TThe text message arrived early Sunday morning from an Israeli friend with a question in Hebrew (and most other languages) that hadn’t been asked in months: “Are we going out tonight?”
After a whole year of pandemic and repeated blockades, the second of which in September closed all of Israel’s restaurants, bars and cafes – and Tel Aviv’s Go-go – the country almost reopened fully yesterday with the world’s leading COVID vaccination campaign . Cariocas, in turn, made the most of it and left with strength.
“Back to life, first in the world,” shouted former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a cafe during a live Facebook broadcast of cappuccino and cake. “First” was a vague concept: many countries, especially in East Asia and Oceania, have never closed or are already open after reducing infection rates to zero.
But for most other countries in the world equally affected by the coronavirus, Israel is in fact a test case for how to restore our lives – thanks to vaccines – and how that life can be. Based on the first night in Tel Aviv, it is definitely celebratory, decidedly surreal and seemingly normal – bordering on recklessness.
On Dizengoff Street, in the center of Tel Aviv, where there are luxury shops and many popular bars, the Sunday night scene was a big party: balloons tied to awnings, people walking on the sidewalks with beers and young revelers overflowing from the majority beverage establishments. while electronic music played.
Beast Travel Digest
Have the whole world in your inbox.
In one of these bars, Fasada, a table of 10 friends, all of them almost 30 years old, drank red wine and beers, talking about life, work and romance. Beside them were two guys working and smoking joints, more concerned with everyday concerns, like a fallen piece of pizza. Nearby, three girlfriends worked together on a bottle of white wine while looking at the crowd.
“It’s wonderful to be back,” Sapir, 28, the waitress, beaming, told me. “Tel Aviv used to be like that.”
Apparently, the only concessions for the unpleasant things from last year were the masks hanging under the chin and the tables more widely spaced than normal. Much of the government’s reopening plan is linked to the “Green Passport” scheme for all those vaccinated or recovered from COVID.
Currently, 40 percent of Israel’s entire population of 9 million people have been fully inoculated with the Pfizer-BioNTech dual vaccine, including 90 percent of those over 50 who are most at risk. Health officials have even started vaccinating teenagers in an attempt to completely stop transmissions that are becoming younger and younger.
But general hospitalizations and those seriously ill due to the virus are decreasing, even in the face of daily COVID infection rates that are still, on a per capita basis, one of the highest in the world (almost entirely among those who have not yet been). vaccinated). Several studies by Israeli researchers in the past few weeks point to a clear fact: vaccines work. Israel’s Ministry of Health released official data this week showing that of more than 3.3 million people considered fully vaccinated, less than 5,000 were infected and of those only 900 developed symptoms.
Hence the great reopening of the economy through the “Green Passport” scheme, which aims to return everyday life to an appearance of normality, in a responsible manner.
Available through an application launched by the government or electronic PDF issued by the Ministry of Health (which can be printed), the small document grants entry to restaurants, bars, event halls, concerts and other public meeting spaces – with capacity restrictions and other safeguards still in place. For those who have not yet been vaccinated, there is still the option of sitting outside, which in the mild climate of the late Mediterranean winter in Tel Aviv, most people on Dizengoff Street were doing.
Not that they necessarily needed it. At first glance, the Green Passport was more of a recommendation than a hard and fast law, with masses of people in and out of various bars mixing freely (and without a mask) for the most part.
“Nobody really looked at the Green Passport,” Tor, 25, an alternative medicine professional with friends, told me at a bar near Boulevard Rothschild.
And, in fact, Tel Aviv has more than 1,700 nightlife spots, cafes and restaurants – an impossible number for local authorities to monitor. The bar code at the bottom of the “Green Passport” is, at this point, an adornment; all that is needed to get in so far, The Daily Beast learned first hand, is a quick flash for the porter of a document that may or may not belong to its owner.
With a vaccine or without a vaccine, however, people went out to enjoy what Rebecca, 35, a British journalist friend, called “our new old way of life”: a good meal in a restaurant with her cousin that was not served in packaging plastic. plates or the ubiquitous plastic boxes placed during the block outside many restaurants (instead of tables and chairs).
The scene in the restaurant, similar to the rest of the city, was “as if last year had never happened,” she said. “The excitement was palpable, people were dancing around the tables to cheesy Israeli pop songs, as if it were a holiday weekend.”
Of course, there were those who found the whole thing difficult to process – at least in the beginning.
“It was weird to leave after so long and be around so many people,” said Tor, the alternative medicine specialist. “But in the end everything was normal, especially after alcohol.”
In a nod to regain lost normality, Baruch and Lauren, both 29, were enjoying a quiet drink outside a cocktail bar on Dizengoff Street, away from the hordes. “It is the déjà vu of life that we have had,” said Baruch, who runs a human resources company, referring to being out. “It is our first meeting after the corona,” he added.
“Our second date,” Lauren, his fiancee, jokingly corrected him. “We went to a cafe this morning.”
A manager at a bar service company, Lauren was dismissed because the entire industry closed because of the pandemic. Even so, she and Baruch had not yet been vaccinated – a recurring theme among many younger Tel Avivis who are not as anti-xxxxx as they hesitate to vaccinate.
“I don’t want to be the first to jump in the pool,” said Baruch metaphorically. “We will see in the future.”
Others seem more irritated with the government for making their lives dependent on receiving a vaccine – and with those who ask. “It is nobody’s business if I did it or not,” Sapir, the waitress, replied when asked, now somewhat less smiling. “The government shouldn’t tell us what to do … and if a restaurant asks me for a green passport, I turn around and don’t go in.”
It was a gap in the arrangement, to be sure: to sit inside a club or restaurant after showing a vaccination document while the bartenders or waiters could not be vaccinated. But there is no way to legally force employees to be vaccinated.
Tor, for his part, was furious with those who have not yet benefited from Israel’s copious supply of vaccines and easy access.
“I have a lot of family members in the United States and they are going crazy [trying to get a vaccine]… People here in Israel don’t understand what the situation is in the rest of the world, ”he said.
For Ohad, 22, a waiter at the Baruch and Lauren cocktail bar, it was an easy decision. He had just received his first jab and was – like his colleagues – wearing a plastic mask.
“I want the customers I serve to feel safe and comfortable,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for six months to start this job – because really, how long can you stay home [on unemployment] getting lost? “
It was an important point: an entire generation of young people in the hospitality industry (and other hard-hit sectors of the economy) who lost a year of their lives in the pandemic.
It was the first night of the rebirth after almost half a year, and both sides of the nightlife equation were eager to return to normal.
Idan, 42, the majority owner of Jasper Bar, a Dizengoff stowaway known for its non-existent closing hours, said it was not easy. “Everything was stressed – there was no government dialogue with the industry, and their financial support basically covered our rent.”
He considered himself one of the lucky ones: his team remained loyal and came back, and judging by the heavy traffic both inside and outside his establishment, customers did too. He hugged and kissed goodbye while hesitantly saying to me, “Tel Aviv … Tel Aviv … things should just go back to what they were.”
After the first day of reopening, it seems so. And as is Tel Aviv, so is Israel – and so is Israel, with its high numbers of vaccination and infection rates, most other countries are likely to fight the pandemic.
If the vaccine succeeds in reducing the number of seriously ill people while the economy and daily life remain open, the world will have a model of how to actually live with the virus. And if it doesn’t, Sunday night will have been the first step towards yet another blockade.
In the meantime, however, Tel Aviv will remain open and the routine will have returned.
“We are going out this weekend, right?” my friend asked at the end of the night, perhaps a sign of how common everything had become.