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Revenge of the goody two shoes By Avner Bernheimer Recent news reports about crime boss Itzik Abergil, along with his youthful criminal appearance, have evoked within me forgotten images from my adolescence in Petah Tivka. After my parents left the kibbutz to start a new life in the city, with no financial help whatsoever, we moved into a two-room apartment in the Argov housing project in Petah Tikva. Argov was inhabited by laborers and consisted of about 10 buildings separated by huge lawns, which were like heaven for children and dogs. It was a safe time, and we could wander around the vast space alone after dark without being bothered. Each building housed 24 families, most of them young couples with children, first-generation Israelis, not native-born "sabras." Our building definitely represented the different ethnic groups in the neighborhood: Romanians, Hungarians, Iraqis, Yemenites and Georgians. Until I joined an elite unit in the army, I never experienced inter-ethnic tension, at least not any that I could interpret as such. We were all children of workers - most of us with fathers who were laborers in the aviation industry and whose buses picked them up every morning to take them to Lod and came back, after overtime, at 10 P.M. The mothers worked part-time and took care of the children, who all wore Adidas and other cheap imitations, and we lacked for nothing. Advertisement Not far from this paradise, there were two slightly rougher neighborhoods: Mahane Yehuda and Sha'ariya. Another neighborhood, Paja, was considered even rougher, but it was pretty far away, and we never went there except on days off from school, when we'd ride our bikes to the sources of the Yarkon River to wade in the water. When we'd pass by Paja, we'd ride particularly fast, terrified of the miniature thugs who would try to chase us and knock us off our bikes with soccer balls, as though we were ducks at an amusement park shooting range. Most of us got hit in the head, but tried to keep our balance and keep riding as though nothing happened. It was basically a nightmare, and I eventually gave up riding my bike through there. The children of Mahane Yehuda and Sha'ariya were harder to avoid. They were just across the street, and went to school with us. Most of them were perfectly fine, but the thugs were scary; they were all thin and muscular like Abergil, and looked like man-boys. When children from Mahane Yehuda and Sha'ariya would see us - the "goody two shoes" from the Argov housing project - they would blow a fuse. They didn't have pocketknives or guns like today's hooligans, but they would beat us up just like that, with no excuse but frustration, which we didn't know how to define then. Childhood frustration is generally taken out on the wrong people, especially on the wrong children. I mean, it would be one thing if they beat the kids from Neve Oz! Our only crime was that we were nearby. Things got even worse later on. I went to Brenner High School, which was considered a leading academic institution until a junior high for children from Mahane Yehuda and Sha'ariya was added on to it. The high-school classrooms used to be in a two-story building, while the junior high got a big, new building with three or four floors. During recess, the little thugs would stand at the windows and pelt us with sandwiches with chocolate spread; plastic bags filled with cheese sandwiches; tomatoes and cucumbers; hard-boiled eggs; and whatever fruits were in season. My friend Anat from the penthouse, who went to high school with me, remembers to this day a sandwich with butter that got stuck to her hair. My husband, who was two years ahead of me in school, was hit by half a loaf of bread, the contents of which were hollowed out and filled with tuna salad. I got a slice of pastrami with mustard stuck to my forehead. It didn't really suit my cool look. "That's it, I'm finally going to put an end to this," said Agai Yehezkel, a good friend of mine in high school, who had been hit by a particularly horrifying tomato barrage. Some say it was the barrage that propelled him into a military career during which, at its peak, he would serve as a high-ranking Armor Corps officer. I don't know what went down on the third floor of the junior high. Agai let me stay behind, at the home front. Maybe he didn't want me to pity the little hooligans, maybe he didn't want me to interrupt my rehearsals for "Singin' in the Rain," but the operation on the enemy front led to an immediate cease-fire. For two recesses, we were sure that we had won forever. During those few euphoric hours, no one imagined that the junior-high thugs from Mahane Yehuda and Sha'ariya had big brothers, all of whom look like Itzik Abergil. Heavy clouds filled the sky when we finished school that day, at 2 P.M. We left the gates of the school in good spirits, happy to have wiped out the enemy's sandwich-launchers, only to discover roughly 10 thugs from the auto-mechanics track in the vocational school, along with a miniature one from the junior high, who was pointing at us. The balance of power wasn't on our side. We had big backpacks and umbrellas; they had sticks, monkey wrenches and chains that they dismantled from our bicycles, which had been locked outside. Agai tried to negotiate. It could have worked had I not dared to look into the eyes of the stud-thug with the big stick and smiled at him. "You think something is funny here?" He interpreted my smile as arrogance, and spit a phlegm wad in my direction that would have knocked me over had I not quickly opened my black umbrella and blocked it. That signaled the end of the shortest cease-fire in history. Bookmark to del.icio.us   'I didn't kill Rose' Rose's mother, grandfather request court delay autopsy of body found in Yarkon River. Israeli requests Israel asks U.S. for arms and permission to use an air corridor to attack Iran.

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