From the expansive rooftop of a grubby, eight-floor parking garage in the center of İzmir, one is greeted with a spectacular panoramic view of Turkey’s third-largest city. To the north and west is the downtown area, and just beyond is the curving coastline of the Gulf of İzmir, tucked into a pocket of the Aegean Sea. Right across the street stands the heart of the city’s old Jewish quarter, concentrated around Havra Sokak (Synagogue Street). Synagogue Street is a busy, dense, and cacophonous outer section of İzmir’s Kemeraltı Bazaar, a massive open-air market with centuries of history that still functions as an important space of commerce. The street is lined with vendors gutting, cleaning, and selling fresh fish, and butchers hawking various types of organ meats, racks of lamb, and whole chickens. The stench is pungent to say the least, and packs of stray dogs and cats are on the prowl after fallen morsels. Kemeraltı is bustling by day but mostly dark and eerily silent at night, though bars and restaurants have recently opened in certain parts of the market, providing light and energy to its maze of empty streets and shuttered shops.

The rule for watching the Israel-Lebanon frontier is that although nothing seems to be going on, something always is. Nothing seemed to be going on, for example, on one of the afternoons I recently spent along the electrified fence trying to sense the course of events this fraught summer, gazing out at a green blanket of shrubbery stretching toward a cluster of Lebanese homes nearby. All was still in the late summer heat. A bush rustled just across the fence and a grey sunhat appeared, followed by a bearded face, and then a purposeful body belonging to a young man in a black Adidas soccer jersey—Hezbollah, but armed only with a camera. Anyone who’s ever spent time in an ambush or on guard duty knows how thrilling it is to have something to do after hours of boredom, and there was a spring in the man’s step as he strode in our direction. He raised his telephoto lens at a spot about 50 yards from where I watched with an Israeli officer and two soldiers. The guerillas don’t operate alone, but the photographer’s comrades, presumably equipped with more than cameras, remained in the bushes, unseen. The Hezbollah lookouts in the windows of the placid town nearby, Ayta ash-Shab, and scattered throughout the underbrush had probably seen the Israeli Jeep climbing the approach road to the border emplacement and knew its multiple antennas meant it belonged to a commander. They were waiting. The officer wasn’t surprised to see the photographer, who snapped a few dozen shots of us. We took a few cell-phone shots of him. Hezbollah watches the army watching Hezbollah watching the army. “This sector is like a game of chess,” the officer said.