Tel Aviv Parties While Israel Burns

Living in a bubble

The suicide attack at a crowded shawarma stand last April was particularly brutal, even by Israeli standards. The young Palestinian man whose backpack blew up near Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station wounded dozens of people and killed 11, including a Florida high-school sophomore in town with his family for Passover. The bodies were swiftly bagged, and rabbis carefully collected flesh for burial. As day turned to evening, the nation braced for the army’s inevitable response, and the TV news crews went home.

But just a mile uptown from the explosion, the other Tel Aviv was getting ready for action: the Tel Aviv crammed with hipster bars and noisy cafés, chiseled gym rats and long-legged honeys. It’s a place where people obsess not over terror but over threesomes, not over bombings but over blow. Shielding themselves from their nation’s enemies and the quickly ascending religious right, these Israelis exist in a secular, apolitical purple haze. In the midst of the region’s mayhem, some call their world the Bubble. And for those inside the Bubble, ignoring socio-political reality—living in the moment rather than in fear—is an instinctive, desperate strategy of survival. CONTINUE

February 24, 2007 | 2 Comments »

Subscribe to Israpundit Daily Digest

2 Comments / 2 Comments

  1. Page 3: “Living in the Bubble doesn’t make them bubbleheads, though. Everyone here served in the military just after high-school graduation. They know Israel’s enemies are real. It’s just that they’ve got other priorities. “Give me a call when Syria starts to invade,” says Itay Valdman, a 27-year-old deputy editor of Time Out Tel Aviv who moonlights as a DJ when he’s not studying psychology and international relations at Tel Aviv University.”

    (He’ll fit right in unfortunately).

  2. The meaning of life?
    1. The Israeli leftist atheists say there is no god. We are all here by accident. Our life is meaningless and random. Human beings are merely talking monkeys with no particular value. All human beings are pretty much interchangeable.
    2. Religious Israelis believe that God created the universe so that human beings could make His Existence complete (in a mystical feed-back loop). He built up the universe according to His plan (guided evolution).
    He made human beings by placing a Divine Soul in a material body. The material world was designed to hide God’s Presence from us, so that we have to go looking for Him. When the time was right, He gave the Torah to the Jewish people so that they could lead the way.
    3. For a Jew, our mission in this generation is to re-establish the Jewish State of Israel as a Torah-true State, and most importantly, to learn from the mistakes of the past so that we get it right this time.

Comments are closed.