Same Buildings, Different Emergencies, No Home |
There are objects that tell the story of an entire period. Not through declarations, but through the roles they come to play. In recent years in Israel, the hotel is one of them.
In 2019, approximately 4.5 million tourists entered Israel, the highest number ever recorded. Hotels fulfilled their original purpose. They hosted strangers for short stays. A year later, COVID arrived and transformed them overnight into something entirely different. They became quarantine facilities. The towels were still folded into flowers. The soap was still wrapped in paper. But guests could no longer leave their rooms.
On October 7, 2023, following Hamas’s massacre of communities near Gaza, more than 200,000 Israeli residents were evacuated from their homes. Over 90,000 of them were housed in hotels. Not for a night or a week, but for months. In June 2025, with the outbreak of the Twelve-Day War, the same image returned. In February 2026, it appeared again. And some have yet to return from any of them. This has extended even into the present, with ongoing arrangements placing vulnerable evacuees, including elderly residents, in hotels during the Passover period.
Six years. Four transformations. The same buildings, the same rooms, the same beds. Each time carrying an entirely different meaning for those inside them. This is not fluctuation. It is a continuity of suspended life, collective and individual. And the hotel is the silent witness to it all.
On the surface, the logic is almost irresistible. The war devastated Israeli tourism, which had only just recovered from the COVID years. The country’s international standing has rarely been worse. Hotels that would otherwise sit empty suddenly had occupants, and the state had a ready-made answer to an urgent problem. For the hotels, survival. For the evacuees, a roof. For the state, a solution that required no plan. It looked, from every angle, like it worked.
But hotels are designed for temporariness. That is not a flaw. It is their entire architecture, physical and social. There are no neighbors who know you by name, no sense that the space around you is yours to shape. Nothing is meant to resemble home, because home is where the guest returns. And yet: “Home” taped onto a space not meant to hold it. When that temporariness is mapped onto something that needs to function as home, a price is paid. First by the evacuee, who is asked to build a life in a space engineered to prevent it. And then by something harder to measure: the relationship between citizen and state. That relationship depends on a form of ground, the sense that the state sees you, knows where you are, and has a plan for your return. A hotel room, however comfortable, cannot provide that ground. And without it, something erodes.
Sociological literature distinguishes between two terms that collapse into one in Hebrew: house and home. One can lose a home without the building being destroyed. Home is made of habits, neighbors, smells, routines, and memory. When a family moves into a hotel for a week, the home remains intact in memory. When the stay stretches into months, and no one has told them when it will end or what will be left when it does, that fabric begins to fray. When it happens a second time, the unraveling begins earlier. Not only because the conditions are difficult, but because the very sense of permanence has already been cracked.
Three structural gaps make this problem visible. First, no one knows who is responsible: the authority meant to absorb evacuees has not had its mandate updated in 65 years. Second, there is no central body managing information about displaced citizens. In the first weeks after October 7, that information came from the hotels themselves. Third, and most importantly, there is no framework for citizens who cannot return, not because their home was destroyed, but because the trauma makes return impossible. A February 2026 report by the State Comptroller made all three of these gaps official. It did not invent them. It found them waiting. With Operation Lion’s Roar, two and a half years after October 7, hotels were once again approached at the last minute, exempt from standard tender requirements. As one resident of Kiryat Shmona described in a government focus group: “I was assigned to one hotel, my son to another, my daughter to a third. We are one family, scattered across the country like crumbs.”
Israel is not lacking in laws. There is civil defense legislation. There are compensation frameworks for war damage. There are emergency structures. What is missing is not only policy, but the decision to make it a priority. The state has shown it can move quickly when it chooses to. Here, it has not chosen. That framework does not require inventing new buildings. It requires a decision that the state’s obligation to a displaced citizen does not end at the door of a hotel room.
There are children born during the COVID years, now six years old, for whom moving from one emergency to another is not an exception but the only reality they know. They have lived their entire lives inside the collision between a space designed for temporariness and a state that has not yet decided what permanence it owes them. That is not their failure. It is ours.