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Yulia’s threatened seal is not phased by rockets from Gaza, let alone missiles headed in the opposite direction.
About six feet tall and twenty years old, Yulia went up last Friday to a sandy beach in Jaffa, an ancient city south of Tel Aviv. It was the fourth of five days of fighting between Israeli militants and Palestinian militants in Gaza.
He fell fast asleep.
Yulia is the definition of a mismatched scene. Two days earlier, air raid sirens on the same coastline sent swimmers and sunbathers rushing to a municipal bomb shelter. Now, an endangered Mediterranean monk seal – one of about 700 in the world – has landed on Israeli shores for the first time since 2010.
“It’s a miracle,” said Ruthy Yahel, a marine ecologist at the Israel Nature and Parks Authority who helped look after Yulia this week. “They know no limits, no boundaries, no wars between countries.”
Yulia stayed on the beach for days, sleeping unconscious because of the ceasefire announcement. He didn’t react when crowds started gathering over the weekend to watch him sleep. She seemed unbothered when a local boy christened her Yulia, and the name began to make headlines in the Israeli news media.
They focus instead of molting, their fur gradually changes color from brown to gray. Sometimes, they roll around in the sand. But mainly, he slumbered.
As his fame spread, Israel’s natural authorities closed the beach to prevent onlookers from disturbing him. Kan, a national broadcaster, trained a camera on the sleeping area, providing an online livestream. He is an inspiration memes on social media, with users humor so that he can defeat the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in the elections.
Over the weekend, Israel’s national conversation became part of the war to seal – providing one of the emotional whiplash events that define daily life in Israel, where the decades-old conflict with the Palestinians, coupled with the growing internal divisions. creating a tumultuous existence. Domestic unrest one week, deadly conflict the next – closely followed by the emergence of rare marine fauna.
“We’re all looking for sanity because of all the craziness that’s going on,” said Avi Blyer, 47, an animator who came to see the seals on Wednesday morning.
“He is an ambassador of sanity,” Mr Blyer added. “They represent something else.”
For conservationists, Yulia’s arrival is also a small victory after decades of efforts to revive the endangered species.
In the late 1800s, the Mediterranean monk seal population was in the thousands, experts say, but dwindled to hundreds in the 20th century after hunters killed too many and human activity destroyed the seal’s habitat. Over the past twenty years, conservation teams, mainly in Greece and Turkey, have developed coastal nature reserves, helping to increase the number of seals.
“This is something to celebrate,” said Ms. Yahel, a marine ecologist
Like many travelers, Yulia stopped in Turkey before going to Israel.
After Mia Elser, an Israeli seal expert, sent a photo of Yulia to her colleagues in Turkey, the Turks found a familiar and distinctive mark on her back – a scar that has been compared to the “tughra”, or the intricate calligraphic signature of the Ottoman caliphs.
The Turkish team realized that the seal was one they had been tracking since the mid-2000s and that they had been seen frequently in a cave near Mersin in southern Turkey – most recently in March. The seal was so familiar to Turkish mariners that for many years it was known as Tugra (pronounced TUR-rah) – after the Turkish spelling of the calligraphic signature.
Why the seals swam more than 320 miles to Jaffa is a mystery, but one theory is that the growing seal population created more competition for food, which drove them farther.
Yulia appears to be braver than most species, Turkish experts say – generally less afraid of human contact, and more prepared to swim long distances. In 2019, he appeared in Lebanon.
“They are very easygoing seals,” said Meltem Ok, a Turkish marine scientist who says he has been following the Tugra/Yulia since 2005. “They don’t care about humans.”
At one point last week, Yulia seemed so unconcerned that Ms. Elser, an Israeli seal expert, worried that she was dead. To check he was still breathing, Ms. Elser crept slowly towards him in the darkness, watching carefully for signs of life. Suddenly, the seal’s nose twitched, and he opened one eye.
“This is the only one of us that is close to him,” said Ms. Elser, a researcher at the Delphis Association, an Israeli non-profit organization that works to protect marine mammals.
For Israel, the news of the seal has provided a short balm from the sequence of rolling crisis – from a deep social rift through the government proposed changes to the court, to the war last week, and the insurgency in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At the local level, there has been a brief reception of ethnic tensions in Jaffa, once a predominantly Arab city where Arab residents still often feel priced out by the growing gentrification.
News of Yulia’s movements has dominated social media groups in the neighborhood for the past few days, said Deborah Danan, a Jaffa resident who is one of the groups.
“It’s nice to be able to talk about where the seals are on the beach – instead of where the nearest bomb shelter is, or whether there is a protest,” Ms. Danan said.
But on Wednesday, visitors were met with a disappointingly empty beach. Yulia has disappeared into the sea, and it is not clear if she will return.
On Thursday, Yulia made several attempts to land on the beach further north, but each time a dog appeared.
“I hope this country will come back,” said Ms. Danan. “This country needs a distraction.”
Myra Noveck and Hiba Yazbek contributed reporting from Jerusalem.
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