105

FROM THE TERRACE OF a second-floor apartment, Cobi peers up and down Ibn-Gvirol Street, the would-be Park Avenue of Tel Aviv were it not for the design of the apartment houses that line its six lanes. As in the Italian city of Bologna, its apartments are cantilevered over the sidewalk, so that pedestrians shopping at street level or drinking espresso outside the cafés are shaded from the Middle Eastern sun and protected from the long winter days of rain. Now there is neither shopping nor coffee drinking, but there is shade, beneath which tens of thousands of Jews sit on the cracked pavement and do what refugees do. Nothing.

Apart from the pistol strapped to his waist, Cobi is armed only with a foot-long brass pipe, once a spent artillery shell, sealed at both ends. A ball-peen hammer is tucked into his military web-belt.

As expected, the first of a long line of Royal Jordanian tanks appears from the south, making its way slowly down the divided boulevard. Not one shot is fired from their cannons. Apparently their intent is to take up positions along its entire length so as to seal the long roadway from end to end.

Cobi tests the cable strung tight across the boulevard.

Like the other cables, it is taut as the string of a violin, the white sheet pinned to it announcing surrender—a surrender that everyone in the city understands will not be honored by the victors. Their tanks are not here in some imperial gesture or show of strength. They are not here to proclaim victory, but to execute it. Tel Aviv is about to be blasted to bits.

As the endless column moves down the boulevard—named for the medieval Spanish poet who wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew, a detail which could not possibly interest the invading force—the lead tank’s commander scans the street through binoculars. Sure of the city’s surrender, he stands in his turret. He sees nothing but white sheets. Satisfied, he re-enters his Challenger, seals the hatch, and orders his driver to continue until the very end of the street, which his digital map shows terminating at a rather flimsy bridge over the Yarkon River. After the buildings on either side are destroyed and their inhabitants annihilated like cockroaches, he will order his brigade to bypass the flimsy bridge, cross the river, little more than a wet ditch at this time of year, and then attack the northern suburbs, whose highrise apartment buildings can be expected to collapse. After that, they must only wait for Egyptian infantry to pour into the open wound that was Israel’s first city and mop up the surviving population.