The Hollywood Institute

This week Yuval and I went to three brothels. We started our tour in the heart of Tel Aviv's slum, at a building that was burned in August of 2000, but a religious lunatic who locked the door of what was then a functioning brothel and then lit the building on fire. It was his way of protesting immoral activity. Four women burned to death and in their memory, women's rights activists held a memorial ceremonial at the site. We and about 100 other protestors gathered to light candles and place flowers in their honor and in order to protest trafficking in women. Trafficking in women and children is, unfortunately, more common than you might think and the lighter restrictions on trade in the EU have also made trafficking in women and children easier. In Israel, most of the 3,000 trafficked women who enter Israel annually come in through the Egyptian border.
After the commemoration ceremony, the group of protestors were given stickers with the 24 hour hotline that offers services to trafficked women. We marched through the neighborhood and placed the stickers. After marching for a while we came to the Hollywood Institite and there we paused. It actually took me a minute to realise what the flashing lights of the Hollywood Institute meant. We stood outside and chanted. A woman on the top floor of the building came out to the balcony and waved at us. After a few minutes, a man came out and shut the main door to shut out the noise of our chanting.
We marched through the pedestrian street of the area where Russian speaking men sat with bottles of beers on their tables and cat called at the parade of women who appeared from nowhere marching through their territory. I felt like the circus arriving in a small town, or like the women prohibitionists in the early 1900's.
The protest ended with a ceremony in a park where a member of the parliment spoke against trafficking in women.
After a little while, Yuval and I walked on. It was late afternoon and I realised suddenly, when the world started spinning, that I hadn't drunk anything for two hours and the heat was getting to me. We walked past a newly remodeled falafel stand. "That's the only falafel stand in Tel Aviv with a permanaent guard," said Yuval. It's been blown up twice in a row already, not somewhere I wanted to stop for a drink. We walked on and came to a kiosk. I walked inside and chose a drink. As I was trying to pay, a police car pulled up across the street. Suddenly everyone around me started shouting, the developmentally disabled guy at the register started laughing and shouting "The cab! The cab!" Yuval laughed too. I started panicking and shouted to Yuval "Help me!" He was just laughing and enjoying the show as all of the people in the shop started running down the street or hopping into cabs. To me, it was just a reminder of how much higher his fear threshold is set. When I'm in a slum and the police pull up and all the wanted criminals around me freak out and start diving out of the way, I personally want to disappear. I'm sure I'll be shot in the next minute or so. He, on the other hand, is aware that the last thing that a wanted criminal is going to do is shoot some random person in front of the cops as they are trying to run away, bizarre accidents aside. And that police officers who have pulled up to address a parking violation on the other side of the street, are not very likely to open fire on the person buying a bottle of water across the street.