Emancipate Yourselves from Mental Slavery

My time living in Israel is embryonic yet it hasn’t taken long to notice a conspicuous characteristic known here as the ‘friar mentality’.  In Israel, the worst possible insult for one Israeli to enunciate to another is that he or she is “a friar”, roughly translated as “a sucker”.  Although I’ve yet to come across anyone in any country who wants to be referred to as a sucker, in Israel, so much of day-to-day life is determined by the fear of an individual or indeed an organisation being seen as ‘a friar’ that the collective essence of the country is somewhat diminished.  In other words, the friar mentality creates the antithesis of the “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.  

To offer an over-used yet veracious example, the driving here is appalling.  No-one pays any due regard to anyone else with each man (and woman) only looking out for himself.  Heaven forbid a driver would let another in-front of them for fear of being ‘a friar’.  The effect: traffic is worse, it takes longer than it should to get anywhere and more worryingly, a stomach-churning 400 deaths on the road in 2010 (compare that to the UK where there were 1857 deaths but with a population 10x that of Israel). 

One further example is Tnuva who were arguably the catalyst for the social protests that took place last summer.  By skyrocketing the price of cottage cheese, Tnuva disregarded their responsibility to the collective i.e. their customers, for bottom line profit.  Of course, it would be naïve to suggest that Tnuva’s mission is to service the collective well-being of the general population but nevertheless, Tnuva demonstrated scant disregard for the population as a whole which in the end, only came back to bite their backside as Israeli’s consequently boycotted  their products which affected their profits and damaged their brand.

Last summer’s demonstrations were, I believe in part, symptomatic of the gradual erosion of some of the roots which bind together the collective essence of what Israel is and stands for as a nation state.  Whatever your political allegiances, one cannot argue that Israel’s development over the last sixty five years is nothing short of a minor miracle and the country is now both certainly a hyper-capitalist and forward thinking state.  Conversely, there is an underlying collective consciousness which exists both as a national and individual identity - which may indeed come from the country’s socialist beginnings - which when threatened becomes a highly visible and powerful force for good. 

Following the demonstrations, there were (and are) a number of accusations levelled at both the organisers and demonstrators themselves – normally from those with most to lose - about what difference the protests would actually make to Israeli society.  “Socialists”, “lefties”, “talk is cheap what’s the point of the marches” to highlight a few.  Personally, I feel this misses the point of the demonstrations.  Paulo Freire  talked about the idea of ‘conscientization’ - developing a consciousness which has the power to transform reality.  The marches were precisely this development of the collective conscientization, the implicit feelings and hopes of a nation made explicit in order to bring about transformative change.  They were a powerful message highlighting the erosion of responsibility to the collective and a message that the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.