Egged

The jokes came because Israelis had not yet learned to take seriously men who spoke with Moroccan accents.

But as Yossi Sarid and David Levy talked, as their Egged bus went by Tirat Zvi, Sde Eliyahu, and other kibbutzim, past Ma'ale Efraim and Fasayil and Jericho, past Wadi Kelt, they found in one another what to admire and came to see how much of a worldview they shared for all their differences.

They were, for instance, both socialists or social democrats or whatever label you put on it.

They both believed that people without the right accent and without the right framed degrees on their wall, without the right books on their shelves, were too often subject in Israel to humiliations and hardships, and that it was their job as young politicians to try to change that, even if they were in different political camps.