Considerations

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

Now Available: E-Book download: "Let­ters from Israel: An Amer­i­can journalist’s adven­tures in the Holy Land."

Related posts:

1. Letter from Israel: The Meaning of Israel
2. Letter from Israel: Stories from the Desert I
3. Letter from Israel: All About the Palestinians
4. Letter from Israel: Me and the Israeli Arab
5. Letter from Israel: Stories from the Desert II