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Assimilation

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Somewhere between Ramat Ha Sharon and Tel Aviv I had my first panic attack.

We’d picked up a new passenger at some distant, unlikely stop on the highway. As he got on the bus, a silent wave of stares rippled from front to back. It wasn’t his skin or hair color. Rather it was his unseasonable clothes—layers of bulky sweaters at the end of summer—and the briefcase he gripped with both hands.

I stood in the middle of the bus, holding onto the blue bar above. The man walked towards me. The bus jerked forward and my body swayed with the movement. I realized I had nothing to lean against, no seat—the air around me was empty and I felt alone. I wanted to be sitting next to someone. A man maybe. I wanted to grip his arm and hide my face behind his back. I didn’t want to see what was before me.

But I looked ahead, staring at the man as he passed. The people around me were watching, too, and as he continued towards the back, our eyes shifted towards each other. A teenage girl with long blond hair and a nose ring; a middle aged man with a full face and a clean-shaven head; a young guy with glasses and a backpack. One by one, we made eye contact as though we were discussing everything with our eyes.

We’re in the middle of nowhere.

What should we do?

Should we get off?

No, no. Yihyeh beseder.

Our decision was made. We stood, looking calm and still. But my heart fluttered and my shirt dampened with sweat.

Everything inside of me amped up, and my senses flew into overdrive. Edges sharpened. The people looked like cutouts placed on a bright background. I was attuned to every conversation, every sigh. I smelled her perfume, his sweat, a baby’s sweet, milk-laden breath.

When I got off the bus in Tel Aviv, I breathed hard and deep. I grew dizzy gulping air. And then, just as suddenly as it had all started, I was fine.

Or so I thought.

The next attack came a week later. An abandoned suitcase—green—on the sidewalk on Allenby. I hurried past it, my stomach churning. As I rushed down the street I listened for a boom.

By the time I reached the end of the block, I was fine.

It was the third one—on a sherut, a ridiculous place to be worried—that made me think.

Although I took heart in the fact that my panic had come and gone in a flash—quick and only vaguely annoying, like a gnat flitting in my face—I was disturbed by the change I noticed in myself. Israel had once felt so comfortable and safe to me; now it’s a mental minefield. But why, all of the sudden, when everything’s so quiet?

It’s the silence that’s scaring me.

After Israel’s horrific winter incursion into Gaza, more than 40 years of a brutal occupation, and over 60 years of dispossession, our neighbors are still angry. I know that the average Palestinian does not want war or death—but some of the fringe groups do. And my guess is that they’ve not just given up. To me, the calm Israel is experiencing right now tells me that there is something terrible on the horizon.

The media confirms this with a stream of stories about Hamas’ rearmament and Hezbollah’s new caches. The government tells us that the next war will be all encompassing—missiles in everyone’s backyards—and initiates one national drill after another, each larger than the last. When there aren’t civilian exercises, there are publicized army and emergency response drills. And there’s the occasional testing of the air raid siren (just to give us all a reminder that, no, we still don’t live in a normal country).

Is all of this just part of our culture of fear? Or are we marching towards some sort of an awful catastrophe?

I turned to a prominent historian and left-wing activist for answers. He told me, off the record, that he agrees with the government’s forecasts. Yes, an all-out war is coming. Why? Operation Cast Lead showed a barbarism he’s not seen before and, eventually, Israel will reap what it sows.

“You are right to be afraid,” this well-known member of the peace camp said.

I boarded another quiet, crowded bus. I looked at the passengers—Ethiopian, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, foreign workers, olim— a microcosm of Israel. Squeezed in together, hurtling towards some destination that we might not reach.

Fear edged in again and I realized that I’d gotten an intellectual answer, but not a pragmatic one.

So I met Boaz, a native Yerushalaymi, at a café. He was wearing a black t-shirt. On the front, in white block letters, it announced to the world: Take me drunk, I’m home. Flip, hedonistic—very Tel Aviv.

He was sitting at a table outside, rolling what looked like a cigarette. But I know Boaz, so I knew he was using excessa, tobacco mixed with hash.

“Has it come to this, that we’re rolling joints in public now?” I asked him.

And I let loose my torrent of worries—buses, bombs—as Boaz smoked.

When I was done talking, he took another drag, leaned back in his chair, and crossed his legs. He blew the smoke out through his nose.

“But this is all normal,” he said. “Not the sherut—that’s weird—but everything else.”

He tapped the joint with his finger. Ash fell to the ground.

“I know people who get scared and get off buses all the time. The problem for me when I’m on the bus and that happens is what to do? If I get off and the bus explodes, I’ll feel terrible that I didn’t say anything. But if I say something to the driver and the guy’s not a terrorist, then that’s not right, either.”

Boaz shrugged. “I just keep going.”