By Vera Reider
I take the No.10 in central Tel Aviv, and, for lack of places, move to the back of the bus. I sit down, I take out my book, and then I see it, right on the glass screen between the seats and the back door, a big, round, sticker: “Now everyone knows – Kahane was right.”
Former MK Rabbi Meir Kahane was the founder and leader of the Kach movement, which called for racial segregation and for expelling of all Arabs from Israel
Slowly boiling up, I begin and try to figure out what to do about it. The bus is packed, and the seat under the sticker is occupied by two passengers: A woman and a schoolgirl. Since I can’t reach over their heads, or, obviously, ask them to move, I decide to wait. If don’t manage to get rid of the sticker, plan B is to file a complaint with the bus company.
The worst of it is that the back of the bus, where this obscene sticker is facing, is usually occupied by Arab kids. They’re traveling home to Jaffa from their Jewish schools in Tel Aviv, where their parents send them to. Whoever put this sticker there, knew who to target. Even now, some Arab teenagers are already sitting across the aisle from me.
I generally don’t like it when someone targets children; and besides, I believe one of the most potent time-bombs Israeli society is actively shoving under its own stomach, is a generation of Arab kids who constantly hear they are a demographic threat, that they’re strangers in their own country, that it’s better if they hadn’t been born at all, or if they had gone somewhere else.
Whatever. The bus enters Jaffa and begins to empty out. The Arab teens get out, and a stop later, so does the woman sitting under the sticker. I rush to grab her seat.
I try to scrape the sticker with my fingernails, but no use: It’s one of those stickers designed to be placed on the outside of windshields, and is resistant to all weather. I keep trying, and the girl next to me is very deliberately looking outside the window. She’s also Arab, a school girl, aged about eleven or twelve.
A few minutes later she gets up and pushes past me for the exit. She’s standing by the door, looking at me, while I despair with my fingernails and begin attacking the obscene sticker with a coin. And then she suddenly reaches into her schoolbag, takes out a marker pen, and give it to me. I cross out “right” and write over it “a fascist.” Then I give the pen back to the girl, and she leaves the bus. All this is happening in complete silence. A Jewish man sits down next to me, looks at the amended sticker, and doesn’t say anything either. The entire bus seems deathly quiet. The silence remains as we travel across Jaffa.
And later, back home, my husband says: “You know, I feel like watching “Cabaret” again. For the atmosphere.”
“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome”. I guess I’ll make sure to have a black marker in my handbag from now on.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs5bnVoZK4Q[/youtube]
Vera Reider is an Israeli publicist, activist, and Russian-language blogger.
