Shabbat Goy: Not-so-trivial matters

On ‘Strangers No More,’refugees and random quizzes.

By AKIN AJAYI
Trivia (photo credit: Courtesy)
Trivia
(photo credit: Courtesy)
My son has a thing for trivia.
“How many planets are there in the solar system? How tall was the tallest man? How many teeth does a lion have?” To which my answer is I don’t know, I don’t care and I’ll be sure to count the next time I come across a carnivorous man-eater. Just don’t expect an answer from me anytime soon.
I jest. I have a thing for trivia too. Although, as far as the Small Noisy One is concerned, I most certainly do not know how many planets there are in the solar system. I said nine, he sneered and said eight. Then I remembered. Bloody Pluto. Too small, too erratic to be called a planet anymore? Huh. I had Pluto thrashed into my skull at school; as far as I am concerned, it remains a planet for all time and I defy anyone to tell me differently.
But there are other things that we disagree about.
Take the other day, when we were were shooting questions at one another. I asked him to name the smallest country in the world. “Israel!” No, I retorted. Israel is most certainly not the smallest country in the... “It is, it is, it’s a fact!” Then he started to jump up and down on my head to emphasize his point. Typical.
To be fair, I don’t blame him. I mean, if your dad was dumb enough to think that there were nine planets instead of eight, you’d hardly be likely to trust him with any other set of facts, would you? That aside, I kind of see where this is coming from. I’ve been told so many times that Israel is smaller than New Jersey that this notion of infinitesimal smallness tends to stick. Even though I’ve been to New Jersey and I can report that it is bloody huge. Also, that I’ll never want to go back there again. But that’s a story for another time.
Facts, trivia or otherwise, are odd things, aren’t they? There’s that presumption, drummed into our heads from the dawn of time, that facts are sacrosanct, unimpeachable. Even trivia facts. But only up to a point, I’d argue. It’s always a matter of how selectively one chooses to employ the facts at hand, after all. I mean, we’re not so very often told that Israel is bigger than Slovenia, are we? But then, Slovenia isn’t experiencing an existential crisis, beset on all sides by enemies, no longer able to offer succor to the stranger in its midst, etc, etc. But I’ll come back to that later.
I was rooting around for distraction – for trivia, in fact – on the Internet the other day (this is usually called “research,” by the way) when I stumbled across a blast from the not-so-recent past. Strangers No More.
Do you remember that? Bialik Rogozin School in south Tel Aviv? Karen Tal, inspirational head teacher? The immigrant children who melted the hearts of a nation? The Oscar win, the national pride – so the film wasn’t made by Israelis, nu, it is about Israel and it shows us all in a good light.
Do you remember it? Nope, neither do I. Must have been in a parallel universe that leaked into ours momentarily. Quite seriously though, it’s funny how much has changed so quickly. A year and a bit ago, everyone except a very small group of principled – if wrong-headed, in my opinion – refuseniks were raving about the film. Now? The very best one can expect is that the film and its poignant subject matter have been reduced to the level of ephemera. A question on a quiz program: “What is the name of the Oscar-winning documentary set in a south Tel Aviv school, home to children from 48 different nationalities?” Once a fact, now trivia at best.
This thing about this whole refugee/migrant worker/“infiltrator” business that really gets to me is that people cite the facts that fit their prejudices and ignore everything else. So the human rights campaigning groups describe the cohort of people as “refugees,” for example. Really? Each and every one of the people seeking asylum in Israel are fleeing from persecution, torture or worse? Give me a break. A part of me does understand this: refugees, in the legally accepted definition of the word, have certain rights accorded to them. The government – for reasons best known to itself – does not have a functional refugee policy. So, for as long as our government finds itself unable to to implement the international conventions to which it is a signatory, the matter will remain a hopeless muddle.
And that’s the very best prognosis, by the way.
(Just to be clear, I 1. have no empirical evidence about the split between genuine asylum-seekers and migrant workers, but neither does anyone else and 2. don’t have any particular problem with migrant workers either. To be frank, I think they show great resourcefulness in trying to make a better life in an alien country. It’s just the selective application of “facts” that bugs me.) But just in case you think I am going to let the Right off the hook... Let’s forget cancers and rapists and diseases for a moment. Let’s concentrate on the term du jour favored by the current government: “infiltrators.” There is something callow, unprincipled, borderline dishonest about importing a term that has a very specific meaning in the Israeli lexicon to describe refugees/migrant workers/whatever else you chose to call the people.
“Infiltrator” is a term embedded in the public consciousness, belonging to another time and another set of circumstances. It refers to the Fedayeen who – with all the ill will in the world – smuggled themselves into Israel to cause mayhem in the 1950s.
These, I believe, were the real infiltrators. Somehow, this fact has been extended by stealth to cross six decades and to represent an entirely new set of facts.
But maybe this is all trivia. Or, at least, trivial.
The Small Noisy One wants me to ask him a new question, but my reservoir of arcane factoids has dried up. So I make one up. A small part of me feels a little guilty. But it’s all trivia, isn’t it? Or facts. It doesn’t matter.
No one’s going to bother checking, after all.
(Postscript: A trivia question for 10: Discuss the origins of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. For five bonus points, outline its specific connection to the State of Israel. And for a a gazillion bonus points, discuss why the Israeli government seems to have such a problem with it. Have fun!)