How some Israelis view the United States

[Here is some old material that remains pertinent. Three years ago my college alumni magazine produced a roundup of articles on how Americans are viewed in eight countries around the world. They asked me to write about Israel. -- J.M.H.]

“Don’t look at me like that,” a man’s voice rings out in American English. It resonates over the Hebrew buzz of a Tel Aviv shopping mall. “I’m not going to steal anything from you,” the American snaps at the manager of a newsstand that sells foreign magazines.

The newsstand manager replies in Israeli-accented English. “What’s the problem? Why must you talk this way? I didn’t say anything to you. We are brothers.” Brothers they may not be, but they are about the same age, in their late 20s or early 30s.

As people do in Israel, I butt in. I ask the American if he has been here long. He says he arrived only recently. He is on military duty. We talk for awhile. The American is black. I tell him he will find that people here don’t view skin color the way Americans do. He returns his attention to the magazine racks for a few minutes and then vanishes into the crowd.

“He thought you were staring at him,” I tell the shopkeeper, explaining that a white man staring at a black man in the United States might provoke some discomfort.

“In America, they’d think I’m white?” asks the magazine seller, whose olive skin marks him in Israel as of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern background — historically, a group that has suffered discrimination by fellow Jews of European origin. He tells me that he spent a couple of years in the States — in Seattle and California — and was not aware of racism. He was living there illegally and thought it best not to divulge his nationality. He told everyone he was Italian — which went over well with women, he adds. He loves America and would move there in a minute, he says, if he could get the immigration papers.

Elsewhere in Tel Aviv, friends and neighbors express various views of the United States and its people. Moshe, who owns a stationery store, says Americans are “freiers” — an evocative Israeli term of disapproval that is variously rendered as “suckers” or “pushovers” or “gullible victims.” Moshe explains: “They go to places where they don’t belong — Iraq, Afghanistan. They try to be the police force of the whole world. They should stay home and attend to their own problems.”

Hannah, a school administrator, finds fault with U.S. family life. Adult children move away and see their parents only once or twice a year, she says, and even college students leave home to study. Accustomed to a society where the generations are reunited every Sabbath, she sees the way Americans live as cold and fragmented.

Mazal, a beauty-shop operator and mother of a combat pilot, is impressed with the U.S. work ethic. Even the richest Americans insist that their children find jobs, she believes.

Some years ago an Israeli journalist wrote about U.S. supermarkets. What struck him was the impersonal way in which store clerks told him to have a nice day. Later, a book by a pair of cross-cultural consultants found that Israelis often see Americans as insincere, naive, superficial, too formal, lacking spontaneity, insistent on going by the book rather than improvising, and easily taken advantage of.

Mordechai, a jewelry designer who has visited 11 U.S. states, thinks differently. The first word that comes to mind when he is asked about Americans is “kind.” He adds that the Americans who visit his shop in Tel Aviv are not stingy the way French tourists are.

I tell Mordechai he is generalizing. “I know that,” he says, smiling.

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

(Cross-posted at ZioNation: Progressive Zionism and Israel Web Log)

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Arabic voices, and the faces of Ma'alot

It is memorial day, and we are waiting for the start of a ceremony for the war dead in Ma'alot, a small Israeli city near the Lebanon border. We already know more or less what the speakers will say. They talk every year about the heartrending loss of young soldiers' lives as the price of protecting the country.

While we wait, people sitting behind me are chatting in Arabic. Three of the four local people killed in the Second Lebanon War were young Arab civilians. They were Shanati Shanati, 18, Amir Naeem, 18, and Muhammed Fa'ur, 17. A direct hit by a Hezbollah katyusha rocket killed them Aug. 3, 2006. They had been riding together in a jeep and got out to take cover.

The fourth local victim was Sgt. Maj. Moti Abutbul, 28, a member of Flotilla 13, an elite unit that is sometimes likened to the U.S. Navy SEALS. A katyusha killed Abutbul and 11 other Israeli soldiers Aug. 7, 2006, near Kfar Giladi.

We saw the faces of the local dead last night. On every memorial eve Ma'alot shows the faces of its dozens of fallen soldiers and terror victims, displaying them one by one on a big outdoor projection screen. Brief narration accompanies each photograph, telling when and how the person died. As each face appears, a family representative mounts the stage and lights a memorial candle.

Arab family members showed up last night to light candles for the recent victims. They chose again today to take part in a program in memory of the Israel war dead. A Jewish high school put together the program today.

Whatever meaning you may read into this, it is something to set alongside current media reports which suggest that Arabs have nothing on their minds except the notion of the Nakba, the disaster which some say resulted from the birth of the state of Israel. In Ma'alot, life is much more complicated than that, and coexistence is a daily event.

---Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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That's better. A 60th birthday logo that doesn't tear Israel apart

Without fanfare, a cleaned-up version of Israel's official 60th anniversary logo has started turning up.

The revised logo appeared in a government advertisement in the Haaretz newspaper's May 2 Hebrew weekend magazine. What's new about it is that the country's name --- ישראל --- no longer is torn apart. It now appears as one unbroken word.

The original logo, which won a prize from a committee that picked it, ripped Israel into two unequal pieces, leaving "el" floating by itself, separated from the rest of the country's name. This typographic atrocity appeared in both the English and the Hebrew versions. There was no apparent reason for it, unless perhaps the committee that chose this logo thought it looked more original than competing designs which spelled the country's name the same old way that everyone else spells it.

The revised logo already decorates the website of the official 60th Anniversary Administration. The old design continues to appear in many other places. At this writing, these include the websites of the Prime Minister's office and a public relations firm which is promoting the birthday events.

Thousands of visitors to this blog have seen our September 2007 article finding fault with the old logo. We kvetched, "At first glance, the winning logo seems to express the confusion that afflicts Israel in many ways today. Even the country's name is typographically ripped apart."

It would be nice to think that our criticism helped bring about the change, but we could not have been alone in complaining. You don't have to be a design genius to see that the old logo didn't look good. The new logo is a big improvement.

-- Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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Myth, legend and fact in the 1947 Exodus episode

The word "mythological" is taking hold of the Hebrew media. Listen to a broadcast or read a newspaper and you will encounter this fad. People who should know better are lavishing the term "mythological" on various actual entities---an outstanding athlete, a sports team, a rock group, a local landmark, a record album that sold well.

It's not only newspeople who are representing our realities as myth. The distinguished author David Grossman referred in a British newspaper to David Ben-Gurion as "Israel's mythological first prime minister." A big-name business promoter recently described our military command center as "one of Israel's most mythological institutions."

This is misuse. "Legendary" is probably what they meant. Real-life subjects are not "mythological," a term that belongs to dragons, unicorns and the Tooth Fairy. Are we having a problem distinguishing between reality and fantasy?

Hold the question. Last week some 300 people including President Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Ehud Barak gathered in Tel Aviv's London Park for a tribute to the late Yossi Harel, who commanded the refugee ship "Exodus 1947." Harel died April 26 at age 90.

The ceremony took place at the monument to Aliyah Bet in the little seaside park. Speaker after speaker took the trouble to say thanks to the departed Harel. This was a pointed reminder that the State of Israel never got around to awarding the Israel Prize to Harel in recognition of his contributions to the country.

Last week a Hebrew newspaper columnist found irony in Harel's words of acceptance when the Italian government conferred on him its Exodus prize in 2007. This prize, awarded for promoting peace and humanitarianism, is named for a refugee ship that Harel commanded. The Israeli hero thanked his Italian hosts "for teaching your children our history."

A headline on an Israeli obituary referred to Harel as "the real Ari Ben Canaan." This was a reference to the fictional refugee ship commander and hero of Leon Uris's 1957 novel "Exodus." Harel was widely said to be the inspiration if not the model for the dashing Ari, portrayed by Paul Newman in Otto Preminger's 1960 movie adaptation.

It is not surprising that the word "mythological" appeared in what was written about Harel after his death. In real life, Harel commanded four Haganah vessels that transported 24,000 refugees from Europe in the clandestine maritime operations which Zionists called Aliyah Bet and which Britain called "illegal immigration." One of these vessels was the Exodus 1947, a dilapidated former excursion liner crewed by North American volunteers and captained by Isaac "Ike" Aronowitz, a 23-year-old Israeli who had served in the British merchant marines. Aronowitz, who regarded Harel as a political commissar and disputed some of his command decisions, has also been called the original Ari Ben Canaan.

Uris put a disclaimer on the first page of his book: "There may be persons alive who took part in events similar to those described in this book. It is possible, therefore, that some of them may be mistaken for characters in this book. Let me emphasize that all characters in Exodus are the complete creation of the author, and entirely fictional."

The story of the real-life Exodus is largely forgotten today. It includes fascinating behind-the-scenes elements which resulted in a public drama after a Royal Navy convoy captured the crowded Exodus at sea July 18, 1947. Built to carry only 400 passengers and a crew of 58, the ship had escaped from a French port on July 11 with more than 4,500 Jewish refugees aboard. In the July 18 battle, three Jews were killed and 28 others hospitalized. Harel, Captain Ike and other underground members evaded capture by a standard Haganah ruse. They went to hiding places aboard ship. After the Exodus docked at Haifa, a work detail of Jews came aboard at Haifa to clean the filthy vessel, and the fugitives walked off among them.

With the capture of the Exodus, the British government decided to "teach the Jews a lesson," as Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin put it. Until then, the British policy had been to intern captured Jews in camps on Cyprus. Under a new policy, the government ordered the Exodus passengers returned to their port of embarkation in France.

Except for some 60 infirm and elderly refugees who went ashore in France, the Jews staged a hunger strike off the French coast and refused to debark from the prison ships on which they were confined. After a standoff of more than three weeks, with political criticism and negative news coverage mounting, Britain sent the prison ships to Hamburg, Germany, and put the Jews ashore there by force on Sept. 8, 1947.

The bravery of the Exodus passengers and crew may well have hastened the end of British rule here, as a result of the international attention and anti-British feeling which this series of events generated.

A much different incident takes place in the fictional "Exodus." In the book, 300 Jewish orphans proclaim a hunger strike at Cyprus aboard an old salvage tug renamed the Exodus, and they win British agreement to sail for the promised land. Nothing like this ever happened.

A brief synopsis of the real Exodus story does appear in the novel "Exodus," in Chapter 27 of Book I. It is not an important element in the plot, and it does not convey the political impact of the actual Exodus voyage.

The impact of the fictional Exodus has been immeasurable in other ways. This has to do with the story's epic sweep, in which the Aliyah Bet sequences are only a small part. In their times, both the book and the movie offered compelling presentations of the story of Israel's founding.

Many things about Harel's life are not publicly known. After his major role in Aliyah Bet, he went on to other activities which included Israeli intelligence and private business. He was only 28 when he commanded the Exodus. As a teenaged Haganah member, he served under Orde Wingate, the legendary British Zionist exponent of Jewish self-defense.

Friends and admirers have been remembering Harel as a person of great leadership ability, bravery, personal charm, negotiating skills and modesty. The author Yoram Kaniuk reminisced about Harel's concern for Armenian victims of genocide. The radio personality Natan Zehavi wrote a column in Ma'ariv on May 2 recalling that Harel told him in 1988: "As someone who spent many years transporting refugees, I have special feelings on the subject. It doesn't matter to me if they are Jews, Vietnamese, Palestinians or Indians. It's necessary to help refugees and people who have been exiled from their country."

The Tel Aviv gathering in Harel's memory on April 28 ended with a musical conflation of myth wrapping itself around reality. The performer Haim Topol concluded the ceremony by singing an authentic song from Harel's youth. Then, as friends and family filed out of the Tel Aviv park for a busride up the coast to bury Harel at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, recorded music sounded on the speaker system. It was the theme song from the soundtrack of the movie "Exodus."

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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Racism and Israel

A Jewish woman in the United States has sent a question to the Zionism and Israel Information Center. She is planning a visit to Israel and asks: "How would I be treated if I decided to make Israel my home?" She describes herself as an African-American convert to Judaism, active in her local synagogue.

She expressed concern about discrimination and asked what the Israel government is doing to combat racism.

Here is a response.

Dear ____:

How would you be treated as an immigrant to Israel? No one can answer with certainty, but I'll tell you two things I have learned in 25 years of life here.

1) Israel is not the United States. The two societies are very different from each other. U.S. terms and concepts often do not apply to Israel. If you want to use them, you need to append lots of footnotes and clarifications to explain why they don't really mean the same thing.

Discrimination exists in Israel, but it is not what Barack Obama was talking about in his celebrated speech about race in the United States. He spoke of "the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through -- a part of our union that we have yet to perfect."

The concept that people belong to different races is foreign to Israel. The Israel government doesn't issue forms asking us to identify ourselves by race according to six official racial classifications, as is done in the states. Israel has no background of segregation based on race, nor of laws forbidding miscegenation, nor, above all, of chattel slavery.

2) Israel's population comprises scores of different ethnic and national groups jostling one another to attain their place in a society that still hasn't developed a unitary Israeli culture.

Prejudice and discrimination in Israel express themselves in Israeli terms. These reflect the society. The biases are mainly ethnic, cultural, religious, economic and political. Ethnic humor is acceptable, and ethnic slurs often go unpunished. To the extent that a person's skin color matters in Israel, its only significance is that it may point to their ethnic or cultural affiliation. It does not signify that anyone is racially inferior or superior.

My guess, from what you have related about yourself, is that people in Israel will not readily know how to apply the standard Israeli categories to you, and this could give you a good shot at defining yourself.

Israelis often don't know what to make of Americans. Popular stereotypes see Americans as naive, unduly square or easily manipulated. Quite a few Israelis can quote "ask not what your country can do for you" from John F. Kennedy's inaugural address but seem never to have heard the part where JFK said "civility is not a sign of weakness." Our media know about U.S. identity politics but insist on using the discarded term "Afro-American."

What is the government doing about racism? As noted, Israel has many internal problems but they don't involve race. The solutions to social welfare problems generally depend on which political parties are in power.

Unfortunately, anti-Israel racism is a problem, and the government does have to deal with it internationally.

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Sounds of music in a city more crowded than Gaza

Some people will tell you that Gaza is the most crowded place on earth. Actually, Tel Aviv (aerial view at right) is much more densely populated than Gaza.

The first modern Hebrew city, not quite 100 years old, has already managed to cram almost 400,000 residents into its 51.8 square kilometers. This makes Tel Aviv more densely populated than Hong Kong or Singapore, which in turn are much more crowded than Gaza. (A note on comparative crowding appears below, at the end of this post.)

The other night at the seder, we sang loudly and made other noise. Some 20 of us, representing three generations, sat around a ping-pong table covered with white tablecloths in a central Tel Aviv backyard and sang Passover songs. No neighbors complained about the noise. From time to time, we could hear singing from other buildings.

A guest at the table remarked that nowhere but Israel would you hear voices from house after house, all singing the same traditional songs. Whether or not this is the case, it is true that sounds from apartments can be heard around the neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, especially in the mild months when windows are open. In a one-block stroll, you may hear my neighbors playing piano, various woodwinds, drums or electric guitar.

A trumpet player in the neighborhood used to walk down to the Mediterranean at night to find an empty place on the beach where he could play without an audience. One afternoon he was playing at home, fooling around with some improvised passages, and another trumpet answered from elsewhere in the neighborhood. The windows were open, and a fellow trumpeter had overheard his experimentation. He never found out who the other, unseen musician was.

The beach no longer offers much solitude at night. Tourists and local people in growing numbers visit the beachfront after dark. A cafe on a northern stretch of beach now stays open around the clock.

Even the rooftops of Tel Aviv don't provide much privacy. One recent day, a musician stood alone on a roof in the next block, playing jazz on a saxophone. Attracted by the sound, I listened from the rooftop where I live, 75 meters away.

It was a special event. I have heard this saxophonist perform with groups in concert halls, festivals, night spots and other venues. In years of living in the neighborhood, I had never seen him up on the roof before. If he had gone up there in search of privacy, he picked the wrong place.

A telephone rang and I went inside to answer it. When I got back outside moments later, the music had stopped and the other roof was empty. I don't know if the saxophonist had noticed that he had an audience, or whether he simply had finished what he wanted to play. I wonder if others in our crowded city got to enjoy his rooftop solo, too.

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

===

A note on crowded places

The canard that Gaza is the most crowded place on earth continues to circulate.

The UK politician George Galloway wrote in The Glasgow Record last month that the Gaza Strip is "the most densely populated piece of earth on the planet." Galloway wrote that 1.5 million Palestinians live there.

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist currently teaching at Princeton, wrote March 26 that Gaza is "one of the most densely populated places on earth, with 3,823 people per square kilometre." Kuttab's figure is in line with recent Gaza population estimates of 1.4 million.

If Galloway's estimate of 1.5 million Gaza population is correct, this is almost 4,200 people per square kilometer. The Central Intelligence Agency projects that the Gaza population will reach 1,537,269 in July. This would bring the density to 4,270 people per square kilometer.

Both Singapore and Hong Kong have more than 6,000 people per square kilometer. Tel Aviv has more than 7,000 people per square kilometer. If you count the suburbs of Tel Aviv, the metropolitan area with its population of 2.3 million has a density of more than 5,000 people per square kilometer, which is considerably more crowded than the Gaza Strip as reckoned by Galloway or Kuttab or the CIA.

Selected estimates of population density:

Mumbai
27,209 people/sq km
http://www.mcgm.gov.in/

Kolkata
24,000 people/sq km
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolkata

Tel Aviv
7,445 people/sq km
(385,000 people, 51.8 sq km)

Hong Kong
6,352 people/sq km
http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/factsheets/docs/population.pdf

Singapore
6,252 people/sq km
http://www.singstat.gov.sg/stats/keyind.html

London
5,100 people/sq km

Tel Aviv metro area including suburbs
5,050 people/sq km
(2.3 million people, 453 sq km)

Moscow
4,900 people/sq km

Tokyo/Yokahama
4,750 people/sq km

Warsaw
4,300 people/sq km

Gaza Strip per CIA projection
4,270 people/sq km
(1,537,269 population July 2008, 360 sq km)

Gaza Strip per George Galloway
4,167 people/sq km
(1.5 million people, 360 sq km)

Gaza Strip per Daoud Kuttab
3,822 people/sq km

The numbers for London, Tel Aviv metro area, Moscow, Tokyo/Yokohama and Warsaw are from the City Mayors site.
http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-density-125.html

--J.M.H.

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The Proofreader's Guide to Israel

The sign in the photo, captured at the Central Bus Station in Afula some time ago, offers you a hamburger in two languages---in Hebrew, and in mangled English as a "humborger."

Israel is rich in misspelled foreign words. A bakery sign in Tel Aviv advertised a "corazon" (a heart in Spanish). This is a blue-and-white improvised spelling of "croissant." It roughly approximates how the French word sounds when pronounced with a Hebrew accent.

The country's nonchalance about misusing foreign languages goes beyond spelling. The other day I was talking with someone in a Tel Aviv cafe. A cheerful server heard us speaking English, so she offered to bring us an English menu. We told her the Hebrew menu was fine. We addressed her in Hebrew, which both of us spoke better than she could speak English. Nonetheless, she persisted in speaking English to us, and she replaced the Hebrew specials-of-the-day card with an English card.

If you are a tourist, this treatment might be both helpful and charming. If you are a long-term speaker of Hebrew, it is something else. A widely accepted explanation for this behavior is that Israelis like to practice their English. Darker factors may also be at work.

A neighbor in Tel Aviv used to shout to me in English on the sidewalk. At times when she did address me in Hebrew, she would speak loudly and slowly, mouthing each word separately as if to suggest that I would not otherwise understand. Her attempts at linguistic one-upmanship stopped only when she moved away.

Last year this former neighbor and her family showed up in the Sinai at the same beach where I was staying. For the rest of her stay, this woman spoke to me loudly in clumsy English, even when I replied to her in Hebrew and even when she could see I was reading a Hebrew novel. Her lack of English skills never seemed to deter her.

A local blogger has complained about this phenomenon in treatment of new immigrants: "Scenario #2: An oleh chadash is hanging out with a bunch of Israelis. He is speaking in his best Hebrew and keeping up with the crew. Yet, despite this, the Israelis insist on speaking in stupid, broken English."

Back to misspellings. Last weekend, a newspaper printed a story about a couple of misspellings of French that appeared in a leaflet which the city government distributed in tourist hotels. Our officials misspelled "ce soir" as "se soir," and "Jeudi" as "Jedi."

The weekly Tel Aviv Time quoted Deputy Mayor Per Visner, head of the local Greens party, as brushing off the official display of ignorance with a couple of jokes and a non-apologetic comment. According to the newspaper, he commented that the errors weren't intentional, that mistakes always happen, and that they didn't cause great embarrassment.

A separate statement from City Hall disavowed responsibility for the spelling gaffes. It stressed that an advertising agency prepared and distributed the leaflets, that the misspellings were the fault of a French-speaking volunteer, and that the bottom-line result was that most of the hotel guests complied with the leaflet's request that they turn off their lights for one hour in observance of Earth Hour on March 27.

Many Israelis would second City Hall's suggestion that results count and spelling doesn't. In this country, which has accomplished so much in only 60 years, it is a national article of faith that results speak louder than words.

--Joseph M. Hochstein, Tel Aviv

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