Israelis of a certain age cannot say the word “Tiberias” with a straight face. The reason is a 1960s comedy sketch — “The Cafeteria in Tiberias,” written by Nissim Aloni for the beloved trio HaGashash HaHiver — in which two elderly locals and a municipal official gravely debate whether to build a cafeteria on the lakeshore, until the humble snack bar swells into a monument that would scratch the skies of Tiberias, punctuated by the sighing refrain: ah, Tiberias, Tiberias… if only you were Safed. Israelis still quote it, because the joke is affectionate and because it stings: a gorgeous city, endlessly talked up, that never became what everyone agreed it should be.

Shimon Peres liked to say Israel had only two seas, and one of them was dead. Stand on the Tiberias promenade and the arithmetic feels unfair: here is the country’s other sea — fresh water, ringed by hills, layered with two thousand years of history, the kind of setting that elsewhere becomes Lake Como or the Lake District. Instead, the joke got there first.

And then the sirens made the joke impossible to tell. Since October 2023, Tiberias has absorbed wave after wave of alerts: Hezbollah barrages that sent shrapnel into its streets and set fires on its hillsides, Iranian ballistic missiles over the Galilee during the twelve-day war of June 2025, and the renewed Lebanon war that reignited in March 2026. The city has largely been spared mass casualties. What it has not been spared is economic devastation. Hotel occupancy — the lifeblood of a city whose identity rests entirely on lakefront tourism — fell by as much as 45 percent year-over-year at the war’s peak; national tourist overnight stays cratered by nearly 80 percent. Room nights in Tiberias, above 800,000 in 2018–2019, collapsed to just over 100,000 after COVID and three successive wars. Meanwhile the city took in some 10,000 to 12,000 evacuees........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)