Cell phones in Haifa
When the Hizbollah isn’t busy trying to blow the place up, Haifa, I learned today, is a pretty calm and interesting place.
Shortly before heading back to Tel Aviv, I was stopped by a group of Arabs (Christian and Muslim). They wanted me to take a photo of some courtyard and once I got there, I found two Canadian flags hanging on the wall. “My sister lives in Toronto…Mississauga,” says the owner of the sandwich shop to which the courtyard belongs. “We are Arab. In Canada, you have native people. Here, we are the natives.”
The small group of people invited me to sit with them. Most only spoke Arabic and Hebrew but one or two spoke some English.
One of them told me about the war and how a bomb filled with ball bearings fell on a neighbouring building. “We nearly died,” said one of the guys.
Then he asked if I had a cell phone. Looking at it, he asks “Is this from Canada? We don’t have nice phones like this here.”
They still have Bluetooth though and they really use it. In countries like Iran where the Internet is severely regulated, I’m told that cell communication is king when it comes to sharing subversive or objectionable content.
The Internet is totally free in Israel but it appears that at least with Arab Israelis, the habit of sharing material over SMS or Bluetooth has caught on anyway. Eager to share, I was subjected to photos of things like white girls in bikinis, a naked girl snorting cocaine who was described to me as a “Canadian girl”. There were also some videos. These guys started by asking if I wanted a few porn videos on my phone too. Then, they showed me some stuff that made me really understand why Bluetooth communication over the Internet is so popular. It was a short program. Two videos. It was stuff many of us have probably already seen but it wasn’t something I was prepared to see in the middle of a friendly chat.
Video 1: Beheading of a North American hostage
Video 2: Autopsy footage from Abu Ghraib?
As I said…footage that had made its way through certain circles on the Web but also footage that was quickly removed by most hosts. You can’t very easily go on Youtube and search for “beheading” and find the real deal.
They went on to show me photos of themselves holding guns both towards the camera and to themselves.
“A person who is poor in their home country cannot call that place their home,” says one of the guys. “We are like black people in the U.S. Most of us don’t have opportunities to go to university. Most of our parents work so much that they never see us. This isn’t normal. It’s not a way to grow up. But, people have to get by, so what do they do? They sell drugs, they steal. There is a serious problem with poor Arabs in Israel and people rarely think of how this creates other problems.”
Despite all this, however, Haifa, the third largest city in Israel, is maybe the most cooperative in terms of religions. Tel Aviv has a considerably large population of secular Jews in their 20s and 30s. Jerusalem, like Haifa, is a total mishmash of religions, probably some you and I have never even heard of. The difference though is that while the religious diversity in Jerusalem is a source of serious tension, people in Haifa appear to look beyond faith and see human beings. “We feel discriminated against but this is our home. We have to get along with people.”
That’s just one story but actually, I spent a good chunk of the day hanging out with a cool illustrator at the top of the mountain top before I set off on foot to the bottom, where I met the people I just wrote about. Instead of walking, maybe I could have taken the Carmelit, Haifa’s furnicular subway, which is apparently recognized by Guinness World Records as world’s shortest metro line.
This country is filled with stories.
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super bon article man!
Comment by iain — December 3, 2007 #