Why can’t Israelis just be nice to each other?

A manager at the Interior Ministry commits suicide days after being publicly shamed on Facebook for alleged racism against a black Israeli woman. What will it take for us to start treating each other like human beings first?

Last week, a black Israeli woman went to a branch of the Interior Ministry with her small children to renew a passport. She got stuck in various lines, and the versions about what happened (hers, or this one from an eyewitness) differ only in nuances. Frustrated, she spoke to the manager, telling him that she had been given the runaround on the lines because the clerk was racist. He got offended and, according to her, brusquely rejected her accusation (“get out of my face”). According to the manager, he was merely being firm.

On Wednesday, she wrote an angry Facebook post and asked people to share it. By Friday 6,000 people did so, Channel 10 interviewed her and another popular TV host picked up the story. On Saturday, the manager wrote a lengthy Facebook post expressing how hurt he was at being labeled a racist.

Then he committed suicide.

For a couple of days, Israelis spoke of little else. Everyone knows the rage that wells up when we receive foul treatment from bureaucrats or customer-service agents. There was the race aspect, dovetailing on terrible treatment of Ethiopian-Israelis demonstrating against discrimination recently.

When it turned out that the dead manager was a longtime Shin Bet agent before retiring in his 40s and moving to the Interior Ministry, the political angle exploded. Ugly responses from the Left said “I won’t shed a tear for him” — that his role in propping up the occupation was unforgivable, or that he must have been suicidal because all those terrible deeds at the Shin Bet ate away at his conscience.

Some on the right predictably decreed that the woman had manipulated her racial victimhood. Mainstream media covered the fact that he was active in organizations promoting Arab integration and in the center-left Council on Peace and Security. Those who knew him felt he was simply the wrong target for the accusation of racism.

Protesters sit in the road at a demonstration by Israelis of Ethiopian descent against police in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, May 3, 2015. (Activestills.org)
Protesters sit in the road at a demonstration by Israelis of Ethiopian descent against police in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square, May 3, 2015. (Activestills.org)

But sometimes it is not about Israel. Often people are simply not nice enough to one other. I used to think the local version — gruffness or open hostility — was a charming idiosyncrasy, since it harked back to the romantic Israeli mythology. Now I think it’s just inexcusable — here, or anywhere.

It won’t help to wax utopian about human nature. But surely there is something we can do short of overhauling whole institutions of parenting, social interaction, education systems and the particular local culture that contributes to meanness (like, I believe, the Israeli political environment).

A modest suggestion: that we consider our interlocutors as full human beings, with history and vulnerabilities just like us.

Here is a recent anecdote that I thought of — the only real parallel is the aggression.

Not long ago, I was jogging home down a narrow sidewalk on a pleasant spring morning listening to my iPod. At some point, through the music, I became aware of someone’s voice behind me saying “get out of the way.”

I turned around and saw a bicyclist, on the busy sidewalk full of people. “You shouldn’t be biking on the sidewalk,” I told him. He pushed past me and yelled backwards “it’s a shame you exist.” I shot back “do you want to run me over?!” He gave me the finger. It was only as he pulled ahead of me that I saw the child in the kid-seat behind him, who wasn’t visible when the rider was behind me.

My stomach soured and my head rang with the nasty words; my morning was shot. I wondered if I had been unfair. I wondered whether, if he had known I couldn’t hear him at first, he would have been less testy in asking me to move; if I had known first that he was biking with a kid whether I would have been less self-righteous about insisting he ride in the street. And whether if he had known that one spring some years ago, I was knocked over by a cyclist on a sidewalk, which crushed the bone in my wrist, sent me to surgery and put a titanium plate, screws and a suicide scar in my arm, and after two months in a cast and six months of physiotherapy, permanently limited my flexibility, he would have considered riding on the street instead, choosing safe routes.

But we didn’t know those things. Next time there is an altercation, we won’t know the history of the person who we believe has wronged us. Following the suicide, the woman from the Interior Ministry wrote that she has been ill-treated for being brown-skinned for years, and now the first time she decided to write publicly about it, someone was hurt. She expressed terrible sorrow. He didn’t know her history, and she couldn’t have known that he would be suicidal.

But maybe we can guess. If we think of each other first as human beings, we might then remember the experiences and vulnerabilities that go along with that. Perhaps that will help us turn the volume down a notch, especially when we’re heated. And if we can do that for individual interactions, can it get easier on the collective level too?

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