Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

I read Haaretz because of people like Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Danny Rubinstein, Tom Segev–and Daniel Ben-Simon. No one has described Israel’s “development towns” and the everyday lives of poor Mizrahim (Jews of Middle Eastern origin) more eloquently than he has.

Daniel Ben-Simon: Why I’m leaving journalism for politics - Haaretz, June 13, 2008

I don’t know when it happened. Maybe on that day when the composition teacher was handing back eighth-grade essays. He went from student to student, making comments and returning graded papers. He skipped only me. We sat straight and tense, as befitted students at the Ecole Normale Hebraique boarding school in Casablanca, Morocco, considered the country’s best.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. Was the teacher about to humiliate me? And then he stood up and read my entire essay out loud to the class. It was about a classmate who had disappeared secretly from school, as if the earth had swallowed him, until I found out he had gone to the Holy Land with his family.

“I don’t know what you want to be when you grow up,” Solly Levy told me after reading my essay, “but if you’ll pardon me, I suggest you become a journalist or an author.” The idea had never before occurred to me, but after that, nothing could deter me.

Immigrating to Israel, and particularly the absorption experience, shaped my journalism, positioning me on the underside of Israeli society. I spent my first years here in the company of students whose choppy Hebrew attested to their incomplete integration. They were sent to agricultural boarding schools to acquire vocational skills. They studied welding, mechanics and farming. Only a few got to study academic subjects.