Educators of the World, Unite

In 1973, the American sociologist Daniel Bell predicted the coming of a post-industrial society in which knowledge and information workers would play an increasingly important role. Like the United States, Israel has undergone a transition to post-industrialism. But if anyone thinks that labor conflicts are passé in the post-industrial era, they should take a look at recent events here. You wouldn't know it by reading the American press – the conflict with the Palestinians seems to be the only news about Israel that the U.S. media find fit to print – but in the past few months Israel has been convulsed by major labor conflicts involving its educational workers in both secondary and higher education.

Let's start with secondary schools. On December 13, 2007 – about a month before I arrived here – a 65-day strike by Israel's secondary school teachers concluded with an eleventh-hour agreement between the Secondary School Teachers Association and Israel's Education and Finance ministries, reached "just minutes before court injunctions ordering teachers back into the classroom would have gone into effect" ("The Morning After," The Jerusalem Report, Jan. 21, 2008). Following what The Jerusalem Post described as "the longest and most grueling education strike in Israeli history" ("The Treasury's Shining Hour?," Dec. 14, 2007), the agreement gave Israel's teachers a modest pay raise and a promise to reduce class size. However, the teachers' shamefully small salaries and poor working conditions were only the most prominent of a much wider set of grievances, which included growing frustration with repeated budget cuts imposed by Israel's Finance Ministry. As Israeli union activists put it, the teachers' struggle was not for themselves alone, but was a "just struggle for the future of public education in Israel" ("Schools Reopen as Last-Minute Talks Aim to Clinch Deal," The Jerusalem Post, December 13, 2007).

It's not clear to me whether the last-minute settlement with Israel's secondary school teachers adequately addresses the underlying problems and grievances. In an interesting commentary on the strike ("The Treasury's Shining Hour?," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 14, 2007), Haviv Rettig suggested that the outcome was a "tactical victory" for the Finance Ministry that reflected the current government's commitment to American-style market-oriented rationalization (in Max Weber's sense). "This is a Treasury," Rettig suggests, "that will enforce strict budgetary discipline and maintain an efficient marketplace at almost any cost." Quoting another observer of the education system, Rettig asked: "'Are we a country that has an economy or does the government think of us as an economy that happens to have a country?'" Rettig concluded that "the strike has only contributed to a widespread feeling – according to polls extremely widespread – that the country is led by a political class disconnected from the daily struggles of ordinary Israelis." (That situation should sound familiar to American readers.) But elsewhere Rettig offered a more optimistic assessment: "By forcing the government to recognize some of the structural issues in secondary education and to promise to deal with them," the teachers' union "may have succeeded in getting something very important…. [T]he current deal launched a process that will see a broader reform plan developed" ("Just the Beginning," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 14, 2007). Probably there is more conflict to come.

Secondary school teachers were not the only ones striking in Israel. Senior lecturers at Israeli universities brought their own extraordinary 90-day strike to an end on January 18, 2007 – just days after I arrived – when they, too, reached a deal with Israel's Treasury officials. The agreement, I might add, came only after the lecturers stood firm in the face of threats from the Council of University Presidents to seek an injunction against their strike or to cancel the academic year altogether. (The latter would have been completely unprecedented.) According to Haaretz, it was "the longest higher education strike in Israel's history."

As with the secondary school teachers, the university lecturers' demands for higher salaries (to compensate for years of wage erosion) were only the most prominent of a wider set of grievances. In an illuminating commentary ("Why Academics Are on Strike," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 27, 2007), Professor Nathan Dascal outlined the lecturers' other grievances, including cuts in government funding for research; increasing class size; the shrinking number of tenured academic positions; growing reliance on cheaper "junior academic staff (mostly our own PhD students) and non-tenured teachers hired for eight months a year and shamefully fired every summer without academic rights and unable to do any research"; and tuition hikes to compensate for the government's budget cuts. "Our struggle is really over funding for education and research," Professor Dascal noted, "not just our salaries." (As if Israel's university lecturers didn't have enough woes, some readers may recall that certain block-headed activists in Britain's University and College Union sought to punish them still more with an academic "boycott," more accurately described as a blacklist. Solidarity forever, but no Israelis need apply. That campaign was thankfully defeated when the union's own lawyers warned that such a blacklist would violate British anti-discrimination laws.) Again, it's not clear to me whether the compromise agreement between the university lecturers and the government will adequately address the underlying problems. Even leaving aside all of the other issues besides salaries, the deal reportedly fell short of the lecturers' initial demands. However, Zvi Hacohen, the head of the coordinating body for senior faculty organizations, nevertheless hailed it as "an excellent wage agreement, the best that has been reached in the last decade."

The broader social and historical context for these labor conflicts is the dismantling of Israel's once-sturdy social compact and the resulting growth in socio-economic inequality here. "During the last decade," The Forward noted in December 2004, "thanks to the Thatcherism of Likud and Labor neo-liberals [i.e., neo-liberals in the European sense of free-market enthusiasts], Israel has been turned from the most egalitarian nation in the industrialized world into the most unequal." In fact, the trend started earlier. In 2002, the Knesset Committee of Inquiry into Income Inequality found that "the gap between rich and poor [in Israel had] widened by 23 percent in the past two decades [i.e., since 1982], putting the country at the worst level of inequality in the Western world after the US. In contrast, Israel had one of the best equality figures in the 1960s" ("Gap Between Rich and Poor Here Up," The Jerusalem Post, December 3, 2002). Some readers may recall that shortly after Israel's 2006 election, there was talk that Israel's Labor Party (then under the new leadership of Amir Peretz), the religious Shas party, and the newly formed Pensioners' Party might form a united "social bloc" in the Knesset to halt the socio-economic polarization of Israeli society. Unfortunately, this much-needed social bloc never materialized, and the polarizing trend has continued. Just recently The Jerusalem Post reported the following: "The budget cuts of recent years and widening social gaps are causing increased polarization between those from rich and poor families according to Dr. Yitzhak Kadman, director of the National Council for the Child which released its 16th annual report…. Perhaps the most disturbing data revealed in the report is the confirmation that every third Israeli child lives below the poverty line" ("On Eve of Israel's 60th Anniversary Its Children Are Worse Off Than Ever," The Jerusalem Post, Dec. 31, 2007). Truly, the great theoreticians of socialist Zionism and the country's socialist founders must be turning over in their graves.

If all of this sounds critical of Israeli society, it's meant to be. However, we should remember that the social ills I have described in this post are hardly unique to Israel; they appear, albeit in different forms, in other countries as well. (American readers should need to be reminded of this least of all.) Moreover, my purpose here is not to add to the demonization of Israel ("Aha, warmongering and inegalitarian!"), which is regrettably all too common in certain circles that I have had the misfortune to encounter. On the contrary, my criticism reflects sincere distress about the serious harm these trends are doing to a country about which I care deeply; it reflects my concern that socio-economic inequality is weakening social solidarity here; and it reflects my own sense of solidarity with those "ordinary Israelis" from whose daily struggles the country's political class appears so disconnected. But, since I don't wish to end this post on a pessimistic note, I'll close with the words of the famous American radical and labor leader Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, organize." That advice is as good now as it was then.

B'Rehov Rupin

One of the many things I like about Tel Aviv is the street names. There is a Syrkin Street, a Spinoza Street, even a Jean Jaurès Street. A great intellectual or fighter for social justice behind every street. Needless to say, I was delighted and honored to learn that my street is named (appropriately enough) after a sociologist. And not just any sociologist, but "The Father of Jewish Sociology," Arthur Rupin (1876-1943). What's more, Rupin founded the sociology department at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where I will be teaching this semester. Surely it's no mere coincidence that I'm living on Rupin Street. It's a sign, as my friend T. would say, and so I have enthusiastically added Dr. Rupin's 1934 book The Jews in the Modern World to my spring reading list.

Sharing my excitement about this discovery, my friend M. proclaimed Rupin "the Bill Sewell of Israeli sociology," and my friend J. wrote: "That's incredible, a sociologist and a Zionist!" Soon they'll rename the street after me, she said, "the last true Zionist living in Tel Aviv." Call me old-fashioned.

Past and Present

Last Thursday I took the bus to Tel Aviv University to register for a 4-week ulpan (language training), which is a good thing, because I'm starting to feel like a damn fool repeating "Atah medeber anglit?" and "Ani lo medeber ivrit" to everyone. The ulpan started on Sunday and, like Mark Twain in The Innocents Abroad, "we are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility."

After registering for the ulpan last week, I walked into a café on campus to buy a bottle of water. Being a frugal person (some would say packrat), I had saved a few 20-shekel notes from a previous trip to Israel. Naturally, I brought them with me, and I tried to use one of them to pay for the water. "Mah zeh?" asked the girl with a frown. "Zeh kesef," I said. Eyeing me warily, she said (in English), "That's not money." Apparently, these 20-shekel notes are so old they've been taken out of circulation and aren't good anymore. Another girl asked me incredulously how I had obtained these shekels as if I'd just stepped out of a time machine.

I took the bus back to the city center, and on the way home to my new apartment I passed a man who was sitting in a wheelchair in the street. He gestured to me, and I made my now habitual reply ("Ani lo medeber ivrit"). It quickly became evident that he didn't speak much English, but the encounter didn't end there. I figured out that he wanted me to push him down the street a few blocks, and, trying to be a good Samaritan (though not in Samaria), I complied. Thinking as most reasonable people would that a busy city street is no place for a man in a wheelchair, I tried to wheel him up on the sidewalk, but for reasons I could not fathom and he could not explain in English, he vigorously and resolutely insisted on remaining in the street. He tried to make small talk with me with the small English vocabulary he possessed.
"Jewish?"
"Ken."
"New York?"
"Ken."
"Of course," he muttered with a tone suggesting that New York Jews were not a rarity in Israel.
"Native New Yorker?"
"Lo, Florida."
"Ah, Miami," he said knowingly.
"Lo, Tampa." (I figured he'd never heard of Largo, Florida, where I grew up.)
"Atah sabra?" I asked.
"No, from Eastern Europe."
"Poland?"
"No."
"Russia?"
"No. East Germany. You know it?"
"Never been there."
A pause, and then, "You're twenty years too late."

These experiences got me to thinking about time. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville suggested that in a sense Americans had no past because on the Western frontier "the nearest neighbors are ignorant of each other’s history." Even today, long after the frontier has disappeared, geographical mobility perpetuates this state of affairs. But here in Israel – even in the new and modern city of Tel Aviv – I find that remnants of the past have a way of sticking around and lingering in the present.

Shabbat eve in Tel Aviv

From this (Wisconsin in December):

To this (Tel Aviv in January):










































I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.

John Masefield

Arrived in Israel!

Arrived in Israel on Tuesday afternoon. My flight – New York to London to Tel Aviv -- was uneventful. I spent most of my time reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, watching Doctor Who (I'm a fan of the new series), or sleeping. I expected to be interrogated like when I flew El Al, but I wasn't. I had to go through security again in London, and then in Tel Aviv the woman at passport control asked me where I was planning to stay in Israel, but that was it. Perhaps I look especially trustworthy (but lost) these days. The only other thing about the flight worth mentioning is that I was a little surprised the passengers didn't clap when the plane touched down in Tel Aviv. I've seen that happen on past flights to Israel, but maybe they only do it on El Al flights and not British Airways. Actually, one person started clapping but quickly and sheepishly stopped when no one else joined in. (No, it wasn't me.) That's what sociologists call a collective action problem.

My friend U. very kindly met me at the airport in Tel Aviv and dropped me off at my new apartment. He and his wife A.K. are Israeli sociologists. U. would ordinarily be teaching in Haifa on Tuesday, but all university lecturers are currently on strike in Israel -- more about that in a later post -- so he was free to pick me up. On the drive to my new apartment, we talked about the strike and U.'s recent journal article about the Ethiopian Jews airlifted to Israel in the mid-1980s and in 1991 and the cultural racism they now experience in Israel.

After taking me to my apartment on Rupin Street, U. accompanied me to the supermarket around the corner. I learned that most Israeli supermarkets carry only kosher meat, even in secular Tel Aviv. If you want non-kosher meat, you apparently have to go to some specialty non-kosher supermarkets. Anyway, as luck would have it, one of the cashiers was a young Ethiopian girl. (As U. pointed out later, all the cashiers in the store were Ethiopian, Arab, or Russian, an indication of the ethnic stratification in the Israeli labor market, just as in New York the cashiers would typically be black or Latina.) U., remembering my interest in his article and in Israel's Ethiopian Jews, steered us to the Ethiopian girl's lane and launched into a conversation with her (in Hebrew, but translating for me) about the situation of Ethiopians in Israel and whether she thought there was racism in Israeli society. (Her very sensible answer: Yes, but there's racism everywhere.) U. reassured me that it's not unusual or strange to engage strangers like this in Israel; there seems to be less of what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "civil inattention" here. (In fact, we'd had an earlier exchange with another stranger in the supermarket about coffee.) Judging from the girl's reaction, U. is right. She was friendly and chatty and smiled a lot. I asked the girl in Hebrew whether she understood English and learned that she could understand pretty well but was reluctant to try to speak it. Too bad; I would have enjoyed talking to her more.

After shopping for groceries, I went with U. to pick up his wife A.K. at Tel Aviv University. The three of us drove to a shopping mall to get some coffee for me from Arcafe (the Israeli equivalent of Starbucks, but better) and a coffee percolator. I was reminded of the line in Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X that it doesn't matter where you come from anymore because everyplace has the same stores now. This mall didn't look very different from the ones I remember from my adolescence in the Florida suburbs. I'm fairly certain it's not what Israel's socialist founders had in mind.

With coffee and percolator secured, U. and A.K. took me to their stylish Tel Aviv apartment to join them and their two daughters (the younger one had to be picked up en route from her Girl Scout meeting) for dinner, wine, coffee, and good conversation, including some very interesting shop-talk about guest workers (official and de facto) in Israel and the sociology of citizenship (a topic about which A.K. has written a book). By the time U. drove me home to my new apartment, I was (as they say in Russia) tired but contented.