Israel is not only a place, it’s also a state of mind, a bitter-sweet reality. It’s ebullience, verve and vitality. It’s the quiet measured pace of 19th century Mea Shearim, and the now, the in, the where-it’s-at dizzying and bedazzling Dizengoff Street.
It’s where a Cabinet Minister can stand on a street corner chewing the fat with a crony and where a disgruntled citizen can chew out a Cabinet minister. It’s where the speech of a Prime Minister is interrupted on TV and radio so that an international soccer match in which an Israeli team is involved can be telecast and broadcast.
It’s where young men and women soldiers stand at bus stops waiting to hitch rides. It’s where bus drivers are kings and riders are peasants in their eyes. It’s where motorists vie with each other to see who can drive faster than a Concorde plane. It’s where every red-blooded Israeli aspires to become a “pakid” (bureaucrat) and where every pakid reigns supreme in his or her own office or cubicle.
It’s Yad Vashem and King David’s Citadel. It’s where every street is named after known or obscure Zionists, Jewish writers, poets and philosophers — and American Presidents like “Avraham Lincoln.” It’s arms tattooed with concentration camp numbers, faces from almost every corner on the globe, and where the worst form of intermarriage is that between a Litvak and a Galitzianer.
Israel is also a place where primary school students dressed as American Indians put on a Purim play for recently arrived Ethiopian Jewish immigrants at the Kfar Saba absorption center. Why American Indians? A Jewish Agency official was quick to explain: “Why not? Who’s to say that Mordechai and Esther weren’t Indians?”
Israelis have always been known for ignoring lines and for breaking into them at will at bus stops, at supermarkets, at movies, wherever. It was a challenge. The usual response from those waiting was always a boisterous, “Rega, Rega,” (roughly translated as “wait a minute” or “hold it.”) No more. Lines are respected, and if someone should revert to the primeval, the offender will immediately say, “slicha” (excuse me.) Unbelievable, but true.
Taba is little more than a hotel and a strip of sandy beach. The Egyptians and Israelis are trying to settle a dispute over the ownership of this enclave near Eilat. But the Israeli and Egyptian soldiers who stand on either side of the border, which is demarcated by nothing more than two oil drums with a heavy metal rod across them, are more concerned with who is going to get the latest container of coffee for each other than who owns the land. Fraternization is the order of the day.
Some 40 members of the 80-member United Jewish Appeal Ambassadors’ Mission visited an Air Force base somewhere in the Negev. While there, they planted trees. With uncanny adroitness, every one of them picked up a shovel, dug up some earth and patted it down around the saplings.
Having finished their task, they boarded a waiting bus to take them to their next destination. As the bus, filled with contented UJA tree planters, left the base it passed by the area of the planting. Out in the field IDF soldiers were busy re-planting the saplings, “doing right what we screwed up,” some of the UJA members said wistfully.
Kibbutz Grofit, in the Negev near Eilat, across from Aqaba, has what might be a unique relationship with Jordan. Through a tacit agreement with the kibbutz and with the Israel government, Jordanian security authorities notify the kibbutz whenever they know or suspect that terrorists might be in the vicinity. The Jordanians are practical about this arrangement — they don’t want their only port city disrupted, and so they keep the kibbutz informed. “A cat couldn’t slip through the area without us being informed,” said one leading member of the kibbutz.
One of the hottest items in Israel is a T-shirt with the inscription: “America, feel safe. Israel is behind you.”
Owners and workers in the “shuk” (open air market) in the Old City are inveterate hawkers and talkers. They entice customers into their emporiums by assuring each and every passerby, “Come in, doesn’t cost anything to look.” Once in, the customer is asked his place of residence. In my case, the answer was New York. It seemed as if almost every merchant — if one took seriously every one of them — had either visited New York, intended to visit it or had friends or relatives who lived or had visited the city. Invariable, the areas were identified as “Central Park West,” “Forest Hills,” or “West End Avenue.” Real Arab enclaves.
Tourists love to take pictures. And what better place is there than at an absorption center for Ethiopian Jews. The ever-smiling youngsters are a joy to behold. And so, on this afternoon a group of American tourists were cocking shutters, flashing bulbs and having a time photographing the Ethiopian youngsters and each other photographing the youngsters. One of the Ethiopian children turned to his counselor and asked, in all innocence: “Are Americans born with cameras?”
Few Israeli civilians are seen in Nablus. The few that are cabbies. It seems that they come here to have work done on their cars because the mechanical work is better and cheaper than it is in Jerusalem. Although it might take a whole day for the job to be done, the cabbies don’t mind. While waiting for their cabs, they sit around at the local cafes and sip coffee at a leisurely peace.
On a recent Saturday night a group of young Orthodox Jews sat around a TV set in a hotel lobby. They were entranced by an episode of the popular “A-Team,” with Hebrew subtitles. They chortled and chuckled with delight whenever the A-Team good guys would clobber the baddies.
Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, addressing the Ambassadors’ Mission, stressed that the basic threat to Israel’s national existence comes from the Arab armed forces and that “the limited threat to Israel, not the major one,” is posed by terrorism.
“Whenever we deal with Israel’s security we have to bear in mind the existence of these two levels of threats. No terror organization can threaten the very existence of Israel, not the PLO, not the Shiites and who knows who in the future. But at the same time they carry out the daily threat to the normal way of life of the Israelis. When we talk about Lebanon, we talk only about terrorism. Lebanon never was and will not be in the foreseeable future an Arab country than can build an armed force that can be of any threat to Israel.”
Premier Shimon Peres, addressing the same mission, said: “I know that many of us were suspicious that deep in our hearts we want to expand, we want to gain land. Nothing is more wrong than that. We have withdrawn from Sinai though we could have remained there. We are withdrawing from Lebanon though we have the military strength to stay there. What we are doing represents a policy, a moral commitment, not a military must nor an expediency in political terms.”
Israel is land and it is people. Since 1948, Israel has absorbed more than 1.8 million Jews from 120 countries, speaking 70 languages. But above all else, Israel is a word — and that word is Shalom.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.