Anarchism is thriving in the nooks and crannies of Tel Aviv and spreading to other cities. But its latest symbol, the Florentine 'squat,' is living on borrowed time.
The setting is hardly alluring: the small yard of a literally gray, four-story, formerly abandoned, industrial-style building in the mostly shabby but steadily gentrifying Florentine neighborhood of South Tel Aviv. The buffet menu is modest and strictly vegan: meatless cholent, rice noodles, tomato-and-cucumber salad and tehinah, served on an eclectic assortment of china dishes. The loud music that draws one to the place is actually coming from a jam
session in an unrelated storefront across the street. But it certainly serves the occasion of this Friday-afternoon party thrown by the Florentine "squat," which is intended less to celebrate its 11 months of existence than to reinforce its self-styled role as a social and cultural center for the surrounding community. Indeed, the casually dressed crowd of mostly twentysomethings, who evince a body-piercing or two but no punk hairdos or visible tattoos, is laid-back and appealingly hospitable - not at all what one expects from the intense and belligerent image that attaches to the word "anarchists" - though no one is prepared to divulge more than his or her first name to a representative of the "mainstream press," and most are prudently camera-shy.
For the sake of the uninitiated, an anarchist squat is an abandoned building taken over by a group of people not because they're otherwise homeless but because they believe it's "absurd," as we're told by this one's spokeswoman,
20-year-old Anat, "that people have to kill themselves working (at steady jobs) in order to have a place to live." Everyone should have that "without having to turn themselves into robots who have no time to actually live their lives," she stresses. "So why shouldn't people move into abandoned buildings, restore and maintain them, and open them to the community for social and cultural activities?" she concludes with aplomb.
Inspired by the more-developed squat scene in European cities like Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin, the Florentine group has so far focused its community-minded efforts on running a summer day camp and street-circus performances for neighborhood kids, as well as throwing parties to ingratiate the squat with its neighbors.
Some squats abroad also feature an "info shop," for the purchase or loan of books and video cassettes, a coffee bar, and rooms for lectures and concerts. "That's what we're aiming for here," Anat explains.
But for now, restoration of the building - which formerly served as a mikveh (ritual bath), of all things - is still a work in progress. The newly painted walls of its stairwell are already peppered with posters and graffiti-style paintings. The basement has been converted into a workroom for the street-circus costumes. A first-story room serves as a rather grimy kitchenette-cum-living room. And the rooms on the upper floors have been converted into bedrooms - by covering the mikvehs and bathtubs with boards on which to place mattresses - for the squat's 17 members. Aged 17-31, they're an eclectic mix of Sabras, including ex-kibbutzniks, and veteran immigrants from the Former Soviet Union (FSU) who hail from all over Israel, and some are already preparing to move on and establish squats in other cities. To fill their modest material needs, says Dima, 20, who came to Israel from Belarus as a child and has been living in the squat from the start, they work at odd or part-time jobs, conserving their best energies for artistic or political endeavors. The kitchen is run on a common kitty, though Dima notes that some members are not averse to scavenging in dumpsters. "The idea is to exist on what society discards," he says cheerily, "be it food, furniture or a building."
Set up last January, the squat is already in its second incarnation, essentially due to lessons learned through trial and error. The founders, "serious people of an anarchist bent," says Oleg, 18 - who also came to Israel as a child and has been living in the squat for five months - felt that the place should be open to all comers. The result, he reports disdainfully, is that "it was soon full of stupid little punkers who created a balagan (mess)," which he explains broadly as noisy, irresponsible behavior that brought complaints from the neighbors. But after the troublemakers were booted out, Oleg continues, "they were replaced by artists, musicians and political activists who are serious about creating, living and spreading the counter-culture."
Florentine is not Tel Aviv's first anarchist squat, but its predecessor - on northern Tel Aviv's chichi Dizengoff Street - came to a bitter end last year in a high-profile police action that included the tossing of furniture and belongings out the windows. So it's all the more striking that the Florentine squatters actually received police protection when the owner of the property - a religious NPO called the Health Bath House - hired a private security company to drive them out. Anat takes pains to note that the building, which had been abandoned to decay for eight years, was so far from its owner's concerns that the presence of the squatters wasn't even noticed for about seven months. But then, "in the middle of the night about four months ago, the owner sent in about 15 thugs to drag people out," she relates. In response to frantic phone calls to friends, "about 200 people turned up to try to stop them," she adds. The clincher was that the squatters also called the police - who pronounced the eviction illegal and sent the musclemen packing.
"The law allows you to use 'reasonable force' to evict trespassers, but only within 30 days of their entering your property," Yossi Wolfson, a Tel Aviv human-rights lawyer who has been helping the squatters, explains to The Report. "After that period, you need a court order to evict," he says - and that, adds Anat, can at any rate be carried out only by the police, not a private security company. For what-ever reason, no such order has been served on the Florentine squat. But it has received a court summons to answer a civil claim lodged by the Health Bath House.
"We hope to reach an out-of-court settlement on paying a symbolic fee for rent," says Anat, confiding the squat's present strategy. "But if all we're offered is a reasonable period in which to clear out, I'm opposed to accepting that." The group would rather take its chances arguing before a judge that the squat serves a far better service to the community than a chronically abandoned building. "When it stood empty, this place was filled with used syringes and industrial waste - a real social and environmental hazard," says Anat. "Nobody cared: not the owners, not the city. We're the only ones who have turned it into something beneficial." The Florentine squat is perhaps the most concrete manifestation of Israel's loose web of anarchist-minded groups. Another is Salon Mazal, which sounds like a beauty parlor and actually takes its name from just such an establishment that evacuated premises subsequently rented to this anarchist infoshop. "The sign was already up there, so we just adopted the name, " says Rosana, 28, one of the volunteers who work at the shop in rotating shifts, "especially as 'salon' also fits our character as a place for meeting and sharing ideas." Last year, however, it parted with the sign and relocated just off Tel Aviv's King George Street, almost in the shadow of the huge Dizengoff Mall, whose consumer culture its denizens so sorely decry.
Registered as an NPO, Salon Mazal is a combination discount bookshop, art gallery and lending library where one can pick up fliers and pamphlets explaining a multitude of anarchist-associated causes - from gay, women's and animal rights to the anti-globalization fair-trade movement and the struggle against Israel's occupation of the West Bank. In its new quarters, the salon also features a vegan bar, continues to host lectures (organized around a
monthly theme), and is even growing organic vegetables in a plot behind the building.
Rosana quantifies the shop's "regulars," ranging in age from 17 to 30, at about 50 - though "many more, from teens to octogenarians, occasionally drop in to shop or come to lectures," she reports. Following Salon Mazal's lead, a similar infoshop is operating in downtown Jerusalem under the name "Daila" (from the Hebrew slogan Dai Lakibbush, freely translated as "End the Occupation"), but a third, in Haifa, has closed down.
Rosana explains the shop's fairly limited clientele as the result of a prevalent misconception. "Many people think anarchism means revolutionary chaos or throwing bombs at innocent people in the streets," she says. "But it really means the organization of community life in a way that can dispense with the need for an overarching government and its police force, because people are prepared to respect the rights of others. And just as we don't seek power over others," she stresses, "neither do we want others - governments - deciding and dictating how we run our lives. "
Yossi Bar Tal, an articulate, bespectacled 19-year-old who is active in the anti-security-fence group Anarchists against the Wall and also works for the Palestinian-Israeli Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, similarly explains that in Israel, at least, anarchism means more the spirit of how groups operate than a doctrinaire political philosophy. The underlying principle is that "anyone can join, everyone can express his views, and things are done by consensus," he says. "And because of the absence of hierarchy, anarchist groups are also more dynamic than other organizations. To hold a demonstration," he elaborates, "you don't have to hold five meetings or wait for approval from 'above.' If you want to do something, you do it."
There's also considerable cross-fertilization between groups ostensibly devoted to a specific issue. And oddly enough, Bar Tal reports, this has been fueled by their common opposition to Israel's occupation of the erritories. At the first Gay Pride parade after the start of the intifada, for example, the gay and transsexual group Black Sheep marched under the slogan "There's No Pride in the Occupation," which was born of the conviction that "the same militaristic mindset that oppresses gays is also oppressing the Palestinian people," says Bar Tal. The tent camp set up in the Palestinian village of Mashah, in April 2003, to protest the construction of the security barrier, also drew a variety of Israeli anarchist groups that sensitized each other to their focal causes - from gay rights to fair trade - during their five-month sojourn there. But in one sense, the intifada has also had a constraining effect on the development of the anarchist scene. Like its counterparts around the world, the Israeli Indymedia website was designed to be a source of "alternative" information on the full gamut of themes close to anarchist hearts. But, by chance, it went online four days before the outbreak of the intifada - and has been dominated by anti-occupation material ever since.
Back at the squat, when I wonder aloud whether the anti-authoritarian spirit of these young anarchists has any chance of taking root in Israel's thoroughly conservative and conformist society and making an impact beyond the fringe, Dima smiles at me indulgently. "We don't think on that scale," he replies. "We just do what feels right, and if others try to stop us here, we'll start over again elsewhere."
