Vigilante Justice

Um, so you remember how I am kind of vulnerable to practicing vigilante justice? Usually it’s harmless stuff—for example, I feel like I’m paying too much and working too hard to be on this kibbutz, so I got really annoyed when they said we had to buy our own toilet papers. So I’ve been “stealing”/taking more than I need for one go/whatevering toilet paper from all of the kibbutz’s public bathrooms. I am not stealing—I am not taking the toilet paper from the market here—but I am definitely abusing something in order to rectify something I see as wrong.

Well, I kind of practiced vigilante justice on Monday night. Don’t worry, I didn’t go on some ridiculous raid on a Palestinian village, nor did I release animals from some animal testing center….

On Monday night I hit someone. Really hard. Like, I’ve used the same move on my brother a couple years ago while we were roughhousing, and it reduced him to tears on one occasion.

Perhaps the most exciting part of all of this is that the person I hit was my best friend here. Yet I don’t regret what I did. In fact, if given the opportunity I would have hit this person even harder. In fact, I TRIED to hit the person again immediately after the first strike, but someone physically restrained me.

Maybe I should explain. What drove a short + fat dweeby jewish girl to violence? Cruelty. More details? There are two boys here in ulpan that don’t really have any friends. One of them has some serious physical problems that cause his speech to be almost unintelligible and from listening to the content of what he says, I suspect there are serious mental/intelligence issues. But he’s perfectly harmless and hasn’t done wrong to anybody. There’s another boy here who is just socially awkward….I don’t really know how else to explain it. Anyway, a group of “cool” boys have been teasing the two non-stop, and it just disgusts me. Previously my best friend (I hate to use the term “best friend” for someone I haven’t really known that long, but “closest friend so far in Israel” is a bit too long to have to keep repeating for the sake of the story) here was a kind of quasi-religious guy with a huge interest in Nachman (so he was really big on positivity), and he was very nice to everybody.

Well, the problem is that this guy is also a little bit insecure. And there was a sort of invitation from the “cool” boys to hang out with them. So he accepted. And he joined in with the merciless teasing of two boys who have not a single friend in this country. Everything these two boys said or did was met with cruel laughter and embarrassing imitations.

So on Monday night the “cool” boys decided they were going to play pranks on these two boys. Previously they had taken a pair of HUGE tightie-whities, drew in a skid mark and wrote one of the boy’s names on it in HUGE letters….and then left it out for all to see. Then they went into the borderline-retarded kid’s room while he was sleeping and drew an enormous penis on him in sharpie.

I kept yelling at them to stop, telling them how mean it was, but they just kept doing these things and other things to the boys. I spent the whole time screaming STOP! DON’T! until I was blue in the mouth, but they just keep playing horrible pranks and saying horrible things about the friendless boys. But my friend kept laughing right along with the “cool” boys, egging them on.

Well, finally I had had enough of yelling at people to stop behaving like teenaged assholes and I just wanted to go to bed. As I walked back to my room, I saw that the “cool” boys had left a flaming t-shirt on the borderline-retarded kid’s doorstep. (I hate to call someone “borderline-retarded,” but I’m not really sure how else to put it.) The flames were getting pretty large, but my friend jumped out with a can of hairspray to make an even larger flame. Before he could do that, I grabbed the t-shirt and was about to slam my foot down to put out the flames. My foot was right on top of the flames when my friend, absolutely desperate to be as big of jackass as possible, sprayed the flames with hairspray so that a HUGE fireball came up around my foot. I was okay, but it scared the shit out me and I was greatly upset that my friend was so desperate to continue a prank on some poor friendless kid that he was willing to put me at risk. I was disgusted that he was so willing to make some poor friendless kid’s life even worse than it would already be just so that he could have a gang of “cool” boys to call his own.

So he took a few steps away to laugh at how badass he was with the group of “cool” boys that had gathered…..so I took a few steps toward him, drew back my hand and

WHAM!!!!

I smacked him as hard as I possibly could. What I remember is that the look on his face was immediately of immense shock, then of horrible pain, and then of intense anger. I honestly thought I was going to have to follow up my smack with a legit fist fight.

Needless to say, I am no longer friends with my best friend in Israel. I’m not surprised. Usually best friends don’t get into physical fights. But then again, usually I’m not friends with immoral jackasses. So….

What makes me so angry about all of this is that my former best friend knows all the words to every song with the word “shalom” in it. If it’s a song that begs for peace, he knows it and sings it. If it’s a song that wonders when peace will come on Israel and the world, he sings it with tears in his eyes.

So this is a personal matter. Why am I bringing it up on this blog? Because I think it has everything to do with Israel, and everything to do with the world:
I got a few questions for him and people like him. Why the hell do we angrily wonder why the Arabs can’t stop blowing themselves up to kill us when you can’t let your borderline-retarded neighbor sleep in peace without worrying about whether or not he’s gonna wake up with a Sharpied-in phallus on him? Why sing “Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu” if you’re gonna do everything in your power to make sure two friendless boys have the complete opposite of shalom on them? If the rest of the world is already shit enough to the Jews to make them want to move to Israel to escape, why do we feel compelled to replace the missing negativity when we arrive with our own shit-ness?

Can we, the Jewish community, stop being such shitholes to each other? Maybe once we've gotten that under control we can ask the rest of the world to leave us the fuck alone, too.

You know what’s ironic? He complained bitterly about the “cruelty” to the camels we had to ride in the Negev, yet he sees nothing cruel about constantly taunting and teasing two boys without a single a friend in this country. I don’t know how that’s possible. I mean, I’m all for kindness to animals and all, I was a vegetarian for four years, but humans are worth more to me. I don’t give a shit that some camel is being ridden against its will when two poor boys are basically being tortured by their peers in ulpan.


I’m not saying we have to be best friends with anybody—I mean, I’m not exactly jumping in line to hang out with these two friendless guys—but if people don’t have the strength in them to be friends to the two guys (as I don’t), then they can at least just leave them in peace.

What I find really encouraging about all of this is that, though the “cool” boys keep teasing the friendless boys mercilessly, most of the rest of the ulpan heard what happened and has told me that I did the right thing and that they agree with my sentiments.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on in my life.