Reveille for Israeli Yuppies: Give Us Your Trucks

Pity the Israeli yuppie who just wants to hit the off-road track in his four-wheel-drive vehicle. Although the nation is wealthier and more at peace than it has ever been, the army just issued a jolting reminder that Israel still needs even those lucky enough to afford an off-road vehicle.

Well, at least it needs their cars.

In what the army insists is standard procedure, it recently sent notices to owners of Land Rovers, Jeeps, Nissans, Toyotas and other four-wheel-drive vehicles, informing them that in times of emergency or national crisis, they may be called upon to hand over their cars to the army until further notice.

To prepare for such an emergency, owners were also told that they must participate in occasional drills to demonstrate that they can get their vehicles to a designated army collection site on short notice.

“This is not a question of yuppie persecution. This is a question of fulfilling the army’s needs,” an army spokesman said.

But owners of the coveted off-road vehicles are howling in protest.

“I didn’t buy a Land Rover for $75,000 to give it to a unit in the army for training exercises,” said Medad Yaniv, 35, a Tel Aviv businessman. “These days, everybody speaks about peace--even with Syria. Who talks about war? So why is the army talking about this?”

Yaniv said he and other owners have discussed taking their case to Israel’s Supreme Court, should the army ever make good on its vehicle grab.

“It is like the army will suddenly decide to confiscate someone’s house, just because he happens to live on the border and they want to use it as an observation post,” Yaniv said. “They can’t just take private property like this.”

Reaction to the notice says much about how drastically Israel is changing in this era of peace and prosperity.

Not too long ago, when Israelis were poorer, the nation was more threatened and fewer people owned cars, such a call would not have raised a murmur of protest.

“Twenty years ago, 10 years ago, people were more patriotic, I think,” said Yaki Shkrel, owner of a commercial off-road vehicle club with about 400 active members. “People used to say: ‘Whatever they need, give them. This is our country.’ Now, people don’t feel that way.”

*

Indeed, some owners went so far as to accuse the army of singling out yuppies and their vehicles out of sheer spite, a claim the army and commentators dismiss with scorn.

“From the beginning of the history of the state, station wagons and trucks and commercial vans were enlisted” in times of war, Haaretz columnist Amnon Dankner wrote after Israeli newspapers ran stories on the complaining yuppies. “But the yuppies are rebelling. The vehicles in question are private and expensive vehicles that are dear to their owners and give them a social standing.”

Dankner noted that the yuppies seem relatively unconcerned about the possibility of their own conscription to fight the next war.

Most Israeli men serve at least a month’s reserve duty until age 52, after serving three years’ mandatory service in the army upon reaching age 18.

Dankner described the protesting car owners as “madmen who don’t mind going off to war or sending their children off to war, but a scratch on their car would kill them.”

In past wars, vehicle requisitioning was common and rarely protested.

After the 1967 Middle East War, a popular comedy trio called HaGashash HaHiver wrote a hilarious skit about a hapless civilian who comes to fetch his car from the army, only to find that it has been systematically stripped of everything from its seats to its engine. “Did you have an engine when you gave it to us?” the quartermaster innocently asks the distraught owner in the skit’s closing line.

“The skit was real. That was why people loved it,” said Abraham Desha, the troupe’s manager. “After the Six-Day War, when you went to pick up your car from the army, you usually couldn’t recognize it.”

*

The last time, though, that Israel was involved in large-scale combat and requisitioned civilian vehicles was in Lebanon in 1982.

Israel has since undergone an economic, social and diplomatic revolution: Inflation has been under control for a decade, the nation’s gross domestic product is increasing at a dizzying rate and there are more and more affluent Israelis.

Yuppies have arisen as a class, and they have started purchasing the sort of cars that just five years ago were almost unheard of here, where taxes on cars and trucks can exceed 100%.

A spokesman for Toyota in Israel said the company’s 4-Runner sells for 160,000 shekels, or about $53,300. The most expensive Nissan four-wheel-drive vehicle goes for about $45,000, about half the cost of a one-bedroom Israeli apartment.