I took the seat at the end of the table so I could see the picturesque view of the Mediterranean.
We were in a restaurant called Kalamata, in Kedumim Square in Old Jaffa, a five-hundred-year-old stonehouse wedged between the fishermen's port and the old city. Directly below the windows stood the bell-gable of the Greek Orthodox church that sits above the harbour, a row of greenbronze bells under a stone cross. Past it: the breakwater, fishing boats, a sailboat with a green sail, an Israeli flag laid flat along the seawall.
The food was Mediterranean, which for a Filipino table meant small plates and no rice.
Tal Schneider sat in the middle of that long table, Filipinos down both sides of her. The political and diplomatic correspondent of The Times of Israel introduced herself, mentioned the book she has coming out in two weeks — Israeli women in combat on 7 October, in Hebrew first, English later — and then spent lunch taking questions from a room of foreign reporters about the least comfortable subjects in her country. She had not asked to see a single one of them in advance.
She drew the distinction herself, more than once over the course of the lunch: the Israeli press is not the Israeli government, and Israeli reporters make their living pointing out what their government gets wrong. A foreign correspondent who confuses the two will get the country wrong.
The accusation we flew in with
Before this delegation landed, colleagues in Manila were already writing that we had picked a side — that Filipino reporters who accepted an Israeli embassy's invitation were there to carry propaganda.
It is worth describing what the propaganda actually consisted of.
A Filipino colleague asked about Gaza: the killing of journalists, and Israel's refusal to let international press in. Schneider gave her government's case first and gave it fully — that some people carrying press cards on 7 October were not journalists, that her own paper had documented cases, that a man filming a hostage in his own house is not a media worker.
Then she gave the other half, unprompted:
“I think my country is making them stay out. I think the country should have let media people in. It's not a good way to conduct issues. It's a mistake.”
“Maybe at the people were beginning, when the war was going on and the abducted captive — but now there is no explanation for that.”
That argument is not a foreign one. It is currently before Israel's own Supreme Court, in a petition to which the Union of Journalists in Israel is a party alongside the international press bodies. Israelis are arguing about it among themselves, loudly, in Hebrew.
Asked how she weighs Gaza's information against her own government's, she went somewhere nobody at the table expected — to the aid distributions.
“During the process, people were killed. They were killed by IDF fire, because when they got close to the location where the food was handed out, some other people instigated a hustle, and the soldiers were afraid for their lives.”
“So on one side you try to help, on the other side you don't do it correctly. And people lost their lives. This is not worth it.”
She also told us where she thinks her country's critics are wrong, at length, and she did not soften that either. On casualty figures she said plainly that she does not personally trust the Gaza Health Ministry, and pointed to her own paper's investigation showing that some names listed as journalists and athletes belonged to armed operatives — a finding that led the Committee to Protect Journalists to open a review of its own database and remove several names.
That check runs both ways, and she would want it to. The Israel Defense Forces has itself since accepted a Gaza toll of around seventy-one thousand, close to the ministry's own count, and a peer-reviewed survey published in The Lancet Global Health in February suggests the real figure is higher still. She said the number was “way too high,” and “horrific,” and that there were parts of the war Israel should have fought differently.
No question was vetted. No draft was reviewed. Nobody from the embassy sat in the room to steer her. Diplomats usually book friendly voices; these ones booked a working political correspondent and let her talk. That is what we were supposedly sent home to launder.
Where the country goes next
The reason she kept circling back to the calendar is that Israel votes on 27 October, and she thinks foreigners consistently misread what that means.
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Start with the oddity. This government will be the first in roughly fifty years to serve a full term, and 27 October will be the first Israeli election held on schedule since 1988.
“This is very rare in Israel politics for a government to finish four years. I don't think I ever covered a Knesset that finished a full term.”
Then the arithmetic, which is the part foreign bulletins routinely get wrong:
“In Israel it's not enough to win the biggest number. You also need to be able to form a coalition. And the problem is that Netanyahu may not be able to form a coalition, but the other side may not be able to do it also. And then if you go to a re-election, he remains as interim prime minister. And if he is an interim prime minister, it means that he won. It's not a big win, but it's a win on the procedural aspect.”
Sixty-one of a hundred and twenty seats form a government. Mid-August polling put the governing bloc at forty-eight, with the former army chief Gadi Eisenkot's new party at twenty-three, Likud at twenty-one and Naftali Bennett's list at fourteen; an earlier survey had the opposition one seat short. Both blocs can lose.
Neither is assured of winning, and a stalemate returns the country to the polls with the incumbent still in office.
On the prime minister himself she was measured rather than damning:
“He was never highly popular. He's a very divisive figure in Israel's history. He always won, but he won narrowly. Many people from the liberal and secular society really dislike him. But he was always able to win with the help of the ultra-Orthodox and the religious and the conservative and people who love him.”
What the vote actually decides
What the vote actually decides is bigger than one man. Three questions sit under it: whether Israel finally opens a full state inquiry into the failures of 7 October, which Schneider calls the most urgent unfinished business in the country and which no government has yet begun; whether the ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service survives, the issue that nearly collapsed this coalition; and what Israel intends for the day after in Gaza, on which the main parties differ less in aim than incompetence.
She would not predict any of it.
“Asking someone in Israel to predict what's going to take place in the next fifteen minutes is impossible. I can only tell you it's going to be hot.”
Back to the window
She took the questions, made her country's argument where she believed it, and took it apart where she didn't.
Then, near the end of it, she mentioned almost in passing that it was her birthday.
Nobody had arranged the lunch around it — the date was the embassy's and coincidence was hers. So we sang to her. We are Filipinos. It is what we do.
That is worth reporting on its own. A country two months from the most consequential election in its history sent us a journalist rather than a spokesman, the journalist argued with her government in front of foreigners for an hour, and then a table of Manila reporters sang to her and she let them. Whatever Israel decides on 27 October, it is deciding it out loud.
Outside, the Mediterranean kept doing what it has done through every empire that ever held that shoreline.
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