Globalization? Try finding an automatic-teller machine that accepts a Cirrus card or an Israeli ATM card that isn’t useless anywhere outside Israel. Efficiency? Opening a simple checking account requires a minimum of thirty signatures from both client and bank officials. Then there’s the country’s bloated public sector and its dysfunctional bureaucracy, which combine the creaky socialism of 1970s Italy with the sheer backwardness of Ethiopia.
Overnight, the strike paralyzed nearly every aspect of Israel’s economy. Longshoremen walked off their jobs, stranding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods at Haifa port. Air traffic controllers and baggage handlers stayed home, throwing Ben Gurion Airport into chaos. Day-care centers locked their doors. Government ministries shut down. And perhaps worst of all, sanitation workers stayed off the job, quickly filling the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa with mounds of uncollected garbage.
The strike escalated quickly into a public health crisis. After ten days without collection, hundreds of plastic trash bags lay in reeking heaps up and down our Jerusalem street, most of them torn open by ravenous packs of stray cats. Fourteen days into the ordeal, with public-health officials warning of the possible spread of epidemics, Histadrut accepted a 3.6 percent wage increase and the garbage trucks returned to their morning rounds.
Relief lasted precisely one day. Israel’s city administrators then rejected the deal, which called for raising municipal taxes to pay for the salary hikes, and the local workers’ union, including garbage collectors, called a new strike. It dragged on for another two weeks.
Yet the remarkable thing was how muted the Israeli reaction was. Perhaps in a country subjected to weekly bombings, shootings and other terror attacks, mountains of trash piling up on the streets once a year isn’t such a big deal. According to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the only act of protest occurred in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mevasseret Zion, where a group of irate citizens gathered garbage from their residential streets and dumped it into the unsullied plaza outside the town hall. Israel’s media barely covered the crisis, except for a handful of columnists who expressed fear that the country’s image, tarnished by four months of violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was suffering further damage from the spreading chaos in daily life. “Many people are simply tired of dealing with a disorderly country,” wrote Avraham Tal in Ha’aretz, “where one may encounter blocked ports of entry, closed ministries and numerous other disruptions any time a union or a particularly belligerent workers’ committee declares war.”
This societal breakdown was brought home in other ways as well. Our arrival in Jerusalem was supposed to be followed by a 500-pound air shipment of personal effects three days later. Instead it took a month. Part of the delay was because airlines-fearing the Palestinian Intifada and the threat of terrorism-refused to take our shipment on board for two weeks. Then, after Lufthansa reluctantly agreed to do it, the strike began and all of Israel’s airport employees walked out.
Just when it appeared that a settlement was in sight, Lufthansa’s exasperated management announced that it was canceling all air-freight deliveries to Israel “until further notice.” The shipment sat in Berlin for another five days until it was trucked to Amsterdam, then placed on board an El Al flight to Tel Aviv.
Leaping past that hurdle brought us to the next stage in the maddening process: the customs clearance. Dependent for its survival on sky-high customs duties, the Israeli government ensnares foreign residents who wish to bring in their personal effects in a thicket of red tape.
Holders of residents’ visas don’t have to pay import duties for their belongings. But they do have to register every single imported electronic appliance they bring to Israel, as well as “luxury items” such as alcoholic beverages or Oriental carpets, which are normally slapped with a 75 percent tariff. To prevent the importer from selling the stuff inside Israel, customs requires that each item be inscribed in the resident’s passport and be brought out when he departs. In addition, a bank guarantee for the total value must be deposited into an escrow account, and held there until the he leaves. Even broken electronic items have to be brought out of the country upon departure.
“It’s a crazy system,” said Malka, the shipping agent who processed the 40-foot container holding the bulk of our possessions, after it arrived at Haifa seaport. Malka filled three pages in my passport with scribbled descriptions of my hardware: Mitsubishi VCR, General Electric blender, Siemens steam iron, Aiwa boom box, Sharp fax machine, Hoover vacuum cleaner. After 20 years in the business, Malka was fed up. “I have 36 bottles of wine being brought in by somebody for personal use and customs is killing me about it,” she sighed. “But what can you expect of this poor little country? We don’t have oil. We have customs duties.”
Then there are the hoops that a foreigner has to leap through in the attempt to purchase a motor vehicle at a reasonable price. Import duties on cars and trucks in Israel are normally a whopping 110 percent, among the highest such tariffs in the world. But the Israeli government permits expatriate residents to buy a second-hand car duty-free as long as the transaction is carried out on a “passport to passport” basis. That means that one foreigner can purchase another foreigner’s car, but only if the seller exports it out of the country, and the buyer imports it back in-and the transaction is, of course, duly recorded in both parties’ passports.
This loophole in the tax laws has given rise to a whole class of enterprising middlemen. Searching for a four-wheel-drive vehicle last month, we noticed classified ads in the Jerusalem Post placed by someone named Nigel, offering a 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee, a 1998 Suzuki Grand Vitara, and a 1999 Kia Grand Sportage. Nigel turned out to be an English auto broker in Israel who keeps a parking lot on the island of Cyprus which serves as a clearing house for foreigners’ vehicles. Nearly every transaction is carried out on a sight-unseen basis. “Just wire the money to my bank account and I’ll put the Jeep on the overnight boat,” he told me.
We were leery about that. Then Nigel told us that the Kia Grand Sportage hadn’t yet been shipped out of Israel and arranged for us to visit the seller: a Norwegian lieutenant in the UN peacekeeping force who was heading back to Oslo after a two-year tour on the Lebanese border. But inspecting the vehicle would have required a three-hour drive to a remote rural area that’s come under Hezbollah rocket attacks, and we let the offer pass. We’re still looking for a four-by-four, but after being subjected both to Nigel and the craziness of Israeli bureaucracy, perhaps we’ll just pay the import duty after all.
