Love Davka

The less nice side of Israel

I'm still angry, and a little bit frustrated and a little bit sad.

I just passed a homeless guy on the street on my way home from work. He's a guy that I've seen quite often recently - in the morning when I go to work and in the evening when I come home, he's sitting somewhere on the same street - him with his one crutch and his way of getting people's attention and getting people to talk to him. I try to ignore him, mostly. He sometimes calls out to me to come over and talk to him, but I pretend like I can't hear his voice or that I'm so focused on whatever else I'm doing, my job, my life, providing for my own, that I don't have the capacity to pay attention to him. But I hear him, and he probably knows it.

Once I saw him singing a song of the type which here would be called "Eastern" - the nasal music of Arab singers - at a group of young women, in a kind of taunting, aggressive way, and they just laughed on him ("at" is not the right preposition here, and the Hebraicised English is the closest I can get to the meaning) and continued walking away. And I disliked him for singing at those women, and for being out on the street, and for whatever else he is or was. It's the kind of dislike which can only grow out of hatred for how it makes you feel that he's there, out on a freezing cold night, genuinely sleeping on that bench, it's not just some kind of trick, he's not just pretending to get money out of people and then at night he goes home to sleep somewhere warm, even on the coldest nights like tonight he's out there, and I'm in here surrounded by technology and safety and warmth and wealth, and he's out there surrounded by the night and the occasional passing car and the cold freezing fucking cold.

This is the less nice side. Of anywhere. But in Israel you prefer to think that there isn't this, that you don't have to think about this, that there aren't kids who catch a taxi "return" on their parents' fifty shekels to Lod to buy a gram of heroin from the "ATM"s, as they call them, the places where you can walk up to a hole in the wall and you never have to see the dealer who is profiting from turning your life into shit. You want to think that everything's perfect here and it's just not, this is not even getting started on Palestinians Shmalestinians, just look at what's in your own back yard, on your own street, no matter how many security walls you put up it will always be there in your face, just where you don't want it or need it.

A country just like any other. What an achievement.

posted by Daniel @ 2:24 PM