The true story of "Plan B"
For the majority of my life I shied away from debates. Everybody feels the burden of knowing oneself, and amongst the few certainties I had whitened my knuckles holding onto was the realization that I was beyond my worst at debating. I knew that if I stayed on the field for too long I would lose my identity to it. Real debating awoke a petulant yet savage version of me that filled me with shame. I was a writer, not by virtue of having been published or recognized but because I could do nothing else, and as a writer words were supposed to be my home, books my friends and the language my tool. But the words spilled over each other, inhaling books never granted me the desired ability to summon the relevant facts and statistics to support my beliefs and the language remained cold and impartial to my needs. I could never win a debate; I could only lose my pride, my confidence and the right to show my face again.
I was safe in the realm of lightweight opinions, where I could argue the merits of a film, a band or a book and later agree to disagree as easily as scratching my nose. Anything that pertained to life outside of artistic creation was off bounds for me. Yet as hard as I tried to steer clear from it, there was one topic that consistently bullied me into the debating ring, and that was any claim made against Zionism, the state of Israel or the IDF. I’d never understood why that was.
I had never been a Zionist. Having been born into Israel as a reality that enveloped me wherever I turned, the term Zionist was a historical relic to me. Zionism was the great ideological project of creating the Jewish state, and now that the state had been born there was no reason for those of us who’d never known a world without it to deliberate whether we were Zionists or not. It was a moot point.
I had never been much of a patriot either; nothing about it appealed to me. I was Israeli because I’d been born Israeli, and the concept of having pride in that was irrelevant, especially as long as everyone around me was just as Israeli as I was.
Finally, I had never had any love for the army. The IDF robbed me of three years of my life by making me hate myself and my existence throughout every single day I wore its uniform and every other day the uniform wore me from within its hiding place in my closet. The army was a brute and evil machine, a soulless hell. I had no doubts about my harsh feelings towards the army, but it was only a good week or so after I’d found myself in a cruel and emotional argument with my good friend Tal that I looked back in confusion and saw that I'd been shouting passionately in this army’s favor. I had to stop and make sense of myself.
We had all been discharged from the army and were floating around aimlessly along with the majority of our Israeli generation. During most of that first year of civilian life I wrote comic scripts for an underground Israeli comic book by the name of “Plan B” that friends of mine had established. It was a small operation that began with the meager initial investment of three hundred shekels, which had allowed them one hundred zeroxed copies of the first issue. By the third issue they were printing six hundred copies and selling them for ten shekels each, and the money was poured back into the next issue.
It was a time of radiant emptiness for me, and I was ready to romantically embrace any endeavor. We spent a couple of days each week selling our comic magazine at science fiction or comic book conventions, at special events or on the streets of Tel Aviv. “Israeli comic book, in Hebrew!” We cried out. “Come and get your funny comics in the holy language!” We devised many attention grabbing techniques, partly to attract buyers and partly to amuse ourselves. We’d call people out by their clothing, shouting “An Israeli comic book in Hebrew for girls wearing white jeans and a pink shirt with sunglasses and a nose ring!” just as that girl walked by, and we’d be sure not to look at her as we did it. Some would laugh, others would laugh hard enough to buy an issue.
I enjoyed those days on the streets more than any other aspect of “Plan B”. The process of creating the comic anthology was not as romantic as it had promised to be. The idea of comics in Hebrew had pulled me in deep, and I’d written out enough scripts to fill five issues. The artists, on the other hand, preferred to work on their own material despite the fact that none of them were writers or put much thought into their words. When they did bring one of my scripts to life they would do so on their own, without collaborating with me, leaving me displeased with the outcome. They were slowly backing away from everything I’d held dear about our little dream; the stories lost their narrative thread and their language as well, they became surrealistic sequences void of words. I’d imagined short stories drawn out as serious, funny and endearing comics and was willing to live with them being collected under the English title, “Plan B” as long as the content was exclusively Hebrew, but I was losing the fight and making everyone else miserable along the way. My friend Gil, one of the founders of “Plan B”, told me “You’re too aggressive. You’re pushing people too hard.”
Though I was close to giving up on ever changing “Plan B”, I was still as active as I could be. I came out for sales every day during the Israeli annual “Book Week”, which consisted of dozens of bookstands from every publishing house in the country set up in a park for people to browse through. We set up our little table-less stand and sold magazines on the periphery of the event, shouting our lungs out with the same absurd slogans about Hebrew comics for people who hated books, Hebrew comics for people who had just bought books, Hebrew comics for people who liked weeks, Hebrew comics for people with beards and Hebrew comics for pregnant ladies and Hebrew comics for just about everyone.
On the second or third day of the “book week” the creators of another underground comic magazine approached us with an offer: since they had a stand of their own on the other side of the park we could swap some of our issues for theirs and sell issues of both magazines. It was a good idea and I would have agreed to it were it not for the content of their anthology, which was blatantly anti-IDF. While our comic stories were bittersweet tales about the dissuading nothingness of life, theirs were distinctly political and featured bloody panels of Israeli soldiers eating Palestinian body parts with a smile on their face. They were all glee and gore, with plenty of sarcastic, cynical politics at the core. They sickened me.
I told my friends I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t stand and scream my lungs out for a magazine filled with the propaganda of teenage ingrates, who shamelessly mocked fallen Israeli soldiers with their drawings and filled their pages with the call to selfishly avoid the draft. Within moments I was caught up in a highly personal debate with my friend Tal. It was exactly the kind of debate I knew to run away from, but I couldn’t help myself.
We were good friends and we loved each other, and we were at each other’s throats. I was yelling “This isn’t Vietnam and we aren’t in “Hair”, we’re a tiny country surrounded by enemies that want us dead! To ideologically refuse to serve in the army is to believe that none of us should serve in the army, it’s advocating the destruction of the army and the destruction of our lives here!” Tal was having his own debate with me, it had nothing to do with ideology, only with the pain the army had inflicted upon him. He kept violently cutting me off and fabricating my side of the argument. We wound up repeating our sentences to each other; me saying “Do you agree that we need an army? Do you!?” and him saying “If you’re talking this way about the army that means you were able to handle it. But some of us weren’t.” In a way he was saying that I was strong, and yet I felt deeply insulted.
Our shouting match faded away and gave way to a hangover of shame. I apologized, he apologized, we forgot about it. As time went by I had to admit to myself and to my friends that there was no place for me in “Plan B”. It was a gentle departure, and I wasn’t the only one to leave. “The Plan”, as they affectionately called it, had gone through puberty and emerged as something else. It was no longer the Hebrew comic book, probably since it never had been.
I struggled with myself and those awkward tendencies to defend “my country” and “my army” with alarming zealotry. I drifted away from Israel, first to Los Angeles and finally to New York. The move stilted my writing for nearly a year; my American characters were fake, they lacked convincing histories and the English in their mouths was synthetic, the product of watching a language on a screen and reading it in books but never living it. I’d never wanted to write in English but I decided that since I was living out a few years of my life there I might as well cultivate my English language skills. It wouldn’t hurt to have a secondary language to fall back on, a “plan b”.
And that’s when it truly sank in, the real reason that I had been unable to stop myself from jumping into regrettable debates about Israel: I was afraid for my language. I was a writer in search of immortality through words and yet the language I was writing in was a perishable mutation, a language that had been dormant for hundreds of years and would most likely become extinct again once the Israeli experiment succumbed to wars, hate and plain old demographics. I was a dead man walking, writing in a dead man’s tongue.
Whether this apocalyptic vision was accurate or not had no effect on the fear it instilled me with; arguing its probability was about as effective as spouting safety statistics to a man afraid of flying. It scared me, much more than the shame of a failed debate ever could. My personal “plan b” grew stronger the more time I spent in NY and the more English words I made my own, but it would always be just that; Plan B from Israel. I was sad in Hebrew and wrote about it in English. After all the debates were over with, gone and forgotten, I thought: I should have known better.
I was safe in the realm of lightweight opinions, where I could argue the merits of a film, a band or a book and later agree to disagree as easily as scratching my nose. Anything that pertained to life outside of artistic creation was off bounds for me. Yet as hard as I tried to steer clear from it, there was one topic that consistently bullied me into the debating ring, and that was any claim made against Zionism, the state of Israel or the IDF. I’d never understood why that was.
I had never been a Zionist. Having been born into Israel as a reality that enveloped me wherever I turned, the term Zionist was a historical relic to me. Zionism was the great ideological project of creating the Jewish state, and now that the state had been born there was no reason for those of us who’d never known a world without it to deliberate whether we were Zionists or not. It was a moot point.
I had never been much of a patriot either; nothing about it appealed to me. I was Israeli because I’d been born Israeli, and the concept of having pride in that was irrelevant, especially as long as everyone around me was just as Israeli as I was.
Finally, I had never had any love for the army. The IDF robbed me of three years of my life by making me hate myself and my existence throughout every single day I wore its uniform and every other day the uniform wore me from within its hiding place in my closet. The army was a brute and evil machine, a soulless hell. I had no doubts about my harsh feelings towards the army, but it was only a good week or so after I’d found myself in a cruel and emotional argument with my good friend Tal that I looked back in confusion and saw that I'd been shouting passionately in this army’s favor. I had to stop and make sense of myself.
We had all been discharged from the army and were floating around aimlessly along with the majority of our Israeli generation. During most of that first year of civilian life I wrote comic scripts for an underground Israeli comic book by the name of “Plan B” that friends of mine had established. It was a small operation that began with the meager initial investment of three hundred shekels, which had allowed them one hundred zeroxed copies of the first issue. By the third issue they were printing six hundred copies and selling them for ten shekels each, and the money was poured back into the next issue.
It was a time of radiant emptiness for me, and I was ready to romantically embrace any endeavor. We spent a couple of days each week selling our comic magazine at science fiction or comic book conventions, at special events or on the streets of Tel Aviv. “Israeli comic book, in Hebrew!” We cried out. “Come and get your funny comics in the holy language!” We devised many attention grabbing techniques, partly to attract buyers and partly to amuse ourselves. We’d call people out by their clothing, shouting “An Israeli comic book in Hebrew for girls wearing white jeans and a pink shirt with sunglasses and a nose ring!” just as that girl walked by, and we’d be sure not to look at her as we did it. Some would laugh, others would laugh hard enough to buy an issue.
I enjoyed those days on the streets more than any other aspect of “Plan B”. The process of creating the comic anthology was not as romantic as it had promised to be. The idea of comics in Hebrew had pulled me in deep, and I’d written out enough scripts to fill five issues. The artists, on the other hand, preferred to work on their own material despite the fact that none of them were writers or put much thought into their words. When they did bring one of my scripts to life they would do so on their own, without collaborating with me, leaving me displeased with the outcome. They were slowly backing away from everything I’d held dear about our little dream; the stories lost their narrative thread and their language as well, they became surrealistic sequences void of words. I’d imagined short stories drawn out as serious, funny and endearing comics and was willing to live with them being collected under the English title, “Plan B” as long as the content was exclusively Hebrew, but I was losing the fight and making everyone else miserable along the way. My friend Gil, one of the founders of “Plan B”, told me “You’re too aggressive. You’re pushing people too hard.”
Though I was close to giving up on ever changing “Plan B”, I was still as active as I could be. I came out for sales every day during the Israeli annual “Book Week”, which consisted of dozens of bookstands from every publishing house in the country set up in a park for people to browse through. We set up our little table-less stand and sold magazines on the periphery of the event, shouting our lungs out with the same absurd slogans about Hebrew comics for people who hated books, Hebrew comics for people who had just bought books, Hebrew comics for people who liked weeks, Hebrew comics for people with beards and Hebrew comics for pregnant ladies and Hebrew comics for just about everyone.
On the second or third day of the “book week” the creators of another underground comic magazine approached us with an offer: since they had a stand of their own on the other side of the park we could swap some of our issues for theirs and sell issues of both magazines. It was a good idea and I would have agreed to it were it not for the content of their anthology, which was blatantly anti-IDF. While our comic stories were bittersweet tales about the dissuading nothingness of life, theirs were distinctly political and featured bloody panels of Israeli soldiers eating Palestinian body parts with a smile on their face. They were all glee and gore, with plenty of sarcastic, cynical politics at the core. They sickened me.
I told my friends I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t stand and scream my lungs out for a magazine filled with the propaganda of teenage ingrates, who shamelessly mocked fallen Israeli soldiers with their drawings and filled their pages with the call to selfishly avoid the draft. Within moments I was caught up in a highly personal debate with my friend Tal. It was exactly the kind of debate I knew to run away from, but I couldn’t help myself.
We were good friends and we loved each other, and we were at each other’s throats. I was yelling “This isn’t Vietnam and we aren’t in “Hair”, we’re a tiny country surrounded by enemies that want us dead! To ideologically refuse to serve in the army is to believe that none of us should serve in the army, it’s advocating the destruction of the army and the destruction of our lives here!” Tal was having his own debate with me, it had nothing to do with ideology, only with the pain the army had inflicted upon him. He kept violently cutting me off and fabricating my side of the argument. We wound up repeating our sentences to each other; me saying “Do you agree that we need an army? Do you!?” and him saying “If you’re talking this way about the army that means you were able to handle it. But some of us weren’t.” In a way he was saying that I was strong, and yet I felt deeply insulted.
Our shouting match faded away and gave way to a hangover of shame. I apologized, he apologized, we forgot about it. As time went by I had to admit to myself and to my friends that there was no place for me in “Plan B”. It was a gentle departure, and I wasn’t the only one to leave. “The Plan”, as they affectionately called it, had gone through puberty and emerged as something else. It was no longer the Hebrew comic book, probably since it never had been.
I struggled with myself and those awkward tendencies to defend “my country” and “my army” with alarming zealotry. I drifted away from Israel, first to Los Angeles and finally to New York. The move stilted my writing for nearly a year; my American characters were fake, they lacked convincing histories and the English in their mouths was synthetic, the product of watching a language on a screen and reading it in books but never living it. I’d never wanted to write in English but I decided that since I was living out a few years of my life there I might as well cultivate my English language skills. It wouldn’t hurt to have a secondary language to fall back on, a “plan b”.
And that’s when it truly sank in, the real reason that I had been unable to stop myself from jumping into regrettable debates about Israel: I was afraid for my language. I was a writer in search of immortality through words and yet the language I was writing in was a perishable mutation, a language that had been dormant for hundreds of years and would most likely become extinct again once the Israeli experiment succumbed to wars, hate and plain old demographics. I was a dead man walking, writing in a dead man’s tongue.
Whether this apocalyptic vision was accurate or not had no effect on the fear it instilled me with; arguing its probability was about as effective as spouting safety statistics to a man afraid of flying. It scared me, much more than the shame of a failed debate ever could. My personal “plan b” grew stronger the more time I spent in NY and the more English words I made my own, but it would always be just that; Plan B from Israel. I was sad in Hebrew and wrote about it in English. After all the debates were over with, gone and forgotten, I thought: I should have known better.
posted by True @ 4:49 AM
1 Comments:
At 3:28 PM,
Steve Bergson said…
Are there any issues of Plan B left?
I am working on a presentation on "Israel and Israelis in comics".
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