Letter From Israel: The Optimistic Future

Eighth in an ongo­ing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel – I was mugged twice in the nine years that I lived in Boston. After see­ing the reac­tions of nearby Bosto­ni­ans at the time and Israelis to whom I have told the sto­ries now, I can under­stand why Israel is more secure than peo­ple realize.

—
Cop­ley Square and East Boston

Boston is usu­ally safe – as long as one is not alone in parts of the Dorch­ester and Rox­bury neigh­bor­hoods at night – because it is a col­lege town. Roughly one-fourth of the city is com­prised of peo­ple between the ages of 18 and 22. Peo­ple walk around at night, even alone, and every­one nor­mally feels safe.

While I was work­ing at my first jour­nal­ism job out of col­lege in 2002 as a staff reporter for The Boston Courant, a weekly neigh­bor­hood news­pa­per, I was on my way to the Cop­ley Square sub­way sta­tion to cover a Boston Pub­lic Health Com­mis­sion meet­ing in the Fen­way neigh­bor­hood. On the way, I stopped to have a cig­a­rette before walk­ing down the stairs to the sta­tion. (Yes, it was a bad habit. Kids, don’t ever start.)

Two young men walked up to me, and I can only describe them as stereo­typ­i­cal ghetto thugs. (I hate to describe them in this man­ner, but it is nec­es­sary to set the scene accu­rately.) One was a small-but-built guy who wore baggy clothes, and the other was a large, fat guy who needed to lean against a post next to me because he had obvi­ously smoked too much marijuana.

The first guy stood right in front of my and stared into my eyes. “What do you have in your pock­ets?” he demanded in a rough, men­ac­ing voice. I froze, partly out of sur­prise and partly out of fear. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the pack of cig­a­rettes. “That’s all,” I said with a shrug. He grabbed it out of my hands, and the two thugs walked away. I was glad that I had inten­tion­ally not men­tioned my wal­let and mobile phone.

The thing I remem­ber most about this expe­ri­ence is that it hap­pened at rush hour. There were dozens of peo­ple within a few hun­dred feet, and no one said or did any­thing. After the two guys walked away, I looked around because peo­ple were look­ing in my direc­tion. Every­one nearby low­ered his head and turned away when we made eye contact.

Two years later, I found myself alone on the Fourth of July because I had just flown back from vis­it­ing my fam­ily in Illi­nois. My friends were out of town, so I went to a neigh­bor­hood pub in East Boston to cel­e­brate. I was walk­ing home when two men, seem­ingly out of the blue, grabbed me from behind, held me by the shoul­ders, and placed a knife across the front of my neck. I offered my wal­let and cell phone, which they took and then ran away. As I stum­bled home (my legs felt half-paralyzed out of shock), I saw that a small group of peo­ple were loung­ing on their front porch not very far away. They had done noth­ing to help. In addi­tion, I was obvi­ously shaken and pos­si­bly stum­bling, but they did not even ask whether I was all right.

—
A Sin­gle Community

In sev­eral of my prior let­ters, I described the strong civil soci­ety that has devel­oped in Israel as a result of Jew­ish tra­di­tion and tribal iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, along with the his­tory of the com­mu­nal farms named kib­butzim and the desire to unify in the face of numer­ous, per­ceived threats. I fully real­ized this while telling the two prior sto­ries to my Israeli friends.

Israelis are shocked and hor­ri­fied to hear that no one helped me while I was being mugged (or pos­si­bly some­thing worse). They told me that, in Israel, if some­one were being attacked on the street, every sin­gle
per­son nearby would run over to help – and most likely, to be blunt, kick the crap out of the bad guy. Every­one looks out for every­one else. (It also helps that nearly all Israelis have some degree of army train­ing as a result of the manda­tory mil­i­tary ser­vice after high school here. As I heard it put once some­where, an Israeli has more courage in his fin­ger than most peo­ple have in their entire bodies.)

In addi­tion, vio­lent crime is also extremely rare in Israel. In the eight months that I have lived here, I have yet to see a news report on a ran­dom mug­ging, mur­der, or rape. Despite what peo­ple in the West see on the news, Israel is extremely safe. Ter­ror­ism has been extremely rare for years, and more peo­ple die in traf­fic acci­dents each year than the num­ber who have been killed in all wars and ter­ror­ist attacks com­bined. Most vio­lence is either related to the Russ­ian mafia, traf­fic acci­dents, or drunken brawls in bars. No one, for exam­ple, ever breaks into a ran­dom house and kills or rapes the per­son inside. Every­one walks around at night, even alone. On some level, every­one looks out for every­one. Sta­tis­ti­cally, Israel is safer than most major Amer­i­can cities – the chance of being killed in a sui­cide bomb­ing might be one in ten thou­sand while the chance of being mur­dered in many parts of the United States might be one in five thousand.

In major Amer­i­can cities, a per­son can feel alone even though he lives among mil­lions of peo­ple. This never hap­pens in Israel. Peo­ple are care about every­one (unless they work in cus­tomer ser­vice). It is hard to describe the level of open affec­tion in inter­per­sonal rela­tions in Israel to some­one who has never been here, but I will try.

Peo­ple are warm and friendly to a degree that I have never seen any­where else. Dur­ing con­ver­sa­tions, peo­ple touch and hug each other all the time. Every­one (even men) embraces and kisses on the cheek when they meet some­one – some­times even if it is for the first time. Just the other night, a good male friend of mine gave me a hug from behind and a kiss on the shoul­der when he saw me sit­ting at a local pub. When­ever some­one is eat­ing at a restau­rant or some­where in pub­lic, nearly every­one who passes by – whether he is a friend or stranger – will tell him, “Behteyahvon!” This is the Hebrew phrase that roughly trans­lates to “Bon appetite!”

At first these dif­fer­ences are uncom­fort­able to peo­ple who, like me, grew up in the United States, where peo­ple have larger amounts of pri­vate, per­sonal space between each other and peo­ple, espe­cially men, are less affec­tion­ate in pub­lic (or at all). But after one becomes used to the cul­tural dif­fer­ences, it becomes very heart­warm­ing and endearing.

While I wrote about some dis­cour­ag­ing trends in mod­ern Israeli soci­ety in my prior let­ter, it is still true that peo­ple here are gen­er­ally friendly and warm (most of the time). After all, Israelis tend to believe, to vary­ing degrees, that they only have each other in the entire world.

The pri­mary rea­son that I am opti­mistic about Israel’s future is that I have seen and under­stood the Israeli mind­set. The close, civil soci­ety here brought Israel through threats of exter­mi­na­tion in the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, as well as through two intifadas and sixty years of a tur­bu­lent exis­tence. Israelis can get through any­thing – even the polit­i­cal, social, and reli­gious dif­fer­ences described in my prior let­ters – because they know that they will always have each other.

Still, many of the spe­cific prob­lems I have men­tioned seem to be improv­ing, espe­cially when one com­pares Israel today to decades ago.

—
Brighter than it Seems

– Israel is much more secure. Although Israeli and Amer­i­can con­ser­v­a­tives always claim that Israel is con­stantly fac­ing threats to its very exis­tence, this is no longer true. If Israel had lost any of the wars of 1948, 1967, and 1973, the coun­try would likely have been invaded and destroyed by the sur­round­ing Arab coun­tries. (Many Israelis began dig­ging their own graves in 1967, and rab­bis started recit­ing Psalms in the Israeli legislature.)

How­ever, every­thing has changed with most of coun­tries that bor­der Israel. The Jew­ish state is at peace with Egypt and Jor­dan. Iraq is no longer a threat since the United States top­pled Sad­dam Hus­sein. Saudi Ara­bia is pur­su­ing a peace plan to solve the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict. Lebanon is occu­pied with its own inter­nal bat­tle with Hizbol­lah. Despite Syria’s con­nec­tion to Iran, the coun­try is hav­ing peace talks with Israel. Syria’s mil­i­tary alone is no match for the Jew­ish state.

Israel does face threats from Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hizbol­lah in south­ern Lebanon. How­ever, these ter­ror­ist groups do not threaten Israel’s exis­tence. Rock­ets fired into south­west­ern and north­ern Israel do kill a few peo­ple and cause minor dam­age in those places, but they can­not destroy the coun­try. Since Israel built the con­tro­ver­sial sep­a­ra­tion bar­rier between Israel proper and the West Bank, the num­ber of sui­cide bomb­ings has fallen to prac­ti­cally zero. (Sui­cide bomb­ings, although hor­rific, can­not destroy a coun­try either.)

– Iran will not nuke Israel. The Jew­ish state would face an exis­ten­tial threat from Iran­ian nuclear weapons in the hands of Islamic extrem­ists in the country’s gov­ern­ment. But Israel will never let that become a pos­si­bil­ity. The Jew­ish state destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reac­tor in 1981 and (allegedly) Syria’s in 2007. Israel, with or with­out U.S. assis­tance, will do the same to Iran. This coun­try does not — and can­not — take threats lightly.

– Every­one knows how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian con­flict. Except for Israeli and Pales­tin­ian extrem­ists, nearly all peo­ple agree that a peace plan will have the fol­low­ing: an Israeli with­drawal from all or most of the West Bank, a divi­sion of Jerusalem, and a ces­sa­tion of ter­ror­ist attacks. The prob­lem is with imple­men­ta­tion: Minor, ultra-Orthodox polit­i­cal par­ties in Israeli gov­ern­ing coali­tions veto any of these with­drawals, and the Pales­tini­ans have been fight­ing a low-grade civil war amongst them­selves between the Fatah and Hamas polit­i­cal parties.

How­ever, the fact that the vast major­ity of Israelis now rec­og­nize what a peace plan must entail is a good start. As the con­flict con­tin­ues year after year, more and more Israelis and Pales­tini­ans will start to move towards the cen­ter. No one, no mat­ter how much of an ide­o­logue, wants to live in a pressure-cooker for­ever. In the end, prac­ti­cal real­ity usu­ally trumps imprac­ti­cal idealism.

– Israeli soci­ety is becom­ing less frac­tured. As I wrote in a prior let­ter, there has been much social strife and divi­sion between Ashke­nazi Jews (peo­ple with a European-Jewish cul­ture), Mizrahi Jews (peo­ple with a Mid­dle East-Jewish cul­ture), and non-Jewish Israelis like Rus­sians and Arabs. But this is slowly dissipating.

Israel is a small coun­try, so every­one inter­acts with every­one all of the time. So peo­ple from these dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties fre­quently fall in love and have chil­dren. Now, for exam­ple, I have friends here who are half-Polish and half-Moroccan, half-Indian and half-American, and half-Iraqi and half-Romanian. The terms “Ashke­nazi” and “Mizrahi” are increas­ingly obsolete.

When non-Jewish Rus­sians moved to Israel fol­low­ing the col­lapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s through a loop­hole in immi­gra­tion law, they faced much dis­crim­i­na­tion. But their chil­dren, now in their teens and early twen­ties, are as Israeli as Jew­ish Israelis. The first lan­guage of these non-Jews is Hebrew, not Russ­ian. Their per­son­al­i­ties are very Israeli, not Russ­ian. As a result, they are just as Israeli as sec­u­lar, Israeli Jews, and they fit into soci­ety very easily.

Although it will always be dif­fi­cult for Arab Israelis to feel at home in a Jew­ish state, I think they are slowly mov­ing in that direc­tion. For exam­ple, I once saw a group of Arabs sit­ting in a hos­pi­tal while I was vis­it­ing a friend’s fam­ily mem­ber there. Sur­pris­ingly enough, they were speak­ing Hebrew amongst them­selves. This can only be a good sign.

– The influ­ence of the ultra-Orthodox might be decreas­ing. As I wrote in a prior let­ter, reli­gion in Israel is extremely polar­ized. Every­one is either com­pletely sec­u­lar or wholly Ortho­dox, and even the Ortho­dox world is divided:

    • Mod­ern Ortho­dox (also called National Ortho­dox in Israel) Jews live in the mod­ern world while remain­ing com­pletely obser­vant. They are also the pri­mary inspi­ra­tion behind the set­tle­ment move­ment in the West Bank.
    • Charedi (also called Ultra-Orthodox) Jews live in iso­lated neigh­bor­hoods and block out the out­side world while reject­ing any mod­ern­iza­tion of Judaism. While they do not rec­og­nize the State of Israel, they still rely on gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies instead of work­ing to pay for their chil­dren, and they con­trol most of the offi­cial reli­gious estab­lish­ment. (I dis­cussed them in my first let­ter.)
    • Hasidic Jews who are very mys­ti­cal and believe that their found­ing rabbi is the Mes­siah, even though he hap­pens to be dead.

The ultra-Orthodox move­ment has been very harm­ful to Israel. They receive lit­tle sec­u­lar edu­ca­tion, they do not serve in the mil­i­tary, they work very lit­tle, they have numer­ous chil­dren (some­times ten or more), and they sur­vive on tax­payer dol­lars (er, shekels). Their rab­bis in gov­ern­ment posi­tions are increas­ingly dis­crim­i­na­tory against all other forms of Judaism, even other types of Ortho­dox Judaism. In charedi neigh­bor­hoods, peo­ple will throw stones at you if you drive through there on Shab­bat or do any­thing else that vio­lates Ortho­dox Jew­ish law.

But the pen­du­lum might be start­ing to swing in the other direc­tion. Incom­ing Prime Min­is­ter Tzipi Livni might be able to form a gov­ern­ing coali­tion that does not, for once, include Shas, the most pow­er­ful ultra-Orthodox polit­i­cal party. The finance min­is­ter passed a bud­get over charedi objec­tions this year that did not increase the amount of money ultra-Orthodox fam­i­lies receive each month to pay for their chil­dren. More­over, the charedi com­mu­ni­ties are not self-sustaining. Many of them have relied on wealthy par­ents and grand­par­ents, but those funds are dis­ap­pear­ing as the older gen­er­a­tion passes away and the money is spent. Once the ultra-Orthodox com­mu­nity starts to lose influ­ence, then Israel can start to move towards the cen­ter religiously.

– The econ­omy is gain­ing strength. Israel is largely a desert that is devoid of nat­ural resources, so the coun­try has had to rely mainly on one asset: Israeli brains. As a result, the coun­try has become a world­wide leader in fields like high-tech and biotech­nol­ogy that is on the same level as Sil­i­con Val­ley and Ban­ga­lore, India. Israel is a coun­try that is suc­ceed­ing in a glob­al­ized world.

As New York Times colum­nist Thomas Fried­man once the­o­rized, no two coun­tries that have a McDonald’s have ever gone to war with each other.* The rea­son­ing is that coun­tries need to have a large mid­dle class to have fast food estab­lish­ments, and a place with a sta­ble mid­dle class wages war less often. (When peo­ple have more stuff, they are less will­ing to risk los­ing it through con­flict. Peo­ple are more will­ing to fight if they have noth­ing to lose.)

Well, Israel has many McDonald’s and Burger Kings. As a result of Israel’s grow­ing econ­omy, the coun­try is gen­er­ally becom­ing richer (although the gap between the rich and poor is also ris­ing). Since the mid­dle class is grow­ing in Israel, it is likely that the pub­lic will gen­er­ally be more will­ing to make nec­es­sary sac­ri­fices for peace. This is also why it is impor­tant for the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity – and Israel – to help improve the Pales­tin­ian econ­omy in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well. If there were many McDonald’s in Gaza, per­haps the Pales­tini­ans there would be less likely to sup­port Hamas.

—
Sign­ing Off, For Now

Well, this seems like an appro­pri­ate place to end my series, at least for now. I will be fly­ing to the United States soon for a few weeks, and I’ll be back in Israel in Novem­ber. It will be inter­est­ing to see what will hap­pen over the next sev­eral months.

* The recent war between Rus­sia and Geor­gia may be an exception.

Adden­dum: In response to this essay, a friend in Boston e-mailed me to say that the city is becom­ing more vio­lent — peo­ple are now assulted in broad day­light in Down­town Cross­ing. This is very sad.

Prior let­ter: No Way Out (or, Stuck in the 1970s)