My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

  In a sense, it is just like Aharon Appelfeld’s story. The same state that denied the Diaspora and denied the Holocaust and denied Palestine also denied the Orient. Perhaps there was no other way. In order to survive, the establishment tried to forge one strong people and build a unified state. But the human price was heavy. The long-term consequences were severe. We have wounded millions of Oriental Jews.

  Yet there is another way to look at all this. There is a politically incorrect truth here that is not easy to express. And this truth is that Israel did a favor to those it extracted from the Orient. The Jews there had no real future in the new Baghdad, the new Beirut, the new Cairo, or the new Meknes. Had they stayed, they would have been annihilated. But forcing them to forgo their identity and culture was foolhardy, callous, and cruel. To this day, many Oriental Israelis are not aware of what Israel saved them from: a life of misery and backwardness in an Arab Middle East that turned ugly. To this day Israel is not aware of the pain it inflicted when it crushed the culture and identity of the Oriental Jews it absorbed. Neither Zionist Israel nor its Oriental population had fully recognized the traumas of the 1950s and 1960s. Neither has yet found a way to honor it and contain it—and make peace with it. This is why the wound lingers on.

  In a Tel Aviv café, I meet Gal Gabai. A friend and colleague, Gabai is a journalist and the anchor of a popular political talk show. I ask her what makes her identify with Aryeh Deri. “You are a secular feminist left-winger,” I say to her. “You are committed to democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law. Why are you mesmerized by this ultra-Orthodox politician who was convicted of taking bribes and whose world is so distant from yours?”

  Gabai, who is a decade younger than Deri, says that ever since she was a young girl in 1970s Beersheba, she remembers being torn between two polar forces. One was ruge raas: the edict to hold your head high. The other was khshumeh: shame, the need to hide from others, not to let them see you in your disgrace. For dozens of years khshumeh was stronger than ruge raas, shame stronger than pride. “There was a feeling that there was something wrong with us, with Oriental Jews,” Gabai says. “That there was something tainted and inferior. That’s why we bowed down to the Ashkenazim and abased ourselves before them. There was a subtle, complicated sort of self-loathing, a deep unease with one’s self. Until Deri came and proved that we could stand tall and proud—walk among the Ashkenazim as equals. Deri brought North African Jewish tradition to center stage. He said we were just as good, if not better. He awoke the ruge raas in us. He let us lift our heads high. He gave even Oriental yuppies like me the ability to be at peace with ourselves and feel worthy. Deri meant I could be accepted in Tel Aviv without turning my back on Beersheba. He meant we could succeed in the West without betraying the East.

  “I remember the overwhelming identification with Deri in my grandmother’s housing estate in Beersheba,” Gabai recalls. “Deri enabled the housing estate to go back to the traditions that Labor never recognized and the Likud never encouraged. Deri offered a traditional cultural option that was not shameful, backward, or fanatical. He put a stop to our mimicry of the Ashkenazim. He wiped away the shame. He won us over by not wearing a costume, by not disguising himself. Unlike the Oriental Israeli leaders who preceded him, Deri was authentic. He was at peace with himself and at peace with his Oriental identity. While others pretended to be Europeans, Deri said proudly he was a Moroccan. This was liberating. You cannot imagine, Ari, how liberating this was. At last one of us, a Moroccan from Meknes, was not afraid of who he was and was not afraid to say it. He was proud of himself, even full of himself.

  “I have a theory,” Gabai says. “In Israel, belonging is bought with blood. We Oriental Jews didn’t bleed enough into the river of belonging. We were not murdered in the Holocaust. We did not get killed in the War of Independence. We did not participate in the formative saga of Holocaust heroism revival. We were imported here and we were imported late. We were imported only because European Jewry was exterminated and there was no other way to grow the state. That’s why there is always a shadow hovering over us: this place was not really meant for us. This communal house doesn’t quite suit us. It was, and it remains, alien to us. We have no other home, but for us, Israel is not quite home. We are not at ease here as one should be in one’s home.

  “Let me put it this way,” Gabai continues. “In its terms of reference and in its mission statement, the State of Israel never planned for Aryeh Deri or Gal Gabai. That’s not who it had in mind. But at the end of the day, the European fort was housed by Arab-speaking Jews. By Aryeh Deri and Gal Gabai. But the fundamental structure of the fort and the ethos of its builders sentenced Aryeh Deri and Gal Gabai to remain outside in a sense. Western Zionism feared us. It feared the Arabism we brought with us: the Arab music, the smells and tastes of Arab cuisine, Arab mannerisms. Think about it, something amazing happened here. After the Holocaust, Zionism imported a million Jewish Arabs here so they’d save it, demographically, from the Arab world. But after it brought these Jewish Arabs, Zionism panicked because of their Arabic identity. It sensed danger in my grandfather’s Moroccan music, and in my grandmother’s Moroccan cooking, and in my father’s Moroccan tradition. It feared that we Oriental Jews would dissolve Western Zionism from within.

  “That’s why they steamrolled us,” Gabai says. “They had to dominate us. The problem was not one of socioeconomic injustice. It wasn’t about housing or welfare or income. The new immigrants from Poland and Romania had it hard, too. But the difference between them and us was that from the very beginning they belonged. They were the ones the State of Israel was meant for and planned for. From the outset we were under suspicion. So we were culturally castrated. We were expected to relinquish what we were previously. We had to prove daily that we were not Arabs. The outcome was an internal struggle that is tearing us apart to this day. We do not accept ourselves and we do not love ourselves. We are split between worlds that don’t really intersect. And we are always asked to present proof. We have to prove we are not inferior and not flawed. We have to prove we have totally assimilated. We must prove daily that we are not Arabs anymore.

  “You wouldn’t get it,” Gabai tells me. “You are from here. You belong. In Israel you are always at home. You own the place. But I was raised knowing that there was an inner circle that I was not a part of. There was an alpha group, and I was not in it. Because there was so much love at home, I was empowered. I had my own well of strength. So I insisted on breaking in. I wanted to be with the strong, with those who belonged. That was also the message I got from my family. Their first message was education: study, study, study. But it was clear that knowledge on its own would not suffice. To really get ahead one had to bleach oneself. Progeny bleaching was the best vehicle for social mobility. My beloved grandmother would say it to me in her native tongue: ‘For you, Gal, a Moroccan will not do, only a Polish boy.’ And this went right into my subconscious. No way would I have a Moroccan spouse—if I’d married a Moroccan he would have been an earnest social worker and I would have been a caring high school teacher, and in the evenings we would listen to nice ethnic music in our three-room apartment in a Beersheba housing estate. But because I was ambitious, I had to mate with white power. I had to dilute the black in me with white sperm.

  “Our home was filled with music. Even when times were hard, our rooms were filled with the warm sounds of Moroccan music. But my grandmother took me to a classical music concert and when we came out it was clear that I would play the mandolin—not the Moroccan oud, but the Russian mandolin; not Farid al-Atrash but Tchaikovsky. I love Tchaikovsky. I love the mandolin. But within me there is always a yearning for what was lost, a yearning for Arabism. When I visit Arab friends, my eyes tear up. When I watch Arab movies, I am all emotion. I know that there, in Morocco, my father was at ease. In Israel he was never at ease. And he passed his unease to me. Although I live in Tel Aviv and I host a television show, I am not at ease within my own skin. I don’t delude myself. For
me Arabism is closed off. But in a sense, Israeliness is closed off as well. Although my three kids are half-Ashkenazi, Ashkenazi Israel does not accept me as I am. Israel still suspects me.

  “That’s why Deri was so important,” Gabai says. “Before and after Deri, most Oriental Jews in Israel channeled their pain to nationalist politics and Likud support. This was artificial and wrong, as most Oriental Jews are not extremists. And when Deri came along it was different. He addressed the Oriental-Jewish inferiority complex and the Oriental-Jewish sense of longing. He made our pain legitimate. But what was really wonderful was his alliance with Rabin. When Yitzhak Rabin and Aryeh Deri formed their alliance in the early 1990s, it was much more than a political compact. Rabin represented the kibbutz, the Palmach, and Tel Aviv; he was the mythological Sabra and warrior of Zionism. Deri was Meknes–Bat Yam–Jerusalem. He was the hero of Oriental Israel. When Rabin and Deri stood together, we could all stand together. When Rabin and Deri looked each other in the eye, we could all look each other in the eye. There was mutual recognition. There was a way to combine political moderation with ethnic pride. Now the Oriental Jews could prove themselves not by hating the Arabs but by being a bridge to the Arabs. For the first time there was hope that Zionism would make peace both with the Arabs without and the Arabs within. But then Rabin was assassinated and Deri was convicted and everything fell apart. The moment of grace of the early 1990s passed. And the more Deri was persecuted, the more rage there was. People were angry at the white establishment that hounded him. But people were angry at Deri, too. Perhaps everybody in politics is corrupt, but he should not have been. He should have been cleaner than clean. Because he had a mission. He was endowed with a crucial historic role. He was our entry ticket. He was supposed to let us in, make us belong. But because he’d fallen, this couldn’t happen. Our hope seemed to have been an illusion. And we all knew we didn’t stand a chance. We could not be ourselves. All we could do was to adjust, to mimic, to give up and mimic. To go back to khshumeh.”

  Gabai stops. Tears fill her eyes. “When my friends read what I’ve said to you, they’ll be terribly angry,” she says. “They think the only way forward is to deny our past and deny our pain. They say we must not look back, not wallow in what happened. That’s why they pretend that the ethnic wound has formed a scab. They want to believe that socioeconomic mobility and intermarriages have diluted the problem and put out the fire. They think the Oriental-Ashkenazi divide is the one divide Israel is about to overcome. But I tell you that is not the case. I see my brothers and sisters suffocating. I see their torment. When two thugs at the Shaar Aliyah immigrant camp took my then nine-year-old mother by force and cut her glorious long hair and left her shaven and humiliated and helpless, they wounded her soul. They told her not to be herself. And when my Ashkenazi schoolteacher in Beersheba looked at me in that condescending way and told me with her eyes that my place was at the bottom of the social ladder, she wounded my soul. She told me I was flawed. One way or another, all Oriental Israelis were wounded. That’s why the Oriental soul is a wounded soul. It was wrenched out of tranquillity and thrust into turbulence. And from turbulence into shame. And from shame into self-denial. Into forced Westernization. But underneath Westernization lie bitterness and discontent. Our great enemies are bitterness and discontent. Deri was to have freed us from them. He was supposed to head the defiance that would lead to reconciliation. So when Deri fell, so did we. We found ourselves again in the darkness. And in the darkness we ache. We bleed. We cannot find comfort or remedy or home.”

  (photo credit 12.1)

  TWELVE

  Sex, Drugs, and the Israeli Condition, 2000

  NINI SAYS, “FINALLY YOU CAN REALLY LIVE IN ISRAEL.” HE TRULY FEELS it. As the millennium approaches, it is the first time that Nini can be cool here. It used to be that every time he came back from a trip to Amsterdam, he would ask himself why he came back. But this year he suddenly noticed that he is fine here in Tel Aviv. He can breathe. Tel Aviv is free and fun. It feels as if, all of a sudden, everybody has decided that enough is enough. Everyone is fed up with the bullshit, the politics, the terrorist attacks. The religious fanatics. The occupied territories. The military reserve duty. All the pressure that has always fucked up everybody’s head here.

  Itzik Nini is a dancer at Club Allenby 58. At thirty-one he is good-looking and buff. Clad in a torso-hugging black T-shirt, camouflage army fatigues, and tall black boots, he looks like a European clubber. Actually, he hails from small-town Binyamina, but he came to Tel Aviv at the age of thirteen. He saw everything, tried everything, experienced everything, including all of the clubs: the Coliseum, the Penguin, the Metro. He left and came back and left again. He pursued the life of an actor-model-performer, shuttling between Tel Aviv’s trendy Sheinkin quarter and Amsterdam’s nightlife. So he knows that there are some things you still can’t do here. Like S&M. There isn’t enough openness for that just yet. It is the Middle East. And anyway, S&M is more of a Western thing. But apart from that and a few other things that are really hard-core, he suddenly feels that everything has opened up here. Almost anything goes. Change is truly awesome. Even he is sometimes blown away.

  What caused the change? Nini says it is peace. Because of peace Israelis are more relaxed now, more self-assured. He can see it from his window on Yehuda Halevi Street in downtown Tel Aviv. Everything is calmer. People sit in cafés for hours. They’re in the groove. No more old ladies shouting, “Shame on you, what are you doing having a good time and going to clubs and getting laid when soldiers are getting killed?”

  There is another thing: MTV. Video clips really got into people’s heads here and turned them on. Now when you see kids of fifteen from some remote development town coming to the city with piercings and tattoos, you know it’s because even in their traditional hometowns they watch MTV. They see what’s happening in the world, and they want to be a part of it. They want to live. They so badly want to live.

  But the real cause of change, Nini says, is drugs. They’ve hit in a really big way over the last five or six years. And every year it gets more intense. Every time he comes back from Amsterdam he notices it. So now the feeling in Tel Aviv is that it’s okay. Everybody is doing drugs. The whole world is doing drugs. And they do fantastic things, these drugs. It’s time to say it. They make everyone happy. They liberate you. They open things up, especially Ecstasy. It’s the drug of the millennium, Ecstasy. It’s not a trip, it’s not LSD. It doesn’t remove you from reality but makes you feel better within reality. It started off as a drug for very angry people. It was a pill that softened them, made them gentler, more loving. And that’s what it did for Israelis. It made them less uptight, less tense. Look at the street, you can see it. Sometimes you get the feeling that they poured loads of Ecstasy into the National Water Carrier to make everyone happy and laid-back. Take the gays, Nini says. Only a few years ago being gay was really underground. When he walked down the street with his long hair in a ponytail, people would shout: You maniac, you fag. And the gay scene was hidden, in the dark, not more than one or two hundred people. But now there are thousands, tens of thousands. And they are not ashamed anymore. They’re not afraid. They don’t give a shit. “Did you see the Purim carnival in Rabin Square?” he asks. “Did you see the Love Parade? And the night Ehud Barak won the elections over Binyamin Netanyahu and Aryeh Deri—the gays were partying in the streets. And Shirazi’s events—hot as can be.” Everyone has come out of the closet. Millennial Israelis have pried apart the iron bars that imprisoned them.

  Nini says that even the tough Oriental guys don’t say a word now. And the straights now envy the gays. It’s difficult to tell who is what. “All the straights look like gays now, and the gays look like straights,” he says. “Everything is topsy-turvy. There is openness we never had here. It sounds strange, but love is in the air. Tel Aviv is now no less exciting than New York. Maybe it’s even more exciting. And there is no less of a happening here than in Amsterdam—maybe even more. All o
ver the world they get it. The word is out that Tel Aviv is hot. Very hot. And the scene here is really classy. It’s worthwhile coming here just for the scene. It’s getting to be a bit like Ibiza. Gays, straights, after-parties, pills. Open and sexy and totally free. Not at all like Israel once was.”

  Chupi says that when you think about it, it’s pretty amazing. Just five or six years ago, house music was completely marginal in Israel. In 1993 and even in 1994, when he showed up with his box of CDs and started playing these really long tracks, people thought it was spacey, music from another world, from the next millennium. They didn’t understand it and they didn’t know what to do with it, not even how to dance to it. They still wanted music to have words and meaning. To have a human voice. Even at the Allenby 58 club, they didn’t want it at first. It was too weird.

  “Who in Israel knew then what Chicago House was?” Chupi exclaims. “What Detroit Techno was, or New York Garage? Who knew the difference between highs and peaks? Who knew then that the most important thing is the DJ? People did not realize then that the DJ isn’t some technician who changes CDs, but the musician who creates the one-time music of that particular evening. They didn’t know that he is the one creating those combinations in the mixer, and that with perfect timing he hits those peaks that suddenly bring everyone together, that suddenly make a thousand people one. Because of the DJ, a thousand people raise their hands together and take off their shirts together and shout together in bliss. The DJ liberates them for a few hours from the conflict and the wars and the stress and all the shit of this country.”