Life (sadly) imitates art in the city center

The groups that hang out in Zion Square are varied, and their numbers are growing. And last month’s beating of an Arab teen was not an isolated incident.

By PEGGY CIDOR
Teenagers drinking and smoking Hookah 521 (photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
Teenagers drinking and smoking Hookah 521
(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)
In one of the most dramatic scenes in the recently released Israeli movie God’s Neighbors, a group of Jewish reformed delinquents who became religious decide to put an end to what they regard as provocation by young Arabs from a nearby neighborhood. The scene ends with two seriously wounded – an Arab and a Jew.
The reason behind the Jewish group’s attack on the young Arabs who hung around their neighborhood and tried to seduce Jewish girls was to teach them a lesson.
“How long are we going to sit here in shame and do nothing while these Arabs come and take our girls?” asks one of the characters, who convinces his friends to join him on a foray into the Arab neighborhood.
The film depicts some of the lesser-known and quite disturbing aspects of life in some of the tougher neighborhoods in the center of the country. What makes it relevant to Jerusalem is the fact that the same words could be heard in the city center on the night that a young Arab was beaten by a group of Jewish youths hanging out there – and even on the days after the beating.
In both cases – that of the film, which according to its creator Meni Yaish, is a realistic description of life in these neighborhoods, and the real-life events – the combination of religious youngsters, the dangers of life on the streets and the presence of young and no less at-risk Arab youth is an explosive one.
The exact figures regarding the number of youths who hang out in the vicinity of Zion Square are not clear, and they vary depending on the source. But all sources talk about hundreds of them.
And all agree on two other things: that the number is constantly rising, and their average age is decreasing.
“When I started to work with these groups, about three to four years ago, they were mostly aged 15 to 17 years,” says a social worker employed by the municipality. “Today, the largest group is barely 13.
We even see some that are 11 or 12. I’m talking about boys and girls who dropped out of school, drink alcohol, smoke – all kind of things. Many of them do not sleep at home anymore, or only occasionally.”
On Thursday evenings, the city center becomes the territory of the young delinquents – those on the verge of criminality, promiscuity and drug and alcohol abuse. To the untrained eye they might all look the same, but there are differences. And those differences say a lot about the situation of these youngsters and the level of risk they are at.

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However, they all seem to have one thing in common: Whether they come from haredi families, national-religious backgrounds or underprivileged immigrant families from the former Soviet Union, they all hate Arabs. And though some groups of young Arabs from east Jerusalem keep coming to the area, the atmosphere is laden with hatred toward them.
Violence erupts from time to time, and it is a big mistake to assume that the brutal beating of 17-yearold Jamal Julani three weeks ago was an isolated incident.
But it is true that there hadn’t been such a serious incident until that one.
Whether it is the result of incitement or, as one of the youngsters told this reporter, the result of the intifada, there is no doubt that the Arabs are the common enemy – in addition to the establishment, the schools, the police and their own families.
Uriel Ben-Shabbat, a teacher and therapist, is very familiar with the atmosphere at Zion Square and has been deeply involved in various programs to deal with these youth for years. Ben-Shabbat – one of the founders of Bayit Ham, an organization established by a group of French immigrants in the late 1970s that works with at-risk youth using psychological approaches – says that although the characteristics of these youths have changed, they still share many of the same symptoms and problems.
“In the late 1970s, they were mostly teenagers rebelling against their parents, the schools, authorities and the system. They wanted autonomy and freedom, but many of them overcame this difficult period in their lives and found their way back to their families or at least to some kind of normative framework,” says Ben-Shabbat. “But for young boys and girls from haredi environments, once they leave home or the yeshiva, things become much more difficult – sometimes there is no way back.”
Ben-Shabbat explains that one of the first things that brings young haredi boys to the streets is connected to the ultra-Orthodox way of life.
“From the age of 13, haredi boys do not live at home. They go to yeshiva and go home only once in three weeks for Shabbat or the High Holy Days. From the moment a haredi teenager says he doesn’t want to go to yeshiva, he is not wanted at home because he might ruin the [marriage] prospects of his older sisters and brothers, and he is a source of shame for the parents. So, in too many cases, these kids are simply shown the door,” he says.
At first these boys are easily recognizable, with their white shirts and black pants. Most of them continue to wear the black kippa, but usually they lose the rest of their ultra-Orthodox trappings – because very quickly they start to smoke, even on Shabbat. They get rid of all practices that separate them from girls; and they adopt very crude language. Some of them go back home to sleep, particularly on Shabbat, but most of them do not, and the distance between them and their families – and any haredi environment – grows wider.
Over time, many of these youths will cut off their sidelocks, exchange the white shirt and black pants for a black T-shirt and jeans and ultimately consolidate the transformation with one or more tattoos.
What is strange, remarks the social worker, is that in many cases these youths refuse to admit that they are already far from the haredi world.
“They will declare that they need to do some repenting or decide that soon they will get back to prayers and observing religious laws, but most of them won’t be able to do it and will continue to drift away from that world. As a result, they will have much less chance of finding their way back to their families.”
However, adds the social worker, in quite a few cases, when these youths reach marriageable age in haredi society (around 21), if they have managed to maintain some type of ties with their parents, they might give up their life on the streets and return to the haredi world.
Most of them, in this case, will not return to yeshiva but will get some professional training.
But these are a relative few. In most cases, after a year or two they lose contact with their relatives and become totally secular and live on the fringe, doing menial jobs and very often abusing drugs or alcohol.
As for the girls who drop out of haredi society, their situation is even worse, says the social worker.
“Life on the streets is a higher risk for girls in terms of harassment or even rape, but we have no evidence that these acts are perpetrated specifically by young Arabs.”
ANOTHER LARGE group of such youngsters are those who live in settlements in the region, as well as those who formerly lived in Gush Katif or were involved in the settler protest during disengagement. According to social workers who try to maintain some form of contact with them, these youths, who were 12 or 13 in 2005, are now in their 20s. Most of them have not enlisted in the IDF either because they refuse to be part of the army that threw them out of their homes or because the army prefers not to draft them.
Unlike the haredim, they remain religious in many ways, although they allow themselves a few changes in customs, such as close relationships with girls and the use of drugs or alcohol. For this group, the traumas they or their family members experienced during the intifada are often the trigger that led them off the path.
“It is a mixture of many crises,” says the social worker. “They experience a break in their faith [especially with regard to disengagement from Gush Katif] and a serious loss of trust in their own parents, whom they see as kind of losers who caved in to the army that evacuated them from the settlements.”
These are the circumstances of those commonly referred to as the “hilltop youth,” who reject the authority of their parents or teachers and live outside the institutions of the establishment.
A third major group on the streets is the young immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Even if some were born here to parents who arrived in the early 1990s, they are still regarded as “Russians.” They mostly keep themselves at a distance from the other groups.
“There we see the highest use of alcohol, and they are a little older. Many of them simply kill time [in the city center] until late at night as a regular way of spending leisure time, while still being employed during the day or even studying somewhere,” explains the social worker, who adds that besides these youths, there are many who have completely cut ties with their parents and live on the streets or squat in groups, surviving on low wages or pick-pocketing. In addition to these three major groups, many youngsters who live at home and go to school also congregate in the city center, especially on Thursday nights, as most of the schools are closed on Friday, and they can stay out all night. According to volunteers from several organizations that try to help these youths, most of them engage in smoking, drinking alcohol and a lot of sexual activity.
The youths who still have a home return at the end of the night, but those living on the streets squat in empty buildings close to the center or sleep at the homes of friends whose parents don’t mind or work at night and are unaware. During the day, quite a few of them work at the Mahaneh Yehuda market or the small kiosks in the surrounding area or do supermarket deliveries.
According to the volunteers, by 2 or 3 a.m. all the youngsters who live at home have left, using the night buses, which have become another violent trouble spot due to these passengers’ use of alcohol.
“Those who remain in the city center are those who do not have anywhere to go, between 30 and 40 [youths] each week.
They just fall asleep on the sidewalks at Zion Square or in one of the little alleys. These are mostly the haredim. They have fewer connections to find solutions for the night, at least at the beginning, once they are outside their neighborhoods.”
ON ONE Thursday night, at 10 past midnight, a group of youths, some playing guitars, is sitting on the stairs of Zion Square below the bank building, with bottles of beer and arak scattered around. When asked to talk a bit about their life on the streets, some burst into derisive laughter. One girl asks in a provocative manner if the purpose of the inquiry is to protect her from “being with boys” – prompting more laughter. Upon hearing that the question comes from a journalist, one of the boys angrily asks, “How long are you going to keep digging into this lynch story? He deserved it. He provoked us.”
This is soon followed by other equally harsh reactions. Snir, 19, hushes his friends and orders them to let him explain a few things to the “leftist journalist.”
“The Left cares only about the Arabs and what the world says about us. And what about us? We suffer every day from their violence.
They throw Molotov cocktails at us on the roads, slaughter us. When we come to spend time here in Jerusalem, they come in groups, curse us in Arabic and try to get Jewish girls, to pimp them. Should we keep silent because the leftist media doesn’t understand what’s going on here?” Snir – who says he lives at home in a settlement near Jerusalem and is not studying for a degree at the moment – says he reached this conclusion after his best friend’s father was killed by Palestinians and that he decided not to go to the army after the Gaza disengagement.
“This country has sold out to the Left and to the Palestinians, so why should I bother to serve it?” he asks, adding that he is against violence. “We also have some Arab friends. They work in our villages, and they feed their children thanks to the money they earn from us. But we don’t trust them. We know that at the first opportunity they will stab us in the back – so we don’t want them here with us or getting close to our girls.”
Meanwhile, some 40 city residents mount a protest in the square against the beating as Jewish and Arab families stroll nearby.
Snir comments that he was in Zion Square on the Saturday night following Julani’s beating.
“There were lots of leftist Jews who came here to show the world they apologized for the Arab who was attacked. I don’t think it’s good that he was beaten, but why do you guys from the Left always care about what the world thinks about us? Why not care about us first? It’s not that we hate Arabs just because they are Arabs – it’s because they try to kill us and throw us into the sea. They have to understand and admit that it is our land. Once they do that, we won’t harm them,” he says.
“I don’t hate Arabs as such. As long as they understand who’s in charge here, I don’t mind,” he says.
Asked what brings him to the city center at such a late hour, Snir at first refuses to answer and then says he and his friends are bored in their small villages.
“We’re not like our parents. We want to have some fun, like any kids.”
Word on the street
and is not studying for a degree at the moment – says he reached this conclusion after his best friend’s father was killed by Palestinians and that he decided not to go to the army after the Gaza disengagement.
“This country has sold out to the Left and to the Palestinians, so why should I bother to serve it?” he asks, adding that he is against violence. “We also have some Arab friends. They work in our villages, and they feed their children thanks to the money they earn from us. But we don’t trust them. We know that at the first opportunity they will stab us in the back – so we don’t want them here with us or getting close to our girls.”
Meanwhile, some 40 city residents mount a protest in the square against the beating as Jewish and Arab families stroll nearby.
Snir comments that he was in Zion Square on the Saturday night following Julani’s beating.
“There were lots of leftist Jews who came here to show the world they apologized for the Arab who was attacked. I don’t think it’s good that he was beaten, but why do you guys from the Left always care about what the world thinks about us? Why not care about us first? It’s not that we hate Arabs just because they are Arabs – it’s because they try to kill us and throw us into the sea. They have to understand and admit that it is our land. Once they do that, we won’t harm them,” he says.
“I don’t hate Arabs as such. As long as they understand who’s in charge here, I don’t mind,” he says.
Asked what brings him to the city center at such a late hour, Snir at first refuses to answer and then says he and his friends are bored in their small villages.
“We’re not like our parents. We want to have some fun, like any kids.”