Our Story

My Father's Dream

My father came to Israel from Iran in 1979. Since the day he arrived, he has been a true master of Persian cooking. The rice, the stews, the spices, the smells that fill the whole house – that is his art, the same way designing is mine.

For years he had one dream: to open a small restaurant of his own. Nothing too big, nothing that would break his back. Just a concept that works only on Fridays, so he could do what he loves without working too hard.

And he knew from me that Pardes Hanna is the place for food. People come from all over the country for its culinary scene, and someone with real talent can do very well selling food from there.

So when I moved to my fourth home, I wasn't only looking for myself anymore. That is why the fourth home was much bigger and much more expensive than anything I had rented before. It was two separate buildings. The smaller one was for me. The bigger one I gave to my father, so he could finally make his dream come true and sell his food from there.

For the first time, it felt like Babylon was behind us. Like something good was finally being built.

The Law of the Farmland

But as we already know, that house was hiding a lie too.

This time there was no demolition order. This time the problem was the land itself. The property was a nachala – agricultural farmland – and farmland in Israel has its own law. A very simple one.

Under the settlement rules, only the owner – whether registered in the land registry or the leaseholder without it – must live there. If anyone else lives there instead, it is a violation of the law against the Israel Land Authority.

We didn't know any of this. It turned out that we had been rented a house we were never allowed to live in at all. Only the landlady was supposed to live there.

War

When the story exploded, my best friend – the same lawyer from the birthday gift – came to sit with them and look for a fair solution. A way for everyone to come out of it in peace.

Instead, they realized how much trouble they were in. And they declared war on us.

My father didn't want a war. He told them clearly: if this can't be made legal, I'm leaving. And he left.

But even after he left, they sent him an eviction order. An eviction from a house he had already walked out of. It was their alibi – a way to look like the victims on paper.

The case reached the court and ended with a demand that my father pay the landlady 3,000 shekels for her lawyer's fees.

My father wanted to pay right away, so it would never reach the Execution Office (Hotza'a LaPoal), the authority that collects debts in Israel. But they wouldn't give him their bank account details. Days passed. Then weeks. Two whole months.

It smelled like a trap. As if they were waiting for the debt to grow, so they could take even more money from him through the Execution Office.

The Search That Changed Everything

So I asked my lawyer, my best friend, to log in to the Execution Office website and check whether they had already opened a case against my father.

We were looking for a file where my father was the debtor.

What we found instead stopped us both cold.

There were many files – dozens of them – where my father was not the debtor at all. He was the creditor. The one who was owed the money.

Slowly, the picture came together. In 1992, when I was a baby, a lawyer came to my father's business. He collected dozens of bounced checks that customers had given my father, and promised him that there was no need to pay any fee upfront. He would simply take a percentage of whatever he managed to collect.

Then he took the checks and disappeared.

And only 33 years later did we find out the truth: right up until the day we discovered it, that lawyer had kept collecting my father's money and depositing it into his own private bank account.

For 33 years.

New York, New York

All my adult life, I asked my parents the same question, with anger and with blame: why was I the only one of all my friends whose parents lived in a rented home?

Their answer was always the same. My father once had a clothing store called New York New York. It did really well. But so many customers paid him with checks that bounced that the business went bankrupt, fast.

And the house we were living in – the house my parents were just about to buy for only 24,000 dollars – slipped through their fingers because of those same checks.

I grew up believing it was just bad luck. Customers who didn't pay. A business that failed.

Now I know that part of that money was never lost at all. Someone took it. And for 33 years, he kept taking it.

Divine Guidance

In 2015, when I left Tel Aviv, I cried over my fate and over the fate of my family. And deep inside, I imagined that there was one specific person somewhere, someone I would one day settle the account with, for all the suffering he caused my parents and me.

But I never really believed that this is how I would find him.

Think about it. If the last landlady hadn't tried her dirty trick – refusing to take my father's money so she could squeeze more out of him through the Execution Office – we would never have searched that website. And we would never have found out that my father is owed much more, by a much older enemy.

Today, thanks to the recordings and thanks to that landlady's dirty trick, this circle is finally closing. My father is suing the man who had long forgotten his name and his details, and who stole so much money from him for 33 years. Because the theft was discovered only recently, the case can move forward, and it is already underway – just like the case against the landlady. And in both of them, we have the upper hand.

That is why this is not only a survival story.

It is a story of divine guidance. Every trap they set for us became a door. Every Babylon that rose against us led us one step closer to the truth.

A name is a destiny. I named this brand Babylon Survivor before I knew what it meant. Now I know: a survivor doesn't only get out of Babylon alive. A survivor walks out with what was taken from his family.

Going Home

The suburbs taught me everything I needed to know about Babylon. And when that chapter of my life came to an end, I went back to Tel Aviv.

Back to the big city. Back to the towers, the noise and the traffic I once ran away from. Tel Aviv is still Babylon. But this time, it was different.

I didn't come back to the Babylon I ran from. I came back to the Babylon of Zion.

Not the pure Zion. Not yet. That Zion is in the hills of Judea, as close as possible to Jerusalem. But for now, my place is here, in Ramat Gan, the city right next to Tel Aviv where I was born. My family is here. And so are the few friends I never really lost.

But my family and my friends were not the only reason I came back. I came back because the time had come in my life to bring the people who committed crimes against me to judgment.

I am a man of peace. I gave these people dozens of chances to settle everything peacefully, without ever stepping into a courtroom. They refused every single one. And then they dragged my father into it. They put him in financial danger, and worse than that, they took advantage of him in the most cynical way.

That was the red line. You can come after me. But my family is off limits.

That day, I made myself a promise: I would bring an apocalypse on these enemies. Not with violence – with the law, with the proof, in the courtroom. And to make sure the victory would be crushing, I knew exactly where I had to fight from.

The Ending I Already Knew

The truth is, I knew this is how the story would end. I knew it the day they tore down my first home in Pardes Hanna.

When the bulldozers came for my garden and a tower started to rise in its place, I understood something: there is no escape from Babylon. You can run to the quiet suburbs, to a house with a garden, to the end of the world – and Babylon will find you there too.

And if there is no escape from Babylon, then the only question left is where you choose to stand when you face it.

Already then, I could see how this story would end: one day, I would come back home.

The Friends Who Stayed

Remember the friends I told you about at the beginning? Back in 2014 and 2015, I felt like I was losing them, one by one. I had started talking about the things that mattered most to me: spirituality, what is true and what is a lie, and who we really are. And I could see it in their eyes – they thought I had gone too far.

I was the strange one. The outsider. The guy whose ideas were too extreme to even listen to.

But a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. The world changed. And the few friends who stayed here in Ramat Gan had the time to close the gaps on their own.

When I came back, something amazing happened. Suddenly, everyone understands me. The same ideas that once made me an outcast now sound like common sense to them. What used to be "extreme" has become mainstream.

I didn't change. The world finally caught up.

Fighting From Home

The most important lesson of all is this: I have to fight my wars from my own base. From my home.

Not from a place that never welcomed me. Not from a house where the landlord was always waiting for the right moment to push me out. But from the one place where I truly feel at home – surrounded by my family, by friends who understand me, by the streets I grew up in.

A soldier does not go into battle from enemy territory. He goes out from his base, and he knows there is a home waiting for him when he returns.

And the place I came back to has a name of its own. In Israel, the area around Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan is called Gush Dan – the land of Dan. It is named after the tribe of Dan, whose land in the Bible was right here, around Jaffa. In Hebrew, the name Dan comes from the word din, which means judgment and justice. When Jacob blessed his sons, he said: "Dan shall judge his people" (Genesis 49:16). And Samson, one of the great judges of Israel, came from the tribe of Dan.

Then I looked at my own name. In Hebrew, Idan is written עידן. Its last two letters, דן, spell Dan. The judge was hiding inside my name all along. My parents gave it to me long before I knew I would one day stand in court and fight for justice.

A name is a destiny. I came back to the land of Dan, with Dan inside my name, to gather all my strength for this war of justice.

This is what the Hebrew language gave me. Not just words, but a key to understand who I am and why I am here.

The cases are still going on, and Babylon is still out there. But now I fight from home, from the land of Dan. And from here, I am stronger than ever.

Double Chai

But to fight from home, you first need a home. And in Ramat Gan, that turned out to be a battle of its own – a battle worth fighting, but not a short one.

In Pardes Hanna, I had grown used to a certain kind of life: a ground-floor home with a garden, full of sunshine. In Ramat Gan, that is almost a fantasy. This is a city of apartment buildings. Finding a garden apartment that isn't squeezed between the buildings next to it, that has a good view, and that doesn't cost a fortune like everything else in a big city – that is a whole different level of searching.

So for fourteen months, I had no choice but to move back in with my parents. At 35.

And when I turned 36, I said to myself: this is it. Now it's going to happen.

In Hebrew, the number 18 is chai – life. And 36 is double chai. I was born the first time at zero. At 18, I was born again, the day I enlisted in the army. And now, at 36, I was going to be born a third time. With a number like that, the luck would come too.

I Stopped Searching

And how right I was – about how hard it would be. The apartment search in Ramat Gan was five times harder than anything I had been through in Pardes Hanna.

My parents started to worry that I would never find a place, so they tried to help. My mother began sending me links to apartments for rent. Lots of links. Apartments I had already seen. Apartments that had nothing to do with what I needed. Apartments that were wrong for a hundred different reasons.

One day, I simply broke. I raised my voice at her and said: "Enough! You're driving me crazy. You're only making this harder. I promise you – if this is how it's going to be, I'm done searching."

"I want to stay close to you. I want to help you, and especially Dad, with the legal battles we're fighting together. And I know – I promise you – that what is waiting for me is right here, in this neighborhood. If God wants me to have the perfect home I've been wishing for, it will come to me. Not me to it."

And I stopped searching.

The House Next Door

What happened next was exactly what I believed would happen. Only in a way far more surprising than I ever imagined.

My father has a neighbor, a friend from the street. Almost every morning they run into each other in the parking lot and say good morning. One day my father introduced us, and I found out that he works at a vehicle inspection center – the place where you take your car for its yearly licensing test.

I took his number. I had just moved back to my hometown, and I knew I would need a new place to test my car every year.

When the time came, I called him. "Tell me, where is your test center? Maybe I'll start coming to you."

And he said: "Who cares about the test center? Who cares about your car? Forget the test! Tell me, why don't you go see the house right next to your parents' place? It's an incredible apartment. Lucky for you, my son's friends came to see it and didn't go for it – I don't know what's wrong with them, believe me. It's an absolute gem. They could easily rent it out for 8,000 shekels, but the owners are great people, and the price they're asking is something you won't find anywhere. Go see it. Now."

"But how?" I asked. "I didn't see any ad. Not on Facebook, not on Yad2, not even a sign outside the building. I've been searching this neighborhood – only this neighborhood. I would have seen it."

"Their ads got lost somewhere," he said. "And they never put up a sign. Go see it now."

So I went.

Within ten seconds, I knew it was my home.

I stopped running after it. And it came to me – right next door.

To me, it was a huge miracle. Everyone who walks into this apartment asks me the same questions: How did you ever land a place like this? And how did nobody grab it before you, with the crazy demand here in Ramat Gan – and in this neighborhood especially?

The Card She Played

But while I was still living with my parents, my war with Pardes Hanna was far from over.

Remember the house of cards? The landlady of my fourth home was only the first card. Behind her stood the cooperative agricultural association that the house belongs to. The association operates under the local council of Pardes Hanna-Karkur. And above them stands the Israel Land Authority – the body that is supposed to supervise this land and make sure nobody lives there unlawfully.

When we reached the eviction hearing in court, I argued that, according to the recordings, she was not the real owner of the house. She didn't have many good cards left to play against that. So she played one that did exactly the opposite of what she wanted.

She presented a document from the Pardes Hanna council. It stated that only four months after that very hearing, ownership of the land would finally pass from the previous owner to her.

In other words, her lease hadn't even started yet. She was certainly not registered in the Land Registry. And even if she had been, on a nachala that would not have helped her anyway.

Her own evidence proved my claim.

I am not a lawyer, and I don't pretend to understand every one of these laws. But I have basic logic. So after I had moved out and finished the whole move, I called the Pardes Hanna council and asked them one clear question:

"How did you accept my rental contract and register me for arnona – the municipal property tax – when a document from your own office, issued three years later, shows that she was not the owner? According to the details in your own computer, you should have known for certain that this contract was not legal. So how did you approve it in the first place?"

They told me that to get an answer, I would need to set up a meeting with the council's legal advisor.

The Phone Call

One day before that meeting, her secretary called me.

She started asking, impatiently, why I even needed to meet the legal advisor. But every time I tried to answer, she cut me off. Again and again. Rudely. As if she was waiting for me to lose my temper and curse at her – so the blame could be turned on me, for insulting a public servant.

It didn't work.

When I finally managed to get my claim out, she said: "You're wrong. We have a Land Registry extract here in her name."

But a few months earlier, I had already ordered the Land Registry extract myself. It was not in her name. It was registered to the Jewish National Fund (KKL).

"Liars!" I shouted. "I have the Land Registry extract, and your own Planning and Building Department confirmed one hundred percent that this is the exact address of the nachala. And even if it were registered in her name – it's a nachala. You were not allowed to approve my contract without a permit for non-conforming use!"

She tried once more to push me over the edge. But instead of getting angry, I chuckled and told her: "Go on. Keep going." Just enough to let her understand that everything was being recorded.

The moment she understood, she panicked and hung up the phone.

A Small Note From Ramat Gan

Fourteen months after I moved back in with my parents, I moved into my new apartment – the house next door. And once again, I had to register for arnona. This time in Ramat Gan.

Within minutes of handing over my contract, the clerk – a kind, polite woman – told me: "I can't complete your registration. The owner's name in my computer is different from the owner's name on your contract. I'm writing down for you what you need to bring me from her, so I can approve it."

On a small note, she wrote exactly what was required: a Land Registry extract confirming the transfer of ownership.

I messaged my landlady. Within minutes, the extract was in my hands. The very next day, everything was settled with the Ramat Gan municipality.

That small note changed everything.

Until that moment, even my best friend, my lawyer, thought I was just looking for reasons to blame the Pardes Hanna council too. Real estate isn't his field, and from the outside it sounded like too much. But that note was the proof that I was right. Every local authority owes the people it serves a duty of care. Ramat Gan checked in a few minutes exactly what Pardes Hanna never checked at all.

One clerk in Ramat Gan did in five minutes what the Pardes Hanna council never did – while it kept collecting my arnona.

And because the Pardes Hanna council never admitted its mistake, never offered to make up for the distress or for the payments it collected from me unlawfully, and instead tried to trap me into insulting a public servant – my next lawsuit is against them.

This time, I file it from the land of Dan.

Isn't it ironic? Ramat Gan, the city I once saw as the evil Babylon, behaved like the "city of righteousness" the prophet Isaiah spoke of. And Pardes Hanna, the quiet place I ran to, is the one that wants to become Babylon – and as I learned, it will use almost any means to get there.

The Last Open Field

If you're asking yourself what could drive anyone to act this way, I asked the same question. The answer found me by accident.

While I was searching for an apartment in Ramat Gan, I also looked at land for sale. Out of curiosity, I checked Pardes Hanna too. One ad caught my eye. It was posted by a neighbor who lived two houses away from me, in the same agricultural association.

The ad called his plot "the best investment for developers". According to the ad, that agricultural land is going to become a 10-story building, as part of an enormous project worth billions of shekels: around a hundred buildings like it, on dozens of acres of the association's farmland that are being rezoned for construction.

And all of it is happening right under the noses of the people who live there – using a trick known in Israel as the salami method. You never show the public the whole plan at once. You cut it into thin slices and serve them one at a time, each slice small and innocent.

That is exactly what happened here. From what I found, the project has already passed the stage where the public can object. But instead of the usual signs announcing a plan like this, what residents saw on the street was one innocent slice: a plan showing that the road would get a facelift and a new bike lane. Nobody gets upset about a bike lane. And by the time people finally see the whole salami, it is already too late to object.

The people of Pardes Hanna love that area for its nature and its open fields. Little by little, those fields were built over, until the association's land was the last open space left. And the council does not intend to stop. It wants to become a real city, with its own police station – and for that, it needs more apartments and more residents.

Pardes Hanna is building its own Babylon. And the last open field is next in line.

To be continued...