FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
TEL AVIV The solidarity assembly line begins in the basement, where a hundred boys peel the potatoes, wash and cut the lettuce and divide the meat into portions. From there, the ingredients are brought upstairs to the kitchen of the Ha’Achim restaurant, “The Brothers” in Hebrew, where chefs prepare individual meals that are easy to transport and eat even under a military tent on the edge of Gaza.
Yotam Doctor, together with his brother Asaf, transformed the area on the avenue to Rabin Square, named after the prime minister who was assassinated in 1995 and with him the hopes for peace, into the operation’s headquarters. Until Saturday, until the horror began with the invasion of villages and towns around the Gaza Strip, discussions took place in the bar about the government’s justice plan and how to stop the anti-democratic turn. The demonstrators quenched their thirst here with a beer on the way to the parades.
Because Yotam had been protesting since the first days of January and only stopped on Saturday, when the entire movement behind the protests decided to remain silent and the political slogans were silenced by the massacre. But – he says – when you have served the country as a pilot of an Apache attack helicopter, when you have organized the parades of thousands of people on the chessboard of Israeli cities for ten months, you cannot back down. “Where the state was missing and is still missing, we intervened,” he says in the garden of the restaurant, now divided into stations, each with a mission, the young people sitting in front of the computers they brought from home: “At this table they take the requests for help, they create the product list, they collect donations, the others sort the meals that come to us from a hundred chefs.”
Every day, the Doctor brothers and their extended family of volunteers prepare and distribute 20,000 meals, especially for the soldiers at the front, and reach the families evacuated from the destroyed areas with a warm meal. “The government has failed them,” he continues. The situation is so serious that we are negotiating to purchase bulletproof vests for the soldiers.” From the uniform of the protests, the T-shirt with the broken black heart and the inscription “I have no other nation” has become a symbol of these dark hours .
Yotam and former airmen, up to the pilots of the elite squadron that flies the F-35, were at the forefront of the demonstrations and were among the angriest and most organized. Like their own, other groups shifted from antipathy to the far-right coalition to a coalition of unity within 24 hours.
The women, who marched every Saturday in red dresses and white bonnets inspired by Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” set up a center in the Expo sheds north of Tel Aviv where they try to help the families of those still missing, and The organization has activated 80 communities to provide comfort to other women across the country. “We had to transform,” one of the leaders told Haaretz newspaper, “from a collective full of anger to a traumatized group that had to help other people who were more traumatized than us.”