Vincent Van Gogh, "Field with Crows"

The vendor at the Subway sandwich shop on King George Street was the kindest kid I’ve met in years. He kept cracking jokes with Ruthie and me while fixing my sub, praised my choice of meat, and expressed curiosity over the guitar I was carrying. “So do you play music?”

“Yup. We’re coming back from a cafe where I played a gig.”

“What kind of tunes?”

“Tonight I sang mostly political songs.”

“Political, you mean, right? Left?”

“Left-leaning,” I admitted, having internalized that it’s not okay to say “left” in Israel anymore. Still, I was surprised at Ruthie’s further reservation: “Social left,” she said.

The boy’s face turned blank. He didn’t smile any longer, nor crack any more jokes. He handed us the sandwich blankly, collected the pay blankly and handed the change blankly. My attempt at breaking the instantly formed ice failed. We left the cold shop and walked into the cold street.

My appetite was gone. The sandwich maker was 17 or 18 years old, evidently from the Tel Aviv area, probably on his way to three years of compulsory military service. His humor showed him to be educated and open, yet openness has its limits. When one meets a monster, one’s defences are activated, and a leftist, in mainstream Israeli society today, is a monster. To the majority of Israelis, “leftist” is no longer a designation of views or a position on life and politics. I may have just as well told that kid that I am a professional back-stabber and just came back from stabbing his family. This is what Gideon Saar’s education system makes us out to be. This is the fruit of Netanyahu’s gradual takeover of the media.

The boy’s reaction reminded me of something, a short story by Hebrew author Gershon Shufman, who lived in Austria for part of his life. In this story he describes walking down a path that cuts through a field of wheat, near his small town, and meeting the town’s schoolteacher. The teacher stopped for a small chat and complained about the kids cutting through the field and harming the grain.

Several months later, following the Anschluss that incorporated Austria into the Third Reich, the two met again along the same path. This time the teacher did not stop to chat. Rather, he walked off the path and into the field, doing anything to avoid the Jew, the monster.

There are many things about my country that scare me these days. The fact that the state arrests 3-year-old children, then holds them in custody, starves them and deports them, as in the case of Kimberly and Gerladine (links in Hebrew). The fact that it builds a concrete wall to surround a community of “unwanted” people 360 degrees. The fact it decreed that asylum seekers will be held for three years without trial in a special camp to be built in the south for this purpose. Still, nothing penetrates my calm more severely than being made to feel like a monster for caring about these people. There’s just something about it that evokes a bad memory, a really bad memory.