Letting Oneself Be A `Freier' In Israel Is Really Blowing It

JERUSALEM - Why does an Israeli driver speed up when another car signals its intent to enter his traffic lane? Because he doesn't want to be a "freier" - a sucker.

What do Israelis say when dodging military reserve duty? "What do I look like, a freier?"

And how does the Club Riviera advertise its five-star apartments? "Only Freiers Pay More!"

If Israelis could agree on anything, it just might be that the cardinal sin is to be a freier.

A freier, in Israeli eyes, is a shopper who waits patiently in line to pay retail. It is a driver who searches for legal parking rather than pulling onto the sidewalk with the other cars. And if he does this on the way to file an honest tax return, he is the consummate freier.

The ideal Israeli is clever, shrewd and tough, and a freier is a pushover - in the way that Israelis often perceive Americans to be.

The fear of being a freier is a national preoccupation that has earned Israelis an international reputation as rough and gruff, more brash than New Yorkers and ruder than the French.

It permeates politics, everything

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu beat the Labor Party's Shimon Peres in elections last year in large part because of Peres' nice-guy image and his view that Israel must be generous from its position of strength, giving up land now to gain long-term peace.

"He was misperceived as someone who would make us freiers," lamented former aide Uri Dromi, "even though he never made concessions or compromises on something important to us."

Recently Netanyahu credited his muscle-flexing for the drop in terrorist attacks against Israel. "The Palestinians have learned that we aren't freiers," he said in an interview. Affects many topics

The freier factor affects attitudes on nearly every subject. When Israel's telephone company, Bezeq, announced an 80 percent drop in the price of international calls, Israelis did not simply rejoice.

"I feel like such a freier for having paid the higher rates all these years," said an Israeli who often phones abroad.

Theories abound on the origin of an Israeli's fear of being a freier. Social commentator Stuart Schoffman says it is a response to the Jews' victimization in the diaspora. Israelis built their own state to ensure they would never again be oppressed by the "goyim," or non-Jews, and they mean to be strong.

Israelis walk around with their guns in full view and their chests thrust out as if to say, "Just try me. I am not a freier."

Amnon Dankner, a commentator for the daily newspaper Haaretz, theorized that it stems from a feeling of deception. Israel was founded by socialist Zionists who urged their followers to sacrifice for the good of the Jewish state.

While many Israelis stayed in the army and slaved on the kibbutz, the children of political apparatchik went to universities to become professionals.

Now they belong to a yuppie elite in a wealthier Israel that is abandoning the collective ideology for free-market individualism, Dankner said, and farmers and fighters feel like freiers.

Americans are biggest suckers

Americans often find the Israeli attitude intolerably rude. Israelis, meanwhile, find Americans to be the biggest freiers of all.

Author Shahar, a dual citizen of Israel and the United States, said Americans are perceived as innocents who follow the rules and who believe a person will actually do what he promises to do.

"An American is willing to trust until someone proves to be untrustworthy," Shahar said. "Israel is much more like the rest of the world, where the basic assumption is that people . . . should not be trusted until proven trustworthy." ----------------------------------------------------------------- How not to be a sucker

In the Maariv newspaper's weekly column, "Who Is an Israeli?" readers define the anti-"freier," or anti-sucker:

-- "An Israeli is someone who lets you back out of a parking spot only if he needs it himself. . . ."

-- "An Israeli is someone who pretends to be asleep when an old man gets on the bus." Los Angeles Times