Israel is a Zoo

Daniel Estrin
Brandeis University
(studying at Ben Gurion University)

The drivers are nuts and the attitude is spicy and the politics are maniacal and people eat fast and don't stand in lines and they shout in public as if they were in their own homes and there's always someone complaining. Yes, this is indeed a zoo.

But it's also a zoo here in the more literal sense of the word. There are all sorts of interesting creatures lurking around in unexpected places.

In Israel, as a general rule of thumb, beware of stepping on stray cats. They are everywhere. If they are not hungry or crying or prancing through the university halls, they are situated immediately outside your window, late at night, screeching to the world, proclaiming that they are in heat.

You must also beware of the stray chihuahua. How in the world does a chihuahua come to the Israeli desert? Perhaps it's a side effect of globalization, but the Mexican dog from the American Taco Bell commercial lives on the north side of the Ben Gurion University campus. This little guy is ferocious: he will chase you at breakneck speed along the main pathway, yelping all the way. I quickly learned never to be without my bike when I head to north campus and still I break a sweat pedaling away from this beast.

Within a five minutes' drive south of Beer Sheva, you find yourself smack in the serene middle of nowhere. The highway curves through rolling desert hills of tan and the recurring road signs read, Beware: Camels Close to Highway. Sometimes the signs are a simple yellow triangle with the silhouette of a camel in the middle. Unfortunately, the signs fail to alert drivers to the Bedouin Arabs to whom the camels belong -- they also live next to the highway. Nor do the signs mention their donkeys, decrepit shacks and children with backpacks who run along the shoulders of the highway early in the morning, late for school.

Drive a couple more hours southward and you reach a dead end: Eilat. The southernmost point of Israel, this resort town boasts a Red Sea of colorful underwater creatures. A couple of weeks ago, a few friends and I were in Eilat and we went shnorkeling. (That's the Hebrew word for snorkeling--just take the English word and shmear the first consonant, Yiddish-style.) We swam with beautiful fish, found Nemo hanging out with his clownfish friends and then we hit jackpot: a gorgeous octopus. This creature was a celebrity, followed around by an entourage of various fish, and it constantly changed colors, from purple to black to blue to silver.

If the octopus wasn’t enough, we exited the water to witness an event that was later the top story in the evening news: a plague of locusts originating somewhere in Africa traveled through the Sinai desert, crossed the Egyptian border into Israel, came up through Eilat and made its way to the southern portion of Israel where it proceeded to feast on Israeli crops. From the last beach before the border with Egypt, we savored this moment of Biblical irony as the plague of locusts left Egypt and made a mass exodus to the Land of Israel.

What do Israelis think about the newest members of the zoo? As we return our shnorkel masks, we discuss the swarm with the woman at the kiosk. "Thailandim eat those things! Eechs!" she says, referring to the large number of Thai workers who work in Israel as cheap labor. A few weeks later, the latest episode of Eretz Nehederet (Wonderful Country), the Israeli equivalent of Saturday Night Live, offered a different take on the recent arrival of locusts and the government's swift response of pesticide spraying: The actions of the government of the State of Israel concerning the locusts are abhorrent! Here we have tens of thousands of new immigrants who have left Africa to make Aliyah, and this is how we treat them?

Daniel Estrin is a junior at Brandeis University studying English Literature and Near Eastern & Judaic Studies. This year he is studying Hebrew Literature (and attempting to grasp Colloquial Arabic) at Ben- Gurion University in Beer-Sheva, Israel. He is an avid cellist and plays with a chamber music group in Beer Sheva. Upon graduation, he hopes to have a stable future doing something, somewhere, somehow, connected to writing.

[Posted 12/9/04]