Daniel's question this week is deceptively simple. What is it actually like to live a few doors down from a head of state? Not as a thought experiment, but as a daily reality. He and Hannah were apartment hunting in Jerusalem and found themselves standing outside a place that was, as he puts it, a street or two from the Prime Minister's residence. And his immediate reaction wasn't curiosity, it was deterrence. Who wants motorcades and weekly protests and CCTV as permanent fixtures of their address?
And his instinct, I think, was right, but the reason it's right is more interesting than the instinct. He assumed it would feel suffocating, like living inside a security perimeter. What the reporting actually shows is that it's less about feeling watched and more about feeling... managed. The security is a nuisance, but the real friction is with the other people the security attracts.
The protesters.
The protesters. And the counter-protesters. And the journalists. And the people who park on your street because they're trying to get a glimpse of a motorcade. The residents near Balfour Street in Jerusalem, and near the Caesarea villa, don't talk like people who are paranoid about surveillance. They talk like people who can't get their car out of the driveway on a Saturday night.
Which is a different kind of invasion. Daniel framed it as privacy, but the anecdotes that actually surface are about logistics. A paramedic who can't answer an emergency call because the crowd is too dense. A woman whose ten-unit building emptied out because nobody could stand the noise anymore.
That's Efrat Benn. She lived on Azza Road, which is right in the thick of the Balfour protest zone. She told the Jerusalem Post that by early twenty twenty-one, her building had gone from ten occupied apartments to two. Hers and one that had been converted to an office. Everyone else left. She couldn't even sublet her place for a vacation rental because nobody wanted to stay near the protests.
So the market priced in the nuisance. That's the thing about living near power. It's not that the state is watching you, it's that the state's opponents are shouting outside your window, and the state's defenders are blocking your street, and your property value is doing whatever it does when both of those things are true at once.
And it cuts across political lines. Caesarea is interesting here because it's Netanyahu's private villa, not the official residence. It's on Hadar Street, parallel to Rothschild Boulevard, which is the town's main promenade. He bought it for about a million dollars in two thousand two, and it's worth roughly four times that now. But the house itself is usually guarded by just two agents. Two. On protest days they reinforce, but the baseline is minimal.
Two agents for a sitting prime minister's private home. That's either a statement about how safe Caesarea is or a statement about how much security is theater.
I think it's a statement about how much the security apparatus relies on the neighborhood itself. Caesarea has about six thousand residents. The houses sell for ten million shekels and up. It's a gated community in practice, even if it's not formally one. The residents are wealthy, they're connected, and they're not the kind of people who want a permanent security cordon. So the compromise is two agents, a few cameras, and a lot of hoping.
Until the protests started. Then the compromise broke down.
Right. In twenty twenty-four, the weekly protests were drawing about seven hundred people. That's not a huge number in absolute terms, but Caesarea is small. Seven hundred people on Rothschild Boulevard is a visible, audible event. And the residents split in a way that's interesting. Some of them joined the protests. Some of them jeered. Some of them filed police complaints through the local committee chairman.
There's a quote from a sports therapist named Shahar Bek, who was hurrying home with his daughter and said, roughly, this is awful, I want it to stop. Their shouts in our ears, blocking the road on our only free day, putting us under curfew, essentially. And then the kicker. And for what? Netanyahu isn't even here.
That's the detail that keeps recurring. The prime minister isn't home. The protest is symbolic, the security is symbolic, but the traffic jam is real. And the residents are the ones who pay for the symbolism.
There was also a real estate agent named Hanna Bendor who protested weekly and said, I also find it inconvenient, but I find it more inconvenient to live in a country run by a crook and a failure. So even the people who support the protests acknowledge the nuisance. They've just made a different calculation about which nuisance is worse.
Which is the actual texture of living near power. It's not a spy thriller. It's a zoning dispute with national politics layered on top.
The Balfour Street situation in Jerusalem is even more compressed. The official residence sits at the corner of Balfour and Smolenskin, in Rehavia, which is one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. Smolenskin Street has residential buildings on only one side, all odd numbers, ending at number nine, which is the prime minister's house. Half the street has been sealed off for years.
And there's a journalist, Greer Fay Cashman, who lived on Smolenskin and wrote a first-person piece about what the protests did to the street. She described demonstrators scaling the wall of the adjacent Terra Sancta church property, entering residents' gardens, bringing flaming torches. Her phrase was that residents were subjected to an invasion of their privacy.
Flaming torches in someone's garden. That's not a metaphor. That's an actual thing that happened on a residential street in Jerusalem.
And the response from at least one protest leader was revealing. Sadi Ben-Shitrit said, I don't care about them, as far as I'm concerned they can move to another neighborhood. Most protest leaders rejected that, but the fact that it was said out loud tells you how raw the conflict got.
There's also an eighty-two-year-old woman named Anna who was woken at five thirty in the morning by megaphones and initially thought it was a terror warning. Her quote was, God forgive me, at that moment, I hated them. And the thing is, she's not a political actor. She's an old woman in an apartment who got woken up by a sound system.
Sixty residents petitioned the High Court to shut down or limit the Balfour protests. The court rejected it. And the court was probably right, legally. The right to protest near the seat of power is important. But the residents weren't wrong either. They were living in a place where their basic quiet enjoyment of their homes had been suspended, and the legal system said, yes, that's the cost.
What I keep noticing is the asymmetry. The prime minister can leave. The protesters can go home. The security detail rotates shifts. The only people who can't leave are the residents. They're the fixed point in everyone else's transient drama.
And when the security apparatus decides to get serious, it gets worse, not better. The Ra'anana case is the clearest example. When Naftali Bennett was prime minister, he refused to move into Balfour, so he stayed at his private home in Ra'anana. And the security services turned his neighborhood into what one resident called a jail.
This is the part where the surveillance Daniel was imagining actually materialized.
Yes. Chipman Street in Ra'anana was covered with cameras mounted on metal rods from lamp posts. One resident said they were like birds, and that they invaded privacy and drove people crazy with their constant hum. There were generators powering enormous projectors that lit up the area every night, including the bedrooms and living rooms of neighbors.
So the security solution to one family's protection was to flood the neighbors' homes with light and noise. That's not a byproduct. That's a design choice.
A thirty-year resident said, I'm sick of the questions. Give me your name, show me your ID. I take my dog out for a walk, I need to ask permission to pass in two directions. It's like living in a jail now.
And there was an accountant named Ohad Shalom, father of six, who lived inside what they called the sterilized zone. He said, I look out the window and see steel walls surrounding me. There's a generator here that pollutes the air. I, my wife and children can only enter the house from one direction. They built a three-meter-high wall.
Three meters. That's not a fence. That's a barrier. And it wasn't around the prime minister's house, it was around the security perimeter, which happened to include the neighbors' homes.
Bennett later said that if he'd known the disruption, he would have taken a sleeping bag and slept at Balfour. Which is easy to say after the fact, but it does suggest that even the protected person didn't fully grasp what the protection would cost the people around him.
The reported cost of the security and construction around the Ra'anana house was on the order of fourteen million dollars. For a temporary arrangement. The prime minister's neighbors got a wall and a generator and a permanent ID checkpoint, and the prime minister got to sleep in his own bed.
There's a woman who lived near Bennett who was asked whether she'd trade the disruption for Netanyahu returning to Balfour. Her answer was, I'm willing to continue to suffer. Which is the most Israeli thing I've heard in this whole story. The suffering is acceptable as long as the alternative is worse.
And that's the thing Daniel was circling. He said he'd find it suffocating, and he's right. But the suffocation isn't primarily surveillance. It's the loss of control over your own schedule, your own street, your own quiet. The cameras are the visible part, but the real cost is that your life becomes contingent on someone else's security needs.
The international parallels are just as absurd in their own way. The neighbor of the vice president in Washington, Thomas DePasquale, said living next door means the national anthem blares at eight in the morning every day. His son got kicked out of school Zoom calls during Covid because the motorcade killed the cell service. And ordering pizza is impossible because the delivery driver gets stopped by the Secret Service and the location gets scrambled.
The pizza detail is my favorite. The most powerful security apparatus in the world, and the practical effect on the neighbor is that his dinner arrives cold.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's neighbors in Kalorama complained about closed sidewalks, overrun parking, noise, traffic. One neighbor said the family had completely taken over the whole block. Which, again, is not a security complaint. It's a neighbor complaint. The security is just the excuse.
Tony Blair's move to Connaught Square in London triggered a neighbors' petition. One neighbor called it a nightmare. Another said it was the best possible news for burglary, because who's going to rob a house two doors down from a former prime minister's security detail?
That's the other side of the coin. The security nuisance is also a security benefit. You're less likely to get burgled. Your street is well-lit, even if it's well-lit at three in the morning because of a projector aimed at your bedroom.
And in Jerusalem, the Balfour area has a permanent police presence. That's not nothing. If you're a resident, you have a faster response time to any incident than almost anyone else in the city. The question is whether that benefit outweighs the cost of living inside a protest zone.
For most people, the answer seems to be no. The Efrat Benn building emptied out. The Rehavia residents filed petitions. The Caesarea locals filed police complaints. The people who stay are either ideologically committed to one side or they're stuck, financially or practically.
There's also a weird class dimension. Rehavia and Caesarea are wealthy areas. The people living near the prime minister are not a random cross-section of the population. They're people who could afford to live somewhere else if they really wanted to. And yet they stay, or they stay long enough to complain about staying.
Which raises the question Daniel didn't quite ask, but was hovering around. What does it do to a person's relationship to politics when the national political drama is literally on your doorstep? Does it make you more engaged or less?
The evidence suggests it makes you more exhausted and more polarized. The Caesarea residents split between joining the protests and jeering at them. The Rehavia residents split between petitioning the court and joining the demonstrations. Nobody seems to have become more moderate by proximity.
Proximity doesn't breed understanding. It breeds friction.
And there's a darker layer. The security incidents. In October twenty twenty-four, a Hezbollah drone hit Netanyahu's Caesarea residence. No injuries, but still. A drone strike on a residential street in a wealthy beach town. The neighbors were not consulted about whether they wanted to live next to a target.
Then in November, two flares were fired at the Caesarea home. Three suspects arrested, including a reserve officer active in the protest movement. So the protest and the security threat blurred together. The neighbor can't tell anymore whether the crowd outside is a political demonstration or the prelude to something worse.
That's the paranoia Daniel was talking about, but it's not the surveillance that causes it. It's the ambiguity. Is that person outside my window a protester or an attacker? Is that drone a delivery or a weapon? The security infrastructure is there to manage those threats, but its presence is also a constant reminder that the threats exist.
And the residents are not wrong to feel that the whole thing is being imposed on them. The prime minister chooses to live there. The protesters choose to gather there. The security services choose to fortify there. The resident just lives there, and everyone else's choices become the resident's daily reality.
There's a quote from the Times of Israel piece about Caesarea that captures this. The protests normally keep an eight-hundred-meter distance from the home, but on one Saturday night they came within two hundred fifty meters. And the residents noticed the difference. Eight hundred meters is a background hum. Two hundred fifty meters is in your face.
So the distance matters. The difference between living near power and living inside power's radius is measured in hundreds of meters. And the residents know exactly where they fall on that spectrum.
Do you remember the detail about the pizza delivery in Washington? The Secret Service stopped the driver. And the neighbor said the location gets messed up. That's the mundane reality. It's not that the state is watching you. It's that the state's security protocols interfere with your dinner.
And the state doesn't apologize. The security detail has a job to do. The protesters have a cause. The prime minister has a schedule. The resident is the only one whose needs don't appear on anyone's list.
There was a paramedic in Jerusalem, Yossi Zinger, who lived above Paris Square, which is the protest epicenter. He raised the question of emergency access. If I get a call for duty, how can I make my way on a Saturday evening when the whole area is crowded? That's not a rhetorical question. That's a man whose job is to save lives, asking how he's supposed to do it when his own street is impassable.
And nobody had a good answer. The protest organizers said the cause justified it. The court said the right to protest outweighed the inconvenience. The paramedic was left to figure it out himself.
Which is the whole story in miniature. The big principles get debated in court and in the media. The small practicalities get dumped on the people who live there.
I'm going to say something that might sound callous. But I think part of the reason this dynamic persists is that the residents are not a sympathetic class. They're wealthy. They live in Rehavia and Caesarea. They chose to live near the center of power, even if they didn't choose for the power to come to them.
That's fair. The Rehavia residents filing petitions didn't get much public sympathy. The Caesarea residents complaining about protests outside a prime minister's villa sounded, to a lot of people, like rich people complaining about noise. Which is true. But it's also true that the noise is real.
And the noise is political. That's the part that makes it different from living near an airport or a highway. The noise has a message. It's directed at someone. And the resident is collateral.
I keep coming back to the Ra'anana generator. The one that polluted the air and lit up the bedrooms. The security services needed power for their projectors, so they installed a generator. And the generator ran all night. And the neighbors breathed the fumes and slept in the light. And that was considered an acceptable cost of protecting the prime minister.
Nobody asked them. That's the thing. There's no consultation process for becoming a security buffer. You wake up one morning and there's a camera on a pole outside your window and a checkpoint at the end of your street.
And the cameras hum. That detail from the Ra'anana resident. The constant hum. It's not the watching that drives you crazy, it's the sound of the watching.
Daniel said he'd feel like his privacy was invaded. I think the more accurate description is that his life would be requisitioned. Not his privacy. His time, his quiet, his ability to move freely. The state doesn't need to watch you to control you. It just needs to make your street impassable.
There's a line from the Washingtonian piece about Harris's neighbor. He said living by the vice president, there are occasional hassles. Occasional. That's the understatement of the whole genre. The national anthem at eight in the morning every day. Motorcades that kill cell service. Pizza that never arrives. And he calls it occasional hassles.
Which suggests that people adapt. The hassles become background noise after a while. The question is what the adaptation costs.
I think it costs a certain kind of political innocence. You can't live next to the prime minister and still believe that politics is something that happens elsewhere, to other people. It's happening on your street. It's happening in your garden. It's happening at five thirty in the morning with a megaphone.
And the residents respond by becoming either more engaged or more checked out. The Caesarea woman who said she'd rather suffer than have Netanyahu back at Balfour. The real estate agent who protested weekly. The eighty-two-year-old who said she hated them. They're all responding to the same stimulus in different ways.
There's no single resident experience. That's the point. The prompt assumed residents would be jaded and paranoid. Some are. But some are furious. Some are politically activated. Some are just tired.
And some are all of those things at once, depending on the day.
The High Court rejection of the residents' petition is worth sitting with. The residents argued that the protests violated their rights. The court said the right to protest near the seat of power is fundamental. Both things are true. The court had to pick one.
And the court picked the protesters. Which means the residents' only recourse is to move. Which is what the Efrat Benn building did, apartment by apartment.
There's something sad about that. A neighborhood that emptied out because the political drama became too loud. The buildings stayed, but the community dissolved.
And the protest leader who said they can move to another neighborhood. That's the attitude that makes it worse. The dismissal. The assumption that the residents' attachment to their homes is less important than the cause.
Most protest leaders rejected that statement, to be fair. But it was said, and it was heard, and it probably did more damage to the residents' willingness to tolerate the protests than any single megaphone.
The international examples show the same pattern. The Ivanka Trump neighbors complained about parking. The Blair neighbors complained about security risk. The Harris neighbor complained about pizza. It's always the small things that break through.
Because the big things are too big to fight. You can't argue with the Secret Service about whether the vice president needs a motorcade. You can argue about whether the pizza guy should be allowed to reach your door.
And the pizza guy never wins. That's the lesson. The security apparatus is not designed to accommodate the neighbors. It's designed to protect the principal. The neighbors are an externality.
Which brings me to something I've been turning over. The prompt mentioned that the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem is enveloped by a surrounding community. There's no sterile buffer zone. And that's true. But the Ra'anana case shows what happens when the security services try to create one. They don't move the community. They wall it in.
So the choice is between living inside a protest zone or living inside a security zone. Neither is good. The only question is which kind of bad you prefer.
And the Caesarea model is the third option. Minimal security, maximum reliance on the community's own exclusivity. Two agents, a few cameras, and the assumption that Caesarea's gates and wealth will do the rest.
Until a drone flies over the gate. Then the model breaks.
Right. The drone attack in October twenty twenty-four was a reminder that the villa is a target, and the neighbors are in the blast radius. Literally.
I wonder if Daniel's instinct was right, then. He said he'd never want to live there. And after looking at all this, I think he's right, but for the wrong reason. It's not the surveillance that makes it unbearable. It's the unpredictability.
The unpredictability of the crowd. The unpredictability of the security response. The unpredictability of the next drone or flare or protest or motorcade. You can't plan around it because you never know what tomorrow's threat level will be.
The threat level is set by people you'll never meet, for reasons you'll never fully understand, in response to events you'll only read about.
That's the alienation. You're not a participant in the security drama. You're not even an audience member. You're the set dressing.
Hilbert, you've been quiet.
Hilbert: I wouldn't call it a perimeter.
Which word would you use?
Hilbert: Enclosure. I worked a summer job in the late two thousands doing event security for a firm out of Holon. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, the occasional politician's rally. We'd set up what they called a sterile zone around the stage. Ropes, barriers, a few guys in black shirts standing around looking serious. And the client always thought the barriers were the point. They weren't. The point was the gaps. Every barrier has a gap. The gap between the rope and the wall. The gap between the shift change and the next guy's arrival. The gap between what the client thinks he's paying for and what six guys with walkie-talkies can actually do.
The gap is the perimeter.
Hilbert: The gap is the whole job. The reason those Ra'anana residents needed permission to walk their dog wasn't because anyone thought they were a threat. It was because the security plan had a line on a map, and the line went through their front door. Somebody drew the line in an office, probably in an afternoon, and then a different somebody had to enforce it for two years. The residents weren't being watched. They were being administered.
That's the word, isn't it. Administered.
Hilbert: You want to know why the generator hummed all night? Because the contract said the projectors had to run from sunset to sunrise, and nobody thought to ask whether the generator could go somewhere else. Or whether the projectors needed to point at the neighbor's bedroom. The spec said illuminate the perimeter. So they illuminated the perimeter. The fact that the perimeter included a family's living room was not in the spec.
The security apparatus isn't paranoid. It's just literal.
Hilbert: Most of it is. The guy who installed the cameras on Chipman Street probably mounted them on lamp posts because the lamp posts were already there. Not because it was the optimal surveillance position. The lamp posts were zoned, permitted, wired. It was the cheapest way to do the job. The fact that it made the street look like a prison was nobody's decision. It was just the sum of a hundred small decisions made by people who were trying to finish before the weekend.
The banality of security.
Hilbert: The banality of procurement. You think the prime minister's neighbors in Caesarea are bothered by the two agents? They're not. They're bothered by the fact that the two agents need a place to park. And the parking spot is in front of someone's gate. And the gate is the only way the garbage truck can get through. So now there's a memo about the garbage schedule, and the memo has to be updated every time the prime minister changes his plans. That's what living next to power actually is. Memos about your own garbage.
I hadn't thought about the parking.
Hilbert: Nobody thinks about the parking. That's why it never gets solved.
The residents aren't wrong to feel like their lives have been requisitioned. They've been requisitioned by the parking plan.
Hilbert: The parking plan was written by a twenty-four-year-old who'd never been to the neighborhood. He looked at a map, saw a spot near the gate, and wrote it down. That's the whole security apparatus. A series of maps and memos and specs, and the people who live inside the map are the last to know.
That reframes the Ra'anana wall. I'd been thinking of it as a deliberate intrusion. But what you're describing is more like... administrative drift.
Hilbert: The wall was probably in the original plan. Somebody specified a three-meter barrier, and the contractor built it, and nobody checked whether it blocked the neighbor's only entrance. Or they checked, and the fix was too expensive, so they added a gate with a guard. And now the guard has to check IDs, and the resident has to carry an ID to walk his dog. Not because anyone thinks the dog is a threat. Because the gate exists, and the gate needs a procedure.
The procedure becomes the point.
Hilbert: The procedure was always the point. The security is just the excuse.
When Daniel says he'd feel suffocated, the suffocation is procedural. It's the accumulated weight of all the small decisions made by people who don't live there.
Hilbert: The residents can't appeal. There's no form for this. You can't file a complaint against the perimeter. The perimeter doesn't have a customer service line.
The pizza guy in Washington found that out.
Hilbert: The pizza guy got stopped by a man with a gun whose job was to stop anyone who wasn't on the list. The pizza guy wasn't on the list. The pizza was. But the man with the gun doesn't care about the pizza. He cares about the list. That's the whole thing in one sentence.
The neighbor's dinner arrives cold because the list doesn't have a field for pepperoni.
Hilbert: The list has a field for everything except the thing the neighbor actually needs. That's what I learned that summer. The barrier is never the problem. The list is the problem.
The list is written by someone who's never been to the street.
Hilbert: The list is written by someone who's never been to the city. He's in an office in Holon, looking at a satellite photo, drawing a circle around a house. And the circle goes through a playground. And now the playground is inside the perimeter. And the kids can't use the swings. And the residents are furious. And the security guys are just doing what the circle says.
The solution is to draw better circles.
Hilbert: The solution is to have someone on the ground who can say, this circle is stupid, move it twenty meters. But that person costs money, and the budget was set before the circle was drawn. So the circle stays.
The residents live inside the stupid circle for two years.
Hilbert: Then the prime minister moves out, and the circle disappears, and the residents are left with a wall and a generator and a street full of lamp posts with holes in them where the cameras used to be.
The scars of the security apparatus outlast the security need.
Hilbert: The scars are the only part that's permanent.
I keep thinking about the woman who said she'd rather suffer than have Netanyahu back at Balfour. She'd internalized the whole thing. The suffering was acceptable as long as the alternative was worse. That's not jaded. That's something else.
It's resignation with a political edge. She wasn't apathetic. She'd made a calculation. The noise was worth it if it kept the other guy out.
Which is a very specific kind of civic engagement. You're not participating in politics. You're enduring it. And you're enduring it on purpose, because the alternative is worse.
The real estate agent who protested weekly, Hanna Bendor, said the same thing. The inconvenience was real, but the inconvenience of living in a country run by a crook was worse. So she protested. And she lived with the noise she helped create.
That's the part Daniel's prompt got slightly wrong. He assumed the residents would be uniformly resentful. But some of them are the protesters. They're the noise. They're the thing their neighbors complain about.
The neighborhood is divided against itself. That's the real cost. Not the surveillance, not the traffic. The fact that the people on your street are now political enemies.
They still have to share a garbage schedule.
The garbage schedule is a memo. And the memo was written by someone in Holon.
The whole thing comes back to the memo. The banality of it.
If you take one thing from this, it's that living near power is less about being watched and more about being managed. The cameras and checkpoints are visible, but the real weight is the accumulated small decisions made by people who don't live there and never will. The resident's life becomes a series of memos about their own street.
The memos have no author you can appeal to.
The one thing I'll carry is the pizza. The most powerful security apparatus in the world, and the practical effect on the neighbor is a cold dinner. That's the whole genre in a single image.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing.
If you've got a weird prompt of your own, email us at show at my weird prompts dot com. Or find us at my weird prompts dot com.
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