Letter from Israel
Israel’s Zones of Denial
Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?
By David Remnick
July 28, 2025

One night, not long after a ceasefire between Israel and Iran took hold, I was sitting at the bar of a crowded restaurant north of Tel Aviv, a place buzzing with high-spirited talk and laughter, jokes shouted over bottles of wine. All at once, every phone in the room lit up with alerts. One read:

BREAKING: The I.D.F. has identified a ballistic missile launch from Yemen toward Israeli territory. The Israeli Air Force is operating to intercept the threat, the I.D.F. said.

The news came with a map scarred with a blob of angry red, covering nearly all of central Israel—including, as far as I could tell, the bar where I sat with a burger and a beer. For a moment, everything seemed to pause.

Starting on June 13th, with the onset of Israel’s prolonged bombardment of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the aerial assassinations of many of its military and intelligence chiefs and nuclear scientists, Israelis had regularly been warned by wailing sirens and bulletins on their phones that ballistic missiles and drones of retaliation were headed their way. They had just a few minutes to clamber out of bed, wake the kids, and get to municipal bomb shelters or to a mamad, a safe room equipped with steel doors, reinforced concrete, and blast-resistant windows. Through twelve days of war, schools and most businesses closed. The streets were nearly abandoned.

In the early days of the war, the Israel Defense Forces estimated that between eight hundred and four thousand Israelis would be killed. In the end, the number of dead was twenty-eight. Physical damage, to be sure, was widespread. Windows were blown out at the headquarters of Mossad. Missiles had hit the Soroka hospital, in Beersheba; several buildings in central Tel Aviv close to the Kirya, the country’s military nerve center; the Bazan oil refinery, in Haifa; the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot; the Tel Nof airbase; the Zipporit armor-and-weapons-production base; and a ten-story building in Bat Yam, where nine people were killed, including five members of a Ukrainian family. Not far down the road from the restaurant, in a northern neighborhood of Tel Aviv called Ramat Aviv, I’d checked out an apartment complex that a ballistic missile had left uninhabitable. A few kids climbed on a teetering stanchion to gawk at the ruins. They took selfies with the caved-in concrete as background. Throughout the country, thirteen thousand people were left without homes. The damage in Israel, however, was modest compared with that in Iran, where the death toll was more than a thousand people, around half of them civilians.

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/04/israels-zones-of-denial