Eucalypts, Water and Ethiopian Weddings

I’d asked my friend if there was a decent sized park in Tel Aviv a day or so before Shabbat. She didn’t know of one, and after we found ourselves there the next day, admitted in all the years she’d lived in Israel she’d never been to the National Park at Ramat Gan. Although really an urban park and not officially ‘national', it is the second largest in Israel, opened in 1953. 

Such is the way of most of us, often traveling the world but rarely seeing the best parts of our home locales! 

The most immediately striking thing to an Aussie like myself are the giant eucalypts which line the pathways and literally forest some areas of the park, but we’ll come back to these gentle giants again shortly.

It had rained the day before, a downpour that took the city by storm so to speak, and flooded Tel Aviv’s streets for an hour or so. The storm-water system was obviously not up to the task, as it was really only an intense shower and not the kind of blinding incessant rainfall that an Australian is used to in Byron Bay, or Sydney for that matter, let alone far north Queensland! The streets had become slick and dangerous and it seemed like half the cities washing powder was foaming in the boulevards. Many people seemed almost afraid of the rain, in the manner we might in Australia be afraid of say .... raining missiles.

It was the day after Netanyahu’s speech to the United Nations which followed the Palestinian claim submitted for statehood, and President Mahmoud Abbas’s speech. There was an uncomfortable feeling abroad somehow in Tel Aviv, some dire predictions abounding, and at dinner the night before we had talked about the future security of the country in the light of these developments, but frankly had decided NOT to pay for the optional ‘security fee’ on the restaurant tab! I had remarked earlier that unemployment would soar in Israel if there was peace, as so many are employed at security jobs in shops, restaurants, and just about everywhere else. 

One of our Israeli friends, who lives in Byron Bay, had been at her parents home during the speech. Obviously firmly left wing she commented how shocked she’d been that all her mother could say about Netanyahu as he held forth before the international conclave was – “isn’t he handsome?” 

In the park there were a dozen Ethiopian weddings in train, tiny little black bridesmaids in pristine white frilly frocks, rose-coloured bridal gowns against the steamy afternoon glow, slender handsome best men in powder blue suits, while fat-lensed cameras clicked away. Apparently the Ethiopian custom is to go about in luscious settings taking all the photos before the wedding! I wondered what would happen to all these gorgeously crafted shots should a bride or groom get cold feet at the end of such a picturesque day and flee the final festivities.

We walked with family into the park, past all this colourful buzz, to an enormous playground, the likes of which I have never seen. Undercover and covering a soccer field sized area, the climbing, swinging and rotating structures were sophisticated, elegant, and architecturally brilliant. Hundreds of children were all over them like ants on honey. It is one of many such places designed for underprivileged children, but here today Jewish and  some Muslim Israelis, and ring-ins like myself enjoyed the playful afternoon together. 

The grass is radiantly green for this time of year, and a large artificial lake features in the centre of the park. Water supply in Israel is a delicate political issue, and one that many see as just as important as who has what territory – more valuable than oil, and a longer term threat than the occasional deadly missile lobbed by mad fundamentalists. Water is life, and despite sophisticated systems of water management, Israel relies partially on surface water from the Jordan River and thus on political stability. Despite agreement in 1995 with Jordan, Israel is in dispute continually with Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians over this water, and the water that sleeps in the West Bank mountain aquifer.

Before 1964 Syria was secretly attempting to divert water from the headwaters of the Jordan River away from Israel's thirsty population, but was foiled by one Eli Cohen, known to many now as Israel's greatest spy. And to many, Israel’s capture in the ’67 war of the Golan Heights, from which Israeli villages in the Galilee had been shelled by the Syrian army for years, was largely due to Eli Cohen and to the eucalyptus trees planted there due to his novel espionage techniques. 

Cohen was a Syrian Jew born in Eqypt, who after moving to Israel at 33 had offered his services to Mossad, which initially turned him down, despite his experience already as a political operative. But a few years later they came back to him, and after intensive training and assuming a new identity as a Syrian, Kamal Amin Ta'abet, then spending time in expat Syrian society in Argentina to establish his cover, he found his way into the centre of power in Damascus and into the embrace and trust of high level government and military operatives. He attended and hosted lavish parties, even orgies, supplying dignitaries with beautiful women – a practice he was not averse to partaking in himself – but meanwhile began to transmit information to the Israelis. So trusted was he that he was given a tour of the Syrian Heights army fortifications. In early 1964 the Israeli Air-force destroyed the machinery being used in the water diversion operation based on Eli’s photographically precise intelligence. 

But what about the Eucalypts? Well while on a visit in the Golan Heights Eli Cohen had convinced the Syrians to plant them around their fortifications, to hide them from the Israelis and to provide much needed shade. In 1967 after defeating the Jordanian and Egyptian armies, Israel used the location of these eucalyptus groves that Cohen had told them about three years earlier to defeat the Syrians and take the Golan Heights.

Eli Cohen however did not live to see this decisive result of his spying. He was captured and executed in 1965 after getting just a little too cocky and underestimating the technology of the Soviets who were helping the Syrians discover why so many exact intelligence leaks were happening.

Because they grow so fast, Eucalyptus were originally brought to Israel at the end of the nineteen century to dry out the swamps, but none of those original settlers could have imagined their later use.

Meanwhile as the battle for holy earth and water continues, people get married, children play in the park, and the restaurants are full on Friday and Saturday nights in Tel Aviv. What will happen next to this place living in a constant state of uncertainty and readiness for disaster? And what will happen to the Palestinians, whose children also play, whose adults also marry, and who would also like the luxury of a restaurant meal every now and then in their own legitimate and safe State. A state of independence that all beings deserve.

From “State of Independence” by Jon and Vangelis, originally sung by Donna Summer

Home be the temple of your heart

Home be the body of your love

Just like Holy water to my lips

Yes I do know how I survive

Yes I do know why I'm alive

His truth will abound the land

This truth will abound the land

This State of independence shall be

This State of independence shall be

Playpen on Wheels

It’s still hot in Tel Aviv, but it’s a waning heat, as autumn comes, no longer the intensity of the shirav, the thick heat that I once felt in the gold souk in Dubai, which literally melted my intentions to do anything but hunt for air con and cocktails.

We’re driving north again to an area past Netanya, where, on holiday Friday, a series of art exhibitions are being held in suburban homes, a novel idea and one that feels very community driven. 

Our first stop is a backyard shaded by a very old pecan tree, a beautiful and wise old thing that stretches its lazy branches over a few tables, cushions and rugs and the trestles set up with jewelry, pottery and the like. Turkish coffee is available and I naturally partake accompanied by some delicious homemade poppy seed pastries.

Our friend and host’s parents are supporting her as she makes a few extra dollars from her excellent baked goods – tough times for a social worker. Her father is a professor of comparative Jewish literature, has written several books, and whose expertise is in Jewish medieval folklore. 

He tells me he is working on a book on 13^th century Jewish women in Germany. How at that time Jewish females were so subjugated that there are almost no texts written by women in that era, especially not in Hebrew, which of course was not a spoken language then. “The language a mother speaks to her child is the language of the culture,” he tells me. Indeed. He also tells me that Christian women at that time who felt repressed and needed to individuate would get themselves to the nunnery, or the monastery, and there were able to write. 

Thus arose the quite significant body of text and poetry written by Christian women in the Middle Ages. Some scholars have argued this was the first recognizable flowering of feminism in the world, allied to and in fact sprouted from faith. But here, with the aid of modern technology, the professor is searching out and piecing together the ancient conversations of these significant Jewish enclaves.

Folklore as well as religion is what grounded and threaded the Jewish faith together through the Diaspora, (as well as food!) and after Rabbinic Judaism created a religious mandate for literacy in the 8^th century or so, requiring all Jewish males to learn Hebrew and to read from the Torah, literacy and education became the template for the advancement and indeed survival of the Jews.  The Torah also forbade Jews from agricultural pursuits, a career still somewhat looked down upon. 

So the written word in the local language, then in Yiddish and later in revived Hebrew, gave the Jews, even when abused and segregated, an advantage in the many lands throughout which they were scattered – in business, law, accounting and record keeping. But at that time it was the boys who did that – the women, were in the kitchen, and always with a child at the breast, one in the oven, and several more by their side.

It’s Shabbat dinner now and we are in a very smart apartment north of Tel Aviv. I am talking to a great grandmother, ninth generation Jerusalemite, who herself however was born in Alexandria in Egypt after the Ottomans expelled her family and a majority of Jews from the Holy City before WW1, which the Turks subsequently lost to the Allies.

This remarkable woman speaks about nine languages including Arabic and Italian, and Yiddish, a language almost decimated by the Holocaust when about five million of its speakers perished. She speaks fluently in English to me, just shy of 90 years old, and with a still-sharp scholarly eye for life’s details, but when she talks disparagingly about her Sri Lankan maid, I hear a particular arrogance that is indeed racist and unkind. I like the woman so much I don’t want to hear this, but it is what she does, and it is revealing.

Education in Israel is exemplary, but as my girlfriend tells me the education bubble is bursting. There are people with Masters degrees working in Hungry Jacks, and people studying religiously for obscure doctorates that are unlikely to yield work. Israelis – Jews, like to work, they work hard and always have, but now times are tough, thus the protests recently, social workers baking cakes to afford a little extra lifestyle and scholars working in menial jobs to survive.

Next day in Dizengoff Street in central Tel Aviv, I see again as I have several times before, a wooden playpen on wheels being pushed down the sidewalk with five toddlers gurgling within! It’s a great sight, and something that apparently comes from Kibbutz life, where the vistas however would be more nurturing perhaps for the little ones than the heavy traffic and often gruff citizenry passing by in central Tel Aviv.

As in all places the business of education is paradoxical and fraught. How do you both maintain culture and tradition, language and the invisible glue of community, while seeing far enough ahead to give breadth and depth to a young person’s vision of the world? To disenable the narrowness that leads to cultural isolation, religious intolerance and fundamentalist practices. In Israel, as in Tehran and Texas, the battle for the minds and hearts of the young continues.

On Face Book a friend posts this, quoting Buckminster Fuller; "Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction." Indeed.

Netanyahu Serious

I’d only been back in Israel two days when, as the sun set on Shabbat on September 4^th I found myself in Tel Aviv with 300,000 protestors for social justice. Some way to get over jet lag – not!

We marched, or rather rambled, from Rothschild Boulevard where thousands of tents have filled the tree-shaded median strip for the last six weeks, down past Rabin’s memorial and on to meet the masses gathered in Hamedina Square, where speeches from student leaders and others are delivered – the cut-and-thrust periodically translated for me. The crowd is young but older than a month before when this same number had turned out and stunned commentators with its intention and passion. One friend Michal tells me people were weeping as they walked, overcome with the feeling that finally something was happening, and that friends and even brothers on the other side of politics were marching and saying “enough!”

Netanyahu’s government was caught on the back foot, scrambling to appear to be taking some action to unravel what people consider a rotten power structure operating between big business monopolies and government, undercutting quality of life for millions from the middle class down. Yet this equally large march was far less emotional, prompting another friend to say, “It’s so Israeli – the more extreme the emotion the faster they forget.” Was the energy for change flagging?

During these hot summer weeks the tent cities flourished with art and culture, Shabbat dinners on summer eves with wine and challah, peppered with fervent discussion. Not everyone has agreed, yet there has been no violence, and as one commentator put it, “the middle-class demonstrators {have really conducted} themselves like participants at an open-air Athenian forum”.

Tonight, while the red-decked communists are in force and the struggling Labor opposition, unions and students represented; this is a march of the people. There are countless special interest collectives, indicating how deep the dissent runs in Israeli society. At one point a large group of placard carrying psychiatrists march by! This week medical interns have quit their jobs. Once in the system, many professionals say, pay stagnates while prices continue their steep climb. Classrooms are overfull, and affordable housing rare as bacon on Dizengoff Street.

As one sign held up by a teenager wryly proclaimed  – “I am only thirteen, and I am worried!”

Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz recognized that after this summer of awakening "the last of the complacent decided that they, too, had to show up," Driven by students and fuelled by political and apolitical passions, Israel has risen up on the tail of the Arab Spring to its own promising (r)evolution. ‘Revolution’ is too strong a word for many, not wanting to attack the State itself. As one speaker put it “Israel is home, a home we are willing to die for – but will the government let us live?” As a social worker friend put it, “I just want to be able to pay my bills each month and have an occasional cappuccino in my local café. Is that too much to ask?”

Israel’s economy since the GFC has been, like Australia’s, the envy of many. With beyond 5% growth and about 5% unemployment the value-added and high-tech driven economy has sped forward. But the underlying structural issues have driven the middle classes, the ‘Young Turks’ of IT and others who have fuelled the economic success, to untenable financial situations.  Why?

Sixteen families and tycoons control half of Israel’s economy in elaborate pyramid structures that create one of the most concentrated oligarchies in the developed world. Price-fixing monopolies, shielded by high tariffs on imports, have meant, for example, that Israeli-made cottage cheese bought in San Francisco is cheaper than in Tel Aviv, by a ridiculous amount. It has meant too that when a lease expires tenants are faced with extraordinary hikes in rents, pricing them out of the market. Hence the tent city that has mushroomed these last weeks. And as one friend, until recently an IT expert with Hewlett Packard, told me, his superannuation funds were lent to and lost by a real estate company for investment in European property. The same wealthy Israeli owns both companies, using one as his personal bank for the other. My friend wonders where his money has really gone.

Since the protests began shares in some of these companies have fallen dramatically as investors wonder if the government will be compelled to take action against conglomerates. But the government is compromised by the lobbying power and in some cases direct political power of some. Michal tells me, “so many people finish working for the government on Monday and by Wednesday they are working for one of these companies that three days before they were supposedly policing.”

The claim is that the protest movement is grass roots driven, from middle class and student anger demanding social and economic reforms, lower prices from more market competition and government action to bolster affordable housing and education. But some people also say that there are other forces supporting and financing the protestors, less apolitical groups and individuals. Obviously the opportunity for a change at the ballot box is presenting itself here.

And then there are the rarely spoken issues that barely make it onto the protestors’ placards. One of those was delicately raised in an article on the weekend. By adulthood the next generation of ultra-orthodox children here will make up 30% of the population. They do not have to go into the army to defend the Holy Land as does every other boy and girl, nor do they have to work, but instead are supported by tax dollars. And then there are the settlements, 48% of which have been built with tax dollars over the last 10 years or so, compared to only 20% of affordable housing for everyone else. The impact of these economic burdens is being felt in the working and largely secular middle class. But orthodox religion here keeps Bibi’s government in power. Just like their ‘godparent’ the USA, Israel’s policies are disproportionally determined by big business monopolies and religious elements.

So, is the energy waning, and are the issues too complex? Do Israelis simply get passionate then lose interest? It remains to be seen. Certainly some protestors involved doubt that the naïveté that drove those first demonstrators, Daphne Leef and her fellow comrades, to the streets is enough to instigate real change in the face of an uncompromising government, a relatively successful economy that some think should not be tampered with, and perhaps a growing gap between the secular and the sectarian. One such activist, attorney Yaniv Moyal said, “Just because a child can yell that the emperor is naked doesn’t mean that same child has the ability to sew the emperor a new set of clothes.”

The government has established a committee led by respected economics professor Manuel Trajtenberg to study the protesters' demands. It is due to report later this month.

And, as an outsider, what I have also noticed is the lack of international reporting on these issues. As always the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and this week the serious hardening of Turkey’s relationship to Israel, and a severe turn in the ‘new’ Egypt against Israel, are obvious and important fodder for journalists, yet what is happening here may well signal a societal shift that will have profound ramifications on all the issues that riddle this region.

Israelis want change, and maybe that arrow will eventually hit a much wider target – peace in the Middle East.

……………………

Postscript:

Several days after writing this we were walking up Rothschild and watched as police slapped warrants on tent after tent along the street. It occurred to me that the government had decided it was time now to move on the activists after this second march because of some of these issues I have written about here. The somewhat ill defined or contested goals of the protests; the perception that the issues are so complex that disillusionment can come easily, and thus a waning of enthusiasm in a country where passions rise high and die away with the next tide.

Driving down the coast last night a song comes on the radio – the words are telling, “DJ is not a name but if you say it out loud in Tel Aviv half the people will turn around.” This city, this country likes to party. In Tel Aviv certainly it is the best way to forget that Israelis, Jews, are a people long lost who have found themselves in this place after centuries of wandering and abuse, but are still and again surrounded by vilification and danger. It is ironic then that the necessary internal changes here the protests have vigorously exposed, may be unattainable when the focus is first and foremost on survival of the whole.

The protestors have agreed to take down the tents, but meanwhile after weeks of peaceful protest, violence did erupt outside city hall on Wednesday night resulting in 40 arrests.

Last night on Shabbat, one week after the march, at dinner in a town an hour south of Tel Aviv, our host, a television cameraman said, “Well unfortunately maybe it takes some violence for change to really happen.”

“The situation is hopeless, we must take the next step!”  Pablo Casals


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