Haaretz.com, by Bradley
Burston, Israel, 8 Aug 2011
 |
| Hundreds of thousands of protesters march in Tel Aviv, August 6, 2011 (Photo; Tal Cohen) |
"Show
a little faith," a song keeps playing in my head. "There's magic in
the night."
It was
playing as I watched a young father, sweat-soaked and hoarse, slogging along
with his wife and 200,000 other people in the heart of Tel Aviv, juggling a
toddler daughter on his shoulders, the handle of a stroller in one hand, the
handle of a placard in the other. The crayon on his sign read "Yisrael
Noledet M'chadash" - Israel Is Being Reborn.
What if
he's right? Despite everything we're trained to think, despite everything that
disappointment has trained us to distrust, and despite the state religion of 21st
Century Israel, the one religion everyone here can fully believe in and
practice, which is cynicism. What if
this country is, in fact, being reborn? What if, despite everything we know, we
could choose the Israel we would want Israel to become?
And, most
unimaginable of all, what if this explosion of protest could spark a
reconsideration of what it is to be an Israeli? What if it could spark
different modes of thinking, even different modes of behavior, of how we act
and how we react?
It already
has.
If Israel
were the same Israel that it was three weeks ago, if we were the same Israelis
that we used to be, we would know what issues are serious and which are, well,
unmanly.
There are
subjects we see as worth fighting over – usually, to no effect - and there are
those we leave alone, in shame over our own needs and our inability to address
them.
If this
Israel were the same Israel, we would know that no one would bother to hit the
streets for education, which, while vital, is, let's face it, domestic, and can
wait. We would know that no one would go out and demonstrate for health care,
which, while crucial, seems to eke along in any case, and can wait. We would
certainly know that no one would raise a collective call for housing, which,
while essential, only gets built for people wealthy enough not to live in it,
and can wait.
But what if
that young family is right? What if, in choosing the Israel we want Israel to
become, ordinary people decided they could no longer wait?
Three weeks
into this, I'm betting they're right. What have I got to lose? Politicians who
have nothing better to waste their time on than concocting laws to end all
laws, democratic processes to end all democratic processes, Cherno-Bills worthy
of the Supreme Soviet? Or, for dessert, a new bolus of legislation, all the
parliamentary sewage flushed into one, a bill so
heinous it will make it impossible even for Israel's best friends to defend
Israel as a democracy, so extreme it will remove every remaining moral
obstruction to branding Israel outright apartheid.
I'm
thinking, choose again. I choose the Israel that's on the street. I choose
these Israelis.
You're
thinking: sure you do, what do you know, you're not from here. But you don't
know. I've had decades of re-education in the gulag of the now-aging
neo-Zionist ideal: The New Hebrew Man'yak. In uniform and out, I can recite
chapter and verse. M'kol Mlamdei Hiskalti Lo L'tzet Frierer. The man who cuts
me off in traffic, the woman who cuts in the pharmacy line, the bank line, the
clinic queue - they are all my teachers in the idea that I, we, are all alone
in this place, and I, we've got to grab everything for ourselves before someone
else gets to it. Nothing will ever change. If it does, it won't be for the
better.
If, after
the failure of socialism in Israel you still believe in people getting together
to make a better life for ordinary people and their needs, goes the credo, you
must be either effeminate, if you’re a man; unduly mannish, if you're a woman;
or, in any case, that most contemptible and therefore invisible and
trample-worthy of Israelis – the freier (sucker).
When I saw
that young family in Tel Aviv, I remembered one day when my wife and I were new
parents, and new Israelis, living in Beer Sheva. Shopping for Rosh Hashana in a
mobbed supermarket, we waited forever in a check-out line, our infant daughter
in our arms. As we neared the register, a checkstand opened alongside, and the
checker motioned us over. A burly man who had just arrived, watching the scene,
rammed his shopping cart into the line just ahead of ours. With a giddy look of
consummate triumph on his face, he pronounced his coup de grace sentence, for
the benefit of my education in Israeliness: "Kol Echad V' haMazal
Shelo." "Everyone has his own personal brand of luck."
Looking
back, I can only thank this man. He taught me a lesson much more valuable than
he could possibly have suspected.
I used to
think that the lesson of the supermarket story was that if that was this guy's
brand of luck, he was welcome to it. I had a lovely family, and I wasn't about
to trade.
But there
was something else, which took me years to see. This week, walking with
hundreds of thousands of people in Tel Aviv, I began to wonder, who are the
real freiers now?
What if
these ordinary, extra-ordinary people, at long last, could make their own luck?
What if they could begin to trade the mindset that substitutes macho displays
and disproportionate might and intensely selective blindness, for addressing
the authentic problems of ordinary, no less heroic people?
Saturday
night, a little boy near us marched with a sign reading "Mommy says we
don't have enough money for a little brother."
It's time
to choose the Israel we want Israel to become. The hell with my re-education as
the New Privatized Hebrew, which is, at this point, as last century as you can
get. I'm starting a new re-education program. To be myself again. As a human.
The hell with macho. The hell with the hair on the chest and the taking pride
in putting visiting diplomats into sawed-off chairs.
Let's hear
it for little brothers and sisters.
It's time
to show a little faith. Now that there's magic in the night.
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