How We Survived the Cultural Pandemic with Half a Smile and a Shawarma Stand

🧠 Introduction: The World “Woke Up” – We Took a Power Nap

While students in America were screaming at statues, journalists in London were apologizing for their skin color, and people in New York were debating whether saying “mother” constitutes a gender hate crime – in Israel, someone was busy yelling:

“Bro! I said no pickles!”

As WOKE culture spread across the West like TikTok with good intentions and the nutritional value of wet cardboard, something strange happened here in Israel:
We didn’t adopt the language.
We didn’t internalize the guilt.
In many cases – we just yawned.

🌍 What Is WOKE – and Why Is Everyone Losing Their Minds?

WOKE, loosely translated, means “aware.”
It started with noble intentions: social justice, gender equality, racial sensitivity.

Then it mutated.

Today, WOKE is shorthand for:

• Cancel culture as a moral sport
• Identity as a full-time career
• Rewriting history by deleting everything that disagrees with you
• Moral superiority based on Instagram posts and HR workshops

If you’re white, straight, Jewish, and not aggressively leftist – congratulations, you’re the villain by default.
If you also eat meat, like your country, and have a flag on your balcony – you’re practically a domestic threat.

🇮🇱 Why Israel, of All Places, Is Still Standing

1. Because Life Here Is Not a Feelings Workshop

The Israeli reality – rockets, reserve duty, traffic jams, and a Moroccan grandmother – leaves very little room for philosophical debates about non-binary pronouns.

You can’t cancel someone for using masculine grammar while both of you are digging a trench in reserve duty because Hezbollah just launched a new reality show from a bunker.

2. Because Everyone Here Is a Minority – So Who’s the Oppressor?

In Israel:

• Religious? Minority.
• Secular? Minority.
• Right-wing? Minority in the media.
• Left-wing? Minority at the ballot box.
• Pineapple on pizza? Seek professional help.

So the classic WOKE framework of “oppressive majority vs. victimized minority” collapses instantly.
There are no “privileged whites” here – only Mizrahim, Ethiopians, immigrants, Haredim, Druze, and, worst of all, Tel Avivians who believe they’re persecuted for being called Ashkenazi.

3. Because Israelis Don’t Really Cancel People

What do you do with:

• Guri Alfi’s humor
• Netanyahu’s sarcasm
• An Iraqi grandmother’s vocabulary
• High-school kids uploading TikToks during IDF oath ceremonies?

You try to cancel someone – and they reply:
“Yalla, you done?”
If you insist, they send you a meme of Bennett dressed as a Pokémon.

Conversation over.

🧓 The Israeli Grandma: Zionism’s Secret Weapon Against Cancellation

You cannot do WOKE with an Israeli grandmother.

Try explaining “gender-queer” to her.
She’ll offer you chicken soup and ask if you’ve eaten.

She won’t ask how you identify today – she’ll ask why you lost weight.
The conversation will end with you going home carrying food containers, pickles, unsolicited advice, and mild emotional damage.

Israeli grandmothers don’t fight trends with hashtags.
They crush them with love, toughness, and battlefield experience from open-air markets.

🧱 The Core Conflict: WOKE Is Theory – Israel Is Practice

WOKE wants to fix the world through language.
Israel fixes the world through action.

We’re not busy “addressing you correctly.”
We’re busy pulling you out alive.

That’s the difference between a faculty seminar and a rescue unit in the north.
Between a pride flag debate and an IDF uniform with a dust stain in the Jordan Valley.

🧠 A Right-Wing Moment of Honesty: Why WOKE Is Actually Dangerous

WOKE isn’t just ridiculous – it’s corrosive.

It:

• Replaces permanent values with temporary identities
• Elevates feelings over responsibility
• Pushes radical agendas under the banner of fake morality
• Splits society into competing victim groups, all permanently offended

Israel, for all its chaos, still has:
Belonging.
Purpose.
A shared understanding that reality is messier than California sociology templates.

😎 So What Do We Do Instead?

We serve in the army – we don’t just feel patriotic, we do patriotism.
We argue endlessly – then eat together on Friday night.
We understand that men and women aren’t “social constructs” – they’re the most Israeli dynamic there is.

Instead of fragmenting into endless sub-identities with creative names, we fight, survive, and build the country together.

✡️ Conclusion: One Nation, Under Pressure – Awake Enough

WOKE is like quinoa on a scooter – it doesn’t belong here.

It may shine in academic conferences and New York studios, but it collapses instantly when faced with a tank, a stubborn grandmother, or a former MK shouting in a finance committee meeting.

Israel may be stuck in eternal traffic – but at least it didn’t drown in this cultural flood.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the lesson for the West:
Sanity isn’t fear.
It’s understanding that people are more than labels.

And also:
A mother is still a mother.
Being a man is not a crime.
And not every post needs to be a moral indictment.