Returning this week, the skies still hum with planes, though these are passenger jets carrying holidaymakers and teens on tour, not fighter jets.
One of the apartment buildings damaged by the strike daubed with an Israeli flag[Missing Credit]
Along Allenby Street, shopkeepers mostly insist that life has returned to normal since that early morning on June 16 last year when the missile hit.
“It took a month or two to fix everything,” says Ofer, who runs a camera shop. The storefront window and part of the stock of lenses were destroyed, but the damage could have been a lot worse. “We were lucky,” Ofer adds.
Allenby has long been the centre of Tel Aviv’s photography trade; at one point there were around 30 camera stores here.
Further down the road, Yaacob, 81, is fighting for compensation for the damage to his shop. Inside the Aladdin’s cave of Photo Doron, named after Yaacob’s son, vintage cameras are stacked from floor to ceiling. The blast caused around 150,000 shekels’ (£38,000) worth of damage, Yaacob says, but as much of his stock is second-hand, he lacked the receipts required by the authorities to pay for the repairs.
“I’ve passed it to the lawyer to fix,” he says.
Shopkeeper Yaacov sells and fixes vintage cameras[Missing Credit]
The strike that hit this part of the city was one of the Iranian missiles to slip through Israel’s air defence shield during the 12-day war, causing an estimated $1.47 billion in damage. In this shop, which Yaacob opened 51 years ago, the scale of the destruction is visible on his door, still marked by jagged shards of glass.
Sitting me down to tell me his life story, Yaacob points to a black-and-white photograph of himself on the wall and says he once owned half a dozen camera stores across the city, importing cameras from Japan when film still came in rolls. He was badly wounded during the Yom Kippur War, when tank fire at the Suez Canal killed two of his friends, and shows me the scar on his leg.
So he takes a long view of Israel’s present troubles – they are, he thinks, not comparable to 1973.
Photo Doron first opened its doors 51 years ago[Missing Credit]
Miraculously, nobody was killed in the strike that hit this neighbourhood. Elsewhere, 28 Israelis died during the 12-day war and a further 60 people in Israel were killed in the conflict between Israel, Iran and Hezbollah that followed this February.
Along Allenby, businesses of every kind were forced to close while repairs were carried out. Further up the road, a sex shop remained shuttered for several months. The nightclub next door, MASH, stayed closed even longer. Inside the store, shopkeeper Christian says many of the dildos survived unscathed. Being made of rubber has its advantages.
The sex shop[Missing Credit]
A few doors up the road, a man working at a liquor shop recalls shelves of shattered bottles and floors slick with alcohol and shows me CCTV footage of the moment the blast wave blew through. It took months to repair the damage, with government compensation covering much of the cost.
Across from the blast site, at Norish, a stylish Bauhaus-era building now home to a coffee shop, art gallery and hi-fi DJ deck, British comedian Zach Margs sits in the sun with a friend while Yuval makes coffee behind the counter. She tells me it was only two weeks ago that the café's replacement doors were finally installed, the heavy hardwood design sourced from Italy.
“It's not recovered yet. It will take time,” she says of the community in this central district. “My heart breaks when I hear about people going down to the shelter and then coming home to nothing,” she adds.
Across the road, the juggernaut of the missile-damaged office block with its blown-out windows and scarred façade looms over. I remark on the juxtaposition between people sipping coffee in the sunshine and the ruin opposite.
Yuval shrugs, “That’s Israel,” and calls the next coffee order.
