A year of being unable to go home

The Dan Hotel on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem is far away from Lebanon but guests there were glued to their cellphones Saturday night for news of the IDF’s cross border ground operation against Hezbollah.

“The IDF spokesman made a statement at 8am and he is going to make another one now,” said Liat Dahan, one of 250 evacuees from the town of Shlomi who have stayed in the hotel for a year. “Everyone is following the news.”

On 16 October 2023 they were evacuated by authorities amid cross border shelling and fears of a Hezbollah invasion after the October 7 brutal Hamas incursion that left about 1200 people dead and 250 abducted to Gaza. In the ensuing war, the IDF has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to Hamas health authorities, and more than two million people have been displaced, according to US media reports.

An estimated 60,000 Israelis were displaced from the country’s north and a slightly smaller number from the south.

About 1000 of Shlomi’s approximately 7500 residents were brought to the hotel, but most have sinced moved back north to be close to work or to flats in Jerusalem and elsewhere. For many of those still in the hotel, it’s been a long year of claustrophobia, idleness and uncertainty over when their displacement will be over.

But now, with the IDF ground offensive underway, their spirits have been lifted and they are already thinking about what they will do when they return to Shlomi.

“I have very high hopes now,” said Ayaly Okrat, 57. “We see the light at the end of the tunnel. I would like to believe that the army will do its job and the problem will be solved.” She envisions being home by January.

That could be overly optimistic given that the fighting in southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah is on its home turf, is proving costly. Moreover, even if the Iranian-backed group is vanquished in the south, it may still be able to fire long range missiles from locales further north. There is also great uncertainty over how the current confrontation with Iran will play out.

But it is easy to understand why Shlomi’s evacuees want their exile to come to an end as soon as possible. Okrat, who was a senior worker in Shlomi’s community centre and serves at once as the main organiser of the evacuees at the hotel and their liaison for assistance from the government and Jerusalem municipality, said the transition was difficult for many.

“There are crises, there are children and adults who need emotional care. You’re not at home and it’s hard to adjust. At first it was hard for the parents to sleep with their kids. Then we were able to get more rooms. All day you’re in the rooms and all the time with the same people. Not to be in your house, your neighbourhood and with your friends is hard.”

But Okrat stresses that the Shlomi evacuees were better off than many. For five years, the local authorities had prepared for mass evacuation to Jerusalem in case of a Hezbollah challenge. “We were fortunate to get a big hotel and we opened a mini-town here. We opened facilities for grades 1-3 and for the elderly. We were much better off than elsewhere because when we came, we were ready.”

But she says going back will have its challenges too. “We’re going to need a lot of time to repair our education system and our frameworks,” she said.

It seems that the key to getting through the year in good shape was to keep busy, preferably with meaningful pursuits. For paramedic Liat Dahan, this meant opening and volunteering at a clinic for the evacuees.

October 7 and the days after had been frightening and traumatic. While reeling from the news of Hamas’s incursion in the south, “I kept my eyes fastened on the border, to know that Hezbollah was not entering from there. I thought they would come out of tunnels. If Hamas were able to do what they did in the south, I thought Hezbollah would make minced meat out of us,” Dahan said

She added that she had stayed in Shlomi during difficult periods before and that it was hard for her to leave. But she knew this time the danger was greater and joined the evacuation with four of her children.

At the clinic, she treated infants as well as the elderly five days a week in the morning and working at a paid job she found in the evening. Recently, she started working full time in Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital.

Meanwhile, her children took a liking to their new school and would like to stay there. “For me and my children, Jerusalem has been a good place,” said Dahan. She is not sure whether she will return to Shlomi when that becomes possible.

Dahan says that for her fellow evacuees the possibility of returning home soon “is what’s helping them to hold on”. But she thinks the army still has much to do before people can return safely. “We haven’t even started. If Iran is taken care of in a good way, that will finish off Hezbollah and Hamas. When you want a fish to die, you have to hit it over the head.”

Mali Jano, a cosmetics specialist in Shlomi, says she kept herself sane by offering cosmetics services in the hotel. “I bought second hand furnishings and some materials and opened a studio in my room.” This kept her busy, but she still has the feeling that “we have been on hold for a year. For a year, we haven’t gone forward, we may even have moved backward”.

“It will be hard when I get back,” she added. "I visited and found that the ceiling had fallen down on the floor. A few months ago, another part collapsed. I will have to start from the beginning.”

What will be even harder to repair will be the relations between Arabs and Jews, uneasy even in the best of times. Jano says she no longer believes a negotiated solution with the Palestinians is possible. “When their babies are born, they turn them into poison,”she asserts.

Okrat, the community leader, stresses that she feels no sympathy for the evacuees in Gaza, most of whom have been displaced multiple times amid widespread concerns about hunger, clean drinking water and being bombed by the Israeli airforce, which says it is targeting terrorists. “Hamas brought this upon them and they were partners who contributed to murder. I do not have pity for them.”