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If it was the sense of the exotic that tugged at my heartstrings through all these months in the Arab world - the crowded souqs, the pungent spices, the men kissing and holding hands and carrying on like a trailer for
Spartacus - it’s the utterly familiar that gets me off to a good start here in Israel. There are young mothers in yoga pants and Crocs and men wearing baseball caps with
Daytona Beach stitched across the front. There are kids debating the National League East standings on a park bench. There’s even a middle-aged dad tossing around the ol’ pigskin with his son on the sidewalk. It’s like I left Damascus and ran smack into the Jersey Turnpike, hitching a ride in the back of a Ford Taurus while some guy named Eddie fiddles with the radio.
There’s an easy-going air about Haifa, a sort of casual prosperity that, you suspect, owes much to the university sitting at the top of the hill. Around Carmel Center, with its cafés and falafel shops and late-night noodle joints, the college kids are out in force: guys in frayed jeans and rumpled t-shirts, girls in flip-flops and short-shorts and oversized
baseball caps resting low on their smooth foreheads. It’s a scene not unfamiliar from any American college town, a whiff of earnestness and tireless procrastination, coupled with the suspicion that mom and dad are footing the bill.
I take to this town from the start, as much for the lazy days of free WiFi and bottomless coffee as the broad expanses of leg being flashed at every turn. It’s here, in sunny Haifa, that I’m reacquainted with certain truths of animal longing that millions of years of evolution have created and pop fashion has honed. “Israeli girls are so fucking hot,” is how I put it in an email to a friend, an observation that - coarseness aside - seems to tidily sum up the situation at hand.
I’m reacquainted with casual flirtation, too, a near-forgotten pastime that I’m pursuing around town with democratic vigor. I’m reminded of the baroque measures some of my Arab friends had to go through to meet girls, the parental petitions and social constraints that gave a simple cup of coffee all the gravity of a war-crimes tribunal. You don’t appreciate the sweet, simple pleasure of flirting with a pretty waitress until you’ve
been denied it for months on end. And with apologies to all the fine waiters I’ve encountered in the Middle East - the sparkling eyes, the wisps of moustache, the English they fumbled like a hot potato - there’s no better way to enjoy your falafel than with a whopping side dish of crass innuendo.
Life in Haifa feels improbably normal, in spite of the turbulent Lebanese border just 25 miles to the north, in spite of the ever-bubbling cauldron of Palestinian-Israeli politics. Maybe I was expecting a bit much from this country from the start: more impassioned debate on the street than idle chit-chat in the cafés. But I get the sense that for all the pressure-cooker politics of the region, for all the hostile neighbors that surround it, Israel isn’t entirely unlike the place that I call home.
One night I have dinner with Adi, a local
CouchSurfer, and her friend Yfrat - both students at the university. We eat at a stir-fry shop in Carmel Centre and then browse through the walls of movies at the neighborhood Blockbuster. They talk about the fleeting headaches of college life: early-morning seminars and merciless professors, the perils of
juggling jobs and boyfriends with their coursework. Twice we’re interrupted by Adi’s phone - calls from her boyfriend in Tel Aviv - and she ducks behind a tree or sits on a park bench, huddled over the phone with a sweet, conspiratorial smile while she tells him about her day.
When she comes back she sighs: it was her suggestion that sent him to Tel Aviv, where he volunteers at a camp for refugees fleeing the Hamas missile attacks in the south. She bristles at the thought of him being so far from Haifa, though she admits it’s all relative: in a country of Israel’s size, even an hour-long drive feels like a long way to go. I point out that for the time it takes Yfrat to reach her boyfriend in the north, I couldn’t even make it from my home into Lower Manhattan, but that’s hardly consolation for either of them as we pick up a few trashy comedies.
We pass a few young soldiers on our way down Moriah St. For someone who’s gotten used to tales of the Israeli Defense Force - the scourge of the Arab world, if ever there was one -
I’m still struggling to adjust to the sight of these kids on the street. While I don’t doubt the IDF’s combat platoons can open a fine bottle of vintage whoop-ass when pressed, the bulk of the Army - 18- and 19-year-old draftees with poor posture and goofy grins - are about as threatening as an upset stomach. Adi and Yfrat joke about their own days in the service, and the lengths they’d go to to find themselves in the infirmary. Some kids would rub chalk dust into their eyes to spur a mild infection; Adi’s brother had worked out an exact science to throw off a thermometer by drinking hot tea.
“You can’t drink it right before you see the nurse, or else your temperature would be like 140,” she cautions. “He knew exactly how many minutes it would take for his mouth to cool off.”
Yfrat managed to trick her supervisors with improvised bouts of psychosis.
“I would just look at the floor and say, ‘I see ants, I see ants,’” she says. “They didn’t know what to do, so they’d send me home.”
It’s safe to say I’ve found myself in savvy hands here
in Haifa, and the girls give me a quick whirlwind tour on our way back to Adi’s place. By the time I get back to the hotel it’s half-past one, and as I tip-toe into the dorm room, the place is empty. It’s after daybreak when the pilgrims finally get in, their voices subdued, their feet sleepily dragging. Later in the day there are only cryptic allusions to events of the night before - punctuated with sly winks and sideways glances - and I can’t entirely shake the feeling that this Baha’i pilgrimage bears an eerie resemblance to a hazing ritual on the front lawn of Kappa Delta Rho.
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