If you need a friend, better to have a truthful one
The year was 2008 and for many Americans an economic meltdown, the War in Iraq, and the waning failing days of the Bush Administration had spawned a feeling that change was needed. But for me, at the time a struggling engineering student at the Technion’s pre-academic program, the idea that voting would change that wasn’t even in my mind. I’d moved to Israel four years before, served in the army, and didn’t vote in my first eligible American election. Leaving the USA I’d pretty much come to the conclusion that the American political system was dominated by two hogs wrestling over corn cob. But the truth was that by 2008-09 I had also become fatigued and culturally alienated despite being from an extended family largely made up of Israelis. I was living in the Hadar neighbourhood of Haifa, a warren of dilapidated early 20th century Bauhaus homes populated by a population of the city’s poorest, heroin addicts and alcoholics, elderly Russian immigrants, and Filipino ...