We'll deal with good-natured teasing about our little crush on Israeli YouTube stars Tasha and Dishka, but this email is of a different kind:
I looked at the two videos by the Israeli girls. Israelis sure wouldn't have produced videos like that back in 1967... are those brainless and silly girls going to grow up to be decent wives and mothers? I doubt it. If Israel ever solves its problems and finds lasting peace, the Israelis will be come just like the Europeans! That's where they're headed now.
I don't suppose you would react positively to the idea that God in his anger has raised up cruel and fierce enemies against the Israelis to make them suffer. That's what he did in the Old Testament, the foundation of Judaism. When it comes to women, the Arabs go too far to one extreme, the west goes too far to the opposite extreme.
Our email back expressed (a) our strong belief that Israeli women liked dancing and laughing even in the 1960s, (b) that there is more to life than being a wife and a mother, although those are undoubtedly important - and not at all undermined by happiness in a girl's youth, and (c) that since these girls were soldiers the rest of the month, we really doubt that the emailer's characterization of them as "brainless and silly" was justified.
That was more than what we wanted to spend on that emailer, but there really is a serious point here about the vitality of Israeli culture that needs to be emphasized over and over again. Our original post about these two got at some of it...
The entire [video] is just pure, infectious happiness - carelessness and exuberance and silliness. Compare that to the sexual degradation and near slavery that defines the cradle to grave existence of young girls in the Arab and Muslim world. Theirs is a life that is joyless in every way that the lives of these Israeli girls are joyous. And the difference has nothing to do with colonialism or Orientalism or any other apologia: it's about a society under the constant threat of genocide but determined to enjoy life versus a society swimming in resources but so pathologically sick that half of its population lives in the most deadening conditions imaginable.
... but it's a much broader issue. Not to get all pretentious before lunchtime, but one of our favorite scholarly passages is from Edith Hamilton, and it's exactly about this issue:
While Egypt submitted and suffered and turned her face toward death, Greece resisted and rejoiced and turned full-face to life. For somewhere among those steep stone mountains... something quite new came into the world; the joy of life found expression... In Greece nothing is more in evidence. The Greeks were the first people in teh world to play, and they played on a great scale. All over Greece there were games, all sorts of games, athletic contests of every descriptions: races - horse-,boat,foot-torch-races; contests in music, where one side outsung the other; in dancing - on greased skins sometimes to display a nice skill of foot and balance of body; games where men leaped in and out of flying chariots; games so many one grows weary with the list of them. They are embodied in the statues familiar to all, the disc thrower, the charioteer, the wrestling boys, the dancing flute players... There "glorious-limbed youth" - the phrase is Pindar's, the athlete's poet - strove for an honor so coveted as hardly anything else in Greece. An Olympic victor... splendor attended him, processions, sacrifices, banquets, songs the greatest poets were glad to write... If we had no other knowledge of what the Greeks were like, if nothing were left of Greek art and literature, the fact that they were in love with play and played magnificently would be proof enough of how they lived and how they looked at life. Wretched people, toiling people do not play. Nothing like the Greek games is conceivable in Egypt or Mesopotamia.
Israel is one of the most vibrant countries of the world. It takes the best of Jewish ethics and learning, and combines it them with a patently Western joy in action and life. Israelis hike and they sing and they swim and they build campfires and they sing songs. A lot of them even dance, and not a few have the skills to make silly videos. We just can't understand why some people hate fun, but the theocrats in Iran - and, to a far lesser extent, our emailer - certainly do. Listen, Israel isn't preferable to Saudi Arabia because Israeli girls dance and Saudi girls don't. Israel is a better culture because in Israel, girls WANT to dance - and in Saudi Arabia, they simply don't see much of a reason to.
Previously: This Will Not Be Our Last Bow, WaPo Discovers Egyptian Anti-Israel Movements, Gets Story Wrong Anyway, UC Irvine Course Description: American Unilateralism Responsible For Islamist Barbarism
