A hard look at escapism in Israeli mass psychology
Israel’s newspapers for once lead with a story far from home: the growing tension
between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Both Yediot Ahronot and Maariv headline the
Foreign Ministry’s call to Israeli hikers and tourists in India to come home as soon
as possible. The Tel Aviv mass circulation tabloids state that other countries are also
urging their nationals to leave the potential war zone.
Yediot Ahronot and Maariv highlight Shin Bet’s mistake in identifying the woman
accomplice in the May 22 suicide bombing in Rishon Letzion. They write that Shin Bet
initially said the accomplice was Marina Pinski, a Jewish woman who emigrated from Russia
11 years ago. The intelligence agency later had to retract and admit the woman involved
was actually Irena Plitzik, a Christian from the Ukraine who worked as a prostitute and
had been using a forged ID card to pass herself off as Pinski.
Yediot Ahronot has front-page pictures of the “real Marina Pinski,” dubbed
“Marina, the innocent,” and of Plitzik, dubbed “Marina, the
terrorist.” Both newspapers state that what made things even more complicated was the
fact that the man Plitzik is married to, the Palestinian accomplice in the terror attack,
is called Ibrahim Sarahne, and Pinski is separated from a distant cousin of
Sarahne’s, who has the same name. Maariv quotes Pinski as saying: “She stole my
identity and now everyone thinks I am a terrorist.”
In an opinion piece in Yediot Ahronot, Ron Leshem states two possible reasons for the
mistaken identity: a very good forgery of the ID card, and careless checking up on Plitzik
and her documents. “There is no doubt that the Shin Bet is under tremendous
pressure,” Leshem writes. “At any given time, it has more than 2,500 detainees
under interrogation.”
But, Leshem continues, “the fact is that only after Pinski approached the media
because she was being harassed did the investigators realize their error. And it’s
also a fact that the character assassination and slander occurred in a blaze of publicity
after unequivocal statements by the police and the Prime Minister’s Office. All this
shows they are far too quick on the trigger. The same disaster that struck Pinski without
warning could tomorrow destroy any Israeli citizen.”
Maariv’s opinion pages host three columnists who go beyond the realm of everyday
economics and politics to ask some probing questions about Israeli society, and come up
with dismal conclusions.
Discussing the role of escapism in Israeli mass psychology, Nir Baram writes
sarcastically: “The Arab boycott is the best deal Israel ever got. Instead of having
to compete and function in our own sweaty, harsh, totalitarian, Levantine region, thanks
to the boycott we have been transported into, green, peaceful, progressive, cultured
Europe in sport, in music the Eurovision song contest, for example in literature, in
economics.
“But in order to exist geographically in one region, and culturally and mentally in
another, you need a lot of one psychological characteristic: repression. And that’s
what we do. We repress the occupation, we repress thoughts of the approaching economic
abyss, the demographic volcano, the intolerable racism against Israeli Palestinians. Give
us a problem, however threatening, however massive, and we’ll repress it.”
“And now,” Baram enthuses, “we have been presented with the biggest aid to
repression ever invented: the World Cup. For an entire month, we’ll use the Mondial
to repress everything, short of a nuclear conflagration. We’ll even repress that if
it involves such distant nations as India and Pakistan.”
Another pundit, David Fogel, wonders about Israelis’ obsession with everyone
else’s place on the political spectrum. “Everything you do in this country,
every opinion you express is measured against your world outlook. But isn’t it about
time that the question ‘Are you a left- or right-winger’ be dropped when
we’re considering whether a person is a decent human being or not?”
While Israelis are preoccupied with the left-right dichotomy, Fogel asserts, “some
things are accepted with unbearable ease for example, did our dear soldiers, those
wonderful kids of ours, really have to break into the homes of the residents … in the
West Bank, and smash everything in sight? Was the destruction of computers and furniture,
and even looting money and valuables, an essential chapter in the history of the Zionist
enterprise, or even an integral part of the lesson we wanted to teach that rogue, Yasser
Arafat?
“Has humiliating or victimizing an Israeli citizen just because he’s an Arab
become the national sport of our lovable younger generation? And what about the Druze
colonel in the (Israeli Army) who was manacled and dragged to a police station in Acre
just because of his accent?
“You don’t have to be left or right
to see how wrong these things are,” Fogel ends, “but simply a decent human
being.”
Finally, Gail Hareven is horrified to discover that everyday Israeli reality is not enough
to satisfy her fellow citizens’ craving for excitement. “Of all the scary news
this week, the most shocking to me was the item about a flying casino that will take off
from Ben-Gurion Airport, take its passengers out of Israel’s airspace, so they can
indulge in gambling. The very fact that serious businessmen are prepared to invest
millions in such an enterprise is evidence that there must be thousands of potential
customers, so many in fact that there’s already talk of two jumbo jet casinos.
“Who are these people?” asks Hareven. “Is one of them driving the kids to
school? Are any of them commanders in the army? Engineers who are constructing our bridges
and our apartment buildings? To my great regret, I believe that the sky-gamblers are all
of us: our leaders who crave action instead of tranquillity, the kamikaze drivers on our
roads, the engineers who build our bridges out of toothpicks. Perhaps the flying casino
isn’t such a bad idea after all let’s put them all on the plane and keep them
as far as possible away from us.”
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