A simple walk through the market is all it took to remind me what has changed over the years, why even walking through the market isn’t simple, and to stir up some surprising optimism.
Jewish Israeli friends were having a Christmas dinner, and I wanted to buy some good vegetables for my modest contribution. So I went to the shuk for the first time in ages yesterday, on Christmas.
In my first years after moving to Israel, I used to revel in the romantic grit of the Tel Aviv shuk. By contrast to Jerusalem’s renovated market, it is unreformed. The place has been wallowing in dirt for decades. The walls, shops, grills, grates, wagons and tables are all colored a crumbling gray-brown. The ground runs with a rotted vegetable muck.
It was a bright December day, the kind of mild loveliness that reminds me why I live here.
Against the dirty-bland palette, produce was bursting off tables like a color storm. Tomatoes glowed; light filtering in through the narrow line of sky above the alley turned yellow peppers into flames. Huge bushes of fresh green herbs created scented clouds of cilantro and basil. When I pass by these, I am prone to momentary fantasies of jumping inside the invisible cloud and inhaling forever.
Edging through the packed Friday crowd, the market became a landscape of nostalgia. In those early years, I embraced my move from the US by visiting the shuk regularly, although it was far from my first neighborhood. I was dazzled by the farm-to-table sensation before the term had been invented, having left a country where food felt frozen and soulless – symbolizing how I felt about the move in general.
I had been captivated by Israel because in general I felt life to be closer to nature and the spirit of things, more raw, less packaged. Just a few days after I arrived as an olah, I found myself talking with my then sister-in-law, about why we had moved. My ex and I spoke passionately about how the US felt plastic, and Israel felt real. His sister had also immigrated some years back; she though we were idealizing. We argued so vociferously that at the end, her toddler piped up: “plastic, plastic.” She laughed and hugged her kid. I remember thinking that she felt the baby saw through us, and that she thought the kid was right.
Back in the shuk, my mind was now reflexively mapping out the places that were once my regular stops: The lady who sells spongy Yemenite lahuh bread. The nuts, seeds and spices shop had a dish of candied pecans out for sampling – they used to be my greatest guilty pleasure, but they are too sweet now for my older palate.
Though I hadn’t planned to stop at those bygone places, I got a wave of comfort to see that they were still there, even as hipster pubs and organic shops have opened up beside them. I don’t mind, actually. The market just feels more jolly.
But the soothing wave of familiarity made me realize how much else has changed – not the shuk, but me.
Of course I romanticized the country back then; I knew it on some level even then. I don’t blame myself. If not in my 20s, then when?
It’s not that I glossed over problems at that time either. But now I find myself treating even the great weather at Christmastime and mouthwatering produce as an unjustified indulgence. I had allowed myself to believe for a moment that at last here was something everyone in the region must be enjoying simultaneously –we share the sunshine and strawberries. But that reminded me that we share nothing at all. Mine is the joy of certainty and stability. Years go by, but on any given day, I can go where I want, do what I want, buy what I want, work or study as I want, and others cannot.
The price of my joy is that someone else may or may not be able to go where she wants – she can never know. Maybe she can travel, maybe not. Maybe there will be a destruction order on her house, or her brother will be detained indefinitely. Maybe a war will destroy her entire apartment building. Or perhaps none of these will happen and she’ll live sort of normally, developing regular dreams like taking a trip, studying in another part of the country, opening a business; only to have to fight bureaucracies for days, weeks, months and years, to do things I take for granted. Maybe she’ll give up.
Maybe one night a unit of six or seven soldiers in full battle gear will enter her family’s home at 2am, throw all their belongings on the floor searching for something – the soldiers themselves are not sure what – then photograph everyone, take down names and ID numbers, interrogate and record meticulous details of the family – knowing all the while that they are unrelated to terror or violent activity. That’s what Nadav, a Breaking the Silence leader, told an audience in Tel Aviv two days ago that he had done in the army. He rushed to his superiors with the photos he had been ordered to take, and waited for a commander to ask for the memory card. “I was sure we had Bin Laden on that memory card,” he said. No one cared. All the material was eventually discarded. The order had been part of a policy of “demonstrating our presence” – lehafgin nohahut.
They call me a bleeding heart for letting such thoughts mar a gorgeous Christmas day when I could be enjoying something that everyone here can enjoy – they have markets too – without worrying about the occupation.
We are called traitors, anti-Semites, foreign agents, terrorist supporters, mocked or threatened for remembering these things.
We are called those things no matter what we do or think about the problem. If we talk at home, no one listens. If we talk abroad, we are neglecting our own or airing dirty laundry. If we criticize, we are traitors or self-deluding occupiers; if we don’t we are just occupiers. If we criticize but we can’t solve the problem, we are useless, but all the solutions we propose – 1, 2 states or everything in between – are rejected. If we seek to advance these ideas politically, not enough people will vote for us, if we remain mainstream, the policy won’t change.
Those thoughts began to weigh heavier on me than 2.5 kilograms of beets in my bags. Then something about the sunlight and the colors, or maybe it was the fresh carrot and pomegranate elixir I had drunk along my walk, that made a different vision form before my eyes.
It was the same shuk. But I realized that the market is no longer just the Israeli version of the traditional Middle Eastern shuk from my early years. The subtle changes and additions I had been eyeing all along suddenly gelled into an oddball blend all its own: shopkeepers whining songs in Arab Mizrahi tropes, improvising funny rhyming lyrics designed to sell their wares, pressed up against grungy beer joints tucked in for the hipsters. The Asian food shop faces down the Russian place across the way that sells lots of traif meat. The nuts and seeds shop is run by a man with a Bukharin embroidered kippa, and the butcher is shouting to his Filippino customers about chicken, in English: “you want 1 kilo? Or two kilo? Which you want?”
It was a shuk stretching its limbs and expanding its borders. The cultural color now runs as rich as the blood-red pomegranate seeds. A stir of creativity fluttered briefly in my stomach. One day, I imagined, there will be room for all the cultures and people – even those who are already here.