I am not a neutral observer.

I’ve spent time in enough of these places—in cafés in Hebron, Ramallah, Diyarbakır, and in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—to have developed something more than an opinion. Something more like a clear preference. A loyalty.

A café is never just a café. It’s a kind of social contract you can see if you sit long enough — who takes up space, who hesitates, who speaks freely and who edits themselves mid-sentence. Who touches whom, and who doesn’t.

If you want a rough measure of a city’s freedom, don’t start with its constitution. Start with its cafés.

There’s a particular quality to a Tel Aviv afternoon — the light off the Bauhaus buildings, the argument still going at the next table, the sense that the city has no interest in making you smaller than you are — that I’ve stopped trying to explain and just started to love. It feels less like an observation and more like a relief.

Tel Aviv was always meant to be something new. Founded in 1909, just north of Jaffa, it was imagined as a modern city — secular, outward-looking, loosely European in temperament even as it sat on the Mediterranean. That aspiration, however one evaluates it politically, settled into daily life in a way that is hard to miss once you’ve spent time there.

You see it in the ordinary. A couple sits close without thinking about it. An argument breaks out at the next table — politics, always politics — and no one lowers their voice. People come and go dressed as they please. Different worlds overlap without ceremony. It isn’t harmony. It’s something more basic than that: a lack of self-consciousness about being in public.

Underneath it all, a baseline assumption — that the state is not, at least in this moment, hovering just behind your shoulder. That you can sit, speak, and exist without calculating the cost.

Much of what I know about Cairo or Damascus comes not from sitting in those cafés myself, but from friends who have, from writers I trust, from reporters who’ve spent years there. I haven’t been everywhere I write about. But I’ve been enough places to know that the pattern is real — and to understand what it means when it breaks.

The cafés of Cairo, Amman, and Damascus are often more beautiful, more textured, more rooted in history than anything you’ll find on Rothschild Boulevard. But they operate under a different grammar of possibility.

Egypt under Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has narrowed the space for dissent to something fragile; casual political speech can carry consequences that trail you home. In Syria, the system that Assad built cast so long a shadow that even its collapse — and he did fall, in December 2024 — leaves the room feeling watched. You don’t dismantle that kind of architecture overnight. Jordan, more temperate and often admirably stable, still marks its limits clearly enough if you press against them.

But it isn’t only political. That’s what makes it difficult to describe and impossible to reduce to a single cause.

The constraint is social, internalized, ambient. People regulate themselves before anything external is required. A man in Amman does not refrain from holding another man’s hand simply because of the police; he refrains because of his family, his neighbors, the invisible web of expectation that binds reputation to survival. You see it in small adjustments. A sentence that trails off. A glance that checks the room. The way certain topics simply don’t quite surface.

And then there is the gender dynamic — and here I am speaking from what I saw directly, not from what I was told.

In the cafés of Hebron, Ramallah, and Diyarbakır, the rooms were overwhelmingly male. Not aggressively so — not in any theatrical or overt sense — but unmistakably. Men occupied the space as if it had always belonged to them, because in some informal, accumulated way, it had. They settled in, spread out, filled the room with noise and presence. Women, when they appeared at all, were often accompanied, often more contained — peripheral in a way that didn’t require explanation because it didn’t require enforcement. It was already understood.

This is what misogyny looks like when it is embedded rather than declared. It doesn’t prohibit so much as it shapes. It determines who can settle into a public space without a second thought, and who has to remain alert and aware of themselves while doing so. The café, which elsewhere feels like an extension of private life into the open, becomes something more conditional — a space in which certain people are guests by default.

And once you notice it, it follows you.

Which is what made a particular afternoon in East Jerusalem so striking — and why I keep returning to it.

I was sitting in a café in the Arab quarter of the city, still within Jerusalem, when I noticed a group of Arab women who had taken over a corner of the room. They were smoking hookah, laughing loudly, leaning into each other, completely at ease. No hesitation, no visible self-editing, no performance of permission. They were, quite simply, there. Fully. Taking up space the way people take up space when the space is theirs.

I resist making too much of a single scene. One afternoon does not overturn a pattern, and I know it. But it stayed with me precisely because of the contrast — with what I had seen in other places just days before, and with what I had not expected to find here, in this city, in this context. It felt unforced. And that, I came to understand, was the point. Freedom that requires no announcement is a different kind of freedom.

Politics follows the same logic. In Cairo, criticism of the state survives in fragments, exchanged carefully between trusted people. In Damascus, it has retreated almost entirely from public space. In Amman, it calibrates itself, aware of where the edges are.

In Tel Aviv, the argument is right there on the table. Newspapers open, voices rising, disagreements sharpening. People disagree fiercely — about the government, the war, the occupation, the courts — but they do so in the open, the openness itself is not in question.

None of this makes Tel Aviv a paradise. It doesn’t dissolve the moral weight of Israeli policy toward Palestinians, or the tensions that run through the society, or the real questions that anyone who loves the place has to sit with. And it would be easy, and wrong, to flatten Cairo or Amman or Damascus into caricatures. There is warmth in those cities, and complexity, and forms of life I’m sure don’t make themselves legible to outsiders. Life finds ways to breathe, even under pressure.

But the café is hard to fake.

It shows you what people are allowed to be when they are not performing for an audience — or when, at last, they are performing a little less.

I said at the beginning that I am not neutral. I should say now, at the end, what that means.

It means that given the choice — having been to enough of these places, having sat in enough of these rooms — I would choose to live in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv without hesitation. Not because either city is simple. Not because I am unaware of what coexists with the freedom I’ve described. But because I have felt, in those places, what it is to occupy public space without rehearsing yourself first.

That is not a small thing.

In fact, I’ve come to think it might be close to everything.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)