Inner city Zionism
I’m an ideological city dweller. I don’t think this country is big enough for suburban sprawl. So I live in a high-rise on a busy Tel Aviv corner (thankfully, not high enough to be of interest to any passing planes). I’m not actually suffering for a high ideal here. I love Tel Aviv and I love city life.
But there are many difficulties connected to living in the city with a family.
Summer vacation is an extra challenge for city dwellers with kids. Especially nowadays. If perverts and crazy drivers aren’t enough, now I have to worry if it’s safe for my eldest daughter to have an ice cream at the ice cream parlor with her pals, or go to her favorite haunt – the local toyshop. Among some of the other mothers I’m regarded as very liberal, because I allow my daughter to ride the mini-bus to the swimming pool.
What am I to do? Put her under house arrest all summer? (This actually happens when there are warnings of suicide bombers on the loose in my area).
But then again…
I do have some misgivings about not having a little house with a garden. I have this little fantasy about having a “boustan”, which is a traditional fruit garden with figs, vines, carobs, olive trees and other indigenous fruit trees. (Although killjoys tell me these plants attract several types of annoying flying insects). Maybe someday it will happen. Who knows?
Asking forgiveness
Tsila Levi, Bank Leumi clerk from Hadera, was arrested for embezzling six million shekels of her clients’ money. I heard her on Israeli radio today, crying and asking for forgiveness. “I love you all,” she wept, “I didn’t mean to do it.”
I hope no one ever loves me that much.
Palestinian brainwashing
I ventured into Indymedia Israel today and was pleasantly surprised. There was a lot of pro-Israel stuff, which probably means they’re blasted with this stuff faster than they can censor it.
I found this piece about incitement on Palestinian T.V. rather disturbing (we do actually hope to live in peace with these people one day).
An Israeli woman is telling about her changing relationship with her longtime Palestinian friend and her family, because of the fabricated horrors her friend watches on Palestinian T.V.
“Fatima's kids have always watched what seems to me to be a lot of television […] but for the past few months, it was all "news." I put it in quotation marks because it's not really news. It's propaganda. To my college-educated, Western eyes, it's the most blatant, offensive, obvious kind of junk -- bad actors, bad commentators reading from gory scripts of the most inflammatory kind, plainly seeking to inflame the senses of anyone watching.
[…] Fatima called me in a panic one night, saying that they had just heard that Jewish residents of our neighborhood near Jerusalem were marching on their villages and shooting everyone. I looked out the window, saw nothing, then sent my husband up the street to check things out. It was perfectly quiet and peaceful, not a soul in sight, not a sound to be heard. I told her then that she should not believe everything on the TV and radio, that they lied in order to get people upset and angry.
Even as I told her, I could sense her skepticism: "Oh, sure, Shira. You don't know anything more than I do, and of course you don't want to believe that your neighbors would shoot us!"
[…] If anyone could be immune to political propaganda and hate-mongering, I would have thought it was Shiruk. She has spent a lot of time with Jews. After all, she has eaten in our home, been to our parties and synagogue, held our babies. She has a good head on her shoulders, knows English, reads books. But it seems that even the brightest mind is susceptible to hate-mongering, given enough exposure to it.
Kept out of school, Shiruk spends many, many hours watching television. She has seen dramatized, studio-fabricated decapitations, gang rapes, and children being maimed and murdered -- all at the hands of "Israeli soldiers." Her younger siblings watch, too, and I imagine that this is the norm in most homes in hundreds of villages throughout the West Bank.”