SCENE XXIV
كيبوتس عين دور
KIBBUTZ EIN DOR, State of Israel, 2001 ce
***
Hadas Shimeon Naphtali “drinks like a fish and smokes like a chimney” and she, unlike many was born here. My punk rock Persian. Her parents fled persecution in Iran in the 50’s. They settled here in the North. Her English, it gets far worse the more she drinks, and she uses Farsi or Hebrew curses after every fourth word. She is some cross between a goth and a punk, a Persian or Jew depending on what she wants to do after you take her clothes off. This little badass riot girl had gotten me into trouble before. Moaglie a kibbutz brat arse had some long-standing territorial claim on her. I was encroaching.
He was her ex-boyfriend and wanted to beat me senseless when Johnny Yuma informed on me, buddying up to him to get better food and watch HBO with air conditioning. The scum fucker Yuma told him that Hadas was sweet on me. That lip-flapping, eluding bastard sent the jungle boy after me. The little ape threw a brick at my head and chased me with a shovel across the field into the village of Debriyiah. The kid was huge. Some villagers let me hide in their little mosque.
I took this violent outburst of jealousy and its consequences as a sign to move after somebody turned my whole room inside out. One night I threw a brick through the jungle boy’s window and lit off a Molotov cocktail on his porch. ‘Us little bitches are nothing but trouble,’ Hadas told me giggling after the fact.
Bruriya tells me to pack my bags and ‘get gone!’ She refunds a couple hundred sheks from the Ulpan and washes her hands of me. The best way was to keep it internal and banish me before me or the jungle boy tried to kill each other.
I caught the next southbound bus to Tel Aviv. I had not been there since the bombing. I was not cut out for what was left of collective living anyway. I had the phone numbers of my roommate, the wild chesty Hadas and Mr. Jones if I ever needed places to crash.
The mood in Tel Aviv has grown a little bit darker now. But it is just me. The central bus station of Tel Aviv was still a maze of commerce and a madhouse failure in human trafficking. It was Grand Central Station with neither grandeur, elegance nor any discernable organization. It was like the Port Authority with five minutes to live. Increased security and soldiers swarmed the area. ID and random bag checks were done on everyone coming or going. Arab Israelis and Yemenite or Moroccan Jews may as well have never put the identity cards back in their pockets. It was a kind of muted hysteria, not as edgy as being terrorized, but prepared to jump on anyone who looked suspicious. People were colder than normal. Everyone was more jumpy, more likely to curse out strangers and cut lines.
Nothing had really changed except me. Except my perception of what is potentially dangerous. I keep my eyes peeled for bag bombs now and racially profile out my ass. Looking for dark skinned Disney villains. Having never met more than a small handful of Arabs in real life. I take a Sheroort, a mini-van cab, from the bus station to Jerusalem Beach. I always seem to wind up here under the Opera Towers. It seems open and safe.
I drop my black rucksack and set up my art stand from the huge plywood piece near the foot de-sander sprinklers. It air-dried in about five minutes and so did I. The heat was something ridiculous in Celsius. I was soaked through and through. I affixed a large white tablecloth that I had expropriated from the kibbutz to the board and then taped my twenty-some-odd sketches to it. I dropped a handful of new Israeli shekels on my turquoise, bandana-wrapped archive sketchbook. I wedged a sign that some girl had made for me next to it, which said OMANOOT MAQHAR, ‘Resistance Art’ in Hebrew.
With my makeshift art stand up and running, I sat in the shade and counted out my remaining shekels. I have only had 280 left. I had few options for living free or cheap. The most rundown hostels cost 40-plus a night and we’re talking places you would only bring hookers to. I had to get some money and a roof over my head fast.
Squatting isn’t really an option because of the heat and the junkies. There was not really a squatter movement here in Israel, that is, unless you counted the several million Palestinians as a kind of squatter community, squatting their own homes now deemed illegal. The irony of this was not lost upon me. Only junkies in bombed out shit holes did not pay rent. They were constantly evicted. I didn’t want to live in that kind of situation.
The boardwalk is empty because of the evil heat. A small girl came up to me with her mother and then ran off quickly. They only buy my sketches at night when they’re drunk. On a Thursday or a Friday, it would get busy, and I could do okay. Or at least that was what it was like when I was coming down just for weekends. They can’t seem to get an American selling political art here. They also really can’t get their heads around a New Yorker immigrating here. They spend more time trying to talk me out of moving to Israel than buying art. Only girls and tourists buy anything for more than ten NIS. They buy what hangs on the board sometimes quite inspired by one of my scribbles. I don’t put the time into these things that I did in London. A lot of them are photocopies of my archive colored in with pencils and sharpies.
No wonder they thought I was crazy. Whatever AIPAC and the big US Jew lobby was doing, it worked, all the propaganda had worked. Israel is the single largest recipient of US aid on the planet. What it offers in intelligence or about anything seemed too negligible for the number of US dollars it receives each year. These are the subjects of lofty and opinionated books, but Israel seemed more like an outpost than a colony. Its claims toward both democracy and Westernness were highly exaggerated. Things were neither particularly Western nor Democratic in the Holy Land.
Arab rhetoricians liked to compare the ‘Zionist entity’ to the crusader state during the Middle Ages. That was weak, too. Except maybe that’s how it looks to everyone except us. Israel was clearly quite capable of fighting off joint amalgamations of Arab armies prior to the serious military aid that didn’t get started in earnest until after the war in 1956. The massive evangelical Christian support for Israel was geared to their Bible book of Revelations, based upon wishful thinking that the Jewish return would precede the end of days. The Evangelicals were thrilled about us coming home. The sooner we all returned home and were slaughtered, the sooner Jesus would return.
This little outpost of 8 million people was also like a large open-air ghetto in the sands. And inside our ghetto wed built Palestinians a few smaller ones. This outpost oasis would always be armed, walled and holding out for reinforcements, which were never coming. The hundreds of millions of dollars in gun money and the immigrant waves of several thousand a year couldn’t outgun or out breed the Palestinian will for their nation to be liberated. We’d built our ghetto on top of someone else’s land. No matter how we justify it, that is how they see it. If it had been ours some thousands of years ago, that didn’t matter on the Arab or Muslim Street. They weren’t going anywhere, and neither were we.
That an American artist would come here to draw was neither logical nor in line with the Israelite Dream. You did your army time and then moved on to New York via Bali or Europe if your finances allowed. If you got to America, you didn’t come back unless you came back rich. The Russians were just biding time. Their Zionist yearnings were in an entirely different language. If things had been shit for Jews in Russia, they were shit here too. Only Brighton Beach was paved in gold. For the Israeli kids it was in Williamsburg or DUMBO where these golden streets were to be found. They all just wanted out of here. They felt the walls beginning to chip.
Draft dodging was not just on the rise; it was a supported subculture. These Refuseniks, as they were called, claimed insanity, or pacifism, or whatever they could. Most went to prison or fled the country. The ones who stayed were ruined. Doors were closed to them not only for vital state monies for healthcare and school, but also for thousands of upper middle-class jobs. You were marked as a traitor if you didn’t join the IDF because the whole outpost relied on the strength and violence of its young to hold the fort.
The religious, or Dosiim as they were called derogatorily by my Russian friends, were exempt from the army and taxes too. Their role was to keep the ‘Jewish character’ of the state together. Maintain actual Jewish identity. They voted as a block and their SHAS party was always needed for any government coalition. This created a tremendous amount of religious baggage that was foisted upon the secular Jewish state. It impacted nearly every aspect of Israeli life. You couldn’t get married if you weren’t Jewish. You had to fly to Cyprus to consummate a marriage that was not halachically approved.
Things are locked down on Shabbos. Not everything, but about everything outside of Tel Aviv. Russians and Arabs ran their stores and clubs, but the national bus and train lines went down for 24 hours. You could not find too many restaurants with pepperoni pizza. Technically you couldn’t have pigs on the territory of Israel, but Russians got around it with elevated sties. There were ways around everything, but the real result was divisions that had been growing in Israel since the mass waves of Sephardic Jews began showing up in the 50’s fleeing pogroms in Arab countries after the first two wars had gone so badly.
The Mizrahim, as they were derogatively called by the Ashkenazim, the white European Israelis, looked like Arabs, spoke and thought in Arabic, ate foods like Arabs and to an outsider were indistinguishable culturally from Arabs. The Jews and Muslims had done well enough together for about 1600 years, far better than Jews had done living in Christian Europe. Their status as a “People of the Book” had protected them under the Islamic Shari’ah Law for hundreds of years. There was intermarriage as well as vast cultural exchange as Jews had been integrated throughout the Caliphates. This ended quite abruptly in 1948. Beat enough war drums and shed enough blood and now less than fifty years later, the Jews and Muslims will swear they have been enemies since creation.
The Mizrahim demographically are quite diverse, but the largest contingents are the Jews from Yemen and Morocco. For decades the racial and cultural tensions drove the first schisms within the Jewish state. The constant state of war, however, never allowed these differences to be politically dangerous. There had been a Black Panther Party of Israel in the 1970’s, which fought discrimination. Eventually they were arrested or co-opted or forgotten about or ignored. When there’s a war every ten years and the survival of the state always seems to hang in the balance, these internal contradictions are swept under the great wool rug. Then came huge waves of Ethiopian Jews in the 70’s and there was a new other, one more racially pronounced and completely unaccustomed to living in a quasi-developed, industrial country. But better to be a nigger in the outpost than a nigger in a war zone. Ethiopia went up in the flames of civil war and the 20,000 odd Ethiopian Jews were lifted out and naturalized in Israel. They belonged to two great African tribes that had been practicing Judaism for over 2,000 years and were widely believed to be the lost tribe of Dan. My Russian friends called them the Cosiim, which meant Blacks, but might as well have meant niggers. The Russians seemed to never play nice with Ethiopians. There were fights in the ghettos, fights in the schools, fights in the army, and fights in the clubs. I almost got the shit kicked out of me in front of Abulafiah trying to break up a Russian Ethiopian fisticuff right after I first arrived.
The Russian flood began in 1989 when the wall came down and surged by the early nineties. Any Russian with even the flimsiest claim to being the grandchild of a Jew came in swarms. All over the former Soviet Union as former party and KGB operators grabbed up turf, men and weapons, the fall of communism meant a mass exodus of a million so-called Russian Jews to Israel. Fleeing poverty, repression and anarchy, these Russians were called Barbarians by just about every other marginalized group as they packed ghettos all over the outpost to capacity right next to Sephardic, Ethiopian, and lower-class Ashkenazi groups like the Romanians. The adjustment to this new immigration was still underway. My closest friends here, like the now exploded and dead Roman, were the children of this new wave. They spoke English better than they spoke Hebrew because they tuned into MTV and VH1 everyday having grown up cold-war, capitalist-culture deprived.
There was another especially important demographic in our outpost. They were harder to count because they had so many kids they didn’t always report. They had their own ways and were as insular as they could be. A Tagliit Birth Right Israel guide would call them the Arab Israelis; but that was a fiction for tourists not attuned to demographics or statecraft. There are easily a million Arab Israelis or Palestinians living in Israel proper. They are the ones who never left. Some of them were Christians, like the inhabitants of the town of Nazareth and Acho. Many were not. No one wanted to call them Palestinians, but that’s what they called themselves. I had met a few on the tiyeled. They went out in packs because it was safer that way. They didn’t have to join the army, but they benefited by staying. They were hated by everyone else and suspected as a fifth column in this latest Intifada.
There were two more subgroups of the so-called “Arab Israelis” with whom I had no contact: the Druze and the Bedui. You had to count them separately because even though they were Arab they had always sided with the Israeli state despite any silly claims at ethnic loyalties. The Bedouin were Sunni Muslim like the Palestinians, but their nomadic desert nature put them quite at odds with every Arab regime in the region. They were concentrated largely in settlements all over the Negev and periodically joined the army as trackers. They were very poor and were also well integrated into southern crime and smuggling out of Egypt. I hoped to meet one eventually. I’d never been south of Judea. The Druze were more ambiguous still because they practiced a highly secretive religion something like Hinduism and Islam mixed. They lived in little village citadels in the north in Lebanon and the Galilee. They were active supporters of the Jewish state, and many sent their children to the IDF. I was told that even if I did meet a Druze, they’d never tell me anything about their religion. They kept to the hills and to their own ways clandestino.
So, our little outpost of 8-9 million souls, 11-12 if one counted Palestinians in the territories, had quite enough internal fighting simmering to add to the twenty-plus nations in the region that continued to swear to kill us, not to mention the two million Palestinians in the occupied territories. There were internal contradictions of the inner city and the ghettos. I saw them clearly on the tiyeled. I drew pictures about them and about the need for unity even with the Palestinians at war with us. It was becoming obvious to me that this internal fighting would do in our outpost far sooner than some Arab army could. All this building hatred was exploding around us three or four times a week. A bus here, a bar there. Sometimes it was just a child with a Kalashnikov opening up on people in a market. The suicide bombing campaign was low intensity and high volume. There were never more than twenty fatalities per attack, but it was taking its toll. The Israelis would strike back with ‘smart bombs’ and checkpoints and road closures, but it stopped nothing. This thing was just getting started.
Anya is the blondinette-streaked, raven-haired Russian really part Jewish Khazaki girl that I am fooling around with from the town of Pardes Hana. She tells me that it all started when Ariel Sharon and a huge armed escort made their way to the Temple Mount where the Dome of the Rock sits and demanded access to pray. A violent and terrifying fitna erupted within twenty minutes of the Prime Minister’s initial visit. It was this that had started the first Intifada. It must have begun less than a month since I first visited in 2000. Now, nine months later, the body count was in the thousands with daily retaliations. It was the bomber belt versus the F-15 fighter with their laser-guided rocket smart bombs that always knocked out the terrorists and nine families living near them. It was blood for blood and bullet for bullet, a test of wills as to who possessed the constitution hold the outpost.
I was working late on a Thursday when I saw something unusually gangster. Two carloads of Palestinians were careening down the highway that runs alongside the tiyeled at over 70 mph. They were each waving four huge red flags with the crescent of Islam upon them. Thirty Israeli police cars were pursuing them with sirens wailing. It was a high-speed chase over what might have just been a first amendment question at a high speed but was getting blown up into something more significant. It was indeed quite gangster so see these Arab bandits tearing down the highway repping their colors. They’d be very lucky if the Israelis didn’t open fire on them. I hoped to not see the end of it. It was brave, noble, more of a statement than exploding yourself in a club full of uninvolved high school kids. But that was naïve. Everyone was involved.
One of the Israeli squad cars pulled off a pit maneuver on the rear vehicle and it spun out of control into a concrete barrier and flipped. The lead car took off out of site heading south toward the Dan Hotel and District Yaffo. A crowd gathered around the vehicle and the police took positions with their pistols drawn. Some fat American tourists with handheld video cameras turned their attention from the three-card Monte stands to ‘the terrorists.’ A group of Russian youth swarmed the site, but not too close in case the people in the overturned car ‘exploded’ themselves.
A young Arab man crawled out one of the broken windows. He dragged his buddy with him. The police started screaming in Hebrew for him to put his arms in the air. A policeman fired in the air. I think you only fire in the air in third world countries. The young Arab rebel’s hands and shirt were all bloodied up. He hadn’t let go of that flag.
There were two more guys in the back who were pretty fucked up because they hadn’t been wearing seat belts. The paramedics arrived on the scene as well as a few more cop cars. A loudspeaker was telling everyone in Hebrew and English to get back in case the car was booby-trapped. Maybe it was because the fat Americans were filming. Maybe it was because he hated the sound of Hebrew. Maybe it was because English is the Modern Greek, the bloodied Arab rebel bellows:
“Khaybar, Khaybar, ya yahud! Jaish Mohammed soufa ya-oud!!”
He did not bellow it exceedingly long. Some of the gawking Russian kids overran the security cordon and started kicking his face in. They tore him and his friend in the front seat apart.
The police beat the Russians back with riot sticks and pepper spray. Peace was eventually restored. Four young Arabs were in cuffs. Only one of them was conscious. The police called some ambulances for the four kids who could not really have been said to have been doing much more than speeding with the pride of the nation.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 