THAI LASS - Photo by OxymanusWhat do Israeli sex tourists in Thailand really think?
By Yotam Feldman, Haaretz CorrespondentOn a steaming hot summer morning around three years ago, Guy Brucker, a student from the Haifa University, traveled the 165 kilometers from Bangkok to Pattaya, the sex tourism capital of Thailand. The silence of the other passengers in his taxi - an Israeli in his 50s, two German men and a Japanese man - made it unclear what they were after. Or not.
People go to Pattaya for only one reason," Brucker, 35, said. "Everybody knows that, but nobody talked about it on the way. I felt like I was climbing mental and physical mountains. I felt so very alone."
Unlike his fellow passengers, Brucker was not searching for sex in Pattaya, at least not in the customary sense. Brucker had traveled there within the framework of an anthropological study of Israeli men seeking sex services in Thailand. Over the course of three months, Brucker did not leave the city, which is viewed as heaven by some and as hell by others. Today he says he will not be traveling in Thailand in the future.
Brucker stayed at the "Mai Travel" hotel in the city, which accommodates, almost exclusively, Israeli sex tourists. He visited sex clubs, dined with Israeli sex tourists and played pool with them. In between activities, he interviewed some 60 men.
Amir (not his real name), a 39-year-old bachelor, said "I heard about Pattaya the same way everyone hears about it. But only when you arrive, and you breathe in the atmosphere and live the place, only then do you understand how much everything you were told is nothing, a pathetic tiny nothing of nothings, compared to the amazing and wondrous reality that awaits you here."
"The openness," Amir continued, "the humanity, the smiles of the beautiful sexy and open-minded women. It's not like the Israeli women, with their nose so far up in the air that it slaps Jumbo planes flying by in the sky."
Brucker, formerly a member of the Sha'ar Ha'amakim kibbutz, currently lives in Ramat Gan. He traveled to Pattaya alone after spending a week in Thailand with his girlfriend, Hila, a clinical psychologist. "I was afraid that Guy would get bored, and wouldn't be able to last three months," Hila said. "It wasn't that I was afraid he would do something, but three months seemed like too long to me. When we sat with Israelis and I heard them speak about the Thai women I was disgusted. I thought it was the most vulgar thing. Later, it became apparent that this kind of talk was the acceptable norm."
Do whatever you want
Brucker, an introverted type, overcame his natural shyness and bought a ticket to the infamous city through the Israeli Connection travel agency. "When the Thai driver called out 'Pattaya' I got a flashback of seven-year-old Guy breaking a soup bowl in the middle of the kibbutz dining hall during Shabbat dinner and the eyes of half the kibbutz turn to him, asking 'what's going on with Shmuel's son?'" Brucker writes in his report.
The hotel was not very striking, he writes. "You can see pictures of men hugging Thai women on the walls alongside thank you notes from former clients thanking the hotel owners for their hospitality. There are wooden tables in the lobby and a small room with three computers," he describes the scene. The room was the closest thing he could imagine to a whore house, he adds. "Inside there is a television, a DVD and a refrigerator with a box of condoms resting on top. Just in case, there is another condom on the bed, alongside burned DVDs of Israeli television shows and movies. The first thing I did was buy new sheets at the local supermarket. Just the thought of what previous guests had done on them?"
The first night, he writes, was a jarring experience. "A large number of women standing in the streets, touching you, inviting you, calling out to you. There is a sense of a lack of boundaries. I have never seen anything like it."
"It is difficult to reconcile all the papers I've read with the feeling this place gives me. With sex out in the open and seductive women, the defenses and the theories don't silence the libido. The city invites you. It tells you 'go do whatever you want' - there are girls here at your service and around you everyone is affirming the very behavior you've always criticized. Think of Eilat, an entire city, only all the streets are part of an enormous brothel. There is no where to run other than into your room and inside your head. Even when I went to buy food at the mall."
What happened there?
"I thought I could get a break. Everything is very sterile there, except perhaps the many pairs of Thai women and tourists. So I sat down at a restaurant to eat, and two women were making eyes at me for the duration of the entire meal. You could say men are sexually harassed in Pattaya. This way you can really understand how women feel."
On the second day, the city looked a little less inviting. Brucker describes his work as a defense mechanism protecting him from the feelings raised by his first encounter with the city. Maybe it was this defense mechanism that left him with no real friends during the three months he spent on the island. "Most of the time I was unhappy," he said. "The worst days were the ones during which no one wanted to be interviewed. I would find myself spending most of the day in the hotel room in front of the television. After that I would go to another restaurant, and another restaurant, and no one wanted to talk."
He managed to convince the Israeli men to talk to him relatively easily, during the afternoon hours at the hotel. Though most men were reluctant to divulge information about their lives in Israel, they were happy to describe their activities in Pattaya. There were those who even approached him voluntarily. The interviewees ranged from age 17 to 50s and 60s, from trash collectors to students to businessmen. Some of the men were permanent residents of the city - retired policemen or Israel Defense Forces officials who bought apartments in town and stayed for several years.
"They say that the economic situation in Israel is killing them and that the women are killing them. They have no sex lives. So in Pattaya, they say, they have relief on both fronts. They come to a vacation spot and feel like life is a vacation," Brucker said.
The Israelis he met were not ugly or repulsive in any way. However, many of them complained of having undergone a crisis over their manhood. They said they were disappointed by the economic situation, the loss of their youth, the materialistic culture, but more than anything they blamed the feminists and the Israeli women. The comparison between Israeli and Thai women always took center stage in his conversations with the Israeli men.
"I think it's the exact opposite of what happens in Israel," said Assaf, a 39-year-old bachelor. "In Israel women wait until they are 150 years old, and by then they have been eaten by worms in their graves for about 60 years. In Pattaya, women give off the signal 'we want to devour you, we're ready for anything with you, sex and romance too, so let's live because there are a lot of nuclear bombs in this world and some idiot could push a button and the world could go to hell.'"
"I felt handsome," said Ran, a good looking man of 21 who spent most of his time without a shirt on. "All the things that make you feel ugly at a young age - I stopped thinking about that nonsense a long time ago, thick eyebrows and all that crap. For a long time now I have thought that I have nice eyebrows after 20 thousand Thai women told me they were nice. This whole thing about maybe my hair is nasty, all those dumb thoughts you have about yourself: maybe this doesn't suit me, maybe this is why girls don't whistle at me, maybe because of this I have to work harder to get the girls, be cuter inside. But then you arrive here, and suddenly your hair is the most beautiful in the world."
Brucker emphasizes in his study that the victims of the sex trade, first and foremost, are the women, but he adds that men, too, have become the victims of the society they belong to. They suffer not only from the social requirements around them - to be rich, to be handsome, to be a chauvinist - but also from the merciless social requirement to get laid. "People there don't rest," he said. "They feel the need to have sex with more and more women. They don't care that they're tired, they don't listen to what their bodies are telling them."
Could this situation lead to positive things too, such as a more critical view of Israel?
I think that some of the men are extremely critical of Israel long before they arrive in Thailand, and their stay only reaffirms their criticism. The problem is that when they talk about being unhappy, they blame the women. If they complain about the value placed on having money, they'll eventually end up complaining about women and the feminism that has reared its head, about the fact that the man is not given his rightful place."
Like a rag for you
In his study, Brucker describes at length the otherworldly quality the men that visit Pattaya attribute to the city. They feel as though they are leaving the familiar world and moving into a parallel universe with an entirely different set of rules than the ones they are accustomed to. The anonymity and the lack of social restrictions are two key elements in their experience.
"Imagine me coming to Israel and suddenly becoming a different person," said Haim, a 54-year-old married insurance agent. "Think about it, I have to disconnect myself. I disconnect from what happened here, I don't recount experiences, I don't tell my wife. Here I am disconnected. It's hard because I have a family. I try? If it were up to me, I wouldn't call anyone at any time, I would disappear. But I call because I have a commitment, I call my parents, I call my family, but not too much. As little as possible."
Many of the men think of Pattaya as a liberal open space that allows them to overcome the inhibitions that characterize their sexual relations in their home country. Brucker was surprised to find how prevalent the cultural relativism theory, which originated in the social sciences departments, was among the tourists, and often used to justify. "They recruit the ideas of relativism to see an openness that doesn't really exist in Thailand, and by that justify their deeds," Brucker said.
Yoram, 60, married with two children, fifth time in Pattaya: "In Buddhism there is no taboo on sex, it's not a sin, not a crime, it's nothing, so these girls enjoy themselves from the get go. When you're with someone you can tell that she wants to have sex."
Moshe, a 24-year-old Jerusalem resident, added "Here, it is the most natural thing there is, that's how they are. They don't know any other way. It is the way they see things, they think that this is the way it should be. When you bring a girl to your hotel room nobody looks at you as if you're doing something wrong, because it is the most normal thing that could be."
These descriptions ignore the pain and the humiliation that define prostitution, like the physical and psychological violence prostitutes endure. Pattaya sees a very high incidence of murder and violence, Brucker said. Some of the interviewees even told him about bullying the women as though it were a natural part of the relationship between a tourist and a prostitute. "You feel that you can do anything," said Eli. "You come and you do everything, all the things you don't do with your wife out of respect, you let yourself do here. Because here they are like a rag for you. If one doesn't want to do something she can go home. There will be another one within seconds, so you can do whatever you want."
"We are our head, we have fantasy," said David. "We want to realize our fantasies, and we can't make them happen at home. With the Thai women you can do anything. You can bang her in the ass, she sucks you off, you can put your penis in her ear, her mouth, her nostril. You can do everything and everything alright. And why is that? Because with my employees, when I tell them to do something, they better do it. So even if she's a really good employee, she has to get up in the morning and go to work and she has to make my fantasies a reality because I am paying her money."
Against this background, it is easy to understand what Pattaya brings out in men. Brucker explains that more than anything, he was embarrassed by the treatment the hotel waitresses received. "These are 17-year-old girls from Laos. I felt the most shame over the way they were treated, more than other things, because I sat with men that they gave service to, I was part of them. You see them smack the waitresses on the back side, people telling the waitress she's stupid or ugly. I sat with them at the table and didn't tell anyone to stop, so I felt much more complicit in it than in other things."
Giving them Zionism
Despite the distance from Israel, tourists in Pattaya bring much of home with them. It's not only the Israeli hotels, with menus in Hebrew. "There was a group of paratroopers who came straight from reserves duty to the island," Brucker related. "One of them said that one day he didn't feel like leaving the hotel so he ordered a girl by telephone. He said 'I called the enlistment officer' referring to the woman who sends prostitutes to men."
Another interviewee, 26, went even further when he explained to Brucker about the ideological messages he insists on relaying to the prostitutes. "I give them a lot of Zionism, lots of Zionism. I talk about Israel constantly, about the army, how much I don't like Arabs and that they shouldn't go with Arabs? I tell them I was a paratrooper and that I fought the Arabs who killed my commander. I tell them that in Israel, radical Muslims carry out terror attacks. Somehow it isn't easy to explain it to them, but I try."
Brucker surmises that Israeli sex tourism, like domestic violence and sexist attitudes towards women, is directly connected to service in the IDF. As a combat fighter who was wounded during his service in the Israel Air Force's elite Shaldag commando unit, and through his work at a facility researching behavior of IDF troops, Brucker sees a clear connection between IDF service and sex tourism.
"You see how we have a culture of personal glorification, of saying that who you are is related to the occupation of the other. This is how people grow, through the subjugation of others. It's possible to see this in the way we don't acknowledge what is happening in Gaza or the failures of the Second Lebanon War. We see these as the result of us not finishing the job, because the resistance of the prostitute was too strong. She said there was a limit to how much you can trample on her."
One of Brucker's surprising revelations in his research was the way sex tourists in Pattaya would avoid or ignore the concept of prostitution, often crafting elaborate fantasies of romantic relationships with the women whose services they had purchased. Many of these men don't pay for the women's services outright, instead buying them gifts, inviting them to restaurants, and sending money to their families. Brucker sees this as a form of denial and personal fraud carried out by the men.
"This allows them to be present physically, while at the same time detached from the act," Brucker says.
"She really enjoys it," says Kobi, 40.
"I also love to tell her nice things, to whisper them to her, to hug her after sex, I love spoiling her before the sex. I do things for her that no one has ever done?She knows how to appreciate this," Kobi says, adding that he sees this as why "she didn't ask for money the first time. The sex was so good and she enjoyed it so much that at some point she just turned away the money?On many occasions, she tried to pay for things, but I prevented her from doing so, even when she said it's alright. I like giving her things, with the knowledge of course that she stays with me and doesn't go out with any other men."
One man, Dekel, says "she's in it for the fun" though he did admit that "I did pay her rent and bought her clothes, she can't say I owe her anything. I buy her food, buy her what she wants, little things of course."
But does Thailand allow men to pursue relationships they couldn't find with an Israeli woman who is only interested in their money? According to Brucker, "On a basic level, the place [Thailand] doesn't allow for relationships that aren't based on the exchange of money." Brucker added "this place doesn?t allow you to think of relationships in the same way they're thought of in Israel."
Brucker insists that a trip to Pattaya has a lasting effect on men after they return to Israel, in the way they treat women.
"The boss who returns from Pattaya will treat his female employees differently, he will treat women he meets at work, the pharmacy, the mall differently. One man told me, after Patayya, even when his wife tells him no he knows she really means yes."
Would these women still be considered prostitutes if they were to return to Israel with men they met in Thailand?
"For many women, this is the dream," Brucker says, "but in reality, its like winning the lotto, there is almost no chance it will happen." Still, Brucker says even in such hypothetical cases, he doesn't see any likelihood that the relationship would become any more equal than it was as a prostitute-client arrangement back in Thailand.
Brucker says that today there is a need to change legislation in order to prosecute men who travel to Thailand to take part in the sex trade, but in the meantime, it is up to women to prevent their husbands from going on such trips, or at least to tell them they are not naïve, and know the real reason they are flying to Thailand with their friends for "a two week trip to take in the sights.
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Israel's sex trade
March 16, 2004 an exerpt
If you want to talk to Nomi Levenkron, be prepared to endanger her life. More than likely she'll be on the road when you call, pressing her cell phone to her ear as she speeds towards a women's lock-up in Haifa, or to a Knesset hearing in Jerusalem, or to the trial of a sex trafficker in Eilat. She'll tell you she's happy to talk but is in a rush. Could you call again in a few hours?
As legal director for the Migrant Worker's Hotline an organization that battles the scourge of trafficking in women for prostitution Nomi's workday often starts at 5 A.M. She carries two cell phones on her at all times. And she talks fast. Her fluent English outpaces most native speakers. When she switches to Hebrew, she seems to forgo drawing breath.
Nomi's days are spent crisscrossing the country, encouraging victims to take the stand against their traffickers, lobbying the authorities to take more action, and suing dangerous men for compensation on behalf of the women they brutalized. Once, after she filed suit in the case of a young Moldovan who had passed through the hands of six violent traffickers, friends came to Nomi?s home to say goodbye, assuming it was the last time they would see her.
During her first six months on the job, Nomi worked full time without salary. She admits its an addiction. "You don't really choose this kind of work," she says. "It's like heroin." Perhaps only an addict could spend 18 hours a day pursuing brutal criminals through the courts, have government officials call her a traitor for exposing Israel's dark side, and still not be discouraged when thousands more women are sold into sex slavery in her country every year. When she finally pulls up to the Hotline's offices in Downtown Tel Aviv, its already ten at night. Nomi releases her seatbelt buckle and the belt slides up across her bulging belly. She is five months pregnant.
Tel Aviv's red light district is only a short walk from Nomi's office on Rehov Ha Hashmal. Most of the brothel-lined streets are filthy, the buildings run-down. Trails of red arrows painted on the walls lead customers to "health clubs" and "massage parlors," all marked out by twinkling strips of colored lights that flash their patterns like cuttlefish enticing their prey.
The billboard for "5 Star Peep Show" on Rehov Neve Shaanan features the silhouette of a naked woman balanced precariously on the end of a dollar sign. She sits astride the bottom curve of the "S," straddling its final phallus-shaped curl. The silhouettes are everywhere. On Rehov Fin better known as "Rehov Pin" or "Penis" a reclining nude beckons clients into "Club Viagra." On Rehov Yesod Ha Maale the floating nude in one "Health Club" window tilts her head back as though in the throes of ecstasy, her feet pointed in the direction of a neighboring falafel stand.
The real women don't seem quite so eager. Through open doorways one can spot them glumly applying make-up or styling their hair. Sometimes they can be seen in brothel windows, chatting to each other and looking out onto the street as they smoke a cigarette. Most of the windows have bars on them. "In the majority of the brothels in Tel Aviv," says Meir Cohen, Head of Investigations for the Israeli National Police, "there is no question that most of the women there are trafficked."
The vast majority of women trafficked to Israel come from Romania and the countries of the former Soviet Union. Seduced by agents of organized crime, they agree to be smuggled into Israel, hoping to make good money. The women are usually young girls, like "Anna" (her real name has been suppressed) a 23-year-old Romanian who testified about her experience to an Israeli court in 2002.
Anna says that in 2001 she was approached in her hometown by an Israeli girl named Shula, who promised to get her work caring for the elderly in Tel Aviv. Shula booked Anna on a plane leaving from Bucharest, but Anna had no idea where it would land. When it touched down in Cairo, she thought she was in Israel. Collected by a liaison, she and a group of other women were driven across the desert in an open car, escorted by masked Bedouin armed with automatic weapons. At two in the morning, they left the cars and walked for several hours, then crawled on their stomachs under a chain-link fence.
Often, it is the Bedouin who are the first to tell victims of trafficking they will be working as prostitutes, as justification for sexually assaulting them. "As early as Egypt I found out that I was going to engage in prostitution in Eilat," one woman told the Hotline. "I tried to run away but a Bedouin got hold of me and beat me. In the evening, four Bedouin raped me, one after the other. I was bleeding and I couldn't walk, it hurt me so much between my legs.I wanted to die."
Since Anna was "lucky" enough not to be raped in transit, she still had no idea what awaited her. After crossing the border she was picked up by a man identified in court records as George Ben-Abraham Yosef, who drove her to Tel Aviv. There, Yosef took Anna to a hotel, and ordered her to strip in front of a roomful of men.
The ordeal is known as an "auction." Like traders in a cattle market, the traffickers inspect the "goods" and bid for the women they want to buy. "[The woman] is made to stand naked in the middle of a room," a female trafficker told Maariv. "[The traffickers] touch her breast, her ass.They check her tongue, her teeth, to see if she's healthy. They touch her private parts.They tell her, "walk forward, backwards, strike poses like a model, wiggle it honey, bend over. Lower. Let's see what you're worth." Traffickers are not necessarily picky about the venue of an auction. In one case a woman was stripped, inspected, and sold for $6,000 in the men's room of a McDonald's.
When the Hotline first contacted Nomi five years ago to ask for her help, trafficking in women was not even a crime under Israeli law. Nomi, then in law school, wasn't interested. She had studied criminology and was more intrigued by criminals than victims. But she had one skill that was crucial to the Hotline - she spoke Romanian.
"Although I had a very hard childhood [in Romania], I'm very grateful for it now," says Nomi. Without Romanian, she would never have gotten involved. The Hotline convinced her to volunteer for just a few hours, speaking to detained women in prison. What Nomi heard from them the brutality they suffered from both criminals and police shocked her into a new consciousness: "I started to say to myself, 'something is really wrong with this country on this issue.?" Two hours of volunteering a week became two hours a day, then 18 hours a day, until finally Nomi was getting only four hours of sleep. When she slept, she dreamt about work.
The plight of the Moldovan sold to six different traffickers proved a watershed for Nomi. The woman wanted to testify but the police wouldn't listen. At the time, women who had been trafficked weren't considered victims. "A prostitute was considered as a partner in crime," says Meir Cohen, the police investigator. Instead of testifying, victims were simply arrested and deported. Police were instructed not to intervene in brothels. The authorities preferred to use pimps as intelligence sources for other underworld investigations.
The police in Beersheba told Nomi that her client was lying, that it wasn't important. So she sued the traffickers in civil court. She sued the police for not investigating. She even sued the ministry of interior for not issuing the woman a visa. Suddenly, the police began to pay attention. More than 50 men were arrested almost immediately. "It was funny," says Nomi. "There were almost no men left in Beersheba."
In May of 2000, Amnesty International had published an embarrassing report that condemned Israel for its cavalier attitude towards sex slavery. The resulting public clamor forced the Knesset to make trafficking in women an explicit crime with a maximum penalty of 16 years in prison. Enforcing the new law was another matter.
"No one wanted to deal with the problem," says Member of Knesset Marina Solodkin, who sits on the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Female Trafficking. "It was easier to just pretend that these women were new immigrants from the FSU and were not being trafficked into Israel." But efforts by Nomi and other activists to publicize the issue finally paid off when, in 2001, the U.S. State Department placed Israel on a "blacklist," among countries that were failing to combat trafficking in women.
The State Department's report was not simply a stain on Israel's reputation. United States law forbids the government from providing non-humanitarian aid to countries put on the blacklist. Washington had jerked back the economic reins. The Israeli government was forced to do a complete about-face. A national police unit was established to investigate the sex trade. And officials insist their entire approach has changed. "Today, one of the central elements of the war against organized crime is trafficking in women," says Cohen.
The challenge is daunting. Demand for prostitution in Israel is enormous, with an estimated one million visits to brothels every month. Human rights organizations estimate that 3,000 women are brought into the country as sex slaves every year. The women come primarily from Russia, Moldova, and the Ukraine, where the collapse of social safety nets in post-communist economies has created a ready supply of destitute women.
In a Hotline survey of trafficked women conducted at Neve Tirza women's prison, one third said that they, like Anna, had no idea they would be engaging in prostitution when they came to Israel. Others knew they would be prostitutes, but were promised good conditions by the traffickers. They were told they would have to take only a limited number of customers each day and that they would earn a thousand dollars a month (a massive sum in most Eastern European countries). Eventually, the traffickers said, they would be able to leave the brothels.
In the parlor, laughter is forbidden. Girls must always smile and sit straight. "I would sit there wearing thin pantyhose and freezing in the air conditioning," "Natasha," a Russian victim of trafficking told the Hotline. "Laughing was not allowed because the client might think he was being made fun of and leave."
When Anna was first taken to a brothel, she didn't know what it was. Yosef had put her in the hands of a man identified in court records as Yuri Ben-Michael Gur. "Yuri told me that he had bought me for a lot of money and I had to do what he said to do prostitution," Anna testified. "That's how I realized that I had been sold like an animal."
Anna was given tight, see-through clothes and told to put them on. Then she was ordered into a room with a man identified in court records as Menasha Ben-Avraham Faraj. Another girl had already told Anna that this was the man who visited the brothel whenever a new girl arrived. As the other men stood outside and laughed, Faraj raped and sodomized her. The "right" to have sex, including by force and without a condom, with an acquired woman, is taken for granted by most traffickers.
After her horrific initiation, Anna was forced to take clients whenever they selected her. Customers paid 150 shekels, which Anna had to give to Gur's underlings. For each client they would give her back only 20 shekels, with which she had to pay for food and contraceptives. In the end she was always left with nothing.
According to other women interviewed by the Hotline, brothel owners made them work seven days a week and an average of 13 hours a day. They had to work during their periods, using diaphragms to prevent blood from leaking. "The meetings with the clients were short just 15 minutes," according to Natasha. After the client finished, she would rush to the tepid showers, then back down to the freezing lobby.
The customers who frequent these brothels are regular Israelis. Soldiers in uniform get discounts. Orthodox Jews stuff their skullcaps into their pockets when they enter, then replace them when they leave. If a customer is dissatisfied, the girl is beaten. But as one 18-year-old victim told Hotline volunteers, "they beat you so as not to leave any marks, because clients don't like to see a woman with bruises." If a woman gets ill or pregnant, she is taken to a veterinarian or a back-alley abortionist.
About half the women interviewed by Hotline volunteers said they had been incarcerated in locked brothels. "Try and escape," one of Gur's employees told Anna, "and I'll crush your head in the door." In one notorious case, two women were tied up in a cage on Tel Aviv's Rehov Pin and forced to provide sexual services. But even if the doors aren't locked, the women are always prisoners. Their traffickers confiscate their passports and threaten their loved ones. "The Russian mob knows exactly how to get to their families," says Nomi. "It is enough for them to say to the prostitutes, if you don't want to see your grandmother's house burned down or your 12-year old sister taken as a prostitute, you better do what we tell you."
At a conference on prostitution in August 2002, Police Major General Moshe Mizrahi stepped to the podium and stated the obvious: "Trafficking in women here is run by organized crime." Though his announcement was no revelation, Mizrahi's willingness to make it was unusual. For years, Israeli officials have consistently denied or downplayed the existence of organized crime groups within Israel's borders. But faced with a multi-billion-dollar sex-slaving trade and its serious political implications, the elephant in the room has become too dangerous to ignore.
According to a report by Nomi and her staff, trafficking in Israel is made possible by "an international network of criminal organizations, most of whose members are from the countries of the former Soviet Union." Almost 80 percent of the women Nomi interviewed said their traffickers were Israelis whose origins are in Russia or other FSU countries. Their language skills and local connections give such traffickers a professional advantage.
"The Russians do quality work in crime. That's Russian education for you," says Police Superintendent and Spokesperson Gil Kleiman. Kleiman believes the trafficking networks are so successful because they are made up of individuals who grew up and served in prison together. Their connections and experience allow them to coordinate the complex arrangement of recruiters, bribes, intermediaries, and buyers that an international smuggling operation requires. "It's always a 'Sasha,'" says Nomi. "One 'Sasha' recruits them in Moldova, another 'Sasha' is waiting for them in Egypt, another meets them when they arrive in Israel. Its organized perfectly."
Once the women get to the brothels, traffickers use intimidation and violence to keep them enslaved, and to ensure that those who escape do not testify. One former prostitute recounted how her trafficker drove her to a beach and threatened to drown her if she caused any trouble. When Anna refused to work and stayed in her room to pray, her pimp beat her with her own bible, screaming "this is not a church."
Traffickers prefer not to murder their prostitutes, since killing them would mean a loss of "merchandise." But sometimes examples are made of woman who break "house rules." In June 2002, police found the body of a woman dressed in revealing clothes, who had been strangled and dumped in the street of Eilat's red light district. In October of that year, 42-year-old prostitute Svetlana Lukatzky was bound, beaten, and stabbed to death.
Trafficked woman also find themselves the victims of turf battles between organized crime groups. To assert dominance, traffickers will abduct women from their competitors, as in the case of one call girl who was ordered to a customer's hotel room only to be thrown in the trunk of a car and driven to her new owner. In other cases, brothels have been firebombed as part of gangland feuds, leaving women burned and maimed.
Fear and corruption outside the brothel combine to keep victims of trafficking enslaved. "People are scared," says Nomi. "When we try to convince them to go to the police to complain about the brothels operating in their neighborhood, they say, 'What are you joking? The traffickers will kill me.' There is a lot of fear in Israel of the Russian mob."
If citizens do screw up the courage to complain to the police, they are quite likely to be met with indifference. "In Tel Aviv [the police] understand what is going on," says Nomi. But in most places "its a different story. They couldn't care less and they don't see [trafficking] as a serious crime. They think these women really enjoy what they're doing."
Nomi acknowledges that the police today do listen much more. "In the beginning we had to sue for every victim. It was hard. But after two or three cases, they learned don't mess with them." Nomi says enforcement has been improving since the state department's report. But she blames the police for creating the crisis by ignoring trafficking in the nineties. For her, the new efforts are far too little and much too late.
Even in Tel Aviv, Meir Cohen admits, most brothels operate freely. He says the law does not allow police to shut them down without proof that the women have been trafficked and kept there against their will. Since most women are too terrified to complain, the system favors the traffickers.
But fear of reprisals is not the only reason prostitutes do not go to the police. According to a Hotline survey, 40 percent of the ex-prostitutes interviewed said policemen were clients at their brothels. And some reported seeing money change hands between pimps and police officers. In one case, a woman said the police tipped her pimp off about an impending raid. And in another a woman claimed the police dragged an escaped prostitute back to their brothel.
Police officials angrily dismiss such claims. "These allegations are bullshit!" fumes Police Superintendent Gil Kleiman. But they are not without proven precedent. In one noted case, a police officer named Oskar Siss was not only a customer but cooperated with traffickers to buy and sell women and coerce them into prostitution. "Without a doubt, there exists collaboration between the police and the pimps," says MK Solodkin.
Though seeking the help of the police might seem risky to many women trapped in prostitution, their only other hope for freedom buying it back is a chimera. When a woman is trafficked to Israel, she is charged both for the cost of being smuggled and, paradoxically, for the price of being acquired. But while the traffickers make back the purchase price on a woman they buy in a matter of weeks through the money clients pay for her services, the woman herself is paid almost nothing. And her debt is compounded both by exponential rates of interest and numerous fines for invented "infractions," from refusing a client to chewing gum.
The debt, of course, is never meant to end. Being sold to another trafficker generates a new debt, and if a woman ever comes close to repaying it she is sold once again. "They are traded and sold from one trafficker to another like a piece of merchandise," says Cohen. And so the victim remains in bondage.
Anna was lucky. Shortly after Yosef picked her up, when she still thought she was being taken to her job as an elder-care worker, they stopped at Lod airport on the way to Tel Aviv. Yosef briefly left her alone in the car to run an errand. As she sat in the passenger seat smoking a cigarette, a security guard approached her and asked her to move the car. "She spoke no Hebrew at all," says Nomi. "So she said to him in Romanian, 'Leave me alone.' And he replied in Romanian so they started talking. He made her take his cell phone number because he thought something was wrong. She said that everything was okay."
After three weeks in the brothel, Anna happened to get a Romanian client. She asked him where exactly she was, then sneaked a call to the security guard on one of the employees' unattended cell phones. The security guard received the message and went to see her, posing as a customer. He then went straight to Tel Aviv's main police station and insisted on seeing the head of the vice unit. Within 48 hours, the police stormed the brothel and arrested Yosef and Gur.
Most victims of trafficking don't get the chance to orchestrate a police raid from within a brothel. A few pluck up the courage to flee (Nomi notes that most of those who do come to the Hotline, not the police). Others are arrested in chance raids. Either way, the women are detained as illegal immigrants and scheduled for deportation.
Nomi is a regular at the detention centers, informing the women of their rights and urging them to testify against the men who trafficked them. Convincing a former prostitute to take the stand after all she's experienced is a tough sell. But "big court cases" aren't always so crucial. "If you told her a joke and made her smile, that's enough for me," says Nomi. "Just make those women laugh. It's just as important."
Those who do decide to testify are put up by the police in unguarded hostels. Galit Saporta, who works with the Hotline, regularly takes a team of volunteers to one such hostel in Tel Aviv (to ensure the women's safety, Nomi and Galit insisted its location not be published). "There are approximately 40 women staying in the hotel waiting to testify," says Galit, who despite being eight months pregnant still visits the hostel each week. She makes sure the women are aware of their rights and are receiving the medical care and 150 shekels a week in pocket money (spent entirely on cigarettes) they are entitled to.
Galit's visits have another, unspoken purpose. Women in line to testify against traffickers have a habit of "disappearing" from the hostels. If Galit can account for all the girls she knows are among the hostel's guests, she can ensure they're safe. Still, women can wait up to a year to testify, giving the traffickers plenty of time to find out where they're staying. One day in the hostel, Anna's roommate handed her a cell phone. On the other end was a man who spoke Romanian. He said Gur and Yosef had paid him to hurt her family. If she didn't withdraw the complaint, he'd set her parents on fire.
In April 2002, Anna took the stand and testified against Gur, Yosef, and Faraj. Gur and Yosef were both found guilty of trafficking in women and were each sentenced to eight years in prison. Faraj received a two-and-a-half year term for rape. The convictions are one more sign that Nomi's hard work is paying off. Since the beginning of 2002, Tel Aviv police have busted five major prostitution networks, culminating in the arrest and conviction of Mark Gaman, who police believe is the country's leading sex racketeer. Gaman- the owner of several massage parlors and gambling clubs survived a car bombing in 1996 that left numerous shrapnel scars on his body. Those distinctive mob markings allowed many of his victims to identify him to the police. Gaman was convicted and sentenced to ten years hard labor.
Whenever they lecture, the prosecutors say 'look at Mark Gaman,'" says Nomi. She is standing by the bulletin board in her little office on the Hotline's floor, staring at a picture of the victim with whom she grew closest. She was forty years old with a child waiting back home and the main witness against Gaman. Six months after the trial she committed suicide. "Very few people know about it," says Nomi.
Other stories have happier endings. Nomi often gets invited to weddings of former sex workers who married Israelis. She points to a picture of another woman on the bulletin board. "The one in white is already a mother," says Nomi. "She was told by a gynecologist that she would never be able to have a child. But now she has a son."
Further along is a small wedding photo, a happy couple. The woman is Anna, smiling in her wedding gown. After testifying, she and the security guard who rescued her fell in love. "It was worth everything just to meet him," she told Nomi. "Divine intervention, of course," Nomi comments dryly. Nomi and her boyfriend recently got married themselves. But when people say "Mazel Tov" on hearing the news, she waves off their congratulations. "Ach," says Nomi. "We only did it so that my parents wouldn't say they had a prostitute in the family."
