
I have a question: There are over 7 billion people on the planet. There are 30 apartments on my side of the building. Why am I almost always waiting for the elevator?
Chat GBT seems to write everything, but at least Global Thoughts is still written by a human. Enjoy it while you can. They already have robots that give massages, so what else is left?
In NYC they charge you for bags in grocery stores. I hate it because all I do is throw them away at home. I am usually shopping on the way home so I don’t think to take bags with me. But if you ask for a plastic bag they use for frozen goods, all cashiers have them and they are good enough for small amounts of shopping. Rather than look at you funny, cashiers respect it because they are working for a living.
Jeremy had an Uber driver in stitches telling him and us that he is in a fantasy football league in which the loser gets a punishment dreamed up by the winner. He and this friend are both taking an elective in school on Broadway musicals and they have to perform a song in front of the class. My son hates to sing so they decided that one kid writes the song and the other sings it. My son decided that if he wins the fantasy league, he will write a song that is so gay and the other guy will have to sing it, and the whole thing will be insanely funny in front of the class. Beware, you do not want to lose in a fantasy football league to Jeremy. Bad news: Jeremy lost and I can’t wait to see him belting out whatever his friend gives him to sing. He said they wouldn’t waste their time trying to compose lyrics – Chat GPT would do it for them. I wonder what happens when you tell Chat GPT to compose a Broadway music song “very gay-like”. We tried it and less than a second later the app composed a hilarious song with stage directions to boot. Insane. To add to this, Jeremy beat his friend in a double or nothing bet so the other guy has to sing again. I heard lots of people are dying to go to that class to see that performance.

Speaking of school, I cannot believe what kids have to learn these days to get through high school. He’s taking anatomy and it involves pages upon pages of memorizing words that are defined by other words that make no sense on their face. He will never have to know this stuff in the future. Pre-calculus is another such course, unless he wants to take calculus in college. Most people don’t. It is a crime having all these kids spend so many years cramming their minds with useless information they will never need to know. I would have never tolerated these courses in my high school years. Somebody needs to rethink what it means to be educated in high schools.
A parent told us that in the elementary school where my daughter used to go they now go to third graders and each month ask each of the students to tell them which gender they currently identify with. One day this month the NY Times had 3 articles about transgender people. You would think this 1% of the population was taking over the country based on the amount of coverage they get. There is a good reason that half the country is disgusted with this culture war and wants this movement sidelined. I think that asking third graders each month how they wish to identify borders on harassment. What is a kid supposed to say? This month I feel like Swiss chocolate almond?
When American Airlines went down systemwide on Christmas Eve because of an IT problem on an app that measures weights on airplanes, I figure that spies in Russia and China were amazed that it would be so easy to bring down one of the 3 airlines in the USA systemwide. No redundancy for stuff like this? They are probably thinking of all kinds of choke points in America like these.
While a lot of rockets from Lebanon were raining down on central Israel one particular day, my daughter was crisscrossing the country on an “Amazing Race” day in her gap year program. They went from train station to train station and had to do zany things such as start a flash mob to a popular dance tune and find someone in a bus station with their same middle name to take a photo. The kids are having too much fun to be bummed out by the insane reality going on around them.

Last posting I told you a week in advance that Trump would win and that the media were in a conspiracy of silence about it. Let’s talk boxing. A friend of mine who has spent over 10 years as a tournament boxer said there was no doubt that Tyson was paid to throw the fight to his opponent Jake Paul, a showman who he says can’t box well. He showed me video with wide open shots that Tyson didn’t take, and compared Tyson’s earlier fights with this one. Usually, Tyson goes inside and fights up close; this fight he stayed away and was even biting his gloves showing his frustration that he wasn’t taking shots at this opponent. I read the press afterward; they said that it was a boring mismatch and that it was embarrassing for Tyson. Nobody said what was obvious to anyone who fights – that the match was rigged. You can see that all over the place on MMA websites. The prize money was many millions but not where the money really is – in merchandising and website traffic, which is where Tyson’s opponent expects to win big on an ongoing basis. The US media are increasingly self-censoring because their owners have other business interests and they don’t want to run afoul of Trump.
I suspect that after Trump takes office, direct flights will restart between the US and Tel Aviv. I think there is an unofficial boycott going on because those flights are profitable for US airlines. Normally there are 4 airlines operating between NYC and Tel Aviv and they fix the prices to the exact dollar. The State Department has been creating safety issues and unions want to boycott Israel. Biden is so much in bed with the unions it’s sick; I thought it was disgusting that as a lame duck he signed an agreement to allow the social security administration to continue to work from home for another few years. The taxpayers are clearly not getting their money’s worth, offices sit empty and DC’s economy is suffering. I think Trump ought to sue to block the deal. Every person I know who works for the federal government has hardly been in an office for years. I’m rooting for that DOGE department although it is probable that they will accomplish little against such a mammoth beast of inertia and entrenched interests.
Listen, I need a ceasefire in Gaza. The cantor in my synagogue drones on each Saturday for about 10-15 minutes with all these special prayers they’ve added for soldiers, hostages, the state of Israel, etc. Rabbis are great at composing prayers that think that if you throw in enough words, God will make it happen. I don’t like standing so much and need it to stop already!
When Al Jazeera keeps headlining daily Israeli brutality at the top of its website, I know nothing important is going on. They stop leading with that story when something else important is happening.
If the Israelis can knock off the Houthis, they will get huge respect from Saudi Arabia and the Emirates who tried but failed to bring them to heel. The Americans haven’t had much success either with them.

ISRAEL What a difference a year makes. I’m back visiting again because my daughter is here for the academic year. A year ago I was sitting on the runway at Tel Aviv airport while rockets were hitting Tel Aviv. Israel looked like it was just taking whatever pot-shots Iran and its proxies were throwing at them. I couldn’t see much of a future there to that enterprise. Now, Hizbullah and Hamas are no longer in charge of anything. Syria’s Assad is gone, Hizbullah has been cut off from arms via Syria, and Iran has been exposed as naked in its defense and is probably gonna get it from the Israelis in February after Trump takes over. Regime change is on their agenda and they just might humiliate the ayatollahs enough to get it. Now Israel is top dog and is probably safer overall strategically for the moment than it has been for years, even though the Houthis are doing a great job of harassing them at this particular time (and at some point sooner than later it will stop). I did predict that earlier this fall, by the way. I still recall visiting Syria in 2000 just when Bashar Assad took office and everyone was wondering what Syria would be like under his rule. I don’t think anyone predicted the last 24 years, but now it is over. Israel has decent relations with some of these rebel groups such as the Kurds who probably control 25% of the country. In the short term, I don’t know that any group will have centralized control. If the Israelis can walk a tightrope among these groups and manage not to piss everyone off, you never know what might happen down the line. But my gut says that the Israelis can’t help themselves being bastards with the various Syrian factions. I think the Israelis will work things out with Turkey because Erdogan is a practical guy and both sides can make the other miserable in Syria and nullify their objectives, so it pays to figure out how to create spheres of influence and to cooperate.

I was speaking with an Israeli soldier who was commanding a unit in Lebanon, and he told me some interesting things, and the rest of this paragraph is his point of view. At least through the first week of November, Israeli troops were generally no more than 5 miles from the Israeli border. They had been successfully fighting against Hizbullah units who they feel are not real competition for them and not particularly better than the Hamas units they fought in Gaza. They said the Hamas units were nuttier and more willing to die. The army has not been prepositioning equipment in Lebanon nor making long-term plans for people to serve there; for instance, reservists know that they will be stationed in Gaza in March 2025; people expect fighting in Lebanon to end in the next few weeks, probably by the time you read this. In his unit, 75% of reservists did not show up to the last call-up (that means 16 of 20 people did not show up to a paratrooper unit that is fighting in Lebanon); the mood has changed since a year ago when people showed up even if they didn’t have to. Now, people are getting divorced, going bankrupt, risking their jobs with foreign companies and showing the strains of a year of war in a citizens’ army of reservists. People increasingly feel that the prime minister should have taken deals with Gaza and Lebanon to stop the fighting and that the war is more to keep the prime minister in power than to achieve objectives, since those doing the fighting feel the objectives on the ground have been achieved. Lebanon is a large country and Israel cannot conquer all of it, meaning that they cannot go after every single rocket that Hizbullah has stationed in the country. Only a deal between the two countries will bring an end to the rocket threat against Israel. Well, now that you are reading this, it’s indeed how it ended.

In one sense the above commentary makes sense. Israel would never have withdrawn from Gaza in 2005 had it known that it would become a Hamas-run territory that would be a nonstop irritant to Israel culminating in the October 2023 attack. So why would they withdraw from there now, when nobody competent is prepared to run the place? The Israeli army is going to be there at least a year from now and everyone seems to know it. Even Hamas seems to have conceded the point. Under this government, I wouldn’t be surprised if they reannex Northern Gaza and start putting settlers there again. The checkpoint beneath Northern Gaza looks more like an international border I’m told, and the Israelis have made the northern half of Gaza mostly uninhabitable; only 20,000 of the 500,000 that were living there remain. They have also created facts on the ground along the corridors on the borders of Egypt and made a lot of the debate by commentators to be academic; they have created several buffer zones, pretty much like what I predicted in the first 2 weeks of the war right here on Global Thoughts.
But if you were wondering what Bibi’s foreign policy in terms of this war is, I think it’s more simple than it appears: Screw with us and we’ll fuck you up so bad you’ll wish you never started. I think he made the point with Lebanon and Gaza. Only problem is that you break it and then you own it. In Lebanon, there is a purported country with a fake army you can turn the place over to. In Gaza, there is nobody to take it and now the place is really messed up, and that’s why the Israelis will probably be there a long time. It’s probably fair to say that Hizbullah and Hamas wish they had not messed with the Zohan (I’m thinking of the Adam Sandler movie). They are mucked up so bad they don’t have leaders to even surrender.
When you think about the President of Iran consider this: When the Iranians struck Israel at the end of October, the president was only informed after the missiles were already in the air. Meaning that Israel knew before he did that an Iranian attack was underway. The Ayatollah is the only decision maker in that country.

SYRIA My understanding is that there was not a single intelligence agency in the world that was predicting Assad’s downfall in Syria. An Israeli who was one of the top people in the Mossad told me that they couldn’t be expected to follow every single rebel group with a few thousand soldiers, especially when they were not targeting Israelis. Even the rebels were not expecting such a quick win. One question we should be asking is if North Korea is similarly a house of cards that could easily fall. The reason the Iranians and Russians pulled out of Syria so quickly is that it became apparent that Assad’s military was not willing to put up a fight for him against the rebels. I wonder what would happen in North Korea. I also really wonder just how strongly the Iranian military would act to protect the Ayatollah. Also, I’m seeing evidence that Iran is more brittle than it appears. The Israelis evidently bombed several gas pipelines almost a year ago and the country is still reeling from it. A recent New York Times article details how much of the country is functioning without electricity to the point where 30-50% of manufacturing is offline and schools and government offices go day to day without people knowing if they will be open. Conditions are becoming ripe for people to revolt, and I’ve noticed that senior Israelis are being increasingly vocal hoping that it will happen.
What struck me about the fall of Bashar Assad was that he was a real jerk to the loyalists around him. He just snuck away and didn’t tell anyone, not even his palace guard or his close relatives in Syria that he was leaving. His wife and kids have already been living in Moscow the past several months, which makes me wonder why his family was there all that time. People in Syria see him as a coward and an asshole. He would never be able to show his face in that country again. He was a real idiot to buy $2 billion worth of real estate in Moscow with 18 apartments. The minute he got there they seized his assets and put him under house arrest. They are not going to risk their military facilities in Syria to the new government that would be expected to demand this. He should have gone to Cuba or North Korea, but I guess there is no good shopping there for his wife and kids. One day we’ll maybe find out if it was true that he gave Israel important military secrets when he left to ensure they let him fly to Russia without bringing him down. It would explain how Israel was so successful in bombing military sites the day after in what I’m told was an insane broad-sweep operation with little precedent.
Ten years ago when Russia put more footprint into Syria, Obama was not impressed and said it would be a swamp for them and Iran. People blamed Obama for giving Russia a free pass to make trouble for everyone in the region at a relatively low cost. Obama’s instinct was vindicated. Russia and Iran are going to have to write off more than 100 billion of debt, have basically been tossed out of their facilities they invested in, and have nothing to show for it. Consider that Iran got what the US got in Afghanistan: They invested in a local army but nobody considered what would happen if the local army decided they didn’t give a shit and just walked away from the arena. Everything just collapsed around them and they lost face. Consider that Israel blocked all entry routes into Syria including Iraq. Khameini in an early December speech made note of this. It might be why Iraqi Shiite militias have recently said they are no longer planning to fight against Israel. It’s just not happening for them at this point.

US POLITICS Trump is putting in some decent people and some nuts. The more idiots he puts into high positions, the less effective his presidency will ultimately be. The bureaucracy will ignore them and foreign leaders will dismiss them. I recall that in the first year of his presidency Middle Eastern leaders were trying to divine what his strategy was for the region because nobody could figure it out. Finally it became apparent that there was no strategy, not just one big shitshow. Now everyone knows his number and they know how to play him. He is actually more predictable than it seems, once you get the idea. He is more likely than not to be taken advantage of by nations abroad, especially as it becomes apparent that he is all talk and no walk. He won’t use the military except once in a while in unpredictable ways but sparingly and only if Americans are killed, and he will be exposed as a paper tiger. I personally think that Trump is a bit of wussy guy who likes bullying around but doesn’t like getting hit. It also won’t help that there will be tons of in-fighting, leaking and backstabbing within Trump’s administration. They will be wasting tons of energy fighting each other. I would recommend bulking up on cash during 2025. Everyone will just wait this out for the next few years. I suspect that many liberals will simply tune Washington out, and the Democrats will focus their efforts to fighting in court to stop executive actions they think are illegal.
In 2012 when the Republicans lost with Mitt Romney, I wrote that the Republicans would need to moderate their positions on immigration because the country was moving toward more non-whites and this was not a way to get their votes. I didn’t realize that over the past 10 years the Republicans would get more of these votes with their anti-immigration stance than the Democrats have. It’s been a mystery to me and others why Blacks and Latinos have voted Republican, even for a guy like Trump. I figured that Blacks would vote Democratic because they could get more handouts from them. Well, who knew? The past year I’ve seen and heard a lot from these people. Remember I quoted last spring how I wanted to cry at the supermarket with all the price increases and how people must be feeling? Or last summer when I quoted the black Uber driver in DC who said that Biden did nothing for him. Blacks and Latinos were sick of being told that they needed government to help them because they were inferior to Whites, and Asians hated being shunted aside because their kids were working too hard and had “merit” on their side, which was evil according to progressive ideology. Boy, did I hear from Asians this year. Basically, all the people that the progressives thought they were “civilizing” turned on them and said we’d rather vote for Trump than Kamala Harris, one of our supposedly own kind. The Democrats are right – this is a hard pill to swallow because on its face it just doesn’t make sense. Except that it does. Democrats are going to have to win back these voters by jettisoning the progressive ideas of the politics of identity and quotas based on the color of your skin and go back to rewarding merit and equal opportunity with an eye toward helping economically disadvantaged people, regardless of what they look like, even if they are white, male and straight, God forbid. But they won’t – the party leaders care more about ideological purity than winning elections. They probably think the voters will come crawling back to them after 4 years of Trump who will create inflation and higher interest rates with his program, and that they don’t need to make changes. They might even be right. But the Republicans will come out with a new candidate who will win the argument if the Democrats trot out the same ideas that the majority of Americans don’t like. I personally am much more partial to Republican arguments about the economy, and it’s the economy, stupid.
Consider this: According to the Associated Press “Vote Cast” survey, 20% of voters thought immigration was the most important issue. 89% of those voters voted for Trump. I don’t understand why the Democrats allowed half the country to get so pissed off about this issue because immigration is not evil, but they did.

Consider this: I was visiting a pizza parlor and was trying to figure out why revenues had gone steadily down during the year after it changed owners. The new manager was Black and said that White people would come to the door, see him making pizzas and standing behind the cash register, and walk away. The neighborhood (Mount Vernon NY) has a lot of Albanians too and they also seem to take offense at Black people. I’m wondering if replacing him would change the numbers. That comment really hit me hard and made me feel bad; I know there is racism out there, but I didn’t think it extended to deciding whether to go into a particular pizzeria or not. It’s hard to make a living as a Black man in a White neighborhood if you have to worry about stuff like that. It is also possible that the pizza quality is awful according online reviews and my own personal observation, and that might also be a reason for the drop in business.
JAMAICA VISIT I went to Jamaica with Jeremy for Thanksgiving weekend and we went to the town of Negril to visit Rick’s Café, now celebrating its 50th year in business. The highlight there is that it is on a cliff and you can jump into the ocean from various points. Jeremy jumped twice from the 35 foot point and you can see some photos and a video of it here on the site. Food is good there too. Trouble is that from Montego Bay the 1.5 hour drive really takes over 2.5 hours due to lots of traffic and tons of potholes. Probably the worst road I’ve ever ridden on that I can remember. There is a private beach there which is nice but not as pretty as the one at my hotel, the Half Moon resort. It’s not worth 5 hours in a car out of a 7 hour sightseeing trip. Also to know, the water temperature in late November is colder than it is in mid-March. Not so bad you can’t go in, but cold enough that you don’t want to go in.

ISRAEL TRIP NOTES We went to Israel to visit my daughter who is on a gap year program, meaning the year between the end of high school and the beginning of college. We arrived the day after Christmas and left the day after New Years Day. Normally the country would have lots of tourists, but our hotel was only 40% full in Jerusalem and in Tel Aviv they were basically giving rooms away to us. The rockets from Yemen hit Tel Aviv a lot more than Jerusalem. I didn’t see a single person I knew the whole week I was there. El Al Israel airlines has a monopoly for now on flights from the US and most of Europe and they are taking full advantage and hotels in Israel are pricey. The cost of 3 people flying to Israel and being there for a week and a 2 day stopover in London was within 10% of the cost of 4 people flying to Brazil and South America for 2 weeks. There are only 32 seats in business class and there were only 2 flights on the day we left out of NYC. The majority of passengers are Orthodox Jews. Nobody else is going to Israel unless they have to. So how many free-spending tourists can you get into the country in a day here? Foreign airlines are in no hurry to re-enter a market that is so unstable. United’s CEO said he has no interested in re-entering a market for the third time in several years. El Al is an airline that is neither elegant or awful; it’s just that when you ask for a glass of water, the flight attendant on both flights refuses to bring one because you have a plastic bottle at your seat so why bother? The food is somewhat better than hospital food but it’s not going to win any awards.
The first thing you notice on the ground is the traffic. GPS is of limited utility because you never get where you’re going when it says you will. We were very frustrated going anywhere except at 10pm and it’s going to be at least another 5 years before Tel Aviv has a light rail system because they are not paying their bills to the French company and keep changing the plans. Jerusalem has a light rail system that works pretty well but the rest of the city is snarled in traffic. It took us 3 hours to drive from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv during rush hour, a trip that should take 60-90 minutes by car or 30 minutes by train. It doesn’t pay to take the train because you still have to get to and from the train stations in taxis that might not be available and the train only goes every half hour even at peak hours. The “Gett” taxi app doesn’t tell you how much it will cost or when you will get there. It just hails a taxi for you. There is no other service available. It’s frustrating because you can’t go and visit people unless you have lots of time to muck with the traffic. I had people come to see me for breakfast. The kids had to cancel several activities and my wife got stuck because they couldn’t get taxis or it took so long to go where they wanted to go that they ran out of time. The best time to move around during the day between cities or within a city is around noontime except on Fridays. I have kept a few friends in the country after all these years, but I wonder if any of them would show up to see me if I didn’t offer them breakfast in a 5 star hotel.

Walking to the Western Wall at night through the Jaffa Gate and then through the Jewish quarter is quite safe with plenty of people walking all over. It wasn’t that way 40 years ago. The Jaffa Gate at night-time is safe and pleasant. My son Jeremy’s happy place is at a shuq eating street food, although he enjoys it more on a quieter Sunday than a chaotic Friday. There are several of these in both major cities. On a winter Friday, downtown Jerusalem is closed by 2pm. We went to services at the Great Synagogue and I found the place not so well maintained and the new cantor and choir not so good. It’s a little disconcerting seeing the same two brothers running the show 40 years later as if nothing ever changed. We ate our Friday night dinner and Shabbat lunch at the King David Hotel. The meals are elegant and quite expensive, but nothing we ate was particularly memorable. They have a good pastry chef. Friday night dinner is about $170 per person including all taxes and fees and Saturday lunch buffet is $120. If you are not a tourist staying in that hotel, add 18% tax. People complain but consider that brunch in the Circle Room at the Breakers in Palm Beach is about $300 a person and, because we don’t eat shellfish or nonkosher meat, we can’t eat most of it. The King David rides on its reputation and hasn’t invested in its facilities in over 20 years so there is no executive lounge, steam room or indoor pool and its gym is small but adequate. I don’t really want to go to the YMCA gym a block away to swim in the winter and to work out. The facility is good, but it’s not a very nice atmosphere like a hotel. The Inbal Hotel (formerly the Laromme) has a nice gym, indoor pool and spa facilities. Their breakfast is better and they are just 3 minutes walk further down the street. They have a new wing of rooms and suites that are decent facing the old city and which I inspected. Their grand premiere rooms look good and their Royal Suite has a connecting room. The Diplomat’s suite does not but is larger. They have standing showers but they are Israeli style meaning the water will go all over the place. Breakfast is better than the KD which gets boring after 4 days with the same salads and pastries. On my next trip, I will probably go there because they have invested and come up with a better product at a decent price. Another hotel about 8 minutes further away is the Orient. I looked at rooms and suites and they are all just dark and small and it’s far enough away that you have to get in a taxi to go into town. The Emek Refaim area near the Orient does not have as many places to go as it used to but the old railroad station across the street from the hotel has a good food court open at night, which is important because so much of Jerusalem near the hotels is dead after 10pm and on Saturday nights there are so many people in the malls that you can’t get into any sit-down restaurant. We were frustrated Saturday night at 10pm and wound up eating room service in the King David hotel with a very limited menu because everything was either closed or full and they had no lobby service after 9.
In Jerusalem, we went out to Eucalyptus Restaurant, just a few minutes from Jaffa Gate. It is one of the best restaurants in the city with an interesting menu of regional dishes and the chef comes out and talks to customers. We also liked the Grill Room at the King David hotel which is excellent. In Tel Aviv, Asimi restaurant on the beach next to the Dan Hotel had very good fish and dairy items. The best of all was the Herbert Samuels restaurant in Herzliya, about half an hour drive from Tel Aviv beach hotels. It’s expensive but all these places are still half the price of a good Manhattan kosher restaurant.

An excellent activity was a helicopter ride over Jerusalem’s old city and the Judean desert to Masada and the Dead Sea. The whole ride takes an hour and you get a unique feel for the terrain. We used a company called Israel Unlimited and were happy with it. The heliport we used that day was about half an hour from center city Jerusalem. Make sure you get good instructions and go to pee before you get to the heliport if there are no facilities there. You fly over the bright blue waters of the Dead Sea and the salt formations and rocks along the coastline, over a monastery in the desert and around Masada and the Old City; you see the layout of the West Bank cities; it’s really cool. We visited the brand new National Library which has a guided tour as well as a room with very interesting masterpieces of books and manuscripts of interest to Jews worldwide. They show you how robots retrieve and stack books and the architecture is interesting. In Tel Aviv, we went on a graffiti tour of the Florentine neighborhood with an interesting trans person as our guide. Last year I did a graffiti tour in the industrial zone; this was better because it gave you a sense of how the art blends into the neighborhood. Afterward, we had a workshop and made some of our own art on LP records. The Museum of International Jewish Sport at the Macabiah complex in Ramat Gan (a suburb of Tel Aviv) was very nicely presented in English if you book a special tour in advance. We enjoyed walking the beach promenade, Carmel Market and Shenkin Street in Tel Aviv. There was a really good café somewhere between the Carmel Market and the Royal Beach hotel. Café Florentina for lunch in the Florentine neighborhood was decent.
In Tel Aviv, we stayed at the Carlton Hotel. It is not the best hotel in town but I like its location and facilities. They are friendly to us and there are some nice suites up on the 14th floor. The two bedroom suite is not the best suite but it is a 2 bedroom suite. The Bianco suite is the prettiest with nice views but it doesn’t have connecting rooms; there are adjoining rooms. The Kempinski is 20 minutes walk further south and some people prefer that location but I don’t think it’s worth the extra money and their facilities are not great. My wife was not happy with the lack of air conditioning in the winter at the Carlton and was more impressed with the vibe of the Royal Beach hotel near the Kempinski and will soon be trying out that place, but I was not impressed with the facilities there. None of the Tel Aviv hotels have great facilities and that’s a bummer coming to this city. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem both need either a Four Seasons or a Ritz Carlton hotel to bring the cities up to true 5-star standard. None of the existing hotels are really higher than a 4-star, even the King David. I have been told to try the Vista suites at the Tel Aviv Hilton; it is a all-suite section of the hotel and that the hotel has good facilities.
I reluctantly visited Hostage Square in Tel Aviv by the Museum of Art which is something you have to see as a tourist nowadays in the same way you have to Yad Vashem and see the Holocaust Memorial if you haven’t seen it. It represents the soul of half the country that is fixated on the hostages in Gaza. (The other half look at them as a distraction and an excuse to oppose the government. That’s what you get when you have a lot of cynicism and division at the nation’s core). I hope it’s a temporary exhibit that doesn’t keep getting extended. I don’t know if the prime minister ever visited. It has some clever art exhibits and it’s sad. They have a piano there which I played. The idea is to play all the time in honor of the hostages. What makes me sad about all this beyond the square itself is that I and plenty others there feel that the government doesn’t really care about the hostages. They want this to go on forever because the minute the hostages are free they will have to face the music which will then stop and then they will lose their chairs. Rabin Square where he was assassinated is just a few blocks away. That’s what you get in this country – lots of memorials and sad places and nobody ever wants to be happy here. Any time you could be happy somebody comes up with an excuse not to be.

I know that this is not what most others think, but to me this whole country is a failure after 80 years and the tragedy is that people here haven’t figured it out. I want to be specific about what I mean. Success is not just that the country has skyscrapers, world-class companies and research, highways and 10 million people, and that it is feared and respected in the region. Success means that you can live a normal life. The country is more of a pariah than ever and it has become a partisan issue in the USA instead of a bipartisan consensus item. Israelis risk being arrested and harassed abroad. Israelis never make social plans more than a few days in advance. Everything is always tentative and for an American visitor it is infuriating because we make plans in our lives. When I think of people who have moved to Israel, I see very few who succeeded financially. Either they went there with a large fortune and lived off it, or they just went there for ideological reasons and lived hand to mouth and never penetrated the natives and their elites. The number of people who immigrate to the country is roughly the same as the number that leave each year (this year it was negative), which means that growth comes from people in the country having children. It has never really attracted westerners to live there, and aside from various publicity campaigns in times of anti-semitism which result in small spikes of people moving there (and then moving back a few years later), it probably never will. The vast majority of tourists today go there on “missions” — group tours to express sympathy and solidarity with the country and its victims. They tour hospitals with amputees, visit soldiers, do volunteer work picking fruits and vegetables and making food packages, and meet with political figures. It’s in fashion to make a pilgrimmage to the “nova” festival site — a drug-induced trance festival held on a Jewish holiday located right on the border of Gaza that became a killing field last October 7th. My first reaction is probably that of most tourists “If my kid would have been at that festival, I would have killed him/her.” So all of a sudden because Hamas terrorists busted this party, it’s become a must-see attraction to a bunch of religious tourists who would never support such as a festival? The whole thing to me is warped that we put things on a pedestal just because it’s Jewish or Israeli; and for my whole life I’ve seen missions coming and going to this country where it’s never been a good time. But that’s not tourism; it’s charity travel for a segment of people that want to feel they are doing “something” and I am not sure that many Israelis want to feel that this is the future of tourism because it is not making them proud, and it does not involve spending money other than on inflated airline tickets. Most of these tourists just want to eat in kosher restaurants at a good price and don’t want to go visit other countries where they cannot eat freely. Many of them have apartments in Israel and don’t even go to hotels. It is a very small slice of world Jewry and most Jews will never visit even once. There are only so many attractions to see and restaurants to go to. I don’t know half a dozen people in the country at this point that I need to visit. You can see that I curated a great family trip for a week but now that we’ve done it, that’s probably the last family trip to Israel we will take. There is a lot of the rest of the world remaining to be seen and no real reason to come back. Most of the visits I’ve taken to Israel over the years have been only for a few days at a time to get in for a particular reason and to get out.
So yeah, to my mind, I don’t chalk this all up to success after 80 years. And with the mindset that is now the majority of the country, it’s never going to get better. The strategic equation might be in Israel’s favor for the next decade, but a Trump-like figure who runs America and might be willing to take on the Iranians comes only once in 50 years and the future is more likely to be more liberal-type presidents closer to the Biden-Harris-Vance mold. And Trump might yet disappoint; nobody really knows what to expect from him. The vast majority of Americans and even Jews under the age of 40 are not going to be very supportive of Israel’s ambitions and they are not going to take on Iran. So unless Israel figures out how to deal with its Palestinians, it’s always going to be a country at war and it’s never going to be a happy place to live or visit. In 50 years, it will be the same shit-show you are watching now. At least for the coming decade, Israel is planning to increase its all-around war footing with bigger defense budgets and increased soldiering. It will be a burden carried by a minority who will not want to be the suckers that carries everyone else’s weight. I don’t see the upside in the medium-to-long term even if people are convincing themselves that Trump and Bibi will knock Iran out of the box and everything will be better. It’s too easy to dismiss all this and say that the Palestinians don’t want peace and that the Iranians will always be there in the background to muck things up. October 7th didn’t happen in a vacuum; Gaza has been a festering problem for over 50 years and it is obvious why people danced in the street there when it happened. The Israelis share blame in maintaining the tinderbox that exists because half the country wants territory more than it wants peace. Yes, the current Palestinian leadership will not make peace but they know they have no incentive to change given Israel’s current leadership. It will take new leaders on both sides under the age of 60 willing to take risks, move their people to a moderate position, convince the other side they can be see a deal go through. Something could be done here, and the big difference now is that the other countries in the region actually want Israel to exist and to contribute to the region, and they want stability. None of them want Iran and if you take away the excuse of the Palestinians, Iran loses its excuse to fan the flames. I don’t see this as an impossible problem to solve if the will is there.
To recap, I’ve been coming here for 40 years through the Lebanon War in 1984 all the way through 2000, the Intifadas in 1988 and 2000, Gulf War in 1991 and 2002, and all the Gaza mini-wars from 2014 onward, and it’s never been so touch and go every minute for this long a time that you are afraid a rocket will hit any spot in the country, and right now it’s just shrapnel. A year from now it could be nuclear weapons and the Iranians won’t be so stupid as to keep the bomb only for themselves; they will give it to their proxies to maintain deniability just like they have done till now. You can’t go to sleep at night with any sense that you will get a good night’s sleep. Parents with kids in the army won’t travel out of the country for years at a time because they are always waiting for a bad phone call. Every time you go somewhere it is a total pain in the ass. It’s not a life for me and I don’t know why people here seem to be immune to it. But Israelis? They are busy thinking they are the smartest people in the world and for some reason the country rates high on the world happiness scale. Really? It’s a place where taxi drivers second guess Waze and then find themselves thoroughly fucked.
But let’s be honest. Israelis do not win the award for being the smartest and stupidest people in the world at the same time – British black cab drivers think they are also too clever with their 3 years of taxi-based “Knowledge” training and refuse to even look at the GPS. You don’t want those guys taking you to the airport in London; go with Uber. We would have been thoroughly screwed had we sat in the highway traffic jam with a taxi driver on the way to Heathrow that could have been avoided. Not only are they intelligent: Israeli taxi drivers scream at you and call you an idiot if you take too long to adjust your seat or put on your seat belt. I’ve had several of those most charming encounters but at least I’ve learned how to work the doors on their cars.

I visited relatives who I used to see 40 years ago when I first visited the country on a gap year program. Now it’s full circle and I’m there visiting my daughter who is on a program and seeing the same relatives 40 years later, one of whom is now 95. She is not happy with what the country is today; it’s not what people founding it signed up for and the Europeans who founded the country are now a minority within it. Its Anglicized prime minister survives by adopting the psyches of the more Middle East Arabist sort. Arabs I speak to that are older and have some institutional memory prefer the European stock that they used to deal with.
Iran should be smarter about its designs to make Israel disappear. Stop spending so much money on terrorism and proxies. Just keep funding the Israeli Arabs plus the ultra-Orthodox who don’t work or serve in the army and the Messianic settlers who are mainly a financial drain (which is over 50% of the country), and just let the Israelis destroy themselves because with all this non-productive nonsense the 10% who pay 90% of the taxes mostly want to leave. People who call for National Unity basically want everyone else to adopt their own point of view and then shut up. I don’t enjoy being here with all the constant tension, traffic and attitude. I was counting down the days and hours till we were ready to leave. I’ve never seen it as unstable in 40 years of visiting; I don’t want to go to sleep at night wondering if I’ll be woken up at 3am with sirens due to Houthi missiles. That happened 3x the week I was there. As I see it as a visiting outsider, Israelis seem immune to the fact that they are living in a shithole, and they don’t even react when the sirens go off according to my kids who were in nightclubs with them.
What’s funky about Israel is that most people have 2 sides to their lives. You see one of them but if you ask them what they do when they are not doing their day job, you get strange answers. One massage therapist says he breaks down doors during anti-terrorist operations. A waiter says he goes behind enemy lines to blow things up.
There will be some interesting political talk on the Israel subject below in the Travel Notes section about my recent visit to Israel this past month.
New Years Eve is not a big thing in Israel and the Houthis disappointed us by not striking that evening. Mocktails are not yet in fashion in this country. People who want to drink want to drink alcohol. I guess we know why.
At this time of year, it’s cold in Jerusalem with highs in the 50’s and often rainy. Tel Aviv is more pleasant in the 60’s when it doesn’t rain.

Tel Aviv airport on departure is not bad but the El Al business lounge has 4 toilets for a two story lounge. The Business class security lane is just one lane and it had 25 people waiting when we got there. VAT refund line took a long time because just one person at the window. You have to take shekels in cash for the refund which is useless when leaving the country as a tourist. I wouldn’t rely on it especially if there are people in line and if you have no place to spend the shekels.
It’s a 5 hour flight to London. In the past, I’d be reading Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post cover to cover and it would take a long time to read them. Now they are mostly rags. Haaretz is ultra-liberal and preachy and predictable. They hate everything about the country. The Jerusalem Post basically prints press releases and puff pieces and you could just skip over these papers in 5 minutes.
All the toilet paper in the hotels were hard and my butt is all rashed up, so I’m happy to move on to London with soft paper and heated bathroom floors and a shower that has a door and a sunken floor with borders around it.

Some political talk in Israel for a moment: my friend Mohammed who is probably the smartest guy in the country who ought to be prime minister and is very highly placed, says that the Syrian rebels want to deal with Israel and are making overtures in a religious manner that show that they have consulted with religious leaders who approve of their overtures. Hamas under Sinwar veered extremist but others around him are more reasonable and could be dealt with. Iran has a movement that is against all this interventionism and might have been responsible for killing the previous president, and assisting in the elimination of others such as Haniyeh. Turkey will deal with Israel. Bennett for prime minister is a good choice. Iran’s nuclear program is completely penetrated so that they might not want to find out what actually would happen if they tried to press the nuclear button. He agrees with me that North Korea might be softer than expected. He’d like to live in Syria; doesn’t see a great future here unless Israel and Palestinians make a deal. Agrees that today’s Israel is not what it was and that Ben Gvir and Smotrich are beyond the pale. Assad was an idiot to go to Russia although he had no great choices but they will not protect him when Syria has leverage over their assets there. Hamas will eventually invite a pan-Arab force to enter Gaza. Yemen will cease rockets into Israel as soon as there is a ceasefire in Gaza; most Palestinians don’t like the Houthis and feel they are doing more harm than good for them. The ceasefire will take away the excuse of shelling Israel. This paragraph is Mohammed’s views and I think they are insightful.
A friend of mine in the foreign ministry agrees that it is not a matter of Israel having better propaganda but that the product itself is not selling well in the rest of the world. I told him that Diaspora Jews increasingly sees Israel as a liability to their security rather than as their ultimate protector and that Americans and Israelis increasingly do not share the same values and that progressives will not be supportive of a government with racists in it and eventually isolationist Republicans will not be either because Republicans have not historically supported Israel and it’s just these evangelicals that are driving the party’s current support. They will be happy for Israelis to defend themselves, except without their financial assistance. He did not argue my point. He hopes that maybe Smotrich will be out of the government. He likes Benett and Liberman, the latter who he says is not the same man he was years ago and who was one of the few people who years ago warned about what would happen in Gaza. He is counting on Arabs to police Gaza. Lots of opportunities if Turkey and Israel cooperate. Thinks Bibi will lose next election because too many people have suffered economically from all this war. Agrees that the country’s makeup has changed. Doesn’t want to leave. Some of Israel’s economy is booming such as AI, cybersecurity and weapons sales. The rest of the economy has suffered real damage.
To me it is simple – the next year will prove everything and probably be the most important year of Israel’s modern life. Either the Yemenites and Iranians will be stopped or nobody in the entire region will be able to invest or sleep well at night forever. I don’t want to be there now and I wouldn’t want to be there ever in that case. Israelis keep clubbing even in the middle of sirens because they are just immune to it all. Maybe you have to be. I’m in no rush to go back. Other than the fact that restaurants in Israel are cheaper, I don’t see the big attraction. Food prices are cheaper – look at the price of meat in a market and it is half of what it is in NYC. But few Israelis can afford to buy the meat.

LONDON TRAVEL NOTES Let’s talk London a bit: we had a 2 day stopover and I’ve been to London many times to the point that I don’t really care to see anything here except to do a bit of shopping and to just enjoy the vibe of the place. Having arrived just after New Years, the holiday crowds are gone. There is a surplus of 5-star level hotel rooms and prices are going down. Uber is not that much cheaper than a black taxi cab but they use GPS so it is better for the airport. We used Uber from the airport but it wasn’t very convenient; if you arrive at night, just take the black taxi cab to town and the price is not that much more. Besides the Heathrow Express to Paddingon, there is a new Elizabeth line on the tube that goes from Heathrow into central London and makes several stops, such as at Bond Street right by Oxford Street. It takes just 5 minutes more than the Heathrow Express and for this reason fewer people are riding that train and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ultimately goes out of business. Claridge’s hotel is just 2 blocks from the station. It’s easy and cheap to get from Heathrow over there. That Bond Street station is a ten minute walk from the Langham which is where we stayed. It’s an old favorite of mine; it is 3 blocks from Oxford Circus and has nice rooms (the corner Executive rooms are great) and good food and facilities including an indoor pool and a business lounge that puts out a decent lunch at 2pm. Claridge’s has also upgraded its facilities but it is more expensive and exclusive. If you are at the Langham after 10pm it is a ten minute walk away to food places such as a pasta bar and a gelato place. Not much in that immediate area at night.
Marks and Spencer does not offer VAT refunds. Harrods food court has no place to sit. We were disappointed at Harrods; all the clothes are black and white and appeal mainly to Arabs and Russian mafiosos. Can’t buy handkerchiefs at Harrods anymore. You can buy them at M&S but they are not super soft. John Lewis actually had some nice clothing to buy and at a good price. Nopi Restaurant by Ottolenghi is decent. Claridge’s hotel restaurant (not the lobby) was also good with a cool blueberry baked Alaska dessert, and both restaurants got us out quickly pre-theater. We saw two good shows: Mrs. Doubtfire (from the movie) and Operation Mincemeat, a British comedy-musical about a world war II deception operation. Went to Covent Gardens but we’ve been there so many times that we’ve bought anything we wanted from any of the stalls there. Paul Smith has a flagship store right near the Covent Garden tube station that had beautiful stuff and great post-holiday sales. England is cheaper than I ever recall it being at 1.25 USD to a British Pound, and prices at a Pret sandwich shop are 50% less than what you pay in NYC. The Oyster cards are easy to refill at the tube stations. Jeremy wanted to visit the Jack the Ripper museum which is worth all of 15 minutes. It was pretty cold here with a mix of weather. I was expecting 40’s but it was colder; bring a hat and gloves.
We flew home on Virgin Atlantic. This is the second time I found the clubhouse lounge at the airport to be better than the flight itself. I keep getting stuck on old airplanes with very old cramped seats and small overhead compartments. The lounge has good food but no more spa services. I can’t tell you much about their upper class service because every time I fly on the airline I see an old cabin that is not representative of what they supposedly offer.
The British economy is not good right now and I don’t know how long the new prime minister will last. Arabs and Indians are making London work right now because they are the ones putting money in. There are fewer Russians around right now. It’s all very corrupt here but in a discreet way. At least things look clean to the tourist when you walk around the city. London is still a pleasant place to go although Jews say it is less pleasant these days to live there. On our next trip we might go to the Victoria & Albert Museum for a private tour (there is a big Cartier exhibition coming in later this year) and the Transport museum where you can see old underground stations and cars.