The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
One year ago, a new El-Al 777, its tailfin Star of David the most coveted missile target in the world, took me on a circuitous route from Thailand to Israel. Naturally, the Jewish airline couldn’t enter Arabic airspace, lest the “essence of the barbaric monkey, the wretched pig, the most evil among creation,” to quote a six-year-old Palestinian girl’s words, infect the righteous lands of Muhammad.
My flight tracked up the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia on my right, Egypt on the left, before banking over the Sinai Desert and into the lemony sunshine of Tel Aviv.
What a jewel in the desert it is. Palm trees lined the six-lane highways. You could see the Tel Aviv University and the opera house and the green fields and the rad mix of brutalist concrete and art deco architecture, the modernist apartment blocks designed by Jews who’d studied at the famous Bauhaus school of architecture before fleeing Nazi Germany. White sand beaches stretched almost all the way to the border of Lebanon. And all this under that sublime Mediterranean climate of hot summers and mild winters.
Even in January, I sweated as I sat in a café, soaked by the sun.
Life there was somewhat perfect, you’d think. The people went to soccer games, they watched “Big Brother,” they argued and they shoveled impressive amounts of hummus and bread into their gourds.
But the more the world turns, the less some things change.
By coincidence, I’d arrived on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which references the day in 1945 when the biggest of the death camps, Auschwitz, was liberated by Soviet troops. Only a handful of survivors emerged—out of the six million Jews killed by the German Final Solution.
Hamas, the de facto governing body of Gaza at the time, used the occasion to announce it would never accept the two-state solution or “give up one inch of the land of Palestine.”
Three hundred clicks to the northeast lay Damascus. (Take the M-5 highway and an M-4 carbine.) The armies of ISIS were one day’s gallop away. There was a small WSL event on in Israel, the first of its sort. An old friend had brought me over to, well, I didn’t really know. Steal precious wind-waves from the little kids? Pursue a hummus addiction? Join a Segway tour through the alleyways of Jerusalem?
It was my second trip to this corner of the world. I held precious memories of the first, which I’d made the previous year with Josh Kerr, Creed McTaggart, Dion Agius, and Craig Anderson. At the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest sight in all of Judaism, while Hasidim bobbed up and down in frenzied prayer, and a boy became mitzvah, a voice rang out. “Craig Anderson, you’re my favorite surfer! I love Slow Dance!” At the Jaffa Gate, the ancient entry to the Old City, a group of American girls shouted. “Craig Anderson we love you!” In small beachbreak lefts, a teenage boy looked like he might faint. “I love your style Craig Anderson!” he gasped. “Today is a special day!”
On this go-around, perhaps I had been invited to Israel to marvel, again, at the miracle of this little nation, surrounded by mortal enemies and yet held to a higher moral standard than any other country in the world.
Whatever, it was a free ticket and a beachfront apartment if I could manage to recruit two pro surfers to color the event. Thus, I secured Australians Ozzie Wright and Otis Carey. Neither was particularly into the idea of a WQS event, but both were open to the idea of veering out of the Australia-Indonesia-Hawaii surf triangle.
In any case, the pair dutifully joined the WSL, mowing through all the banalities of contest administration forms and erasing nearly $1,000 each on their credit cards in the process. The small, onshore soup, a sort-of-left off a jetty, swung the contest in Ozzie’s favor. His 5’5″ Joel Fitzgerald-shaped twin-fin, a very retro 3 inches thick, ate up the wind swell while those on standard thrusters got bogged down in a glutinous manner.
Ozzie, who had just turned 40, was treated as a god. Wherever he went, crowds of curious onlookers gathered around him. “He’s more influential than Kelly Slater,” three different surfers, at three different beaches, confirmed.
At a party presented by the mayor of Netanya, the beach town north of Tel Aviv where the contest was being held, a surfer of no more than 18 stopped Oz and told him that 156 Tricks was the best movie of all time. Then his girlfriend called Oz the “best aerialist in the world.”
For me, it was another chance to finally examine something I’d been puzzling over for decades: why these smart and industrious people, who’d setup shop across Eastern Europe and the Middle East over the last 2,000 years, enriching each county with their music, arts, crafts, trades, and native intelligence, had been forced to suffer the worst privations, the pogroms, the excessive taxations, the restrictions, the boycotts, the lies, and the scapegoating.
I asked a woman I met if she was going to have kids. Standard small talk. “With this tension?” she replied. “Last year we were running into bomb shelters. Do I want to bring a child into this?”
I asked a young surfer if he felt tension between Jews and Arabs. He said of course he did, but “it’s our destiny to be chased. It’s our destiny to be hunted.”
He went on to explain how, whenever he traveled, he was treated differently once it became known he was an Israeli. He’d tested the theory on two Canadians while on vacation in Thailand. They asked his nationality and he said he was Australian.
An Australian! A beer was poured down his throat and he was embraced like a brother. Later, when the surfer admitted that he was actually Israeli, the mood soured and he was chased out of the bar, followed by taunts of, “We wish the Germans had succeeded.”
“We have a very stressful existence,” he said. “You feel it all the time.”
JFK first saw Palestine as a 22 year old in 1939. In a speech 21 years later he said the following: “The neglect and ruin left by centuries of Ottoman misrule were slowly being transformed by miracles of labor and sacrifice. But Palestine was still a land of promise in 1939, rather than a land of fulfillment. I returned in 1951 to see the grandeur of Israel. In three years this new state had opened its doors to 600,000 immigrants and refugees. Even while fighting for its own survival, Israel had given new hope to the persecuted and new dignity to the pattern of Jewish life. I left with the conviction that the United Nations may have conferred on Israel the credentials of nationhood; but its own idealism and courage, its own sacrifice and generosity, had earned the credentials of immortality.”
Beautiful, no?
But history, oh history, has its nuances.
One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. And so forth.
The sci-fi writer Isaac Asimov called it from another angle: “What are we doing?” he said. “We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2,000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back.”
But who needs a Zionist polemic? We came to surf.
*
Israel has waves—and not just in some oblique, theoretical way. Pull out that old school atlas and swing into the Middle East. See how much fetch there is in the Mediterranean, west to east? Over 4,000 kilometers. Enough to create swells that’ll hit, at times, 8 feet plus and light up one of the most wonderful collection of reefs, break walls, and beaches you could ever imagine.
On my very first day in Tel Aviv, I’d walked straight into glassy, and miraculously empty wedges at Hilton, the city’s main beach. I figured it was like that every day, and drank coffee and talked to freckle-faced beauties until I realized I’d actually strolled into the rarest of conditions. I ate up half-an-hour of waves as good as the Gold Coast’s D-Bah until it was carpeted with Israelis yelling, “Op! Op! Op!” and dropping in without rancor or self-examination. The happiest of chaos.
As the wind came, the surf grew. Under giant smoke stacks we surfed 6-foot peaks that rebounded off a jetty into a surprising size. That evening, a glass-off and more clean beachbreaks, our cars parked near a dumpster where a transsexual prostitute conducted her business al fresco.
On a flat day, we ate pastries, dates, and drank beer on the beach after floating in the Dead Sea, where our wet hair dripped salt into our eyes and caused the most excruciating pain. We drove for hours on roads free from the pollution of roadhouses and billboards, just cherry blossoms and fields of green with water pumps painted in lavender, past that Israeli prickly fruit of the cactus, the Sabras, the adopted name of Jews born in Israel.
My co-traveling surfers, blissfully unaware of Israel two weeks earlier, had found a desert in bloom, the friendliest bars they’d ever been to, and streets safe to stagger upon drunk at 3 a.m. Men who could snap your neck in a second politely moved away in crowded nightclubs, the sea of smiling people parting like the Red Sea for Moses two millennia prior. Pretty army girls in fitted, khaki uniforms with machine guns swinging off their backs. Smoking in restaurants, and tables dressed in bowl after bowl of hummus and baba ghanoush and giant skewers of lamb and chicken and cow.
“I like the Jewish steez,” Creed said, the modern surfer’s echo of Kennedy’s 1960 speech.
*
One Israeli whose company I enjoy is Arthur Rashkovan, a pro surfer and surf shop owner from Tel Aviv. He’s always doing his Surfing4Peace thing, giving boards and wetsuits to Palestinian surfers, taking the show on the road through Europe, joining Arabs and Jews.
It isn’t always a roaring success, of course.
How does a young Arab, who’s grown up under “Jewish occupation,” and who’s been indoctrinated about the evils of Jews since he was born, wipe that off?
Arthur tries, and he cuts through little by little.
He remembers when Dorian “Doc” Paskowitz—who introduced surfing to Israel 60 years ago—brought 14 boards into Gaza, a miracle, given the dogma of the Islamists on one side and the Israeli security on the other. But Doc and his son David got ’em in, handed over the boards and, in the Hawaiian tradition, handed over their shirts to their Palestinian compadres too.
“For an instant,” said Doc. “For an instant…we solved that problem. Between the Jews and the Arabs. And it was beautiful, so beautiful to see.”
You talk to Arthur, who runs his surf shop amid the modernist concrete tangle on the beachfront, and you get a sense of what it’s like to be young, a surfer, and surrounded by madness. “I’ve met many Arab surfers, and not only in Israel,” he says. “And we have this pure and true common bond. My identity and heritage are Jewish but my only religion is surfing. The same goes for those who I’ve met in Morocco, the Maldives, and on my trips in France. I’ve met Afghan, Tunisian, Lebanese, and Gazan surfers. And of course we come from enemy countries. But at the grassroots level we are friends. The passion for the surf erases our daily worries.”
Arthur believes, at some micro level, surfing can be effective in bridging the divide between Arab and Jew. “We can make a minor difference in awareness,” he says. “We belong to a new breed of people. I’m completely detached from Jewish religion but strongly attached to Jewish history. On the other hand, I don’t want to look back, but forward with those of my generation. Maybe a day will come when a whole generation on both sides will say, ‘Stop. What you did until today didn’t work.’ Sadly, on the other side, they are controlled by maniacs. And on our side our leader is a pure opportunist with no agenda but to stay in control.”
Is he positive about a peaceful future? Yes, but he ain’t blind to reality.
“I’m very positive—but for a future 100 years from now, not tomorrow. Will a two-state happen? I believe in trying. I hope the other side truly believes that this is inevitable.”
To the reader, I would say: go for the food, the army gals, the mostly flat but occasionally very good waves, for the hospitality that just doesn’t stop, for the dazzling architecture and, if you’re a worldly sort of cat who likes to create his own opinions, to see, with those two holes in your head, this land. Next year, Tel Aviv!
[Feature image: Confluence of marine and terrestrial engineering in Tel Aviv—a modern coastal city for metropolitans, some surfers, and the descendants of the dispersed. Photo by Dragonfly/Alamy Stock Photo.]
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