An Escapade to the Holy Land
6:00 am, 12th November 2010, London Luton Airport - the humid cold wind is au rendez-vous - what a sham!
I board an Easyjet flight to Tel Aviv, a city that is to Israel what Barcelona is to Spain, New York to the States, Sydney to Australia… Shanghai to China: a cultural hub that brings cupcake culture to sea bordering havens of nighttimes hedonism, women in their fifties sporting Gucci sunglasses and intricate ideological paradoxes.
5 hours and a few turbulences later, the plane touches down. As I leave the plane a blow of blazing heat hits me hard in the head and make my shoulders bend. I rejoice.
After a series of endless and repetitive questionings by security guards I finally exit Ben Gurion International and smoke a Marlboro Red in an instant. It is Shabbat; no trains are running which gives a good excuse to avoid the struggle of understanding the subtleties of local transports by splurging on a taxi ride. As I reach the hostel I am welcomed by a refreshing sea breeze and a hole in the wall I will inhabit for the next week, I fall asleep and wake up 14 hours later.
I spend my first two days walking through the city and exploring its backstreets that lead me to Florentine, a neighbourhood portrayed as the place to be in order to see and be seen. To my disappointment this hip Eldorado consists of only a few adjacent streets in the formerly poorer area of central Tel Aviv. Nevertheless this very compactness allows me to bump into a friend I once met in London. Minute is the world, or is the gay world that is just too claustrophobic? No answer to that! It is always reassuring to find some familiar faces in unknown corners of the world.
The following day I venture into the local art world and prefer to run away as fast as possible. The sight of painfully hung Chagals on cracked walls is only representative of what the local public museums have to offer and the budgets they have available. As for the private galleries, they are merely populated by camel toe modelling Gallerinas force feeding buyers further works displayed on their Ipads. Not my cuppa.
In spite of my initial scepticism, which I blame on my unconditional love for the never-ending buzz of the oversized megalopolis, I fell for the city. Its architecture, its hummus serving cafés, its ‘I-need-a-glass-of-prosseco-right-now’ bars, its dangerous nightlife and its incredibly hairy men seduced me. That is why I decide to venture into Jerusalem, the antithesis of Tel Aviv, on the day of Eid al-Adha a.k.a. the Muslim holiday of the sacrifice. The city is effervescent and the experience of walking in its streets feels unique. My mind is stuck somewhere between the firecrackers, my media biased conception of the place, what I saw in Tel Aviv and the celebrating Muslim minority.
Back to the seaside I become increasingly aware that, in spite of Tel Aviv’s cosmopolitanism and Jerusalem’s conservatism, a certain aspect of Israel’s society is fundamentally sterile. Despite the clashes between dominant lifestyles and opinions in both cities, which one would assume to generate a dialogue, regardless of which shape and form it would take, a little something is missing. Indeed, youth is missing, because youth is fighting.
On the smaller scale no one is present to naively denounce the ‘judification’ of Jaffa. No one innocently praises Marxism against the building of shopping malls. On the larger scale it seems there is very little visible action taken against the embargo on occupied Palestinian territories. Here I am not referring to those immediately subversive actions, rather it is those very unsuccessful movements that slowly help generating awareness, and over time, maybe, change opinions. As a matter of fact Israeli youth is forced into the army at a very young age; by the time they are released and ready to enter higher education the government’s ideology has already nested in their minds and shaped their views.
This is also the case within the gay community. I have always believed that through the process of accepting one’s homosexuality one also overcome dominant heterosexist ideals, which also helps one to understand better societies in their entirety. But in the case of Israel, pardon for the crude generalisation, coming out does not equal with going against local politics. Indeed the military system is open to homosexuality, the Israeli government recognized same sex unions performed outside of the country and gay prides of substantial sized take place in Tel Aviv. It turns out that this open mindedness works as a veil that covers the eyes of young gays on what their country intends.
Yet, some do escape the military system, the ladies by pretending to be religious and the gentlemen by hiding behind dubious lies, and thanks to them and many others that do go on to serve, slow change is on the horizon.
Nevertheless, local politics nurture the sterile aspect of their society in order to maintain their dominance over their population in a very similar way the US government does through its educational system. But then again, as I walked on the beach to reach my favourite hummus serving café, admiring beautifully hairy men, I could not help but have a good time in this slightly troubled city.
