From New Lines Magazine
The religious-nationalist right has targeted Israel’s most secular, liberal city
The sound of male voices chanting the Sabbath liturgy was not something I expected to hear during a Saturday stroll on a quiet residential street in central Tel Aviv. It had been a rigorously secular city when I lived there, during the first decade of this century. Delicatessens that sold pork charcuterie were far more common than synagogues, and the Sabbath was for sleeping late, sitting in cafes or lying on the beach. All this was still the case for the vast majority of the city’s residents. But something had changed during the 14 years since I left the country; there was a new subculture living in the city. In neighborhoods that for decades were populated almost exclusively by secular liberals who made their livings in the arts, journalism and academia, there was now a noticeable presence of people who dressed in the style that identified them as religious-nationalist West Bank settlers. The sight was incongruous and inexplicable, since Tel Aviv doesn’t have the institutions and amenities to support their lifestyle, like yeshivas and synagogues, and there aren’t many kosher restaurants. It took me some time to understand the significance of their presence.
Once, people dressed in the style associated with ideological settlers — the men wearing large crocheted skullcaps and an automatic pistol tucked in the waistband of their jeans, the women wearing elaborately wound headscarves and almost invariably pushing a baby carriage — were a rare sight in Tel Aviv. When one did see them, they looked awkward and out of place, like dusty farmhands visiting the slick city on their day off. No longer. Now they radiated confidence and entitlement as they strolled along the city’s main commercial arteries, past restaurants and cafes that served nonkosher food they would not eat, boutiques that sold immodest clothes they would not wear, past the sex shops, the head shops and the posters announcing DJ sets at clubs that opened at midnight. They seemed not to notice or interact with any aspect of their surroundings.
During the Second Intifada, when Israel’s politics and culture began their lurch to the right, Tel Aviv acquired a nickname: the Bubble. It’s fallen out of use, but when it was a popular cliche the term referred, depending on one’s worldview, either to an island of effete leftists who were out of touch with the majority of the country, or to a queer-friendly, bohemian bastion of sanity, secularism and cultural creativity. There is even a 2006 movie called “The Bubble,” featuring a star-crossed love affair between a Palestinian man and a Jewish man who, when he’s not hanging out with his friends in their shabby-chic apartment on Tel Aviv’s then-edgy Sheinkin Street, is working at a hip record store that sells vintage vinyl or attending a rave against the occupation. In a classic bit of cognitive dissonance that seems inexplicable to outsiders but completely normal for Israelis, he also serves his annual reserve duty at a West Bank checkpoint — though he feels really, really bad about it. The checkpoint is where he first locks eyes with his Palestinian lover, who finds a way to come live with him in Tel Aviv. Ensconced in the apartment, they are embraced by their liberal friends until — spoiler alert — the Palestinian decides to become a suicide bomber. The film is about as awful as you can imagine and deserves the excoriating review published by Haaretz. But it was popular in Israel, and it did serve a purpose in exposing the blind spots and benign racism of Tel Aviv’s well-meaning liberals, though that was surely not the director’s intention.
Lisa Goldman is Europe Editor at New Lines magazine. Prior to joining the magazine, she was a reporter in the Middle East covering Israel-Palestine and the surrounding region for 12 years. Lisa worked at Haaretz newspaper during the Second Intifada and was part of the core group that launched +972 Magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian nonprofit media cooperative, in 2010. After her time in the Middle East, Lisa relocated to New York, where she was a fellow with the International Security Program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. Lisa now lives in Montreal.
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