Army Fatigues, Tefillin, and other Incongruities in Israel

Three soldiers with Uzi submachine guns slung casually over their shoulders step from the sidewalk to the street as a group of Orthodox Jewish siblings pass, the oldest carrying the youngest on her back. This is Israel-- a religious dream, a Jewish homeland, whose existence depends on constant military supervision. The army fatigues and tefillin, uniforms of the military and the religious, have shared the sidewalk here for so long that viewing them together is less surprising than it is the archetypal vision of Jerusalem.

But everywhere in Israel, I am confronted with startling incongruities.

The eyes of the men pumping iron at a gym in Tel Aviv are glued to the television, where a changing host of the power elite come to play-- Nasrallah, Condi, Bush, Olmert. But the images play on a muted screen and are accompanied by Madonna or Coldplay on the stereo. CNN becomes a surreal music video, in some ways scarier than anything even Marilyn Manson could ever hope to create.

Tel Aviv's beach and boardwalk are crowded with families and sunbathers on the weekends. But for the low-flying helicopters passing just above the water as they head north to Lebanon, one would never guess that this is a country at war, that a 45-minutes drive north to Haifa would reveal a ghost town where Holocaust survivors and children sit in bomb shelters, scared, traumatized, occasionally wetting their cots.

In Tel Aviv, cab drivers are more up-to-date about the situation in the north than most blogs. Listening to the radio all day, the cabbies have become the highly-informed spokesmen of an identical position: winning the war against Hezbollah is profoundly important for the survival of the state of Israel. Israel must do everything she can to win this war, and any opposition to the war is understood to be opposition to the existence of the Jewish people.

In the U.S., it would be close to impossible to drive with so many cabbies in a row who voiced the same position on anything, much less on the country's need to go to war. But here it is a different kind of country, and a very different sort of war.

Conversations here are slippery, like fish you can never quite grab hold of, as they dip into the tragic one minute and the ordinary the next. "None of this will stop until they've wiped out the Jewish people, and if they never wipe out the Jewish people, it will never stop," said a man eating brunch on Friday morning in a coffee shop in Tel Aviv. He paused, drank. "Good coffee," he remarked. "I love this place. So what time are we meeting Yaron tonight? If we're going out, I need to pick up the dry-cleaning, because I want to wear my blue shirt."

Life in Tel Aviv seems to continue more or less as usual. But just beneath the surface, nobody here has forgotten that their country is at war, even if in Tel Aviv the war seems inchoate-- constantly present, but also not really here at all.