My trip to Tel Aviv

Hilonim ... what?

A few weeks ago, I had to go to Modiin. In an ideal world, a direct route from the Golan Heights to Modiin would look something like this:

Unfortunately, though, bathroom stops in Nablus are not feasible at present, so the two relatively direct bus routes go either via Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, like so:

This is genuinely a fairly legitimate argument against partition. This shape makes no sense.

Both of which suck. Moovit that morning, however, was in the mood to suggest elaborate triple bankshot moves involving catching a connection at the side of a dual carriageway in the middle of nowhere with two minutes leeway and no further buses for the rest of the day, so I thought I’d just bear the cost of an extra hour, and take a direct bus to Tel Aviv, and then to Modiin. This was, I think, my third time entering Tel Aviv in the last five years, and maybe the tenth or so since moving to Israel. Once in a while, it’s nice to see hundreds of misshapen, tinted-glass skyscrapers jarringly clash with the sky, each other, the ground, and the very creation itself. It’s not really, just kidding, but I can cope with standing there for a few minutes to get a bus connection.

The direct bus to Tel Aviv terminates at ‘Tel Aviv Central Bus Station’. I figured that ‘Tel Aviv Central Bus Station’ sounded like a good place to catch buses to different parts of the country, so I told Moovit it could go pound sand and I got on the bus with a good book. The journey was pleasant enough, the only unpleasant element being the usual, namely heretic posters on the back of every road sign, literally thousands of them.

We have been conditioned by living in a heretic state to think this is normal, but it is absolutely not, and God’s mercies are not infinite

But today’s article is not about that. When we got to Tel Aviv, everyone but me and some old bubby got off at Savidor, which to the best of my knowledge was a train station, but I’m poor and wasn’t going to spring for that; ‘twas the bus station for me. The Arab driver appeared to be looking at me quizzically through the mirror, but my book was good and I paid it no mind. As we continued through absurdly congested roads, I thought maybe my mistake had simply been not getting off at the first available stop and getting on the tram, something I had learned to do early on as a resident of Jerusalem.

When we arrived at the ‘Tel Aviv Central Bus Station’ an unconscionably long time after, some things appeared to be wrong. For one, none of the escalators over the seven floors worked. For two, the toilets had a big padlock and chain over them. However, if I had to put my finger on it, I would say that the principle issue was that I was in a dishevelled, hollowed-out wreck full of Africans.

Evocative scene setting is not my thing. I’m more into insults and nerding out, but if I was good at that, I could set you quite the scene. Suffice to say that, in the plaza at the bottom where there’s supposed to be a shop where you can stand around for 5 minutes trying to decide whether to have a rubbish Israeli chocolate bar or a rubbish Israeli snack, and then just buy a Magnum for the millionth time, there were row after row of third world stalls selling dolls or kitchen equipment in cellophane bags. I didn’t even know where the exit was, but presumably there had to be one. I could hear a bunch of what I guess are languages, but no Hebrew. I thought. Who does their shopping here? Where do the Africans even go to acquire this merchandise? Am I going to die? Questions rolled around my head, and I texted a few friends asking what the hell was going on. The responses came in:

Why the ___ are you in Tel Aviv Bus Station?

You muppet 🤦

How can you not know this? LOL.

But Wikipedia always knows. I guess I was lucky not to see the ‘bat colony’.

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Like the repentant harlot of Hoshea, I turned to my old master Moovit for help. Of course, no actual buses go from the Tel Aviv Central Bus Station, but it was only a ten minute walk to one. ‘Bnei Brak Street’; can’t be too bad:

We can do this

It was that bad.

I’ve been to Brixton. I lived next door to Tottenham. I know what black people look like. I’m prejudiced, but not like some ninety-year old guy in a blazer. But what on earth did I see over those ten minutes? There is a level of squalor beyond which it’s not even squalor any more, it’s ruins, just with people coming in and out of them. There were two people it was possible to identify as non-African, but it’s hard to tell what exactly they were, so contorted were their features. They appeared to be shouting in ‘Meth’. (Was the one *sniffing* the bus stop sniffing *for* something?) Though I didn’t hear Hebrew, I did hear English from a street preacher who shouted at me that I had spurned the covenant of Moses and was not saved. I wanted to tell him I know and we’re not all like that but I didn’t want him to bite me. I don’t want to say I’m lucky to be alive or something spastic like that, nothing actually happened. But maybe I am, I don’t know. What if bus-stop sniffing man had sniffed me; what am I actually going to do?

But I got there and got the bus. For the trip back, I did my research and it turns out that the real Tel Aviv central bus station isn’t ‘Tel Aviv Central Bus Station’ (you muppet!), it’s just a bunch of bus stops littered around the streets adjacent to Savidor train station, kind of, sort of where Moovit says they are, but not really. Here the story ends.

From this tale of muppetry, we can learn two things. First of all, I know nothing at all about Israel. I’m just some dumb caveman in the Golan Heights. I don’t know why anyone would read this blog. What are you expecting to learn?

The second message is that seculars need to get their 💩 together, and they need to get it soon. At Savidor, when I was trying to work out which bus stop was G and which was H, I saw lots of people going back or forward from work with their briefcases and what I guess counts as business casual. They work from 8 till 6, pay 50% income tax, do army reserve service and just generally spend all their time subsidizing bums. I wanted to shake them: ‘you built this city out of nothing on a sand dune, you gave your blood for it, you are still giving your blood for it, why do you just let it be an African slum? ’

Tel Aviv Central Bus Station isn’t on the fringes of Tel Aviv. Google Maps tells me it’s a 15 minute drive from the wealthiest neighborhood in the whole of Israel, a place where small flats go for many millions of dollars (it looks rubbish though). The Second Aliyah, the kibbutzim, the War of Independence, the Oslo Process, what even is the point if you are just going to let your ‘Third Temple’ become downtown Lagos? If Bibi hadn’t built the big fence to keep Eritreans out, would they just have let the whole of Tel Aviv look like that?

Someone has to run this country, and it should be someone who isn’t committed to running it into the ground as fast as possible, which means secular Ashkenazim by default. However, just as the PA obviously can’t run Palestine if it can’t even run Jenin and not stop it being taken over by adolescent street gangs, seculars can’t run the country if they can’t keep a a lid on it in their metropolitan core. You can’t just build the second largest bus station in the world, and abandon it to Africans and bats, and shamefacedly send buses to terminate there because everyone knows the real bus station is this thing you jerry rigged across town. That’s pathetic. If I’m a muppet, I’m just some guy on Substack. No-one’s harmed. But this is serious; you’re not allowed to be muppets. I don’t know what you were thinking when you built this country; I don’t think you know either, but you did it anyway, and it’s yours. A lot of people in this country need to be crushed by your iron fist. Start practicing your grip strength.