TEL AVIV — In this consumerist, status-symbol-obsessed country, the bauble of the outgoing Jewish year was without question the cellular phone.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who visited Israel during the election campaign, wrote that he saw so many people walking around with cellular phones here that he felt “naked” without one. Ha’aretz columnist Yoel Marcus wrote over the summer: “A friend in France told me she could spot the Israeli tourists from blocks away — they were the only ones carrying cellular phones.”
Indeed, some tourist companies were offering cheap cellular phones as an enticement for Israelis wanting to travel abroad.
Israelis have always been gadget freaks, and the cellular phone is their new toy. Teenagers gabbed away on their cellular phones while lying on the beach. Guests at weddings complained about the fellow sitting two rows back talking on his “pelephone” during the ceremony. (Pelephone, which means “wonder phone” in Hebrew, was the name of the first Israeli cellular phone company, and is now the Israeli generic term for all such phones.)
People were shushing pelephone users in cinemas. It got so bad that Bezek, the national telephone company, tried to help Israelis improve their manners by running a humorous TV ad about a man who chatted on his pelephone during an opera performance.
Cosmetics saleswoman Ruti Benziman said she uses her pelephone during her 40-minute commute. “But I can’t pull my husband away from his,” she said. “If we go out to a restaurant, he’s always on the pelephone. It drives me a little crazy, but that’s his life.”
Bezek found that Israelis who own cellular phones spend three times as much time talking on them — over 500 minutes a month — as American users. An ad for Flipper, one of the most popular of the latest models, calls this product “the tiny, lightweight cellular phone that lets you talk and talk and talk…”
Two years ago there were about 200,000 cellular phone owners in Israel. A year ago there were some 400,000. Now there are approximately 860,000, out of a national population of nearly 6 million.
For fashionable teenagers, a pelephone is a must. About a year ago the army actually had to issue a new order barring recruits from taking their pelephones along on combat exercises. And a new law will take effect next January requiring Israeli drivers to talk only on car speaker phones; the Transport Ministry found that Israelis, who are famous for driving recklessly and for talking with their hands, were becoming an even greater menace with pelephones in their cars.
Seeing Israelis sitting around a cafe table, one after another grabbing a pelephone, dialing a number and speaking in loud, urgent tones about this deal or that, it’s hard not to think this is an ego-boosting instrument.
Not only do businesspeople and others on the go find the phones a necessity, but less wealthy Israelis are also big pelephone fans. At a Bat Yam mobile home park, which the government built for the city’s homeless, park manager Dov Malick said, “People here will stall for years on paying their rent and municipal taxes, but they pay their pelephone bills on time every month so the service doesn’t get cut off.”
Privately, a park resident who didn’t give his name said proudly, “Sure I have a pelephone, and not a Cellcom, but a Motorola.”
Motorola, whose Pelephone subsidiary started the Israeli cellular phone industry in the mid-’80s, carries much more snob appeal than Cellcom, its sole competitor. Pelephone’s rates are much higher and its service is considered much better. Cellcom, which entered the competition in 1994 with rock-bottom rates, has developed a reputation for relatively bad service. Motorola pelephone owners dismiss it as “Cellclum” — clum is Hebrew for “nothing.”
Cellcom is a prestigious enough company to have lured former Shin Bet chief Ya’acov Peri to become its director general. And with 400,000 subscribers, it is gaining on Pelephone, which has 460,000.
At Dizengoff Center electronics stores, Cellcom’s Mango cellular phone, at $220, and Motorola’s Flipper, at $440, were the big sellers. For the true status fiend, however, there were still some mint-condition Motorola HL 200s to be had — at nearly $2,600.
“These were the original pelephones,” explained a clerk in one electronics store. “If you carry one of those, people look at you and think, `Wow, he must have had a pelephone before anybody else. He must be somebody really big.'”