Kadima (forward)! The United Workers' Party (Mandate-era Socialist party)
Via Bert, I bring you Israel Election Compass. To find out what party best represents you, click here and take the test. Brought to you by a Dutch Christian broadcasting company and newspaper, the Israel Democracy Institute, Ynet, the Dutch website Kieskompas and a Dutch university cooperate.
I took the test, but I won’t share my results until at least 10 readers describe theirs in the comments section. Think of it as a political version of “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” Ha!
UPDATE: Okay, the Sandmonkey makes 10. Here are my results:
83% Meretz
82% Hadash
82% Ra’am-Tal
72% Balad
I did vote Meretz in the last elections, but given their shameful position on the Gaza operation, I am not sure that I’ll cast my ballot for them this time. This is a problem, because the options are even less attractive (I wouldn’t vote for any of the other parties that ostensibly represent my views). So… What to do? Not sure yet. Welcome to the Israeli leadership vacuum.
Against a dramatic black background, the cover of last week’s Time Out Tel Avivshows a white dove marked as though viewed through a sniper’s rifle. The caption has two meanings. It could be “say goodbye nicely,” which is how one instructs a small child to bid farewell. Or it could be “say peace is lovely.” Combine the two, and you get “say goodbye nicely to peace”; or, in more sophisticated English, “bid peace a fond farewell.” The sub heading is, “Tel Aviv between Gaza and Sderot.”
According to the polls, 90 percent of Israelis support the Gaza campaign. I find that number quite worrying: public debate and a diversity of opinion are, as Ohad notes in this post, essential characteristics of a healthy democracy; and anyone who has expressed even the mildest anti-war sentiment can testify to the intimidating responses that have, I noticed, cowed many people into silence.
The intimidation ranges from verbal violence (“traitor!” “fifth columnist”) to the threat of being fired from one’s job – as in the case of Channel 2 anchor Yonit Levi. One friend even received death threats – via Facebook, if you can believe it. Assuming, though, that all the people polled about the war know that the Israeli media’s reporting has been controlled by the army spokesman’s iron fist; and assuming that everyone polled is both well-informed about what is really going on in Gaza and unafraid to voice an opinion that deviates from what we are constantly told is the mainstream, that still leaves one person out of 10 opposing the war. In this edition, Time Out Tel Aviv gives them a voice. Below are some translated excerpts.
In a weekly column titled “Reality,” (p.10) Amir Ben-David parodies the wildly popular Big Brother reality TV show that ended last month. (I blogged about his friendship with the editor of of Time Out Beirut during the Second Lebanon War). The hosts of the show were Erez Tal and Assi Ezer. Excerpt:
Erez Tal: And once again we join you, with a show that will have you on the edges of your seat. It’s called “the big boom.” Yes – tonight we have eliminations (from the show). Tension is high. Nerves are frayed. Everyone is biting his nails, especially the handsome young man standing here next to me. Good evening, Assi Ezer.
Assi Ezer: Good evening, Erez. Or, as I prefer to call you, Erez Crossing…
Erez: Ha, ha. Very funny.
Assi: I couldn’t resist. Yes, as you said, tonight is a big night. Everyone is sending SMS’s like crazy, but only one candidate will be eliminated at the end of this evening. Only you, the viewers, will decide who that will be. The lines are open and the decision is all yours.
Erez: Remind us, Assi, who are the candidates for elimination tonight?
Assi: With pleasure. Can you smell the smoke? Three are turning on the rotisserie tonight – Jabalyah, Dir El Balah and Nusseirat Refugee Camp. Our brave air force pilots are already sitting in their fighter planes. The tension in the offices of the higher command is at its peak, and only our viewers, who are SMSing now, are the ones that will decide who the pilots eliminate from the face of the earth by the end of this evening.
Erez: Just like that? They’ll eliminate them? Erase them completely?
Assi: Completely! We won’t leave a single stone untouched.
Erez: Children? Women? Old people?
Assi: All of them!
****
On page 28, editor Itai Waldman‘s column is about the despair engendered by the increasing frequency of wars in this region, and the sense that a normal life is ever more elusive. Excerpt:
“You sit on the sofa watching TV and you see the parade of politicians, ministers and generals, and all sorts of people that they find in the attic whenever there’s a war, because they wore a rank on their epaulets so they must know something about something, and everyone analyzes the event, and then we go to our correspondent in Sderot who interviews people where a rocket just fell that very second, and you listen to it all, and you simply refuse to believe that it’s happening again. Because the most frustrating thing about wars is that they never ask you. You’re living your life, in the center of Tel Aviv as it happens, trying to be a good citizen and just go with the flow from age 0 to 80, and to have a nice life, without hurting anyone and without being hurt by anyone else, and every few years, one fine morning, they drop a war on you. And you feel like shouting, ‘Hello?! Could we do this some other day? Because it really doesn’t work for me today; I had other plans. Like living, for example.’
But you can shout until tomorrow, because no-one is listening, and no-one really cares. Not in the places where they make decisions, at least. And you think it could be otherwise, and it could even be that you have some good advice up your sleeve, but with the cacophony of words coming at you from every direction you’re pretty sure that no-one will listen to you, and besides, how much does it really matter?
And then the IDF goes into Gaza, and by the end of the day the generals summarize the first day of the ground operation and say that it was a fantastic day and that we achieved all our goals (‘what goals?’ you wonder naively to yourself), and sometime during the news broadcast, quietly and without moving his lips too much, the anchor announces that one of our soldiers was killed. And the subtext is that one dead in nine days is really nothing and we can be happy and go to sleep with smiles on our faces because the operation is succeeding and everything is fine, but it’s 1 a.m. and you’re very cold and you can’t fall asleep so that probably means that nothing is fine.
And all you can think about is that poor boy who last week was hanging out with his friends at the mall, and after that he went to see a movie with his girlfriend, and then they went back to his place, and they made love the way you do when you’re 18, quietly, because you still live at home and your parents are sleeping in the next room. And in the morning they get up together, and he goes to the army and they make plans to meet when he gets his next furlough, in another two weeks, and until then they will speak on the phone, ‘I’ll SMS you when I’m back at the base, so you’ll know I’m okay.’ And then the war starts, and they tell him he is going into Gaza, and she is worried, and he tries to calm her down, and she won’t be calmed, and he has to hang up, and she’s alive, and he’s dead.”
—–
“And now you’re frustrated. And your frustration is so big that you can uproot mountains and make buildings collapse. Frustrated, you watch the news hosted by Raviv Druker and Ofer Shelach, whom you usually like a lot, as they talk with some general from the reserves, and they start with that fascist mumbo jumbo, and Shelach says that the best way to fight in a heavily built-up area is to blow up the whole neighbourhood first and then to fight in an open area, and they laugh, they really, really laugh, and you think ‘How can you laugh? How are you able to laugh?’, and you feel as though you’ll never want to laugh again.
Wars have a certain cumulative quality. When you’re a kid and they bomb you, and your dad takes you in his arms and runs to the shelter, the whole situation is infused with a sort of weird childhood magic. And when you’re in the army and you enter a battle with your unit, you’re so brainwashed that it doesn’t really touch you. And you can even survive your first war as an adult civilian. But one day the moment comes when you just collapse.
And that’s what you feel is happening right now. That you don’t understand what they want from you. That you don’t understand why now. That everything looks so capricious, illogical, unfair. And you’re sad for everyone – the people of Gaza, the people of southern Israel, who didn’t do anything bad to anyone either, but mostly for yourself. You’re sad for yourself because you don’t want to to spend the rest of your life like this – from bombing to bombing, from injustice to injustice, from death to death. You’re sad for yourself because life has taught you that you only have yourself. And the only people you thought maybe you’re not sad about are the politicians, but then you give that a bit more thought, and you’re sad for them too. They’re so contemptible, so impotent, that it would be disgusting on your part not to feel grief for them.
War is something huge. Enormous. And you can look at it from so many different angles. You can talk about the causal factors, and you can talk about the disengagement from Gaza; you can try to understand if this is calculated as an election strategy, and you can talk about the crisis within the political left; you can talk about the wartime induction of the media, and you can talk about pathetic celebrities, that go to perform in the bomb shelters in a cynical attempt to revive their careers. But talking about all that will just make the war continue. And that is why the only subject worthy of discussion in wartime is the people who are dying. The newspapers should be filled with lines upon lines with the names of the dead, and who they were, and what they did, and what they wanted to do tomorrow morning but will never do. People who planned to live here with us, today, and to breathe the air that I breathe now when I write this text, and the air that you breathe when you read this text, and the only thing that touches their cold nostrils right now, is ash.”
*****
On page 30, Elinor Davidov writes about a 40-episode television documentary called Gaza-Sderot, Life in Spite of Everything. Each episode features an interview with an ordinary person on either side of the border, describing daily life. The result is a fascinating combination of drama and banality that makes the series well worth watching. It was co-produced by a staff from Sderot’s Sapir College, Gaza’s Ramattan Studios and the German-French arte.tv (photos and bio blurbs are here). On page 31, there is a sidebar: it reproduces a sad and desperate IM chat that took place between one of the Israeli producers and a Gazan producer shortly after the windows on the latter’s house were blown out by a bomb that fell on the house next door.
Hadash MK Dov Khenin wrote a long opinion piece that starts on page 35. I’m running out of time for translating, so I’ll just do the introduction:
“And of course it would never occur to anyone to think that this military operation has actually made life worse for the residents of the western Negev. After all, it’s ‘our right and even our obligation’ to protection civilians. Everything is buried under the rhetoric that deals with the most immediate response – they’re shooting at you, thus you are permitted to shoot back, and you are even permitted to go a little crazy and shoot at everything that is in your way. Is it wise to shoot? Are there other ways to stop them from shooting at you? Not now. We’re shooting now.”
Page 37 has a sidebar that describes the Israeli media’s total silence about the anti-war march I blogged about last week. According to the item, 15,000 people participated in that demonstration. Each of the major media outlets offers an official explanation as to why they ignored the story.
A series of snapshots – mini-interviews, slices of life – from southern Israel are spread out over pages 38-41.
And there you have it – voices from amongst the 10 percent.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh has three Israeli sisters. They live in a Bedouin town near Beer Sheva, which is within range of Hamas’s rockets. Back in the 1980s, when a Palestinian from the occupied territories could become a citizen by marriage, the sisters were married off to Israeli Bedouin. They are widows now, but they still live in the village with their grown children. Some of their neighbours – also Bedouin – served in the Israel army. In a January 4 interview with Yedioth Aharonoth‘s Nir Gontarz, the sisters expressed fear of the incoming Hamas rockets and worry for their brother Ismail – who is hiding in a bunker somewhere in Gaza. They called upon both Israel and Hamas to cease firing. “Hamas must stop firing rockets at Beer Sheva, but so must Israel stop attacking Gaza. If our children are afraid, then it must be very difficult for the children in Gaza,” said 59 year-old Khaldia Abu Rakik.
Kids playing in Gaza, September 2005
Last week I called Gaza, which has the same local dialing code as Sderot, to check on my friend “Musa,” a journalist in Gaza who regularly files reports for Israeli media (all the Israeli media have local correspondents in Gaza). Speaking in his still-fluent Hebrew, he insisted that he was fine – working hard, busy all day, no time to think. “And your children?” I asked. “Well, my 6 year-old daughter lost the ability to walk – it’s a symptom of trauma – so she spends all her time in bed. We only have electricity for a couple of hours a day and school is canceled, so the other kids have to sit around in the dark doing nothing all day. We can’t let them play outside because of the bombings. Anyway, they are too afraid to go out. There isn’t any water, because you need electricity to pump it. We have enough food, although my wife could not find bread yesterday. She said there were about 200 people queued up at the bakery. It’s cold and we don’t have heat, but we have to leave the windows open so they won’t shatter from the booms. But I am fine. You haven’t told me about yourself! How are you?” Musa was always like that – overdoing the stiff upper lip, even when circumstances would justify some complaining.
Suddenly there was a lot of static on the phone line and we had to shout. “Can you hear me?!” we called out to one another. “Musa, I…” BOOM. The static cleared. Musa’s children were shouting in the background. “That one was very close,” he said calmly. Just before we ended the conversation Musa said, “You know I don’t support Hamas. You know that. So just tell me… do Israelis know what is happening to us here?”
Not really, I told him uneasily. Israeli television is more focused on how the war affects us. We see very little of the images from Gaza.
That conversation took place before the IDF’s ground incursion began, and before the air force bombed the central power plant. Since we spoke, the number of casualties in Gaza has more than doubled. And there is no electricity at all.
Nor is life terribly pleasant for children living in the Sderot/western Negev area these days. Then again, it’s been pretty bad for the past 8 years – with Qassams falling several times per day and sirens and safe rooms a part of life. No-one could figure out how to stop the Qassams, but the people of Sderot thought that the government was not really trying – that they were indifferent to the suffering of Mizrachim living on the country’s periphery. “Do something!” they cried out to the government, as elections approached and Bibi Netanyahu seemed positioned to win.
So Ehud Barak, the defense minister and leader of the Labor party, which before the war had a very low popularity rating indeed, decided to do something. A couple of days after Hamas fired 88 rockets in one day at Sderot and the surrounding communities, the air force attacked Gaza and killed 200 Palestinians in one morning.
It may be true that sometimes you have to crack some eggs in order to make an omelette. Unfortunately, however, the campaign against Hamas, now entering its twelfth day, has not stopped the jihadists. They may be hungry, cold and dirty, but fanaticism is a mighty motivator. They are still launching rockets at Israel all day long. Several Israeli military correspondents have explained that it might not be possible for the IDF to wipe out Hamas’s military wing.
Writing on his blog, Channel 10′s political analyst Raviv Drucker outlines the reasons why the IDF campaign is unlikely to deliver on the government’s promise to stop the Qassams. Journalist Danny Rubinstein, a noted Middle East expert who speaks fluent Arabic, thinks the military operation in Gaza is just going to make Hamas more powerful and more popular.
Which is probably why the Hamas leadership, holed up in cozy bunkers, thinks it’s a good strategy to keep launching rockets at Israel while the people of Gaza sit in the dark, terrified, freezing and hungry, not knowing when the next bomb or tank shell will come and where it will land, with nowhere to run and no way to protect their children. Indeed, some Hamas militants took time off from their heroic battle against the Zionist enemy to visit Gaza’s Shifa Hospital, where they summarily executed wounded Palestinians accused of collaborating with Israel – with a bullet to the brain. Sorry for the gore – I just wanted to make a point, in case you are one of those western fake leftists (a.k.a. anti-democratic reactionaries) who might be marching in London, waving banners emblazoned with the idiotic slogan “We are all Hamas now.” If you are one of those people, you might be interested in knowing that the Hamas leadership has completely buggered off, leaving ordinary people to fend for themselves without any infrastructure – no phones, no banks, no post office, no schools, etc. So much for the “resistance.” So go ahead, I am with you all the way on the calls for a ceasefire. But please, spare me the apologia for a fascist, theocratic, thuggish movement.
Not only are the Hamas leaders not suffering, but they must be figuring they’re about to come out of this campaign way ahead. Thousands of Arabs are demonstrating on their behalf, enraged at their own leaders for failing to help the people of Gaza. I imagine that a certain turbaned gentleman living in a cave somewhere in Afghanistan is rubbing his hands in glee at the prospect of pro-west Arab rulers having to deal with popular protests that threaten to destabilize their governments. Saves him having to recruit more suicide bombers, doesn’t it?
More strange tales from the Middle East. On Saturday night, I attended an anti-war demonstration in Tel Aviv that attracted thousands of Israelis from all over the country. You can read English language Israeli bloggers’ reports about that demo, and view their photos, here, here, here and here.
Below is a clip that I shot with my digital camera (the fabulous Mr. Idan Gazit put in the subtitles). As you will see, the turnout was pretty high – organizers estimate 10,000; I don’t know about that, but I can say that there was a solid mass of people stretching from Rabin Square to the Cinematheque (maybe 500 meters?).
And yet, to the astonishment of everyone I know who was at that demonstration (which included former combat soldiers and those who identify firmly with the Zionist left) the Israeli media either ignored it, buried it or dismissed it. Israeli journalist Itamar Shaaltiel, who also participated in the demo, has more details in this Hebrew blog post. Israeli media reports under-estimated the number of protesters and inflated the number of counter-demonstrators from a maximum of a few hundred, to several thousand. In fact – and to my chagrin – the only accurate and neutrally worded report I found is on Al Jazeera’s English website.
That article briefly undermined my AJ hate-on -but it was quickly revived when I saw an execrable interview from the Washington studio: guest journalist Marwan Bishara explained to his enthusiastically receptive hosts that Hamas is not a terrorist organization. Indeed, explained Marwan, Hamas has committed to ending its violence against Israel as soon as the occupation ends. Awesome, Marwan. Could we have a source for that astonishingly mendacious statement, please? I suppose Marwan wasn’t thinking of Nizar Rayyan, the number three Hamas leader and all-round freak who dispatched his own son to commit a suicide bombing and masterminded several more. Haniyeh just said that his death was “a painful loss” (the IAF killed him a few days ago, along with his wives, 12 of his children and some of the neighbours’ children as well). I did not receive the memo about Rayyan having disavowed the Hamas charter, although I do question the ethics of the “collateral deaths” involved in his assassination.
Standing in clusters along the route of Saturday’s anti-war protest march, wrapped in Israeli flags, there were a few small groups of hecklers who sneered, “intellectuals!”, “bleeding hearts!”, “traitors!”, “terrorists!” and “go live in Gaza!” I started filming the guys in the clip below when they suddenly began to pump their fists and jump up and down like soccer hooligans as they chanted, “death to Arabs!” (MAH-vet l’ah-rah-VEEM! MAH-vet l’ah-rah-VEEM!). It was almost a pity that they stopped as soon as I pointed my camera at them. But I caught them yelling “bogdim!” (traitors) and singing an, um, “interesting” version of the national anthem they purport to cherish. The guy on the left is brandishing a flyer that shows a picture of MK Avigdor Lieberman, who is often parodied for his far-right (some say fascist) views.
Here’s the part that seems perfectly normal in Israel, and probably perfectly strange to foreign observers: The Border Police who impassively and non-violently formed a human barrier between the anti-war demonstrators and the racist counter-demonstrators were mostly Druze Arabs. Yup, true. Arab citizens of Israel protected the right of a bunch of thugs to yell racist epithets.
Meanwhile, Yudit reports that some anti-war activists (Palestinian-Israelis) were interrogated by the police and put under house arrest in Jaffa, on suspicion of incitement to terror and non-recognition of the state. One of the activists under house arrest is Omar Sikseck, a member of the Tel Aviv municipal council. I wonder how he can be accused of not recognizing the state, since he is an elected participant in one of its institutions. Haaretz has more on police intimidation of Israeli citizens who oppose the war.
And as long as we’re on the subject of Palestinian-Israelis, let’s talk about how the war against Gaza is affecting them. Documentary director Ibtisam Maraana, whose prize-winning films include Paradise Lost, Three Times Divorced and Lady Kul el Arab, dropped her candidacy from the Meretz list in the upcoming election because the left-Zionist party supported the military action in Gaza. Meretz has since changed its position, but for Ibtisam it was too little, too late. As she wrote in response to my message on her Facebook profile, “…I could not lend a hand to Barak and his campaign of killing and terror, which will fall upon the people of both Gaza and Sderot.” Ibtisam speaks fluent Hebrew, lives in Tel Aviv and socializes easily with both Jews and Arabs. A firm believer in co-existence between Arabs and Jews, she has represented Israel at prestigious international documentary film festivals. For many Jews, however, her stance against the war was a matter of indifference (“number 12 on the Meretz list?” sneered one friend. “She never had a chance of getting elected anyway”), while Arabs wondered why the hell she was a member of a Zionist party in the first place.
Karen Alkalay-Gut, a professor of English literature at Tel Aviv University, has published a letter from one of her Arab students on her blog. “…there is no one who is right and no one who is wrong, there is no good guy and no bad guy and what’s happening is inhumane from both sides..,” he writes. Read the rest here (scroll down to January 4 entry).
Sayed Kashua, a novelist who writes in Hebrew, wrote a brilliant satirical piece for Haaretz about the military operation in Gaza. Apparently inspired by Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, Sayed’s piece includes this paragraph:
So now I am telling you: Our aim is to grind them into the dust. We will soften them up with missiles until they understand that for every blasted Qassam they let fly at us, they will get a hundred tons in their face. And it won’t end, either. Who said it has to end? Hey, the rules of the game have changed. How long can you be good to them? Hey, was there a cease-fire? There was. What happened? All they did was figure out how to plan the next blow. So we didn’t open the transit points? Is that our fault? They brought Hamas on themselves. Let them deal. Click here to read the entire article.
Unfortunately, an appreciation for fine satire seems to be increasingly rare in our self-righteous corner of the globe. Things got so bad, with Arabs calling Kashua a monster and Jews calling him a fifth columnist, that the soft-spoken writer felt compelled to defend himself in this interview, broadcast yesterday evening on Channel 2. It’s clear that the host, Oded Ben-Ami, sympathizes with Kashua. But he still had to ask the insulting question, “Do you have the same feeling [of sorrow over Palestinian deaths] when you see news of a rocket falling on Sderot, or on a kindergarten (God forbid)?” Kashua’s answer: “I think that’s the wrong way of looking at the matter. I think non-combatants should be excluded from this conflict completely.” Then he added that he agreed with Barack Obama, who visited Sderot and famously said that he would do everything to protect his daughters if someone was shooting rockets at them. “Everything,” says Kashua, “Includes attempts to negotiate…and it certainly does not include killing 300 people in one day, killing children and entire famlies with bombardments. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no difference between the IDF saying it accidentally killed families while targetting Hamas militants, and Hamas militants claiming that rockets which hit Sderot were meant for a nearby military base.”
The Arab man from Ramle who sells me fresh eggs and home-cured olives from his stall in the Carmel Market just smiled at me sadly as he weighed the olives and then added a few more, as he always does. “Let’s hope for better times,” he said. Meanwhile, a friend asked me to visit someone she was close to, a wounded Gazan man who had been evacuated to a Tel Aviv-area hospital. Which reminds me: I have been trying without success to obtain a laptop for him, so that he can follow the news on the internet. If anyone in the Tel Aviv area has a spare laptop to lend him for a week or so, please send me an email.
On last Tuesday’s episode of Eretz Nehederet, the country’s most popular satire show, one of the skits, “The Big Restaurant,” is about an Arab restaurateur in Akko (Acre/Akka) and his Jewish customers. Ali Hamoudi’s traditional Arab restaurant has been empty since the Yom Kippur riots, which scared away the Jewish customers upon whom he depends for a livelihood (in Arabic, Hamoudi is derived from the name Mahmoud; but in Hebrew it means “cutie,” an endearment usually directed at a child). So when a stylishly dressed yuppie couple and their two children timorously enter the restaurant, he does everything to relax them. “You are in good hands,” he says, piling traditional appetizers and far too many main courses on their table. The macho husband, Shmulik, tells his neurotic wife Dalia, “I told you there was nothing to worry about. These are Christian Arabs. They love us.” But in the end Ali Hamoudi and his staff are so delighted to have customers that they freak the couple out with their hospitality overkill. Dalia and Shmulik end up running away from Ali Hamoudi’s restaurant. Since the entire episode of Eretz Nehederet was about the war (which was only in its fourth day), the unspoken question seems to be, “What will happen to Arab-Jewish relations now, with the war in Gaza?”
And in a final twist of unintended irony, the new season of Survivor, the reality show that takes place on a Caribbean island, started off with its first-ever female Muslim contestant – Nasreen Ghandour. The daughter of a university professor from Haifa, she has two graduate degrees and once aspired to be the first Muslim flight attendant for El Al. She’s also gorgeous.
Nasreen Ghandour, first Muslim on Survivor
Nasreen was voted off the show during the first week of the Gaza operation (uh, everyone knows the show was recorded a few months ago, right?), but first there was quite a bit of sexual tension between her and a macho gungh-ho army guy from a West Bank settlement. File under “complexities and anomalies of Israeli society.”
Eamonn asked me on the second day of the war why I was, according to my Twitter status, “outside the consensus.” On that day, when we were told that all those people killed in the initial bombardments were Hamas militants (later we found out that those men in uniform were actually a class of newly trained civil police at their graduation ceremony), I outlined my views in an email that morphed into a guest post on the Z blog. As you will see, I took a pragmatic stance. Mohamed said it doesn’t sound like me; too cold, he said.
The thing is, I’ve noticed that the response to an ethical argument against the war tends to be derision at best. Some people become absolutely enraged. An expression of compassion for the people of Gaza is interpreted as an expression of indifference to the people of Sderot and the rest of the southern towns under bombardment from Hamas operatives in Gaza. I find this reaction astonishing and sometimes frightening. On more than one occasion, some people I was actually friends with turned absolutely psychotic – attacking me in writing, yelling at me and accusing me of being a Hamas supporter – just because I said that I oppose this war.
Over the past 11 days, more than 600 Gazans have been killed and around 4,000 injured. Entire families have been wiped out. Parents have lost all their children in one split second. Schools packed with refugees looking for a safe haven from the bombardments have been hit by artillery shells that killed dozens of people and wounded many more. The hospitals are completely overwhelmed. Buildings have collapsed on multi-generation families of 52 members, killing them all at once. Given these circumstances, in addition to those described above, I feel compelled to speak out – even though I know that my voice will not make any difference. As my sister put it, after musing about why she had not attended any protest marches in Toronto, “In Israel, however, where you can say ‘I love Israel, I deplore these actions’ – here I would have marched.” And so I marched: because I love Israel, but I deplore its actions in Gaza.
Today I watched two video clips that affected me strongly. The first is a Channel 2 news report about the soldiers who were killed by friendly fire. In a typical cross-section of Israeli society, they include a religious-national (“settler”) soldier whose first child was born four months ago, a secular guy from the center of the country and a 19 year-old Druze. The interviews with the bereaved families are hearbreaking. Sobbing, the Druze soldier’s younger brother, Amir, chokes out, “I don’t know how I will live without him. And I hope he is the last soldier killed in this war.”
The second clip, from SKY news, is an interview with Norwegian physician Mads Gilbert, who has been working at a Gaza hospital since December 31. Watch:
Dr. Gilbert’s report, on top of all the information I’ve obtained from friend in Gaza (before the phone lines were cut off) and international media reports, leads me to conclude that the cost of this military action – justified or not – is too high. Whether intended or not, our army’s actions are causing unspeakable suffering to innocent people. This must stop.
Even the military experts interviewed ad nauseum on Channels 1, 2 and 10 confirm that the best we can do is “change the reality” for a few months, until Hamas regroups and attacks again. Surely this does not justify sending teenage soldiers to fight and die; surely we cannot shrug off the fact that the bombardments have caused enormous suffering to the ordinary people of Gaza. I do not understand why people I know and respect and love – doting parents, generous friends, intelligent, educated people – fold their arms over their chests and look away from the suffering of Gazan civilians. “Well,” said one friend, “I am sorry for them, but they should not have voted for Hamas.”
“They started it”; “but they’re terrorists”; and “it’s worse in Darfur” are not, in my opinion, intelligent responses. I do not live in Darfur. I am a voting, tax-paying citizen of Israel, so this is where I have the moral obligation to speak out when I see something that is wrong.
Yes, Hamas is a bunch of fanatic thugs. I remember that they threw Fateh people off of multi-story buildings during the July 2007 coup. I know that they use civilians as human shields. I do understand that Israel has got itself caught in a struggle between Iran, which is funding Hamas, and the Arab states, which hate Hamas and fear Iran. And yes, Hamas could stop the war if they would just cease firing the rockets. But they will not do that. So it is up to us: we have it in our power to stop the killing. We can stop the war. And we should stop it, immediately. For their sake and for ours.
Because it is undermining our morality. Because it is costing us hundreds of millions of shekels. Because it is a shocking waste of life, money and goodwill from moderate Arabs. Because if we plan to live in this neighbourhood called the Middle East for the long term, we need to find a modus vivendi with our neighbours. We needn’t love one another. We just need to stop killing each other. And to those who say one cannot negotiate with a terror organization that refuses to accept Israel’s right to exist, my response is – perhaps you are right; but have you tried?
I’ve been writing this blog post for days, which is why it is so long. If you are still with me, thank you. And if you are curious about mainstream sentiment toward the war, I recommend the blogs of Liza and Israeli Mom. Both express regret for the suffering of Palestinians, alongside a belief that the war is necessary. As Liza put it in a IM chat yesterday, “I love you, but I totally disagree with you.”
Below is a summary of Israeli blogs and other media sources that express a more definitive anti-war stance.
Attorney Jonathan Klinger explains his opposition in this self-translated post (from the Hebrew), Between Gnosis and Genocide.
And here he is again, at the same anti-war demo that I attended, explaining in his typically articulate fashion why the war is such a bad idea. Uri Avnery, Ibtisam Maraana and several others make their own interesting observations. Recommended. (Thanks, Yishay!)
Well-known Haaretz journalist Avirama Golan moved last year to Sderot in order to express her solidarity. She writes a blog about life in Sderot in Hebrew. And she is certainly not the only Sderot resident who opposes the war.
Bloggers opposed to the war who write in English:
Freelance journalist Ido Levin (see also this post on the mainstream Israeli media’s largely uncritical coverage of the war);
Life Goes on in Gaza and Sderot is co-authored by a Palestinian from Gaza and an Israeli from Sderot. They call themselves Hope Man and Peace Man.
Besides a few articles in The City (Tel Aviv) and some other weekly publications that have limited-to-no online presence, some of Time Out Tel Aviv’s regular columnists wrote critically about the military operation in this week’s edition.
On pages 14-15 there are interviews with Gideon Levy and Amira Hass, who recently traveled illegally to Gaza by boat (Israeli law forbids its citizens to enter Gaza), only to be kicked out by Hamas a few days later.
On page 34, Boaz Gaon’s weekly column begins, “As I write these lines, in my pastoral house surrounded by the hush of a peaceful night that seems to stretch in all directions, Gazan parents are hugging their children and promising them, in vain, that everything will be alright.”
Gal Uchovsky writes (page 146), “We are hearing the usual slogans: ‘So what do you expect us to do when rockets are falling on Ashdod?’ ‘We withdrew from Gaza, isn’t that enough for them?’ ‘We gave them everything, they are responsible!’ Go ahead, try and argue. Israel had become such a selfish place, so narcissistic, that it is very difficult to explain what is wrong with the strongest army in the Middle East bombing the hell out of areas that are full of civilians, while there aren’t even enough medical supplies in the hospitals.”
I mentioned the Arab restaurant skit in last week’s Eretz Nehederet above. To end this epic post, below is another skit in the same episode. Here is comedian Tal Friedman’s brilliant portrayal of Ehud Barak giving a mock “press conference” about the war. Remember that it was conceived and recorded only three days after the campaign began. So far, events are evolving in tandem with the predictions outlined in the skit.
Click here to watch the clip with subtitles. For some reason, they don’t show up in the embedded version.
My landlord wants to sell my apartment. It’s not the most fab pad in Tel Aviv, but it’s in a perfect location; the current real estate market is pure hell (very little availability, insanely high rents); and I’ve already moved three times over this very traumatic year (evil, evil landlords) so the thought of having to look for a new place tends to make my breathing shallow and difficult.
But my landlord assures me that I need not be stressed (and here I picture him smirking into his mobile phone) because he is marketing to rich French Jews who are looking for a long term investment. This is bullshit, of course. He is marketing to rich French Jews who want an “appartement de vacances” in Tel Aviv. And my slumlord thinks they will be willing to pay $220,000 for a sub-divided, tiny 1-bedroom unit that has neither solar heater, nor balcony nor even cooking gas.That’s about $30,000 over market value, even for super-expensive Tel Aviv.
Unlike American and British Jews, who prefer to buy their overpriced holy land real estate in Jerusalem, the kosher froggies really love Tel Aviv.
Naturally, the people of Tel Aviv reciprocate this love by overcharging them and badmouthing them. Yes indeed, Israelis are accusing French people of being ill mannered. Please don’t snort like that. You will leave spittle marks on your computer monitor, and those are difficult to remove.
So yesterday yet another French-Israeli real estate agent brought over yet another potential purchaser to inspect the place. The potential purchaser is a 30-something, olive-skinned guy who, despite the summer heat and humidity, wears a perfectly pressed blue-and-white striped shirt with french cuffs (naturally) and highly polished black loafers. He is also well-marinaded in eau de expensive cologne. His name is Aime (I swear).
Aime speaks to me in French (“alors, Lee-ZA, t’es canadienne? De Montreal?) without bothering to inquire whether or not I speak the language. He thinks the apartment is mignon. He asks if I live here with my copain. Then he asks whether I’d be interested in renting a much bigger apartment that he recently purchased in Jaffa. No, I said, but I have a friend who might be interested.
Ah oui, he answers. Let me take your number and I’ll call you a bit later so that we can make an appointment.
Two hours later, the cheeky little pervert calls and asks me to come to the apartment alone – unless my friend is interested in a threesome.
I think I’m going to tell my landlord to compensate me for showing the place. Enough of this polite Canadian Jewish girl thing. It does not serve me well, apparently.
Etgar Keret with his son, Lev, in a photo taken two years ago.
My sister loves listening to the weekly podcasts at This American Life. Me, I don’t tend to listen to Podcasts so much. I have a severe case of adult onset ADD – does that mean I’m post-modern? – meaning, if I can’t multi-task I feel a bit lost.
Just as Tel Aviv prepares to celebrate its 100th birthday – and not looking too bad at all, dah-ling – the second edition of City Guide Tel Aviv is available. You can browse it here, then go here to buy it.
The new edition is bigger, better and more beautiful than ever, with expanded texts and some really amazing photos by Natan Dvir.
Dalit Nemirovsky, a.k.a. Superwoman, pulled the whole project together while simultaneously planning her wedding, which took place last week and was, naturally, lovely.
The superb graphics are by Lahav Halevy, who sets the standards in his profession around these parts.
All research and writing is by moi, of course. It was tons of work, but also – truly – a labour of love. And sorry for the cliche, but it is awfully nice to work with people you like and respect, and who all live in the same neighborhood (makes staff meetings really easy to arrange).
Gal Uchovsky – who, by the way, appeared NAKED on the cover of last week’s Time Out Tel Aviv, together with our favourite transgender pop diva, Dana International – wrote the introduction.
According to Israeli law, citizens are allowed to make as much noise as they want on Independence Day.
So I was informed by the police, when I called – at 4.15 a.m. - to complain about the noise from a rooftop party taking place one street away. I had closed all my windows (despite the perfect spring weather) and pulled the quilt up over my ears, but the hosts of the independence day party had clearly invested in some serious stereo equipment: the bass of the deep house or trance or whatever you call that electronic noise emanating from their super-sonic amplifiers was making my windows vibrate and my head pound.
I tend to turn into a female version of the Incredible Hulk when I am confronted with extreme rudeness and a total lack of basic civility. Not to mention appalling taste in music. It’s best to stay out of my way until I either calm down or achieve JUSTICE.
So I grabbed the essential 21st century tool – my mobile phone – and went out to investigate.
On the the door of the building, at 17 Feierberg Street, the hosts had taped the following notice:
Translation:
Dear Neighbours,
Today, Independence Day, there will be a party in apartment 17.
The party will continue until late and it will be noisy.
We regret the temporary inconvenience.
Thank you for understanding,
Idan and Sam
Apartment 17
(the following morning, someone scrawled: “Please clean up.”)
***
Okay, Idan and Sam, here’s the thing: If you had made a noisy party that affected only the people in your building, and they were all cool with that, and you actually made an effort to be quiet after – say – 2.00 a.m., and the next day you went around to all your neighbours with some kind of symbolic gift (a bottle of wine, flowers, or something similar), then fine.
Instead, you just announced – dictator style – that you were going to make as much noise as you felt like making and you really didn’t care how miserable you made your neighbours. I am assuming you didn’t ask for their permission – let alone inquire whether there were any exhausted mothers trying to calm their screaming babies at 3 a.m.
But besides that, the noise you made was not confined to your building. The bass from the electronic shit you played until 4.30 a.m. was bouncing off the walls of this whole neighbourhood for a 150 meter radius. Apparently you just decided that you had the right to prevent hundreds of people from sleeping that night. Who cares if they are tired, or they have plans that involve getting up early in the morning, or they have little kids? Your party is much, much more important. Right?! Of course right!
It is true that you were not breaking any laws. But there is this thing called common decency – a.k.a. civilized behaviour. I gather from the median age of the people at your party that you are in your late 20s or early 30s. Given that you are already earning enough to afford a flashy pad in a renovated building in one of Tel Aviv’s most expensive neighbourhoods, I’m assuming you have an education. Pity there’s no required university class called Basic Good Manners 101.
Idan and Sam of 17 Feierberg Street, Apt. 17, Tel Aviv: you are inconsiderate, selfish dicks. And if anyone reading this blog knows Idan and Sam, I encourage you to pass on my message.
For those who don’t read Hebrew, the second half of this post’s title means, roughly, “that’s what there is.” It’s the kind of phrase that parents are wont to use when their offspring say they don’t like what they’ve been given for dinner. Lately, I’ve been using it when journalists ask what I think of the state of the state (of Israel) 60 years after its founding.
This is the cover of this week’s “City Mouse,” a weekly culture and entertainment magazine that is distributed in Tel Aviv with Haaretz newspaper. David Ben-Gurion and his sour-looking wife, Paula, look out the window of their Tel Aviv residence (now a museum) at Tel Aviv hipsters celebrating Independence Day armed with cocktails, silly string in a tin and squeaky plastic hammers. “So,” Israel’s first prime minister asks his wife, “Was it worth it?”
The Israeli media seems to be torn between celebrating the big 6-0 (part-y! And don’t forget to buy our newspaper on the holiday eve, ’cause we’ve included tons of special supplements with lots of gossip!) and reminding us of how far we have strayed from the values of the state’s founders. Occasionally, we are served up “rare archival footage” of black-and-white proto-Israelis in embroidered Russian peasant blouses, grasping one another’s hands as they dance in joyful circles. The message is that we should mourn the lost group spirit and hate ourselves for becoming a bunch of materialistic individualists. No one mentions the austerity, the unemployment, the controlled economy and the lack of air-conditioning, but I’m assuming that we are not meant to miss those things.
Meanwhile, the foreign media has been busy informing us that Israel is – more or less, but mostly more – DOOMED. Depending on the editorial agenda of the media outlet (or the personal agenda of the writer), this message is conveyed in tones that range from sober concern to barely-disguised glee. Apparently, the age of the nation-state is totally passe – for the Jews, that is. Everyone else is allowed to live in atavistic bliss.
Here at my neighbourhood cafe, where the espresso is strong and the WiFi runs true, Ido-the-barman just unfolded the nylon (made-in-China) Israeli flag that came with today’s newspaper and jokingly draped it over the shoulders of Selim, the Palestinian-Israeli from Jaffa who reigns over the tuna salads and quiches. Selim handed the flag back to Ido and they both laughed knowingly – because they know that a Star of David and the stripes of the tallit are not symbols that speak to a Muslim. They did not, however, launch into a discussion of whether or not the state’s symbols should be more inclusive of all its citizens.
Israel is a flawed, young state with tons of problems. It is also a flawed, young state that has a lot of good stuff going for it. If it weren’t, I would not live here. I am not religious and I am not a refugee from political or economic persecution. I might be a refugee from Canadian weather, but that’s another story.
If you live in Jerusalem and you spend most of your time at the Knesset, the prime minister’s office, the West Bank and Gaza, and it is your job to report about the problems (because who’s interested in good news, anyway?) it’s easy to feel as though you are living in a cuckoo’s nest. Trust me, I’ve been there. In fact, I still go there far too often, and it’s definitely not a good place to be. Tel Aviv-Hebron-Tel Aviv in 8 hours or less can make your fuses pop. If I were doing the Jerusalem-Hebron trip on a regular basis, I’d probably be on Prozac.
When the political problems get to me, I take a break and spend some time in the healing confines of Tel Aviv – which the great Hebrew poet and translator Shaul Tchernichovsky (1875-1943) described as the best place to be a Jew. These days it’s more of a multi-ethnic town, and it’s got its fair share of urban problems, but it’s a lovely place nonetheless.
If we are going to talk about Zionism (and mostly I don’t, because “isms” make me nervous), then Tel Aviv is, for me, the great Zionist success story. I don’t feel any particular emotion when I look at Jerusalem’s Western Wall. I would certainly never put a note in its cracks – makes me feel as though I’m performing a voodoo ritual. I love to visit the Hurva Synagogue, because the story of the arch is so fascinating, but I do not feel a desire to pray there.
But I have been known to get a little misty when I look at Tel Aviv’s Bauhaus architecture and tree-lined boulevards; at the posters advertising dozens of plays, concerts and club events; the theaters and the publishing houses and the art galleries, the stock exchange and the fashionable boutiques. Tel Aviv is the city where the first school with a curriculum taught entirely in modern Hebrew was established. It is where all three of Israel’s major daily newspapers were founded and still exist today, in their original locations. It is the home of the national opera, the national symphony orchestra and more than half-a-dozen theaters. It’s a place where homosexual couples and ultra-Orthodox families live peacefully in the same neighbourhood – even in the same building.
Tel Aviv is also a noisy city with a lot of air pollution. There’s dog shit everywhere. Rents are insanely high. And it is not uncommon to hear of landlords that find excuses to avoid renting to Arabs in Tel Aviv, too.
Yup, good stuff and bad stuff. Tomorrow night we mark 60 years since the establishment of the state. It might not be what Ben-Gurion had in mind, but that’s what there is.
I did not intend to write about Yom Hashoah this year. Sometimes you feel you’ve said all there is to say. And in the case of the Holocaust, I am really tired of seeing the memories kicked around in the name of political ideology. I cringe when visiting heads of state are taken to Yad Vashem rather than schools for gifted children, places like Neve Shalom and innovative hi-tech companies; I am appalled when I hear that (non-Israeli) Jewish teenagers who don’t know the difference between Genesis and Judges, can’t speak Hebrew and have never heard about the 500 year history of the Jews in Spain are nonetheless able to recite names of concentration camps; and I am disgusted when I read comparisons between the Palestinian-Israeli armed conflict and the death camps. Lately, a lot of people have made me feel like yelling, “Shut up and have some respect, moron.” (Bert has a more intelligent response, here). But I was raised in Canada, so I am polite. Usually.
There’s no denying that we Jews are still grappling with a collective trauma that is visited unto the third generation – and probably beyond. Today, for example, I read about a man who walked into a Tel Aviv tattoo parlor to have his father’s concentration camp number copied onto his own forearm. And right now I’m reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost, which is reviewed here.
Last year my mother sent over “my library” – 15 boxes of books that I’d collected over the decade I lived in New York and then left behind when I went off gallivanting around the world. As I unpacked them eight years later, it was almost embarrassing to see how many of those books were novels and historical accounts about the Holocaust. Wait, didn’t I have a whole bunch of books on ancient Rome, existentialist philosophy, Baroque music and contemporary architecture? Um, apparently not so much. There I was, thinking that I was this secular, worldly, urban type, but my boxes of books told the truth: From Judtith Kerr’s When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit to Tom Segev’s The Seventh Million, I was just as obsessed and bent over under the burden of memory as the next Jew.
Yesterday afternoon on Rothschild Boulevard I saw another piece of installation art that attempts to address this issue of collective memory. (I’m hoping the artist will replace the turf at some point!).
It is called “Broken Jew: Memory as a Genetic Scar.”
The anonymous artist left the following explanation tied to the railing with a yellow ribbon – to match the yellow star, a replica of the one German and Austrian Jews were forced by the Nazis to wear. Translation below.
BROKEN JEW
(Memory as a Genetic Scar)
Plaster orthopedic mould for the rehabilitation of back problems as a reflection of a society with post-traumatic stress disorder.
A wall can make life difficult, sometimes. This past Friday morning, as weekend strollers on Tel Aviv’s peaceful, tree-lined Rothschild Boulevard were on their way to cafes, yoga class, and shopping, many were surprised to find their path blocked by what looked like a concrete wall. Actually, it looked like a section of the oft-photographed wall that forms large parts of the separation barrier in places like Abu Dis and Qalandiya.
According to 37 year-old artist Ehud Segev (the bearded guy wearing a canvas hat, sitting on the bench in the foreground), about 98 percent of passersby stopped to express their support for his installation art-cum-political statement. Mauran Paz (the one holding the bicycle), said that a few parents pushing kids in Bugaboos were angry at the inconvenience of having to lift the pram around the wall. To which Ehud responded that they were absolutely right to be upset: a wall did indeed make life difficult.
Others stopped to use the chalk and spray paint provided by Ehud to decorate the wall.
Around lunchtime, a couple of guys approached Ehud and told him they were more concerned about the well-being of Israelis than of Palestinians.
“I actually agree with them,” said Ehud in an ambiguous response that is open to interpretation. “But in general I am against walls. They always fall, in the end. In the meantime, they just create disconnects and misunderstandings between people.”
And how, I asked, do you respond to those who point out that the separation barrier is often referred to as a security barrier – i.e., that its purpose is to save lives by preventing terrorists from entering Israel?
“I am an artist, so it’s not my job to respond to people who say the wall prevents terror attacks,” he answered. “But I do think there is something very cowardly about building a wall. It’s like sitting in a reinforced room in your house all day, wearing a helmet and bullet proof vest. Who wants to live like that?”
Then, almost as a non-sequitur, he volunteered , “I think the solution to the conflict is for every Israeli to learn Arabic in school from day one. A lot of misunderstandings could be avoided that way.”
By 1.30 p.m. the police ordered Ehud, who had put the installation up around 8 a.m, to take the wall down. “I wasn’t upset,” he said calmly. “Actually, I was surprised it lasted as long as it did.”
I am a freelance journalist and blogger, currently based in Jaffa. I write mostly about Israel-Palestine (IsPal). Since co-founding +972 Magazine, I post all my articles in both blogs.
