Jaffa's most European coffee shop is cool and calm; the Cuban album joyfully skipping in the background grants nonchalance to the cofee-farmers plastered walls. As I sip the first cup I've had in weeks, I become aware of the other group of costumers in the adjacent table. They are three; two women and a men; all in their fifties, with the calf-like confidence of the mature but not particularly wise. They are educators, who, I learn, had made it from the obscurity of the southern suburb of Bat Yam to the high life of the northern suburb of Hertzelia. As I leaf through the old newspaper and try to come up with something for my column, they pick a snarling fight with the waitress. It begins when the man, a small, balding, corpulent specimen, deliberately loudly asks the owner of the place whether there is a legal possibility to deport the Neo Nazi gang that was uncovered in yet another suburb of Tel Aviv last week (see my Libnanews column). This question prompts the waitress to pull up a chair and sit down next to them, and the following conversation ensues:
Waitress: Why do you think they did it?
Teacher: Oh come, don't give me that. [Mockingly] Because their mommy didn't hug them when they were small? Aww. Bullshit. I'm 53 years old and let me tell you, it's all bull.
W: but studies showed...
T: No, they didn't!
W: Will you let me finish a sentence?
T: Pfft. [To the adoring women:] Fine, have your sentence.
W: Every serial murderer that ever was found to have something gone wrong in his childhood. These kids were bored, they came in as immigrants, they weren't integrated...
T: Integrated? We integrated the Russians like no other country in all world history! I personally had a company back then, the state sponsored salaries for two out of four Russians I took in, and one was better than the other! Maybe you didn't meet any Russians...
W: Beg pardon? Our family personally took care of two immigrant families in our building. We ended up adopting a Russian kid who lost her parents soon after they arrived. So don't tell me...
T: Fine, alright. But anyway, they should be deported
W: Why?
T: Why? WHY?! because they are Nazis, we can't have Nazis in the State of Israel! And besides, they beat people up...
W: Well, plenty people beat people up. Police beats people up. Up until ten years ago, every night someone would beat up gay people who were cruising in Electricity Park, and more often than not the police would be involved.
T: Well- I think, I think! I think that a policeman that goes and beats up a fag should sit in prison even more - mark me, even more! than those Nazi kids. But you know, with fags its different. But I would never believe all this crap about police just beating people up for no reason.
Owner: Excuse me, when I was a journalist, I myself took pictures of policemen beating up an Arab. And when they saw me taking pictures they broke my camera and beat me up.
T: Well this is just wrong, you see. You were doing your job. But let me tell you something else: he was probably a terrorist. Or a thief. They had reasons to beat him up. You just came in too late, and it came out in the pictures they were just beating him up.
O: Maybe, possibly - but what do you want me to do, coordinate with people when they are being arrested, so I can film the entire process?
T: No, well, I dunno. But I can tell you something for sure. There has never been a single case in which a policeman or a soldier of the IDF beat up someone without being provoked. What happens normally is that those Palestinians insult the soldiers, or set something on fire, and then call the press- and journalists would arrive just in time to see them beaten up, and now everyone around the world thinks we're mean. But I know how it works, because I used to do reserve service on checkpoints, and we would also beat them up. And shoot them. And it was fun.
* * *
The streets are empty, wide and warm; every time there's a gap in the crackled whitewashed walls, a heap of silence rolls on you from around the corner like an invisible sack of wheat. It's a holiday, even the cars are gone. As I climb up the hill, breathing in the sea breeze unobscured, for once, by exhaust fumes, I begin to hear the smooth lisp of bicycle tires up ahead. Fairly soon he appears, an old, wizened, sun-dried cod of a man; in dirty shorts, a sweaty t-shirt rolled up half way up his chest, a sun cap and thick rimmed glasses, on a child's bicycle. As he passes, he raises his water-flask towards me and cries out, in Russian: "Long live the freedom of France"! Before I come up with a response, he is already down the road, toasting the first passing car I've seen today, and then he is past a corner and is gone.
