A.’s impeccable cool is winning: a ’60s black-and white, female nude mounted on cardboard is tacked onto the wall next to the bathroom, and there is a repeated miniature-shoe motif throughout his compact, roof-top studio apartment in central Tel Aviv. The hipster greets Y. and me in colour-coordinated khaki cords and hooded sweat-top, the pristine white undershirt nicely offsetting his dark skin. A. never seems to be without his retro hat, his slender fingers holding a stubbed out spliff. An aspiring artist, the twenty-something dude has plastered the wall of his open-air, chill-out zone with several nightclub event promos, including one for Submob crew in Israel on Friday 7 January and for Macy Gray’s upcoming concert (see boycott call: http://boycottisrael.info/content/macy-gray-performing-israel-already-political-stand-human-rights-and-cancel), abutted on one end with a minimalist Israeli campaign poster denouncing the deportation of African asylum seekers. Restrained graffiti in thin-nibbed black marker pen adorns the wall facing the toilet, some of which Y. translates for me from the Hebrew – the son of Yemeni Jewish migrants, A. is rediscovering African power slogans. In his kitchen, hanging from a peg, is a standard issue gas mask. For a short while we hoped he might proffer a sign of solidarity with his Palestinian brothers and sisters, but on that he did not express himself, on any surface.
My friend Y. was subletting the apartment during A.’s month’s military reserve duty with an Israeli army unit, Kfir, with a bad reputation in the occupied Palestinian territory, and we considered the surreal possibility that we would face the friendly guy with the tobacco-stained teeth across the line that divides peaceful protesters against the apartheid wall in Palestinian villages and the state’s army – a row of helmeted and armed combatants – each one all but indistinguishable from the other.
S., sitting to my right on the Easyjet flight, London to Tel Aviv, loads a film on his widescreen MacPro book: The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover by a favourite British director, Peter Greenaway.
I ask whether I can watch it with him, and the earnest young Israeli passes me one ear piece before deciding to just play it at full volume. We giggle at the sexually explicit scenes, which, on reflection S. remarks, make this an unsuitable in-flight movie. Greenaway’s intention to unsettle the viewer is clear: thugs smear excrement on the naked body of a man at night in a backstreet, as nearby a pack of dogs feeds on discarded offal from the kitchen of a pompously named, faux-baroque restaurant, “Le Hollondaise,” the film’s central set; the violent male protagonist physically assaults and rapes his wife, and his gangster assistant vomits into his plate of food. There is much that is visually stunning – visceral textures and vivid colours – and S. reminds me that the revered director trained as a painter. S. also tells me that he is a cinematography student in London and is back home with his family in Tel Aviv for the winter break. Before passing through security at Ben Gurion, I am reluctant to share with anyone the details of my trip and offer only that I speak Arabic after a year in Egypt. Why would I be visiting Israel then, he asks. Then he talks about how beautiful the Negev is and how he loves spending time in the desert. I bite my tongue and inhale deeply: about the unrecognized Bedouin villages repeatedly demolished by the Israeli military I decide to remain quiet. “After I finished my military, I travelled in China and trekked with Tibetan nomads”. “Wow” I respond, while wanting to ask if he can see his own oppressed.
The elderly woman in the bus transporting me to the central bus station in West Jerusalem asks me what language I was speaking to the driver. “Arabic”, I replied. Ah, she recalls, her grand-daughter also learned the language in the army, so she could listen in to Arabic transmissions. I could tell from the ill-fitting wig and long skirt that she is a Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jew, and when she goes on to tell me that as an American citizen she moved here 13 years ago and the Arabs don’t miss any opportunity to try to murder the Jews who are only reclaiming land that belongs to them, I have little tolerance for her unfiltered racism and blindness.
In contrast, there is a temporarily seductive quality to the stubborn innocence of all grim realities that is found in the Israeli, such as A. and S., immersed in bold art and nature but apparently blind to Palestinian suffering. Last October, another British filmmaker cancelled his teaching trip to Israel in protest at the loyalty oath bill, and in support of the BDS call. The Palestinian call to culturally boycott the state of Israel will hit this culturally-savvy new generation inasmuch as it will deny them access to live cultural productions in their homeland as long as Israel continues to violate international laws. It is also hoped that the cultural boycott will encourage Israelis to make the link between the art they consume and their own narrative of dispossession, apartheid and military occupation. All that vaunted cultural exchange, so dear to western elites is, it transpires, full of voids and disturbing silences that put into question the purported Goodness and Truth of all art in any context.
Eleanor K is a UK citizen
