an affordable apartment because the landlord was a racist? Maybe I’d never find a place to live if I applied that criterion. He leaned across the table, slapped my thigh affectionately and said: “You know what? It’s good you’re moving into that building! We need people like you to Judaize Jaffa.” I did sign the lease and he proved to be a fairly decent landlord, mostly because he never came to visit.
Since the settlers see the West Bank not as occupied territory but as part of the biblical land of Israel, their position is that the settlements are a continuation of Israeli government policy since the establishment of the state in 1948. What’s interesting is that the settlers are now acting out their own version of a one-state reality by reverse-settling Israel within the 1948 demarcation lines. One could argue that the far left and the far right both aspire to a single entity from the river to the sea, although they differ sharply on the matter of equal rights for all.
The author of the investigative report for The Marker describes the Garin Torani as “an apocalyptic vision” in which religious-nationalist families that had for decades expanded settlements in the West Bank were now “being sent to resettle deep in Greater Tel Aviv, with the support of the religious right-wing parties.” He quotes prominent rabbis in the religious-nationalist settler movement who have said explicitly that the purpose of the Garin Torani is to indoctrinate secular people with their religious-political ideology. The leaders of the movement espouse overtly racist and reactionary ideas, like implementing laws that would prevent Arab citizens of Israel from renting or buying homes in Jewish-majority areas and replacing Israel’s democratic political structure with a theocratic one. The Ministry of Education sponsors hundreds of young men from the settlements who want to spend a gap year between high school and military service leading workshops that teach conservative social and religious mores in public, secular high schools, to the great displeasure of the public school pupils’ parents.
A decade after the liberal think tank Molad published its report about the Garin Torani, the national-religious settlers who live in Tel Aviv radiate triumphalism. They have ascended to the highest levels of power in the government, the judiciary, the army and the intelligence services; and now they have established themselves as major players at the center of the Israeli media establishment, with their own television station and their own newspapers.
I saw this triumphalism on full display at the book launch for a memoir by Eli Sharabi, an invitation-only event. Sharabi is one of the most famous former Israeli hostages; he learned only when he was freed in February 2025, after 491 days in captivity, that his wife and two daughters had been killed on Oct. 7 and that his brother Yossi, who was also abducted to Gaza on Oct. 7, had been killed by his captors 100 days later. Yossi Sharabi’s body is still in Gaza, a fact that is a major issue for the Sharabi family. They want to bury him. In a now-iconic photo, Eli Sharabi emerges from captivity, emaciated, hollow-eyed and wrapped in an Israeli flag. That image is now the cover of his memoir, “Hostage,” which instantly became the fastest-selling book in Israeli publishing history.
The launch event was held on a Friday morning in late May at the Museum of the Jewish People, which is located on the campus of Tel Aviv University. It’s a notably attractive campus, pleasingly symmetrical in its layout and famous for several Brutalist buildings designed by renowned architects like Louis Kahn. The campus was built in 1956, on the ruins of the Palestinian village of al-Sheikh Muwannis, which was destroyed in 1948, except for the mukhtar’s (village leader’s) elegant house, which is now the university’s faculty club. The museum is a large, blocky, two-story building with floor-to-ceiling windows and polished black floors.
The publisher of Sharabi’s memoir is Sela Meir, a national-religious publishing house; it specializes in books that espouse right-wing ideology. This was a surprise, because Sharabi was from a left-wing kibbutz and seemed, when he was interviewed for television, to hold liberal views. But his brother, who lobbied tirelessly for his release, is aligned with the national-religious movement, which in turn is directly connected to the government. Perhaps, speculated my friend, Sharabi was hoping to use these connections to exert influence on the government to negotiate with Hamas for the return of his brother Yossi’s body. I must have looked judgmental, because my friend lifted an eyebrow and said, simply, “People are desperate.”
Entering the large event room, I saw the who’s who of the right-wing Israeli media world — columnists and television commentators — mingling with prominent figures in the right-wing political establishment. But a significant number of the people in the room were not religious, while several were known for having publicly shifted to the right after Oct. 7, saying the brutality of the Hamas-led attacks had convinced them there was no longer a case for liberalism; Israel, they now believed, was locked in a struggle to survive against an implacable enemy that wanted to destroy them and there was no longer any room for a conciliatory stance. I did not see a single journalist associated with liberal political views, besides the incognito friend who had received an invitation and generously brought me along as his “plus one.”
Several large tables spread with heavy white tablecloths were laden with high-end catering that looked like something Martha Stewart could have planned. On one table there were trays of neatly arranged viennoiseries like pains au chocolat, croissants and fruit-filled Danishes. There was a table of savories like smoked fish, cheeses, eggs and artisanal breads, while yet another table was for fruit and vegetable platters. Placed around the perimeter of the room were several large, professional espresso machines staffed by efficient, uniformed baristas preparing cappuccinos to order.
We could have been at a posh event hosted by bourgeois secular Tel Avivians, but for two factors: The food was all kosher, and there were guns everywhere. The publisher of one of Israel’s best-known far-right media platforms, a 50-something man with a generous paunch and a crocheted skullcap on his bald spot, had an M16 rifle slung over his shoulder like a purse with a cross-body strap. At least a third of the men roaming the room or standing in clusters of people chatting while nibbling from plates of food had holstered automatic pistols tucked into their waistbands. One young woman with long hair, about 19 years old, wearing a long-sleeved, modest dress that suggested she was religious and conservative, also carried an M16. When I lived in the country, this entire scene, of armed religious nationalist settlers sipping espresso on the Tel Aviv University campus, would have been inconceivable. This was not their turf — until suddenly it was.
Eli Sharabi stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by people who posed with him for selfies, one arm flung around his shoulders, his book held up prominently in the other hand, all smiling broadly for the camera. I stood against a wall, sipping a cappuccino and taking it all in. My friend introduced me to a prominent television news commentator who almost immediately launched into a monologue of tired right-wing talking points about Hamas’ indifference to the suffering of the people in Gaza. If they would just lay down their arms and release the hostages, he said, Israel could end the war.
For the second hour of the event, the organizers ushered us into an auditorium one floor below the reception room. Every seat was taken. A self-possessed woman wearing an elegant but modest sheath dress in teal blue, with a matching headscarf and dress shoes, stood behind a lectern, introduced herself as the program director and delivered a speech about the book and its author. She was followed by a well-known character actor who has, in addition to his roles in Israeli productions, played an Arab terrorist and a Middle Eastern dictator in a few Hollywood films; he gave a reading from Sharabi’s memoir. Sharabi’s brother and sister both gave speeches. And then Sharabi sat for an interview with a female journalist whose crass and vulgar style made me cringe with personal and professional embarrassment. “Worst journalist in the world!” I typed on my phone’s Notes app and tilted it so that my friend could read it. He nodded in agreement. She didn’t try at all to mask her intention, which was to elicit an emotional response from Sharabi and, by extension, from the audience. “How did it feel to survive all those months in a Hamas tunnel, only to learn that your wife and daughters had been brutally murdered by terrorists?” Sharabi, who had already said in a long television interview with Ilana Dayan, Israel’s Diane Sawyer, that he was not angry, remained stoic and answered the questions patiently. The audience sat raptly, listening with the same reverence my schoolmates and I showed Holocaust survivors, decades earlier, when they came to speak on Yom HaShoah. It was clear to me that for this audience, and possibly for most Israeli Jews, Hamas (a term used interchangeably with “terrorists” and “Palestinians”) were the new Nazis and Oct. 7 was a continuation of the Holocaust.
We all received a free copy of “Hostage” in a swag bag as we left. For the rest of my trip, every time I was browsing at a bookstore I heard someone ask a sales clerk if they had any copies of Sharabi’s memoir. Invariably, the book was sold out.
In August, several weeks after I departed Israel, Tally Gotliv, one of the most noxious and extremist members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, posted in Hebrew on X: “Religious Jewish settlement in Tel Aviv is the order of the day! Settling this land obligates us to settle entire neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. Just like in Lod and Herzliya [a prosperous town just north of Tel Aviv]. I appeal to all those involved in this effort. We must secure huge donations to establish a Jewish religious presence all over Tel Aviv.” Someone posted a screenshot of the X post on Facebook, where the Hebrew conversation is very active. Among the 200 responses, many of which are contemptuous of Gotliv, is one that reads, “Whoever thinks she’s joking or crazy … Pay attention to the new Garin Torani that appeared under your home.”
The triumphalism of the far right contrasts starkly with the agony of the liberals. For three years they have been participating in weekly mass demonstrations against the Netanyahu government, first to protest its plan to end the judiciary’s independence and then to demand a ceasefire in exchange for the release of the hostages. Their voices have had absolutely no impact. The government has demonstrated amply, in word and deed, that it does not care about citizens in the anti-Netanyahu camp; Israeli liberals are beginning to grapple with the understanding that their ability to exert influence is almost nonexistent in an authoritarian political environment. For the anti-Netanyahu camp, the source of their agony is their concern for the hostages and the well-being of the soldiers in Gaza, while the source of their existential fear is the far-right government’s naked ambition to destroy the state’s democratic institutions. The sense of deep uncertainty about the future is difficult for them to bear; several friends told me that they and everyone they knew were taking antianxiety medication.
But this fear and anxiety do not extend to the word “genocide,” which is simply not part of the mainstream discourse. For me and for many people I know, this is a very painful fact. It must seem absolutely incredible and incomprehensible to people watching from abroad that Israelis don’t see the news the rest of the world sees and don’t believe the things that are for most people outside Israel indisputable, but that is the case. Beyond my inner circle of like-minded friends, conversations about Gaza were such a landmine that I simply avoided the subject or actively self-censored. You never knew who was going to explode in rage (and there is a lot of rage in Israel these days), or — and this happened to me several times — they would pull away with a dubious, hurt expression, as though they weren’t sure they could trust me to understand their pain. Most Israelis seem to view expressions of compassion as a zero-sum game: If you express concern for the people of Gaza, then you don’t care about the hostages and you don’t care about Israelis who lost relatives on Oct. 7 or since. The nightly news broadcasts and the mainstream newspapers perpetuate this state of affairs by continuing to report almost nothing about what’s happening to Palestinians in Gaza. Worse, they amplify the voices that insist there are “no innocents” among the Palestinians in Gaza. There’s a complete information vacuum on the starvation and destruction in the Hebrew media, with the notable exceptions of Haaretz and Local Call, the Hebrew sister publication of +972 Magazine.
On the last morning of my visit, over cappuccino and scrambled eggs at my “regular” cafe, an unpretentious hangout for aging leftists who work in the arts and journalism, I chatted with the proprietor, a lesbian in late middle age with kindly smile lines around her eyes who wears her long, gray hair in a messy bun. I told her that I’d been interviewing people about the increasing visibility of religious settlers in Tel Aviv and summarized what I had learned about their growing presence and power. She nodded. “The thing is,” she said, “For us, politics is something we do in our free time. But for them, it’s their entire lives. And that is why they will win.”
This is the second in a series of articles derived from the writer’s recent reporting trip to Israel-Palestine. The author applied for and received funding for her travel expenses from the Open Society Foundation. Read the first article here.
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