"Don't Go To Strangers, Lover Come To Me"

The Israeli government has stepped in it again. The Ministry of Absorption released a campaign in the US aimed at Israelis living abroad, encouraging them to return to Israel before they become too assimilated. It was initiated in I think five places where there are large contingents of Israeli expats, including New York City, Los Angeles, and Palo Alto. The campaign apparently consists of billboards with phrases like "Before 'motek' becomes 'honey'" and "Before 'aba' becomes 'daddy'", warning of the dangers of...speaking English, I guess.

The billboards are accompanied by videos which are so melodramatic and heavy-handed (Israelis are not known to be subtle) as to be comical. The tagline is: "They'll always be Israeli. Their children won't. Help them return to Israel", complete with sad piano music and the requisite sense of fear and foreboding that Israelis are so well-trained to respond to.

Aside from portraying Israelis themselves as lazy (if your kid doesn't know what Hanukkah is, it's no one's fault but your own)*, oblivious (I hope your kid knows the word for "fire" in Hebrew, Dad), and socially inept (hey, Dafna: stop creepily staring at the graphic of a candle and explain to your boyfriend what Yom Hazikaron is; he's American, not retarded), it insinuates that Americans and American culture are incompatible not only with being Israeli but with being truly Jewish. You can imagine how American Jews feel about that...

"The idea, communicated in these ads, that America is no place for a proper Jew, and that a Jew who is concerned about the Jewish future should live in Israel, is archaic, and also chutzpadik (if you don't mind me resorting to the vernacular). The message is: Dear American Jews, thank you for lobbying for American defense aid (and what a great show you put on at the AIPAC convention every year!) but, please, stay away from our sons and daughters."

The reaction of diaspora Jews is a little more complex than that, depending on if you're reading the more conservative Ynet or the more liberal Haaretz talkbacks sections. I'm not going to wade into that issue, because a) I'm not Jewish, and b) given the tone of this blog entry already, do I really need to? What I think is interesting is what this says about Israel and, more importantly, Israelis.


Israelis have this funny habit of forgetting that other people(s) exist. My theory is that, because of the feeling in Israel of constant threat, either from "the Arabs" or Iran or the Nazis or anyone else Israelis can label as a threat, there is a constant and ingrained sense of intergroup bias that has essentially become cultural and that, in some ways, blinds many Jewish Israelis to empathizing with anyone outside of their group, including American Jews who they offended with the same mistake two years ago.

The geographical divides, especially the segregation that exists in Israel both between and within societies, reinforce this thinking and make the concept of "the other", nevermind living among "the other" and assimilating, that much more threatening. The idea of  "us vs. them" strengthens polarization and demonization, making "them" that much scarier and "us" that much safer; if you criticize Israel you're anti-Semitic, if you praise praise her even once then you're pro-Israel. It also creates a nice Hebrew echo chamber with no dissenting voices, making it easy to not only ignore the dissenters but to forget they exist. Even the fact that the Ministry of Absorption launched this campaign without consulting either the Foreign Ministry or the US Israeli Embassy, nevermind American Jews, shows that sometimes Israelis forgot that other people have opinions and feelings.

A similar situation recently happened here in Israel, when the IDF sent recruitment fliers to various Druze villages that touted its commitment "to the security of the Jewish people in their land in peace and in security". Now, I understand that 99% of these fliers (printed in Hebrew) are sent to Jewish families, but the fact that the IDF neglected, in its own literature, 20% of the Israeli population (Arab Israelis), nevermind all of the foreigners who live here (I guess I'm on my own in the case of a war?), is still a bit shocking. Equally interesting is that the focus not on protecting the country, as is implied by the name Israel Defence Forces, but on protecting a people, an important distinction for us non-Jews.

This kind of attitude is, in my experience, pretty wide spread. In some ways I think it accounts for a lot of the racism that exists in Israeli society; a more sub-conscious, instinctual self-preservation than a “fuck you, goyim!” mentality. I rarely run across people who are actively racist, but I constantly hear people say quasi-racist things without a second thought. It's like how many people will use the term "Israelis" to mean "Jewish Israelis", nevermind that a fifth of Israelis aren't Jewish. That it's unintentional doesn’t make it OK, and doesn’t make me, as a  non-Jew, feel any better, but it is what it is. Or maybe it's not. Maybe I'm totally wrong. But it's an interesting pattern.

UPDATE: Between my drafting and posting of this, Bibi has already ordered the campaign shuttered.

*Sadly, they took this video down, likely after the complaints by American religious groups that the ad implied there was something inherently wrong about Christmas. It's unfortunate, because it was the most absurd of the three (giant menorahs prominently placed; the whole nine yards), but goes to show how near-sighted the Israeli government was in releasing this campaign: not only did they not take the feelings of American Jews into account but also didn't think about how all the non-Jews would feel about their culture and holidays being portrayed as "less than".