i did have to bust out a significant amount of russian though. after my business in Israel was done i was bombarded with relatives, some of which i've seen, some of which i recognized from pictures, and some which i couldnt tell from my own ass. that expression doesnt make sense, but either does this: during my short stay in israel, i met no less than seventeen relatives, none of which could properly pronounce my name. bullshit you say. oh no! in less than 48 hours i hugged, kissed, and smoked with the following people: shlayme, masha, zlata, liron, maidan, benya, yakira, lyusa, misha, rita, dodik, masha, sopha, edit, orit, her 2 year old little sister, and azreal. these folks arent that distant either, most of them second or first cousins. so, for the older folks i really had to get my russian in order. though i made several mistakes (including mixing up the verbs "to write" and "to piss") i managed to get my point across without terrible difficulties, but the effort in speaking a different language for several hours at a time was both exhausting and frustrating.
luckily, i found that israelis are really not that different from us, except that they smoke cigarettes. a lot of cigarettes. at first i was intimidated but then i said fuck it and just went full on. smoking in people's houses, around babies, on the can. nobody gives a shit. they just passed a law over there that you're not allowed to smoke in bars any more and people just shake their head and say 'thees eeez boolsheeet law!". i mean for god's sake, do you remember that arcade games where you drop a grippy hook thing into a pool of furry things, hoping to take hope a cuddly little friend? umm yeah:
(that's not candy!)
but their lives are harder than ours and worrying about their health doesnt really figure in. of course the irony of all of this is that they have the 8th highest life expectance in the world (the US is 38th). this includes wars and bus bombings and suicide killers and all the shit americans are so scared of. and of course CIGARETTES ... OMG CIGARETTES. they think that we are crazy for worrying so much about everything and considering their proximity to enemy lines, you can see how we look ridiculous for worrying about transfats.
such proximity to your mortal enemies promotes a currency of violence which is ubiquitous -- even more than money. got a big house overlooking the ocean ? awesome. hijacked a syrian tank with nothing more than the uzi in your trunk and your work clothes? 1000 times awesomer. guns are everywhere in israel -- and the government wants it that way. specifically, they think that having 10-15% of your population armed at all times will create a mobile and instantaneous fighting force, if such a thing is required. everyone has a gun and active soldiers (you are active in the army till your 50s potentially) usually have an uzi in their trunk. again, the effects of this are almost counter-intuitive. for example, armed robbery on the streets is almost non-existant. imagine someone crazy enough to try to rob someone when there is a 10% chance that they have a gun and 90% chance that they know how to engage in some sort of hand to hand combat. i went to the train station to pull some money out of the atm and after several security checks (you cant get into a mall, train station or any hotel without getting your shit searched) i watched two 25 year old dudes walk on the train with automatic weapons strapped around their shoulder. none of this bothered me at the time, which i thought was odd. when i returned home and tried to superimpose this scenario on my current world, i realized the incongruence of it all. can you imagine walking to the 16th & Mission BART station and seeing everyone packing heat? fucking scary! not in israel, where scary takes on a different role. and gratefulness -- gratefulness means waking up alive. all of this is intense, and only heightened by israeli's desperate fanaticism for coffee and everything caffeinated. so you can imagine the scene. cigarette in one hand, coffee in the other, handgun holstered your side pocket. these people are INTENSE and thats the way they like it. plus all the girls look like a sexier version of amy winehouse (sans track marks).
the strangest thing is that these oddities make israelis the best americans ever. they embrace a gun culture in a way the framers of our consitution could only dream of, and while their freedom of press isnt necessarily up to par, their democracy is alive and kicking, unless you happen to live in the west bank or gaza , in which case all bets are off (as are the safeties on the guns). israelis love americans because without the states, israel would be naked. "danny," they would tell me, "we want to be the 52nd state!" of course this kills me on many levels, but the fact remains -- they are tied to us and their dependency is not shrouded in any shame or naivite. along these same lines, these people love gw bush. I mean, they LOVE him, because in their eyes, he hates arabs more than they do. call this a pr fumble for georgie if you like, but there is no denying that getting attacked by jihadists and starting an ancillary war in iraq with little reason certainly makes their case for them. "daniel, clinton was our friend. he came when rabin died and cried for us. but bush, bush is our gun. and his hand is on our shoulder all the time."
they are dialed into everything american. when i came home tired, i turned on the tv and flipped between 'goodfellas' and 'the untouchables', another nod to the hyperreality of guns and glamour. at the bar, i stumbled into a chicago bears football game (it doesnt matter which continent i'm on, the bears are still shitty) and had a two hour discussion with the bartender about the 85 lakers, 30 minutes of which were spent trying to remember AC Green's number. israelis love hoop! and politcally they are all way dialed into our process. everyone in Israel was curious about our upcoming 2008 elections and who i thought was going to win. i dont really have a clue and i told them that, but i also imparted that these things are all rigged in some way -- that business and money have hijacked a system which was already pretty strange (where do i send my tuition check to the electoral college... anyone?). i explained to them how you have to be born rich and poor people dont ascend to the presidency, and if they do, they are relentlessly hounded by a paranoid wealthy class, who will stop at nothing to prove that the sitting president engaged in oral-anal contact while on the phone with dick army. as i said before, the currency of power in israel is the gun and while you can be poor growing up, you better have been a war hero, or else you no chance to affect politics in any significant manner. the greatest peace brokers in israel were the greatest warmongers, possilby even war criminals, because that blood stained cache provided them a bulletproof perch from which they could influence real change. menachem begin ran a terrorist organization, irgun, to kick the british out pre 1948 , and this level of heroism and sacrifice provided him the moral footing to trade the sinai peninsula back for peace with egypt. yitzhak rabin was instrumental in routing 5 countries in 1967, eventually capturing jerusalem, which he then tried to partially return. maybe if clinton hadnt draft dodged things would be different, but i doubt people would ever have gotten over how 'black' he was. he loved to smoke weed and play saxophone and rich people hate that shit. in israel, he could be banging the pope, but if he comandeered a soviet built heliopter gunship in 1973, such indescretions are happily overlooked.
the strangest thing for me was how homey this place felt, in stark contrast to the time i spent in lithuania, my true birthplace. in my heart i realize that lithuania was a place i happened to be born, and in many way, the US is the place i happened to end up, through no acts of my own. diasporic dice were rolled, and bam! i'm spending the majority of my first 22 years in the state of illinois. israel is still some strange ethereal anchor that i can always turn to. and however flawed the idea of such an anchor may be, the fact remains that i have more family in israel than i do here, and the food is better too. dont look for me to leave or anything, but let's just say that while i was there, the pang was strong, even despite my understanding that moving somewhere to jumpstart yourself is a dangerous escape tactic. theres something magical about a place where jews clean toilets and when theyre done with that, they smoke like crazy and live till their 85.
so a move (at least a short term one) is never out of the question. if it does happen though, you can be sure i wont be packing heat, since my poor mechanical skills make me liable to inadvertantly shoot myself at any time. in the meantime, i'll just think back to overcaffeinated family and friends, packing late night plates with olive oil soaked hummus, stopping only to laugh and light up another cigarette while they celebrate another day.
