My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (46 page)

Gabai stops. Tears fill her eyes. “When my friends read what I’ve said to you, they’ll be terribly angry,” she says. “They think the only way forward is to deny our past and deny our pain. They say we must not look back, not wallow in what happened. That’s why they pretend that the ethnic wound has formed a scab. They want to believe that socioeconomic mobility and intermarriages have diluted the problem and put out the fire. They think the Oriental-Ashkenazi divide is the one divide Israel is about to overcome. But I tell you that is not the case. I see my brothers and sisters suffocating. I see their torment. When two
thugs at the Shaar Aliyah immigrant camp took my then nine-year-old mother by force and cut her glorious long hair and left her shaven and humiliated and helpless, they wounded her soul. They told her not to be herself. And when my Ashkenazi schoolteacher in Beersheba looked at me in that condescending way and told me with her eyes that my place was at the bottom of the social ladder, she wounded my soul. She told me I was flawed. One way or another, all Oriental Israelis were wounded. That’s why the Oriental soul is a wounded soul. It was wrenched out of tranquillity and thrust into turbulence. And from turbulence into shame. And from shame into self-denial. Into forced Westernization. But underneath Westernization lie bitterness and discontent. Our great enemies are bitterness and discontent. Deri was to have freed us from them. He was supposed to head the defiance that would lead to reconciliation. So when Deri fell, so did we. We found ourselves again in the darkness. And in the darkness we ache. We bleed. We cannot find comfort or remedy or home.”

(
photo credit 12.1
)

N
INI SAYS,
“F
INALLY YOU CAN REALLY
LIVE
IN
I
SRAEL.
” H
E TRULY FEELS
it. As the millennium approaches, it is the first time that Nini can be cool here. It used to be that every time he came back from a trip to Amsterdam, he would ask himself why he came back. But this year he suddenly noticed that he is fine here in Tel Aviv. He can breathe. Tel Aviv is free and fun. It feels as if, all of a sudden, everybody has decided that enough is enough. Everyone is fed up with the bullshit, the politics, the terrorist attacks. The religious fanatics. The occupied territories. The military reserve duty. All the pressure that has always fucked up everybody’s head here.

Itzik Nini is a dancer at Club Allenby 58. At thirty-one he is good-looking and buff. Clad in a torso-hugging black T-shirt, camouflage army fatigues, and tall black boots, he looks like a European clubber. Actually, he hails from small-town Binyamina, but he came to Tel Aviv at the age of thirteen. He saw everything, tried everything, experienced everything, including all of the clubs: the Coliseum, the Penguin, the Metro. He left and came back and left again. He pursued the life of an actor-model-performer, shuttling between Tel Aviv’s trendy Sheinkin quarter and Amsterdam’s nightlife. So he knows that there are some things you still can’t do here. Like S&M. There isn’t enough openness
for that just yet. It
is
the Middle East. And anyway, S&M is more of a Western thing. But apart from that and a few other things that are really hard-core, he suddenly feels that everything has opened up here. Almost anything goes. Change is truly awesome. Even he is sometimes blown away.

What caused the change? Nini says it is peace. Because of peace Israelis are more relaxed now, more self-assured. He can see it from his window on Yehuda Halevi Street in downtown Tel Aviv. Everything is calmer. People sit in cafés for hours. They’re in the groove. No more old ladies shouting, “Shame on you, what are you doing having a good time and going to clubs and getting laid when soldiers are getting killed?”

There is another thing: MTV. Video clips really got into people’s heads here and turned them on. Now when you see kids of fifteen from some remote development town coming to the city with piercings and tattoos, you know it’s because even in their traditional hometowns they watch MTV. They see what’s happening in the world, and they want to be a part of it. They want to live. They so badly want to live.

But the real cause of change, Nini says, is drugs. They’ve hit in a really big way over the last five or six years. And every year it gets more intense. Every time he comes back from Amsterdam he notices it. So now the feeling in Tel Aviv is that it’s okay. Everybody is doing drugs. The whole world is doing drugs. And they do fantastic things, these drugs. It’s time to say it. They make everyone happy. They liberate you. They open things up, especially Ecstasy. It’s the drug of the millennium, Ecstasy. It’s not a trip, it’s not LSD. It doesn’t remove you from reality but makes you feel better within reality. It started off as a drug for very angry people. It was a pill that softened them, made them gentler, more loving. And that’s what it did for Israelis. It made them less uptight, less tense. Look at the street, you can see it. Sometimes you get the feeling that they poured loads of Ecstasy into the National Water Carrier to make everyone happy and laid-back. Take the gays, Nini says. Only a few years ago being gay was really underground. When he walked down the street with his long hair in a ponytail, people would shout: You maniac, you fag. And the gay scene was hidden, in the dark, not more than one or two hundred people. But now there are thousands, tens of thousands. And they are not ashamed anymore. They’re not afraid. They don’t give a shit. “Did you see the Purim carnival in Rabin
Square?” he asks. “Did you see the Love Parade? And the night Ehud Barak won the elections over Binyamin Netanyahu and Aryeh Deri—the gays were partying in the streets. And Shirazi’s events—hot as can be.” Everyone has come out of the closet. Millennial Israelis have pried apart the iron bars that imprisoned them.

Nini says that even the tough Oriental guys don’t say a word now. And the straights now envy the gays. It’s difficult to tell who is what. “All the straights look like gays now, and the gays look like straights,” he says. “Everything is topsy-turvy. There is openness we never had here. It sounds strange, but love is in the air. Tel Aviv is now no less exciting than New York. Maybe it’s even more exciting. And there is no less of a happening here than in Amsterdam—maybe even more. All over the world they get it. The word is out that Tel Aviv is hot. Very hot. And the scene here is really classy. It’s worthwhile coming here just for the scene. It’s getting to be a bit like Ibiza. Gays, straights, after-parties, pills. Open and sexy and totally free. Not at all like Israel once was.”

Chupi says that when you think about it, it’s pretty amazing. Just five or six years ago, house music was completely marginal in Israel. In 1993 and even in 1994, when he showed up with his box of CDs and started playing these really long tracks, people thought it was spacey, music from another world, from the next millennium. They didn’t understand it and they didn’t know what to do with it, not even how to dance to it. They still wanted music to have words and meaning. To have a human voice. Even at the Allenby 58 club, they didn’t want it at first. It was too weird.

“Who in Israel knew then what Chicago House was?” Chupi exclaims. “What Detroit Techno was, or New York Garage? Who knew the difference between highs and peaks? Who knew then that the most important thing is the DJ? People did not realize then that the DJ isn’t some technician who changes CDs, but the musician who creates the one-time music of that particular evening. They didn’t know that he is the one creating those combinations in the mixer, and that with perfect timing he hits those peaks that suddenly bring everyone together, that suddenly make a thousand people one. Because of the DJ, a thousand people raise their hands together and take off their shirts together and
shout together in bliss. The DJ liberates them for a few hours from the conflict and the wars and the stress and all the shit of this country.”

Chupi says he had to be persistent. He had to put youngsters and club owners alike through a rigorous education, to get the dance crowd used to the new thing. He had to create his own crowd by himself, the house music crowd. And then connect the people to the music, and then connect the people to one another with the music. His goal was to make Allenby 58 the mecca of house music. He went to Europe and met the leading DJs and brought back the newest tracks, and along with a few others he created a music scene here that rivals those of London, Amsterdam, or Paris. It worked. So anybody who is anybody in hard-house or club-trance knows that Tel Aviv is now one of the best. Israel is awesome. No one knows exactly why the crowd here is so special. Perhaps it’s the wars, the pressure. Perhaps it’s the sea, the weather. The atmosphere, the attitude toward life. But what is clear is that the Israeli crowd has an amazing hunger like no other crowd anywhere.

His real name is Sharon Friedlich. He is the son of middle-class German Jews who gave him an education in classical music. He is short and burly, his hair cut short and oxidized. By the mid-1990s he had become a mega-DJ. “When you are a mega-DJ,” Chupi tells me, “you have megapower. When you take your place in the elevated booth behind the glass, you know that if you just press one button, it’s as if you are pressing some point in the heads of a thousand people simultaneously. This is power. Total, sexy power. Because now they are really in your hands. You control them. And if you want to, you can send them to heaven. You can make them horny. The energy of the dance floor is sexual energy. And what they beg you for is climax. You get to decide whether you’ll give them what they are now desperate for. They are totally dependent on you. But if you are good, you wait. You don’t hit peak after peak. You play with them. You arouse them, but you don’t yet give it to them. It drives them crazy. And they shout louder, ‘Give it to us.’ And then, finally, when you give it to them, the club is like a ball of fire. Like an atomic blast. God is a DJ; DJ is God. It’s as if you’ve touched a thousand people in every part of their body. And you see all the blood rushing through them, the sweat dripping from them. And they are yours, utterly yours. They thank you and worship you because you gave them
something powerful and total. Something that nothing else in life gives them. Something you cannot find in the real life, outdoors.”

Shirazi says a real revolution has taken place in Israel. It’s not the Israel he grew up in anymore. In these last five years, everything has turned upside down. And his scene, the gay scene, is the perfect example. Until he launched his Friday night extravaganzas at Allenby 58, the gay scene was really on the fringe. It was tucked away, in places that were dim and secret. Only a few hundred people knew about them, and they didn’t want to be seen going in or coming out. Israel of the 1970s and the 1980s didn’t tolerate homosexuality. Israel was totally straight. It was a conformist society, hailing old-fashioned masculinity and sticking to strict conventional norms. But when Allenby 58 opened in 1994, Shirazi persuaded the owner, Ori Stark, to let him have Friday nights. They called it the Playroom. And they sent out invitations. At first, they were afraid. They didn’t know how straight Tel Aviv would react. They didn’t know if Tel Aviv’s gays would dare come to such a big place in the middle of town. But it turned out that Tel Aviv was not that straight anymore. It turned out that the gays dared. They came in droves, in their colorful coats and their wild outfits and their extravagant attitude. They came without any shame. On the contrary, they came with chutzpah and pride. “Standing there, at the entrance of Allenby 58 and watching that amazing gay crowd congregate, I actually had tears in my eyes,” Shirazi says. “I knew something big had happened. Something huge. We were liberated at last. The gays of Tel Aviv were liberated, and Tel Aviv was liberated. Israel was a new Israel.

“The gays are the scene leaders,” Shirazi says. “Because what the gays have is totality. Gays are very total people, that’s what makes our parties so over the top. If it’s costumes, then it’s costumes all the way. And if it’s drugs, then it’s drugs all the way. And if it’s sex, then it’s sex all the way. Anyone who comes to our Friday night parties sees it immediately. Everything is up-front. Everything is on offer. There is no such thing as busting your ass all evening so that at the end maybe she’ll give you her phone number and go with you to the cinema. With us it all goes down in seconds. We look each other in the eye, walk off to the
side, find the toilets, and fuck. And all around you the temperature keeps rising. There are go-go dancers, strippers, drag queens. Flickering lights, the beat of house music. It’s intense as can be.

“But it’s not only the gays,” Shirazi continues. “Every night that Allenby 58 opens its doors, you get this feeling that something is happening, here and now. You can’t stand calmly at the bar. You can’t just sip a drink. The music, the strobe lights, the meeting of flesh. Chupi’s guys stripping off their shirts. And the frenzy. The sexual directness. The desire for an outlet. This hyperenergized Israel that suddenly appeared in the mid-1990s insists on partying. Insists on devouring life.”