Heads or Tails

Do you deserve what you have? I ask without irony. You probably do, and so do most of the people I know, including the ones who disagree with me about everything. We worked, we studied, we paid the mortgage, we served or watched our children serve, we buried people. It is an honest answer and I would defend it before any audience. What struck me the other day is that it answers a slightly different question from the one it appears to answer.

Two weeks ago, waiting for a bus, I fell into a long conversation with an engineer who came from Kiev in 1993 and is some six years younger than I am. Call him Sasha. He arrived at eleven without a word of Hebrew, slept four years in a caravan with his parents and a grandmother, was beaten up at school for his accent, served in the army, studied at night, and now designs water systems. When he decided to marry, he had to do it in Cyprus, because the rabbinate does not recognize his mother. He is Israeli enough to risk his life for the state and not Jewish enough to be married inside it. He loathes the current government with a steadier rage than mine, went to the protests before I did, and stayed later.

A bus went by on the Ariel route, and he pointed at it and said he had worked up there in 2018, on the expansion of the water network. He described the job with the technical pride of a man who understands pressure and head loss. Then he said the sentence I have heard from dozens of decent people. We built, they didn’t build. I said the comparison struck me as unfair, since one side builds with a permit and the other builds under demolition. He asked me where I was in 2002, when the buses were exploding, and whether I had a child of draft age. I do not. He does. And he added, without a trace of irony, that nobody ever gave him anything. Nobody did.

I agreed with him on that point and I agree still. What I could have said, and did not, is that the water network is his and the sentence is not. The sentence came to him ready-made. It was only at home, that night, that I remembered the board game.

The lab was at Berkeley and the paper is from 2012. It is called “Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior,” a title that needs no commentary. The design, by Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner, had the kind of simplicity that tends to precede the irritating discoveries. Two volunteers who had never met sat down facing each other. A coin was tossed in plain view of both, and the winner of the toss received double the starting money, two dice instead of one, and twice the usual sum each time he came around the board. Nothing was whispered. The researcher announced the rules out loud and left the room.

Fifteen minutes was enough. The favored players took to slapping their token down square by square, raised their voices, and, at the end, explained the victory by the way they had weighed the risk of each purchase. They played well, and that is the point. They really did weigh the risk of each purchase, they negotiated carefully, they knew when to stop. Everything they said about themselves was true. All that dropped out of the account was the extra die, the doubled money, the doubled salary each time around, and the coin that handed out the lot. Nobody lied. That is what makes it frightening.

Deserving what you have and having been handed the second die sit comfortably inside the same person. The question our honest answer leaves unanswered is not whether we deserve. It is whether the game was fair.

Before I go on, I should say how I got here, because it changes the weight of what I write. I came from Brazil as a grown man and by choice, which is to say nobody drove me out of anywhere. I did not serve. I learned enough Hebrew to order coffee and read a headline, and I give up on the second page of anything serious. I spent my first years here convinced that the occupation was a matter for later, once the urgent questions were settled, and the urgent questions were always mine. I did not look closely at a West Bank zoning map until I was past 50. Sasha carried brick. I formed an opinion on a sofa.

His argument deserves to be stated in full, and with the force it has, because in half measures anyone can knock it down. His grandparents left a place where people meant to kill them, and leaving was the difference between existing and not existing. Here they drained swamp, planted in rock, were attacked in wars they did not choose, and won every one of them. They built a state that works in a neighborhood where working is the exception, and they did it by working hard. Seen from today, with what came afterward in Damascus, in Baghdad, in Beirut, the argument looks stronger than it looked to me at 25. The people who built this were right to be afraid. The fear was calibrated.

None of which answers what happens to two 16-year-olds who live four kilometers apart, on the same hill, arrested in the same week for throwing stones at the same road. Both go before a juvenile court, and there the resemblance ends. One answers to the military juvenile court, may spend days before he sees a judge, is questioned in a language that is not his, without a lawyer and without his parents, and signs at the end a document in Hebrew that he cannot read. His remand hearings, which are the substance of the whole proceeding, are held in the ordinary military court, because the juvenile court’s jurisdiction does not reach precisely that part. The other answers to the civil juvenile court, in his own language, with short deadlines, a probation officer, and his mother in the third row.

The Israeli police’s own figures, from the years when it still published them in full, show where each road ends. One thousand one hundred and forty-two Palestinian minors arrested for throwing stones, 53 Israeli minors for the same act. The stone is the same and the road is the same, so the difference of 21 to one is not in the hand that throws. It is in the hand that arrests. Forty-six per cent of the Palestinians were indicted, against 11 per cent of the Israelis. Of the Palestinians indicted, a 100% were convicted, a number that does not describe a court, it describes a conveyor belt. Of the Israelis, four were found guilty without a conviction entered, one was cleared, and a last one whose outcome nobody can report. At the end of December there were 351 Palestinian minors in Israeli custody on grounds the state classifies as security.

Nobody at Berkeley asked for the second die. The winner found it in his hand and rolled it, and at the end explained the result by himself. Sasha did not write the military order that separates the two courts either, and neither did I, and yet we both turn on the tap and water comes out, and both our plates travel both roads. I have voted against in nearly every election since I arrived, and what that mainly bought me is the agreeable sense that the winner is somebody else. That is precisely the sense the experiment dismantles in 15 minutes.

We were all favored. All of us. Me, who arrived by plane with a return ticket in my pocket. Sasha, who slept four years in a caravan, married in Cyprus, and is more right than I am about nearly everything else. The 19-year-old running the search at the checkpoint at six in the morning, obeying an order he did not write. And the settler from Yitzhar who threw a stone last week and was home before dinner, who also got the second die without asking, and to whom this bill belongs as much as it belongs to me. You deserve what you have. So do I. And as long as five million people on the other side are rolling one die so that our side keeps winning, none of us has the right to call it merit.