Maybe it isn’t so clear to Jews or others outside of Israel what happens on Yom Kippur in Israel. Cars stop for the day. They just stop. It looks like a post apocalypse movie where the oil ran out one night and all we have left are bicycles and roller blades.
As far as I can tell (people are very vague on this) there really is no enforceable law against driving, it just isn’t done. The police could stop you, but they’d just ask why you were driving, tell you to be careful and let you go. There is no religious police to enforce this kind of thing in Israel as it isn’t a religious state.
Now it is true that this happens in places where observant, religious Jews live in large majority: parts of Jerusalem, highly religious towns like Tzfat (Safed, Zefad, whatever) and many others on every Sabbath: but on a regular Sabbath in Tel Aviv Friday night traffic is bad and the restaurants serving pork or shell fish are full to overflowing.
On Yom Kippur, however, everything stops. Non-observant Jews and observant Jews alike, just hide the car keys. For sure, if your kid falls off his bike and needs the hospital nobody (from both those communities) would think twice about driving the car to the hospital.
But on Yom Kippur the non-religious Jews just organize their lives such that they don’t need to drive.
For sure many of them will not fast, and they probably stock up on DVD’s because the state TV channels shut down (but there’s plenty of other cable channels).
But they just don’t DRIVE their cars. The air smells good, the visibility gets better and from sundown to sundown the streets are full of people strolling or cycling along 10 lane highways. People have found a way to organize their lives that for just one day a year, nobody drives except for emergencies an many do not even drive at that point, they have self-driving cars that assist them.
I left my apartment to have a look this year and I saw one pickup truck and 3 police cars moving. Slowly. Through the crowds of children on bikes.
Below is a slideshow of what that looks like in Tel Aviv that I found on YouTube, there are many more videos but this kind of gives a good idea.
Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv on YouTube
However, some of you may have heard the stories of violence in Acco this year. Of course this wide agreement among JEWS to selectively observe one of Yom Kippur’s rules and not to drive cars can be abused. As I’ve tried to explain, non-observant Jews almost uniformly observe this rule even though their usual behavior isn’t to observe the laws of the Sabbath (of which Yom Kippur is really a special case).
Arabs, on the other hand, don’t feel this need and as the streets in Jewish parts of Israel are full of children riding carelessly on streets that would normal be chock full of cars, if an Arab decides to drive through these parts, the children’s parents have a right to feel annoyed.
It’s just not something that other Jews do and if they do it, its an emergency and they are driving VERY VERY CAREFULLY (which is certainly not the norm here!)
This is the kind of background you’d never get when AP tell tales of Jews and Arabs fighting over something stupid like someone driving on Yom Kippur. Meryl Yourish picks apart the bias but without really explaining why driving in Jewish areas on Yom Kippur is such a big deal. That’s not a criticism of Meryl, I’ve never really understood or believed the no car thing here until I saw it this year with my own eyes.
Even when you read a first hand account, its not till you understand how widely observed the no car rule is that you get a feel for why fast moving cars driven by anyone, Jew or Arab, on Yom Kippur are SUCH A BIG DEAL.
Sometimes you really do just have to be there.
