Not "Cool" Anymore - Yair Lapid

Yair Lapid is one of the most prominent Israeli journalists. He hosts a weekend news show and writes columns for several newspapers, including the one I'm translating here. I felt very strongly about this particular column, and decided to share it with the Sift.
When commenting, please do two things - Remember that he is writing to Israelis, and read the whole thing, please, don't just read a couple of paragraphs, TL;DR, and skip to the usual comments.

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We've stopped being "cool."
By Yair Lapid

We've had problems here since ever, but up until a few years ago, we were one of the "coolest" countries on Earth. When you met an American and told him you're from Israel, they would immediately say "Wow". It wasn't always clear what they said it about, but it was some kind of "wow" - about the high-tech, the most beautiful girls in the world, the Entebbe operation, the Six Day War, the Kibbutzim, "Exodus", the Mossad, the oranges, or the fact that the weak little Jews suddenly went to the beach and got a tan.

And sometime in the last decade, it was over. "I'm from Israel" you say to John Smith who is sucking on his beer, and he raises a foggy look, "you've got a lot of problems down there, man," he says, "it must be tough."

And John is still OK, he has a nephew serving in Iraq and he hates the "fucking Towel Heads" (the American equivalent to "Arabushim"). Maggie from London just takes her cocktail and walks away with a rather too upright blond neck, so you won't miss her loathing, Julio from Madrid has a Kefiah tied around his neck because he identifies with the screwed people of the world, and Jorgen from Munich - from Munich! God! - says he's a pacifist - which is code for not being willing to take blame for the Holocaust, he wasn't born then yet, and we shouldn't think it justifies everything.

There's something insulting about that. Like being the Prom Queen who got fat, or the moment when you meet - after 20 years - the captain of the basketball team, the one you cheered for until your throat was sore, and find out he's a complete idiot.

Because we're not "cool" anymore. Everything that used to be funny is now problematic. The villager walking into the Opera house in Vienna wearing biblical sandals was replaced by a bunch of teenagers destroying a hotel in Napa. And the guy who got to New York with 10 dollars and became a Millionaire, is now a suspect in a real-estate fraud case and is wanted in 6 countries. Instead of bringing drip-irrigation to Africa, we're selling weapons to the worst governments on Earth. The best army in the world gets photographed the worst on CNN.

And in response we're grumpy and complaining, calling them "Anti-semites", which of course makes things worse, since there's nothing less "cool" than a whiner, but we're stuck with the insult in our throat, and what can we do? Shut up? Leave the stage to the bad-guys?

Only it's not clear what we want from them, because even to ourselves we're not "cool" anymore. Instead of drying swamps we're dehydrating on the bench, collecting social security, the Bible is a settlement on Mt. Hebron, and the guy who calls you "my brother" is about to draw a knife and stab you in the parking lot.

We're the first to admit - in the headlines - that we're intolerable, but when someone else says it, we're always shocked. Because there's no Israeli who doesn't cringe when we kill (by accident, damnit, by accident!) kids in Gaza, but when they write about it in "Newsweek" we're offended to the bottom of our soul. Because we were hoping they wouldn't see us, that it's internal information, that in a world of a thousand TV stations and a million websites, no one will notice.

So it's true that we've had radical left-wing groups working against us around the world for years - backed by Islamic money and supported by self-hating Jews - but it's hard to say we didn't give them material to work with. Because the first rule of "cool" is that no one will love you if you won't love yourself.

We are no longer "cool." We were, and have ceased to be. We are a country - another country - stuck in the wrong side of the Globe, being broadcast between riots in Malaysia to the earthquake in Indonesia, too sweaty, not very graceful, one whose relatives are a bit ashamed of her but will still love her despite her drawbacks, and whose mistakes go unforgiven by everyone so she has to forgive herself, who has some good things - even great - but she still screws up quite a bit. Who has gained too much weight, and no one falls for her at the traffic light anymore, who has to pick being pretty or right, because the two don't fit together.

So should we give up? Forget it, realize that no one will look at us adoringly from the side, wishing they could be like us, or at least our friend? Of course not.

Whoever loved us before will happily come back to cuddle in our arms. Look at the United States in the first few months of Obama: in 5 minutes they went from being a hated empire, to a sexy country everybody wants to get in bed with. The biggest advantage of a flexible world, is that the public mind can change in an instant. Even China is "cool" all of a sudden. For a thousand years she's been the "Yellow Giant" and all of a sudden we're the ones yellow with envy.

It can happen to us as well, but with all due respect to the Explanation Office (raise your hand if you knew we had a re-formed Explanation office, and we even have a Minister of Explanation? What's wrong with you, of course we do, his name is Yuli Edelstein, haven't you noticed how popular we are ever since he was appointed?), if we want to be the guy who gets invited to all the right parties - it was to be for the right reasons.

You can't keep talking about the Holocaust if you don't look after the Holocaust survivors starving at your doorstep; You can't be mad at Jew-hatred if Arab-hatred is running your life; You can't expect to be taken seriously if three outlaw 17-year-olds can run your life from a trailer in the Territories; You can't keep asking for credit for being "the only democracy in the middle east," if your democracy is dysfunctional.

Because it's time we admitted the world isn't automatically against us. Even the Swedes - the same Swedes who made us so mad - gave us Nobel Prizes recently, and organized - of their own volition, but who here remembers the good things - the most important Holocaust memorial committee ever held in Europe.

Many will say that being "cool" isn't worth it. That it's not worth giving up the territories for, or preventing the IDF's freedom of operation, or interrupting Liberman (our foreign minister) from sticking a finger in their eye every time he meets them. It might not be. Israel wasn't formed so they would say the Jews are nice - but so that the Jews could tell them all to stick it.

But just admit you miss the time when every time we walked into a room, all the prettiest girls wanted to dance with us.
gwiz665 says...

TL;DR. also yo momma is so fat.

I did in fact read it, and I think some of it is a bit too nationalistic. The second and third paragraph paints the picture that people from the US, London, Madrid etc. are basically assholes, which I don't think is particularly productive. The outrage that a man from Munich doesn't feel responsible for the holocaust, when he wasn't even born, is also reprehensible, I think. I mean, I'm not responsible for the Danish vikings invading all over Europe either. The fact that a man is from German does not automatically put blame on him for all of Germany's faults.

Like America, I think Israel has a fevered dream about their own exceptionalism (I'm making generalizations here, but I mean that there's a growing trend in the general populace). This ultra-nationalism is ultimately a bad thing - people are people where ever they are from. People are as good and as flawed anywhere, the rest is cultural influence.

I think the first part plays into that, so that he can dismantle it in the latter part, which I like a whole lot more.

"You can't keep talking about the Holocaust if you don't look after the Holocaust survivors starving at your doorstep; You can't be mad at Jew-hatred if Arab-hatred is running your life; You can't expect to be taken seriously if three outlaw 17-year-olds can run your life from a trailer in the Territories; You can't keep asking for credit for being "the only democracy in the middle east," if your democracy is dysfunctional."

I don't want to take sides between Arabs and Israelis, because I think both sides have their hands covered in blood and shit - one side is not a monster, while the other is pure and innocent.

I'm not as educated on the subject as I'm sure many of the rest of you are, so I'm just giving my opinion from the sideline.

Crake says...

>> ^gwiz665:
(...) People are as good and as flawed anywhere, the rest is cultural influence. (...)


Cultural influence is important though, but is mitigated by extensive education; academia itself can be said to be a culture, and is thus a replacement. However, not everyone has access to it, so culture is on average fairly important as a factor for a society's functioning.

And culture is definitely influenced by nationality, so I think it's fair enough to be worried about your nation's well being and image. It is also fair enough, to a degree, to be grateful to a culture that has helped you.

EDD says...

Read the article, and I gotta say, I'm a bit surprised. Some details and emphases might have been lost in translation, but I was still almost unable to grasp why this article seemed exceptional to you, demon_ix. This is because on your (I'll say brief, but it's also been quite prolific) stay here on the Sift you've displayed great intelligence, empathy, multicultural awareness and a wealth of knowledge on a variety of issues as well as popular culture. I feel like I can identify with you easily. So yeah, to me this article comes off as a piece which was written by somebody whose IQ must be noticeably lower than yours and whose form of expression leaves much to be desired. Then there was the paragraph gwiz already highlighted, which is probably the worst example of culturally insensitive journalism (apart from Fox News) that I've seen or read in months, possibly years.

In the end though, while I've been sort of nit picking on the details, I guess the national (&international) sentiment was the centerpiece of the story, right? I suppose nobody had nailed this down until today, had they?

demon_ix says...

^ I believe most of what you're referring to was indeed lost in the translation. I tried to do my best to keep the spirit of it intact, but alas.

The paragraph gwiz665 quoted makes sense (to me, anyway) since this is an Israeli author writing to Israeli readers. To me, the analogy is far far away from Fox News' America-can-do-no-wrong mentality (Under Bush, obviously. Now it's the America-is-being-ruled-by-the-antichrist Fox), and so much closer to Bill Maher's rants about what's wrong with the country, and how to improve it. It's not treason to point out where you are weak, and it's not patriotism to hide it.

The main message I took from this article, is that Israel has to do a better job of communicating with the rest of the world. We spent so long feeling paranoid and alone that we do it automatically now, without thinking. Calling antisemitism against every single piece of criticism against us takes the meaning out of the word.

I heard in a news summary on the radio a while back, that the Israeli government approved construction of new houses in west bank settlements, immediately after promising to freeze construction. The only thought that came to mind was "Hey, it works for Iran, no?". Only after, it struck me, how utterly ridiculous we must sound, denouncing Iran's stall tactics regarding their nuclear program while at the same time using the same tactics with our settlements.

So anyway, Israel needs to care more about how the world views us, and to move in that direction. That's the spirit of the column, for me anyway

rebuilder says...

>> ^gwiz665:
The outrage that a man from Munich doesn't feel responsible for the holocaust, when he wasn't even born, is also reprehensible, I think.


You're missing the point. The man from Germany in the example reacts instinctively to the mere presence of an Israeli national by getting defensive against accusations they assume are coming. It's not that the German should feel guilty, but that they feel the Israeli think they should. The examples may be exaggerations, but from what I've seen, a lot of people really don't much like Israeli politics these days, I can well see these reactions happening.

gwiz665 says...

"and Jorgen from Munich - from Munich! God! - says he's a pacifist - which is code for not being willing to take blame for the Holocaust, he wasn't born then yet, and we shouldn't think it justifies everything"

Even if he were not a pacifist, HE holds no blame, since he was not involved. You don't carry the sins of your father.

I think the accusation already lies in the "from Munich! God!", I also think it is stupid to frame it like "he's not willing to take blame" - I'm not willing to take blame for anything that my ancestors did either, and I shouldn't have to either.

demon_ix says...

>> ^gwiz665:
Even if he were not a pacifist, HE holds no blame, since he was not involved. You don't carry the sins of your father.
I think the accusation already lies in the "from Munich! God!", I also think it is stupid to frame it like "he's not willing to take blame" - I'm not willing to take blame for anything that my ancestors did either, and I shouldn't have to either.

Well, there are several points in that paragraph that were completely lost here. Let's see if I can explain.

- To Israelis, Munich is almost always connected to the 1972 Olympic games and the terrorist attack, on which the film "Munich" is based.
- While the person himself holds no personal blame for either the Munich massacre or the Holocaust, the nation of Germany does (for the latter, anyway). It's hard for some Israelis to separate the two.
- The entire paragraph is satirical, and Lapid is not trying to say Jorgen holds personal blame for the Holocaust, but rather that the person blaming him for it is being absurd.

I guess the last point was lost in the translation as well. It's a shame, since it's a recurring one in here.

lesserfool says...

Interesting read. It is good to see a rational Israeli voice. From what little I know, the Israeli general public seems to be perpetually stuck in the war-like state we were in six months after 9/11. I agree with the author's characterization of (conservative) americans but would add that Joe Sixpack's eyes widen with anxiety (though he desperately wants to hide it) when he realizes he's met a monotheist of a different tribe.

demon_ix says...

It's not actually a war-like state. That's something that's hard to get across to Americans, since your armies will only engage in combat far away from your actual borders, theoretically (Posse Comitatus).

Our army is mostly defensive in nature (It's even called the Israeli Defense Force). You have to look very hard to find a couple of units that could be considered offensive (Sayeret Matkal and Shayetet 13 are the only ones I can think of at the moment). That means that almost every time you hear something horrible the Israeli army has done, we view it as self-defense and wonder why the world doesn't see it that way.

There's an expression in Hebrew which means "What you see from there is not what you see from here". Ever since I've been prowling the web and reading stuff (mostly American stuff), I've been seeing things a lot more from an external point of view. What has been difficult for me, was to get others to see from our point of view. That was one of the reasons I translated the column in the first place

lesserfool says...

By "war-like" I meant that there is enthusiastic public support for military violence. US politicians often try to create this enthusiasm by manufacturing a public perception of an immediate threat. In 2002-2003 it was easy. I would think that Israeli politicians often have it that easy because of the proximity and frequency of threatening events they can point to.

Isn't that misleading to put offensive units within the Israeli Defense Force? Military language is often deliberately misleading. An actual defense force would prevent or lessen damages within their own territory and not be killing people in retaliation outside their borders. I believe a significant portion of US citizens who could identify Israel on a map will say that Israel is heavy-handed with their responses and not doing enough to ease tensions.

Getting a more objective, external view helps yeah.

demon_ix says...

They don't have to create enthusiasm here. For a very long time before Cast Lead, the city of Sderot was taking 10+ rockets a day. The rockets (called Qassam) were basically a street light pole with some fuel and explosives. It's not a very powerful rocket, but it can't be targeted. That means that they can only pick a population center and launch. To the people living in Sderot, an alarm was sounding 10+ times a day that meant "Get to a bomb shelter within the next 20 seconds or you might die".

Israel is a tiny place. To get from the West Bank to one of our major cities (Haifa, Tel-Aviv, Jerusalem) will take about 1-3 hours, depending if the terrorist has someone picking him up, which they sometimes did. That's an extremely short time that the military has to react in, assuming they even know about it in advance.
So they go pro-active. They gather intelligence. They set up road blocks in obvious places where people can cross and build a wall where they can't monitor 24/7. It may seem offensive, but it's really about getting to it before there's nothing that can be done anymore.

The best example I can think of is the Karine A Intercept which also relates to why any army needs offensive units as well as defensive.
The purpose of an army is not to fight, it's not to destroy and it's not to decide it's own agenda. The army takes it's orders from non-military elected politicians and their entire purpose is to give those politicians options in any given situation.

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Americans are always meddling in other governments, election processes and general public perception. Why can't you guys do that here? Start meddling! In the next election, make sure the left-wing peaceful candidate gets elected, and then things might start to change...

We do it all the time to you guys, according to about 20+ videos I've seen on the sift already

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