Israelity welcomes Is.Real

August 3, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, coexistence, education, Entertainment, General, Israeliness, Life, Profiles, tv 
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Don’t be surprised if young and attractive Israelis start popping up on YouTube with alarming regularity in the near future. It’s not your imagination, but the final project of a group of college students taking part in a year long fellowship at Tel Aviv University sponsored by the advocacy organization StandWithUs.

The fellowship is designed to train the students to be effective global ambassadors for Israel. And for their project, 23 of the 150 students devised Is.Real (not close enough to sue them, but watch out guys) – a series of 2-3 minute video clips that focus on the lives of four young Israelis from diverse backgrounds. The MTV-fast paced, frenetic snippets were designed to document their daily lives and provide insight into the authentic ‘real Israel’ that isn’t shown on the news, according to their promo blurb.

The four subjects are:

• Savannah Zvi-Navon, a 27-year-old singer-songwriter originally from Sydney, Australia. She started her journey in Israel at Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael, and has since migrated to Tel Aviv.

• Yair Tayor, a 26-year-old tour guide from Beit Horon in the West Bank. He grew up in a religious family, speaks Portuguese and Spanish fluently, and guides tourists from Brazil around Israel.

• Shay Doron, a 26-year-old professional basketball player with the Israeli women’s national basketball team.

• Ayman Dan is a 20-year-old Christian Arab-Israeli from Kafr Yasif, an Arab village in northern Israel. After studying design in Haifa, Dan moved to Tel Aviv. He hopes to eventually pursue a career in styling and fashion design.

The series was unveiled at a gala screening on Wednesday and the 20–episode series (each subject is the focus of five clips) is due to be uploaded to YouTube any day now. Welcome to the club!

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A capitalist’s take on the tent protests

August 1, 2011 by · 2 Comments
Filed under: A New Reality, Politics, Social Justice 

Tent city in Tel Aviv

I’m not quite sure what to think of the tent protests that have taken over the country in recent weeks. On the one hand, the rising costs that have plagued Israel in recent years have hit our family quite personally. On the other, I remember the days before Israel’s so-called capitalist revolution, and I wouldn’t want to go back there.

There’s no question that Israel is one of the most expensive places in the world to live – and that our salaries are way below other Western countries. Our food costs more, the price at the gas pump is outrageous, and even bus fares (at $1.80 a ride with no transfers until recently) are far beyond the Egged rates of 5 cents back I remember back when I first came to the country. And don’t get me started about the price of imported electronics and automobiles with their import duties of 100%.

Now add in the rapidly expanding gap between rich and poor, and the shocking number of families who live at or below the poverty level, and you have a social structure that’s entirely untenable, both in the short and long term.

The protests started with the cost of buying a home and how young couples and students were effectively locked out of the big cities. Although we were fortunate enough to buy our apartment before the ridiculous price jumps (although we still have a mortgage that rivals rents), it pains me that – at least now – our kids have no chance of buying near us. I want to be a saba who lives close enough to be “used” as a regular babysitter. And my kids say they love Jerusalem. Why can’t they have the same breaks us old fogies got?

But looking at it from the other side, pre-capitalist, pre-privatized Israel was a much less pleasant place to live. I was here in the mid-1980’s when you had to go to the bank every day to change shekels to dollars and vice versa to beat the seemingly insurmountable inflation. Yes, cottage cheese and falafel were cheaper, but so were our choices.

Moreover, Israel’s economic miracle, so dutifully covered in Saul Singer’s Startup Nation, was made possible in large part due to the drive towards a more free market economy. When everyone makes more or less the same salary, there’s no incentive to innovate. In 1988, there was no startup culture in Israel. Immigrants were told to “settle” for low paying jobs in fields they weren’t trained for nor necessarily had any interest in. Ten years later, if you had an idea for an Internet application, you had to fight off the venture capital money.

OK, I exaggerate a little, but I don’t think the recent flood of immigrants from North America (a flood compared with 20 years ago at least) would have happened when we were essentially a socialist state. You wouldn’t be able to sit in any one of the fashionable cafes that dot our modern landscape (assuming you can afford that latte) or enjoy an authentic Italian gelato, let alone sushi for goodness sake, back in a time when the idea of a cash-back return was a mere bad joke of a future unfulfilled.

It seems, in fact, that much of what the protesters are calling for is a return to the “good old days” of their parents, when life was easy and cheap. Maybe they should ask their folks what it was really like.

Moreover, more social services mean higher taxes, and we’re already topping out at 50% when you include health insurance and social security. It’s a tradeoff – lower daycare costs but even less take home pay.

Protesting for social justice is popular, but the government’s “intransigence” is not illogical. At the same time, as someone who suffers just as much as the next guy by high prices and a sense that we’ve lost a valued cohesiveness, I too want change.

The Israeli “Spring” is often compared with the uprisings in neighboring countries. I hope we have more success than they did. In Egypt, one autocratic regime has been replaced by another (Mubarak’s army). Protests in Syria, Libya, Iran and Yemen have sadly not gone very far yet.

Of course, we’re not any of those countries – we have a thriving economy, a true democracy, a free press and a functioning judicial system. And now we have a mass protest movement too.

My wish, then, for the heady summer in which we’re swimming, with a still ill-defined paddle, is that our politicians prove wise, devising ways to ease the financial burden on Israel’s populace without breaking the bank and plunging us back to the not so good old days of 1984.

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Camping out for the long haul in Israel

August 1, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, News, Politics, Social Justice 

One inadvertent boost to the Israeli economy due to the current tent city protests over the exorbitant costs of housing and other goods in the economy has been the sale of… tents.

Camping goods stores have posted spikes in their sales of tent and related camping equipment in the last week or so, as more and more Israelis join the tent protest that have sprung up around the country. See Viva’s report from Rothschild Boulevard from yesterday.

That’s not to say that most Israelis need to purchase camping gear – we’re an outdoors people in general, and in the summer, the national parks and beaches are full of tents and backpackers. But I guess what’s fun and relaxation for some people is turning into a life and death matter for others, as the tent protests seem to be only expanding and not winding down.

If you’ve spent three or four nights in a tent on a camping trip, you know how grungy you can feel, with the dream of only taking a shower and collapsing in a comfortable bed. While the huge majority of the tent city protesters aren’t homeless and can pop up to their apartments to shower, relax and eat when they feel like it, the bottom line is that it’s still spending a lot of time outside in the stifling heat in a tent!

It will be interesting to see if the protests persevere as the balmy 90 degree July weather makes way for the real scorching hot August nights.

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