Israel Hayom (Today)

If you have wondered why I haven’t been posting for a couple of weeks, then that makes me happy…it means somebody is actually reading my musings!  But if you are wondering, then that also means I owe you an explanation.  Clara and I have taken a trip, I guess you might call it a holiday, abroad.  We went to Israel to attend to some family business, not the least of which is to spend some time with our son, Eyal, before his induction into the Israeli Army.  Other family business has included Clara being present for our families in Israel and in the USA.  We’re both at the point in life of having ageing and ailing parents and other family members.

This has been my first visit to Israel in almost eight years, the longest interval since I met Clara that I have not travelled to Israel.  Although the purpose of the visit is family, I can't not use the occasion to make some general observations about Israel Today – thus the title of this essay – to offer you, my reader.

Let me start by stating in the interest of disclosure, as if it were necessary, that I make no claim of impartiality where Israel is concerned.  When I offer my observations as I will do here, I try to do so dispassionately and rationally.  But I don’t claim the mantle of impartiality.  Frankly, I don’t think one is likely to find a single individual on the planet who is impartial about Israel and its place in the world!  (Okay, an exaggeration…but not by much!)

Because Israel has been in the news lately – as she always is – due to the recent tensions with her Palestinian Arab neighbours, I think the current security situation is a good place to start.  As you may know, some weeks back – around the Jewish New Year – there began a new round of Palestinian violence toward Israelis.  Some say that this may represent the start of a ‘Third Intifada.’  The Intifada (the first one), which took place between 1987 and 1991, was an uprising mostly of youth and children, who attacked Israelis in the Palestinian-dominated areas – the so-called ‘Occupied Territories’ – with stones and other weapons that children might use.  Although there is a popular – and largely erroneous – image that the Western Media has cultivated and perpetuated, that this was a spontaneous uprising of desperate children, at least initially unsanctioned by their parents or the Palestinian leadership, there are Arab writers who have soundly debunked that as fiction.

The Second Intifada, sometimes referred to as ‘the Al Aksa Intifada,’ broke out in the year 2000 and lasted until 2005.  It was more an ‘adult uprising’ in which the weapons of choice were suicide bombs.  This round of violence resulted in far more fatalities – on both sides – than round one had.  In dealing with the violence, the Israelis instituted drastic curbs in the numbers of Gaza and West Bank Palestinians working and otherwise entering Israel; the Israelis erected elaborate border fence systems and restricted travel to Israel for Palestinians who could be well-vetted.  These fences have largely worked; they made it very difficult to carry out attacks in Israel proper and certainly contributed greatly to the fizzling out of the Second Intifada.  To replace the lost workers, Israel imported Guest Workers, largely from Romania and Thailand.

This ‘Third Intifada,’ or ‘Intifada of Knives’ (as some are calling it) is a war being waged by a range of the Palestinian demographic, but notable is that many of the attackers are women and teenagers.  The weapons of choice are knives, and vehicles:  as in deliberately crashing cars into groups of Israelis congregating on the streets, for example at bus stops.  That’s not to say that other weapons have not been used.

When we first arrived in Israel in the second week of November, things had quieted down a bit.  We can attribute this in part to the way the Israelis have reacted to the latest round of violence.  In large part, this has consisted of a stance of greater vigilance in their daily lives.  The other part is that Israelis have taken to responding, a la the passengers on United 93, fighting back against the attacks when they occur.  Enrollment in Krav Maga classes, including for middle-aged Israelis, is way up.  As are requests for gun permits.  Someone attacking civilians on an Israeli street is increasingly likely to be set upon my civilian bystanders before the police or army can react.  The Israelis are tired of the violence and increasingly realise that the only way to fight it is with violence.

Earlier this year, there was an interesting video that made the rounds of the social media, where a candid videographer tailed young Muslim women in Hij’ab for ten hours on Israeli streets in marketplaces.  The point of the video was to show the reaction of Jewish Israelis to the woman, or more accurately, the lack of reaction.  When the Israelis in these crowded places visibly reacted to the woman at all, it was usually positively:  with a smile and friendly nod.  (View the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbYopiz6sLg )  Walking around on Israeli streets recently, I saw few Hij’ab or Niq’ab – clad women, and when they do circulate among Israelis today, I’m guessing they are looked upon with more interest and suspicion.  That’s because several of the recent knife attacks have been carried out by Niq’ab and Hij’ab – clad women.  They are the ‘stealth fighters’ of this round, in the way that children and youth were for Round One.  That said, I did see a Muslim woman in the shouk (open-air marketplace) in Ashkelon the other day, and nobody seemed to be paying her any heed.  She seemed like just one more example of the incredible ethnic hodgepodge that is Israel today.

(The video in question, which was posted on YouTube and liberally circulated on Facebook, seemed to have as its purpose to show a contrast to another video, where a man donned the dress and trappings of an Orthodox Jew – yarmulke and ritual fringes – and walked around Paris for ten hours where Muslims and ‘Europeans’ reacted very strongly and very negatively.  View the video at:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AltyhmrIFgo)

(I might also add that Ashkelon, located only a few minutes’ drive north of the Gaza Strip, is sometimes referred to as a city that has been cleansed of Arabs, where until 1948 it was an almost-exclusively Arab town.  Arabs and their supporters in the Western Media sometimes point to Ashkelon as an example of the Israelis’ atrocity of expelling huge numbers of Arabs from their new state, considered the Original Sin of the founding of the state for which there apparently is no atonement apart from just going away and letting the ‘original inhabitants’ return to reclaim what they lost.  But over the years, as I’ve strolled the streets of Ashkelon, I’ve never found them to be anywhere near Arab-free.  When I first became acquainted with the city, there seemed to be more Arabs present, because at that time the border between Israel and Gaza was much more open.  One used to see legions of Palestinians from Gaza, coming into Israel daily to work, either in her cities or on her farms.  Now, Gazans enter Israel in much fewer numbers, and additionally Ashkelon’s population has grown exponentially with waves of new arrivals from the Former Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and more recently, France.  So very likely, the Arab woman I saw in the Shouk last week represents a segment of the population whose members have remained static whilst the population as a whole has grown.)

Although knife and vehicular attacks seem to be the preferred tactics in this round, two days before I flew to the USA there were two attacks resulting in death:  one by a knife-wielding man in Tel Aviv, but the other by a gunman on a highway in Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc on the West Bank south of Jerusalem.

In the past, I’ve noticed that any conversation with Israelis seems to quickly devolve to ‘the Situation,’ that is, the security situation.  This time, it seems to come up in far fewer conversations, at least as their opening subject.  I don’t know why this is so.  Perhaps the Israelis, despite their taking positive measures to protect themselves from the latest threat, are simply weary of the Situation and want to focus on the rest of life.  Security is heightened – there are bag checks going into every shopping centre and guards outside many shops and restaurants – but that has been the case since 2000.  Young Israelis after their army service and their post-service holidays who haven’t yet figured out what they want to be when they ‘grow up,’ can always find employment as security guards.  They are an institution that has become a fixture in Israeli life.  But that aside, Israelis seem less fixated on the security situation than they have been in past years.

That said, the Israelis’ appetite for news has not ebbed at all.  The regular, top-of-the-hour radio news broadcast draws everybody’s rapt attention.  When some act of violence occurs, it is covered endlessly on TV and discussed ad infinitum on talk radio.  Regarding the latter I recently noticed something; the commercial radio airwaves in Israel are dominated by talk shows.  Flip through the FM dial, and almost all of the music stations are Arab.  Israelis listen to talk, not music.  The talk is often about people’s emotional reactions to the current events; people call in to kvetch, but it sounds less political than American or Australian talk radio.  There are also stations that play predominantly religious programming.  A notable exception to this lack of music radio is Galei Tzahal, the army’s radio station, where hip DJ’s play cutting-edge music.  Once the hourly news broadcast is over.

One can tell that the country’s population is growing fast; everywhere one looks, there are new apartment buildings going up.  Between waves of in-migration and a high birthrate – even secular families typically have three or four children, and the religious typically far more – the country’s population continues to explode.  The newcomers make for an incredible hodgepodge of sounds of different languages in the street, and exotic aromas of food brought from all over the world.  The mix of skin tones and styles of dress is becoming ever more diverse.  Israel has never been a country of garden suburbs, but the landscape seems even more vertical than it has been in the past. 

The country seems to have a perpetual housing shortage as people wait for the new buildings to be finished.  There is supposedly more derelict housing than in the past, but I have not seen it first-hand.  I have not been in the infamous Old Central Bus Station, a vast urban area in south Tel Aviv, which has reportedly become a haven of the homeless, mostly African migrants from Sudan and Eritrea who are in Israel illegally, since the new bus station opened in 1993.  Young people in Israel nowadays complain a lot about the cost of housing, but housing has always been relatively expensive in Israel.  That said, it is probably half the price in the smaller cities, than in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.  Clara and I own a small unit in Ashkelon, 80 square metres, two bedrooms, in an old circa 1950’s building.  The tenants pay USD $450 per month.  We could probably get somewhat more, but the same couple, Ethiopian immigrants, has been with us five years and as they are reliable and quiet we have not raised the rent substantially over the years.

Since I mentioned migrants from Africa, I’d like to address that some have taken to considering the Israelis’ unwillingness to legally settle the illegally-arrived Africans as evidence of Israeli ‘racism.’  I don’t think one can make such a case.  As I mentioned above, Israel is among the most ethnically and racially diverse societies in the world with the common thread being that most of the newcomers are Jewish or at least have Jewish ties.  With so many Christian and Muslim-majority countries for them to take refuge in, there is no sound reason why Israel should absorb Christian Eritreans or Muslim Sudanese just because they crossed the border.  They have plenty of other potential refuges.  On the other hand, the Jewish Ethiopians are warmly welcomed and embraced because, being Jews, Israel is their natural refuge.  Besides which, they have nowhere else to go.  If the Israelis’ refusal to absorb Eritreans and Sudanese were evidence of ‘racism,’ why are the Ethiopians not only taken in, but viewed positively by so many Israelis?  The often-heard charge that Israelis are, as a group, ‘racist’ is just one more way that Israel’s detractors try to discredit her.  

Another area of growth in Israel in recent years, has been in transport.  With a high population density, it has always been a challenge to move large numbers of people around the country efficiently.  Travel by car is the most popular, despite that petrol is as expensive as it is in Australia, and despite the chronic congestion on the roads.  But the road network has improved markedly in the last few years.  Modern multi-lane highways with grade separation and well-engineered interchanges are found all over.  Highway 6, the Trans-Israel Highway, goes from Be’ersheva in the south up to near Haifa in the north.  It skirts the Dan bloc of cities of which Tel Aviv is the centre, following the Green Line for some of its distance.  It makes the north-south trip through the highly populated centre, much faster than before.  And everywhere one goes, highways are being modernized and widened.  Additionally, there is a fast and efficient rail service from Nahariya in the north to Be’ersheva in the south with an additional line from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and at least two new east-west lines going up in the Galilee, in the north.  Jerusalem has had an efficient system of trams or ‘light rail’ for several years, and now a similar system will be built in Tel Aviv.  Finally, there are bike paths and bike lanes all over.  Whilst push bikes have never been too popular in Israel – the hot climate makes them uncomfortable to pedal in the summer – they have grown in popularity as a lower-cost (and more fitness-inducing!) alternative to cars.  There has also been an explosion in electric bikes, which one sees buzzing around all over, used for recreation and for basic transportation.

The cost of living in Israel remains relatively low, certainly in relation to that in Australia and even when compared to the USA.  Although housing is an expensive item – see above – and such ‘luxuries’ as automobiles and electronics are as expensive as they are in Australia, basics such as food and clothing appear to be much cheaper.  Walking around the shouk and a supermarket, my impression was that basics such as fresh fruit and veg, meat and staples are somewhere between a half and two-thirds what they would cost in Australia.  And of course, almost any product you buy at either place is certified kosher!