A day at the beach

The trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv only took forty-five minutes in a shared taxi, but when we arrived it felt like we had traveled to another country.

Tel Aviv, which sits on the beautiful coast of the Mediterranean, is Israel’s largest metropolitan area and its most modern city.  Before 1900 the area was just a cluster of houses on the sand dunes north of Jaffa.  This location means that the weather was stifling, just as hot as Jerusalem, but unbearably humid.  On the other hand the modernity and beachfront property make the city feel like a natural party town, sort of how I imagine parts of Miami or one of the surf towns near Los Angeles.  It helps that Tel Aviv is full of really nice bars and restaurants and cafes.

The population is known to be largely secular and that was apparent from the first few minutes of walking down the street.  Of course you still see men wearing kippot and women in long skirts in far greater numbers than you would in New York, but the streets aren’t crowded with men in black hats the way that Jerusalem’s are.  Tel Aviv residents also seemed—and I feel pretty shallow and guilty saying this—quite a bit better looking than those of Jerusalem.  On the whole the city felt, to us, pleasantly normal.

In a lot of ways Tel Aviv makes Jerusalem feel like some kind of provincial outpost inhabited by fanatics.  I have grown to love this city, but I can’t help feeling that this impression of it as provincial and fanatical is largely correct.  Over a third of all Jerusalemites are ultra-Orthodox.  They live in a society of their own.  To say the least, they are not the kind of people you’ll find playing volleyball in Speedos or bikinis on the shore of the Mediterranean.  There are also very few Palestinians in Tel Aviv, as opposed to Jerusalem, half of which is technically occupied territory according to international law.  This is not to say that the absence of Arabs that makes Tel Aviv pleasant—I generally feel more comfortable among Arabs than Israelis and prefer Arab culture overall—it just makes it possible to forget for a minute about the conflict that plagues this region.

What I found interesting was that being in Tel Aviv made me feel—for pretty much the first time since I arrived here—that I can be proud of Israel and supportive of Zionism.  Zionism is a movement to provide a homeland for a nation that lacked one.  Unfortunately, much of this has come at the expense of a people who already had a homeland.  (And there have been countless flaws with the way Zionism has been implemented.) But in Tel Aviv, which was built on an empty piece of land, incurring minimal displacement, there is a feeling that maybe this project could be a success. Maybe Zionism and the State of Israel don’t have to be dominated by religious fanatics and marred by racism.  As a Jew, I do get a certain satisfaction and sense of pride from going to a café or bar and knowing that everyone there is also a Jew, this is a country that was made for us.  But that satisfaction and pride are far greater at a bar in Tel Aviv than it has ever been in Jerusalem.