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September/October 2008-Opinion
Grilled Shrimp and Rock Stars on a Bed of Nails
Eric alterman
After visiting Israel four times between 1974 and 1988, I had not been back for two full decades. What I saw during my two-week visit in late June and early July was, in aspects large and small, a different country than the one I remembered.
Tel Aviv has become a cosmopolitan city that is more Israeli than Jewish. No longer the neurotic little village I remembered from a semester in university there, it is a Hebrew-speaking European style-city with a Mediterranean accent. Sure, it has the assorted black hat walking around, and maybe a few of the restaurants are kosher, but I could not get a reservation at Goocha—a fish place with magnificent goose liver-wrapped grilled shrimps—on a Friday night.
The days when Israel was a culturally isolated, near-garrison state are over. However disappointingly it may have ended, a fruit of the Oslo peace process has been an opening to the rest of the world. If the Arab boycott of companies that did business with Israel is not over, it no longer matters. Add to this the not incidental (and near simultaneous) boom in high-technology industries and suddenly, you’ve got a new kind of country here. From its initial founding, Israel is a country of many miracles, but this new modern country that has somehow arisen in the desert in just 60 years is surely another one.
Israel is also experiencing a remarkable cultural explosion in virtually every area of the arts—something also driven, in part, by its sudden thrust into the world and the multicultural base that has developed inside the country itself. One Sunday night, I attended a party at the home of David Broza, who is to Israel what Bruce Springsteen is to America, both a rock star and a cultural symbol of the nation. He travels the world singing in Hebrew, Spanish, English and a little Arabic, moving among these cultures with remarkable facility. Joined by dozens of musicians and artists at his house, Israelis of myriad cultural origins sang and played folk songs, reggae songs, and even a folkified rap originally by Dr. Dre. (I had to Google that one on my Blackberry to figure out what I was hearing.)
It was a cultural melting pot of the kind that most American cities can only aspire to emulate.
On the other hand, there is something a little unstable, a little spooky about all this happening, as it does, in the middle of the chaos and horror that remains at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is a hybrid society, with European bourgeois culture mixed up with the Levant and plunked down in the desert. Visit the main art museum in Tel Aviv and you’ll see the kinds of Old Master and Impressionist masterpieces you’d see in New York, London or Paris. But if you take a taxi across town to the Museum of the Land of Israel and look at any of the archeological pavilions, you see evidence of the thousands of years of history of a place that has almost nothing to do with this culture. And it is the culture—as well as the people—of this place that has been largely displaced by the new one.
Jerusalem may be the “soul” of the Jewish state—or perhaps its beating heart—but it is much, much weirder than the rest of the country. In fact, typical secular Israelis make up only a third of the city. Two of its three main constituent parts—Haredi Jews and Israeli Arabs (or Palestinian citizens of Israel, as they prefer to be called)—do not even recognize the legitimacy of the state. They are each equally alien to the secularized Western Jew and speak for moral and political systems that share virtually nothing in common with notions we hold to be commonplace. I met a Haredi Jew who was heading up an organization—with an office in the Jewish Quarter—with plans to build the “Third Temple.” He told me it was of no consequence whether the Islamic shrines on the Temple Mount were destroyed by Man or God. He had no problem with terrorism when it came to the Arabs, nor even with genocide. I told him he reminded me of the ideologues of Hamas. This did not surprise or bother him. He had God on his side. Yet the fact that most journalists cover the country from Jerusalem makes the whole country seem crazier—and more dangerous—than it really is.
Regarding the Palestinians, most Israelis appear to have grown both post-ideological and post-compassionate. You can find a rough consensus, encompassing 70 or so percent of the country, that would like to get out of most of the West Bank, for Israel’s sake rather than the Palestinians’, but feel they have no responsible partner to whom they can turn it over. Keeping it, however, contains within it the seeds to Israel’s destruction as either a democracy or a Jewish state, to say nothing of the toll—moral, psychological and physical—that endless occupation takes on the young Israeli men and women who must enforce it. And so no one has any answers to anything in the near term, save continued grinding occupation, death, fences, checkpoint humiliations and possible wars with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran as far as the eye can see.
At the same time, and I say this with some sadness, Israeli consciences appear to be done with worrying about the Palestinians per se, for the time being. They had their chances, goes the argument, in 1947, 1967 and now 2000. Sure, they were never offered all they wanted, but did Israel get all it wanted in 1947? And did Jews cheer the mass murder of teenagers in pizza parlors?
Well, goes the argument, they made their bed of nails...
Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and of journalism at City University of New York’s graduate school. His latest book is Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook to Post-Bush America.