A few days after T and S, refugees from South Sudan, had their first daughter, they were forced to leave Tel Aviv. By Florentine Lempp.

If I was the kind of person that had heroes, T. would be one of them. At the age of 23, she has just had her third child, the first girl after two boys. She’s a refugee from South Sudan who lived in Egypt for a while, until there too life became unbearable.

Almost two years ago, she walked across the border from Sinai into Israel, together with her husband S., in the search of a better life for their children. They carried the boys through the night, fearful of being caught by Egyptian soldiers or abandoned by the Bedouin smugglers to whom they had paid a large sum of money to guarantee their safe crossing.

They are devout Christians. According to S., they prayed, and their prayers were answered. They crossed the border unharmed and finally found their way to Tel Aviv. The rent here is outrageous, but what can you do – if you don’t take the apartment right away, another refugee will come, who might be willing to pay even more in order not to have to sleep in the park.

When I first met T., she was already four months pregnant. She had quit working in a kindergarten for children of refugees and foreign workers and was now only taking care of her own two kids – the quiet but very affectionate five year old, and the cute but hot-tempered little one, whom they lovingly call “Balagan (chaos) Boy”. I’ve never seen her sad, or worried, or even exhausted in light of what she has been through. When a friend got sick, when a neighbor had a child, she was always there to help.

On a very hot June afternoon, when the little electric fan in the apartment was unable to provide any relief from the heat, we took the two kids to the park. With a belly as big and as round as a basketball, about a week before she would give birth, we were sitting near the playground in Lewinsky Park, watching the boys running and climbing, ignoring the comatose homeless man sleeping under the slides and the used needles in the grass. We talked about the immigration police and the expected raids, their orders to expel those who don’t have a valid visa.

T., like so many Sudanese refugees, holds only a “conditional release” from prison, but it doesn’t allow her to live in Tel Aviv – or, for that matter, anywhere between Hadera and Gedera. It also does not allow her, or her husband, to work legally in order to support themselves. But someone has to pay for the apartment and for food.

The reason why the authorities don’t want the refugees to live in Tel Aviv is because, so they argue, the refugees take jobs and apartments that would otherwise go to Israelis. But whoever has paid attention to the kinds of jobs that refugees are doing, will see that it has been decades since those have been done by Israelis. Dishwashing (and other low-wage jobs in restaurants), cleaning and construction work have long been the domain of Palestinian laborers. Ever since the Second Intifada, the void of Palestinian laborers has been filled by refugees and foreign workers.

As for the apartments, I doubt that the shortage of affordable apartments would be solved by removing the refugees from the houses around the two bus stations, an area which is very unlikely to undergo the same process of gentrification that we have seen in other quarters of South Tel Aviv.

T. likes Tel Aviv. There is work here, and the landlords in the south of the city are used to renting their apartments to refugees (even though they demand exorbitant prices). The UN offices are here, and it is not too far from the Population and Migration Authority’s offices in Lod. Here, there are several aid organizations that support refugees and there is a free clinic in nearby Jaffa. But most of all, there is a community of refugees from South Sudan here who know and help each other. If they had to move to the periphery, they would lose their support system.

Two weeks later: the new baby was born, and S. was arrested shortly thereafter by the immigration police. They let him go, under the condition that he and his family leave Tel Aviv within the next six days. He went to Hadera to look for an apartment and a job, while T. stayed home with the kids, partly because she’s worried about the immigration police and partly because it’s too much of a hassle to leave the house with all three of them to look after.

He was not successful. Landlords and employers alike are wary of the “conditional release” that makes him look like an ex-convict. But he’s not giving up.

Neither T. nor her husband is expecting any favors or welfare from the state, all they want is safety for a while, for themselves and for their children, until they can go back to South Sudan. While in Israel, all they want is the chance to support themselves, to work for their living, like everybody else. In the meantime, despite the dire situation, and against all odds, they are optimistic that God will help.

The little baby girl is called “Joyce”.

Florentine Lempp is a political scientist, and works as a program coordinator for German study tours to Israel. She has spent much of the past year volunteering on behalf of the African refugee community living in Tel Aviv.

Published on Haaretz.com on July 27, 2009.

Her latest book just released in Hebrew, the author discussed disaster capitalism, Israel and the growing boycott movement.

Naomi Klein, a Canadian journalist and activist and the author of No Logo, was in Israel-Palestine last week to promote the publication of the Hebrew and Arabic translations of her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Accompanied by her husband, journalist Avi Lewis, Klein spoke in Haifa, Ramallah and Jaffa, visited Jerusalem and Gaza and participated in the weekly protest against the separation wall in Bil’in.

Her appearance early on a Saturday morning at the Arabic-Hebrew Theater in Old Jaffa was somewhat low-key, apparently publicized only on a few leftist websites and blogs, as well as on Facebook.

Disaster Capitalism

Klein began by briefly discussing the idea behind the book. The Shock Doctrine, she said, is a book about “disaster capitalism,” a term which can be loosely defined as a neoliberal political-economic strategy that exploits a society’s sense of shock in the aftermath of traumatic events to push through a radical agenda of free-market capitalism, privatization and deregulation.

The book traces the origins of the strategy from Latin America’s military coups through Thatcherism and the post-Cold War era in the West to the aftermaths of more contemporary shocks, such as 9/11, Iraq and the Asian tsunami.

The idea for the book, Klein said, came to her during the invasion of Iraq. Seeing how the invasion paved the way for an avalanche of “blank slate” economic policies, hastily imposed by an unelected leadership, Latin American friends of hers were struck by the similarity to their own national histories. “They did this to us,” they told Klein, who was in Argentina shooting a documentary at the time.

“Our elites exist in a state of acute disaster preparedness,” Klein told the Jaffa audience. Not, however, the kind of emergency preparedness that would have been useful in the aftermath of, say, Hurricane Katrina. Instead, governments, corporations and power brokers worldwide, said Klein, lie in wait for crisis situations – situations in which they believe they can get away with things that they couldn’t under normal circumstances.

Take the “War on Terror,” for example. A lousy political strategy, says Klein, but an excellent business plan, the War on Terror leveraged the shock of 9/11 to create a new framework for tech companies, devastated by the dot.com bubble, to recast themselves as security firms. Often, this was possible with only minor changes to the technologies or services being offered. Indeed, the “homeland security” industry, which barely existed a decade ago, is today a significant and growing market, with ongoing wars in places like Iraq providing a host of business opportunities for the well-connected.

Israel as a Warning?

Israel, for better or for worse, plays a starring role in The Shock Doctrine. The final chapter of the book, ominously titled “Losing the Peace Incentive,” describes Israel as the prototype of a disaster capitalist state.

Not so long ago, said Klein, in the early 1990′s, Israel’s business and industrial leadership were still actively lobbing the government to negotiate some sort of peace with the country’s neighbors. The violence and chaos of the First Intifada were considered bad for business, so supporting peace was the natural alternative.

By the early 2000′s, however, Israel’s economy was in the dumps, reeling from the bursting of the dot.com bubble and the uncontrollable violence of the Second Intifada. The Israeli government responded by pouring money into the military, which then served as a kind of business incubator for Israeli communication, security and surveillance firms.

Once out of the military, many Israelis took the knowledge they had gained to create new start-ups, which were perfectly positioned to take advantage of the homeland security boom after the attacks of 9/11 made counterterrorism a top priority in the US. The Israeli leadership, seeing the opportunity, was quick to point out Israel’s long experience with such things, rebranding the Israeli security sector as the industry leader.

While this may seem like simply a clever business strategy, Klein sees it as a dangerous threat to the prospect of peace.

In every country where the population has eventually risen up against oppression, she said, it was because of two factors: the loss of a feeling of normalcy and prolonged economic hardship.

In Israel’s case, “bubbles of normalcy like Tel Aviv” substitute for genuine normalcy, and the hardships resulting from ongoing conflict are born by one side only, while the other side actually profits from it. In this situation, the worst case scenario for economic interests is for peace to break out (what will happen to our comparative advantage?). Or as a former businessman told Klein in Gaza: “For Israel, peace is a luxury.”

This extends to the production of culture, which according to Klein has been co-opted by the State for its own purposes. Israel has a new branding strategy that asks the world to get “beyond the conflict” and see the other side of Israel. As part of the strategy, the country has tried to create a different image for itself. Israeli models in bikinis posing for men’s magazines, for example, or the construction of a Tel Aviv-esque beach in New York’s Central Park.

The Boycott Movement

This is where the talk turned to the boycott (officially: Boycott, Divestment, Sactions), which Klein described as a non-violent Palestinian resistance strategy meant to isolate Israel in the international arena, similar to the boycott of apartheid-era South Africa. Klein supports the boycott, and tried to convince her Israeli audience to support it as well.

As she explained it, the boycott strategy does not mean ostracizing Israelis. The idea is to avoid contact with official Israeli institutions. Thus instead of publishing the Hebrew version of her book with a large, commercial publishing house, Klein found a small, activist publisher called Andalus, which translates works of Arabic literature into Hebrew as an “act of resistance.” Klein donated the rights to her book in Hebrew to Andalus, thus supporting a cultural project that she believes in while “boycotting the Israeli economy, but not Israelis.”

By supporting BDS, Klein wants to send the message that Israel is not a normal place, and should not be treated as one. In an interview with Haaretz ahead of her visit, Klein said:

“The State of Israel is trying to show that everything is fine in its territory, that it’s possible to spend a nice vacation here or to be part of Western culture, very Western culture. I don’t want to be a part of that. I am waiting impatiently for the time when I will be able to come for a vacation or a normal book launch in Tel Aviv. But this is a privilege that should be reserved for all the inhabitants.”

Klein, who presented the boycott as external pressure meant to help the Israeli Left bring about change from within, has found it to be a tough sell among Israelis. Israeli Jews are the “missing piece,” she said, yet they “are not accepting this in the spirit of cooperation and movement-building.”

The audience, some 100+ people, mostly Ashkenazi, very leftist-looking, and squashed into a domed, ancient Arab structure converted into a theater, showed no overt enthusiasm for Klein’s call to support the boycott. In Israel, a country where many feel that the entire world is against them in any case, convincing people to boycott themselves will probably take a bit more convincing.

Still, Klein’s books sold like hotcakes, and not just because they were being offered at a discount. The Shock Doctrine is a milestone in the intellectual effort to understand the neoliberal age, and its translation into Hebrew will make it accessible to an audience in a country where neoliberalism is still very much alive and kicking.

By putting Israel’s own sophisticated disaster capitalism complex in the international context, the book will hopefully lead Israeli readers to new insights about the political and economic policy choices made by their leaders. And if the concepts explored in the book manage to penetrate Israel’s cacophonous political discourse, Klein will have made a huge contribution toward bringing about internal change in Israeli society.

Israel’s new point man on refugee issues spouts some pretty shocking opinions in an interview with Haaretz.

Handwritten poster hanging in a Darfuri refugee shelter in Tel Aviv (photo by Daniel Cherrin).

For about a year and a half now, I have been volunteering with the African refugee community in Tel Aviv. I’ve heard some of their stories, formed several friendships and met some incredibly inspiring and resilient people along the way.

Although in many ways the community is much better off now than it was a year or so ago, African refugees continue to face adversity and prejudice in Israel. While gradually emerging from their own personal traumas, and their collective culture shock, the refugees have met with a strange sort of hospitality on behalf of the Israeli government.

For several weeks, rumors have been circulating that the government is gearing up for a large-scale operation to arrest and expel “illegal” foreigners, including foreign workers, refugees and asylum seekers. Recently, a bill was overwhelmingly approved by the Knesset which would criminalize the refugees (Hebrew link to the text of the bill) and those who assist them.

Last week, Haaretz’s Nurit Wurgaft published an extensive interview with Yaakov Ganot, head of the Population Administration in the Interior Ministry, who agreed to shed some light on the subject (read it in English here and in Hebrew here).

Ganot, the architect of the government’s “Hadera-Gedera” policy (which prohibits refugees and asylum seekers from living and working in the center of the country) is in charge of a newly-formed government body, the Population, Immigration and Border Authority. Among other things, the authority will take over the issue of refugees and asylum seekers in Israel, and is set to begin operating July 1st.

I have to admit that I was so shocked after reading this article for the first time that I had to read it again. It wasn’t any easier to digest on the second reading.

The good news for people who care about human rights is that Ganot has no intention of forcibly deporting the 20,000 or so African refugees currently living in Israel. The bad news is that he is not inclined to do them any favors either, and apparently views them as lawbreakers by default: “The kind of thing you find nowadays in Tel Aviv, where illegal workers and infiltrators can just go about freely, this has to stop.”

In a display of circular logic that only an authentic Israeli bureaucrat could produce, Ganot explains that the refugees’ poverty is bad for Israel’s image: “They send the money home, live in horribly crowded conditions, and also give Israel a bad name, because they live in such poor conditions. A hundred people in a moldy shelter, 20 people in one apartment.” If Ganot’s new authority has any concrete plans to improve their living conditions or reduce the crowding in their apartments, he doesn’t mention them.

Ganot admits that the refugees are exploited by employers because they are illegal. The reason they are “illegal” is that they are not officially recognized by the government as refugees. Still, Ganot doesn’t understand what the big deal is: “We don’t send them back, so why do they need that official recognition right now?”

“They’re not going to be lovers of Israel because they’re hunted,”he adds. This is one of the myths put forward by the government – that these are mostly Arabic-speaking Muslims from enemy nations, and they are no great friends of ours. Many will also hint, as Ganot does, that there are security issues at stake.

From my personal experience, the opposite is usually true. While most do speak Arabic, and a great many are Muslims, the refugee community is probably among the more patriotic groups in the country. While I can’t speak for all, the refugees that I know are eternally grateful to Israel and to the Jewish people. They study Hebrew, hang the Israeli flag and some even wish to enlist in the army.

To write off the entire community as “not lovers of Israel” is not only an affront to the refugees, it is also short-sighted. Imagine what will happen when these young Darfuri and South Sudanese men return to their country speaking Hebrew and grateful to Israel for the asylum that they were granted here. What better allies could Israel ask for in a hostile state like Sudan? That officials like Ganot cannot grasp this testifies to an unfortunate lack of imagination.

In an apparent contradiction, Ganot admits that the refugees are just “scraping by,” but then goes on to criticize them for making “pretty good money,” which he says they send out of the country to their relatives: “When a Sudanese arrives here and goes to work cleaning houses, he makes pretty good money. He doesn’t pay income tax, or health tax. They live 20 people to a room. That’s [an income of] two thousand dollars.”

And, of course, Ganot cannot resist delving into meaningless and irrelevant demographic calculations: “We’ve reached a situation in which 1,680 people arrived in one month alone, when our entire aliya [Jewish immigration to Israel] is 14,000 people per year.”

He also can’t help but indulge in ignorant and racist stereotypes: “There are people who defecate in the waiting rooms, who attack and bite.”

In Ganot’s world, this is a new kind of phenomenon, which he calls “refugee foreign workers” – here by choice, not for lack of choice: “In our examinations, I would say that 99.9 percent of them are here for work. They’re not asylum seekers, they are not at any risk.”

On the South Sudanese: “Nothing is happening in southern Sudan. They didn’t come to us from Sudan. They come from Egypt, where they heard there’s a chance to make money in Israel.”

On the Eritreans: “The Eritrean ambassador met with me and he said, ‘Tell me, sir: If you had army deserters, what would you do with them?’ I said, ‘I’d put them in jail.’ He said, ‘They’re deserters. It’s not right that instead of returning them to Eritrea, you keep them here.’”

He neglects to mention that, unlike Israel, Eritrea is a cruel dictatorship that forcibly conscripts its young men in order to fight frequent and superfluous wars. The US views it as a “rogue state.” Ganot, apparently, has found a common language with its officials, who last year called on Israel to repatriate Eritrean “army deserters” to their homeland. Eritreans in Israel, for their part, are convinced that returning to their homeland would mean certain death at the hands of the regime.

And, as if his comments were not sufficiently insulting, Ganot even mocks the suffering of the refugees: “They’re upset about one thing only: That they can’t be in Tel Aviv, make a lot of money to send home, sit here and cry.”

The fact that the Israeli government has chosen to appoint someone who openly makes statements like these to a position where he is responsible for the fates of some 20,000 African refugees is revealing. As opposed to the (mostly volunteer) organizations that approach the refugee community from a position of compassion, respect and human solidarity, the government is determined to deal with the refugees as an unwanted nuisance – banishing them to the margins of society and issuing self-fulfilling declarations describing them as hostile infiltrators and enemies of Israel.

One can’t help but wonder if the politicians and government bureaucrats have already forgotten that they too, along with the entire Jewish people,  were once a nation of refugees, and that in their own interminable period in exile there were also those that chose to accomodate them, and those that chose to persecute them.

Postscript: In her July 1st op-ed in Haaretz, Avirama Golan offers an interesting explanation of the phenomenon described above. In her view, the Interior Ministry’s decision to target non-Jewish foreigners is the result of socio-economic and class politics, couched in the discourse of Jewish ethnic and religious identity:

“The Filipinas who bathe our elderly, the Chinese who build our luxury towers and the Thais who cultivate our fruits and vegetables for export often displace Israel’s Arab citizens. These citizens have no lobby, and no one cares about them or their lack of employment. In contrast, the Africans, South Americans, Ukrainians and all the rest, who clean houses and do other household scut work, displace a different group – the Jewish lower class.”

This class of people is effectively Shas’ electorate. Shas holds the Interior Ministry and dictates policy to officials like Yaakov Ganot that are charged with executing it. Shas, eager to serve as a lobby for its voters, thus chooses to expell foreigners working in one sector of the economy, while “importing” more and more foreign workers for another economic sector – all the while presenting these policies in the language of “Hebrew labor,” while ignoring questions of humanism and universal values.

Reflections on a visit to the USA during the first days of the Obama era, and in the wake of the Israeli elections.

“No entrance to leftists!” A satirical take on Avigdor Lieberman by left wing party Meretz.

Being back in the States after a prolonged absence is always instructive. Living abroad gives you the space to take a detached look at American culture and politics, which can reveal some remarkable insights.

I have been living outside the country where I grew up for most of the last ten years. I wasn’t here for September 11^th, but I experienced the extreme sense of fear and loathing that followed it on a visit back in 2002. I witnessed the wars and scandals of the Bush era from afar, but on each visit back found that latent streams of intolerance and prejudice (I grew up in the South) were steadily emerging out of the shadows and into the daylight.

Perhaps the climax of the absurdity of the Bush years was the Hurricane Katrina debacle, which occurred while I was in New York visiting my grandmother. I saw this disaster through the same media lens that the rest of the country saw it, and on subsequent visits I managed to catch some of the shockwaves (for example, Spike Lee’s ferocious documentary about what happened during and after the storm.)

Like it or not, the way that Americans perceive reality (or perhaps the way that the American media presents “reality” to Americans) is different from the way the rest of the world perceives those same events. Indeed, you can be sure that the BBC painted a far different picture of the Katrina aftermath than did the American news networks. I particularly remember a shot in a BBC report of armed private security guards (Blackwater?) protecting some storefront in the French Quarter, while an obviously wet, traumatized and hungry black family huddled across the street helplessly.

However, history is a series of pendulum swings, as my father likes to say, and lately it seems like the USA really has turned a corner. Barack Obama’s brand of hope is not just a slogan. I’ve met several people who didn’t vote for him here who couldn’t help but admit that the guy just seems real and sincere. (An anecdote: Watching Obama speak on TV, I remarked offhandedly to someone that the guy has great charisma. “So did Hitler,” she answered me. But even she admitted that she couldn’t help but be impressed by him.)

Not just that, but suddenly the whole Washington process, so shrouded in secrecy and tucked out of site during the Bush era, is exposed in all its vulgarity right there on everybody’s televisions. Press conferences, town halls, “bipartisan negotiations” are all being held in plain sight these days, and our leaders are bluntly stating that they just aren’t sure. They don’t have all the answers, and they are not certain that what they are fighting for is even going to work. A refreshing whiff of honesty, in my opinion.

Still, America is in bad shape. Even in the best of times, this has always been a country where people are always preoccupied by their economic situation. Strange that, in the world’s richest country, life always seems to revolve around money: working hard, climbing the ladder, buying stuff, paying off debts, loans, mortgages. Believe it or not, I’ve been to plenty of “poor” countries where money worries are keeping a lot less people up at night.

But these are not the best of times, in fact they are downright lousy. Everyone has heard the bombastic rhetoric about the severity of the crisis – that’s nothing new. What is new, at least for me, if how close everyone feels to it. I can’t remember the last time I felt so much fear and uncertainty in the air in America. I mean, paying back loans on a fancy car that maybe a friend of mine couldn’t afford, yes. But all these stories about overqualified people applying for crappy jobs because there are just no decent jobs to be had right now – that’s something new. And what’s worse is that everyone seems convinced – and I am inclined to agree with them – that it will probably get much worse before it begins to get better.

Yup, things here are in really bad shape, a real disaster, but perhaps not as bad as in my adopted homeland, where I’ve been carrying on a pretty pleasant existence, with notable exceptions of course, for most of the past decade.

Believe it or not, I’m talking about Israel. I know that for most Americans, Israel seems like a place where things are constantly blowing up left and right – and there is some truth to that. There have been some really bad times. It’s not easy living in a country where there’s a war or national trauma pretty much every other year – and the time in between is spent agonizing about the last trauma and trying to anticipate the next one.

Granted, Israel is no Shangri-La, but it does have its advantages. Until recently, the cost of living was fairly low. I was able to live smack dab in the center of Tel Aviv for perhaps a fifth of the rent that I would be paying in New York City. The weather is good for most of the year, there’s a great beach five minutes away, and I can get pretty much anywhere I want in the city by bike. Sounds almost idyllic, right? And by the way, terrorism in Israel’s cities (excluding those located near Gaza) has been almost nonexistent for a few years now. Politically, a promising new grassroots movement won several seats on the Tel Aviv city council, and for the first time a slew of green parties took shape in order to compete for seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.

Then, however, something snapped.

It started with the Gaza war. I was absolutely shocked to hear one Saturday morning that the air force had killed 150 some people in the opening act of what was to become a month long assault. From that first day, and until the fighting ended in late January (with both sides declaring unilateral ceasefires), I was seized with a sense of hopelessness that I don’t recall having even in the darkest days of the Second Intifada, when multiple buses were blowing up every day.

Perhaps I was too young to really grasp what was going on back then, or perhaps I was more insulated (living in university dorms without a TV), but I remember thinking back then that, somehow, things would eventually work out. The fighting would exhaust itself, the “leaders” would drag themselves back to the negotiating table, and somehow the situation would improve.

I can’t say that I feel that way today. Not only was this war savage and one-sided, that’s really not all that new (although in my opinion this one broke new ground). And it’s not only that (on both sides) civilians bore the brunt of the fighting. Unfortunately, that’s pretty standard as well.

What truly disturbed me about this war was the almost wall to wall support that it engendered inside Israel. Very few dared to question the war’s goals, methods or necessity. In the first few days of fighting, only the extreme left in Israel had the courage to protest against it. Noted leftist intellectuals publicly expressed their support for the attack, and even “leftist” political parties rallied around the flag and the country’s leadership. For most Israelis, this was a war of no choice. They shot missiles at us for 8 years, so what did they expect, that we wouldn’t eventually react?

Society’s reaction to the war was one of weary enthusiasm and acceptance, and its reaction to those who dared to oppose it was vitriolic rage. “How dare you traitors weaken our morale when my son is in there fighting to defend you, you leftist piece of trash.” These were the shouts of passersby when they stumbled across a protest in Tel Aviv calling on the country’s leadership to stop the killing.

The media wasn’t exactly helpful either. With Gaza sealed off to journalists, the Israeli press was only too happy to focus almost exclusively on the suffering on “our side.” Endless images of harried  grandmothers shuffling into shelters in the wake of bomb sirens and burnt-out cars, struck by Palestinian missiles, painted a picture of very real distress in the country’s south. The nation’s sympathies truly went out to the residents of the south – but it came at the expense of the knowledge that the other side was suffering from daily air raids, tank shells and a muscular ground invasion.

After the fighting finally ended, the smoke cleared to reveal a new political landscape. Whether it was a conscious political decision or not, the war had managed to push all non-security issues to the fringes of the political debate. The country was in no mood for such “luxuries,” and people were looking for the proverbial “strong leader.” Fed up with their lot, and perhaps despairing of a better future for themselves and their children, many people began to sound less and less rational, and the political discussion turned increasingly shrill and emotional.

Into this mess stepped Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from the former USSR, a settler and a hooligan. With his cold stare and slogans like “Only Lieberman understands Arabic” and “No citizenship without loyalty,” it was clear to everyone that Lieberman was just the guy to finally put those Arabs in their place and show everyone in the Middle East who’s boss. Lieberman, cool and calculated, was only too happy to play on the deep-seated fears and anxieties of his countrymen.

And so, today, as America awakens from eight long years of stagnation, a familiar visitor like me can still catch a glimmer of hope in peoples’ eyes. After almost a decade of Bush, people are understandably weary, and cynical about government and politicians. And with the economy going down the drain, people are clearly withdrawing into their own worries. And yet, there is hope.

In Israel, where for so many cynicism long ago triumphed over hope for a better future, we are entering a period akin to the Bush years in the States. Yes we can? In the Israel of Bibi, Lieberman and their cronies, there is no Obama effect. The people have spoken, and they have received exactly what they asked for: stagnation, misgovernment, war-mongering and above all a deafening absence of hope.