To The Four Corners Of The Earth

Sobel, B. Z.

TO THE FOUR CORNERS OF THE EARTH Last year, 11,000 new immigrants arrived in Israel— and 20,000 Israelis left to live elsewhere. A Haifa University sociologist tells why B.Z.SOBEL The...

...Choosing to live elsewhere is no longer a crime, not even a desertion...
...Because over there [in the United States] I am a child of God, a child of God...
...Obviously, there is opportunity...
...it was not the desire to end their exile that brought them here, but the temporary unavailability of any alternative...
...One hears this from academics who claim an inability to write in Israel, from housewives who assert that their day is never done, from workers who suggest that their work leaves them no time for leisure...
...We have a sense of disappointment that simply is not accounted for by the objective reality, a bitterness the "facts" do not explain...
...Do the Jews and their views make Zion an impossible undertaking...
...The new nations that have come to independence during this period of world history all face the special problem of birth at a time when the world is dominated by the "big eye" of television and the (not unrelated) Americanization of the planet...
...If this be perversion, there may at least be some comfort in the knowledge that we are not alone...
...One woman, asked to explain her prospective departure, responded almost hysterically, shouting, "Why...
...My interviews indicate quite clearly that other factors must be taken into account...
...comparisons between Israel and "there" in which Israel comes up short every time...
...Is there, then, some profound cultural pattern—or, as Yehoshua suggests, a "perversion"—that prevents people from making peace with their circumstances...
...In a world in which the pattern of Everyman's expectations is spun in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue, how does a not-sonew but not-yet-old nation compete...
...at the same time, some 20,000 people left the country...
...On the basis of those interviews, it seems to me that even though the "pragmatic" considerations cannot be discounted, neither can Yehoshua's observation be casually dismissed...
...some were born and raised abroad...
...the behaviors are known...
...In late 1981 and early 1982,1 conducted dozens of interviews with departing emigrants...
...It is supposed to be a natural place to be, not a conditional place to be...
...And, therefore, one is no longer "needed," one does not "owe" the enterprise one's life and effort...
...But the issue goes beyond the effort by the emigrant to rationalize or legitimize his decision to leave...
...Are we more comfortable with marginalny than with autonomy...
...And follow they will, not because Israel is extraordinary, but for precisely the opposite reason—because Israel has become so bloody ordinary...
...Notice the queues, with not a millimeter of separation between the queuers...
...It is true, of course, that people want to earn more, to buy more, to have more...
...One hears not about appliances, but about the pervasive minor irritations that infect our life here, about the fact that shops are not open at hours convenient to the public, about inefficiency and lack of civility in government and other offices, about the low level of public discipline, about the common suspicion of one's neighbors' intentions...
...So why the reluctance of Diaspora Jews to come...
...Government leaders and establishment figures often prefer to attribute the emigration to economic factors, as if by so doing the country would be exculpated, the blame shifted to "factors beyond our control...
...Might it be that normalcy is just not a high priority goal for many Israelis...
...Is the reason a collection of pragmatic considerations—an unpromising economic situation, an absence of career possibilities, reserve duty, high taxation, an inflexible and capricious bureaucracy and so on...
...whereas, such as staid in their places, kept their peace and ease, and enjoyed still the blessing of the ordinances, and never tasted of those troubles and miseries, which they heard to have befallen those who departed...
...Perhaps that is why one hears from emigrants a recurring theme: "What difference does it make where I live...
...Pressed, they talk of the six-day work week, the need to work at more than one job in order to get by, the relative absence of household conveniences—but these are hardly persuasive arguments, since the work week is actually no more than five and one-half days, religious and national holidays provide considerable time off,' washing machines, mixers, vacuum cleaners and such are widely owned...
...Jews are no more abstemious than others, and Israel's economic development since the early 1960s has encouraged an accelerating rise in people's material expectations...
...the language is surely familiar...
...And why, why the readiness of so many Israeli Jews— including many who have "made it"—to leave...
...A large proportion of the emigrants with whom I've spoken have been abroad...
...It should be regarded not as an accident or a misfortune but as a deep-reaching national perversion...
...It's not a desire for intimacy that prompts the closeness, but the fear that if you give them an inch, they'll take a space...
...Would that the outcome also be kindred...
...I am fascinated—albeit not solaced—by a section of John Winthrop's journal, written in the mid- 1600s: "[September 22, 1642] The sudden fall of land and cattle, and the scarcity of foreign commodities, and money, etc., with the thin access of people from England, put many into an unsettled frame of spirit, so as they concluded there would be no subsisting here, and accordingly they began to hasten away, some to the West Indies, others to the Dutch, at Long Island, etc...
...Much disputation there was about liberty of removing for outward advantages, and all ways were sought for an open door to get out at...
...for the governor there invited them by fair offers), and others back to England . . . ". . .They fled for fear of want, and many of them fell into it, even to extremity, as if they had hastened into the misery which they feared and fled from, besides the depriving themselves of the ordinances and church fellowship, and those civil liberties which they enjoyed here...
...I am just as much an Israeli in New York as I am in Tel Aviv...
...With the possible exception of 1953, last year's 11,000 immigrants represent a new low since 1948...
...Israeli artists and musicians, kibbutzntkim and moshavnikim, from east and from west, native and immigrant, religious and secular, educated and uneducated, army veterans and shirkers, rabid nationalists and peaceniks, academics and carpenters—all represented in the movement outward...
...But perhaps precisely for that reason, it is important that we remind ourselves of the real limits that are part of normalcy...
...Furthermore, the recent trend is upward, and there is no sign at all that it will soon taper off...
...If there is no compelling reason to stay, why not go...
...Furthermore, the contemporary Israeli emigrant is leaving a country with a high standard of living, a flourishing western economy...
...They are not members of a frightened and oppressed minority seeking freedom in a distant land...
...Visitors to Israel these days are often amazed at the number of autos that clog the roads, the stylish dress of the women, the plethora of banks all across the country, the stereo shops, the color TVs, the phenomenon of half a million Israelis going abroad for summer vacations, the "villa" sections springing up even in development towns like Ma'alot and Carmiel...
...Israelis driving cabs, waiting tables, baking bread—and sometimes engaging in considerably less savory occupations...
...There are enough other expatriate Israelis so that Hebrew becomes the language of the neighborhood, and foods, friendships and family links can all provide the illusion of a "little Israel" conveniently located in Queens...
...Listening to them, their critiques sound genuine...
...for if one may go, another may, and so the greater part, and so church and commonwealth may be left destitute in a wilderness, exposed to misery and reproach, and all for thy ease and pleasure, whereas these all, being now thy brethren, as near to thee as the Israelites were to Moses, it were much safer for thee, after his example, to choose rather to suffer affliction with thy brethren than to enlarge thy ease and pleasure by furthering the occasion of their ruin...
...Twenty years ago, a two and one-half room apartment, one week a year at the beach, enough food on the table and an occasional luxury (a radio, a refrigerator) represented plenty...
...After all, how can we compete with America...
...More questions than answers here: Do we prefer exile to redemption...
...Is the author A. B. Yehoshua right, for example, when he asserts of the Diaspora that "we foisted it upon ourselves...
...Indeed, in certain circles there is a sense that not emigrating or, at least, not going abroad for an extended period, suggests lack of vigor or ambition...
...Zionism is now seen as complete...
...It is now, therefore, legitimate to turn one's attention to the private garden—and that, as it turns out, is a garden many want to plant in distant soil...
...If thousands of Israelis are so tenuously linked to the national existence that diverse practical problems can cause them to pick up and leave, if their ties to their homeland are so conditional as all that, there must be something peculiar about the way we live, about our sense of roots...
...I am treated like a human being wherever I go...
...It is, to be sure, hard to escape the sense that each emigrant represents a defeat, especially in light of the early enthusiasm and idealism...
...Israeli doctors at times staffing whole departments in foreign hospitals...
...But is the difference so great as to explain the departures...
...Hence the new departure may be seen as merely a move to complete an interrupted journey...
...For many who came to Israel through the years, the country was a way-station, a place to interrupt migration en route to a permanent home...
...Centrally, it is a gnawing dissatisfaction with the quality of life here rather than economic considerations that prompt the emigrants to leave...
...Is it possible that we have remained what we always were, a people of reluctant messianists who continue to be trapped between that which is and that which might be, a people that can never make peace with the here and now because the here and now can never be perfect...
...There, they argue, strangers wish you a good day as they make change or pass you on the street...
...A homeland is supposed to be a homeland, not an option...
...The media report on Israeli "wet-backs" wading the Rio Grande from Mexico into the United States, or sneaking across the Canadian border from Alaska, thence to Los Angeles on a domestic flight...
...It turns out that even after independence, our ties to the palpable Zion are weak...
...The United States, Canada and South Africa are still lands of far greater opportunity...
...I am not shouted at or abused...
...But if emigration and immigration statistics reflect Jewish perceptions, then plainly most Jews regard Golus as, at worst, bittersweet...
...Ask again, what liberty thou hast towards others, which thou likest not to allow others towards thyself...
...Z. Sobel teaches in the Sociology Department at the University of Haifa...
...typically, their sale of apartment and/or automobile has provided them a respectable nest-egg with which to start their new life...
...Zion, after all, was supposed to make "normalcy" possible...
...And this at a time when, though any Jew in almost any land can, if he or she so chooses, come home to the Land, only a handful so opt...
...I am not automatically suspect...
...Underlying this shift is the growing sense that the creative challenge of state-building is over...
...Asked to explain, he came up with a long list of minor cruelties and lapses of good taste rather than anything truly vicious...
...Israeli engineers prominent in various industries...
...What a peculiar form of continuity with the Jewish past...
...this is not Sicily, not Pelopennesus...
...Yet Israel is infused with "ifs"—and the "ifs," apparently, lead to "buts...
...Much as we might wish it otherwise, deep rootedness and binding ties are not developed overnight, and their development is still further postponed by a reality of tarnished dreams and broken promises, of moral ambiguity and political trauma—all of which are, in one degree or another, inevitable companions of normalcy...
...The dream of affluence is powerful, but by itself does not explain the movement outward...
...This problem is not unique to Israel...
...So the puzzle remains...
...An ad in the Israeli press by a South African firm seeking SO technicians elicits 1,500 responses from job-seekers...
...a significant number are professionals, and though not wealthy, they are hardly the impoverished Jewish refugees we recognize from the 19th century...
...People are politer there, merchants are more honest there, government is more benign there, the weather is better there, the quality of goods is higher there, opportunities are wider there"—and so on, a set of In certain circles, not emigrating suggests a lack of ambition...
...One hears phrases that are usually associated with underdeveloped or authoritarian societies—and Israel, of course, is neither...
...I hate thjs place...
...There is, however, another way of understanding the phenomenon of emigration...
...The parallels are apt, though not exact...
...Israel is, withal, a land of milk and honey, a country with an expanding economy, a fine climate, a free political atmosphere, a country still graced by the romance of its remarkable rebirth, astounding growth, breathtaking military victories, the only country that can nourish a rooted Jewish culture...
...And with the growing appetite, there comes a growing fear of being "left behind"—this in a country where "making it" is not yet easy...
...but it is to be feared many crept out at a broken wall...
...But all sources agree that not less than 300,000 Israelis have left the country since 1948—and some estimates run as high as 700,000...
...Indeed, the Israelis who move to the United States these days may well be the most gilded immigrant group to reach American shores in this century...
...Israeli neighborhoods spring up in the world's major cities—in Amsterdam, London, Munich, Frankfurt, Johannesburg and, of course, New York, Los Angeles and Montreal...
...Often, this unease is communicated by depicting Israel as a "blocked" society, a place where choice is inadequate, where one is "locked in...
...here, you are lucky if you are treated with any civility at all...
...What is it that not only inhibits Jews from coming, but prompts them to leave...
...On the material level, there is a certain ease in Zion...
...Israel's government statistician estimates that during each of the last two years, emigrants from Israel have outnumbered immigrants to the State...
...The pristine dream of national revival and the profound excitement of building a new state and society can, it seems, be sustained for a generation or so at best...
...In the years since 1948 and the renewal of Israel's independence, only some one out of five of the world's Jews have chosen to come live in Israel...
...In short, a mere three and one-half decades after the establishment of the State of Israel, in the wake of the greatest tragedy ever to befall the Jewish people, the Third Jewish Commonwealth is threatened by the most prosaic—and ironic—challenge to its viability: a growing lack of will on the part of tens of thousands of its citizens to remain within its boundaries...
...Is our group existence too intense to endure as a permanent condition...
...The small proportion of Jews who returned to Zion did so, for the most part, reluctantly, with less ease than the new emigrants who now depart the Land...
...For such as came together into a wilderness, where are nothing but wild beasts and beastlike men, and there confederate together in civil and church estate, whereby they do, implicitly at least, bind themselves to support each other, and all of them that society, whether civil or sacred, whereof they are members, how they can break from this without free consent, it is hard to find, so as many satisfy a tender or good conscience in time of trial...
...Where earlier emigrants were wont to explain themselves, to justify, to swear an early return, the new emigrants leave almost casually...
...On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of Israelis leaving the country are literate, at least...
...And, indeed, the Israeli community in New York—and a few other places—has achieved a kind of critical mass...
...it remains the preferred location for the vast majority of Jews, and, curiously, a beacon, of sorts, even for thousands who are (according to the theory) already home, redeemed...
...Ask thy conscience, if thou wouldst have plucked up thy stakes, and brought thy family 3,000 miles, if thou hadst expected that all, or most, would have forsaken thee there...
...Fictive marriages with citizens of other countries in order to acquire permanent residence or citizen status...
...In short, 35 years of statehood may be both too long and too short a time: too long for the dream to remain untainted, too short for the roots to take full hold...
...Why...
...In almost all cases, they believe that "people are nicer abroad...
...They're hateful...
...Unlike the Greeks or the Italians, the Israelis arrive not from areas of grinding poverty...
...Less common, though more shocking, we hear of Israeli "boat people"— young Israelis who jet to the Bahamas, then rent fishing boats for the trip to Miami, where they step ashore at the nearest marina...
...for all the material comfort, for all the ease in Zion, there is substantial unease as well...
...Israeliness becomes a movable feast, sustaining the expatriates, beckoning others to follow...
...In Yiddish, there is an old adage that holds that 'Golus'—exile—"is bitter...
...The theme one hears most often from the emigrants—and not just from the emigrants, but from those who stay on as well—is that life in Israel is hard...
...Of course, much of this may be an effort on the part of the emigrant to rationalize his move away, to persuade the interviewer (and himself) that it is not a case of his deserting the ship, but of the ship being unseaworthy, of the ship having failed him...
...But the thousands who now leave Israel are not, as a matter of fact, penniless emigrants, a "displaced rural peasantry" or an exploited proletariat...
...The global village suggests a fundamental interchangeability: Why, after all, here and not there...
...Or is it, perhaps, more sinister and more profound...
...It is not the problems of Israel that drive people to emigrate, but the lack of a perceptible magnetic force that might impel them to stay...
...Statistics on these matters are notoriously difficult to collect with real accuracy...
...Washerwomen in the supermarket don't command me to watch my step...
...A man originally from America, now en route out after 12 years here, broke down and wept, repeating over and over again the word "garbage": "People here are garbage, garbage...
...A Haifa University sociologist tells why B.Z.SOBEL The scene is by now commonplace: Outside the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv, long lines of Israelis vying both for hard-to-get immigrant visas and for not quite so hard-to-get (but not yet easy-to-get) tourist visas that can, as often as not, be finagled into green cards and, eventually, permanence in America...
...Might it be that we have become so accustomed to the "abnormal" that this deep drink of normalcy is disconcerting, literally unsettling...
...Now, we have entered the promised land of luxury flats, trips abroad, stock options, fine automobiles and the like, and we have learned that such development does not satisfy the appetite but whets it...
...The stock market booms along, personal savings are high, instant millionaires abound...
...Are we, in fact, perverse...

Vol. 8 • May 1983 • No. 5


 
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