I am hiding in the opening of a shawarma shop opposite Rabin Square. I don’t know how I got here, all I remember is running, running, and now my legs hurt and my stomach hurts and I can barely breathe but I’m alive: I’m still alive, and I can’t say that for other people in Tel Aviv.
The store is abandoned and there is still the smell of roasting meat inside but everything is thrown around. I managed to lower the metal grate over the entrance and now I’m at the window with the camera peeping out. It’s been very quiet for a while but that didn’t last. The first loud sound I heard — it sounded like back when I was a girl and the first Gulf War was going on and we used to hide in the room with the masking tape on the windows and the wet towel against the gap in the door to stop chemical weapons, and we watched on the television as the missiles were being fired. That’s what it sounds like now. Missiles. Someone is shooting at Tel Aviv again, and I have a strange feeling it’s not the Iraqis.
The missile attack has been going on for over fifteen minutes. I can hear it, a constant bombardment, the whisper of flight followed by explosions, and I can see buildings coming down in the distance. Sometimes I see people running outside, but they don’t seem to have a purpose, they just run, and some of them don’t make it. Then I hear a new sound, like heavy vehicles moving on the road, and I look through the camera and there’s a convoy of tanks moving down Ibn Gvirol from the direction of the cinematheque. As they come closer I hear a man’s amplified voice saying: “Stay inside! Lock your doors! Do not panic! The army is dealing with the situation!”
The situation? All of a sudden I get this huge suspicion and I have to take a deep breath. Is the army responsible for what’s going on? Is it some secret weapons programme from the Weizmann Institute that somehow got out of control? Is that what’s really happening?
The tanks are coming closer. And then, all at once, it becomes very, very quiet. The bombardment seems to have stopped. I don’t see people outside any more. Only the tanks, and more and more of them are coming, and then I see — it’s unbelievable — I see this military jeep going past and two army officers sitting inside it and a third soldier with a machine gun at the back, covering them — the officer in the passenger seat looks high ranking, in fact he looks familiar, I pan the camera on him and get a close-up of his face — it’s the Aluf Pikud Merkaz, the Major General in charge of Israeli Central Command, and I can’t believe it but he’s smiling. He has the driver go straight onto the square itself and there the jeep stops and the Aluf gets out — he’s got a pistol in one hand and he’s smeared his face with battle paint and he’s waving the gun in the air and he seems to be shouting but I can’t pick up any sound. The tanks are going down Ibn Gvirol and down Frishman and down the side streets, spreading everywhere, and they form an enclosure around Rabin Square. Nothing happens for a while but then I notice Yigal Tomerkin’s Holocaust memorial is — I think it’s vibrating. At first it’s hardly noticeable but then I see the whole frame of it, that massive inverted triangle I remember climbing once during a demonstration in the square. The whole thing is shuddering. The Aluf turns to look at it too, and all the tanks rotate their guns and point at it. The Aluf shouts something, it looks like a challenge, and he waves his pistol in the air again. The Tomerkin structure vibrates harder and then it starts to turn, like a Hanukkah spinning top. It turns faster and faster, and then there’s a huge tearing noise and the whole structure lifts in the air, still spinning, and hurtles across the square, above the head of the Aluf Pikud, and into the Tel Aviv municipality office building. All the tanks begin firing simultaneously but there is nothing to fire at. The Holocaust memorial crashes into the municipality building and the whole front caves in, windows explode and rain down glass on the parking lot where Prime Minister Rabin was murdered, and I see the Aluf falling down to the ground and covering his head with his arms and I realize what he’d reminded me of — it was Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now — but he doesn’t now, not any more. The spinning Tomerkin structure gets blasted by the tanks and the council building is collapsing and then —
Something weird is happening in the distance. At first I don’t notice it because I’m watching what’s happening in the square and it isn’t good. There is a strong, sudden wind and it smells of the sea and then I see one tank, and then another, lifted up and hurtled about, randomly, crashing into buildings or into each other and one flies over the square and I see the Aluf lying on his back and he is beginning to scream and then the tank falls on him. The remaining two soldiers in the jeep try to start it and somehow they succeed, they’re driving through the square while things are flying about them and — they make it — they disappear into a side street and I wish they survive; I wish I was going with them. Then I look up, I think I might be crying, there seems to be a sort of mist and I have to blink a couple of times and — the weird thing — it looks like something is rising in the distance, somewhere near the Dizengoff Center Mall, as if the ground is rising and pushing all the buildings and people and cars and — it looks like a mountain.