The new, nice Israeli

For years, the stereotypical sabra stood out as brash and rough around the edges; Today one can see a kinder, gentler people.

By LARRY DERFNER
Israelis_521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Israelis_521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
We were having dinner on Yom Ha’atzmaut at the apartment of some friends in Modi’in, and to give the table talk a little holiday significance, I asked my mother-in-law what she thought of Israelis. She made aliya from South Africa late last year at age 82. She’s a reserved, extremely civilized, gracious person – pretty much the opposite of the popular image of the people in this country.
“I find them very nice, very helpful,” she said. “Not arrogant like they were made out to be.”
A friend of mine who’s been coming here since the 1970s, and who made aliya a few months ago, wrote to his family in the States about his impression of the locals: “The hard edge we might have cast as a stereotype years ago, in my observations just doesn’t exist.”
It’s not just new immigrants – who might be a little starry-eyed – saying that Israelis aren’t the sullen, abrasive characters they’d either heard about or experienced, that instead they’ve become pretty... nice. I also hear this from family members who visit, from regular tourists – even from a veteran bus driver in Jerusalem named Tzadok.
Getting on a bus used to be a classic Israeli experience – you had to fight your way through the crush of people to be in position when the door opened, and you had to have “sharp elbows,” the basic equipment every new immigrant was told he needed to survive in this country.
I asked Tzadok, who’s been driving buses since 1975, if, over the years, the behavior of his passengers had gotten better, worse or stayed about the same.
“Better, definitely,” he said. “Now they’re nicer, they talk nicer.”
Do they still push? “Nah, are you kidding? Now you don’t get that street behavior, now it’s civilized.”
Asked when he began noticing the change, he thought for a moment and said, “About 10 years ago.”
Myself, I started noticing the change in local behavior a little earlier, around the mid-to-late ’90s, but frankly I’m not sure if my observation led to my theory or vice versa. My theory is that the main reason obnoxious behavior, once common among Israelis, has given way to pleasant behavior is that prosperity and modernity have made life in this country a lot easier, a lot happier – and with prosperity and modernity kicking in during the early ’90s, a few years later the effect started trickling down into the national personality.
Before then, life was relatively tough, so the people were, too. Right before I moved here in 1985, my cousin, who’d just visited, warned me: “The toilet paper is like wood. You’re lucky if you’ve got hot water for a shower. The phones don’t work. There’s nothing on TV. The food’s okay, if you like chicken, felafel and French fries all the time.”
I found he was exaggerating about the toilet paper and the food, but he was right about the water, phones and TV.
A few years ago, my cousin made his second visit, and I heard him telling his father on the cellphone: “Israel’s great. It’s like America – you can get anything you want.”
The toilet paper is fluffy, there’s hot water whenever you want, the phones and TV have progressed somewhat, and the food is great, with more variety than the UN food court. You don’t have to buy shirts by Ata and shoes by Gali; you can buy anything from anywhere.
People travel overseas; they didn’t use to until they went on pension. Young people have ambitions, the world is open to them; in the old days they wanted to find a Histadrut job, get seniority and stay there for good.
It used to take forever to get from point A to point B, especially if it involved the government bureaucracy. You had to wait in long lines for the privilege of being abused by listless clerks. When I moved here, Israel struck me as a tired, old country, more like my image of 1985 Hungary than 1985 America.
The people seemed caustic, resentful and resigned. The sayings I kept hearing were variations of ein ma la’asot – there’s nothing you can do.
NOW, THERE’S almost nothing you can’t do. The country is buzzing, people are going places, they’ve got plans. Israel has gotten younger. Life isn’t so hard, getting through the day isn’t such a frustrating shlep. When you get home, you can play on your computer or watch something on TV besides, with all due respect, Haim Yavin reading the news.
And above all, there’s air conditioning. You used to sweat like a dog half the year, now you’ve got air conditioning in your apartment and in your car. In the old days the restaurants would serve you a glass of Coke with no ice. Today, we’ve got ice, we’ve got air conditioning – which, in this part of the world, makes a huge difference in how you feel.
And how do Israelis feel? According to all these international surveys, they feel happy. World-class happy. Happy as Italians. And why not? The quality of life here is good, you’re not stuck indoors, people have friends and family around, they’ve got cars, air conditioning, good food, plans for the weekend, plans for the summer, career plans, retirement plans, air conditioning, the streets are safe, terrorism is nil, the girls are beautiful, the guys are handsome.
Why shouldn’t Israelis be happy? And if they’re happy, why the hell shouldn’t they be nice?
And that’s what’s happened – in the last 15, 20 years (except for four years of intifada and recession), life in this country has gone from hard to easy, from constricted to free, and Israeli behavior, logically, has gone from rough to smooth.
Flying on El Al used to be a nightmare – the passengers behaved like kids turned loose in a candy store, making noise, jumping around nonstop. You couldn’t sit in your seat and have quiet or privacy – somebody was always standing in the aisle, talking over your head to the person sitting next to you. There used to be a poster in the gift shops titled “My Flight to Israel,” which caricatured the bedlam that was typical on board. But that’s finished. Because of prosperity, being on an airplane is no longer such an exotic, heady experience for Israelis, so they act like normal people, and flying with them on El Al feels basically the same as flying on any other airline.
Another example – Israelis standing in line. They didn’t use to be able to – they stood in thick, slowly shifting clumps, with people trying to nudge ahead of you and fighting about who was ahead of whom. Now, while it’s still not like a queue in England, you don’t have to gird your loins anymore and keep your eyes and elbows ready as you advance with the mob toward the clerk’s window.
(I know, driving in this country is still an ordeal. But driving brings out the worst in everyone, and if you compare national accident rates, Israelis are not anywhere near as bad on the roads as people think.)
WHILE I believe prosperity is the main reason Israelis have become nice, there’s also another important reason – demographics. There are simply more people around now who are young enough for their personalities to have been softened by the new prosperity, and fewer around who came of age when life here was harsh, when Israelis put a premium on being tough, no-nonsense and blunt-spoken. When you had to be able to take it, when you weren’t supposed to show your emotions, when “nice” was for softies, for phonies, for people who wore ties – for Jews in the Diaspora who had to be nice for the sake of self-preservation, not the new Jews of Israel who didn’t have to be nice to anybody, not for fighting Jews, not for farming and blue-collar Jews, not for Jews who’d had it hard all their lives and were proud of it.
These people, for all their estimable qualities, for all their remarkable character, were not, as a rule, nice - and there are fewer and fewer of these people still with us. The brash, hearty Palmah types are largely gone, and so are the brash, hearty kibbutz pioneer types.
They were the national models once, and they influenced the style of others. I ran into this style of behavior all the time when I moved here – people with tough, no-nonsense expressions, talking gruffly, making you feel stupid when you asked a question.
“Ma pitom? (What are you talking about?)” “Shtuyot (Nonsense).” “Hishtagata? (Have you lost your mind?)” So often, this was how Israelis answered the simplest requests for information, or disagreed over the pettiest, most inconsequential things. They weren’t being malicious – far from it – but life was hard, this was no place for softies, and they had to jostle you a little, push you around some at first, give you the stinging exterior of their sabra selves before letting you in on the sweet interior – it was the well-known Israeli way.
I very rarely come across this sort of behavior anymore, certainly not from young or middle-aged people. When I moved here, a friend from the States visited me and halfheartedly tried to talk me into going back.
One of his arguments was: “The people here are nuts.”
That was in 1985, and I couldn’t disagree.
But later, around 2000, my sister Suzie made a startling observation: “Israelis under 50 are sane.”
It was absolutely true – and it showed how dramatically the national personality had changed inside a generation. And since that was in about 2000, it means that today, Israelis under 60 are sane, which is a lot of sanity packed into a little country. (The word “sane,” of course, is an exaggeration for effect. Nobody’s saying older Israelis are insane, they just tend to be much harder cases, more sabra-like, than their easiergoing children and grandchildren.) “About a six,” said a New Yorker at the King David Hotel, telling me the rating she would have given Israelis on a 1-10 “niceness scale” when she started coming here in the mid-’80s. And now? “Eight or nine,” she said.
THIS NICE, new Israeli flies in the face of a pet theory of the Left (with whom I identify politically) – that the continuing occupation and slide to the Right is having a coarsening effect on people’s personal behavior. This may be true in the theater, movies and novels, but not in real life, I find. Israelis have become more callous toward Arabs in general, but I doubt that an individual Israeli Jew is now going to be more callous to an individual Israeli Arab, and I see no evidence whatsoever that Israeli Jews are now more callous, on a personal level, to each other or to foreigners. What I see, over and over, is evidence of the opposite.
And I don’t think this is necessarily a paradox. People think about politics abstractly, but they think about the person standing in front of them in very down-to-earth terms. There’s no necessary contradiction between reacting with antagonism to the mention of “the Arabs” – or “the leftists” or “the media” or “the human rights activists” – while being very friendly to individuals, even Arab individuals, even left-wing European human rights activists.
You can’t judge people strictly by their politics, and that’s emphatically so with Israelis over the last decade.
But I don’t want to overdo it – there are still vestiges of the old, pain-in-the-rear Israeli behavior here and there. The most notorious example is said to be found among young Israelis trekking through Asia and Latin America after the army, and among younger Israelis heading to the Greek islands before induction.
“There are guest houses in Thailand and hotels in the Greek islands that still won’t rent rooms to Israelis,” said a young clerk at a branch of Lametayel (For The Traveler). “A few years ago I went to a guest house in Bangkok, and there was a sign on the wall: ‘No drugs, no fighting, no escort ladies and no Israelis.’”
All the horror stories reported here about the young “ugly Israelis” are true, he said – the high school grads who get drunk and trash their hotel rooms in the Greek islands, the post-army trekkers who behave like “masters” toward clerks and waiters in Third World countries.
“But,” he stresses, “this is a very, very small minority of Israeli travelers. I wouldn’t even say it’s 1 percent. The problem is that Israelis are the only trekkers who travel in packs, so they’re very visible, and if one of them treats somebody badly, it’s ‘the Israelis treated him badly,’ whereas if, say, a British traveler on his own does it, it’s just one bad guy, not ‘the British.’”
My guess is that the clerk was sticking up for his fellow Israeli trekkers by saying that fewer than 1% of them are the problem. At another point, he acknowledged that traveling in packs itself encourages aggressive behavior, especially when the travelers are just out of the army or just about to go in. He also recalled that on one trip, he “would ask Israelis where they were going, and I would go someplace else.”
So it’s not that all of Am Yisrael has turned nice 24/7. And anyway, nice isn’t everything – you can be nice and polite and friendly and still be a cutthroat businessman, a corrupt politician, an incompetent repairman, or just a garden-variety untrustworthy or unreliable person, and word has it that there are still Israelis who fit that description.
So I’m not saying that the people here are angels. What I’m saying is that they’re all right, they’re pretty cool, they don’t give you a hard time, they smile, they joke, they’re easy enough to get along with, they’re kind of likeable.
“It used to be such an ordeal going to a restaurant or getting on a bus,” said a South African relative who’s been visiting since the 1970s. “Now it’s a pleasure. Israelis have changed.”
In restaurants, on buses, in line, at the park, in offices, on the street, being around the locals now tends to be an agreeable experience. This isn’t a secret, but it hasn’t yet become general knowledge, not to foreigners or to the locals themselves. Most people still think the truest picture of the Israeli personality is the shouting matches in the Knesset or the honking in traffic jams.
Wrong. That’s the extreme, not the norm, not anymore. In the 21st century, Americans aren’t cowboys, Chinese aren’t rickshaw drivers, and Israelis aren’t assholes. Around here, nice is the new normal.
Shocking, isn’t it?