Seven Years of Famine

In my opinion and from my experience, when it comes to making Aliyah, it takes a family three years to get their bearings and seven years to integrate. Children do not pick up the language in a few months, unless they are two and learning to talk, and even with the assistance of Waze, after seven years I still get lost trying to negotiate my way through the complex and decayed socialist systems of Israeli bureaucracies in all their rotting glory. Spiritually speaking, I have taken a dive to the mirky bottom of hopelessness as I look towards a future where the gap between the have's and the have not's seems to grow exponentially larger, like the government debt collection agents punitive tax on those who have fallen through the cracks of a system seemingly designed specifically for that purpose. It is almost impossible to survive in this country without a foreign income, unless you are privileged and intelligent enough to work in the high tech sector, or are either a businessmen willing to bribe anonymous customs officers with wads of cash, or a lawyer; for it is impossible to live in this country without one.

Like the spies who returned with unfavorable reports, I find myself growing more cynical as I come to better understand the reality of life in Israel. The education system offers nothing to children who are less academic by nature and while the 'start up nation' boasts a brilliant and disproportionate lead in the digital, technological and medical world, it leaves those otherwise inclined struggling to feed their families. A thirty five year old single mother of two, who spends her days bending down to pick up and carry small children in a kindergarten, earns less per hour than I did as a babysitter in my teens.

I have been fortunate enough to see this country from the ground up, listening to stories of hardship and struggle from the cabin of my partners truck. A fifty year old father of four wakes at five in the morning and returns at seven each evening, six days a week to bring home five thousand shekels a month. That's an annual income of twenty thousand Australian dollars.

An Ethiopian child stands by his mothers side watching helplessly as the government debt collection agency removes their second hand fridge from their dilapidated third story housing commission flat.

The brother of a schizophrenic losses his license and thus his livelihood because his brother has defaulted on paying rent. His bank account is frozen and he is unable to pay for a lawyer. Three years later, the government debt collection agency has charged exponential interest, almost doubling the original debt, leaving this young man carrying the burden of his brother's unchecked mental health issues. Their sixty year old mother cleans floors at the local hospital, returning to her flat on the forth floor of her block with no lift and no lights on the stairwell, where she will cook a meal for her schizophrenic son, which he will feed to the street cats because he is convinced she is trying to poison him, and she will lock her bedroom door at night when she goes to sleep.

And yet we continue to think of Israel as a country filled with well educated Ashkenazi Bnei-Akiva types, kippa sruga menches who defend our country proudly volunteering to serve in the army, who then stay on to build a better world for us all. Of course these special young adults who make Aliyah do bring with them the values of service and contribution we all admire and respect but they are the privileged amongst us and they do not represent the reality of daily life in Israel. They are the dream that entice us only to be shattered seven years on, once the country has crept under our skins and its too late to retrieve.

By then, our children are fully entrenched in independence and freedom. They roam the valleys by day and the streets by night, taking ownership of this little country. They defend its borders, its interests, its people, and then they are spat out to battle along with the rest of us against a corrupt and inept rotting system that does nothing to encourage them to stay.

“How could you come from Australia to Israel?​”, I am asked over and over again. Every Israeli I meet, be they Arab, Jewish, Muslim or Christian, would love to live in Australia, where social security is designed to support and encourage those who have hit hard times, not to bring them down, punishing them with punitive measures until they take out a gun and shoot themselves in the head.

And yet I have come to love this country too. Not for its natural beauty, vast and diverse, contained in attainable borders, nor for its never ending biblical and archeological revelations that remind us that regard for our past is as important as concern for our future and that the balance lies in the awareness of our present. Nor do I love it for its unavoidable spiritual lessons that dance too close before us – a constant flame threatening to singe the sheath dare we try to close our eyes to their teachings. I recoil from the loud music that imposes itself on the delicate ears of newborn babies dragged through pomp and ceremony and I detest the lack of care for the environment and the aged. I am astounded by the hypocrisy of religious and government institutions and I hate the hustle and bustle, the lack of regard for personal space and the outright savage fight that takes place between people daily.

But I love the Ethiopian women who walk the streets on Shabbat wrapped in white cloth, while their children lag behind laughing at each others jokes. They will go home to play on the electricity poles, for these are their jungle-gyms. I love the well dressed middle aged, Druse women who sit at the entrance to the beach road selling their home made vine leaves stuffed with rice from a pot. I love the Arab mechanic who rushes to make me coffee while I wait for his cousin to return my car from his cousin who took it to be washed after taking it for a test, saving me a few precious shekels and a long day of untold dealings. When he finally arrives a pack of school-kids spill out the car and scatter through the neighborhood. I love my neighbor who brings me a bag-full of walnuts that have fallen from the tree in her garden and the young salesman from American Eagle who sheds a tear when I listen to his story of injustice at the hand of his manager. Like me, he is too sensitive for the cut throat world of retail.

With teenage children at assorted schools, one on her way to the army and one at university, its too late now for us to go back for we are an integral part of the people, struggling daily to make sense of this strange little country we now call home, and that is why I stay. But living in Israel is no picnic, suffer no illusions.

May the next seven years be plentiful for us all.