Letter from Israel: Me and the Israeli Arab

Sixteenth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — “Why hire a non-Jew when you can hire a Jew?”

That was the response of a local bar owner when I asked him, out of curiosity, whether he would hire an Israeli Arab as a bartender or waitress if the person were attractive, friendly, and experienced. Earlier that day, I had asked the owner of a local kiosk — something like a convenience store — whom I know whether there were any local companies that provide cleaning services. For the equivalent of $12 for two hours of work, I could have my small apartment cleaned as often as I like.

The kiosk owner, to my surprise, called out to another shopper in the store and asked him in Hebrew whether he wanted a cleaning job. Evidently, they were friends. I spoke to the other person — a guy who was my age — and he agreed to come over the next evening after we haggled over the price. As I left the kiosk, the owner told me in English: “By the way, he is a very nice guy. A hard worker. But he is Arab.”

—
Arabs, Christians, and Jews

Thirty percent of Israelis are not Jews. Most of the minority are Arabs who are either Muslim or Christian. The remaining people are immigrants from the former Soviet Union — Christians and atheists — who fled the country in the early 1990s and were able to emigrate to Israel because they had at least one grandparent who was a Jew even though they themselves were not Jews. The latter group has become very successful in Israel because they were highly educated in fields like engineering and the high-tech industry. But the Arab community has always had higher levels of poverty, crime, and poor education. Nearly all of them work in blue-collar or service jobs — if they are
employed at all.

When the owner told me that they guy — a 30-year-old by the name of Faiez who works at a falafel stand during the day — was an Arab, I admit that I hesitated for a split second. The American and Israeli sides of my brain were battling each other. The American said not to be racist since the United States has usually been an idealistic, multi-ethnic society — at least in theory, if not always in practice. The realist Israeli in me said to forget about it. After all, I did not really know Faiez — although the kiosk owner said that he was a good guy, this might be a risky endeavor for all the obvious reasons.

Finally, the American in me won. I told the kiosk owner in Hebrew: “What do I care? A good guy is a good guy.”

—
The Israeli Reaction

I was still a little unsure after I had hired Faiez, so I went to ask some Israeli friends at a bar that night for their thoughts. The owner of the place told me that he always prefers to hire Jews. After all, when you want to build a Jewish country out of nothing but sand, it is important to make sure that all Jews are employed and able to survive. (Although, the owner’s statement was not entirely accurate. Some of the waitresses he had hired were non-Jews from the former Soviet Union, so perhaps he had truly meant that he would not hire any Arabs.) Others offered thoughts that were meant as jokes but offered insights into the Israeli mentality as well. “Don’t leave an Arab guy alone in your apartment; he might try to steal something.” “If anything happens to you, we’ll know what.”

Imagine this conversation occurring in the United States, and replace the word “Arab” with “black” or “Hispanic.” For all of the good things about Israeli society, the sad truth is that this country is incredibly racist as well. A recent wave of immigration brought black Jews from Ethiopia to Israel, but other Israeli Jews frequently refer to them with the Hebrew equivalent of the N-word. For people who were born and raised, for example, in the United States or Britain, these attitudes are always shocking because people in our native countries are less racist, and any racism is at least not spoken bluntly and outright in public.

Now, I am not excusing the racism; I merely intend to explain it. As most people know, Israel has been attacked by the surrounding Arab countries since its inception. Waves of Palestinian terrorism and suicide bombings swept through the country in the late 1980s and 1990s. In this small country — roughly the size of New Jersey — nearly everyone knows someone who died in a war or terrorist attack. For obvious reasons, this affects people mentally. Israelis my age were preteens and teenagers during the worst of the intifadas. The effects are two-fold: 1.) Many Israeli men have some level of
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of military service; and 2.) Israelis have a myopic view that the surrounding peoples — Jordanians, Lebanese, Egyptians, and Syrians — are not individual peoples but simply “Arabs” who want to push the Jews into the sea. The racism in Israeli society recently extended to the city of Petah Tikva, which wants to monitor and “help” Jewish, teenage girls who date older, Arab men. (Although, as I noted, there is also crime, poverty, and education involved in addition to racism.)

In just one example: One friend of mine was fired upon while fighting in Lebanon; a few of his friends died. A few years later, he saw a few other friends die when a Palestinian terrorist took control of a bus and plowed them down in the street. You can imagine what he thought when I told him that I had hired an Israeli Arab to clean my apartment.

—
Me and Faiez

So, Faiez came over. He was very friendly, and he did a wonderful job cleaning. I gave him the wage plus a good tip. While he cleaned, we would watch soccer and basketball on television, talk about girls, and he would ask me about my American DVD collection. (For example, how do you explain “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in basic Hebrew? I said, “A girl in high school kills…” and then held up two fingers to my mouth to imitate fangs. He understood and laughed.)

I do not speak Arabic, and he does not know English, so we compromised on Hebrew. But we started to teach each other a few phrases in our native languages. Faiez would see my neighbors — cute, Israeli girls in their twenties — walk by and then make the usual comments to me in typical guy-fashion. He asked one if she needed someone to clean her apartment; she declined curtly and walked away. That same night, he asked if my girlfriend — an Israeli Jew who was born and raised in Jerusalem — was Muslim. I responded, perhaps sheepishly because I did not want to risk offending him, that she was not.

Later, Faiez told me this past week that it is hard for him to meet girls. I was not surprised. Most Israeli Arabs live in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and in a few towns in the northern and southern parts of the country — not here in the central region. I said that there are some dating websites for Muslims — probably even for Arabs in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip — and that I would find one for him. But then Faiez said something that made me pause mentally for a moment: “I do not have a lot of friends either. Can I come just to hang out sometimes? You seem like a good guy.”

—
A New Friendship?

My mind did not know what to think. But out of my American politeness (as opposed to Israeli bluntness), I said: “Of course! You are a good guy too.”

After Faiez left, I went to talk to my friends again. First, I called my girlfriend. “Jews and Arabs just don’t become friends here; it just doesn’t happen,” she said. “You should screen his calls, and hire someone else.” Another friend who owns a bar in the city: “You know what I think. If you become friends, do NOT bring him here.” (“Not a problem,” I replied. “He is a Muslim and does not drink alcohol.”) But three other people responded: “A person is a person. Who cares what his religion is? If someone said these things about Jews, we would be angry!” The responses to my situation perfectly reflected the polarization in Israeli society and politics — there is hardly anything between the far left and the hard right.

Since I had originally hired Faiez to clean my apartment and he seemed like a nice guy, I no longer had any concerns about the fact that he was a Muslim Arab. I was more concerned about my personal motivations. Did I hire him and possibly want to become friends with him because he was a poor Arab who needed the money? That would be condescending. Was I considering becoming friends with him out of a desire, to help promote peace in some small way, to build a peaceful, Jewish-Arab connection between two people? That would reduce him to being simply “an Arab” and not a person in his own right. If I would become friends with Faiez, it would only have to be for the fact that he was a nice guy whom I liked.

So, after reflecting on this situation and writing this essay, that is what I decided to do. Now I’m just thinking about what I will tell my girlfriend.

Prior Letter: The Bright Side of Life

Letter from Israel: The Bright Side of Life

Fifteenth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — So much of Westerners hear about the Middle East is serious. As a result, most people probably do not know the bright side of life here (with apologies to Monty Python). So here is a list of ten, random anecdotes that you might find interesting.

1. On my second vacation to Israel is 2007, I was trying on some clothes in the dressing room of a Tel Aviv mall. Without any warning, the clerk threw open the curtain after a few minutes and asked, “So, do you like it?” I was halfway undressed, and there were tons of people in the store! (At least the clerk, as usual in stores, was a cute girl.) There is little personal space here. When I lived with roommates, they would open the door and walk into my room without even knocking. It’s a casual country.

2. Even business is casual. At my first job in the high-tech industry here, my boss — the director of the department — usually wore sweatpants and a sweatshirt to work. Men go for days without shaving, even to job interviews. “Dressing up” consists of wearing a nice pair of jeans and a short-sleeve, button-down shirt. That is the typical dress for a wedding (unless you are the bride or groom) or even going to a synagogue. As one Israeli remarked to me: “Only lawyers and the prime minister wear suits here.” I love it — especially the part about not having to shave every day. Most Israelis outside the fashionable parts of Tel Aviv could care less about high fashion. It is common to see most people in cheap, comfortable clothes.

3. I love haggling! You can do it almost everywhere. I was doing my Friday shopping before Shabbat earlier today, and I saved fifteen percent from the sticker prices when I bought a CD player and some posters for my apartment. I have my own secret: Since most sales clerks are high-school girls or young women just out of the army, I flirt shamelessly and intentionally speak Hebrew worse than what I actually know. They always think the American accent is cute! The next time I go on vacation to the United States, I think I will try my haggling skills there. Perhaps I’ll even put on a fake — and bad –
Israeli accent.

4. The funniest thing I have seen to date: A bar full of drunk Israelis singing aloud — in their heavy accents — to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen.

5. Whenever you walk through a busy part of town, it is common for members from an outreach group of Orthodox Jews called Chabad to come up to you (if you are a man) and ask, “Did you pray today?” (It is optional for women to do the thrice-daily prayers.) Then they will try and try to get you to put on tefillin — traditional, leather straps around your left arm and forehead containing pieces of paper with words from the Bible — and say the prayers right on the sidewalk. One rabbi in Jerusalem offered a free bagel sandwich to anyone who would do it. (I took the free food.)

6. I was wheeling a shopping cart full of groceries to a taxi waiting outside a supermarket when three Israelis came up and asked if I needed help loading them. You’d never see that in the United States, at least on the East Coast.

7. The enthusiasm of street vendors can be startling. I was walking by a group of young men on a sidewalk bench when one of them shouted suddenly right at me, “One orange for a shekel (twenty-five cents)!” I declined and wished them the common greeting on Thursdays and Fridays of “Shabbat Shalom (Peaceful Sabbath)!”

8. Once you get used to it, Israeli bluntness is quite amusing and refreshing. People here have no patience for anything, and they will always get right to the point as quickly as possible. A friend of mine was telling a story about another friend of hers, and I asked which one it was because I did not remember. Instead of saying something like, “My friend who works at Cellcom and studies communications,” she merely said, “The fat one.” Immediately, I knew to whom she was referring.

This attitude stems partly from the fact that Hebrew is a blunt, concise language. When I was working part-time in a kitchen in a bar, the manager would hand me dishes that needed washing. Instead of saying, “Here are some more dishes,” he would say in Hebrew, “Take.” If a person disagrees with someone (sometimes even a boss) about something, he will not raise polite counterpoints. He will say, “You’re an idiot!” and then explain why. It’s not being rude or bossy; it is just how people talk. Once you get used to a new alphabet with weird-looking characters that you read right to left, Hebrew is a comparatively simple language to learn. Moreover, you learn to develop a thick skin here.

9. Shabbat begins every week at sundown on Friday. Ten minutes before, rabbis from Chabad — the group I mentioned earlier — will turn on loudspeakers on top of a building in the center of the city and announce that Shabbat is starting. Then they will blare a recording of “Shalom Aleichem” (“Peace Upon You”) for everyone to hear. The song is a traditional one that is sung at the beginning of Friday night dinner. It is a greeting to the two angels who, in Jewish thought, accompany everyone on his way home from the synagogue to eat. (I like the announcement, but I have never thought to ask secular Israelis what they think.)

10. Israeli teenagers love fireworks. In addition to the backfiring cars that I mentioned in a prior letter, one always hears the noise of firecrackers — or larger — going off. When I was walking through downtown Jerusalem with a friend one time, a group of nearby children set off what sounded like an M-80. The buildings and our bodies seemed to shake. I was not used to the noise at that point, so my friend and I jumped and thought the worst when we heard the explosion. When I saw the children, I was about to walk over and strangle them myself. But then the police arrived and got them to go away. Now, I realize that it is just kids being kids.

Prior letter: Stories from the Desert III

Letter from Israel: Stories from the Desert III

Fourteenth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Here are some more anecdotes that I thought people might find interesting.

Remembering the Holocaust

From sundown today until sundown tomorrow, Israel is now observing Holocaust Remembrance Day. Every country has its national holidays, but this day honoring the six million Jews who were murdered by Nazi Germany is nothing like you will see anywhere. Nearly all bars, clubs, shops and businesses are now closed. Almost all of the entertainment channels on Israel’s two cable television providers have suspended programming. Instead, Channel 2, a major broadcast network, will be presenting a somber, hour-long ceremony with rabbis, soldiers, politicians, singers, Holocaust survivors, and writers tonight.

The most significant event will occur tomorrow at 11 a.m. Throughout the country, sirens will blare for sixty seconds. They are so loud that, no matter where you are, it sounds like it is right next to your ear. Everyone at home will stand at attention and remain silent until the sirens stop. Everyone driving on the streets will stop their cars, get out, and stand at attention on the roads, streets, and highways. It is an eerie sight to behold. Then, a few seconds after the sirens, business will resume as usual. As an example, see the above YouTube clip from the streets of Tel Aviv.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is the second of four major holidays that are occurring right now. (The first was Passover.) In seven days, Israel will celebrate its own Memorial Day in honor of soldiers and civilians who have died in the country’s wars and terrorist attacks. Again, the sirens will sound that day for another sixty seconds. The following day is Israel’s Independence Day, when founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion announced the refounding of the State of Israel in Tel Aviv in 1948 just after the British left the parts of the Middle East that they had controlled since the end of World War I. As in the United States, Israelis will celebrate the day with barbecues and fireworks.

The Jewish people are roughly 5,000 years old, and each person carries
a sense of his history — the triumphs as well as the horrors — inside him. It is an amazing experience to see this reflected in every holiday here.

—
They Are What They Eat

Jews have a common joke amongst themselves: “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat!” This is the philosophy that Jewish people have towards food.

Imagine that every holiday and Friday dinner was like Thanksgiving, with so much food that you want to do nothing except fall asleep afterwards. Friday night — when the Sabbath begins at sundown — is the holiest time for religious Jews. Almost all families here spend the entire day cooking large amounts of food, and then they eat together — after saying various prayers and lighting candles, if they are religious — after the sun sets. Saturday lunches and dinners, as well as all holidays, are typically the same. Orthodox Jews, who
cannot use electricity, drive cars, or do many other things on the Sabbath, will usually read the paper, discuss the news, read the Torah, and take a nap after lunch until the sun sets on Saturday. Eating is considered a holy experience, and this is one of the reasons that religious Jews keep kosher — to bring a sense of observance and holiness to one’s meal. It is also considered a commandment to invite guests to meals on the Sabbath, especially if they have nowhere else to go.

But in Israel, the attitude towards food differs in other ways from the United States — not just in regards to religion. Even though fast-food places like McDonalds and Burger King are slowly becoming more popular, Israelis still tend to eat much more healthily than in America. For starters, food just tastes better here. Everything — from meat to vegetables to fruits — is fresh and not saturated with chemicals and preservatives. As a result, tomatoes in stores, for example, are smaller than in the United States because they are not grown with artificial engineering, but they taste much better. (However, people shop more often because food goes bad more quickly.) This will surprise many of my friends and family who know me, but I have eaten many more fruits and vegetables since I moved here. Now, I like the taste. I order hamburgers with the works. In addition, there is nothing as good in the world as fresh orange juice here — and the oranges, interestingly enough, usually come from the Gaza Strip.

Secondly, people eat less junk food. Whenever I travel somewhere on a bus, I see Israelis eating snacks on the way. But they are not eating chips or candy bars or fast food. Rather, Israelis purchase fresh nuts and vegetables, and then they put them in bags for the trip. It is very common to see someone pull out a leaf of lettuce or grab several nuts from a bag and eat them while they are sitting in class or traveling on a bus. The father of a friend of mine frequently eats raw parsley by the bunch. Moreover, kosher eating tends to be healthier (or at least less unhealthy). Religious Jews do not eat pork or shellfish — and they do not mix meat and dairy in the same meal, so they only eat hamburgers. A hamburger is healthier (or less unhealthy) than a bacon cheeseburger — especially when this is how a person eats all the time.

According to the United Nations, the average life expectancy for an American is 78. In Israel, it is 80. I’m starting to understand another reason for the difference.

—
Sleeping in Shifts

When I lived and worked in Boston, I would see people going out after work and then staying until 10 or 11 p.m. In Israel, people are only starting to go out at this time — even when they are in their twenties and thirties.

As I have written in several letters, nearly all Israelis serve in the military for two (for women) or three years (for men) after high school. This experience affects Israelis — in good ways and bad — for much of their lives. In the army, people here get used to sleeping in shifts. Israelis have told me that they will sleep for three or four hours at a time (or even less) twice a day. By the time Israelis are older, they are still used to this schedule.

So this is a typical day for an Israeli: They wake up, and go to work. They get home from work, eat something, watch a little television, and take a nap for a few hours. Then, they go out at 11 p.m. and have fun until 3 or 4 a.m. Then, they go home and sleep for a few hours before getting up for work. No matter how much I try to convince Israelis that it is healthier to sleep for seven or eight hours straight every night, no one believes me. After all, their experience has proved to them otherwise. (And it is nearly impossible to prove stubborn Israelis wrong.)

Still, I see how tired my friends are after doing this for several weeks. I make fun of them and tell them that I was correct, but their typical response is: “Whatever, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Israelis take the standard, Jewish cheer — “L’chaim!” (“To life!”) — very seriously. Still, by the time they are married and have children, their schedules tend to resemble those of typical Americans. I just wish more of my friends would be that way right now. I just cannot stay out that late anymore.

—
Sunset, Sunrise

As I have written in various places, Jewish holidays — as well as days in general — last from sundown to sundown the following day. I had never known why until a rabbi explained it to me.

Look at the following verse from the story of Creation:

God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness He called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, a first day… And there was evening and there was morning, a second day… [Genesis 1:3-5, 8]

The last sentence following each day of creation describes a day as beginning in the evening. So that is why Jewish days begin at sundown. Moreover, darkness existed before light — logically enough — so this another metaphorical reason.

Prior letter: Stories from the Desert II

Letter from Israel: Stories from the Desert II

Thirteenth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Here are some more anecdotes that I thought people might find interesting.

—
The Sporting Life

In the United States, people generally support sports teams that are closest geographically. Bostonians root for the Red Sox, and people near St. Louis like the Cardinals. In Israel, however, people choose their favorite teams based on different criteria.

Since Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey, everyone is close to every potential team that he might like. Moreover, Israeli society is fractured along numerous political, ethnic, and religious lines — and this is where team loyalties come into play.

Secular left-wingers support Hapoel Tel Aviv in soccer and basketball. The name for its community of fans is the Red Devils because the fan base has historically consisted of blue-collar socialists and communists. (The name “HaPoel” means “The worker” in Hebrew.) Conservative Israelis hate the team, especially because one of its soccer players is an Arab. (He also plays on Israel’s national team, leaving right-wing Israelis confused as to whether they should cheer when he scores a goal against another country’s team.)

Conservative Israelis (and those who also want to support the winners) like Maccabi Tel Aviv. This is Israel’s most famous team because, until the last two years, they had been one of the top basketball and soccer teams in Israel and Europe for decades. They are the equivalent of the New York Yankees of Israel. The name “Maccabi” refers to the band of warriors who defeated the invading ancient Greeks in the Chanukah story. Maccabi Tel Aviv and HaPoel Tel Aviv have a rivalry that is just as intense as the Red Sox and Yankees.

Beitar Jerusalem, the new, number-one soccer team in Israel, was recently purchased by Arcadi Gaydamak, a Russian billionare who reportedly emigrated to Israel to avoid an French indictment on weapons trafficking charges in Angola. Gaydamak ran to become mayor of Jerusalem in the recent election, but his candidacy was a joke because he cannot speak a word of Hebrew. Still, he is seen as a populist hero because he spent a lot of money relocating northern residents to safety when Hizbollah rockets were raining down on them from Lebanon in 2006. At the time, the Israeli government was doing nothing, so the team is very popular among poor, working-class Israelis and the so-called “arsim” who I described in my prior letter. Beitar fans are the ones most like to act like British hooligans and assault fans of other teams.

There are many other teams in Israel — like those from smaller towns whose fans are primarily local people — but these are the three that are most popular nationwide.

On a related note, all Israeli sports teams play in European leagues like the European version of the NBA. Israel used to play in the Asian league (which includes the Middle East) in soccer, but Israel left the confederation in 1974 because many other countries refused to play against the team as a result of anti-Israel sentiment. Sports, it seems, can involve politics as well.

—
A Jerusalem Minute

I lived at a Hebrew-language school in Jerusalem for four months after first moving to Israel. Some friends and I were sitting at our living-room table, chatting, doing homework, and playing games like chess and backgammon. It was a typical late afternoon since it was still too chilly in February to spend much time outside.

And then — BOOM!

We froze. There was a loud noise somewhere in the neighborhood close to the school, but we could not tell what it was. No one talked. No one made a noise. “I hope that was a car backfiring,” I said with a nervous laugh. Everyone was still silent. No one moved. Each second lasted forever.

“Let’s hear if there’s a siren,” someone said. We had heard that whenever there is a terrorist incident, emergency crews respond almost instantly. So we waited. One second — nothing. Two seconds — nothing. Three seconds — nothing. Four seconds — nothing. Five seconds — nothing.

After about half a minute, each of us returned to what we were doing as if nothing had happened. No one spoke of it again. There has not been a suicide bombing in Jerusalem since 2002, but everyone worries subconciously whether there will be another.

The noise of car backfirings always startles Israelis for a second — even in the relatively tame, southern, Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Lezion, where I live now. Israelis tend to drive old cars for a long time because new ones are very expensive. When Israelis purchase a new car from a dealer, they pay an 88-percent tax in addition to the sticker price. (I do not know why the government has such an absurd policy.) Since most cars on the road are in bad shape, I hear backfirings at least twice a day. When it is a loud one, I cannot help but think of a bomb.

Oh, and if Americans think gas prices are high there: In Israel, people pay the equivalent of $7 a gallon. It is no wonder that so many people here — even businessmen in their thirties — do not own cars.

–
Tourette’s in Arabic

I was sitting at home in Rishon Lezion one morning, watching TV and eating breakfast. (The day before, I had lost my first full-time job as an English-language marketing writer. Long story.) Then, I heard someone yelling in strange Hebrew. I looked out my window, and a fortysomething guy was walking down my street yelling strange words at the top of his lungs. I ignored it. After all, strange things can happen here.

Then, an hour later, it happened again. And again another hour later. I was so angry that I was about to yell at him to be quiet from my fourth-story window. (People can be, well, colorful here.) Then, I realized that he might have Tourette’s Syndrome. After all, he was yelling in such a strange way. So I felt bad and did nothing. Every day, he did the same thing once an hour for a few hours.

A few weeks later, I told a friend who lives nearby what had been happening. She laughed and said that he did not have Tourette’s. The man was an Arab — hence his strange Hebrew to me — and he was yelling the names of various appliances that he wants. His job, my friend said, is to walk down streets and yell to see if anyone wants to come down and sell him anything that they do not need. Then his business would resell the used item later.

Although his sales tactic is annoying, I do have to give him points for originality. But I would never sell him anything — I could never beat an Israeli Arab at haggling.

—
A Bad Way to Start the Day

I was riding a Jerusalem bus to work one afternoon, and at the second-last stop to mine, three young men tried to get on the bus. It is hard to distinguish Jews from Arabs in this city, but they looked like they may have been Arabs.

The men were in their twenties, they were carrying large bags, and at least one was acting suspiciously. This man wore large sunglasses that blocked his eyes entirely, and as he approached the bus, he kept looking straight down. He never looked up. It seemed weird.

Since the second intifada’s suicide bombings of the early 2000s, bus drivers have been trained to spot suspicious behavior. They will sometimes not let people on the bus if they do not present identification when asked, and they can refuse to allow people to board whenever they see fit. (Of course, this can lead to discrimination against innocent Arabs as well.) Well, this driver
seemed to see fit.

After asking the first man a question that I could not understand, the driver and the men had a conversation. (I wish I had known more Hebrew.) At first I thought I was being paranoid, but then every passenger in the front of the bus rose and moved to the back of the bus once the driver started asking questions. Out of pure instinct, I joined them.

The driver did not let them through the protective turnstile (with a bomb detector) in the doorway. He closed the doors and drove on. Of course, I still do not know what happened. I never will. Perhaps they were asking for directions. Perhaps they did not know which bus to take. Perhaps they were Israeli Arabs who had forgotten their IDs at home. Perhaps they were not even Arabs.

But the other Israelis on the bus had lived in Jerusalem for much longer than I had. If they move to the back of the bus, then so will I. Perhaps I was being paranoid. Perhaps I was being discriminatory against an ethnic group. But I did not feel guilty. In the Middle East, lofty ideals usually yield to blunt realism.

Prior letter: Stories from the Desert I

Letter from Israel: Stories from the Desert I

Twelfth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Here are some anecdotes that I thought people might find interesting.

—
The Five People You Meet in Israel

The Hippie — Most likely a young person who just came back to Israel after spending two years traveling in Latin America or India after finishing their post-high-school army service. They have long dreadlocks, an addiction to smoking pot, an acoustic guitar, and a love of Pink Floyd. They tend to work in bars while finishing a college degree in liberal arts one part-time course at a time. They tend to sleep most of the day because they work and then party at night. Common habitat: Living on a kibbutz. Strengths: Making friends. Weakness: Altered states of mind.

The Yuppie — Most likely a secular, cosmopolitan resident of Tel Aviv who dreams of achieving the American Dream — but in Israel. They work in the high-tech sector and are finishing their MBA degrees. They hate religious people and scowl at anyone with a kippah (yarmulke). They would gladly give away all of Jerusalem and half of Israel if it meant that they could earn a million shekels in peace. Common habitat: High-end cafes and restaurants on Shenkin Street in Tel Aviv that serve pork and other non-kosher food. Strengths: Growing the Israeli economy. Weaknesses: A lack of spirituality.

The Zealot — Most likely a newly-religious Israeli or an Orthodox, Jewish immigrant from America who goes to the West Bank, pitches a tent or builds a small house for his family, buys several guns, and shoots at any Palestinian who comes within range. The Israelis believe that the Torah, as they interpret it, is superior to Israeli and international law and refuse to leave their part of the sacred land. The Americans subconsciously want to live a in a fantasy world resembling that of the Wild West. Common habitat: The West Bank (and formerly the Gaza Strip). Strengths: Defense skills. Weaknesses: Insanity.

The Arse — “Arsim” is a slang, derogatory term for Mizrahi Jews (their families originally came from Middle Eastern countries) in Israel. They are viewed as the Israeli equivalent of so-called white trash. They wear a lot of gold jewelry, have little education, and work blue-collar jobs. Their dress and culture resembles that of Arabs than of Ashkenazi Jews (originally from European countries). They are loud and argumentative, even for Israelis. The singing styles of their popular singers resembles that of Arabic music except that it is in Hebrew. Ashkenazi Jews think that the music sounds like a screeching cat that is in the middle of being killed. Common habitant: Dance bars full of bad music. Strengths: Delicious food. Weaknesses: Listening to them in karaoke bars should probably be another circle in Dante’s Hell.

The “Others” — All of the non-Jewish Israelis, who roughly comprise twenty-five percent of the population. Israeli Arabs (Muslims, Christians, and Druze) are always seen as potential terrorists. Russians are viewed as people who faked immigration papers saying they are Jewish in order to move here, or they are seen as mobsters or prostitutes kidnapped from Europe and forced to work for organized crime here. Christians are viewed as the religion that should have the least say in Jerusalem the Middle East because Jews and Muslims far outnumber them, and Israeli Jews usually associate Christians with the Holocaust. Common habitat: All over Israel. Strengths: Proving that Israel can be a vibrant democracy by embracing citizens who are not Jews. Weaknesses: Threatening Israel’s existence as a country that is officially Jewish (and democratic).

—
Sexual Personaes

In a prior letter, I described how blunt and frank Israelis are in regards to sex. Here are just a few of the conversations I have overheard:

Me: Has the band arrived at the bar yet?
Bartender 1 (a guy): No, but you’ll know when they are here because the floor will be wet beneath Shlomit.
Shlomit (the other bartener): Yeah, the bassist is cute!

Girl 1: I haven’t had sex since August!
Guy 1 (her friend): Has your hymen grown back yet?
Girl 1 laughs and pretends to slap Guy 1.

Guy 1: That dress makes you look like a whore!
Girl 1: Yeah, you can slide a credit card down my vagina.

—
Blame it on the Rain

Even the weather in Israel is polarized and extreme. In the United States, it will moderately rain for several hours before the skies clear. But during the rainy season here (roughly December through March), it can sound like the world is ending — and then it will clear rapidly as though nothing had happened. It will rain violently — including loud thunder, large hail, gusty winds, and bright lightning — for ten minutes, and then it will disappear after ten minutes and give way to clear skies. Then, ten minutes later, the storm will start again. And then it will go away. This cycle can repeat for a whole day — or even longer — at a time.

But during the storm times, it can sound frightening. Sometimes I have thought about building an ark.

From April through October or November, it will not rain. At all. Not one drop. Then, on some magical night in the fall, it will start sprinkling. Everyone will run out of their homes, or their bars, or their shops, and stand outside in the street to feel the raindrops. (I call it First Rain, but I do not know if Israelis use the term.) On First Rain last fall, I saw several children rush out of their apartments onto the street to dance in the rain. They started singing in Hebrew, “Rain, rain, every day!” (“Geshem, geshem, kol yom!”). It was one of the cutest things I have ever seen.

—
Fun With Hebrew

Traditional, English translations of the Bible say in Genesis that Adam “knew” Eve. I had always thought that this was only a polite euphemism for ‘had sex with,” but now I understand the reason. In English, the verb “know” has two major uses: 1.) To “know” a fact, like two plus two equals four; and 2.) To be familiar with something, like “I know math.” In Hebrew, each of these uses has a different verb: “yodea” is to know a fact, and “makir” is to be familiar with something. However, “yodea” can also means “to have sexual relations with” in traditional Hebrew. So, in the original Hebrew, Adam did “yodea” his wife Eve. That is where the “knew” in the Bible comes from.

I was hanging out with some friends one time, and one offered me some of the food on his plate. I declined because I did not like what he was eating. In Hebrew, I told him: “I would not like it, I know myself.” Everyone broke out in laughter. I had mistakenly used the verb “yodea” rather than “makir,” so this is what I had literally said: “I would not like it; I know myself sexually.” (I realized later that this use refers to masturbation in Hebrew.) I should have used “makir” so that I would have said: “I am familiar with myself.”

But I laughed with everyone else. When one is learning a new language in a new country, one needs to have a sense of humor. It can be tough.

—
Young Americans

Israelis always ask Americans why they would ever want to live here because many Israelis have never been to the United States (a visa can be hard to get). They think that America is what they see on TV through television shows like “Friends” and “The O.C.” — namely, that life is easy and everyone lives rich, comfortable lives — because the media is their only exposure to the country. To many secular Israelis, the United States seems to be the real Promised Land of milk and honey. (By the way, Israeli television is now showing reruns of “Alf” as well, and I loved that show when I was a child! I get more of the jokes now.)

As a result, Israelis cannot comprehend why anyone would want to leave America for Israel, whether temporarily or permanently. It has been up to me — and other young Americans I have met — to give them a sense of balance. We tell Israelis that few people there are rich, that the propsperity in recent decades had been falsely financed through debt (and that it is now falling apart), and that untold tens of thousands of people have no health insurance because America, unlike Israel, does not have universal health-care. We describe how warm Israelis are compared to the fact that most people in America barely know who their neighbors, let alone hang out with them frequently. We tell people here that the United States can have a dog-eat-dog, everyone-looks-out-for-himself mentality in constrast to the tribal society in Israel. We say that Israelis always have a sense of spirituality about them, even if a particular person is not exactly religious — and we contrast this to the images on MTV (which is available here), whose popular rap and R&B videos degrade women, celebrate greed, and showcase explicit sexuality.

Although Israelis love the idea of America — especially since the United States can seem like Israel’s only friend in the world — they frequently joke about Americans. Israel is a tiny country populated with Jews and non-Jews from nearly every country in the world, so ethnic jokes are common and acceptable. (It is also because impatient, blunt Israelis have no use for political correctness.) Israelis have jokes about everyone: the French (snobs who insist on speaking French even if they know Hebrew), the Russians (all the women are prostitutes, and all the men are mobsters), the British (pretentious, boring people or wild drunks) and, of course, the Arabs (evil, murderous barbarians). Everyone tells me the American jokes. From what Israelis see from Americans here and on television, they believe that all Americans are materialistic, naive, slutty, shallow, stupid, and fat. The “naive” part is most common — many shop owners and taxi drivers try to overcharge me because they think all Americans are “friarim” (suckers). Moreover, Israelis think that any Americans who come here must be religious zealots. (After all, why else would they leave the real Promised Land?) Still, many Israelis do want to go to the United States because they want to become rich.

More than one observer has remarked, interestingly enough, that the Jewish country is full of racists. But Israelis would just tell them to lighten up and have a sense of humor.

—
Not-So-Fast Food

In the United States, fast food is seen as a cheap, fast way to get a meal. In Israel, it is neither fast nor cheap. Israel probably has the world’s worst customer service in general — why should people care when they are paid by the hour and do not get more money for working quickly? — and a typical Value Meal at McDonald’s costs the equivalent of $12. So, to Israelis, fast food is a treat to be enjoyed once in a while or on a special occasion. But it is just as unhealthy here.

—
The American Accent

Israelis are stereotyped — sometimes accurately — as aggressive and direct. I think the Hebrew language has something to do with it. In English, people emphasize different syllables of different words for different reasons. In Hebrew, the last syllable of a word is always emphasized intensely. It sounds as if I were to say in English: “I WANT to GO to the MALL.” The result is that Westerns feel as though Israelis are punching them repeatedly with the very words they use. Whenever Israelis make fun of the American accent, they do one of two things: 1.) They speak Hebrew in a monotone voice because Americans accentuate Hebrew as if they were speaking English; or 2.) They speak Hebrew like a so-called dumb-blond Valley Girl.

I thought the second option was ridiculous until I overheard some American girls who were likely tourists. I was withdrawing money from an ATM when some early-twentysomething women were getting money at the station next to me. They were discussing their plans for the evening, and I am not exaggerating their conversation:

“Like, do you want to go to Tel Aviv? There is this bar that is, like, so cool! The bartender is super hot!”
“No way!”
“Yeah! I wear, like, this slutty top, and he always gives me free chasers [shots]!”
“Yeah, let’s go!
“Cool… oh, my God! I, like, only have fifty shekels left!”
“Well, I can, like, spot you.”
“Thanks, honey! Let’s party!”
The two of them yell, laugh, and go to flag a taxi.

I rarely hear American tourists because I avoid tourist-trap locations, so this type of chatter sounded a little foreign after a year of living in Israel. And then I understood why — in addition to MTV and “The O.C.” — Israelis sometimes have such a low opinion of Americans.

Prior letter: Finding Israel’s Center

Letter from Israel: Finding Israel’s Center

Eleventh in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Imagine that you enter a voting booth in the United States to choose your congressman, and there is only one choice on the ballot: “The Democratic Party” or “The Republican Party.” This is the only option that Israelis have at election time.

As Israeli voters ponder the fate of their country following its recent, inconclusive elections, the Jewish state itself is facing a crisis of confidence. The people distrust their leaders following numerous investigations, convictions, and resignations from the top levels of government for serious crimes (including a former president Moshe Katsav’s future trial for rape and sexual harassment) and blatant ineptitude (the failed war against Hizbollah in 2006). Civil society is becoming fractured and polarized because of political, ethnic, and religious divisions. The chance of peace with the Palestinians is looking increasingly remote with each passing year.

All of these problems have complex causes, but there is one underlying factor that is a partially responsible for each of them: Israel’s broken electoral system. If Israel wants to solve these fundamental issues, then the government must replace its proportional-representation electoral process with one that resembles the American model: a representative democracy that uses a winner-take-all system.

—

When a country decides upon an electoral system, it must choose between two types that have conflicting values.

Proportional representation, the system used here, gives a political party a number of seats in the legislature that is equivalent to its level of support in an election. If the center-right Likud Party in Israel, for example, receives twenty-five percent of the overall vote in an election, it would have roughly the same percentage of seats in the next parliament.

However, a representative democracy divides a country into electoral districts, and the candidate who receives the most votes in a district becomes the representative of that area in the legislature. This is the model for U.S. elections.

Each system has its benefits and drawbacks. Proportional representation ensures that nearly all opinions have at least some presence in government. This allows for a diversity of viewpoints, and it ensures that minority voices and various interests have political voices. In Israel, this results in a political party for Arab citizens having representation in the legislature of a Jewish state, and it allowed for a small interest-group like the Gil party here to gain enough influence in the 2006 election to advocate for pensioners in the resulting parliament. However, Israeli governments elected through this system are always unstable because a single party never gains enough legislative seats in such a fractured country to claim majority-control of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, by itself. This forces the major parties to gain a majority of seats by forming coalitions with minor and extreme political parties, which then gain a disproportionate amount of influence and an ability to extort through a veto pen.

In contrast, representative systems usually result in political moderation and internal stability because of statistics. The distribution of political beliefs of any given population usually resembles the shape of a bell curve: There are a large number of people in the middle, but the level of support declines swiftly as one moves further left and right. When the size of a sample population increases, so does the overall tendency towards moderation. As a result, the candidates who receive the highest number of votes in most legislative districts will usually be moderates from the center-left or center-right parties. In the United States, for example, nearly every congressman is a Democrat or Republican. However, the negative consequence is that these parties hold a monopoly on power. Other viewpoints are rarely heard.

Israel’s proportional-representation system – in which the people literally vote for a party in Knesset elections — does result in the presence of various opinions in the legislature, but the tradeoff is that governments can be weak, ineffectual, and paralyzed. To solve the complex issues that are facing the country, Israel needs to value political moderation and stability over ensuring that a diversity of opinions is involved in public policy. It needs to divide the country into legislative districts and implement a winner-take-all system in which each party, following a primary, runs one candidate in each locality. The benefits would be numerous.

Functioning governments. Small and extremist parties would receive fewer seats, if any, in the Knesset while the center-left Labor, moderate Kadima, and center-right Likud would receive many more. The center would become stronger, and the extremes would lose power because a single party would be more likely to gain a majority in the Knesset by itself (or with one other party at most). Governments would survive until the next scheduled election because they would never be held hostage by smaller parties that have disproportionate influence in governing coalitions. Minor parties would not have the ability to veto the peace process — or other major issues — by toppling the government. The ultra-Orthodox Shas party, for example, would not be able to demand — and receive — NIS 775 million ($224 million) from the government for its religious institutions, as it did last year. (Pork-barrel politics, it seems, can still occur in a Jewish state.)

National consensus. Israeli policy would generally remain consistent over time because governments and ministries would be comprised of people who range only from the center-left to the center-right. The Israeli government and people would be able to form broad, moderate compromises on the unaddressed political and religious issues that have plagued Israeli society for decades: the conflicting desires to have a country that is a Jewish state, a democracy, and in the ancient Land of Israel; the issues of Jewish identity and diversity within the Jewish religion; and the longstanding conflict with the Palestinians.

Many efforts to resolve these issues are vetoed by extremist parties whom governments need to please to keep them in governing coalitions to remain in power. So far, Israel has chosen to sweep these longstanding controversies under the proverbial rug in an effort to prolong the unsustainable status quo as long as possible. But it is time to settle them once and for all.

Faith in government. Israelis vote in every election, but they have no one in the Knesset who directly represents them because party officials usually compile their own lists of candidates for the Knesset. If Likud, for example, wins enough votes to receive thirty seats, then the top thirty people on the party’s list will become members of the Knesset.

If individual members of the Knesset were chosen directly by the people rather than political parties, then Israelis would have more confidence in their leaders. The fact that party officials create candidate lists only invites corruption at every level. A member of the Knesset would be less likely to engage in unfit practices if the people had the direct ability to remove him from office at the next election. The quality of the members of the Knesset would increase when the people have the ability to evaluate a candidate’s ideas, qualifications, and integrity before choosing whether to vote for him.

Moreover, an electoral system in which people vote for parties and ideologies — as opposed to voting for a person — encourages partisanship and extremism in general.

—

Still, a representative democracy in Israel would be far from perfect. In recent years, the Democrats and Republicans in various U.S. states have redrawn legislative districts in an effort to ensure that representatives from their parties are consistently re-elected. To avoid such a scenario in Israel, the power to determine the electoral boundaries should be given not to the Knesset but to a multi-party committee appointed by the president and comprised of esteemed, retired statesmen.

There may be another significant issue. If minor and extreme parties are marginalized, then it would be likely that non-Jews — most significantly Israeli Arabs — would lose their representation because they comprise a plurality in few, if any, places. Those who are extremely passionate about one issue, like Gil’s pensioners, would also lose their ability to advance their cause by forming a political party and gaining a few Knesset seats.

However, these problems would probably be less significant than one would think. In an effort to attract additional voters, the remaining two or three major parties would eventually co-opt the political causes (like advocating for pensioners) and ethnic constituencies (like Russian immigrants) that had been represented by various minor parties. (This is similar to what happens in the United States: either the Democrats or the Republicans will neutralize a third party by adopting its cause.) In addition, the electoral committee could draw the electoral map in a manner that unites Israeli Arabs, or any other demographic group, in an given area into a single legislative district to ensure that they have representation. The benefits of a representative democracy would far outweigh any possible drawbacks.

—

Implementing such a radical change in Israel’s electoral system would not be easy. Of course, the minor political parties would resist any reforms that would decrease their power. All of the political parties will fight against any changes that reduce their ability to pick the individual members of the Knesset themselves, but they should dismiss these selfish concerns for the sake of the country.

However, there is a way to adopt these needed reforms. President Shimon Peres could lead the way. As Israel’s head of state, he is supposed to rise above politics and represent the Israeli people as a whole. In this capacity, Peres can work to persuade the Knesset. The leaders of Labor, Kadima, and Likud could support this effort as well. The three major parties would naturally benefit from these reforms, and they would be able gather enough votes to pass this legislation. Although electoral reform seems to be dead in the next government already, this issue cannot be taken off the table.

After sixty years as the Middle East’s only democracy, it is time for Israel to reform its electoral system before the next election and unite its people under a banner of moderation, stability, and unity. This might be the only way for the Jewish state to survive for another sixty years.

Prior letter: Sex and Feminism

Letter from Israel: Sex and Feminism

Tenth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — So I was starting my first day at my first full-time job in Tel Aviv where I was an English-language marketing writer for a high-tech company. I was sitting in a room with two other employees, and the department head came inside to wish everyone a good morning.

After the usual pleasantries, the 40-ish boss turned to my coworker, a 19-year-old student from Canada whose father is Israeli, and made a comment that shocked me: “Hey, your breasts look bigger today.” I did not know what to expect. My colleague genuinely laughed. “Yeah, I’m wearing a different bra today,” she said with a smile and a shrug. Then everyone started talking about the day’s work as if nothing strange had happened. If the boss had said something like that in the United States, he would have faced lawsuits and termination.

Israel has various cultural norms regarding sex and relations between the genders that shock new arrivals from the Western world, and this was my first introduction to them. Later, the same boss asked me if I had spoken with “the MILF” in human resources. I laughed and shrugged it off.

—

Back in Boston

Before I moved from Beantown to Illinois and then to Israel, I worked briefly as a marketing manager at a Massachusetts hospital. During the daylong orientation, a group of twenty new employees had to meet with human resources, listen to various speakers, and watch a series of videos. (Obviously, the job did not work out.)

I was sitting next to the only other guy in the room since all of the other new recruits were female nurses. Soon, the HR manager presented a video on sexual harassment in the workplace: A woman ran to a female colleague to complain that the guy who refills the vending machines had asked her out. “I felt so akward!” she whined to her friend. “I feel so uncomfortable, and I don’t know what to do!”

The friend advised her to talk to her boss or make a complaint to human resources. At this point in the film, the other guy and I started laughing to ourselves. It was completely absurd — God forbid that a guy tries to ask someone out on a date! The woman could have simply told him, “No, thank you.”

I think about that video whenever I observe the differences between American and Israeli women. In such a situation like the one in the video, an Israeli girl would have turned him down, probably very rudely. If he persisted, an Israeli woman would have hit him or kicked him in the crotch. No one here would run and cry to management.

—

Tough Cookies

Israeli women are rough. They drink, smoke, and curse. They yell and argue. They are ruthlessly blunt and usually cynical. They know how to fix cars and fire weapons. Part of the reason is that life is harder here, especially during the first several decades since Israel was founded. Everyone pitches in equally. Everyone — men and women — serves in the military for a few years. Everyone works in the fields, stables, and factories on collective farms named kibbutzim. I know several women who have turned down Israeli guys whom they deem to be “too sensitive.” A bartender friend of mine, a woman, once gave me advice on meeting Israel women: “Don’t be so American!” (“American” is the code word that people use for “nice” when they talk to me.) An Israeli woman will work hard all day, then make dinner and clean house at night.

Israel is far ahead of the Western world in terms of the sexes being treated equally. But as I have always written, everything in the Middle East is a paradox. In other ways, Israel is far behind the West as well.

Part of the reason is that Israeli women are very “macho” is that they need to defend themselves against many Israeli guys. Men here, like many of their Arab cousins in other Middle Eastern countries, are not very nice to women in general. Men throughout the country act like guys on a construction site whenever they see a beautiful woman. Men have no shame when they are trying to get into a woman’s pants. Israeli guys think that I am a “friar” (the Hebrew word for “sucker”) when I refuse to try to pick up girls who are extremely drunk in bars. Israeli guys have no rules in the persuit of — well, you know. A later boss of mine at a different job told me not to recruit any female candidates for a position because “they get sick more often, and they get pregnant.” Women need to be tough to succeed in such a society.

Israeli, in many respects, is a conservative country. Women are generally expected to do the cooking and cleaning. Whenever I am a guest for dinner, I always offer to help with the dishes or the clean-up, but the woman of the house will threaten to hit me unless I go watch television with the other guys. And she will only be half-joking.

—

Different Views of Sex

The important thing to remember about Israel is that it is a Jewish country, and Judaism is more than just “Christianity without the Jesus.” It is an entirely different mindset and culture — and one important distinction is how people here view sex.

Christianity originally viewed sex as a necessary evil. The Apostle Paul, who expected Jesus to return soon and whom some historians believe to have been a misogynist, wrote that a chaste life is better in preparation for the Second Coming and that marriage is the less-ideal option (1 Corinthians 7:1-2, 8-9, 32-34):

It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband… I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I [celibate]. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn… He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is difference also between a wife and a virgin. The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

In addition, the Roman Catholic Church still celebrates the eternal virginity of Mary (something that I doubt Joseph had allowed to remain for their entire lives). Later, Europeans and later Americans changed their view: sex was something not to be acknowledged or discussed in public and polite company.

These opinions on sex did not come from Judaism. Secular and religious Jews view sex as something beautiful and as natural as eating and drinking. To them, it is a fact of life — so why make a fuss about it? Jewish people are immensely blunt and practical.

When the mother of Avivit, a female friend of mine, introduced me to Avivit’s seven- and three-year-old nieces, I mistakenly told them that I was a “haver” (boyfriend) of Avivit. The mother corrected my Hebrew: I was a “yedid” (male friend) of Avivit. Then, Avivit’s mother told the girls the difference: “He is a boy-friend who does not sleep with Avivit.” And the girls understood what she meant!

Whenever families eat or visit together, the topic of sex always comes up because someone is always trying to set someone else up on a date, and parents always want their children to get married and have grandchildren. But they will always end up talking and joking about sex — in vulgar Hebrew — even if children are around. It is just part of a culture that has few hang-ups about sex, regardless of the time and place.

You can imagine what people my age say among themselve at bars and clubs. I was told my bartender friend that I always liked it when she worked rather than another male bartender. Her joke in response: “Yeah, I have breasts!” And that is a tame example.

—

Religion and Sex

Israel, however, is not one big brothel. As a half-American friend of mine told me, Israeli girls tend to lose their virginity at 18 or 19 — not 16 or younger as is typical in many parts of the United States. The rate of teenage pregnancy is also lower — in addition to Israelis having sex later, I imagine it is also because birth control is not viewed as immoral as many Christians believe it to be. Still, Israelis tend to be either very liberal or very conservative on pre-marital sex. As I wrote in a prior letter, an 18-year-old girl whom I had just met asked me in blunt English: “Do you want to fuck tonight?” (I politely declined.) On the other hand, many girls I know will wait months to have sex with their boyfriends (even if they talk bluntly about sex all of the time). Just like everything else in Israel, there is not a lot of middle ground.

Even among Orthodox Jews in Israel, sex is not viewed in the same way as many Christians. Most Orthodox Jews observe the law of “shomer negiah” — that no two adults or teenagers of opposite genders are allowed to have physical contact, not even a hug or a handshake, unless they are either married or close relatives. Still, this does not mean that sex is a forbidden subject. Traditional Jewish law discusses dating, marriage, and sex at great length. Orthodox Jews talk about sex as bluntly and frankly as secular Jews — even if they are very observant and will do nothing until they are married. As I heard one person put it: Religious Jews are modest; they are not prudish.

(Interestingly, some Orthodox girls discreetly experiment with lesbianism before marriage because a literal reading of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, bans only male-male sex — it says nothing about female-female. Orthodox rabbis discourage this behavior, but they cannot ban it.)

—

A Sexual Paradox

When it comes to sex and feminism, Israel is liberal and feminist, yet conservative and misogynistic. Israelis are blunt and vulgar when they discuss sex, yet many of them will not even touch someone of opposite sex until they are married. Israeli women are tougher than most American men because many Israeli men act like “barbarians,” but they turn down men who are too “nice” or “sensitive.” Secular girls will either have sex the same night they meet someone, or they will wait for months.

Sex is a paradox in Israel — just like everything else in the Middle East.

Prior letter: The Gaza Conflict

Letter from Israel: The Gaza Conflict

Ninth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — The Israeli military started bombarding Hamas installations throughout the Gaza Strip on Saturday, and Israeli soldiers and tanks are currently stationed along the border in preparation for a possible ground invasion. In response, Hamas has fired numerous additional rockets into southwestern Israel. So far two people have died in Israel, and more than three hundred have died in Gaza.

Various commentators and government spokespersons have appeared throughout the media worldwide, but most of them, of course, are biased towards one side or the other. In this Letter from Israel, I hope to present the historical and present facts surrounding the situation and then give my (biased) thoughts later.

—
Israel Leaves Gaza

In 1967, Israel conquered and occupied the Gaza Strip — along with the Palestinians living there — from Egypt in the Six-Day War. (Egypt and Jordan, along with other Arab countries, had attempted to invade and destroy Israel. The Jewish state gained the West Bank from Jordan in the war as well.)

In 2005, former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew the country’s armed forces from Gaza and forcibly removed all of the Israeli settlers who had moved there to live amongst the Palestinian population. Sharon had reportedly planned to do the same in most of the West Bank to make room for a future Palestinian state, but he suffered a stroke and fell into a coma from which he has yet to recover. The current prime minister, Ehud Olmert, took over for Sharon.

—
Hamas Comes to Power

After Israel left the Gaza Strip, the terrorist group Hamas, which had always been based in the territory, gained in strength and began regularly firing rockets into southwestern Israel. But they had been somewhat checked by the Palestinian Authority, which was dominated by Fatah, a rival, moderate political party.

As part of the Bush administration’s plan to spread democracy throughout the Middle East, the United States pushed for the Palestinian Authority to hold elections and form a representative parliament. Despite objections from Israel and some Palestinians themselves — both of whom feared that Hamas might gain power — the elections were held in 2006. Hamas won a plurality of the seats in the parliament, giving the terrorist group the right to form a new government and name a prime minister. The Fatah party still held the post of president — largely symbolic, like the Queen of England — because Mahmoud Abbas had been elected to the post earlier.

The Palestinians had always been split amongst themselves: Fatah, the moderate party that reportedly supports peace with Israel and a two-state solution, had been popular among Palestinians in the West Bank. Hamas, the terrorist and humanitarian group that wants to eliminate Israel, was very popular among those in Gaza. As I wrote in a prior letter, Hamas was formed to fight Israel, but it was also founded to build daily necessities like schools and hospitals at a time when Yasser Arafat and his corrupt Fatah party transferred millions in international aid into their private bank accounts and purchased items like weapons rather than those like medicine.

In the months following the election, the Palestinians waged a low-level civil war between Fatah and Hamas. The terrorist group succeeded in violently kicking Fatah out of Gaza — some Fatah members were thrown off of buildings or had their kneecaps shot off — and Hamas gained complete control of the territory. Hamas started firing more rockets into southwestern Israel, and the Jewish state blockaded the Gaza Strip in response. The blockade helped to stop weapons from entering the Gaza Strip, but it also prevented items like food, gas, and medical supplies from reaching innocent Palestinians in Gaza as well.

—
Buildup to Conflict

For months, this was the status quo in Gaza. Hamas would fire rockets into Israel, and the Jewish state would continue treating Gaza like a large jail by not allowing anyone or anything to enter or leave. (Egypt, for the record, also closed its border with Gaza because the country does not want extremists and terrorists to enter as well.) Still, Hamas still received weapons and training from Iran and Syria through underground tunnels that the group had dug under the border with Egypt. The rockets that Hamas fired became increasingly advanced, and hit more and more Israeli cities further away from Gaza.

Gaza was a powder keg that was waiting to explode. Most of the Palestinians there are either militant Islamists or innocent civilians who suffer from the lack of daily necessities. Both parties, for different reasons, are not very happy with Israel. On the other side, the Israeli government was facing more and more criticism at home that it was unwilling to defend Israeli citizens by doing nothing significant to stop Hamas from firing rockets into Israeli towns.

Last week, Israeli newspapers carried a report that intelligence analysts believed that Hamas now had the capability to hit Beersheva, the major city in the south-central part of Israel. It is east of Gaza. Such an attack would be too much for the Israeli government to bear, so it only became a matter of time before the Jewish state took action. [Five minutes after I wrote this, two rockets landed in Beersheva.]

—
The Current Situation

Of course, no one knows what the Israeli military is going to do. But it is clear that they want to eliminate Hamas’ ability to fire rockets into Israel at the least. This involves targeting every known weapons storage facility, Hamas office, and staging area — or, in other words, many buildings in every part of Gaza.

However, this also results in the unintended deaths of many civilians because 1.5 million people live in an area that is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. Whenever a bomb falls on a military target, it is inevitable that any people nearby will also be killed. This is unavoidable.

World opinion is divided. Supporters of Israel’s actions argue that the Jewish state has no choice but to do whatever it takes to stop a terrorist group from firing rockets into towns, and they state that any other country would do the same thing. Opponents state that Israel’s response is disproportional and excessive because hundreds of Palestinians — including innocent ones — are dying in Gaza in just a few days even though Hamas’ missiles have only killed a dozen in Israel over the past several years. (The group that is probably most in the middle is the Palestinians who support Fatah. The moderate party detests Hamas, but they cannot afford to be seen as unsympathetic to the plight of people in Gaza.)

—
My Analysis

Although I am biased, I cannot help but blame Hamas for the current conflict for several simple reasons:

• If Hamas did not shoot rockets into Israel, then the Jewish state would have no need to blockade the territory and attack in response.
• If Hamas was only concerned about blockades and border closings, then they would attack Egypt as well. When the current conflict started, Egypt closed the border and pointed machine guns towards Gaza. Egypt wants nothing to do with Hamas as well. But the fact that Hamas targets only Israel proves that they have an irrational hatred of the Jewish state.
• If you pay close attention to comments that Hamas makes to the press, you will always see that the terrorist group always advocates for a cease-fire once Israel retaliates. Hamas never wants a final peace settlement that would allow the two sides to live in peace. There is a pattern in Gaza: Hamas attacks, Israel responds, Hamas demands a cease-fire, Israel agrees, and Hamas builds up its weapons arsenal once again. Then the cycle repeats. Hamas cannot be reasoned with rationally.
• Of course, many more people in Gaza have died as a result of Israel’s military actions than Israelis as a result of missiles fired by Hamas. But this is a distraction from the prior three issues that I just described. In the end, Hamas is responsible for all of the death and destruction. Hamas stores weapons in — and fires them from — hospitals, schools, and homes. So when Israel responds, these buildings are destroyed, and any people inside are usually killed.

Right now, I am sitting in a bar in Rishon Lezion, the main city south of Tel Aviv, eating dinner and watching the news with friends. I am thirty minutes north of Gaza and an hour northwest of Beersheva. In theory, if Hamas can hit Beersheva, which they just did ten minutes ago, then they can hit the city where I live. Until now, the war had just been something on television, but now it is something much more to me.

Prior letter: The Optimistic Future.

Letter From Israel: The Optimistic Future

Eighth in an ongoing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel – I was mugged twice in the nine years that I lived in Boston. After seeing the reactions of nearby Bostonians at the time and Israelis to whom I have told the stories now, I can understand why Israel is more secure than people realize.

—
Copley Square and East Boston

Boston is usually safe – as long as one is not alone in parts of the Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods at night – because it is a college town. Roughly one-fourth of the city is comprised of people between the ages of 18 and 22. People walk around at night, even alone, and everyone normally feels safe.

While I was working at my first journalism job out of college in 2002 as a staff reporter for The Boston Courant, a weekly neighborhood newspaper, I was on my way to the Copley Square subway station to cover a Boston Public Health Commission meeting in the Fenway neighborhood. On the way, I stopped to have a cigarette before walking down the stairs to the station. (Yes, it was a bad habit. Kids, don’t ever start.)

Two young men walked up to me, and I can only describe them as stereotypical ghetto thugs. (I hate to describe them in this manner, but it is necessary to set the scene accurately.) One was a small-but-built guy who wore baggy clothes, and the other was a large, fat guy who needed to lean against a post next to me because he had obviously smoked too much marijuana.

The first guy stood right in front of my and stared into my eyes. “What do you have in your pockets?” he demanded in a rough, menacing voice. I froze, partly out of surprise and partly out of fear. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes. “That’s all,” I said with a shrug. He grabbed it out of my hands, and the two thugs walked away. I was glad that I had intentionally not mentioned my wallet and mobile phone.

The thing I remember most about this experience is that it happened at rush hour. There were dozens of people within a few hundred feet, and no one said or did anything. After the two guys walked away, I looked around because people were looking in my direction. Everyone nearby lowered his head and turned away when we made eye contact.

Two years later, I found myself alone on the Fourth of July because I had just flown back from visiting my family in Illinois. My friends were out of town, so I went to a neighborhood pub in East Boston to celebrate. I was walking home when two men, seemingly out of the blue, grabbed me from behind, held me by the shoulders, and placed a knife across the front of my neck. I offered my wallet and cell phone, which they took and then ran away. As I stumbled home (my legs felt half-paralyzed out of shock), I saw that a small group of people were lounging on their front porch not very far away. They had done nothing to help. In addition, I was obviously shaken and possibly stumbling, but they did not even ask whether I was all right.

—
A Single Community

In several of my prior letters, I described the strong civil society that has developed in Israel as a result of Jewish tradition and tribal identification, along with the history of the communal farms named kibbutzim and the desire to unify in the face of numerous, perceived threats. I fully realized this while telling the two prior stories to my Israeli friends.

Israelis are shocked and horrified to hear that no one helped me while I was being mugged (or possibly something worse). They told me that, in Israel, if someone were being attacked on the street, every single
person nearby would run over to help – and most likely, to be blunt, kick the crap out of the bad guy. Everyone looks out for everyone else. (It also helps that nearly all Israelis have some degree of army training as a result of the mandatory military service after high school here. As I heard it put once somewhere, an Israeli has more courage in his finger than most people have in their entire bodies.)

In addition, violent crime is also extremely rare in Israel. In the eight months that I have lived here, I have yet to see a news report on a random mugging, murder, or rape. Despite what people in the West see on the news, Israel is extremely safe. Terrorism has been extremely rare for years, and more people die in traffic accidents each year than the number who have been killed in all wars and terrorist attacks combined. Most violence is either related to the Russian mafia, traffic accidents, or drunken brawls in bars. No one, for example, ever breaks into a random house and kills or rapes the person inside. Everyone walks around at night, even alone. On some level, everyone looks out for everyone. Statistically, Israel is safer than most major American cities – the chance of being killed in a suicide bombing might be one in ten thousand while the chance of being murdered in many parts of the United States might be one in five thousand.

In major American cities, a person can feel alone even though he lives among millions of people. This never happens in Israel. People are care about everyone (unless they work in customer service). It is hard to describe the level of open affection in interpersonal relations in Israel to someone who has never been here, but I will try.

People are warm and friendly to a degree that I have never seen anywhere else. During conversations, people touch and hug each other all the time. Everyone (even men) embraces and kisses on the cheek when they meet someone – sometimes even if it is for the first time. Just the other night, a good male friend of mine gave me a hug from behind and a kiss on the shoulder when he saw me sitting at a local pub. Whenever someone is eating at a restaurant or somewhere in public, nearly everyone who passes by – whether he is a friend or stranger – will tell him, “Behteyahvon!” This is the Hebrew phrase that roughly translates to “Bon appetite!”

At first these differences are uncomfortable to people who, like me, grew up in the United States, where people have larger amounts of private, personal space between each other and people, especially men, are less affectionate in public (or at all). But after one becomes used to the cultural differences, it becomes very heartwarming and endearing.

While I wrote about some discouraging trends in modern Israeli society in my prior letter, it is still true that people here are generally friendly and warm (most of the time). After all, Israelis tend to believe, to varying degrees, that they only have each other in the entire world.

The primary reason that I am optimistic about Israel’s future is that I have seen and understood the Israeli mindset. The close, civil society here brought Israel through threats of extermination in the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, as well as through two intifadas and sixty years of a turbulent existence. Israelis can get through anything – even the political, social, and religious differences described in my prior letters – because they know that they will always have each other.

Still, many of the specific problems I have mentioned seem to be improving, especially when one compares Israel today to decades ago.

—
Brighter than it Seems

– Israel is much more secure. Although Israeli and American conservatives always claim that Israel is constantly facing threats to its very existence, this is no longer true. If Israel had lost any of the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, the country would likely have been invaded and destroyed by the surrounding Arab countries. (Many Israelis began digging their own graves in 1967, and rabbis started reciting Psalms in the Israeli legislature.)

However, everything has changed with most of countries that border Israel. The Jewish state is at peace with Egypt and Jordan. Iraq is no longer a threat since the United States toppled Saddam Hussein. Saudi Arabia is pursuing a peace plan to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lebanon is occupied with its own internal battle with Hizbollah. Despite Syria’s connection to Iran, the country is having peace talks with Israel. Syria’s military alone is no match for the Jewish state.

Israel does face threats from Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hizbollah in southern Lebanon. However, these terrorist groups do not threaten Israel’s existence. Rockets fired into southwestern and northern Israel do kill a few people and cause minor damage in those places, but they cannot destroy the country. Since Israel built the controversial separation barrier between Israel proper and the West Bank, the number of suicide bombings has fallen to practically zero. (Suicide bombings, although horrific, cannot destroy a country either.)

– Iran will not nuke Israel. The Jewish state would face an existential threat from Iranian nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic extremists in the country’s government. But Israel will never let that become a possibility. The Jewish state destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and (allegedly) Syria’s in 2007. Israel, with or without U.S. assistance, will do the same to Iran. This country does not — and cannot — take threats lightly.

– Everyone knows how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Except for Israeli and Palestinian extremists, nearly all people agree that a peace plan will have the following: an Israeli withdrawal from all or most of the West Bank, a division of Jerusalem, and a cessation of terrorist attacks. The problem is with implementation: Minor, ultra-Orthodox political parties in Israeli governing coalitions veto any of these withdrawals, and the Palestinians have been fighting a low-grade civil war amongst themselves between the Fatah and Hamas political parties.

However, the fact that the vast majority of Israelis now recognize what a peace plan must entail is a good start. As the conflict continues year after year, more and more Israelis and Palestinians will start to move towards the center. No one, no matter how much of an ideologue, wants to live in a pressure-cooker forever. In the end, practical reality usually trumps impractical idealism.

– Israeli society is becoming less fractured. As I wrote in a prior letter, there has been much social strife and division between Ashkenazi Jews (people with a European-Jewish culture), Mizrahi Jews (people with a Middle East-Jewish culture), and non-Jewish Israelis like Russians and Arabs. But this is slowly dissipating.

Israel is a small country, so everyone interacts with everyone all of the time. So people from these different communities frequently fall in love and have children. Now, for example, I have friends here who are half-Polish and half-Moroccan, half-Indian and half-American, and half-Iraqi and half-Romanian. The terms “Ashkenazi” and “Mizrahi” are increasingly obsolete.

When non-Jewish Russians moved to Israel following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s through a loophole in immigration law, they faced much discrimination. But their children, now in their teens and early twenties, are as Israeli as Jewish Israelis. The first language of these non-Jews is Hebrew, not Russian. Their personalities are very Israeli, not Russian. As a result, they are just as Israeli as secular, Israeli Jews, and they fit into society very easily.

Although it will always be difficult for Arab Israelis to feel at home in a Jewish state, I think they are slowly moving in that direction. For example, I once saw a group of Arabs sitting in a hospital while I was visiting a friend’s family member there. Surprisingly enough, they were speaking Hebrew amongst themselves. This can only be a good sign.

– The influence of the ultra-Orthodox might be decreasing. As I wrote in a prior letter, religion in Israel is extremely polarized. Everyone is either completely secular or wholly Orthodox, and even the Orthodox world is divided:

    • Modern Orthodox (also called National Orthodox in Israel) Jews live in the modern world while remaining completely observant. They are also the primary inspiration behind the settlement movement in the West Bank.
    • Charedi (also called Ultra-Orthodox) Jews live in isolated neighborhoods and block out the outside world while rejecting any modernization of Judaism. While they do not recognize the State of Israel, they still rely on government subsidies instead of working to pay for their children, and they control most of the official religious establishment. (I discussed them in my first letter.)
    • Hasidic Jews who are very mystical and believe that their founding rabbi is the Messiah, even though he happens to be dead.

The ultra-Orthodox movement has been very harmful to Israel. They receive little secular education, they do not serve in the military, they work very little, they have numerous children (sometimes ten or more), and they survive on taxpayer dollars (er, shekels). Their rabbis in government positions are increasingly discriminatory against all other forms of Judaism, even other types of Orthodox Judaism. In charedi neighborhoods, people will throw stones at you if you drive through there on Shabbat or do anything else that violates Orthodox Jewish law.

But the pendulum might be starting to swing in the other direction. Incoming Prime Minister Tzipi Livni might be able to form a governing coalition that does not, for once, include Shas, the most powerful ultra-Orthodox political party. The finance minister passed a budget over charedi objections this year that did not increase the amount of money ultra-Orthodox families receive each month to pay for their children. Moreover, the charedi communities are not self-sustaining. Many of them have relied on wealthy parents and grandparents, but those funds are disappearing as the older generation passes away and the money is spent. Once the ultra-Orthodox community starts to lose influence, then Israel can start to move towards the center religiously.

– The economy is gaining strength. Israel is largely a desert that is devoid of natural resources, so the country has had to rely mainly on one asset: Israeli brains. As a result, the country has become a worldwide leader in fields like high-tech and biotechnology that is on the same level as Silicon Valley and Bangalore, India. Israel is a country that is succeeding in a globalized world.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once theorized, no two countries that have a McDonald’s have ever gone to war with each other.* The reasoning is that countries need to have a large middle class to have fast food establishments, and a place with a stable middle class wages war less often. (When people have more stuff, they are less willing to risk losing it through conflict. People are more willing to fight if they have nothing to lose.)

Well, Israel has many McDonald’s and Burger Kings. As a result of Israel’s growing economy, the country is generally becoming richer (although the gap between the rich and poor is also rising). Since the middle class is growing in Israel, it is likely that the public will generally be more willing to make necessary sacrifices for peace. This is also why it is important for the international community – and Israel – to help improve the Palestinian economy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well. If there were many McDonald’s in Gaza, perhaps the Palestinians there would be less likely to support Hamas.

—
Signing Off, For Now

Well, this seems like an appropriate place to end my series, at least for now. I will be flying to the United States soon for a few weeks, and I’ll be back in Israel in November. It will be interesting to see what will happen over the next several months.

* The recent war between Russia and Georgia may be an exception.

Addendum: In response to this essay, a friend in Boston e-mailed me to say that the city is becoming more violent — people are now assulted in broad daylight in Downtown Crossing. This is very sad.

Prior letter: No Way Out (or, Stuck in the 1970s)

Letter from Israel: No Way Out (or, Stuck in the 1970s)

Seventh in an ongoing series

TEL AVIV – So I was on my way to a downtown club a few months ago when my friends and I pulled over to buy some bottled water at a corner kiosk. The clerk got my water from the cooler, and I gave him some money.

I had five shekels in change coming to me. The clerk grabbed the money from the cash register, grinned at me, put four shekels in my hand, and dropped the remaining one in his tip jar.

Since I was still fairly new to Israel, I was absolutely shocked at the gumption. I just shook my head and walked away in frustration because I could not believe that he had just stolen a shekel right in front of me. (Now that I’ve grown accustomed to the culture here, I would have probably grabbed the tip jar, pulled my shekel out, and thrown the rest of the coins on the floor while yelling at him in Hebrew.) In Israel, the worst thing a person can be is a “friar,” which is the Hebrew word for “sucker.” One learns not to be a “friar” very quickly here.

In my last letter, I described the civil society that has developed in Israel over the sixty years the country has existed. However, that closeness and familiarity has been declining in recent years. In conversations I’ve had with Israelis of all ages, backgrounds, and political affiliations, they have noticed the same thing occur as well. Israelis can indeed be the nicest people on earth – but they can also be the rudest.

—
A Change in Personality

Israelis are becoming increasingly cold, cynical, selfish, and pessimistic as a result of the never-ending conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; the extreme political, social, and religious divisions within society; the recent failures of the Israeli military; and pervasive corruption in the highest levels of government. (I’ve described most of these subjects in detail in my prior letters.)

Israelis are increasingly feeling that there is no possible solution to the intense problems that are facing their country. To them, there is no way out of endless conflict. As a result of these subconscious thoughts, Israelis themselves are changing – and not in a good way. The gravest threat to Israel is neither Palestinian suicide bombers nor Iranian nuclear weapons; it is a lack of hope among Israelis themselves.

I was not alive in the mid-1970s during that era’s problems ranging from post-Vietnam disillusion to the Watergate scandal to increasing drug use to economic recession. But I imagine that the pessimism and
alienation that Israelis currently feel likely resembles that which Americans experienced at the time – only that it is far worse here and now. A short review of recent Israeli history brings this to light.

—
Bad News After Bad News

Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1982 in an effort to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), a terrorist group that had moved there and had been attacking Israel. Soon, a new Lebanese group named Hizbollah was formed to fight against Israel’s presence in the country. After years of fighting a war of attrition, Israel withdrew in 2000 – and Hizbollah has still been attacking Israeli civilians to this day.

Lebanon was Israel’s Vietnam. But, for Israelis, it got even worse. In 2006, Hizbollah terrorists entered Israel, killed three IDF soldiers, and kidnapped two of them. This happened after the group had been firing rockets into northern Israeli towns for years. Israel and Hizbollah started a war that lasted several weeks.

A United Nations cease-fire ended the conflict in an official draw, but most Israelis believe that they lost the war. Ever since Israel’s founding in 1948, the IDF has been the most respected (and feared) military in the Middle East. However, in the second Lebanon war, the Israelis could not even destroy a group that they viewed as a bunch of rag-tag, untrained guerrillas. To Israelis, anything that is not an outright victory is a loss because, to them, one major loss could result in the destruction of the county and another Holocaust. (It did not help that their defense minister at the time was appointed to the job because of politics even though he had little military experience — and he failed miserably. The minister later resigned.)

But the bad news has not only involved Lebanon. After years of failing to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians, more and more Israelis believe that it is now impossible. Every time peace has seemed close, the Israelis, the Palestinians, or Fate (or God, if you will) have messed it up.

After former Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin agreed to withdraw from parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a right-wing extremist shot him in the head while he was walking through Tel Aviv in 1995. When former
Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered Yassir Arafat the Gaza Strip and ninety-five percent of the West Bank, the Palestinian leader rejected the proposal and unleashed suicide bombers in a second intifada. Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew all Israeli forces and settlers from the occupied Gaza Strip, and he was about to do the same in most the West Bank. But Sharon suffered a major stroke before he could withdraw from the remaining territory and he has been lying in a coma ever since. Now, the terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza and fires rockets into southwestern Israel almost daily.

Israelis believe that they have tried every possible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – but nothing has worked. Israel tried to occupy the West Bank and Gaza while giving limited rights to Palestinians, but that resulted in two intifadas and terrorist attacks on civilians. Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon and Gaza, but that resulted in terrorist groups gaining control there and having the ability to fire rockets further into Israel. So, to Israelis, there is no way out. They can neither control the Occupied Territories nor leave them. Israelis have come to accept that there will always be endless war. But recent military failures, the failures of the peace process, and the threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb are not the only reasons for Israeli cynicism. The country’s leaders have also failed the people.

Former Israeli President Moshe Katsav resigned last year and is facing trial for the alleged rape and sexual harassment of his secretary (she was just out of high school and serving in the military). A former finance minister also resigned last year after he was suspected of embezzling millions of shekels from a union he had run. A Cabinet minister was convicted for forcibly kissing a female soldier. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently announced that he will resign soon because of eight – yes, eight! – ongoing investigations against him for charges including alleged bribery and corruption. These are just a few examples.

—
How Israelis React

In light of the increasing cynicism and pessimism, Israelis are responding in different ways. Some turn to God: the number of Orthodox and charedi followers (the latter category is the ultra-Orthodox Jews I described in my first letter) is increasing. Some lose their faith: the number of Israelis who are completely secular is rising. The middle ground is disappearing.

Some Israelis turn to drugs. Judaism has traditionally discouraged alcohol consumption except during religious celebrations, but that stigma is disappearing here. Bars and clubs have always existed, but they seem to be becoming more popular. The Jerusalem Post recently ran a story on Alcoholics Anonymous chapters in Israel and how they are becoming increasingly accepted. In addition, I’ve seen more marijuana use in the seven months I have lived in Israel than I did in the nine years that I lived in Boston during and after college. People openly smoke pot in bars or in public, and no one seems to mind. I once saw someone snort cocaine in a restaurant bathroom stall with the door open, and no one around flinched except me. While an acquaintance of mine was lighting a joint as he sat on a couch, he joked, “We do a lot of drugs to get away from the conflict.” (His laugh revealed that he was only half-joking.) I can count on one hand the number of twenty-something and thirty-something Israelis I know who do not smoke cigarettes. Many Israelis are on some form of anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication as well.

Some want to get out. Whenever I tell people that I moved to Israel to work and finish my M.B.A., I usually get this same, exact response: “What, are you crazy? You come here, and all of us what to leave!” A bartender I know asked how much money I would want to get married to she could get a Green Card. (Her tone of voice also said she was only half-joking.) A friend of mine here whose mother is originally from
America said that he and his siblings want to move to the United States since they are all U.S. citizens. Most Israelis travel abroad to Latin America, Europe, America, India, or southeastern Asia for a year or two after completing their mandatory military service, and now everyone immediately wants to leave again as soon as they return home.

But the most significant reaction involves the military. Right after high school, men serve in the army for three years while women serve for two. The IDF had always been the unifying factor in Israeli society: all people, no matter who they are, have had to make this sacrifice, and anyone who did not serve lived with a negative stigma for his entire life. But even this is changing. More and more Israelis are getting out of military service. Some fake mental illness. Some fake drug addition. Some injure themselves (like shooting themselves in the foot). Some lie that they “found God” so they can attend an ultra-Orthodox religious school because charedi Jews are exempt from military service. Some outright refuse and go to jail. Some do
“national service” rather than serve in the military: they do other jobs like work in hospitals, get a government job, or teach English. The negative stigma that surrounds those who do not serve is rapidly
disappearing because more and more people are doing so. Many young people have lost faith in the military, as well as the government as a whole.

—
A Noble Sucker in a Dog-Eat-Dog World

I was sitting in a local bar with some friends the other night, talking to some people who were sitting next to me. As it turned out, I learned that the girl sitting next to me had a boyfriend and was eighteen years old. She was in her first year of national service — the alternative to the mandatory military service that Israelis must do after high school. (In most places outside of the United States, the drinking age is sixteen or eighteen; here it is eighteen.)

After a half-hour of conversation, the girl turned to look at me. “Do you want to fuck tonight?” she said in English matter-of-factly. I was shocked. Girls in the United States are never this blunt and direct. I’m still learning the complex Israeli cultural norms, so I did not know whether she was determining my intentions, being sarcastic, or being serious. I decided to take it as a joke. I laughed and said, “I love it when girls say that to me.” We kept on talking, and later she left with her friends.

Still, the most interesting aspect of this situation was the reaction of my friends here. I told them that I did not know what the girl had meant, and that I would not have had sex with her anyway because she had a boyfriend and was too young. I said that I did not want to jeopardize a relationship.

In typical Israeli bluntness, a (female) bartender at that pub told me: “You are an idiot.” (Later, the bartender added that the girl was obviously a “whore” and that I should not care about her or her boyfriend because of that.)

Last Saturday afternoon, as I was relaxing on the beach with two (male) friends, I told them the same story. They both laughed and also said that I was an idiot. When I said she was eighteen, they responded, “So? She’s legal.” When I said that she had a boyfriend and that I did not want to hurt their relationship, they responded in English, “You are noble… a noble sucker. Fuck the other guy.”

Every time that I told this story, I received the same reaction from Israelis. It was then that I realized that something had gone very wrong in Israeli society. Over sixty years, the country has been changing from a familial, idealistic society in which people took care of each other into a selfish, disillusioned one in which everyone only looks out for himself. In another example, a friend of mine works as a waitress in a bar, and she told me that guys always hit on her aggressively, even after they know that she is in a relationship. I
once went to a pub on a first date, and another guy at the bar tried to hit on my date the whole time right in front of me. (At the time, I did not realize what was occurring because my Hebrew was very poor. I thought they were just friends having a conversation.) There is little courtesy in the dating world. After all, everyone is now competing for everything.

There are several reasons for this general change in behavior, but here is the most significant one: When people lose faith in the government, the military, God, future peace prospects, and society in general, all that remains is oneself, one’s family, and one’s close friends. No one cares about anything – or anyone – else.

—
Tzipi Livni and Barack Obama

The United States, like Israel, is facing myriad problems with the economy, foreign wars, and corruption within the government. Poll after poll reveals that the vast majority of Americans believe that their country is on the “wrong track.” In response, many people are supporting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama because he is an inspiring figure who advocates for “change” (despite that fact that he has little experience in government).

A similar occurrence is happening in Israel. Since Prime Minister Olmert announced his forthcoming resignation, the ruling moderate Kadima political party has been holding its own primary election for party leader. The front-runner in this election is Tzipi Livni, the current foreign minister. She is the one candidate who is promising significant “change” and who is untainted by scandal. (However, unlike Obama, she has years of experience in different areas of government.) If Livni wins, she will likely become the next prime minister. Israelis are hungry for change because they know that there are so many problems facing their country.

In the United States, the pessimism of the 1970s ended partly because of the election of President Ronald Reagan. Some of his policies benefited the country and some hurt the country, but his most significant accomplishment was that he convinced Americans to believe in themselves – and the nation – once again with his optimistic rhetoric. This is why history might be repeating itself in Israel and the United States.* I predict that Obama and Livni will win their respective offices, but what the American and Israeli people do
afterwards is up to them.

—
Looking to the Future

Now, do not misinterpret this letter. Of course, the streets are not filled with depressed people who chain-smoking, fighting with each other, and popping Prozac all the time. Far from it. My point in each of these letters is to put a spotlight on one political or cultural trend of a complex (and paradoxical) society at a time. A pessimistic lack of faith is a pervasive undertone in much of the country, but I am still optimistic about Israel’s future. And that’s the topic for my next letter.

* Disclosure: I will most likely vote for Barack Obama and Tzipi Livni.

Prior letter: Living in a Chaotic Tribe. Related: Sex and the Single Israeli

Letter from Israel: Living in a Chaotic Tribe

Sixth in an ongoing series

RAMAT GAN, Israel — So I was sitting in one of my International MBA classes at Bar-Ilan University the other day, and I realized that I had forgotten to bring a pen. The student next to me had an extra one sitting next to his notebook, so I took it without asking. When I had finished taking notes, I put it back on the table.

Then, a few minutes later, I realized that it had been a very Israeli thing to do. I guess I had started to adapt to the culture here.

—

Israelis are frequently stereotyped as being very rude, pushy, argumentative, and obnoxious. Sometimes it is warranted. Just boarding a bus involves a lot of shoving and elbowing because everyone wants to be first. The next person to be served at a food counter or bank teller is the one who pushes his way to the front. Israelis have no tolerance for waiting in line — everyone tries to “jump the queue,” as the English put it.

But much of Israeli behavior is understandable when one looks at the culture in the context of three specific traits. First of all, Israeli society, like the Jewish people as a whole, views itself as one gigantic tribe in which everyone is a member of a single, large, extended family. (Some would say it is quite the dysfunctional family as well.) Secondly, many of the European Jews who settled the land that became modern Israel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were socialists. They built communal farms — the term in Hebrew is “kibbutzim” — in which everyone shared everything while they tried to build a new country out of nothing but sand. Even the children were raised by the community as a whole. People needed to work together to survive the harsh conditions. Thirdly, Israelis feel that they are alone in the Middle East and surrounded by hostile Arabs and Muslims who only want to kill all of them. So everyone sticks together to defend themselves against a common perceived enemy (one can argue whether it is real or imaginary).

As a result of these collective mentalities that have trickled down into day-to-day Israeli culture, what would be viewed as rude in the United States is considered normal here. America is individualistic; Israel is communalistic. The community is more important than the individual. When people go out to restaurants or bars, people take food off of each other’s plates without asking. If a person wants to try another person’s beer, he will simply grab the glass and take a drink. If a person needs to borrow a pen, he takes it. And no one minds. It’s not that people are rude; it’s that everyone is expected to help everyone else with whatever they need. People rarely ask someone to pass the salt; they just reach over the table and take it. In a communal culture, everything belongs to everyone.

But there is more to the culture than sharing food. Despite the intense social, political, and religious divisions that exist within Israel, people genuinely care about each other. If someone drops something or needs help, six people will run over. Every time I go to the supermarket, I get frustrated because it seems to take twenty minutes for a person to check out even if he only has a few items. (I think I picked up impatience in Boston.) The customer and cashier spend the whole time talking to each other. At first, I thought it was because the customer was arguing over the price of each item. (This would not be a surprise.) But then an Israeli friend of mine told me that cashiers often have conversations with everyone. When a cashier asks how a person is doing, the customer will not merely respond with “fine.” The person will actually talk to the cashier about his problems that day, and the cashier will try to offer some helpful advice to a complete stranger. I’ve never seen that anywhere.

Whenever I go to a store with an Israeli friend, he always tries to tell me what to buy. I’ll get one brand of orange juice, and then he will take it out of my hand, grab a different one from the shelf, and then give a bottle of the other brand to me. “You don’t want that one; this one is better,” he will say. And then we will get into a friendly argument over which one is better. It’s not that my friend is being pushy or bossy; it’s more that my friend genuinely cares and wants to help.

Here’s a common occurrence (recounted from this book): A boyfriend and girlfriend go to a restaurant. The girl tries to order a salad, and the waiter starts criticizing her choice. “You should get something bigger!” he exclaims right in front of the boyfriend. “You’re so skinny! If you had some more meat on you, I’d date you myself!” And no one usually minds because it’s just part of the culture. If I had said something like this while working as a waiter in high school in the United States, I would have been fired. Israelis are a very practical people, and they have a bluntness that is refreshing but occasionally tiresome.

The desire to help everyone even occurs in love lives. Whenever I meet someone, I always get the same three questions right at the beginning of the conversation: “Are you hungry?” “How old are you?” and “Are you single?” (In response to the first question: whenever an Israeli offers you food, you take it.) Everyone is always trying to set someone up with a date. Being single is viewed as a travesty in Judaism and something that needs to be corrected as soon as possible. When I went to a recruiter to find my first job in Tel Aviv, she mentioned that she thought I might like a girl whom she had placed earlier at a company. If I got a job there, the recruiter said she would introduce me. (I ended up going somewhere else.) Friends and family members of friends are always keeping an eye out for someone who might like me. And everyone does this for everyone. (In addition, women do not mind if you ask for their age because everyone does it.)

The attention that Israelis give to each other also extends into daily life here. One of the first things a person notices in Israel (as well as in much of the Middle East) is that people are always talking,
arguing, gesturing, and shouting. People are much more emotive here than in the West. Part of the reason is that people are more irritable because it is extremely hot. Another part of the reason is that people are generally more stressed out as a result of the conflicts. But I think the major reason is that Israelis care so much about everything that they feel a need to argue about it. (If one thinks that the country might be invaded or that he might die in a suicide bombing tomorrow, then every little aspect of life is meaningful today, and everything matters. This attitude is the complete opposite of the philosophy of nihilism, in which everything is meaningless and nothing matters because we will all die someday.)

When I lived in Jerusalem, I once asked a man at a bus stop what time the next one was arriving. “Ten minutes,” he said. Another guy standing ten feet away walked over. “No, it’s twenty minutes!” he replied. Then the two men started arguing over whether our bus was coming in ten or twenty minutes! When the bus finally arrived in ten minutes, the first man slapped my back, pumped his fist in the air, and grinned. “I was right!” he exclaimed. In Western culture, people generally try to avoid conflicts and arguments in their interpersonal lives out of a sense that it is uncivil and impolite; in Israel, people run towards conflict. People argue over politics, religion, business and sports all the time. (It’s almost like the idea of the marketplace of ideas in capitalism: if everyone debates everything, then the best ideas will rise to the top. Endless argumentation can help a society.) To paraphrase New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in this book: Two Israelis having a calm discussion sounds like four Americans having an argument.

But fierce debate is not just a result of modern Israeli culture. For thousands of years, Jewish religion has generally encouraged argument and conflict. Yeshivas (religious schools) are filled with tables of students who read the Bible to each other and then talk back and forth over the meaning of a particular passage. Within minutes, the entire room is full of people yelling and shouting over the personality of Moses, the nature of Creation, or the commandment not to mix meat and dairy in the same meal. It’s quite the surreal sight. In fact, the second most-important book in Judaism after the Bible is the Talmud, which is essentially a collection of arguments and debates between famous rabbis over countless centuries on Jewish law and how one should interpret the Bible.

—

In many of the letters I’ve written, I’ve focused on the negative and political aspects of life in Israel because that is mainly what most of you see on the news. In this essay, I wanted to show some of the endearing traits of this occasionally-anarchic-but-always-exciting country. I imagine that living in Israel is like living in a small town — after all, this is a very small country, and there are probably only two or three degrees of separation between any two people. But it would be a small town with a lot more sand.

Now, I don’t mean to say Israelis are perfect. As I wrote earlier, they can also be extremely rude. In fact, I’d say that Israelis are paradoxically the nicest — and the rudest — people I’ve ever met. But that’s the topic for my next letter.

Next Letter: No Way Out (or, Stuck in the 1970s). Prior Letter: All About the Palestinians

Letter from Israel: All About the Palestinians

Fifth in an ongoing series

TEL AVIV — As my readers have probably realized by now, every issue in this part of the Middle East is a complicated mess of politics, religion, history, culture and economics. The same is true for the Palestinian people. However, there are some things that are definitely not true. In this letter, I will explore the common myths about the Palestinians that are common on both the political left and right – in Israel and the United States.

Myth #1: The Palestinians Have Always Been a People

The Ottomon Empire (now called Turkey) ruled the Middle East until the end of World War I. Britain and France took much of its territory because the Ottomans were allies of the Central Powers, the group of European countries that lost the conflict. For centuries under the Ottomon Empire and then under British rule, the various types of Arabs who lived in the region known as Palestine were divided amongst themselves by ethnicity, tribal kinship, and different religious leaders. It was a localized, tribal society; there was never a united country or people named Palestine whose citizens were Palestinians.

However, history forced the various Arabs who lived in the region known as Palestine to unite and become a common people with a common destiny, whatever that will become. When Israel was founded amidst warfare in 1948, many of the Arabs in the region known as Palestine left for the West Bank (then part of Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (then part of Egypt). (There is an ongoing debate over whether the Arabs left voluntarily or whether they were forced to leave at Israeli gunpoint.) Those who went to the West Bank and Gaza became known as Palestinians, and those who stayed in Israel became Israeli Arabs.

No matter how much far-left activists in the United States and Israel would like to think otherwise, a unified, Palestinian people did not occur prior to the creation of the State of Israel. They were an accidental creation of history. Part of the problem in Palestinian society is that these various groups of people are still trying to figure out how to function and live together in a civil society.

Myth #2: The Palestinians Elected Hamas Because They Support Terrorism

Pundits on the far right who make this claim know little about Palestinian history and society.

For decades, the leader of the Palestinians was the late Yassir Arafat, whose Fatah political party controlled nearly everything. Whenever the international community would give millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians, Arafat and his cronies would deposit a good portion of it into their private bank accounts in Europe. (This is why Arafat’s widow lives in a luxurious apartment in Paris.) While the Fatah leadership was stealing money, the Palestinians suffered from a depressed economy, poor hospitals, lackluster schools, and low levels of daily necessities. After Fatah’s leaders took their share of the money, most of what remained was then used to purchase guns and bullets rather than food and medicine.

Some Palestinians eventually become fed up with the corruption, and they formed a new organization, religious group and political party named Hamas. (Israeli spies actually helped to create Hamas in order to destabilize the Palestinian leadership at the time.) Most Western news outlets report only that Hamas attacks Israel and Israeli civilians. Of course, this is true – but there’s another side to the coin. While Fatah was stealing money, Hamas began opening schools and hospitals. As Fatah bought guns for themselves, Hamas bought food and medicine for the people in Gaza. After all, religious people of all types care about the poor, and the leaders of Hamas, being Islamic fundamentalists, are no different.

There’s an old saying in America: People vote with their pocketbooks. I suspect the Palestinians were no different when they gave Hamas control of the new Palestinian parliament. When the Palestinians were voting for Hamas, most did not do so because they hated Israel – they elected the party because they wanted their daily lives to improve. An open grocery store and elementary school down the street is more important to a family than relations with a neighboring country, even if it is Israel.

Still, I write this not to excuse Hamas. After all, they would probably kill me (or at least hold me for ransom) if I was caught while walking through the Gaza Strip and they knew my identity. Even though I can understand why a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas, I still think they made the wrong decision.

Even though Israel has withdrawn from the Gaza Strip, Hamas still provokes Israel by attacking nearby army bases and firing rockets at southwestern Israeli towns nearly every day. Whenever Israel responds militarily in self-defense, hundreds of Palestinian civilians are killed or hurt. The last Palestinian election offered a choice between the lesser of two evils: Fatah, which is corrupt but wants a two-state, peace agreement with Israel, or Hamas, which improves peoples’ lives but attacks Israel and invites reprisals in return. They chose Hamas – the worst of two bad options.

Myth #3: All Palestinians Just Want Their Own Country

Conventional wisdom, especially from the political left, holds that all Palestinians and Israeli Arabs want a separate State of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza. But conventional wisdom would be wrong.

The Palestinians barely have a functioning economy – after all, their biggest exports are oranges (from Gaza) and olives (from the West Bank). (By the way, fresh orange juice from the Middle East is probably the best thing I’ve tasted in my life.) For obvious reasons, it is difficult to build a society when most people live in refugee camps and Israel erects barriers, road blocks and security checkpoints everywhere to prevent terrorists from entering the Jewish state.

As a result, Palestinians were only able to find work in Israel. Just as the United States and European countries increasingly rely on cheap, immigrant labor for day labor and service industry jobs, so did Israelis employ Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Arabs who live in East Jerusalem are officially permanent residents (but not citizens) who can live and work anywhere in Israel, and Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza can apply for work permits.

But after the two intifadas in the late 1980s and early 2000s, Israelis stopped hiring them out of fear. After all, this was a time when suicide bombers would blow up a bus or restaurant at least once a week. Other Palestinians would go momentarily insane, walk into their kitchens, grab a knife, go outside, and then slash the first Israeli who would walk by him on the sidewalk. I can only imagine what life must have been like. Now, however, nearly all immigrant labor comes from Asian countries like China and Indonesia. The intifadas not only hurt Israel, they destroyed the job prospects for Palestinians as well. This is just one of the reasons that moderate Palestinians vehemently dislike the extremists.

Israel is now one of the few places where Palestinians can find good jobs, quality schools, and modern hospitals. As a result, many Palestinians want to live in Israel (and many Israeli Arabs never want to leave), even if it means that they would be a minority in a Jewish state. If a State of Palestine is ever created, it would not be a miraculous cure-all for the Palestinians. Most Palestinians support the idea in theory, but it does not mean that they would choose to live there. Just as Israelis are divided over what to do with the West Bank and Gaza, so are the Palestinians torn over whether they want two countries in the area, or a single, bi-national country.

Myth #4: Neighboring Arab Countries Support the Palestinians

To many people in the West, all Arabs and Muslims are essentially the same. This is an understandable – though wrong – feeling since most Americans have never met many Arabs and Muslims. Just like Europeans have stereotypes and make generalizations about each other (the British are insufferably polite, and the French are rude), so do Arabs in the Middle East.

To be blunt, the Palestinians are the low man in the Arab pecking order. People in other Middle Eastern countries stereotype them as uneducated, violent, angry nomads. If there were a similar phrase in Arabic for the derogatory English term “white trash,” then I am sure Arabs would use it to refer to the Palestinians. (Conversely, people from Saudi Arabia and Dubai are seen as spoiled, materialistic people who pretend that they are religious, and Bedouins are viewed as some of the most down-to-earth and hospitable people on earth.)

Right-wing Americans and Israelis frequently claim that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to destroy it. To them, the Palestinians and local Arab countries form a united front in an effort to kill every single Israeli and Jewish person. But that’s not true, and not only because Israel has made peace with Egypt and Jordan.

Arab countries in the Middle East do not care about the Palestinians. Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization was kicked out of Jordan (for planning to topple the government). Egypt keeps its border with the Gaza Strip closed most of the time because it does not want Palestinians in their country either. Arab countries would prefer to close their eyes and pretend that the Palestinians do not exist.

Of course, when you watch the news, Arab leaders always seem to say that they support the Palestinian cause. But it’s more important to look at actions, not words – and there are no actions at all. Most Arab countries are ruled by authoritarian dictators who mismanage their governments and economies. (And most of these leaders are also supported by the United States as well, for various reasons.) As a result, most Arabs are very angry at their dire situations and poor lives. The dictators use their state-owned newspapers and televisions to whip up anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian hysteria to deflect public anger from the government and onto Israel instead. Arab countries use the Palestinians; they do not really want to help them. Some Israeli pundits want to give the West Bank and Gaza Strip back to Jordan and Egypt, but I imagine the response from those governments is only laughter.

Myth #5: The Palestinian Government Refuses to Stop Terrorism

Many right-wing pundits in America make assumptions about Palestinian government that are patently untrue. They take the political process in the United States and apply it to the Palestinians. Well, what works in the United States does not always work in the Middle East.

If the U.S. president orders the military to do something, they do it. It’s that simple. So conservative pundits wonder why the Palestinian government does not simply order the terrorists to stop. Every time a terrorist act occurs, these conservative pundits cite it as proof that the Palestinian government does not actually want peace with Israel. Well, it’s more complicated than that. After all, this is the Middle East.

The Palestinians do not have a standing army, or even an effective police force. All political parties, terrorist groups, and violent factions have their own private “security forces.” (Essentially, they are comprised of thugs who need jobs.) Imagine if the Democrats and Republican parties in the United States had their own armies that did their bidding. That’s what the Palestinians have: constant, low-grade civil war.

The president or prime minister cannot simply order terrorism to stop because no one respects his authority. The security forces of Hamas are not going to listen to a president from the Fatah political party. Fatah’s terrorist faction is not going to care what the prime minister from Hamas thinks. If a government official tells a group of terrorists to stop, they will ignore him because they are motivated by an irrational hatred for Israel, not loyalty to one’s country. The Palestinian government is fractured and essentially powerless.

But there is even more to the story. Every political party depends on the support of its base: In the United States, for example, the Republican Party has gun owners and conservative Christians, while the Democrats have minorities and labor unions. These parties cannot win elections without their support. Well, both Fatah and Hamas have their own bases, in a sense: extremist terrorists. These factions need to be supported, or at least tolerated.

If the moderate Fatah political party cracks down too hard on its terrorist faction, then their supporters will go to Hamas at best, or even overthrow or assassinate President Mahmoud Abbas at worst. The moderate government has no choice but to tolerate a limited amount of terrorism. If the moderates make the terrorists too unhappy, then the moderates will lose power (through elections or violence), and the terrorists will gain absolute power. If that occurs, then even more terrorism will occur that what had happened under the moderate government. It’s a no-win situation.

—

As I wrote in a prior letter, I am not an expert on the Palestinians. But I thought it was important to describe the other side of the Israeli coin since news outlets in America frequently ignore the complexities of Palestinian society. Someday I would like to interview Palestinian leaders and people myself, but I fear that such a peaceful day is years away.

Next letter: Living in a Chaotic Tribe. Prior letter: The Great Religious Divide

Letter from Israel: The Great Religious Divide

Fourth in an ongoing series

TEL AVIV — When the early Zionists founded the modern State of Israel in 1948, they aimed to create a country that was based on Jewish ethnicity — not Jewish religion. They were so-called modernists who, like many of the intellectual elite in Europe the late 1800s and early 1900s, believed that religion was a silly anachronism that would soon disappear to make way for a secular world. The Zionists believed that just as the Frankish people have France and the Germanic people have Germany, so should the Jews have an Israel again.

After witnessing the unfair conviction (later overturned) of a Jewish army officer in France in 1894 on false charges of treason, Theodore Herzl, a Jewish journalist who covered the trial, founded the modern Zionist movement because he had come to believe that European Jews would never stop facing anti-Semitism. To Herzl, ethnic Jews would never be safe — even if they were secular Jews like he was — until they had a country of their own.

Fast forward to 1948. After Israel was founded, the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, needed to form a government — moreover, he had to form a coalition with other political parties to have a majority in parliament. Although Ben-Gurion was a secular Jew, his party created a coalition with the Orthodox, religious parties based on a compromise: The government would control the affairs of state, and the Orthodox religious establishment would control the affairs of religion and life-cycle events.

Ben-Gurion made this compromise because he had assumed that religious Judaism (along with all other religions) would quickly disappear anyway (probably because of a lack of faith following the Holocaust). How wrong he was. Sixty years later, the direct result of this decision has been the creation of a quasi-theocratic country that is extremely polarized between religious and secular Israelis. The rabbinate, now led by ultra-Orthodox Jews, has effectively become a parallel government that holds a monopoly over many aspects of life here.

—
The Jewish Religion

Before I describe religious life in Israel, I need to talk about Judaism because it’s a different type of religion than those which are familiar to most people in the West. The other two major, monotheistic religions, Christianity and Islam, are orthodoxic religions — in other words, the dominant feature of these types of religions is a specific set of beliefs. (Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God who died to save humanity’s sins; Muslims believe that there is only one God, and that Mohammed was his prophet.)

Judaism, on the other hand, is an orthopraxic religion — in other words, the dominant feature of this type of religion is a specific set of practices. (Traditionally, Jews observe the 613 commandments that are in the Hebrew Bible, as well as the countless expansions, interpretations and additions that were codified over many centuries in later Jewish law, the Talmud.) In Judaism, belief is secondary to practice. (I know some Orthodox Jews who are atheists.) For example, five different Jews may abstain from eating pork, but they will have five different, specific reasons for why they do so. (One might answer, “Because God says so in the Bible”; another might say, “Because that is an important part of Jewish culture”; a third might state, “Because it’s in the Bible — and it’s there because eating pork in a desert with no refrigeration was unhealthy and dangerous”; a fourth might say, “I never ate it as a child, so it seems disgusting now”; the fifth answer, “I have no idea why.”)

This principle is where religious Judaism became pluralistic in Western Europe and the United States. In the 1800s, the Reform movement (like a denomination in Christianity) arose in Germany. This movement decided that individual Jews should be free to choose which commandments they will follow, and Jews should be free to conform more to Western society. So some Reform Jews began eating pork and shellfish, some Reform synagogues began holding Shabbat services on Sundays, and some Reform services were changed to resemble Protestant Christian ones rather the traditional Orthodox ones that had been used for centuries.

Of course, Orthodox Jews were horrified at the Reform movement’s interpretation of Judaism. Eventually, a compromise was formed, Conservative Judaism, which allows for individual choice — as long as tradition is given a large degree of weight when a person decides which commandments to follow. These three branches of Judaism are the major types of the religion in the United States and Europe.

—
America and Israel

People in the United States are used to living in a country that is religiously pluralistic: There are conservative Baptists, liberal Methodists, Orthodox Jews, Reform Jews, Mel Gibson Catholics and feminist Catholics, fundamentalist Muslims and moderate Muslims. (You get the point.) This type of society does not exist in Israel. Nearly everyone categorizes himself (or is categorized by others) into only one of two Jewish camps: Completely religious and Orthodox or wholly secular and irreligious. There is no middle ground.

This cultural aspect resulted from Ben-Gurion’s decision in 1948 to give monopolistic power to the Orthodox rabbis of the time. As a result, nearly all of Israel’s synagogues are now Orthodox. Women cannot become rabbis. Marriages performed by non-Orthodox rabbis (like Reform and Conservative ones) are not recognized by the government. (There is no civil marriage.) People who convert to Judaism in Israel through a non-Orthodox movement are not recognized as Jews. (However, non-Orthodox converts from other countries are recognized as Jews by the government, but not the rabbinate, because of a peculiarity of the law.) In recent years, the rabbinate has become dominated by charadim — the anti-Zionist, ultra-Orthodox sect that I described in my first letter — and more secular Israelis have become even more disgusted with religion as a result.

Still, Orthodox Judaism as a whole is the only type of religious Judaism with which most Israelis have been familiar throughout their lives. As a result, many secular Israelis believe that non-Orthodox types of Judaism are not valid expressions of the religion. A secular Israeli will criticize Reform Judaism even though he has not been to a synagogue himself in years. This environment produces only two options for Israeli Jews: To be completely Orthodox or completely secular. If an Israeli is unhappy with Orthodox Judaism (and there are dozens of types) for whatever reason, then he can only give up religion completely. Today, Jews in Israel are roughly comprised of 40 percent Orthodox and 60 percent secular.

—
The Two Israels

The end result of such a society is conflict and separation. The purported divide between Red States and Blue States in America is nothing compared to the gulf between what is commonly called “Jerusalem” and “Tel Aviv.” There are two sides to Israel, although it might be more accurate to say that Israel exists in two different worlds.

Jerusalem, as you may remember from a previous letter, is the Holy City. The men dress in suits and usually have beards and head coverings (whether yarmulkes, fedoras, or furry hats). The women wear long, loose clothes that usually leave no skin but the head and neck exposed. People wear dark colors. People are generally poorer because the economy is worse. If you drive through certain neighborhoods on Saturday, ultra-Orthodox children will stone your car because driving is forbidden on Shabbat. (Curiously, throwing stones is just fine on Shabbat, I guess.) Religious people on street corners ask passing men if they had prayed that day. Nearly everything is closed on Shabbat (even most of the hospitals). There’s a tension in the air because of what Israelis call “the Conflict.” The city feels like a separate world that is more pure but just a little bit crazy.

Tel Aviv, on the other hand, is secular, cosmopolitan, city on the Mediterranean Sea. Men and women wear skimpy clothing most of time (it’s hot, after all), many of them seem to have tattoos (a violation of Jewish law), most of them like to drink, go to clubs, and smoke pot frequently. Tel Aviv’s high-tech industry is responsible for much of Israel’s economic growth, so people here drive sports cars, eat at fine restaurants, and have expensive jewelry and clothes. People scoff at religion and admit proudly that they eat pork and shellfish. Whenever they can, many people want to leave Tel Aviv because they can make more money in New York or London. A section of Tel Aviv is Israel’s center of prostitution (they are frequently Russian and eastern European girls who are either kidnapped or tricked into coming here and are then held hostage by pimps or the Russian mafia).

Obviously, I am taking this distinction to an extreme to make a point. Some religious people live in Tel Aviv, and some secular people live in Jerusalem. But you’d be amazed at how different this country can feel after just a one-and-a-half-hour bus ride from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.

—
How I Feel

As someone who converted to Reform Judaism in Boston, I sometimes feel frustrated in Israel. Here, religious Jews — Orthodox Jews, in other words — either view me as either a non-Jew (because I didn’t convert to Orthodox Judaism) or a secular Jew (because I am not religiously Orthodox.) Secular Jews view me as a religious Jew because I’m more observant than they are. To be a Jew in Israel is to feel that one is being forced to pick a side: wholly secular or completely Orthodox. No one here understands that it is possible to be in the middle — like in the pluralistic, moderate religious atmosphere in the United States.

Religious (Orthodox) Israelis think I’m a hypocrite when I abstain from working on Shabbat but still turn light switches on and off; secular Israelis are confused that I go to bars with friends on Shabbat but do not use my computer on that day.* (All four of these things are violations of traditional Jewish law in Orthodox terms.) If an American man wears a kippah (yarmulke), people here assume he is religiously Orthodox even if he is actually a Reform Jew. If an American woman who goes to a Conservative synagogue wears clothes that reveal her knees, upper arms, or shoulders, people here assume she is secular. This is the mindset in which most Israelis have been raised. This is a Hebrew word — “masorti” — for a religious person who is neither completely secular nor wholly Orthodox, but Israelis still always want to classify you into one of the two camps.

Religion in Israel is polarized and extreme. Just like everything else in the Middle East.

(* My reasons for following the specific commandments I do are complex, and it would take a essay much longer than this one to explain. Maybe someday I will, if people are interested. Briefly, I’m closest theologically to Conservative Judaism, but I prefer to attend Reform synagogues because I like the style of their services.)

Prior letter: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Next letter: All About the Palestinians

Letter From Israel: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Third in an ongoing series

JERUSALEM – In the Holy City, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict always occupies the minds of Jews and Arabs here, but it is rarely discussed in public. After all, no one wants to risk a fight on the street if the wrong person happens to overhear a conversation.

But people are always eager to speak their minds during loud arguments in living rooms and hushed discussions over lunch in a restaurant. Everyone in Jerusalem has a different solution to the decades-old conflict. (In contrast, most people I have met in secular Tel Aviv are bored with the issue and rarely want to discuss it all. I think it is because they rarely encounter Arabs, while people here live and work with them everyday – for better and for worse.)

In my prior letters, I’ve addressed some of the religious and cultural issues that are occurring inside Israeli society. Now I wish to present the complex subject with which most Westerners are familiar: The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

—
The Background

After Israel declared independence in 1948, the country was attacked by the surrounding Arab countries. In the resulting war, many of the Arabs who had lived in the region known as Palestine went to the West Bank (which was then part of Jordan) and the Gaza Strip (which was then part of Egypt).

These people eventually became known as Palestinians (and the people who remained in Israel became Israeli Arabs, whom I have discussed earlier). The reasons for their departure are controversial: pro-Israel historians state that the Arabs left to avoid getting caught in the middle of a war, but pro-Palestinian historians believe that the Arabs were forced to leave at gunpoint by the Israeli army in order to make way for a Jewish state. (According to the most recent research, it seems to have been a little of both, depending on the exact time, place, and circumstances.)

In 1967, several Arab countries attacked Israel again. Israel won the conflict and took East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, as well as the Gaza Strip from Egypt and the Golan Heights from Syria. Israel took these pieces of land for both pragmatic and idealistic reasons: Increasing the size of the country gave Israel more security, and possessing Jerusalem and more of the ancient land of Israel inspired religious Jews in the country and around the world.

However, there was a not-so-slight problem: East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza were inhabited by millions of Palestinians, and they continued to fight Israel themselves. At the same time, the Israeli government encouraged Israelis to move to the West Bank and Gaza and build settlements (whose legality under international law is questionable). Religious Zionists wanted to claim the occupied lands for Israel because of its historical significance, and the military and civilian presences there provided additional security for the Jewish state.

This, in a nutshell, is where things stand. And now it gets complicated. I’ll try to be brief.

The Palestinian Authority ostensibly wants peace and an independent country in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, but various Palestinian factions (like the terrorist group Hamas) continue to attack Israel. Israel officially wants the Palestinians to have their own state, but the Jewish state continues to build settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

—
The Real Issue

I cannot speak on the Palestinian side of the issue because I am not very familiar with their society. However, I can write about the Israeli viewpoint.

If Israel’s actions (building additional settlements in the West Bank while negotiating to create a Palestinian state there) seem contradictory, that is because they are. In terms of the Palestinian conflict, the main problem on Israel’s side is that it has yet to answer the question: What kind of country do we want to be?

There’s another old joke among Israels: “We want a Jewish state, a democratic state, and a country in all of the ancient land of Israel. But we can only pick two of the three.”

In other words, Israel must eventually choose one of the following options:

1. Democratic and in all of the land — but not Jewish
2. Jewish and in all of the land — but not democratic
3. Jewish and democratic — but not in all of the land

Here’s why. Israel cannot remain a Jewish state, a democracy, and a country in all of the ancient land of Israel forever because of demographic trends. As a result of their higher birth rates, Palestinians are projected to outnumber Jews within the next couple of years in the total area encompassing Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank.

If Israel wants to be a Jewish state that exists in all of the ancient land of Israel, then it will no longer be a democracy because a minority (the Jews) will control the majority (the Palestinians) and not give them equal rights. If Israel wants to be a democracy in all of the ancient land of Israel, then it will no longer be a Jewish state once Palestinians outnumber Jews. If Israel wants to be a Jewish and democratic country, then it must give up the West Bank and Gaza.

Which of these options would you choose? Yeah, it’s hard – and Israelis have yet to agree amongst themselves. In the United States, people define themselves as liberals or conservatives based on a wide rage of social issues (like abortion and gay marriage) and economic ones (like taxation and government spending). However, Israelis divide themselves as “left” or “right” based mainly on how they would resolve this fundamental issue. All other issues are secondary.

The extreme left: Liberals generally prefer to have a single, bi-national state in all of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza in which one person – whether Jew or Arab – would have one vote. These people place a higher importance on being a democratic state in all of the land of Israel than on the country remaining a Jewish country. Liberals believe that a country based on ethnicity or religion is outdated at best and immoral at worst.

The extreme right: Religious conservatives generally place a higher importance on having a Jewish state in all of the ancient land of Israel than on granting democratic rights to those who are not Jews. After all, the Bible commands Jews to have a Jewish state in all of the land. The Bible does not mention anything about democracy. The most extreme of the extreme want to annex all of the land, expel the Arabs, and reinstitute a monarchy (because ancient Israel was ruled by kings).

The center: Moderates generally place a higher importance on Israel remaining a Jewish and democratic state than on remaining in all of the land of ancient Israel. They want to see a two-state solution in which Israel gives the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians so that they can have their own country. These are the most pragmatic people.

However, even the center is split. The center-left believes that the Palestinians will stop attacking Israel once the Jewish state no longer occupies their land and they have their own state. The center-right believes that Israel should give these areas to the Palestinians only after they stop attacking Israel.

A few moderates want Jordan to annex the West Bank and Egypt to take the Gaza Strip, but this is extremely unlikely. These countries do not want a sudden influx of millions of radicalized, impoverished Palestinians coming into their countries because they are already dealing with their own Islamic insurgents and economic troubles as well. (Israel, by the way, is now at peace with Egypt and Jordan.)

—
The Options

Each of the proposed solutions has its drawbacks. A single, democratic state comprised of Jews and Arabs may seem ideal to many people, but such a country would probably implode into civil war like in the Balkans in southeastern Europe in the 1990s. A single, Jewish state in which Arabs are either expelled or not granted democratic rights would quickly be condemned as immoral and similar to the apartheid regime that existed in South Africa. A two-state solution in which Israel gives away the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza would surrender many areas that are religiously important to Jews and leave a smaller Israel that is more vulnerable to attack.

Everyone in Israel knows that these are the only three options. But the Israeli government has yet to choose one. This is why the government is paradoxically negotiating a return of the West Bank to the Palestinians while building settlements there at the same time. (Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon did withdraw from Gaza, but Hamas took control of the territory and started firing rockets into Israeli towns.)

The Israeli government has yet to decide which of the three options to choose because the government itself – just like the society as a whole – is fractured, divided, and paralyzed. The government is unable to function because of one issue: Israel’s broken electoral system. But that’s the topic for my next letter.

Next letter: The Great Religious Divide; Prior letter: What is Israel, Anyway?

Letter from Israel: What is Israel, Anyway?

Second in an ongoing series

JERUSALEM — There’s an old joke among Israeli Jews: it’s easier to pray for the ingathering of the exiles than to live with them.

Israel, like the United States, is a nation of immigrants. If an Israeli is not an immigrant himself, then most likely his parents or grandparents came from places as varied as Germany, Russia, Morocco, Iran, and New York. Modern Hebrew is known as the only language that children teach to their parents – children born here are naturally fluent, but their parents usually know it as a second or third language.

But there is a crucial difference between Israel and the United States. Neighborhoods, cities, and regions in America are usually comprised of one or two ethnic groups. The southwest is increasingly a Hispanic area. Boston has historically been Irish and Italian. Many people in my hometown in southern Illinois are German.

However, Israel is an extremely small country compared to America; it is roughly the size of New Jersey. As a result, every city, neighborhood, and apartment building is a mix of people from all over the world. Everyone must try to live together in a tight environment, but they do not always succeed. Each ethnic group has its own worldview, culture and religion, and these mentalities often conflict. If you ask five Israelis for their opinions, you will get six answers.

But before I explain the conflicts in Israeli society, I need to set the stage by drawing a picture of the different ethnic groups in Israel and how they came here.

—
Israeli Jews

After Judea was destroyed by the ancient Roman Empire in 70 C.E., the surviving Jews were forced into exile. Some went to Europe. Some went to Spain, northern Africa, and neighboring Arab countries. Some stayed in the Middle East. Over the subsequent centuries, each Jewish community developed its own cultural, ethnic, and religious flavor.

The Jews of Europe became known as Ashkenazi Jews, they developed the Yiddish language, and they tended to resemble other Europeans in appearance over the centuries as a result of intermarriage and conversion. They know European (and later American) history and culture, and they have Western mentalities. Ashkenazi Jews developed many diverse types of Judaism: Haredi Judaism (the ultra-Orthodox Judaism described in my last letter), mystical Hasidic Judaism, and non-Orthodox types of Judaism like Conservative Judaism and Reform Judaism. In the nineteenth century, Ashkenazi Jews founded the secular, Zionist movement that aimed to re-establish the State of Israel someday. Of course, the most significant event in European Jewish history was the Holocaust: Roughly one-third of the Jews in Europe died.

The Jews who fled to Spain following the destruction of Judea became known as Sephardi Jews. For centuries, Spain was divided between Islam and Christianity, and Jews were usually caught in the middle. In the late 1400s, the Christian king of Spain finally defeated the Muslims and united the country. However, there was a side effect. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gave all Jews and Muslims a choice between three options: leave the country, convert to Christianity, or die. (Columbus was not the only person to leave that year.) A sizable number of Jews did convert, but most left Spain to settle in Jewish communities in various places throughout the Arab world. A few resettled in the South America and other countries as well.

The Jews who moved to neighboring Arab countries after the destruction of Judea became known as Mizrahi Jews. For centuries they lived among Muslims in relative peace. A little-known fact: Jews, in general, were historically treated better in Arab countries than in Christian Europe until the twentieth century. (Spain was not the only country in Europe by far to expel Jews.) Mizrahi Jews are Arabs in culture but Jews in religion: their food, their mentalities, their dress, and their physical appearances can be virtually indistinguishable from those of Arabs. Their first language became Arabic. Most Sephardi Jews eventually moved to Arab countries, so the terms “Sephardi” and “Mizrahi” are now interchangeable in Israel.

There are two other Jewish communities that have moved to Israel in the past several years: black Jews from Ethiopia and Indian Jews from India. The communities had claimed that they were descendents from the ancient lost tribes of Israel, and DNA testing confirmed that they are descended from Jews in the Middle East. Most of these communities have decided to move to Israel.

—
Other Israelis

Roughly twenty-five to thirty percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish: primarily, they are Muslim and Christian Arabs, as well as non-Jews from Russia. Each of these groups has a story to tell.

The largest minority group in Israel is the Arabs. When Israel was founded in 1948, some of the Arabs in the region known as Palestine fled to neighboring countries (and, in some instances, the Israeli army forced them to leave at gunpoint). Others stayed in their towns, which were eventually located inside Israel once the borders were drawn. Israeli Arabs are full citizens under the law – Arabic is the second official language of Israel, and an Arab political party sits in the legislature. Arabs, however, do face constant discrimination and suspicion from other Israelis who consider them to be a fifth column. (One exception: Arab residents of East Jerusalem, which Israel annexed from Jordan after the war in 1967, are permanent residents, but they are not citizens. They are free to travel and work inside Israel, but they cannot vote.) Some Israeli Arabs have committed terrorist acts over the years, but the vast majority of them just want to live their lives peacefully.

When the State of Israel was re-founded in 1948, the country’s founders wanted to encourage Jews from all over the world to move here. Under the law, any Jew who requests Israeli citizenship can receive it. However, the law also permits anyone who is at least one-quarter Jewish to receive automatic citizenship as well – even if he is not Jewish himself. (In other words, anyone with just one Jewish grandparent can become an Israeli citizen.) The reason: Adolf Hitler aimed to kill anyone who had at least one Jewish grandparent – even if he was not Jewish himself.

However, this part of the law drastically changed Israeli culture after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Once people were allowed to leave Russia, many non-Jewish Russians immigrated to Israel simply because they happened to have a Jewish grandparent and a desire for a better life. Now, as a result, Israel is partially comprised of a large number of Russians who are not Jews, who do not care about Judaism, and who barely speak Hebrew. In fact, at least one Russian-Israeli teenager even founded a neo-Nazi group in Israel recently and assaulted a few religious Jews in an Israeli city. (He was quickly arrested.) As a result, the government may change the law and close the loophole that allows non-Jews to become citizens, and Israel’s leaders are also facing calls to deport the teenager and strip him of his citizenship.

—
Forming a Country

Following the destruction of Judea in 70 C.E., a few Jews had always lived in the region known as Palestine. Many Arabs lived here as well. Ashkenazi Jews began moving from Europe to Palestine in the nineteenth century, and many Holocaust survivors later moved to Israel in the 1940s and 1950s. Shortly after Israel was founded in 1948, many neighboring Arab countries expelled the Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who had been living in their countries, and they eventually moved to the Jewish State. Israel also had to use military operations to airlift several Jewish communities out of some hostile, Arab countries. Eventually, Jews from Ethiopia and India moved to Israel. After the victorious Six-Day War in 1967, many affluent American and European Jews moved to Israel. Tens of thousands of non-Jewish Russians arrived in the 1990s.

Take all of these communities, place them in an extremely small pot, and stir quickly. That’s the recipe for Israel. But how can one create a functioning country – not to mention a civil society – out of such diversity?

This is another difference between Israel and the United States. America has largely been successful in assimilating its immigrants over the years because the United States is a country that was founded not on religion or ethnicity, but on ideas – specifically, the ideas that are described in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. A person’s ethnicity and religion do not matter – a person can believe in these ideas regardless of whether he is white or Hispanic, Christian or Muslim.

But modern Israel was founded on Judaism, an idea that is an ethnicity and a religion. What this mean for citizens who are not Jews? What does a Russian Christian, a Muslim Arab, and a European Jew all have in common besides the fact that they hold an Israeli passport? What is the status of non-Jews in a Jewish state? What unites all Israelis regardless of ethnicity and culture? These are questions that have yet to be answered.

Still, Jews in Israel are extremely divided even among themselves. Ashkenazi Jews from Europe are generally wealthier and better educated than Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, and this difference resembles the racial divide in America because Ashkenzi Jews have lighter skin tones than other Jews here. Ashkenazi Jews frequently work white-collar jobs at Israel’s top high-tech firms; Arabs and Sephardi Jews tend to work blue-collar jobs in food service and as day laborers.

The divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews presents itself most significantly in a metaphorical question: Is Israel a European or Middle Eastern country? Is it East or West?

The Zionist founders of Israel were European Jews, and the country has developed a parliamentary democracy that resembles those in most European countries. Israel has friendlier relations with Europe than with other countries in the Middle East. The country’s soccer team plays in the European league (and not the Asian one). Israel’s high-tech companies frequently work with Silicon Valley in America.

However, a majority of Israeli Jews are now Sephardi Jews because that community tends to have more children. More people now eat various Middle Eastern foods including falafel, shawarma, and couscous rather than the foods favored by Ashkenazi Jews like latkes (potato pancakes) and matzah ball soup. At the risk of sounding stereotypical, most Israeli Jews culturally act more like Middle Easterners than Europeans: they yell, haggle, debate, and banter all of the time. Israelis are a very emotive people: to paraphrase New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, a calm discussion between two Israelis sounds like four Americans having a livid argument. It’s hard to put into words, but my readers who have traveled to the Middle East should know what I mean.

Still, the ethnic and cultural divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews is nothing compared to the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. But that’s the complex topic for my next letter.

Prior letter: The Ultra-Orthodox; Next letter: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Letter from Israel: The Ultra-Orthodox

First in an ongoing series

JERUSALEM — On my first trip trip to Israel two years ago, I was praying at the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism, when three men approached me and asked for money.

“Can you spare money so our children can have food for a Shabbat dinner?” they asked. I gave them a few shekels. Then, as I was walking away from the wall a few minutes later, an older man walked towards me and asked for a donation. I gave him a few shekels even though I was increasingly annoyed.

Finally, after I had left the Wall and started to head out of the Old City, an old man poked my arm from behind. “Money?” he demanded. By this point, I was extremely agitated. In my basic Hebrew, I told him: “You want money? You work.”

Of course, that probably sounds heartless — especially from someone whose most recent job in the United States was working as the editor of Spare Change News, a Boston newspaper that aims to help the homeless. But these people were not extremely poor — at least not in the manner to which most Americans are used. These men were charedim, otherwise known as ultra-Orthodox Jews, and I disagree with the manner in which they live their lives.

—

Let me explain. Most religious Jews in Jerusalem are charedim. They devote their entire lives to two things: studying Torah and raising a family. From the time they are young teenagers through most of their adult lives, ultra-Orthodox men pray and study Torah — all day, every day. In fact, they stop studying subjects like math and science in the eighth grade. And they choose not to work.

The haredim survive mainly on donations and government subsidies because they have a high level of political clout. (Although the ultra-Orthodox comprise ten percent of the population, Israel’s system of proportional representation gives their small political parties disproportionate power in the government.) Essentially, they receive unemployment benefits for their entire lives. Most charedi Jews live in poverty, but they consider it a small price to pay for their religious devotion. Most ultra-Orthodox men also receive exemptions from Israel’s mandatory military service (three years right after high school for men, and two for women).

In the eyes of other Israelis, the charedim act hypocritically because they accept money from the government but do not recognize that the State of Israel exists. The ultra-Orthodox believe that only God (or the Messiah, depending on who you ask) himself can re-establish Israel following the Jewish exile that resulted from the Roman Empire’s destruction of Judea in 70 C.E. Israel was founded by men in 1948, so the current state is illegitimate to them. Yet the ultra-Orthodox in Jerusalem live here simply because they view the city as the holiest place on earth, and they can fulfill more of the Torah’s commandments in Israel.

The ultra-Orthodox take the religious observance to a level that even other Orthodox Jews sometimes call extreme. The charedim choose to live in a bubble that tries to block out the modern world completely:

Haredim live in insular communities with limited contact to the outside world. Their lives revolve around Torah study, prayer and family. Television, films, secular publications and the Internet are not a part of their world. They tend to have their own economies, educational systems, medical services, and welfare institutions and gemachs (free loan societies for everything from money to household items). In Israel Haredi Jews are exempt from army service.

The distinctive dress of Haredi Jews helps them to define, and then insulate, their communities, as well as maintain a traditional and spiritual focus. They dress as their ancestors dressed in 18th and 19th century Europe. The men tend to wear dark suits with white shirts, and to cover their heads with black, wide-brimmed hats. The men also generally have beards and sidelocks (peyot). Women, in line with strict standards of modesty, tend to wear long skirts and shirts with long sleeves and high necklines. After the women get married, they cover their heads with either scarves, hats or wigs.

The charedim also marry early, and they have extremely large families because they view having children as a religious commandment. Most girls marry between the ages of 16 and 20, and sometimes their husbands can be significantly older. Most marriages are arranged by parents, but the daughters, in the end, do have to consent. The average charedi woman has at least eight children in her lifetime, compared to three among other Israelis and two among Americans. Charedi women — not the men — are the ones who have jobs. They work part-time, or they work full-time after they are married and before they begin to have children.

Many other Israelis are understandably upset that their taxes are paying for the large families of people who, in their eyes, choose not to work and do not serve in the army like everyone else. The freedom that the charedim have to live in their manner comes as a result of the sacrifices of others. If businesses in Tel Aviv did not generate tax revenue for the government, then there would be little money to subsidize large charedi families. Ultra-orthodox Jews can live in relative safety in Jerusalem because of the sacrifices that other Israelis make when they serve in the army. Yet the charedim do not seem to be thankful. In fact, some of them can be condescending when they view other Jews and Judaisms as less authentic even though charedi Judaism is itself a subset of Ashkenazi Judaism and a deviation from the historical norm.

For their part, the charedim say that their lives are extremely difficult — living in poverty is never easy, after all. Moreover, they sincerely believe that their efforts to live as devoutly as possible are helping Israel and the Jewish people by ensuring that God is on their side.

Although I disagree with the charedim politically and religiously, they are pleasant to be around. I do like most of the charedi Jews that I have met. To be honest, the average ultra-Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem seems to be nicer personally than the average secular Israeli in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. But when I visit the Western Wall, I just want to pray in peace.

—

However, Israel will be facing a demographic nightmare as a result of the high birthrate of the charedim. As the number of ultra-Orthodox Jews increases, a greater proportion of Israelis will refuse to work or perform military service, and the government will need to pay even more benefits to them. This would not bode well for the country’s economy or security. Still, demographic trends can change. The future remains to be seen.

The charedim are just one of the dozens of various ethnic and religious groups in Israel: various kinds of Jews, Christians from Russia, and Israeli Arabs (just to name a few). However, this diversity comes at a price: Israel has existed for sixty years, but a civil society as yet to develop here. This affects everything from cultural cohesion to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

But that’s a topic for my next letter.

Next letter: What is Israel, Anyway?