"Oy va voy!": thai workers in Israel

It was the end of the Shabatt evening here in Tel Aviv and the main bus station was slowly but surely resuming it´s daily routes and schedules. Every single store  and alley of the massive 7-story bus complex was completely packed with people eager for the service to start once again nationwide.

Only 10% of the people in the building where actually israeli, the other 90% where definitely not.

Japanese performance in the streets of Tel Aviv

Not even the most tenacious of the founding fathers or the biggest ideologers of the State of Israel could´ve predicted that a migration of non-jewish immigrants would become a day-to-day concern for  the modern jewish state. Now, this problem is a fact.

Throughout it´s short history, Israel has  had to  cope with massive immigrations of jews from Europe, Asia, Arab countries and other places in the world. As a matter of fact, the whole idea behind zionism was that jews would seize to be persecuted if they became members of  a country where they would be accepted as citizens.  What the zionist didn´t envision was the problems that would come afterwards, when a prosperous jewish economy  in a zionist state would be an actual fact.

Now a days, a new wave of non-jewish immigrants looking for job opportunities and a better quality of life has sparked deep tensions within the society. It effects are yet to make their way into history at large.  

I took the communal cab to Herziliya, a city that´s known as the  hub for israeli start ups. The city´s center, and beach-front community, is known also throughout Israel as the home for multimillionaires that have thrived on Israel´s technology innitiatives and social ventures.

Fountain in Herzilya

Let me just say  that the people I was sharing the cab with were far from being this well-known high class business owners, or a technologically "savvy" employee; they where neither computer geeks  or CEO´s .
As far as I could tell, their work seemed to be a bit different: they where janitors, cleaning ladies, and the like.


Israeli comedian dealing with the immigration issue

A friend of mine, studying in IDC Herzliya, told me a few hours later that most of the thai immigrants work in Hertzselya are nurses for the elderly. They push these old veterans of war and talk to them when the rest of society has forgotten about their existence.

The funny thing about this whole situation with illegal immigrants is that jewish culture is actually influencing people from places that had barely been in touch with judaism at all. The video embeded in this clip is an satyrical example of how israelies and foreigners are trying to adapt to this new situation.

Sometimes these culture clashes end up being funny, other times they are completely absurd. In the cab ride to Hertzilya I heard thailanese women shouting in hebrew at the driver, telling him to stop. I heard another one screaming "Oy va voy!", a phrase that I hadn´t hear since The Fiddler on the Roof, a few years back. I thought I was in a Cohen´s brother´s picture, or in "Lost in Translation": turns out I was in modern day Israel, where you can curse in hebrew to locals and foreigners alike.