Talking : Loud :: Saying : Nothing

I’ve been reading the news about Israel for more than 15 years, and in that time I’ve counted exactly three different news stories about Israel. That’s right, there are only three different pieces of news about Israel and they’re just rewritten over and over again with different particulars and no one seems to notice. Here they are:

• The conflict. There’s a terrible conflict in the Middle East. Either we don’t know who started it, in which case we think they should all just stop fighting, or we think a particular side started it, in which case the whole world has to start supporting the other side, because they’re the good guys. This is about 99% of all the stories about Israel, in a nutshell. Congratulations, you can throw away your newspapers and not feel like you’re missing anything.
• Progressive garden of Eden. Can you imagine a country where socialists are in total control of everything, where communes are actually admired, where the light-skinned people actually send planes to rescue the black-skinned people from starvation in Africa, where there are more PhD’s per capita than anywhere else, where there are an insane number of high tech and biotech patents, where there were more trees at the end of the 20th century than at the beginning, where every home has a solar panel, that’s going to have a national system of electric cars very soon? That country is Israel, and it’s full of JEWS! This is about .95% of all the stories about Israel. If you’ve seen this, you are probably a Jew or an evangelical Christian and it probably arrived as an email forward.
• Party central. Can you imagine a city that’s kind of like Europe, with beautiful tree-lined avenues and a beach, and a port, and very inexpensive restaurants that are still pretty good, and that’s full of people in their 20s who are extremely physically attractive and who party all night long, every night of the week, and then wake up in the morning and found internet companies that get sold for a billion dollars? That city is Tel Aviv and it’s full of JEWS! This is the remaining .05% of stories about Israel.

Since I’ve already read all the news there is to read about Israel, and since I never read op/eds anyway, I have no problem admitting that I skipped David Brooks’ article about Israel in the Times. But then no fewer than three people alerted me to it, and I felt a strong desire to write about it here.

David Brooks’ article has also been written many times. It’s been in many of Etgar Keret’s stories. It’s been in many of my emails and blog posts and conversations. It’s been on the tongues and in the photographs and memories of many people who have come to Israel to visit for a week or two, for a summer, for a semester, for a year, and of the many people who’ve moved here from the relatively civilized western countries.

It’s about how weird and different Israel is from what we westerners know and expect. It’s about how Israelis are rude, but not rude in a way that indicates a lower class person (excuse me, individual from a challenged socio-economic bracket). It’s about the sabra mentality and how different it is from the normal mentality.

Sabra is a cactus fruit that’s hard on the outside and soft on the inside. The founders of this country saw that as a perfect metaphor for the type of person they wanted to create, the “new Jew” (or the “Israeli,” or the “Hebrew”). They have been unbelievably successful. I have argued many times, and will for a long time continue arguing, that the Israeli ethos is essentially Russian – but not Russian from the modern immigration from the former USSR. I mean that our ethos is fin de siecle Russian and revolutionary Russian. The kibbutzim, the early folk songs and dances, some of the foods, the bureaucracy, the manners and mannerisms, of Israel up to the 50s are all so Russian (and central European). Then Israel became a middle eastern country almost overnight when assimilating the huge populations of immigrants who were expelled from Muslim countries. In many ways they changed Israel for the better and in some ways for the worse, but they largely reinforced the way we treat each other and how we present ourselves to others and to the world at large: the sabra mentality.

I should add that the idea of the sabra was not the only one floating around in the 20s-40s about what Israelis should be like. Jabotinsky, whose ideas tended to be ridiculed or ignored by the shapers of public opinion, proposed that our youth should be trained to act in the spirit of hadar, which is nobility and dignity, and in the spirit of tagar (a word he coined), which means rising to confront a challenge (etgar). In brief, Jabotinsky’s idea was the exact opposite of the sabra: he wanted us to be soft on the outside, bending and accommodating, impeccable manners, clean appearance, quiet voice – and hard on the inside, totally dedicated to the struggle, fierce when necessary, never compromising the ideal.

A sabra is exactly the person who will rush to an argument over nothing for no reason. He does it because he is hard on the outside, because he feels that someone may have given him an unfriendly look, and he doesn’t allow anyone to give him an unfriendly look. Sabra women love to be mistreated by men and sabra men love to mistreat women. A sabra is also the person who will become emotionally attached to the notion of helping a random stranger, and won’t let go, because he’s soft on the inside. He’ll even get in a fight to protect the stranger that he’s decided to help.

This duality is insanely common in Israel, and Brooks’ telling of it almost captures what it feels like. But he’d get it better if he were an immigrant. Because then he’d be riding in a taxi one day, and the taxi driver would try to rip him off, either by refusing to turn the meter on or by taking a circuitous route. Or by pulling another asinine taxi driver trick, like refusing to go all the way to the destination, or trying to stop for additional passengers. And then Brooks would start to argue, because the most important double lesson to learn about living in Israel is that a) if you have a right to something, you have to take it, and b) if you want something, you have to ask for it. The taxi driver would pull out every play from the taxi driver handbook, blaming it on a miscommunication, threatening to go to the cops, pleading that he has a family to feed. And then suddenly he’d stop and turn around, and he and Brooks would be brothers. He’d talk to Brooks about how great it is that he moved to Israel, how he has an attractive daughter looking for a husband, how Brooks should come over for Shabbat dinner. That is what it’s like to interact with a sabra – hard on the outside and soft on the inside. You see, you have to attack every one of them with an ice pick before you can get an ounce of humanity. But then they come gushing with their nauseating excess friendliness when all you want is a taxi driver who’ll play by the rules and not screw you over.

Living in Israel is full of trade-offs. You will get cut off while driving and run right off the road. But a hundred people will stop to help you out if you’ve been in an accident, and most of them will invite you to Shabbat dinner. You will be treated like shit all the time, right up to the point when you get treated like a king. Then it’s back to being treated like shit.

This is a deeply, deeply familiar society. If you don’t want your neighbors, friends, random acquaintances, coworkers and everyone else to know exactly how much money you make and how much your apartment costs, you’re going to have a hard time adjusting. I know I did. I’ll never forget the day when someone asked me how much I paid in rent, and I said that it’s not considered tactful where I come from to discuss money, and he said … “What does ‘tact’ mean?” But on the other hand, I have no problem going up to attractive looking females in the supermarket and asking them to explain the difference between different dairy products, and then getting their numbers. This pickup shtick works because they don’t think it’s weird to be approached and asked to explain something like that. Try doing that in New York, and see if they don’t reply, “None of your fucking business!”

The familiarity of Israel, by the way, is another reason why we’re so quick to abuse each other and then so quick to hug and make up as if it never happened. It’s quite exactly the way people treat their family members abroad.

The worst aspect of the familiarity of Israeli society is that the expression “it’s who you know, not what you know,” is taken to an absurd extreme here. If you want to get a decent job – you’d better have some good friends of friends of friends to pass your CV along, because plenty of good jobs aren’t even advertised. If you want credit at the bank – you’d better have a good relationship with your personal banker, because if she doesn’t know you and know you’re good for it, you are shit out of luck. Every benefit in Israel goes to the people with connections, and in many cases these connections are passed down from generation to generation, or cultivated in the army. That’s why many western immigrants to Israel don’t succeed in their absorption – they’re trying too hard to treat normal things, like depositing a check, or applying for a job, like they would operate in the US.

Finally, one thing Brooks mentioned but ought to have explained further is his assertion that the status system here “consists of trying to prove you are savvier than everybody else, that above all you are nobody’s patsy.” By “patsy,” he obviously means the word “frayer” or “frier,” which is of Germanic origin but comes from the vernacular of the Russian underworld and means a “mark,” as in someone whose wallet is hanging out and is therefore a mark for thieves (the use of the English term “sucker” for “frayer” is explained very well in the translator’s note at the back of volume one of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago). Since about my third week in Israel, I have understood that the number one absolute most important goal of every Israeli at every moment is not to be made into a frayer. This is the savage and uncivilized attitude that I am speaking about when I complain that Israel is not a civilized country in the sense that the United States is. Not to be made into a frayer means that one must always be making someone else into a frayer, either by paying your employees less than they’ve earned, or by cutting off other drivers on the highway, or by “saving places” in line at the supermarket, or by parking your car on the sidewalk, not picking up after your dog, throwing your trash on the ground, closing off access to a public beach, and all of the thousands of things we do to each other, some of them petty and some of them felonious, but all of them ungodly, irritating, degrading and decivilizing.

David Brooks had his baptism by traffic accident – that is great! But I have been through many of the “sacraments” of living in Israel, in some cases many times each. I encourage him, and everyone else, to come here and experience them all, because if you can survive this and remain a patient and civil person, you will have a lot to brag about.

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Tags:   david brooks · economics · etiquette · frayer · israel · jabotinsky · media · new york times · russia · sabra · shabbat · tel aviv8 Comments