My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel

by Ari Shavit

The young Labor Brigade comrades settling in the Valley of Harod do not ask themselves how the eighty thousand Jews living in Palestine in 1921 will deal with more than six hundred thousand Arabs. They do not ask themselves how a tiny avant-garde of Palestine socialists will lead the fifteen million of the Jewish Diaspora on an audacious historical adventure. Like Herbert Bentwich, the seventy-four Ein Harod pioneers are blessed and cursed with convenient blindness. They see the Arabs but they don’t. They see the marshes but they ignore them. They know that historic circumstances are unfavorable but they believe they will overcome them. Their ethos is one of steely defiance. Against all odds they set up camp in the valley and create Ein Harod.

They are rebels, of course. But their revolution is at least sixfold. The seventy-four twenty-year-olds launching Ein Harod rebel against the daunting Jewish past of persecution and wandering. They rebel against the moldering Jewish past of a people living an unproductive life, at the mercy of others. They rebel against Christian Europe. They rebel against the capitalist world order. They rebel against Palestine’s marshes and boulders. They rebel against Palestine’s indigenous population. The Labor Brigade pioneers rebel against all forces that are jeopardizing Jewish existence in the twentieth century as they pitch their tents by the spring of Harod.

What’s extraordinary about Ein Harod is that it transforms its comrades’ loneliness and despair into a unique generator of remarkable energy. As there is no father, there is no boundary and no restraint. As there is no mother, there is no ease and no comfort. As there is no God, there is no mercy. No second chance. No hope of a miracle.

This is why the children are sent to whatever private lessons they choose. Because the children’s education is the first priority: only what a person knows cannot be taken away from him.

Another founder of Ofra, Yehuda Etzion, greets me with suspicion. What exactly do I want? What am I looking for in Ofra? The tall, bearded settler finds it inconceivable that a left-wing journalist like me can be balanced and fair.

The only way to believe in the future of Ofra is to believe in cataclysm or divine intervention, or both. Etzion is honest enough to say it, but every intelligent person in Ofra must know it: they harbor in their heart a great belief in a great war, which will be their only salvation.

There will be war, no doubt about it. Because of 1948 and 1967, and because of Ofra, there will be war. But war will not save Ofra or Israel. The reality created by Wallerstein and Etzion and their friends has entangled Israel in a predicament that cannot be untangled.

The settlements have placed Israel’s neck in a noose. They created an untenable demographic, political, moral, and judicial reality. But now Ofra’s illegitimacy taints Israel itself. Like a cancer, it spreads from one organ to another, endangering the entire body. Ofra’s colonialism makes the world perceive Israel as a colonialist entity. But because in the twenty-first century there is no room for a colonialist entity, the West is gradually turning its back on Israel. That’s why enlightened Jews in America and Europe are ashamed of Israel.

That’s why Israel is at odds with itself. Although the founders of Ofra wished to strengthen Israel, in practice they weakened it. So when the great war does break out, it will meet an isolated, ostracized, and divided ...

Yehuda Etzion carries on. He tells me about the project he has taken up since his release from prison, a plan for a New Jerusalem: a Jerusalem without mosques and without Arabs, a Jerusalem of the Third Temple. Pinchas Wallerstein carries on, too. “We were not mistaken,” he says. “We built a splendid project. We did what our forefathers did in Hanita and Ein Harod. We followed Labor’s ethos and used Labor’s methods. In the last quarter of the twentieth century we did in Samaria what Labor did in the Valley of Harod in the first quarter of the twentieth century.”

“But this is exactly what the argument is about,” I interrupt. “The question is whether Ofra is a benign continuation of Zionism or a malignant mutation of Zionism.” The answer, of course, is that it is both. On the one hand, the spirit and the modus operandi are remarkably similar. No fair-minded observer will deny the assertion that in a sense Ofra is Ein Harod’s grandchild. But on the other hand, the historic and conceptual context is completely different. In this sense, Ofra is not a continuation but an aberration, a grotesque reincarnation of Ein Harod.

Wallerstein doesn’t get it, so I try to explain. I tell him that from the beginning, Zionism skated on thin ice. On the one hand it was a national liberation movement, but on the other it was a colonialist enterprise. It intended to save the lives of one people by the dispossession of another. In its first fifty years, Zionism was aware of this complexity and acted accordingly. It was very careful not to be associated with colonialism and tried not to cause unnecessary hardship. It made sure it was a democratic, progressive, and enlightened movement, collaborating with the world’s forces of progress. With great sophistication Zionism handled the contradiction at its core. It managed to arrive at the great war of 1948 just and strong and came out of the war with a Jewish democratic nation-state that had clear borders and a massive Jewish majority. It had turned the conflict between an emigrant ...

“But after 1967, and after 1973, all that changed,” I tell Wallerstein. “The self-discipline and historical insight that characterized the nation’s first years began to fade. You settlers took advantage of the feebleness and of the political vacuum created by the wars. You abused Labor’s weakness and Likud’s recklessness. But although you think you outsmarted everybody, you were wrong. You were wrong to think you could have done with Ofra in 1975 what was done in Ein Harod in 1921. You were wrong to think that a sovereign state could do in occupied territories what a revolutionary movement can do in an undefined land. You didn’t ...

You have turned a conflict between nation states into a conflict between a settlers’ community and an indigenous community. By doing that, you endangered everything. Your energy was remarkable, but on everything that matters you were utterly wrong. Out of an understandable yearning for the Zionist past and for Zionist glory, you contradicted Zionist logic and undermined Zionist interests...

I realize that what makes this camp tick is the division of labor. The division makes it possible for evil to take place apparently without evil people. This is how it works: The people who vote for Israel’s right-wing parties are not evil; they do not round up youngsters in the middle of the night. And the ministers who represent the right-wing voters in government are not evil; they don’t hit boys in the stomach with their own fists. And the army’s chief of staff is not evil; he carries out what a legitimate, elected government obliges him to carry out. And the commander of the internment facility is not evil—he is doing the best he can under impossible circumstances. And the interrogators—well, after all, they are doing their job. And it is, they are told, impossible to govern the occupied territories unless they do all this. As for the jailers, most of them are not evil, either. They only want to leave all this behind and get back home. Yet in some mysterious way, all these nonevil people manage together to produce a result that is evil indeed. And evil is always greater than the sum of its parts, greater than all who contribute to it and carry it out. Despite our unkempt exteriors, our clumsiness, our pathetic petit-bourgeois ways, we are evil in Gaza. But this evil of ours is a cunning evil. For it is an evil that happens, as it were, of its own accord, an evil for which the responsibility is no one’s. Evil without evildoers.

I am haunted by the notion that we hold them by the balls and they hold us by the throat. We squeeze and they squeeze back. We are trapped by them and they are trapped by us. And every few years the conflict takes on a new form, ever more gruesome. Every few years, the mode of violence changes. The tragedy ends one chapter and begins another, but the tragedy never ends.

When I was a university student I was an enthusiastic activist in the peace movement. I wrote and distributed peace pamphlets, and I believed with all my heart in the promise of peace. But only when I turned thirty and began listening seriously to what Palestinians were actually saying did I realize that the promise of peace was unfounded. It played a vital moral role in our lives, but it had no empirical basis. The promise of peace was benign, but it was bogged down by a systematic denial of the brutal reality we live in.

I worked out a theory. The theory assumed we lived in a tragedy: an almost eternal struggle between two peoples sharing a homeland and fighting over it. For seventy years we Jews had the stamina needed to withstand this tragedy. We were vital enough to be jolly and optimistic while enduring an ongoing conflict. But as fatigue wore us down, we began to deny the tragedy. We wanted to believe there was no tragic decree at the heart of our existence. So we had to pretend that it was not by tragic circumstances that our fate was decided, but by our own deeds. The territories we conquered in 1967 gave us an excellent pretext for this much-needed pretense, as it allowed us to concentrate on an internal conflict of our own making. The Right said, “If we only annex the West Bank, we’ll be safe and sound.” The Left said, “If we only hand over the West Bank, we’ll have peace.” The Right said, “Our dead died because of the Left’s illusions,” while the Left said, “Our dead died because of the Right’s fantasies.” Rather than face a tragic reality imposed on us from without, we chose to create a simplistic narrative of Right against Left. It’s not the Arabs’ fault, it’s the Jews’. It’s not the Middle East, it’s the Israeli government. It’s not the fundamental Israeli condition but some specific mistake made by some specific Israeli politician. In an ingenious way, we turned the tragedy in which we live into a morality play. We created a virtual reality that enables us to blame ourselves ...

“I made one big mistake. I underestimated the importance of fear. The Right’s strongest argument is fear. They don’t say it out loud because they are ashamed to, but their most compelling argument is that we are afraid. It’s a legitimate argument. I, too, am afraid of the Arabs. So if I were to start the peace movement all over again, that’s the one change I would make. I would address our fear of the Arabs. I would have a genuine dialogue about the Israeli fear of extinction.

Let us today take stock of ourselves. We are a generation of settlement, and without the steel helmet and the gun’s muzzle we will not be able to plant a tree and build a house. Let us not fear to look squarely at the hatred that consumes and fills the lives of hundreds of Arabs who live around us. Let us not drop our gaze, lest our arms weaken. That is the fate of our generation. This is our choice—to be ready and armed, tough and hard—or else the sword shall fall from our hands and our lives will be cut short.

“What happened is quite clear,” Deri elaborates. “Oriental-Jewish culture was founded on three pillars: the community, the synagogue, and the father. The father was very strong—too strong. He was the family’s provider and king. He told his wife what to do. He told his children what to study and how to behave. Even when modernization came, with its French and English influences, the father and the rabbi remained dominant. Religion, tradition, and patriarchy preserved the Oriental-Jewish community for a thousand years. We did not go through European-style secularization. We didn’t have Western enlightenment and a revolt against religion. We lived a life that combined religion, tradition, and rudimentary modernity. We looked up to the rabbi and feared the father, and thus we survived as a community.

“On arrival in Israel,” Deri says, “the communities were dispersed. There was an intentional policy of dispersion. The rabbi lost his authority, the community disintegrated, and the synagogue was very much weakened. But worst of all is what happened to the father. The father figure was broken. Here he could not provide for his family as he had in Morocco or Iraq. Here he didn’t have the authority he had in Tunisia or Libya. He lost his bearings. He was depressed. He ceased to be relevant.

“When we arrived in Israel, there was no community, no synagogue, and no rabbi. My father was mortified. He understood that what had happened to our neighbors was about to happen to us. The family sank into miserable poverty. We children began to misbehave and use foul language. A cousin of ours was killed in a shoot-out between rival street gangs. What saved us was our mother. After the initial shock, she realized she couldn’t rely on our father, so she gathered enough strength to act on her own. Because she is a wise, strong woman, she locked us at home so we wouldn’t stray. But when she realized this wasn’t enough, she consented to the two rabbis who knocked on her door and sent us to boarding school. Personally, emotionally, this was horrific for her. But because she loved us so much she did not l...

“What you are saying,” I challenge Deri, “is that it’s all accidental. Your parents were more secular than religious, more modern than traditional. They loved Humphrey Bogart, they danced the pasodoble. So had it not been for the young rabbis who knocked on your door, you might not have been religious at all. If a fine secular institution ...

Deri nods but is careful not to confirm my hypothesis in his own words. He just smiles his mischievous smile and carries on. “Listen,” he says, “I have no issue with Labor, or with the Ashkenazis. At home, no one ever said the Ashkenazis screwed us. The feeling was that we endured a catastrophe. I understood what happened back in the 1950s. After all, Israel was a poor, young state surrounded by enemies. It was fragile, recovering from war, with a population of six hundred fifty thousand people in all. And suddenly this tiny Ashkenazi nation is flooded with the entire Sephardic Diaspora of the Middle East—communities arriving one by one from Yemen, Iraq, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Lebanon, and Egypt. “So the state builds housing estates for the new immigrants. It sets up factories for them. Within a few years it dismantles the dreadful immigrant camps and gives the newcomers a roof and a workplace. That’s quite an accomplishment. But what the Ashkenazi-dominated state does not understand is that it is taking away from the Oriental immigrants their community and honor and tradition. It takes apart the social and normative structures that have kept them together in the Dias...

“Those who were saved,” Deri says, “are those who had strong mothers. This is a mother’s generation. The mothers are the true heroines of Israel’s Oriental story. But as in my case, the mother could not cope alone. She needed a boarding school. Those who went to a religious boarding school, as I did, became Torah scholars. Those who went to secular boarding schools became engineers or insurance agents. Only the combination of a strong mother and a decent boarding school could save you from ...

“I told you I don’t hold a grudge against Labor,” Deri says. “That’s true and not true. There is one thing that does make me angry: the spiritual aspect of absorption. When it built the immigrant camps and the housing estates and the remote factories, Labor had no malice in its heart. But in spiritual matters it certainly did. The veteran Ashkenazim of Labor thought that most of the people who emigrated from the Arab world were primitive and therefore had to be put through a process of secular European indoctrination. The melting pot was a Western melting pot that was supposed to totally transform us. Those Labor Ashkenazim didn’t honor our civilization. They didn’t see the beauty of our tradition. That’s why they severed us from our roots and our heritage. That was a terrible, vicious mistake. What these people did was to destroy, not build. They took the soul we had and did not...

“They perceived me as a threat,” Deri tells me. “Here stood a person who was as good as they were. Not afraid, not ashamed. An organizer, a planner, a leader. And that person operated in the most modern and effective way. But he represented Judaism and he spoke for Oriental Jews. And he took the ultra-Orthodox out of the ghetto they lived in, and he rescued the Oriental Jews from under the oppression they lived in. And throughout the country he created change—he built alternative schools and community centers and gave people other options. He threatened Ashkenazi Israel’s cultural hegemony and chipped away at its identity as a Western nation. And he was growing stronger by the day, leading the most important revolution in Israel’s short history.

“This is why they had to take me out of the game,” Deri says. “To remove me from government and cut me off from state resources. To assault my character so that even my constituency would denounce me. That’s why they investigated me like they had never investigated anyone else—with a fine-tooth comb. And judged me like they had never judged anyone else—against all evidence. They lynched me and created the impression that I was an evil octopus. And in a sense they succeeded: they expelled me from politics and jailed me and turned me into a demon. “But in another sense they failed: their attacks on me convinced the masses to follow me. A million Israelis felt that when they tried to take me out, they tried to take them out, too. When they locked me up, they kept them out, too. After they had finally raised their heads, they were pushed back half a century. The DDT, the immigration camps, the condescension. That’s why in 1999 we got seventeen seats in the Knesset. If elections had been held a month later, we would have gotten twenty-five or even twenty-eight seats. We would have replaced Likud as the leading right-of-center political force. And the plan was that when I got out of prison we would do just that. We’d pick up where we left off and gain thirty seats in the Knesset. But while I was in jail, I decided not to reopen the wounds, not to reignite the fire. It’s not that the wounds are not there. And the fire, too, lingers. You wouldn’t believe how much pain is still out...

Deri and I are almost the same age. Our collective generational experiences are similar, and our perception of reality and our political opinions are not far apart. We have common beliefs and a common language. Deri is wired in a very direct Israeli way. He is quick and sensitive and his high IQ is matched by his inflated ego. There are sparks of genius in him. I like him. And yet, Deri lives in a faraway place. He has other commitments and loyalties. He is a citizen of a world I don’t know. He is so present yet so elusive, so open yet so inscrutable. He gives me the feeling that even he hasn’t quite figured out who he is and who he would like to be. A wanderer between worlds and between identities, he embodies the great Israeli social and cultural chaos.

And yet Deri is not the issue but the metaphor. He will be fine. After a thirteen-year leave of absence, he is back in the public arena and is once again the political leader of Shas. (After the March 2015 election, in which Shas won seven Knesset seats, Deri joined the Netanyahu government as minister of the economy and minister for the development of the Negev and Galilee. In January 2016, he returned to his old post as interior minister.) His charisma is somewhat eroded and he has lost his larger-than-life stature, but he is a powerful player again in Israel’s power game. So as I leave his Jerusalem office I think not of him but of his community. The Oriental-Jewish story is simple and cruel, I think. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, Arab world Jewry experienced a relative golden age. As it was close to French and British colonial rulers, it enjoyed their patronage. It won rights it had never enjoyed before. Many Jews in North Africa and the Middle East benefited from all that Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Alexandria, Tunis, and Casablanca had to offer. But by the 1940s and 1950s the magic of the Orient had evaporated. Colonialism retreated, Arab nationalism was on the rise, and Zionism was triumphant. Within a few years a civilization collapsed. Thousand-year-old communities disintegrated within months. With one swing of history’s sword the soft underbelly of the old Levant was sliced open. The enchanting, pluralist Orient was gone....

When I was a child, Oriental Jews were not recognized as such. Although they already constituted almost half of Israel’s population, they were oppressed and ignored. In an odd sort of way they were present and not present, belonging and not belonging. They were followed by a constant cloud of doubt and suspicion. They were not our lot, not really us.

In the army I was already a minority. In the paratrooper platoon I served in, elitist Ashkenazim like me were mocked. But only after the 1977 political upheaval that brought Menachem Begin to power—and the violent, inflammatory election campaign of 1981—was political power transferred to the other people. One could no longer ignore the fact that Oriental Jews were the majority. They came out of the immigrant camps and housing estates and development towns to which they had been confined for over a generation to capture the city square. Politically speaking, they were Likud. Socioeconomically, they were contractors and small business owners. Culturally, they were fans of Zohar Argov, whose music I did not yet appreciate. But in liberal Ashkenazi circles, the surge of Oriental Jews brought about an ugly response. The racism of the 1980s and 1990s was even more repulsive than that of the previous era, scornful and maligning: They are nouveau riche. They don’t behave. Their English is atrocious. They are so sensitive regarding their honor. They are Indians. Levantines. Likudniks. They disgrace the state we founded and eventually will take us down with them. In these comments, I saw the dark side of Israel’s enlightenment, a lack of a civility in people who claim to be civilized. The Oriental story fascinated me. As I listened to more and more immigrant stories, and to more and more stories of oppression, I realized we had done wrong. I feared that the pain of Oriental Israelis...

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 ...

“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.

“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.

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 th...

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 el...

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 over 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.”

Chupi says he had to be persistent. He had to put youngsters and club owners alike through a rigorous education, to get the dance crowd used to the new thing. He had to create his own crowd by himself, the house music crowd. And then connect the people to the music, and then connect the people to one another with the music. His goal was to make Allenby 58 the mecca of house music. He went to Europe and met the leading DJs and brought back the newest tracks, and along with a few others he created a music scene here that rivals those of London, Amsterdam, or Paris. It worked. So anybody who is anybody in hard-house or club-trance knows that Tel Aviv is now one of the best. Israel is awesome. No one knows exactly why the crowd here is so special. Perhaps it’s ...

“When you are a mega-DJ,” Chupi tells me, “you have megapower. When you take your place in the elevated booth behind the glass, you know that if you just press one button, it’s as if you are pressing some point in the heads of a thousand people simultaneously. This is power. Total, sexy power. Because now they are really in your hands. You control them. And if you want to, you can send them to heaven. You can make them horny. The energy of the dance floor is sexual energy. And what they beg you for is climax. You get to decide whether you’ll give them what they are now desperate for. They are totally dependent on you. But if you are good, you wait. You don’t hit peak after peak. You play with them. You arouse them, but you don’t yet give it to them. It drives them crazy. And they shout louder, ‘Give it to us.’ And then, finally, when you give it to them, the club is like a ball of fire. Like an atomic blast. God is a DJ; DJ is God. It’s as if you’ve touched a thousand people in every part of their body. And you see all the blood rushing through them, the sweat dripping from them. And they are yours, utterly yours. They thank you and worship you because you gave them something powerful and total. Something that nothing else in life gives them. Something you cannot find in the real life, outdoors.”

“The gays are the scene leaders,” Shirazi says. “Because what the gays have is totality. Gays are very total people, that’s what makes our parties so over the top. If it’s costumes, then it’s costumes all the way. And if it’s drugs, then it’s drugs all the way. And if it’s sex, then it’s sex all the way. Anyone who comes to our Friday night parties sees it immediately. Everything is up-front. Everything is on offer. There is no such thing as busting your ass all evening so that at the end maybe she’ll give you her phone number and go with you to the cinema. With us it all goes down in seconds. We look each other in the eye, walk off to the side, find the toilets, and fuck. And all around you the temperature keeps rising. There are go-go dancers, strippers, drag queens. Flickering lights, the beat of house music. It’s intense as can be.

Does he read the papers? Does he follow politics? Does he have an ideology? I ask him. “Sure,” he answers. He supports the Left, always has. For a while, he even went to peace demonstrations. But today he believes that the party-now scene is more relevant than the Peace Now movement. “Allenby 58 is where it’s at, where politics is really happening,” he says. “In the past, Tel Aviv clubs celebrated machismo and senior officers and military heroes. But now no one cares about that hierarchy. If the commander of an elite commando unit comes in—fine, but who the fuck cares who he is. The heroes here are singers and actors and people who make other people feel good. And this is what the next Israeli century and the next global millennium is going to be about. Not that I will be mayor and Shirazi will be my lieutenant, not that it’s all going to be one big love parade. But fun will take center stage. It will happen. It’s already happening. The young don’t read the papers anymore, but they dance like crazy. They will not go down to the desert, or build kibbutzim, or be army heroes, but they will wildly pursue pleasure and fun.

“In the sixties and early seventies, people wanted meaning in life and in music,” Ori says. “Then came disco. But disco was ashamed of having no message. Now there is no shame, no pretense, no pressure to say anything. You don’t sing about love, you have sex. Sex now, sex right now, sex in the toilets. And this new physical authenticity is what’s real, this need for stimuli and pleasure and excitement. This is what Israel is now about. Forget the Zionist crap. Forget the Jewish bullshit. It’s party time all the time.

“You can see it here,” Ori says. “Look around you. No more poses, no more pretenses. The sound system is so loud you can’t even talk. So you can’t ask her what kind of wine she likes and who did she vote for in the last elections. There is no foreplay. It’s all instant, quick. What’s your name? Let’s go. These kids live on the Internet. They click and buy. So their love is Internet love, too. They have no patience. Satisfaction is needed on the spot. And when they leave the toilets after a quarter of an hour, I wat...

He talks me through a series of multicolored graphs and charts on his computer screen. “What makes all this much worse are demographics,” he says. “As you can see in these charts, over the last thirty years Israel went through a demographic revolution. During these years, the percentage of school-aged children attending ultra-Orthodox schools has risen from 4 percent to nearly 20 percent. The percentage of school-aged children attending Arab schools has risen from 20 percent to 28 percent. So today, 48 percent of all school-aged children are enrolled in either ultra-Orthodox or Arab schools. An additional 14 percent are modern Orthodox. Only 38 percent are secular. That means that by 2030, Israel’s shrinking secular Jewish majority will become a minority. Israel’s cultural identity will change, and so will its socioeconomic profile. Secular Israelis are the ones working, producing, and paying taxes. Once they are outnumbered, Israel will be a backward nation that will not be able to meet the challenges of the third millennium.”

“What you are showing me is a national disaster in the making,” I say. Ben David nods sadly. “If Israel had an effective Zionist government, it would fight this disastrous trend. It is not too late yet, but it might soon be too late. Meanwhile, successive dysfunctional Israeli governments are doing the very opposite: they reward the nonworking minorities and subsidize them and do not require them to take up modern and democratic education. As a result, nearly half of the population is not part of the national effort and does not shoulder responsibility for the nation’s future. The burden on the soldiers of the productive segment of the society is unbearable. Fewer and fewer Israelis work more and more to feed nonworking Israelis. Fewer and fewer Israelis run faster and faster to carry along the Israelis who don’t run at all. A flawed political system guarantees the special interests of the ultra-Orthodox, the settlers, and the megarich. But the productive middle class has been abandoned by the state. That’s why this exhausted middle class is growing bitter. It feels the nation has betrayed it. It sees the Israel it loves disintegrating.”