Another Tack: Careful what you wish for

Sarah Honig
Another Tack
14 January '11

Some time back in the misty shadows of my Junior High days, I read W.W. Jacobs’ classic horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” – a pretty predictable spine-chiller of 1902 vintage. It opens when the White family’s cozy evening around the hearth is disrupted by a visitor who brings into the idyllic setting a mummified monkey’s paw from India, supernaturally empowered to grant its owner three wishes. The Whites are cautioned not to give in to temptation – but irresistibly they do, with ghastly consequences.

The narrative is preceded by an anonymous quotation: “Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it.”

Thus forewarned, I should have known better a number of years thereafter than to wish the area that at the time surrounded Tel-Aviv’s hectic Central Bus Station excised from the cityscape.

It was too Levantine for my youthful snobbery of yore. I used to joke that the only sliver of Eretz Yisrael which I’d cede – assuming Israel absolutely must make territorial concessions to attain peace – is the teeming Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood (whose name ironically means “placid oasis”).

SHOCKINGLY, MY wish came true. Tel-Aviv’s erstwhile hub has essentially been ripped out and commandeered (though, as was consistently proven true of all our territorial forfeitures, this one too bore no connection whatever to any semblance of peace). The entire quarter, once dominated by the old bus station, has become an expanding ex-territorial lawless sphere where few Israelis dare to tread.

Anyone who indeed inadvertently wanders there would be hard put to recognize it as even remotely Israeli. Squalid and foul, it’s packed with an exotic collection of denizens who infiltrated the country and most of whom originally hail from the southern hemisphere. The once-so-familiar streets are nothing short of an alien scene. This is Tel-Aviv’s seamy dark underside and to venture there is truly dangerous.

(Read full "Careful what you wish for")

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