NOTES ON THE AMERICANIZATION OF ISRAEL

Here’s how things are there. There’s a new prime minister and all, but more important, at the McDonald’s in Jerusalem, next door to the Tower Records and down the block from the Ben and Jerry’s, my niece Avital and my nephew Boaz, six-year-old twins, tore into their Hunchback of Notre Dame Happy Meals. “Yesh li Frollo?” Boaz announced proudly, as he pulled out a little figure of the villain from the brand-new Disney movie whose arms popped out at its sides when Boaz pressed its head down. “I got Frollo,” he was saying. He and his sister had already seen the movie, dubbed into Hebrew; it premiered in America on June 21, only six days before it arrived in Israel. They could have seen it in English, too; they understand English with ease, but don’t speak it well, and they like to be able to go home singing the songs. And they love to sing — Avital spent much of the trip serenading me with “Macarena,” a peppy little dance number from Spain that became a sensation in Israel a few weeks before it hit here.

Disney has penetrated even to the Judean hills of the West Bank, to a Jewish settlement called Eli. There I met another Avital — the eight-year- old daughter of my friend Yoram, who grew up in Princeton but now lives in Eli with his American-born wife Ya’el and their five children. The Judean hills are gorgeous and stark, as though the Scottish highlands had somehow popped out of the desert, and nestled in them is this bizarre place with 80s- era tract housing laid out on an unerring grid. The settlement may be geostrategically at risk, but the 230 families who live in Eli are as safe, day to day, as they would be on a lunar colony; Yoram’s three-year-old daughter walks herself to school. Avital informed me that she speaks not only English and Hebrew, but French as well. When pressed to speak it, she could only come up with one word: “Bonjour.” After which her six-yearold sister Tchelet said, “You know that from the movie.”

“What movie?” I asked.

“Pocahontas,” said this daughter of a deeply religious couple who do not keep a television in the house.

Yoram and Ya’el are indeed rigorously Orthodox Jews and profound Zionists, but they are Americans too, and the CD player in the house plays soft rock from the 1970s and 1980s. Their children speak English with the same indelibly accented cadence as Boaz, Avital, Alon, and Noam — my sister Ruthie’s four Israeli children. Where do they get it? After all, they have grown up speaking English, but somehow the Hebrew sing-song whine mysteriously makes its way into their speech no matter which language they are chattering away in.

Otherwise, you would hardly know these kids were not American — or rather, you might think them a little too American, in the manner of Soviet spies in potboiler novels who were raised in a fake Midwestern town somewhere in the Caucasus. My nephew Noam knows everything about popular culture — everything. He is a sponge, remembering not only every movie but the text of every video box and every report he hears on CNN, or MTV, or Sky, or any of the other entertainment news he receives on the 40-odd channels of Jerusalem cable. He named, for me, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movies in order. His brother Alon, a beautiful 10-year-old boy, has long brown hair flattened down on his head and held back in a pony tail. Why did it look so wet? “Mousse,” he replied.

When I took Alon and Noam to Tel Aviv for the weekend, I thought we might drive north to the ruins of the Roman city of Caesarea. No chance; these are boys, after all, and they wanted to do boy things. This meant not Middle Eastern food — “We eat hummus all the time,” Noam informed me, “we’re bored by it” — but McDonald’s (again). Not the memorial to Rabin, but an evening showing of The Rock, with Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage. (“To me, it was like every other movie,” said Alon, who I remind you proudly is 10. “There was a mission, and there were hostages, and there was time running out, and there was a lot of explosions.”)

And then there were the water slide and the amusement park, where they ran off and I sat, like the other adults, fanning myself in the 100-degree heat. The teenagers who populated the Meimadion Water Park in Tel Aviv were jaw- droppingly immodest. The girls were dressed to look like extras in music videos — the bared midriff is now as much a part of Israeli fashion as the chador is in Saudi Arabia. In America, the girls would desperately try to look blonde; in Tel Aviv the girls are dark and work to accentuate the exoticism of their looks. The boys go around like a combination of Michael Jordan and a ghetto kid in Los Angeles: pants belted around the crotch, loose- fitting shirts seemingly made of mesh.

At the park, the adults kept themselves in the shade and talked on cellular phones. There are far more cellular phones per capita here than in America, and if life in Israel is any indication, we’d better get rid of the things fast, because they make going out anywhere a frenzy of overstimulation — there is a constant and persistent ringing in the air, bringing to mind the Edgar Allan Poe warning about the “tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells.” Cellular phones are so prevalent that stores have sprung up that allow you to accessorize with designer cases for your extra batteries that look like sunglasses frames.

Every now and then, but only every now and then, you are reminded that Israel is a country at perpetual war. My sister does not talk about what will happen when her sons go away to college; she talks about when they will go into the army. Five years ago, I sat with my sister and brother-in-law and Noam and Alon at 3 in the morning, all of us in gas masks, as the airraid sirens went off in Jerusalem during the Gulf War. The twins, babies then, were too small to wear masks, so they had to be put into sealed bubbles with air filters. Alon, then five, would entertain himself during the war by imitating the low, loud whistle of the siren, a noise that would make my sister stiffen.

I was struck, as I have been on every trip I have taken to Israel in the past 20 years, by the country’s sheer peculiarity. It seems fitting, this peculiarity, fitting to a country that has at once no history and the history of civilization itself written on its every square foot. Israel is tiny and meaningless, yet consider the fact that you have read to this point in this article — if it were about Sri Lanka, do you think you would have gotten this far?

As everyone recognizes, Israel exerts a fascination all out of proportion to its size, its geopolitical importance, the small glories of its democracy, or the petty tyrannies of its occupation of the West Bank. The American engagement with Israel is now of such long standing that it is (with the possible exception of Cuba) the only foreign-policy issue that has continued to interest and obsess the United States these past 30 years. Europe has faded, the Communists no more, Latin America come and gone, Vietnam a vacation paradise, South Africa of little concern. But Israel and the Arabs? Still with us. Always with us.

And yet there is one population in the United States among whom interest in Israel has noticeably dropped, and that is secular Jewry. My plane to BenGution Airport from Kennedy in New York was stuffed to the gills with Israelis returning from vacation and evangelical Christians who wanted to walk where Jesus walked. There were few secular American Jews. This is a remarkable change from 25 years ago. In 1970 my sister Naomi went to Israel to attend college, followed by my sister Rachel, who spent a few years on a kibbutz. I remember going to meet them at Kennedy when they came home for vacation. The terminal was filled with Americans just like my family, secular Zionists awaiting the return of their prodigals, who emerged from Customs dressed in the up-fromhippie attire of the day — boys with long hair (no different from today) and beards (different) toting gigantic packs on their back, deeply tanned girls in peasant skirts. Where had they been? On a kibbutz, or hiking in the desert, or on an archaeological dig, or in the intensive Hebrew-language immersion program called an Ulpan.

And you could see in their eyes that any number of them had decided to do what their parents nominally were proud of but internally dreaded — make a home for themselves in the Jewish state. They had found something there, and for decades American Jews argued about what it was. Had they discovered a clue to identity in an increasingly identity-less world? Did they feel like big American fish in a small Israeli pond? Were they running away? These were, after all, kids who did everything they could to stay out of the United States armed forces, yet were willing to submit themselves to the discipline of the Israel Defense Forces.

This is all gone. The secular American Jews who did make aliyah — who settled in Israel — seem roughly the age of my third sister, Ruthie, who went there for college 19 years ago, graduated, married an Israeli, and lives in Jerusalem still. Americans in Israel are a large but (sorry, Ruthie) aging population. Far more Israelis leave Israel for America every year than the other way around — an estimated 750,000 Israelis permanently reside in the United States, one eighth of the country’s population permanently missing.

For a time Israel was a twofer for American Jews: It was an oppressed winner. The period of their deep involvement dates back to the victory in the Six-Day War, when Israel won a great lopsided victory against a numerically superior foe. The world loves a victor, and what better victor than one surrounded by hostile countries whose —- it had just kicked? You could feel the interest begin to drain in 1973, when the Yore Kippur War proved a much tougher fight, a sadder and costlier victory. Then, in 1982, the strategically sound but politically disastrous war in Lebanon inspired the first genuine change in temperature in the American Jewish community, and gave the opponents of Israel inside Jewish America their first real opportunity to make their case against the Jewish state. Finally, the beginning of the intifada in 1987 allowed the world media to make a case that Israel was now oppressor, not oppressed. Whether American Jews agreed with that or not, suddenly Israel wasn’t so much a winner, and so some of its cachet was lost.

There was a small spasm of enthusiasm again during the Gulf War, when Israelis were once again victims, threatened by Saddana’s Scuds. The war’s end came and with it the American Jewish romance with Israel returned to the state in which it remains: a businesslike kind of marriage in which many mutual needs are satisfied but from which the ardor has faded. Even the popularity of the Oslo peace process and the martyrdom of Yitzhak Rabin could not quite bring it back.

But if the American Jewish marriage to Israel has cooled, the Israeli love affair with all things American seems to have taken over the country altogether. This was not true 20 years ago, when most Israelis considered themselves morally superior to America and Americans — harder, tougher, forged like steel in the oven of the Middle East. This was certainly an attitude my three sisters and their friends shared in the 1970s. At least, they said, Israelis aren’t wimps; they’re men. (This may explain why it is that it is common to find an American woman married to an Israeli man, like Ruthie, but far less common to find an Israeli woman married to an American man. American men in Israel seem only to marry other diaspora Jews, like Brits and South Africans. Or perhaps the Americans who marry Israeli women bring them back to the States.)

American Jews mostly agreed with my sisters; worshippers of guilt that we are, Israelis gave us a whole new way of feeling guilty. Now we could feel physically guilty, ashamed of our own cowardice, because there were these tough Jews somewhere who could shoot guns and fight like the generals of Biblical times. Of course, Israelis in the 1970s did have it far worse than American Jews, compelled as they were by bitter circumstance to be war riors instead of businessmen.

Or was it bitter circumstance? It is a truth seldom acknowledged, but nonetheless unavoidable, that the better Americans got to know Israelis, the less they liked and admired Israelis as a people and Israel as a nation-state. Israelis, as a rule, have this in common: They are rude, abrasive, and often intolerable, (My family, of course, excepted.) For decades, Zionists have sought to explain and examine Israeli behavior as a logical outgrowth of the country’s desperate position in the Middle East. A nation whose men must serve in the army until their fifties is not a place where conventional manners will prevail, especially when people live on top of one another in an area that, until 1967, was smaller than Rhode Island. They brought the rough- and-tumble manners of the Eastern European ghettoes with them, or the general pushiness of the Arab marketplace where Sephardic Jews sold and bought their wares.

With all due respect, I think these arguments are merely an excuse for the tragicomic truth about Israel’s culture. Israel is the only nation that gestated in the amniotic fluid of socialism, and the bad manners and ugliness are almost entirely attributable to the take-no-prisoners political tactics of the second generation of Zionists, who carne from Odessa and Eastern Europe with a rotten idea in their heads and the rotten disposition that came from believing in it.

Which is why the Americanization of Israel, not only in its culture but in its politics, is welcome, though it has led to a frenzy of criticism about creeping materialism and a loss of egalitarian spirit. Americans may not know it, but we are (when we are not shooting each other) a well-behaved and polite people. In his first six weeks as prime minister, the very American Benjamin Netanyahu has acted with dignity and restraint in the face of very old-timey Israeli assaults from fellow Likudniks David Levy and Ariel Sharon. And, finally, while secular American Jews are increasingly severing their ties with Israel, religious American Jews like my friends Yoram and Ya’el are reigniting Zionism. They are wedding it not to the weird universalist socialist doctrine that waylaid it in the early 20th century but to very specific, very Jewish ideas.

Israelis like them are geostrategically problematic, no question; they have found their purpose in incorporating the West Bank into Israel, and this purpose sets them foursquare against the world’s enlightened opinion. Will they succeed? Will their success mean that Israel will find itself forced to maintain dominion over a hostile Palestinian population with rocks ever at the ready?

They know this, the same thing that secular American Jews used to know, and that is true to this day: Israel is a miracle of a country, It shouldn’t exist, not by any rational standard or reckoning. It does. It shouldn’t be a major military power. It is. It shouldn’t be one of the world’s central places. It is. We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that anyone on this earth is controlling its destiny.

By John Podhoretz