Reading Google's U.S. News Site, one could easily forget that people live real lives in countries other than America. In Israel, we buy food and gas balloons, we pay rent, electricity, health insurance costs, bus fare, school tuition, and the phone bill; and we have to work to make the money to pay for all of the above.

We have sex and women bear babies (lots of sex - lots of women have lots of babies). Some women have abortions, sometimes guys go to prostitutes, married people have extramarital affairs, there are divorces, and there are even passion killings. Sometimes people write bad checks, commit crimes, and do all sorts of not very nice things that have nothing to do with whether Arabs deserve yet another state on our own land.

However, you can always count on the Hebrew press to take the unfortunate events of a man down on his luck to try and drag politics into the issue and cast doubt on the country's future. Before we drag the link into the picture, or even mention the newspaper in question, let's talk a little about the unfortunate man.

Alfonso Rubin came to Israel in 1980 to live, glowing with the sparkling things that the 'ShaliaH" (representative of the Jewish Agency) had told him about the country. According to the story, he chose to live in Ashdod and went to an "absorption center" to help him get adjusted to living in Israel.

If the bureaucracy was the same in 1980 as it was in 2001, he had a 'petek,' a sheet of paper, assigning him to that specific absorption center, and so he figured that when he arrived someone would be there to take his petek and assign him rooms. When he got to the absorption center it was closed.

Welcome to Israel.

When I arrived at the absorption center in Jerusalem with my wife, two kids and (illegal) cat, the absorption center was closed, also. There was an Ethiopian (Jewish) guard on duty who spoke bad Hebrew (just like me). There was a fellow who spoke English there and he got my story out of me, but I had my petek ready to show to the guard.

It took the kid a while to figure what was going on, but after some jawing he eventually he figured out that he had to call the director and get him to assign us a couple of rooms. By the time he got there, we had hidden the cat and smuggled him in quietly when nobody was looking.

The director arrived, a short Moroccan man with an air of authority, and he ordered a bunch of the folks lounging in the lounge to help us with our boxes.