the exile within

Granted. I don’t often take public transport. Both my parents’ cars’ gas supplies are directly or otherwise funded by the state; I like to think that the right subversion is worth the environmental cost. But then you see a different world when taking the bus. You join a social sphere that a car’s stereo and electric windows would be blocking out, and you get to see things you would not if your eyes had to focus on the road ahead. Enter the most proto-fascist Israeli advertising campaign since the ubiquitous “We Will Win” stickers produced by the National Bank two summers ago during the IDF-Huzbullah clashes in south Lebanon. On a big and bright led screen at the exit from Ramat Hasharon, I see the following text animation in nationally-apt blue and white: 

“Ever had elephants in your barrel? Then you are a Real Israeli!”

‘Elephants in the barrel’ is IDF slang for dirt inside a soldier’s gun, as routinely checked for by superior officers. I stare in shock and stop chewing on my apple. Then the lights change and the bus moves on. I was aware of this joint venture from Israel’s leading advertising offices, launched to assuage fears that “youth army motivation” is on the serious decline, but it was one thing reading about it in the paper and quite another being on the receiving end of such a vehement message in public. They are turning the wheel back: the very notion of citizenship is again centred around militancy. Taken to its logical conclusion, this campaign is trying to draw a very clear line in the sand: if you have not been in the army then your Israeliness is either questionable or completely false. The ad using the Hebrew masculine for “Real Israeli” only reinforces the implicit here: men who shoot guns in the army are the purest manifestation of all that is good about being Israeli. They are the rock of our being as a society. 

I change buses and reach Jaffa, one of the only truly multicultural towns in Israel. Those publicists are evidently rich enough to make sure all eyes, at one point or another, set on their propaganda, regardless of whether their owners are on or off the bus. Passing through Yefet street, the side of another bus taunts insistently: 

“A real Israeli doesn’t dodge the draft.”

The irony is in such extreme proportions that nobody seems to notice it anymore. If you are Arab in Israel you are automatically exempted from serving in the army. Think of it as a trust issue. A Jewish administration does not want Muslim Arabs hitchhiking along the country with M16s, civil equality or no civil equality. You never know when they might pick up the plot and join the Palestinian national struggle. The ad on the bus, then, is not only a crude reminder of the 2nd rate status of Arab citizenship in Israel, it is in fact hinting at the eventual and complete revocation of such citizenship in the first place: if the state is Jewish then Arabs cannot join the army, and cannot shoot guns, therefore they can never be or become “real Israelis”.