The passengers were greeted with champagne and mimosas before they retired to their balcony cabins or enjoyed the lavish buffet.
This was not your usual wartime evacuation.
With many flights out of Israel canceled, the United States chartered the Royal Caribbean Rhapsody of the Seas cruise ship to get its citizens out of danger.
US citizens looking for a way out can register with the US Embassy for assistance. More than 3,000 have already done so, and the Embassy was expecting the ship to be filled to capacity (about 2400 passengers).
Instead, only about 200-300 Americans and their families arrived at Haifa port. Many had received emails from the US State Department telling them they were “assigned” to ship transport.
Others were told that boarding would start at 8:00 and that they must be at the port by 9 a.m. Some arrived as early as 6 a.m. to be assured of a place; about 70 people were in line by 7 a.m.
However many people assigned to the ship weren’t on the ship’s manifest. After some confusion, everyone holding a US passport, whether or not they had registered with the Embassy, was able to board around noon.
The ship left port a little after 3 p.m. – two hours ahead of its scheduled 5 p.m. departure. Passengers were outnumbered roughly three to one by the crew.
The ship normally sails out of Haifa and serves the Israeli tourist trade, so the rabbi on board greeted passengers and arranged for kosher meals. Even the duty-free at the port was open.
To arrive in Cyprus
The ship will arrive in Limassol, Cyprus, on Tuesday morning. Passengers will be bussed to local airports, and from there must make their own arrangements to return to the US or other destinations.
Boarding passengers were handed Evacuee Manifest and Promissory Notes, promising to pay back the cost of their evacuation – valued at the cost of an economy plane ticket, rather than a cruise.
The ship’s WiFi system, which started having problems on the way to Haifa, was unavailable, leaving passengers in the dark about the situation in Israel (and unable to make flight arrangements) after losing the phone signal from shore.
One of the departing Americans was Rick Benjamin, a retired lawyer who practiced for 40 years in Detroit. He now spends his days responding to anti-Israel comments on the Internet. He lives in Eilat with his daughter Mara Benjamin, a high school English teacher, and her two teenage children, who made aliyah in 2013.
In 1993, Mara entered an essay contest on why she wanted to go to Israel. She won an all-expense-paid week-long tour.
Mara, who has a degree in Middle Eastern studies, said “I’ve lost a bit of trust in Israel to protect me. I’m going to do what’s in my paranoid gut. I’m going to watch what’s happening in Syria. If it’s just rockets, we’ll go home.”
Rick Benjamin said they hoped it would be safe enough to return within a few weeks.
One reason they didn’t leave earlier is that they needed to find foster parents for their three cats and a dog. Pets were not allowed on board. Each passenger was allowed one 50-pound suitcase and a small carry-on.
At least one family disregarded this and brought two large suitcases each.
Aydela, who didn’t give her last name, lives in Rosh ha Ayin and is on her way to her sister’s home in Dallas with her two young children. Her husband Orian is staying behind to care for the couple’s ten cats. “You don’t leave family behind, he said.” Aydela is planning to come back when the war is over.
One woman in the line to board was seven months pregnant. She was concerned because she doesn’t have health insurance in the US.
Thu and Donna Nguyen, from Fremont, California, were on a Christian pilgrimage tour when the war broke out. The rest of their group of 24 (mostly Europeans) got out earlier via Jordan.
Heda Amir, a Haifa resident who is not a US citizen, came to the port with an Israeli flag and a pizza box with the slogan “bring them back.” She was returning from a protest in Tel Aviv in support of the estimated ### Israelis and foreign citizens, including babies and children, who have been taken hostage by Hamas.
“Many people from Bedouin villages were kidnapped or killed by Hamas,” she said.” Hostage children, she said, had been killed by Hamas and their deaths live-streamed to their parents on their own phones. She hoped that the departing Americans would be made aware of the atrocities and motivated to help with efforts to recover the surviving hostages.
Michele Barnett is an American from Kalispell, Montana who was visiting her son and his wife and seven children in the Golan Heights when the war broke out.
“I felt very safe at first until they started bombing,” she said.
Joseph, an American graduate student studying aerospace engineering at the Technion in Haifa, decided to return to the States because his international lab program was disrupted. “The first week, everyone left. My advisor is going back. Safety isn’t really a concern.”
David Rayner, 33, an American from Louisiana who works at a Haifa videogame design company called Tiltan, offered those waiting in line the use of the company’s bomb shelter in the building next door.
It was built in 1932 and served as a British bank, he said. The shelter, which can accommodate 800, was the former vault. He came to Israel with a MASA program just before the COVID pandemic and then made aliyah.
“I’m the baby in the family,” he said, “and I’m the only one here in Israel. My Dad always sheltered me. He wouldn’t even let me mow the lawn until I was 16. At the end of every conversation with my parents, they would ask ‘When are you coming home?’. But now my Dad said, ‘If there’s anything you can do to help people, stay and help.”
“My friends have guns,” he says. “They’re fighting. If they die, I die. I want to stay.”
This report was written in cooperation with The Forward.