Ghaith Alsayed/AP

Members of a humanitarian aid agency disinfect Ibn Sina hospital as prevention against the coronavirus in the city of Idlib, Syria, Thursday, March 19, 2020.

Syrians now entering their 10th year of war could be forgiven for believing they have already faced the modern equivalent of the biblical Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

But the millions of refugees and internally displaced Syrians are bracing for yet another trial: the coronavirus.

Even technologically advanced nations like China, Italy, and the United States are struggling to stop the spread of COVID-19. But the rudimentary camps full of Syrian victims of conflict – many of them having endured a cold winter in tents, lack of basic hygiene, and malnourishment – may be uniquely vulnerable to the global pandemic.

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Experts say there is still a window to act to take life-saving health and hygiene measures. And one key is for Western donors to recognize that preventing an uncontrolled regional outbreak improves their own long-term risk calculations at home.

That will be a challenge, as countries around the world remain engulfed by their own domestic needs.

And even before the coronavirus, humanitarian efforts in the Middle East were beset by years of conflict; donor fatigue; neglect as populations filled sprawling camps or moved, newly homeless, toward safer borders; and weak governments besieged by popular protests in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.

The trajectory of the virus suggests that it will hit areas with high concentrations of refugees – such as Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Venezuela, says Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). “Then my open question to any decision-maker ... trying to curb the spread of the virus: How can you do social distancing, if you live in a refugee camp with 10 people per small tent?”

“How can you do constant hand-washing, if your water ration is three liters per day, and that’s supposed to go to drinking and cooking? And how,” he continues, “are you supposed to care for the infected and quarantine the vulnerable, when there is no health care?”

Grim conditions in opposition-controlled Idlib, Syria, highlight the depths of the challenges ahead. Recent bombardment of this last, shrinking rebel enclave has forced one million people from their homes. Syrian government forces backed by Russia and Iran have captured nearly half of the enclave since renewing an offensive last December with relentless bombing.

That forced into even tighter quarters the 3 million people in Idlib – among them Islamist militants, including former Al Qaeda affiliates, trucked there as part of cease-fire deals brokered when other rebel-held regions were defeated.

The latest United Nations situation report for northwest Syria, published Monday, notes: “Inadequate land for the formation of new camps and sites leave many new IDPs [internally displaced people] in overcrowded conditions without formalized camp support.”

It adds that, “access to food has become an increasing concern.” Indeed, some 1.5 million people in Idlib depend on food aid, and in January alone, 1,227 trucks crossed the border with supplies from Turkey, the largest number in seven years.

Felipe Dana/AP

A boy walks out of a heavily damaged building where he is currently living, in Idlib, Syria, March 12, 2020. Idlib is the last urban area still under opposition control in Syria, located in a shrinking rebel enclave in the northwestern province of the same name. Syria’s civil war, which entered its 10th year March 15, 2020, has shrunk in geographical scope – focusing on this corner of the country – but the misery wreaked by the conflict has not diminished.

A tenuous cease-fire brokered March 5 by Turkey and Russia, both of which have troops deployed in and around the province, still holds. But the U.N. notes that even before the December offensive began, the population of Idlib was “already extremely vulnerable.”

The World Health Organization says Syria’s health system – especially after years in which government and allied forces targeted health infrastructure behind rebel lines – is “on its knees.” Beyond Syria’s borders, neighbors Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan have absorbed millions of refugees.

“In Syria you have this perfect storm. When we needed the health system the most, it was bombed. When people were supposed to be able to quarantine and distance themselves, they had to flee their houses to temporary, crowded camps,” says Mr. Egeland.

“So as bad as it is in Italy and China and increasingly in the rest of Europe, I cannot see why it would not be 10 times worse when you have none of the mitigating measures that we have,” he says.

But the solution that can ease the impact is still within reach, if donors can see the need for a holistic approach.

“What can we do? Water and sanitation. It’s not rocket science. It’s a logistical challenge,” says Mr. Egeland, whose 14,000 field workers with NRC aim to double to 4 million the number of people across multiple war zones they reach with water and sanitation.

That means more latrines, and 10 times more running water points for washing, and decongesting camps by tripling or quadrupling the space devoted to displaced people. It means expanding health care, public hygiene campaigns, and building quarantine facilities – all actions the NRC says may keep the virus at bay in the Middle East, and so make it less likely to persist there as a threat to the rest of the world.

The need to act is urgent, experts say.

“You have 6 million refugees from Syria, 6 million internally displaced in Syria – including a million recently in Idlib – another 1.5 million displaced in Iraq, all of them living in oppressively unsustainable conditions that, by all indications,” are consistent with transmission of the virus, says Julien Barnes-Dacey, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Brussels.

Another key factor is the governments of Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, all “hollowed out” over recent years by multiple layers of crises and short on leadership and resources, says Mr. Barnes-Dacey.

But that very concern may be causing some shift in regional thinking, with Exhibit A being unexpected support for Iran – epicenter of the virus in the Middle East – by the United Arab Emirates and some other Persian Gulf states, despite long-simmering tensions with Iran.

The Islamic Republic is host to 9 out of 10 of the 21,000-plus confirmed cases of COVID-19 across the Middle East, and a number of its leadership elite are among more than 1,800 citizens who have died. Suffocating U.S. sanctions have complicated both medical exports to Iran and the cash transfers to pay for them.

The UAE nevertheless expressed its support for Iran and “highlighted the importance of collective work and efforts to survive this global challenge.” It made two shipments of medical supplies to Iran, including two planeloads carrying thousands of pairs of gloves, masks, and other equipment, on March 16.

“They recognize obviously that what happens in Iran doesn’t stay in Iran, and it can easily overflow across the Gulf,” says Mr. Barnes-Dacey.

Such moves are “first and foremost about self-preservation, and [Persian Gulf states’] desire to ensure that the situation in Iran is containable,” he says.

“But it points to a model of possible regional collaboration that could be a constructive way of reinforcing efforts to contain and manage the situation,” says Mr. Barnes-Dacey. “If Arab Gulf states are prepared to do something with Iran, it suggests that fault lines and conflict lines will likely be deprioritized in the case of a threat that challenges everyone equally.”

On a wider scale, that is the case the NRC’s Mr. Egeland is making to donor countries like the U.S. and members of the European Union, about the need to look now at easing the effect of the virus among the most vulnerable refugees and displaced in Syria and beyond.

“Why make strongholds for the virus, anywhere in the world, when we live in a global world with global pandemics?” he says. “If it gets a stronghold in camps with half a million people ... it means it can always come back.

“If hand-washing is a mitigating factor in New York City, it’s also important for New York City that there are hand-washing facilities in Syria, because it started with patient zero in Wuhan, and now we are sitting in quarantine in Oslo,” says Mr. Egeland, who is under mandatory quarantine there after a visit to South America.

“So if there are no hand-washing facilities in Syria a year from now, how can you get rid of this virus? It’s a perfect example of ideals and interests intertwined.”

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It was Monday, March 2, when Mayor Jenny Durkan took the call at her Seattle home. On the line was Harvard-trained epidemiologist Trevor Bedford, who had caught the mayor’s attention with an ominous tweet two days earlier about his Seattle lab’s tracking of the new coronavirus.

Dr. Bedford had connected the genetic dots between the first U.S. coronavirus case – a man who tested positive Jan. 20 after returning from Wuhan, China, to Snohomish County north of Seattle – and a teenager who tested positive in the same county on Feb. 28. “This strongly suggests that there has been cryptic transmission in Washington state for the past 6 weeks,” tweeted Dr. Bedford.

Ms. Durkan urgently tracked down Dr. Bedford, who studies infectious diseases at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, to dig into his predictions. Why did they depart so starkly from what government health officials were reporting?

“His modeling, frankly, was very different from what public health was telling me,” Ms. Durkan recalls.

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As the former U.S. attorney listened carefully to the evidence, the shocking revelations sank in.

“After talking with him, there was little doubt in my mind that the modeling was accurate,” she recounts, a belief other top experts would confirm. “We aren’t dealing with five cases. We are dealing with hundreds of cases, and our time to act was yesterday.”

She sketched out the math in a chart on a piece of paper, one she has carried ever since. “Over 70,000 cases,” she thought, “in six weeks.”

She pauses. “It was one of the most sobering moments of my entire life.”

The next day, at 1:33 pm, Ms. Durkan signed a proclamation of civil emergency for Seattle – the blue-collar town where she’d grown up as one of eight children, where she’d sold linens at JCPenney and later graduated from law school. The city she loves. 

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Career’s toughest challenge

Two weeks later, on St. Patrick’s Day, Ms. Durkan, the granddaughter of an Irish Catholic immigrant, sits virtually alone in her 7^th  floor office suite, wearing a shamrock pin. Sunshine glints off the nearby skyscrapers, the deserted streets, and, a few blocks away, the waters of Elliott Bay.

The lobby of City Hall, adorned with a huge, gold seal of Chief Seattle, is eerily empty. Her lone assistant apologetically requests that all the mayor’s visitors first wash their hands, and remain several feet apart from her.

But even at a distance, Ms. Durkan’s gregarious warmth, quick wit, and no-nonsense demeanor comes through.

Ann Scott Tyson/The Christian Science Monitor

Seattle’s normally bustling 4th Avenue, outside City Hall, is empty on March 17, 2020. Mayor Jenny Durkan signed a proclamation of civil emergency on March 3 amid the coronavirus crisis.

“Thanks for coming in,” she greets this reporter, raising one hand and making a “V” with four fingers in a Vulcan salute, popularized by Spock in “Star Trek.” I bungle the return salute, which, perhaps aptly, means: Live long and prosper. “It takes practice!” she says, flashing a smile.

The heaviness of the moment, though, is unmistakable, as Ms. Durkan presides over a city that has gone from boom to virus-inflicted bust virtually overnight. For the past decade, Seattle has been one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. But the double whammy of the pandemic on public health and the economy is akin to an earthquake, shaking the Emerald City’s foundations.

Asked whether this is the biggest challenge of her career, Ms. Durkan doesn’t hesitate. “No question about it, by a magnitude of several factors,” she says. “I don’t think that our country has dealt with a more impactful and complicated and widespread crisis in many generations.”

In response, Ms. Durkan is relying not only on top scientists but also her own, well-honed political instincts to guide Seattle through today’s uncharted waters. The daughter of a legendary Washington state senator and lobbyist, she learned to stand her ground by tussling with her siblings. When she graduated from the University of Washington Law School in 1985, she recalls her mother commenting: “Finally, someone is going to pay you to argue.” But she also learned the art of compromise and teamwork.

On the Sunday after Dr. Bedford briefed her, she huddled for two hours with Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee, King County Executive Dow Constantine, and other senior officials to ensure they were on the same page.

“Once we heard the science, I don’t think there was anyone in the room that didn’t feel the government had to make some significant steps to reduce public gatherings,” she says. “It’s not either-or. It’s really more of a dial,” she says. “You try the first step, and if that seems not to be working, you have to accelerate through the dial pretty quickly.”

On March 11, Ms. Durkan stepped before the cameras flanked by Governor Inslee, Mr. Constantine, and other officials to unveil that first step – a ban on gatherings of more than 250 people. But first, she set the stage. “One of the most important things we can do, according to the World Health Organization, is to speak in one voice as one government,” she said. After a crisp few words, she elbow-bumped with the governor, made the Vulcan salute, and stepped aside.

“This is something Mayor Jenny Durkan was born to do,” says a longtime Seattle journalist who spoke on condition of anonymity. “She’s good at centrist, Democratic government.”

The Washington state team was determined, as Ms. Durkan said later, to rise above the pull of blame-game politics and “fight the virus instead of each other.” In contrast, a few days earlier, as Vice President Mike Pence visited the state to bring vital emergency aid, President Donald Trump referred to Governor Inslee as “a snake” for alleging the administration had not “stuck to the science.”

Robust local leadership has emerged in part amid a weak federal government response, analysts say. There was “a lack of strong leadership from the feds,” says Ann Marie Kimball, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the University of Washington. Moreover, she says, “all epidemics and pandemics are really local, so local officials are in the best position to tailor [the response] … and they speak with a voice we recognize.”

Americans expressed more confidence in their state governments than in President Trump or the federal government in handling the coronavirus, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week.

A city unbowed 

Carrying her hand-sketched chart of future cases, Ms. Durkan has no time to waste on infighting. She knows Seattle and Washington are only about 11 days behind Italy – one of the world’s hardest-hit countries – on the steeply rising COVID-19 curve.

“Every time Italy takes a step because they have reached a crisis point, it sends a signal to us,” Ms. Durkan says. “We should take that step now.”

Yet state and local resources only go so far. What is keeping her awake at night is the lack of protective equipment such as gloves, masks, and gowns for Washington’s first responders and medical personnel. Last Friday, she visited Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center, only to see medical workers reaching into almost empty bins of masks.

“If our workers get sick, our health care system fails,” warns Ms. Durkan, who says she spent dozens of hours last weekend trying to help secure more protective equipment. Washington has already received some supplies from national reserves, but is awaiting approval to get another 180,000 masks and face shields and 65,000 respirators. Hospital surge capacity is also inadequate without federal help, she says.

More shelters for Seattle’s most vulnerable population, particularly some 11,000 people experiencing homelessness, are another critical need. And given the expectation hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs, “we need something bigger than the New Deal to put money in the pockets of workers” and supplement private, local, and state relief efforts, Ms. Durkan says. For example, Amazon executives pledged $5 million for small firms such as restaurants and food trucks in the vicinity of the company’s downtown Seattle headquarters.

Seattle’s vibrant patchwork quilt of neighborhoods is suffering, she says, and she takes such losses personally. She remembers growing up during the “Boeing bust” of the 1970s, when the airplane maker cut more than 40,000 workers. In her friends’ neighborhoods, “there was empty house after empty house, and dandelions pushing up,” she recalls. 

“I love this city to my bones. This is so hard,” she says. “You know it’s going to have such deep, long-term consequences.”

But Ms. Durkan also has a tough streak that Seattle needs right now. After college, she moved to an Alaskan fishing village and taught English for two years. Then she worked as a baggage handler and dues-paying Teamster to help her pay for law school. The first openly gay U.S. attorney, and the first female Seattle mayor for nearly a century, she speaks her mind and tells it like it is.

“We’re a gritty city. We come back from adversity,” she says. “But this one is going to test everyone’s will, and everybody’s mettle.”

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Brian Powers/The Des Moines Register/AP

Fleur Fareway grocery manager Andrew DeGroote helps check out shoppers during an hour designated for those who could be more susceptible to the coronavirus on March 19, 2020, in Des Moines, Iowa.

Every day the nation’s 3 million food-store workers deliver the goods, stock the shelves, and ring up the sales that keep America fed. Only now, the coronavirus pandemic has thrust them in a new light as they keep supermarkets open while other stores close down and offices empty out. They’re front-line workers in a national emergency that almost no one has experienced before, first responders of food who are finding a sudden outpouring of thanks.

“People have been appreciative, thanking us for being open,” says Jim, an employee at Market Basket in the Boston suburb of Waltham, waiting to go home on the bus.

“It’s brave of them being in contact with a lot of people,” says Arian, a customer carrying a bag of milk, eggs, and yogurt from the Cherry Valley Farm Supermarket in Queens, New York. (Neither man would give his last name).

In the past week, their work has spawned letters to the editor. “These workers are often under-appreciated, and these days their work environment – now including risk of exposure to the virus and dealing with worried and cranky customers – is certainly more challenging than usual,” Deborah van den Honert wrote in a letter to the editor of the Boulder, Colorado, Daily Camera published Monday.

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Now, these workers at the low end of America’s pay scale are getting formal recognition. This week, the governors of three states – Minnesota, Michigan, and Vermont – designated grocery employees as emergency workers, which makes their children eligible for free care at schools.

In St. Louis, the local United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union and grocers agreed to change the health and welfare fund so employees would not have copays for coronavirus tests, would get more short-term disability, and would get 90% of their pay when diagnosed with the virus. In addition, the union agreed to waive dues and fees for 45 days for new employees to help grocers hire more workers.

In Washington state, UFCW and Teamsters have reached an agreement with Safeway/Albertsons and Fred Meyer/QFC grocery chains to continue paying for up to two weeks workers who had to stay home because they were diagnosed with the virus or ordered to self-quarantine. The chains have also agreed to schedule workers more flexibly so they can get more overtime if they want it or have time off to take care of children at home, even using paid sick leave when staying home with them. In exchange, the chains can hire workers faster.

“Everyone is really stepping up to the plate here,” says Tom Geiger, special projects director for UFCW Local 21 in Seattle, in an email. “This is going to make it easier for workers and shoppers to stay healthier and get better during the pandemic.”

Hours have gotten longer and the work harder because of the crush of customers who are now eating predominantly at home and stocking up on toilet paper, bottled water, and hand sanitizer. 

“It’s been hectic, crazy,” says Christian Rodriguez, a manager of the Cherry Valley Farm Supermarket in Queens. “But overall, we’re prepared, pretty much. We expected it to get like this.”

Many grocery chains around the country also extended hours this week, while others have reduced operating hours to allow workers to restock shelves without customers. Some have created “senior only” shopping hours for those anxious about shopping in crowded stores. 

Increased sales – and especially panic-buying of staples like toilet paper – have strained not just workers in the stores but those delivering the goods.

With sales volumes running two and three times the norm at certain locations, SpartanNash, a food distribution company outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, said this week it was hiring displaced workers and students to keep its own stores and independent grocers in its 14-state distribution network adequately supplied. On Monday, Amazon said it would hire an extra 100,000 warehouse and delivery workers and temporarily boost their pay $2 an hour through April to deal with the surge of online sales.

“It’s very, very different in the past week,” says Lisa, a flex driver for Amazon in North Carolina, who declined to have her full name published. “The stores are very very panicky, very overwhelmed, unprepared.”

Typically, she picks up goods at Whole Foods and distribution centers and delivers them to customers. She has taken to wearing black nitrile gloves, which she sanitizes often. The tips from customers in the past week have been generous, she adds. 

“I don’t feel like I’m putting myself or my family in any particular danger any more so than, say, going to Walmart,” she says. “Somebody has to [deliver], and why not me?”

Timmy Broderick/The Christian Science Monitor

Lordstown Motors executives lead a tour of their Lordstown, Ohio, factory on March 5, 2019. The upstart auto company bought the plant from General Motors last year and is racing to put the first fully-electric pickup truck on the market.

Steve Burns stands in the cavernous plant that once rolled out thousands of Chevy cars each year and pitches a message of defiant hope: This Rust Belt region’s automotive heyday may actually be in the future. 

Mr. Burns is the CEO of Lordstown Motors, which has begun to transform this former General Motors factory into an assembly plant for electric pickup trucks for commercial customers, a first. 

Experts say that the electric vehicle (EV) industry has a bright future. Rising concern about climate change means electrification is widely viewed as inevitable. But at a time of tepid consumer demand and fewer federal subsidies nobody knows how far off that giant EV market is and who will control it, and whether an Ohio startup has a shot. 

“We don’t want to just be a product, we want to be a movement. And it’s going to take a movement,” Mr. Burns tells a visiting group of reporters and regional leaders. “We are a little bit David and Goliath.” 

Even for larger companies like GM, Ford, and EV-specialist Tesla, there’s no guarantee the U.S. will be a leader in the industry, as rivals in China and elsewhere are also racing to make electric cars and trucks. 

Mr. Burns and others here are hoping that this corner of Ohio will be part of a vibrant U.S. industry. Once known as Steel Valley, the Mahoning Valley already has an electric battery testing lab and business incubators focused on energy. GM and South Korea’s LG Chem are building a battery plant right next to Lordstown Motors (though the batteries won’t be compatible with its Endurance pickup). Youngstown State University is creating a training center for students interested in working for the startup.

Local leaders are now trying to rebrand the area as Voltage Valley. And Lordstown plans to build 20,000 electric trucks in 2021, with a future goal of 420,000 vehicles a year. 

But that momentum depends on government support. The Trump administration is rolling back emissions standards and nixed a key EV tax-credit expansion late last year. It also proposed a budget that would kill an Energy Department loan program that fueled Tesla’s rise – one that Lordstown Motors has been eyeing. 

Moreover, even as the cost of car batteries has fallen, EVs still cost more than gasoline-powered cars and trucks, which is why the industry needs government handouts. The Endurance is expected to cost $52,000 before tax credits. 

“We are all standing on this stage because of Tesla, right? But what launched Tesla was a stodgy government loan,” says Mr. Burns, who has hired several former Tesla executives. 

“Consistency is what you need”

Born in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the EV tax credit catalyzed the industry’s growth. Tesla and GM recently surpassed the 200,000-vehicle sales marker, which means their EVs no longer qualify for full credits. Both companies lobbied unsuccessfully to lift the cap in last year’s congressional funding bill. 

Steve Fecht/General Motors/AP

General Motors rolled out plans for 13 new electric vehicles during the next five years to refashion itself as a futuristic company with technology to compete against Tesla. Shown here, GM's new modular platform and battery system, Ultium, is displayed at the Design Dome on the GM Tech Center campus in Warren, Michigan, on March 4, 2020.

“We have a well-established history of how you get these boom-bust cycles when you offer incentives and then withdraw them and offer them again. Consistency is what you need if you want a steadily- and fast-growing industry,” says Chris Nelder, who manages the Rocky Mountain Institute’s EV-Grid Initiative.

China also introduced electric vehicle subsidies about a decade ago. When the government trimmed those credits last July, sales plummeted and now the cuts are being reconsidered.

Mike Carr of the EV Drive Coalition, an industry lobbying group, says U.S. policy should also be supportive. “The market doesn’t value the zero emission benefits. It doesn’t value the climate benefits. It doesn’t value all the societal benefits that are brought by these vehicles,” he says. 

A higher sticker price is one handicap, though some experts predict the gap could be closed in a few years. Another hurdle is charging infrastructure: Outside of California, not much is being built. As a result, the U.S. EV market is still only 1.4% of new vehicle sales, which topped 17 million in 2019. 

How former GM workers feel

Doubts are high even among local auto workers who for decades built Chevrolet sedans in this community of 3,200 people. The United Auto Workers opposed the sale of the complex, which employed nearly 1,500 workers, to Lordstown Motors. 

Mr. Burns pledges a union plant, and says his priority is to hire former GM workers at wages competitive with other auto plants. But most of those workers either transferred or retired when GM closed the plant. 

“Would I be interested in going back in there and working? I doubt it,” says Matt Moorhead, who worked at the Lordstown GM plant since 1995. “I can do the work, but just with everything that happened – my job was taken away from me, and I’m not going to go back for half the wage.” 

Mr. Moorhead is not alone. Everyone in the region knows someone who worked at the Lordstown plant. At a union hall a mile from the plant, workers say they only know two or three former colleagues who have applied for jobs at the retooled plant. 

Ultimately, Lordstown Motors’ success may depend on whether rivals like Tesla decide its future lies in the U.S., says Mr. Carr. If final assembly of vehicles migrates to China or Europe, suppliers will follow, and without their technology it’s hard to see a bright future here for an electrification hub. 

“The industry is at a real inflection point [in the U.S.],” he says. “We risk losing momentum and thus market share to China.”

Mr. Burns plans to hire 400 workers by late summer and ramp up operations from there. 

“That factory can produce more vehicles than Tesla’s. It’s twice the size. It’s very capable,” he says in a phone interview. “I think the Midwest workers are as capable as anybody in the world at building cars. We think we’ve got a great recipe and a great demand for a vehicle like this. But it’s going to take hard work.”

The best green beans I’ve ever eaten came to my outdoor restaurant table (remember restaurants?) glistening in the sun in lemon juice and olive oil and rubbed in sea salt and garlic and served in a brown paper bag.

Next, I was dipping fresh bread into a variation of msabbaha, a hummus-like dish that feels like a culinary warm, and garlicky, hug. This one swaps out the traditional main ingredient of chickpeas for long-simmered lima beans, soft and warm, topped with chopped onion, and sprinkled with tomato seeds.

Also on the menu: dishes like an Israeli version of bruschetta, topped with towering piles of avocado, and a minute steak, grilled and served on tahini and tomato tartar.

The restaurant, Port Said, named for the Egyptian city along the Mediterranean, is owned by Eyal Shani, an Israeli chef and a central figure in creating and promoting the new Israeli cuisine both at home and abroad.

I was tipped off by a friend, cookbook author Adeena Sussman, who says the restaurant typifies “the vegetable-forward, lemon-spicy, casual-cool vibe of Israel.”

After recent decades focusing on what the rest of the world was cooking, Israel’s food world has turned inward to find inspiration in the diversity of its Diaspora heritage. It’s a mix that stretches from the kitchens of Eastern Europe to those of Yemen, Iraq, and Morocco, and incorporates local Palestinian and broader Mediterranean and Middle Eastern influences and ingredients.

Add to that Israeli chefs’ own personal interpretations, and a food revolution has been served up. The fusion of flavors – think olive oil, tahini, preserved lemons, pomegranate seeds, za’atar, and sumac – and spotlight on fresh produce has been celebrated and amplified by popular cookbooks and award-winning restaurants in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, London, Philadelphia, and beyond.

Ariel Efron/Courtesy of Chef Eyal Shani

Chef Eyal Shani arranging tomatoes at Malka, one of his restaurants in Tel Aviv.

“As the whole seasonal, local movement took hold internationally, a lot of Israeli chefs said, ‘Hey, look what we have under our noses,’” says Ms. Sussman, author of the cookbook, “Sababa: Fresh, Sunny Flavors From My Israeli Kitchen.”

Rediscovered roots

In Israel’s early years, Jews who immigrated here from North Africa and the Middle East were encouraged to leave their culture behind. It’s their grandchildren who have worked to recover their culinary and cultural roots.

Starting in the late 1990s and 2000s there were Israeli chefs, many of whom had been trained abroad, who had the skills to take this culinary inheritance and help it evolve, says Ms. Sussman.

This meant making new versions of elemental Jewish staples like schnitzel or hamin, the Middle Eastern counterpart to Eastern European cholent – a long-cooked stew eaten on the Jewish Sabbath, “and taking the global market basket of spices and herbs and cultural influence and creating something we avoid calling fusion, but really is fusion cuisine on some level,” says Ms. Sussman.

One of her favorite dishes served in Tel Aviv is based on what is marketed abroad as “Israeli couscous” – a type of tiny round toasted pasta developed in the 1950s during a period of austerity at the request of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, as a substitute for rice.

“It’s turned into one of the most sophisticated risottos, with local Pecorino cheese, Israeli white wine, and pieces of roasted zucchini baked in, with Swiss chard adding some green. The Israeli couscous soaks up all the flavor,” says Ms. Sussman. “Who would have thought Ben-Gurion’s rice would have come so far and be a totem to what a modern chef could do?”

Food fit for Instagram

Gil Hovav, an Israeli television food-show host, says Israeli food is having a “moment” for a few reasons aside from an interest in healthy, accessible recipes.

“One is that we Israelis are ruthless, disobedient, and disrespect rules. It can work out wonderfully when it comes to Israeli cuisine,” he says, where you can find the “weirdest and boldest” pairings, mixing Ethiopian with Polish food, and Russian and Iraqi dishes.

“Sometimes it’s embarrassing, and sometimes it really does work. And when it does, it’s incredibly energetic and works for the same reason we are good at startups. We are cooking out of the pot. We are inventive.”

Ariel Efron/Courtesy of Chef Eyal Shani

The lunch crowd at Port Said, a popular Tel Aviv restaurant owned by Eyal Shani, back when there were lunch crowds.

Mr. Hovav also has a theory that Israeli food is taking off because it’s a perfect fit for the Instagram age – appearing luscious with its bold reds, oranges, yellows, and greens.

“It looks very alive, and marketing is everything,” he says.

Alongside fresh produce like blood oranges and pomegranates that photograph well, there’s the sunflower gold of amba, a condiment of tangy pickled mango originally from Iraq, and the red and gold of another favorite topping for those who can handle its kick: schug, a fiery Yemenite import that combines cilantro, parsley, and garlic with spices like cardamom and cumin.

Mr. Hovav grew up in Jerusalem with his Yemenite grandmother in charge of the kitchen. He only started cooking when he was 20, he says, just after she died, to preserve the flavors of her cooking. Men were not allowed in the family kitchen, for fear they would bring bad luck.

Dishing up politics

Yet here, where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict festers, one person’s family recipe can get caught in the tricky fault lines of cultural appropriation.

That makes defining what Israeli food is extremely complicated, “because we are not really talking about food, we are really talking about politics,” about food that gives meaning to a struggle over land and identity, says Ronit Vered, a food researcher and journalist.

Israel is a young country, founded in 1948, but located in a region with a tangled history of colonialism and war whose modern borders were only established in the 20th century.

“Today the biggest influence is local, and you can call it Palestinian, Arab, Levantine, Mediterranean. And then there is the influence of Jewish communities coming from other places that are now thought of as local – Israelis want to also feel part of this geographic, cultural unit,” Ms. Vered says.

This tension over who, for example, can claim hummus or falafel as a national symbol might ease up, she suggests, by stepping back into history itself.

“When one starts researching food, we see these are regional foods, not local foods. They are not Israeli or Palestinian.”

Luna Zraik, a chef and Palestinian citizen of Israel with a popular restaurant in Nazareth, says she has little patience for such debates: “I want them (Jewish Israelis) to honor my food as I honor their food. … At my bistro we exist outside of the [political] chaos.”

Reuters

Volkswagen workers assemble the electric model ID.3 in Zwickau, Germany.

Gasoline prices are tumbling, not only because people are hunkered down at home but also because Saudi Arabia plans to depress oil prices. For drivers with gas-fueled vehicles, that may be good news. But what will become of the predicted future for electric vehicles?

In the past years, big drops in gasoline prices have hurt sales of gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius. But, more and more, it looks as though the electric vehicle (EV) may survive this latest bump in the road.

For one thing, China and many European nations remain deeply committed to subsidizing EVs to help make a transition to an energy economy free of fossil fuels. The United States lags behind, even though it is home to one of the most innovative brands, Tesla.

While Americans still prefer pickup trucks and large SUVs over small gas-saving cars, government policies that encourage electrification, such as ever higher miles per gallon requirements for new vehicles and rebates for buyers of electric or hybrid vehicles, remain in place.

And as gasoline prices eventually rise, the cost of making electric vehicles continues to drop, especially for the battery packs that power them. Early on, EVs had to be priced for the luxury market. Now manufacturers have mass markets in their sights. In Germany, for example, Volkswagen is about to introduce an EV called the ID.3 that will cost less than $26,000.

More would-be buyers are also noticing the lower operating costs of EVs, such as no oil changes or tuneups. These advantages add up. A 2018 study from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute found the average operating cost for an EV in the U.S. to be $485 a year, compared with $1,117 for a gasoline-powered vehicle.

The issue of “range anxiety” is fading quickly as well. Battery efficiency continues to improve. On March 4 General Motors said it would introduce 13 new electric vehicles over the next five years with driving ranges of up to 400 miles between charges. A much more robust system of charging stations is still needed, but long driving ranges help to mitigate that problem.

In a 2019 study, business analyst Deloitte, based in London, projected a tipping point in 2022 when the cost of owning an EV would match that of a gas-powered vehicle. That underlines its projection that EV sales are about to grow quickly, grabbing 10% of the world market by 2024. Worldwide sales by 2030 could reach 21 million (for comparison, about 80 million cars were sold worldwide in 2019).

Tesla has helped make EVs cool – fast, quiet, high-tech machines charged up at home like a cellphone. Now the drop in prices along with more choice in brands should entice more budget-minded shoppers. The knowledge that they are cutting their carbon emissions needn’t be the only reason to buy.