Land’s Broken Promise

It was Roi Noi’s first time. He dressed for the unemployment office as if bound for a dance club: his black hair streaked with blond, his jeans veined with bleach. He passed from the clanging street into a drab stairwell, climbed down to the basement and took a number.

Fading posters on the walls urged him to “Have Faith in Israel,” but the 27-year-old Noi wasn’t buying.

“I came here today out of despair,” he said. “I didn’t want to reach this point.”

The lines outside this struggling nation’s unemployment offices and soup kitchens are bleak reminders of the damage done to a country enmeshed in prolonged warfare. In the five decades since the Jewish state was formed, its economy has never been so sick. Analysts blame the nearly 31-month-old intifada, or Palestinian uprising, for the money troubles that haunt every nook of Israeli society.

Noi used to take home $6,000 a month as a salesman for the French advertising agency Eurocom. Two months ago, he was fired. He’s spent the last weeks sending out resumes, knocking on doors and scanning advertisements. All for nothing.

“There are no jobs,” he said.

All over Israel, wages are falling, unemployment is widespread, and shops are closing. Israel hasn’t faced the harsh degree of poverty pervading the Palestinian territories after months of occupation, raids and curfews. Still, a quarter of the nation’s children live below the poverty line, and 100,000 more are likely to tumble into neediness if the government proceeds with expected budget cuts.

Peel back the numbers and you find that, for many Israelis, the promised land has defaulted. These are a few scenes from Israel’s new poverty.

*

Haim Cohen never went to cooking school, but he wanted, more than anything, to invent a gourmet tradition in Israel. He taught himself to cook, mixing French technique with the staples of his mother’s kitchen: yogurt, sesame, olive oils.

“I learned to cook by watching and tasting and books,” he said. “I grew up in this country, and step by step I did it myself.”

Nearly two decades ago, Cohen found an investor and opened an eatery. Society buzzed about Keren, said it was Israel’s most posh restaurant. And for 18 years, Cohen held court in Tel Aviv, dishing up goose liver and grouper steak to a glittering clientele.

He practiced his sauces while the nation was convulsed by a series of wars; poached his fish and steamed his artichokes while peace talks crumbled. When Palestinian militants blew up a nearby seaside discotheque, 21 young people died. Cohen was dressing a platter of fish at the time. Thunder, he thought -- there must be a storm rolling in.

The tourists stopped coming. The stream of foreign businesspeople thinned. Even those who could still afford to eat at Keren stayed away out of guilt, the chef believes.

“To make a gourmet restaurant in a country where the children don’t have food or school -- it’s a bit cynical. It’s crazy,” Cohen said. “As a chef, how can I create a dish when I read the newspaper?”

So Cohen, 43, ran a newspaper advertisement warning customers that they had a month to visit Keren one last time. Then, last month, he closed the place for good. He is thinking of moving on, of trying his luck in New York or Boston.

“To have this restaurant here,” he said, “you must be a dreamer, or you must be crazy.”

*

The ancient icebox is long dead, but its message is vivid.

“The refrigerator is empty,” somebody has scrawled across the door in dripping letters. “We want work.”

The refrigerator has been arranged in the grass as a sort of gatepost to “Bread Square,” a tent city erected by angry demonstrators to protest Israel’s economic collapse. The city of Tel Aviv has tried to kick them out; the urban campers have clung to their turf.

They delight in spreading discomfort -- they are an awkward reminder for shoppers in Tel Aviv’s priciest shopping enclave. There’s Versace, Gucci and Prada. And on the plaza in the center there are broken-down buses, makeshift tents and rusting appliances.

“We build a slum here and nobody wants to see us,” said Orna Goldberg. The 42-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors, Goldberg said she used to manage a boutique on the plaza.

“It’s not only for people who don’t have work at the moment,” she said of Bread Square. “It’s for all the people in Israel who can’t handle the mortgage, who can’t find work, who make minimum wage.”

This is a state whose government turns on two axes: security and the economy. Israelis argue that one is elusive without the other. The battle with the Palestinians, they say, has driven away tourists, hollowed out buyer and investor confidence, and gobbled up cash to pay for soldiers and weapons.

“The solution to all these problems is to end the intifada,” said Haim Ben-Shahar, an economist at Tel Aviv University. “As long as the political situation doesn’t change, there won’t be much improvement in the economy.”

Despite dire need, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon never managed to cut the budget after the Palestinians rose up in the name of statehood. It was, in fact, a budget crisis that drove his last government to messy disintegration and pushed Israel into early elections this year. Grumbling all the while about the cost of the polling, voters put Sharon back in office in January.

Now, the prime minister is again grappling with the budget. And once again, the tension between social and military demands is creating deep rifts in Israel. Sharon has resisted his finance minister’s insistence that about $1 billion be chopped from the military budget. He warned Israelis to expect a lower standard of living. Massive strikes are expected.

Meanwhile, the army is passing out cash to soldiers so they can buy food on the weekends, and reservists have been returning home to find themselves unemployed. In the town of Afula, a soup kitchen changed its hours so that hungry soldiers and police officers could get a free dinner. And in Jerusalem, the Hazon Yeshaya soup kitchen has been forced to turn away thousands of people.

“We don’t have enough. The people are coming in suits and ties, embarrassed,” said Abraham Israel, the soup kitchen’s founder. “The situation is horrible. Horrendous.”

A man named Avishai served his army time, just like everybody else. Then he found a job as a security guard -- but in a ritual that’s become commonplace here, he got fired this winter. Outside the unemployment office, the 27-year-old veteran shook his head and said his patriotism was crumbling.

“Day after day, I feel I’m losing my belief in Israel,” said Avishai, who declined to give his last name. “For me, it was only Israel, always Israel. Now I’m starting to understand why people leave.”

*

Akiva Lebdinski, 54, was the first rose farmer to break, and not the last. His life in the Jewish state began 10 years ago, when the Russian psychiatrist immigrated to the Palestinian territories to work the land.

The Lebdinski family moved into Yafit, a farming collective started by dozens of French Jews in the Jordan Valley.

The rich land lies outside the boundaries of Israel. But many of the Jews of the Jordan Valley set themselves apart from settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Among them were vaguely socialist peace proponents who prided themselves on their relatively amicable relations with their Arab neighbors.

But those friendships disintegrated when the intifada broke out, and along with the other settlements, the Jordan Valley became a target for shootings and bombing attacks.

Lebdinski’s neighbors began to move away. Soon houses stood empty, playgrounds silent. The highway out of town grew desolate.

Meanwhile, Lebdinski’s farming venture was failing. His debt deepened. His roses got sick. He wasn’t alone. Two years ago, growers began to flood the regional council office to ask for help. Lebdinski was among them.

“He took it hard,” said Mayor David Levy, who borrowed about $4.3 million from the government for the farmers. “I said, ‘For God’s sake, it’s not so bad.’ ”

But Lebdinski hated to ask for a handout, to watch his friends guarantee loans he didn’t believe he could repay.

One morning in February, the failed farmer waited until his wife and children were out of the house, took his Uzi submachine gun and shot himself.

“He died of shame,” said Levy, who was advising Lebdinski on his financial woes in the days before his suicide. “He killed himself because he was not able to look in the faces of his friends.”

“Financially, he was like everybody,” said Levy, who began screening the other farmers in the community for depression and debt. “Maybe the other farmers will imitate him.”

A few weeks later, a second flower farmer killed himself. This man lived in the Negev; he was 48. Unable to repay his loans, he shot himself in the head.

“We all had a dream when we came here,” said Orit Artsiely, a spokeswoman for the Jordan Valley Regional Council. “But the dream is not coming true.”