The scene is surreal: a few kilometers from the border between Israel and Lebanon, Jewish, Muslim and Christian fishermen wait for the fish to bite. A black Zodiac with armed soldiers patrols a few tens of meters off the coast of the small Israeli town of Nahariya, next to the Mediterranean. Soldiers walk along the seashore and in a nearby lot the army has parked about twenty armored vehicles.
Since the bloody attack by Hamas, which left 1,300 dead, the possibility of an Israeli ground intervention in Gaza has become clearer. And, with that, the possibility of Hizbullah going into action from Lebanon.
“The only religion here is fishing,” says Shlomo Louski, an elderly Jew born in Casablanca who has lived in Nahariya for 60 years. “Here we are all brothers and, if Hizbullah shoots us, we will protect ourselves in the same shelter”, adds the 90-year-old former restaurateur, with skin tanned by the sun and who boasts of having stopped working “not long ago” .
Nearby is Bilal, 34 years old. He comes every day from historic Acre, where Jews and Arabs live together, about fifteen kilometers from Nahariya. This city was the scene of violence in 2021, with the result of one death (an Israeli Jew). “I am a Muslim. What Hamas did to those women and children, to those young people who were dancing… It’s terrible… To me, they are not Muslims,” ??murmurs the tall, bright-eyed man who prefers not to give his last name .
He puts his arm affectionately over Shlomo’s shoulders. “This man? He is like my father and I know I am like his son. These barbarians will not be able to change it,” adds Bilal, who wraps breadcrumbs in a large hook. “It seems that the fish are more afraid of Hizbullah than we are… We haven’t caught anything since this morning,” he laments, looking at the empty bucket.
A young woman, Mariana, observes the scene. Her husband, holding a long fishing rod with his outstretched arm and looking toward the horizon, is silent. Around her neck she wears a heavy diamond-encrusted cross and embraces a puppy. “We are like a big family. Every day we gather in the morning around seven o’clock and stay here to fish until the sun is high in the sky,” says the young woman. He also insists that the brutal offensive launched by Hamas will not change anything.
Lev, 80 years old, proudly announces that he was born in Kyiv. Since retiring, he says he divides his time between his two passions: fishing and painting. On the phone screen he shows some of his works. “In Ukraine we know what barbarism is. There were the Nazis and now there is Vladimir Putin. Hamas? It’s like Hitler and Putin combined,” he says. Fellow fishermen nod their heads.
A Leonard Cohen song plays on the radio: “Hallelujah… Well, maybe there’s a God up there…”.
“God loves this country”, whispers Mariana. “This is the country of Jesus and Abraham. He will not let us down. And here we will continue to catch good fish”, he says. Near the dock, a convoy carrying huge tanks passes by. A flurry of rockets coming from neighboring Lebanon has just fallen on northern Israel, killing one and wounding four.
