Foto Friday – Israel Thai Style
Filed under: A New Reality, Art, Foto Friday, General, Life
Asaf Friedman is a professional photographer who, for the past two years, has been documenting the lives of Thai guest workers in Israel. The project is now a powerful exhibit, entitled “Israel Thai Style.”
Friedman trained his lens on the workers’ private lives and, in particular, how they spend their leisure time. Theirs is an invisible community that most Israelis not only never see, but don’t even know exists — though it literally touches the lives of Israelis every day through the fruits and vegetables put on the table.
“I always see them at the town squares as they wait for their employers to pick them up, riding their bikes in the middle of the road, caring for the unfortunate, working in agriculture and construction, and doing the work that not one aside from them is willing to do. When a troop of Thai workers crossed the field across from my house to pick potatoes for several months; that was the first time I really saw them. Questions began to arise – who are these ‘foreign workers’? What other identities do they have, aside from that of a laborer? What do they do when they go ‘home’? What do their lives look like and to what extent does their foreignness characterize them?”
To answer his questions, Freidman got to know some Thai workers who brought him into their private sphere. In gaining access to the caravan neighborhoods scattered throughout the country, Friedman was amazed to discover a world that, without his knowing it, had existed right under his nose.
“My interest is to document, through the camera lens, a collection of rituals and situations from the everyday private live of the Thai migrant workers in order to expose the cultural and social capital they bring with them. Although the exhibit doesn’t directly or explicitly relate to the fundamental significances of the presence of migrant workers in Israel, it could open a small window through which we might think about, reflect on and discuss them.”
Freidman looked at the seamy side of celebration as well, including cock-fighting, pig slaugtering, gambling, and amateur beauty contests for both genders. “Cock-fights in an enlightened country like Israel seems very brutal and in fact goes against a lot of conventions in a progressive society. It’s important for me to emphasize that this is a very popular sport in Southeast Asia, and Thailand specifically.”
Although not overtly political, Freidman does intend for his work to be a statement. “Israel’s migrant workers represent a component, albeit a transparent one, within Israeli society. The significance of the migrant workers presence affects not only the structure and organization of the labor market in Israel, but also exposes other basic aspects of social and political life in Israel.”
“Israel Thai Style,” is on till December 30 at the Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv and can also be accessed online at Friedman’s website.
From ‘Fish to Akko’ to ‘Lychees to China’
The old English expression, “selling coals to Newcastle,” has its counterpart in the U.S. – “selling ice to Eskimos” – and in Jewish tradition, with the Talmud talking about “selling fish to Akko (Acre).” In each case, the idea is that it would be fo
olhardy to try and sell a commodity that already exists in the locale mentioned.
To that list we can add a modern day Israeli equivalent: “Selling lychees to China.” The lychee, that Far Eastern treat known to most Westerners as a dessert choice in Chinese restaurants, thrives in Israel – and thanks to Israeli agricultural technology, China has been able to improve its own lychee crop!
Lychees are grown in Israel at a number of kibbutzim and moshavim in the north, and in the Jordan Valley. There are at least two major Israeli contributions to the science of growing lychees that I am aware of: A patent by Dr. Israel Moran (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6093433.html), for “an improved process for preserving the product quality of lychee fruit,” and the work of Dr. Raphael Stern of Kibbuz Lavie (where we spent a recent Shabbat, the inspiration for this post), who determined the role of water management in the size and quality of the fruit.
Dr. Stern’s methods have been applied in other lychee -growing centers, including Florida, Spain, South Africa – and China, where he was specifically invited to help improve the lychee crop, in a country where the fruit has been grown commercially for hundreds of years. Talk about Israeli “chutzpah” – outshining the country that’s supposed to be the world leader in everything lychee! Luckily for lychee farmers in China, their government hasn’t stood on ceremony – and has gladly invited Israeli expertise to improve their crop of the fruit.
Out With the Old, in With the New
Israel is full of villages – “k’farim,” in Hebrew. There’s Kfar Tabor, Kfar Vitkin, Kfar Shemaryahu, Kfar Habad – and my personal favorite, Kfar Saba. Most of these villages were established decades ago, usually as agricultural settlements.
And some of Israel’s many k’farim may still be largely involved in agriculture – probably the ones way up north or down south. But as the Tel Aviv-centered megalopolis expands ever outwards, and better highways and rail links bring the periphery closer to the center, many of the k’farim in the center of the country have found a new way to grow profits – with real estate, as developers buy up the old free-standing houses, many with large lots, and magically turn them into luxury apartment buildings, offices, malls, and all the other features of Israel’s increasingly urban/suburban landscape.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, of course; people gotta live, and as crowded as Israel is, there is still plenty of open space in the Galilee, and especially the Negev. While many farms and fields in the Sharon region, for example, have been turned into homes and stores, effective Israeli methods of land reclamation has turned large parts of the Negev into flourishing farmland, with everything from vegetables to fruit to grain growing nicely.
In Israel, as in much of Europe, the city centers are the most expensive places to live, and the further out you move, the cheaper the home. But when enough people move far enough out, that location gets an “upgrade,” and turns into a city, in and of itself. And that’s what’s been happening to almost all of the small towns, the k’farim, that once surrounded Tel Aviv. The villages are still there, in name – but now many of them are big cities.
Living as I do in a town not too far from Kfar Saba, I’ve seen the process unfold there over the past few years. First came the mall in the middle of town; then came the new luxury buildings and homes, with real estate shooting up in value by hundreds of percent within a couple of years. Then, they built the new park, a sure sign that Kfar Saba was no longer a “k’far,” which would have its own natural open spaces. Now, the developers have moved on to the edge of town; the funky industrial zone, which really was dedicated to industry (not shopping, like in a lot of other towns), is getting a huge 
combination office/mall space, which will take up about five big city blocks!
Thus the photos accompanying this piece: I may have come across some of the last “authentic” original agricultural-era homes in Kfar Saba. Someone still lives in the house with the sign in the top photo (there’s a satellite dish on the roof), but apparently they got an offer they couldn’t refuse, because it appears that a “luxury building” is going up on the site.
At least we’ll still have the shoemaker, (“sandlar”), whose little shack is seen in the bottom photo. This structure must have been built decades ago, but whoever owns it still has some principles, it seems – no “for sale” signs are up on this one, yet. Maybe the municipality should buy it out in order to preserve it – and let the next generation get a sample of “the way it was.”
Weird Wednesday
Israeli researchers have discovered that the initial appearance of green beads in ornamentation in the ancient Middle East coincides with the beginning of agriculture.
Let me run that one by you again: although bead-making began 110,000 years ago in these parts, an emphasis on green beads emerged only about 11,000 years ago. Archaeologist Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer of the University of Haifa in Israel and geologist Naomi Porat of the Geological Survey of Israel in Jerusalem theorize that the rise in use of green beads was directly related to the onset of agriculture. In excavating sites, the researchers found that hunter-gatherer societies used white, red, yellow, brown and black beads, while green was used occasionally – until agriculture began. “Green jewelry mimicked the color of young leaf blades, thus signifying a wish for successful crops and fertility… Green beads remain popular in agricultural groups today,” Science News reports.
I did a Google search to find out if that last statement was true, as visions of emerald-encrusted farmers wives flashed through my mind. I didn’t find much to back it up. No matter. The burning question for the researchers is whether the green sought after by early farmers was the same green used to ward against the evil eye.
Now this is a very big deal in the Middle East. There is always some old crone sitting on the corner, at a bus stop, running a stall in the shuk, or living on the ground floor of your building, biding her time and storing up energy so that, when the time comes, she can let loose a full throttle laser beam of bad karma. And if you don’t have a red string, hamsa amulet or some blue-green beads on you, you’re as helpless as Superman in the face of Kryptonite. Green Kryptonite.
Or, as the researchers put it, “Mesopotamian texts from around 5,000 years ago mention the evil eye, a belief in a kind of curse caused by a person praising someone while looking enviously at that person. Evil eye traditions still exist, especially in Mediterranean and Aegean regions. It’s not known when evil eye beliefs originated, but they go back at least to the increasing complexity of spiritual belief that occurred at the dawn of agriculture.”
Whew! That’s a pretty heavy for some little green holey bits of stone. Curses, spiritual beliefs, fertility gods, harvest gods… I’m beginning to think that diamonds, purportedly the strongest material known to man (at least according to the DeBeers folks), might be better suited to bear the load. Perhaps that’s why they’re so popular today. Although, there is that one curse they can’t seem to escape…
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