The Real Reason We Don't Live in Israel

Littletree has been asking to go visit her grandparents and cousins in Israel. Sometimes she gets a bit homesick and wants to go back there.

She started asking why we don't stay in Israel, especially when she overheard Purple and I discussing the Osem debacle, I wrote about recently.

Well, there's lots of reasons;

I really need to live somewhere there's a lot of lush green, forests, water, trees. Now, there are some forests in Israel, but what they call "forest" in Israel, I'd call a "grove" or "stand of trees" or "pine plantation". Its a bit like sucking on old teabags when what you need is a strong coffee.

Also, I find the general attitude of the people to be infuriating at best. Now, don't get me wrong, there are many great Israelis, heck, I'm married to one, my daughter is one, I am one... and I'm generalising wildly, but there is a very prevalent attitude of "Klum lo kara" - nothing happened. There could be a suicide bomber just outside my home, killing six people, but the general response is 'nothing happened'. It's no big deal. Don't make a fuss.

And the attitude of "Ain mah laasot" nothing to do. Basically, the bureaucracy is nightmarish, one gets ripped off left, right and centre, taxi drivers are required by law to be homicidal (I have to assume), and oh so many annoying day-to-day little things. And the Israeli's answer: 'nothing you can do about it'. I can go into a supermarket, take an item that is marked 2 shekels, get to the checkout, be charged 3 sheckles. This should be no big deal; I should be able to say to the cashier, 'sorry, that's the wrong amount', and she'll say sorry and correct it, end of story. But no! She will first ignore me. Then argue with me about it. If I'm feeling strong, I can argue back. If I argue long enough, I might get the honour of arguing with the manager. If I argue with the manager long enough, I might be humoured in dragging the manager over to the service counter and debating it there, and maybe, eventually getting the item for the marked price. Israelis say "Ain mah laasot" and shrug.

I could go on for hours about the crappiness of living in Israel (relative to myself, of course; many fine people really love Israel).

But mostly, the REAL reason:

I personally can't handle living in a war zone. and not just any old war zone; one where the people are in total denial that there is a war going on. There are at least 27 armed soldiers on any street corner at any given time, there are pretty much constant conflicts, constant shelling and missiles, constant oppression, anger and bloodshed. And the Israelis just shrug.

They try to convince me that I'm more likely to be run over by a car than killed by a bomb. er, the terrible traffic is another reason not to live in Israel, but why stay somewhere that its likely at all?

They say "oh, there's bombs in other places! There was a terrorist attack in New York, one in London, in Madrid!" er, those were one-offs. they are rare and the whole nation, even the whole world was in shock afterward. In Israel, such things are daily occurences.

I say, they can never ever understand how it feels when one hasn't grown up being desensitised to that, and I would be deeply sad to think I had raised my daughter to be desensitised to war.

The final straw was this image which I saw in the news. I saw this and broke down.

I simply could not go on raising my daughter in a country where children are writing messages on missiles, to be sent to kill other children.

A country that doesn't have a problem with allowing children to be anywhere near missiles in the first place.

I can't do it. I can't live in a place where I can hear bombs going off from my own living room, where most of our nearest neighbours are vocally hating us and plotting to kill us all; to rain nuclear weapons down on us, where there is a sickening "fence" cutting the city, supposedly to keep people to "their own side", yet there are massive holes in it, so it's clearly just a tool of oppression, where almost every child goes into the army and learns to use a gun, a place where people are raised to hate.