by Alex Cocotas
“Israel doesn’t have problems. Israel has challenges,” the speaker tells our group. It is my second day in Israel. The program that brought me here required us to come to his lecture. The speaker is American. He immigrated to Israel in the 1970s and established a kibbutz outside of Ramle, a medium-sized city (for Israel) about thirteen miles southeast of Tel Aviv, one of the few cities where Jewish and Palestinian Israelis (tentatively) co-exist. He presents himself as a sensible, liberal man. He knows many Palestinians in the community; he is close friends with several and prefers to shop in their stores; he listens to Palestinian rap. He goes on to tell us about one of these challenges: Israel’s democracy is endangered. Many of its citizens lack a proper democratic pedigree; they don’t understand democratic ideals. The Russians, about fifteen to twenty percent of the Jewish population, came from the Soviet Union. The Mizrahim, Jews originally from the Middle East and North Africa, about fifty percent of the Jewish population, came primarily from Arab countries and had no experience of democracy. The Haredim answer to God. (The Palestinians, who were not discussed, presumably suffer from the same problem as the Mizrahim.) This leaves about ten to fifteen percent of the population, he tells us, who have a proper democratic pedigree, who are ready and willing to defend the country’s democracy. What he fails to mention is that they emigrated from democratic stalwarts like Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the Second Polish Republic. He has unintentionally revealed a different “challenge.”
***
“We hate two things in this country: Arabs and Niggers,” one of the hosts at the Rosh Hashanah barbeque informs me, apropos nothing, before asking me if I am still hungry, do I want another kebab—the food is good, no? He is fresh from army service and staffed a Birthright trip before his discharge. He wants to travel to America. Americans know how to live: they drink; they smoke; they fuck. Two girls, one night, you understand what I am saying? He leans back in his chair, briefly absorbed by the memory. (Americans’ supposed predilection for blowjobs is a source of much fascination for Israeli men.) His sister, who invited me, stands behind him. She looks slightly embarrassed but says nothing. I have been in Israel for five days.
***
I arrived to Israel in September 2013 on a program to help teach English in underperforming schools. The theme for the Israeli school system that year was, “The other is me.” Students took part in co-existence activities with local Arabic-language schools, playing sports or dancing or whatever it is you need to do to keep nine, ten, and eleven-year-olds engaged for an hour or two. Israeli schools are segregated, so this is one of the few opportunities Jewish and Arab-Palestinian children will have to interact. The goal is co-existence. “Like that will ever happen,” one of their teachers said to me, rolling her eyes. The goal is the façade of co-existence.
***
Soldiers are not an uncommon sight at Israeli schools. They come, the children crowd around them; they hand out candy, receive hand-drawn pictures and other shows of affection. Students start doing military-style physical drills in the seventh grade and enter into pre-army programs during high school. The week of my arrival to Israel, a high school teacher nearly lost his job because he facilitated a discussion about whether the Israeli Defense Forces was the most moral army in the world and voiced his opinion that the IDF, like all armies, engages in some immoral acts. (He was later fired, ostensibly due to budget cuts.) Army representatives came to the class of my girlfriend’s niece to speak about chemical warfare. She was in kindergarten. The same grade when Israeli students start learning about the Holocaust.
***
“Ech Omri’m Tem’in?” one of my students asks. “Yemen,” I respond. “Yemen boy! Yemen boy!” my students start yelling out at one another in accusatory call-and-response. To be a Yemen boy is not a compliment. Mizrahi literally translates to “eastern” or “easterner” but refers to Jews from regions and countries as diverse as Central Asia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco. Among this divergent group of cultures and histories, Yemenis were perhaps the most outwardly distinct, owing to the unique style of their traditional dress and prayer, which fascinated and was frequently depicted by early Zionist artists like Reuven Rubin. (Many Yemenis came to pre-state Palestine at the same time as the early, predominately European settlers.) Yemenis also have dark skin, generally darker than many Palestinians, leaving them in the paradoxical position of looking more like the abstract Arab than the country’s professed Arab enemies. (They are not alone in this regard; the full absurdity of this situation was demonstrated in 2015, when one Mizrahi man, intent on murdering a Palestinian, stabbed another Mizrahi man; and again, inversely, in 2017, when a Palestinian stabbed another Palestinian, mistaking him for a Mizrahi Jew.)
Mizrahim broadly lag the socioeconomic status of their Ashkenazi (European-descended) counterparts. When they arrived in Israel, many were taken to live in squalid tent cities, which later evolved into what became known, euphemistically, as “development towns” on the country’s periphery, far from the economically robust central and coastal regions, often arriving in the middle of the night after being told they would be taken to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. In sixty-six years, there has never been a Mizrahi prime minister and only a handful of ministers in the current cabinet are Mizrahi, despite them representing a plurality of the population. Natan Zach, arguably Israel’s most esteemed living poet, once said of the split, “The one lot comes from the highest culture there is—Western European culture—and the other lot comes from the caves.” My students have diverse backgrounds. Some are Ethiopian. Others are from Russian-speaking families that immigrated after the fall of Soviet Union. But the majority are Mizrahi.
***
One day my Hebrew teacher made a passing comment which seemed to imply, with some certainty, the future residence of us and our unborn children in the state of Israel. Someone in the class asked for clarification. “What do you mean?” she responded incredulously. “It’s the Jewish people’s homeland! The Greeks have Greece and the Jews have Israel. Of course your children will live here!” This left me in a bit of a conundrum, being both Greek and Jewish.
***
The holiest day of the year had just ended and Rabbi Ben Packer looked very proud of himself. He runs the Heritage House in the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, a free hostel for young Jewish pilgrims. Posters and flyers cover the walls of the Heritage House. One triumphs the contributions of the Jewish people to the arts and sciences, including a quote from Mark Twain: “[The Jew] is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.” Another declaims the grave threat of assimilation and intermarriage. Reform Jews intermarry, have few children, their children intermarry, have few children. It projects proprietary trend lines into the future: no more Reform Jews. A third informs me, while I am sitting on the toilet, of all the weapons being smuggled into the West Bank right now, their terrifying capabilities, their terrifying intentions. I shouldn’t believe what I’ve been told, it tells me. We are special, we are dying, they want to kill us: the three pillars of contemporary Jewish culture. Pictures show foreigners, mostly Americans, helping to plant orchards at West Bank settlements, rebuilding an ancient synagogue in Hebron, as part of group outings from the house.
Ben Packer regularly meets with Birthright groups in Jerusalem, gives talks and tours to Birthright groups in Jerusalem. The Heritage House is a popular destination for Birthright participants extending their trip. It also hosts many “lone soldiers,” foreigners, primarily Americans, serving in the Israeli army without any family in country. It costs nothing to stay there. You just have to be a Jew. Their emails are studded with testaments of praise and todas from guests. I found myself at the Heritage House through a different rabbi who had come to speak to my program in an official capacity, to talk about the meaning of the High Holy Days. He recommended we stay there whenever we’re in Jerusalem. It’s free, it costs nothing.
The Rabbi looked very proud of himself. He had just told us how he and twenty of his yeshiva buddies once assaulted two Arabs. Right here, he said, brimming. Twenty yeshiva students attacked two defenseless, unarmed men. What had they done? I don’t remember. Perhaps they looked at them the wrong way or said something—unlikely, given the numerical difference; or perhaps they just happened to be walking in the wrong neighborhood, speaking the wrong language, and didn’t realize they were next to a Jewish heritage house.
***
The day before a “lone soldier,” an American from Indiana who is a regular guest at the Heritage House, told us, “Listen to that savage language,” as the call to prayer floated over the city from the muezzin. The air was still warm. Dusk was descending; the sky was streaked purple—an effect of air pollution frequently mistaken for biblical allure. Everything seemed preternaturally peaceful and still. I was intoxicated with enchantment, of the city, of its history, of the long sweep of its stones; of a foreigner in a foreign land, inundated with foreign sights, smells, and sounds. I didn’t know what to say; the remnants of my Liberal Zionist upbringing were disintegrating within weeks of my arrival; I looked back up at the sky. You look like Scarface bro! another American commented. An automatic machine gun was slung around the soldier’s shoulders, over his suit and under his tallit. He struck a pose and some took pictures. It grew darker. We walked down to Yom Kippur services.
***
English and mathematics are the most important classes in a secular Jewish-Israeli school. They are inviolable, not to be disturbed. This is generally understood among staff. If English or mathematics needs something, they receive it. The Arabic class at my school, by contrast, was treated as an irksome addition that must be pantomimed as the official curriculum requires. I was told I could always take students from Arabic class for supplementary English enrichment: this request was never turned down. The Arabic class was invariably in a state of disarray when I visited: students talking back to the teacher, students indifferently talking amongst themselves, students walking out of the class as they pleased. They don’t care because they know they don’t have to care. A similar attitude prevailed among their teachers. When one asked about my plans for the future, I told her I was thinking about studying Arabic. “Why would you want to do that?” she responded with genuine confusion.
It is rare to meet an Israeli who speaks Arabic. There are some older Israelis who were born in Arabic-speaking countries; some who have learned the language for military or intelligence work; but it is rare to meet an Israeli who has learned Arabic out of intellectual curiosity, or simply to take an interest in their neighbors.
After moving to Tel Aviv—I was thrown out of the program—I spent most of my time working and writing at a bookstore that also has a café; or alternatively, a café that sells a lot of books. It is the sort of place that attracts people who like to read, write, and discuss poetry. They have a lovely back patio strewn with red lava rocks and lined with multilingual bookshelves, and no one questions why you come there and aimlessly stare off into space so often. One day I overheard a discussion about languages between some workers, who are mostly dissipating poets and philosophy students, and regulars, who are mostly dissipating poets and itinerant philosophers. Between them, they spoke at least five languages. They started to talk about Arabic, about how many words are similar to Hebrew, about how easy it is to learn given the similarities, and yet none of them spoke the language.
***
The great venue of cultural exchange for Israeli Jews and Israeli Palestinians is the hummusia on Shabbat. Palestinian-owned establishments are the only restaurants open on Shabbat in many cities. Nowhere else will you find such great numbers of Jews and Palestinians interacting in such a benign, banal manner on a weekly basis. Shoulders are warmly held, strings of laughter roll from mouths, smiles crease. Is there schnitzel for the children? What will you have to drink? How is everything? For a moment, you can almost believe the whole conflict is abstracted, history falls away, and this is just a scene like any other scene, genialities devoid of content. For a moment you can almost believe that. But then you notice it is Israeli Jews eating in the restaurant and the Israeli Palestinians serving them.
***
The novelist Amos Oz once told an interviewer: “It is another misconception of the West: they assume that the Israelis and the Palestinians need to get to know each other better. I get invitations from well-meaning institutions in America to go and spend a wonderful weekend with a number of Palestinians in order that we may get to know and like each other, and whissht, the conflict will go away! Like group therapy or marriage counseling. As if the Arab-Israeli conflict were just a misunderstanding. I have news for them: there is no misunderstanding between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We both want the same piece of land because we both regard it as ours. This provides for a perfect understanding, and for a bitter conflict. As I said, it is justice against justice—a perfect tragedy.”
***
“Kerry, kelev ben kelev,” one of the sons says in the middle of the meal. Kerry, son of a dog. My neighbors have invited me over for a Tu B’Shevat celebration. We eat dried fruits. We eat nuts. We eat a potato omelet, the taste of which so acutely inflamed my memory that I was momentarily transported six years in the past, to my first experience living abroad. I keep eating the omelet, trying to hold on to that feeling, to rekindle the intensity of the identification, sense with sense, like two cables trying to jumpstart time. But it slips past, again. I don’t remember how politics came up, but suddenly the table is talking about the peace talks and now the family patriarch is elucidating some point with a story of how it used to be in Morocco, the moral of which ultimately eludes me. My hosts are warm and friendly, nudging us to eat more, surreptitiously sliding plates in our direction, have we tried this, have we tried that, do you love it here, smiles cresting: what do you love? They are warm and friendly, as almost all Israelis are once you cross their threshold. It’s not like it used to be, another son regretfully told me earlier, you can’t just shoot them when they’re throwing rocks at you.
***
One Sunday the program required us to visit with new olim, immigrants, so we could meet people our age that have made aliyah, immigration to the state of Israel, which translates literally to “ascending” (to emigrate is “to descend”). We were bused to three different immigration absorption centers around the country. Our peers were paraded in front of us to talk about the process, to answer our questions, to subtly encourage nascent thoughts and assuage doubts. At the last center we visited, in Jerusalem, they gave us a hard sell in the guise of an innocuous presentation. There were no peers; instead, we received information about the process, what we need, what we can expect, and the many, many benefits available to us—just in case we were curious, of course. As we were leaving, one of presenters said in a shrill tone, in a manner that suggested it started as a joke and unexpectedly turned into something else, “We need you to move here and help us solve our problems!”
***
The conference was organized for foreigners, young people on work, study, or volunteer programs in Israel, ostensibly to inform them of the security situation in the country, to round out their knowledge, to give them the whole picture, or as much of a picture as you can give in two days and three buffets. There were lectures from an Israeli politician (“the most optimistic man in Israel”), a colonel in the Israeli army, and the chief political correspondent of the Jerusalem Post. There were seminars about Iran, the Arab Spring, the peace process, and the American-Israeli relationship, among other things. Most of the participants were Americans. The conference started with a tour of East Jerusalem. We saw the settlements; we talked about the inequity of development; we discussed the difficulties and conflict these policies have created. But we did not hear from a resident of East Jerusalem. This would become something of a theme for the weekend. Haaretz was repeatedly disparaged, but no Haaretz journalists were present to defend their reporting. We heard a lot about the Palestinians, but we did not hear from a single Palestinian.
***
Gil Hoffman, the chief political correspondent of the Jerusalem Post, gave the keynote address. He started with a lament: “The situation with the Palestinians—[the peace] talks don’t seem to be going anywhere right now. The Palestinians seem to be missing another opportunity. They’re not making the concessions necessary to move the peace process forward.”
He talked about the political class: “Sometimes on the record [politicians] do really want to scare people. It does sometimes help Israel politically around the world if we send out messages that all is going to hell. But privately, in conversations with the leaders who know what’s going on they reveal that actually things aren’t going too bad and sometimes that they really are putting on a show.”
He looked at the bright side of the Syrian conflict: “We said it’s terrible, that the world isn’t doing anything to stop their conventional weapons, only their chemical weapons. Well, their getting rid of the chemical weapons is a really big deal. Twelve hundred tons of chemical weapons in Syria. They didn’t get those chemical weapons to use against their people. They got them to use against you and me. When someone stockpiles poison gas to use against the Jewish people, we take it very seriously. And it is being removed. And, so, strategically, that’s a very good thing for Israel that you really have to appreciate. Now, as for their conventional weapons there in Syria, there is one country that’s doing a lot to remove the conventional weapons in Syria. That country is . . . Syria. Syria is wasting their conventional weapons against their own people. You know, it’s terrible and we don’t get happy about that.”
Of course not. But these people want to kill us—you—us, you know.
***
An Israeli colonel came to give us the “real story” about the situation with the Palestinians. He showed us pictures of the markets in Gaza: they’re full; of the beaches in Gaza: they’re full; of the trucks bringing supplies into Gaza: they’re full. Suffering? Starving? I recognized some of the pictures from Internet comment sections. He showed us a video. It was unclear what was happening but his takeaway was that Israel had the most moral army in the world. Oh, and by the way: his parents were Holocaust survivors. He told us, in conclusion, that we need to return to our communities and tell the people what’s really happening.
A number of months later, I was at the Palestine Festival of Literature, an annual event that brings international authors to meet their Palestinian counterparts and engage with Palestinian audiences. Teju Cole was there; Michael Ondaatje was there; some other authors I am not familiar with were there. There were some readings; there was a discussion of immigrant and exile literature; an American poet approvingly quoted the noxious anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon. An elderly Palestinian poet, a man with a very dignified bearing, closed the night. He directly addressed the visiting authors. He thanked them for visiting, for, as he memorably put it, planting a rose in their collective garden. He went on to describe the Palestinian people as the most victimized people on earth. Now, he told the authors, you must go and tell the world what is really happening here.
***
We sat on the back patio. It was early evening. The sun began to slouch off the horizon and the suffocating heat receded. He was in high spirits. He had a box filled with his most recent collection, a chapbook, self-published. I bought one, even though I couldn’t yet read it. He is a poet but also teaches; the international economics of poetry are not great either. He asked me what I was working on, what are my plans now that I was done teaching. I said that I wanted to continue writing. I told him I had been a journalist before so maybe I would do that, but I don’t want to fall into the trap of “so-and-so said this today.” It’s not worthwhile, he said. You can’t talk about politics directly. People are too cynical, the conversation too crowded. He had once given a reading under the separation wall, calling it Israel’s shame, that they were locking themselves in from the world, but his latest collection used biblical allegories. We must, he said, find a way around the conversation.
***
In my first ten months in Israel I went to four protests. The largest was largely absent Israelis. It was a protest of African asylum seekers against discrimination and demanding that the state process their asylum applications. A counter-protestor with a bullhorn told them, in crisp American English, to “go home.” The other three were a combination of anti-occupation, anti-racism, and anti-violence protests. One was on the sixty-seventh anniversary of the 1967 war. There were not many people there; barring extraordinary circumstances, there are never many people at these protests and everyone knows each other: animal rights protests draw much larger crowds (veganism is very popular in Israel).
The other two took place after the discovery of the bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers, Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah, in June 2014, and after the body of Mohammed Abu Khdeir was found in a Jerusalem forest. He was burned alive, apparently to “avenge” the murder of the three Israeli teenagers. The day before Abu Khdeir’s murder, mobs of Israelis marched around Jerusalem chanting “Death to Arabs” and trying to attack any Palestinian they could find. The first of the two protests was small. There were maybe two hundred people there.
The next day the crowds were larger after Meretz, the largest party of the mainstream left, threw their weight behind the demonstration. A few thousand people gathered next to Habima Theater, Israel’s national theater in central Tel Aviv. Knesset members Dov Khenin and Nitzan Horowtiz spoke, among others. It was a festive atmosphere. Parents brought young children; grandparents anchored the generational chain. After the speeches ended, music played over the loudspeakers, drowning out nascent attempts to maintain the energy and harness the crowd into something more. As the demonstration dispersed, a man, perhaps sensing a missed opportunity was passing by, grabbed the mic and said we would meet here, on the square, at the same time every day until Netanyahu takes notice, until the violence stops. The demonstrations did not continue and the violence did not stop.
***
As I wrote this, the first sirens sounded in Tel Aviv: rocket fire from Gaza, previously a rare occurrence this far north. Everyone on the patio of the café that is also a bookstore looked around in confusion, unsure what was expected from them. “Can’t Slow Down” by Lionel Richie was playing on the record player. The proprietor came out and waved us all inside. The bookshelves are thicker there. The smartest amongst us went straight for the art books with their sturdy, well-constructed covers. Like a fool I stood next to the small literary magazines and chapbooks. I think I finally understand the connection, why they are called sirens. You completely forget the world beforehand, before their arrival, what brought them there and why, so absorbed in their song you are, so absorbed in yourself.
