When Israel’s Great Brainwashing Began

In the '50s and '60s, there was just one Israel as far as we were concerned — Holocaust-survivor, Ashkenazi Jewish, socialist and secular.

Every year after Yom Kippur, the sounds of hammer blows could be heard from the yard behind our apartment house. Three days later the sukkah stood, made of plywood covered with white sheets and decorations, and we, the most secular people on the street, were invited in.
Pictures of rabbis were hung inside that sukkah. In (the few) other sukkahs on the street, people hung photos of Israeli generals and symbols of the various units, in the spirit of the time.
Back then, our balcony faced the Lebels’ balcony. On Yom Kippur you weren’t allowed out onto the balcony with food so as not to hurt their feelings, even though my father didn’t really know his Yom Kippur and from his Purim.
They were our ultra-Orthodox neighbors. Mr. Lebel was a diamond cutter, Yossi and Benny were our friends, with their side-curls and black clothing. That couldn’t happen today. It stopped when the Lebels moved to Bnei Brak — and we were sorry. We never saw them again. Never again was a sukkah built in the yard behind 8 Stand St.
The Lebels were an exception on that homogeneous Tel Aviv street. So were "the Bukharans,” an Egged bus driver and his family. They were the only non-Ashkenazis on our street, not including Shaul Mitzri, who owned the grocery store, and the watermelon sellers in their wagons who showed up sometimes. Even the scissor sharpener would call out in German, “Hallo! Scherenschärfer!“
That was the Tel Aviv bubble back before it was called a bubble. There were no rich, no poor, (almost) no Mizrahim and no Arabs at all. Where vineyards had stood a few years before, Arabs could not set foot, not even to visit.
I think the first Arab I met was the Druze boy who came with us on a youth mission to Jewish communities in the United States to sing and dance “Song of Peace.” We were 17 years old then, Jaffa was beyond the mountains of darkness, and visits to the Galilee and Negev were a dream reserved for annual school trips, which usually only went as far as Caesarea. The Galilee was under military rule, but who knew?
In the 1950s and ‘60s, there was just one Israel as far as we were concerned — Holocaust-survivor, Ashkenazi Jewish, socialist and secular. It spoke Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian and German, and to us it was egalitarian and unified. It didn’t know anything but itself. It only asked why we went like sheep to the slaughter and said Nasser wanted to destroy us. It sang songs like “Dudu” and “Reut.”
No one told us what really happened here only a few years before. There were “gangs” and we overcame them. There were “riots” and the “English,” and of course everyone was against us. People didn’t ask what those half-ruins were everywhere, or what had happened to their owners.
In any case, the Jewish National Fund had started covering them with forests, which sprang up with the help of the saplings we brought on Tu Bishvat with great fanfare to Gan Meir park, and with the coins we put into the blue box every Friday, even when it was hard for our parents.
At morning assembly we read daily verses from the Bible. In Bible class we wore kippot — we had to — and when a Bible fell on the floor we were quick to kiss it. We had to.
We knew we were right about everything — and most importantly, we were the only ones who were right and the only victims. Anyone who wants to understand the Israeli psyche, with all its complexities, has to begin back then. That was when the great brainwashing started; it’s doubtful many other peoples underwent anything like it.
Already back then the national repression and denial were born, the dehumanization and demonization. Back then were born the alienation and racism. Relations with the Lebels were an exception, but after all, they spoke German, just like us.
[Source: haaretz.com]