Kane/Lo: Tel Aviv
Visiting Israel during my trip this past spring (2007) presented me with the most mind fucks since, well, since I had been in Berlin a few weeks prior.
To the chagrin of myself, I know little about the situation in the Middle East. I think there have been wrongs done on both sides and believe in two-states. I like falafel. I wish people would stop killing each other. Y’know, the usual.
Frustratingly, I feel like Israel’s critics judge it harsher than most and its friends–or at least the U.S.–defend it absolutely to the point of being unreasonable. People tend to say, “Well, it’s a very complex situation.” I suppose that’s true, but I also feel like if the parties involved were to stop being so retarded it would make things go a lot smoother.
I had visited Israel before, during high school, in the summer of 1997. It was meant to be another quarter of schooling, but being that my grades were not being counted and it was the summer, it was mostly a social event. Of course, I did learn things and had one of the best summer’s of my life, but I can’t very well name too many historical anecdotes or biblical facts that I once learned in the land of milk and honey.
Because of that and a mystical pull to the place regardless of how lay my Judaism is, I decided to spend a week there as the conclusion to my two month long trip; specifically in Tel Aviv.
I hadn’t spent much time in Tel Aviv in 1997 but it seemed alluring because of its normality, its secularism. It seemed like a place where Jews happened to be majority but everything else was normal.
Taking the nice, new train from the airport into the city I walked a very long distance to my hostel with my very heavy bag. I could’ve figured out the buses, maybe, or taken a cab, but it had become almost ritual for me to walk a ridiculous amount with the bag anchoring me upon entering a new city.
The city–especially from the bus station to the hostel on the beach–is not particularly beautiful. Mildly sooty and shoddy modernist apartments line sidewalks while a cacophony of urban life surrounds you. It’s not particularly interesting urban life, though: Just busy and cramped; the most populated city in a sliver of terra. Honks and hocks. Falafel, frozen yogurt, pizza.
If you look a little closer, little peculiarities start to float. There are black people. A lot of them. (And not all are Ethiopian Jews.) There are asians. A lot of them. You walk by a convenience store and notice there are Tel Aviv-specific newspapers published entirely in oriental characters (I think Vietnamese and Korean.) And there are Arabs. A lot of them.
I imagine that social-service-wise, Arabs might get second rate treatment. And if so, clearly that’s wrong and should be remedied. But they don’t get harassed (nor do they harass), they own shops, they work. They interact with the Yids, the blacks, the Asians, etc.
After doing a belated double-take at the scenes I was a witness to, I wondered to myself what the big deal was? But, I guess it’s complicated like they say.
I checked into my modest hostel by the beach, the Mugraby, and was engaged into conversation by a southerner with a thick drawl and no Semitic evidence in his look. In short time he made a mildly disparaging remark about gays and then brought up food. I was starving and apparently willing to overlook his homophobia so I agreed to go get a falafel with him up the street.
On the walk over to the falafel stand he kept on talking about the IDF and how he visited their museum. I got that he was A) either in the military and/or B) real into wearing camo and probably owned a steamer chest of weapons back in Pensacola. He respected Israel not because of the history or culture of either Palestinians or Israelis, but just because they were tough. They were macho. They kicked ass. Absolutely.
I became queasy and weirded out.
He then propositioned me about making an appearance at the bar down the street to surprise a girl he met the last time he was in Tel Aviv, which was just a few months prior. I was caught off guard that someone without any connection to the place besides an affinity for militarism would spend so much time and money in such a short time.
With no other plans, I agreed. The woman he–the tattooed, muscle-bound, Florida-panhandle yokel–was attempting to woo was a zaftig future grandma. My confusion continued.
At the bar we chatted up a Swede who seemed normal at first, but turned out to be a former military man also sight seeing and enthralled with the Holy Land because of its Defense program. His calm and preciseness were unsettling to me.
I sat at the end of the bar, nursing a far-too expensive beer, with disillusionment at how Israel was perceived and/or become: A Macho Mecca.
In the ensuing days, I didn’t do too much, save for a trip to Jerusalem to visit a friend who happened to be studying at a yeshiva. I walked, had my sole CouchSurfing contact (she was nice, sane, and much smarter about what was going on), and walked a block down to the beach where I read The Tortilla Curtain, people watched, and swam. I was exhausted, poor-ish, and ready to go home and it was a near perfect prescription.
There were lots of issues to wrestle with internally, of course, but there was one thing that stuck out in my mind that bothered me just as much as in 1997. There is a lot of litter in Israel. The beach had butts and bottles scattered in the sand, streets had stray trash piling up into their corners. Besides being unsightly and annoying and environmentally unconscious, it makes me also want to ask Israeli’s what the fuck they’re doing.
A. You have been fighting for this land for so long and so hard, and this is how you treat it? In effect, where’s your pride of ownership? Or is the pride in ownership just bragging rights? I hope not.
B. This is The Holy Land, which means it is–presumably–holy land. Why would you treat such a special place in such an un-special way.
With all that, there is still a pull and an odd familiarity to the place. In a way, it feels as much like Phoenix does now to me: The place is crazy, the people are crazy, and I don’t agree with a lot of the things happening there–but it is still one of my homes.