We had our annual Purim parade here in Ra'anana today. Our main street, Rohov Ahuza, was packed with people watching float after float of enthusiastic children playing instruments and having a good time. The mayor of Ra'anana led the way in an open American style convertable automobile. Security was everywhere, making sure that the Israeli elite and their children could have their fun depite the dirty little war going on outside our secure municipal bubble.
Our quiet upper-middle class town of 60,000 is about 20 kilometers north of Tel Aviv, just a little bit inland from the coast. Another 7 kilometers to the east of us is the Green Line and the town of Qalkiliya, a Palestinian community that has been a locus of Intifada activity, with a strangled economy and little hope for the future. I wake up every morning trying to come to terms with the dichotomy between my life and theirs, between the life I provide for my children and the funerals that they have for theirs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fat cat or stock option high tech wiz kid like so many of my neighbors. No, I go out every morning and get dirt under my fingernails or covered in paint as I fix up the houses and apartments for my better off neighbors. In the local lingo I'm called a Shiputznik, one of the few Jews left in Israel who is willing to get dirty for a living.
Life can be quite surreal around here. Having a street festival for Purim while our army and vigilante settlers are killing a few more Palestinians is just the tip of the iceberg. We also go to the park and have picnics on Saturdays, throw lavish birthday parties and chat about the relative merits of a vacation in India or Peru. Our tree lined main street is full of sidewalk cafes and dress shops that are frequented by the fashionable ladies of Ra'anana. We have a country club where the good people spent time swimming or working out in the gym while catching up on local gossip.
All this has been built on the systematic exploitation of Palestinian and now foreign workers.
Oh yes, now that we and the Palestinians are busy shooting and bombing each other, Israel has become one of the world's largest importers of cheap foreign labor. They don't get visas, their employers do, and then the Chinese, or Philipino, or Thai workers are held in a kind of indentured servitude at the whim of the employer. Just outside Ra'anana there is a huge Amdocs (a high tech company) building going up that has within its barbed wire compound a collection of at least twenty huts which house the captive foreign labor. They are the kind of huts that you might have in your garden to keep tools in, or your dog.
So that's it in a nutshell. Life on the Israeli Riviera. Just one more thing. This isn't a war of national liberation that the Palestinians are waging here. No-one in their right mind believes any more that it's possible to establish two states on this itty bitty piece of land with everyone already living on top of each other. No. We're having a civil war. There is only one country here. Call it Israel, call it Palestine or call it any damn thing you want. The facts on the ground are here to stay. The settlers are not moving. We're all settlers here! And the Palestinians aren't moving either, or the 250,000 foreign workers, or the 1,000,000 Russians, most of them Christians, who arrived over the past ten years. I wish the dumb politicians would just declare a state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, give everyone the vote and get on with building a democratic nation. Anything else is just BS.
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