Just got this through my mail box:

Dear sir or madam,

Petition to President Richard Brodhead to deny use of the Duke University Campus to Supporters of Terrorism.

I would be extremely grateful if you could make your readers aware of the following petition. Palestine Solidarity Movement--the American student wing of the International Solidarity Movement--is attempting to hold its National Conference at Duke University on October 15-17, 2004. We do not want this group, which supports destruction of Israel "by any means necessary," to be given the privilege of using our campus. We are therefore sending a petition to our new president, Richard Brodhead, asking him to keep ISM out.

Sincerely,
Andrew Gerst
Duke University junior
Newton, MA

I don't know if the ISM supports the destruction of the State of Israel, as this person says, but I feel that they are actively contributing towards this end in their actions. I feel very strongly that if they were truly interested in peace in this land, they would be doing something about stopping terrorism and promoting dialogue. Instead they are aggressively supporting one side of the conflict, and by doing so, they are encouraging that one side to continue pursuing violence, a large portion of which is aimed at non-combatants, some of them from their own side.

I would like to point out that I have not signed this petition. I am not an American and I feel that what happens in American campuses is really none of my business, even if it can cause harm to my people, my family, and myself. I thought it was important to bring the petition to your attention, that's all.

So here we have it:
I’m extremely busy doing fun things. I’m creating strange pieces of – ahum - art (Bish says that things that look like they’ve been dragged from the garbage can are not exactly, erm, his, erm ... oh never mind); I’m running; I’m spinning; I’m taking Youngest to swimming (I’m also a very bad poet it seems); I’m riding the wonderful, shiny new bike that R.T. helped me buy; I’m obsessing about things that are happening at work; and I’m trying to keep up with Bish’s new career as an interviewee on Israeli media (four interviews on radio, five on TV (one in Russian -not Israeli Russian, real Russian from Russia, would you believe it?), and quite a few mentions in newspapers, all in the last three weeks, but we reckon it’ll taper off now) – it’s not about the bill, it’s about an aspect of his profession (although not him personally) being connected to one of the big affairs happening in Israel lately, and the media people have discovered that Bish is intelligent, eloquent, and that he looks and sounds quite good (that's my Bish), so he’s being interviewed as a representative of his profession and as an expert, blah blah.

If all that isn’t enough, it is also hot and humid, and even with the air-conditioning it’s difficult to do anything that requires any sort of mental activity.

I have some great photos of Shoosha, but I can’t post them yet for technical reasons (Bish’s laptop died, it’s a long, sad story, I’ll spare you).

By the way, I was reading up about biking and came across this lady. Not only is she sporty, she is also a very witty and amusing writer, and I like her name.

You talking to me?!
Dave from Israellycool gives us some excellent examples of polite French diplomacy.

Swastika carved on Jewish girl / French urban legends
Yael has found the story I was talking about. She remembers it too. I’d begun to think I was hallucinating. This is from April 2004:

Also in Paris, a 12-year-old girl coming out of a Jewish school was attacked by two men. They beat her, held her down and slashed her face with a box cutter. They carved a swastika into her face and walked away. Her parents have filed a police report.

Yael says she tried to interest bloggers in this at the time, to no avail.

Four more years!
No not Bush - Arafat. That's what he got out of this Terror War.

I'm no expert, but I can distinctly remember a lot of rumbling and grumbling among Palestinians about Arafat's corrupt regime, just before hostilities "broke out" in the autumn of 2000, and I mean a lot. And there was talk of his days as despot nearing their end. But he showed them. Typical to local dictators, Arafat skillfully manuevered things so that growing disatisfaction and opposition to his regime was soon directed towards the nearest and most convenient common enemy - us - with disastrous consequences for his people.

Well, the rumbling and grumbling are getting louder again, much louder.

As the Arabs say: 'cool calb biji youmo'. Every dog's day comes. Only this dog’s day is a long time coming.

According to the UN: Israel is the best place to live in this part of the world, while the Palestinian territories are not the worst! Un-effing believable.

Very well put by Yael.

What does this mean?

Leaders of the Presbyterian Church in the US approved a divestment campaign against Israel in a series of annual resolutions that included a condemnation of Israel's security fence, a decision to continue funding churches aimed at converting Jews to Christianity and a disavowal of Christian Zionism as a legitimate theological stance.

In a vote of 431 to 62, the 216th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA compared Israel's policies to those of South Africa and approved gathering data to support a selective divestment of holdings in multinational corporations doing business in Israel/ Palestine, a July 2 church release noted. The church's liaison to the Middle East, Rev. Victor Makari, noted after the vote that if nothing else seems to have changed the policy of Israel toward Palestinians, we need to send a clear and strong message.

That doesn't sound very nice at all. Shouldn't a Christian church be suggesting, clearly and strongly, that Palestinians change their policy of blowing up innocent Israelis?

Swastikas and hoaxes again
Thank you Mary and Mrs. Treppenwitz, for both taking the time to tell me about the Tawana Brawley hoax. Very kind of you, but this is not what I was thinking of.

I do remember reading somewhere quite recently about a Jewish girl in France who had had swastikas carved onto her.

But anyway, this latest hoax in France is particularly intriguing in light of the Tawana Brawley story, isn’t it?

Relevant party
Yes, I had noticed that Kiwi Bob had not supplied an e-mail address for the International Court of Injustice, but didn’t have the energy to deal with such a difficulty in seventy percent humidity. Anyway, now Adrian has sent it to me and I am nicely rested from my weekend in a less humid atmosphere, so I haven’t got any excuses.

Maybe we should all send the letter again, to the relevant party this time. mail@icj-cij.org - International Court of (In)Justice.

Adrian has a very nice new blog design, by the way. I’m dead jealous, although if my blog ever looks any less silly, I’ll have to start taking myself seriously and we can’t have that now, can we?

Lots of news.
Political stuff in Israel. On a personal note, this could turn out bad for Bish’s bill. We’ll have to see. The government still hasn’t voted on it.

Violence and chaos in the Palestinian Authority. They’re talking about the end of Arafat. We’ve heard that one before!

But I don’t want to talk about the yucky stuff, when we have such good news. Welcome, Tamar, our very own blog baby, and a big, big Mazal Tov to Allison.

A few years ago, I was staying with friends in Kiryat Tivon near Haifa. In the late afternoon a group of us walked down a path in the woods. After some time descending the hill we came to a clearing. It was twilight, the sun had just set and it wasn't dark yet.

There before us, already lit up for the evening, were three archways, carved into the rock at the foot of the hill. It was the tomb of Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi, head of the Sanhedrin of old, and compiler and sealer of the Mishna, an important part of the Oral Torah.

I was overwhelmed. I hadn't been to the ancient Necropolis of Beit She’arim since childhood, and had completely forgotten that we used to drive through Kiryat Tivon on our way. My parents used to love Beit She’arim and would to take all our visitors there. I sometimes tagged along.

* * * *

We spent this last weekend in a lovely little place called Beit Lehem Haglilit, Galilean Bethlehem, in a quaint reverted barn, built by German Templars at the beginning of the Twentieth century (These people were all chucked out by the British at the beginning of World War Two, because of their open Nazi sympathies). Our rooms were on the second floor of what used to be the hen house. Our friends slept downstairs in the former stables. Dad made all sorts of cracks about the rooster and the chickens and watching out for the fox, when he rang to see how we were doing. I actually saw a fox, but not in the hen house. I saw him when I went for a little walk. He was at the end of the field, and when he saw me he scurried towards the safety of the trees.

And on Friday morning we went to nearby Beit She’arim . It must be cool in the burial caves, I told everyone, in my attempt to persuade them that it was preferable to the ancient ruins of Tzipori, which I have never seen. I wasn't sure about the coolness, I made a wild guess because I really wanted to see Beit She’arim properly again. But I was right - natural air-conditioning in the dark, damp caves.

And even the kids enjoyed themselves, and found it interesting, more than the usual ‘old stones site’. I think they appreciated the spookiness of being in caves full of graves and coffins, even if they no longer hold any skeletons (all stolen long ago by grave robbers). Us so-called grown-ups enjoyed the Hebrew inscriptions on the sarcophagi and on the walls, and the uncharacteristic use of ‘Goyishke’ symbolism in the carvings (we saw a couple of Roman goddesses, and even a mask of a face), seen as a sign tolerance and openness of the Judaism of the time.

We did something I never did with my parents, we took a guided tour, and our reward was to get in to see the tomb of Rabbi Yehuda Hanassi himself (and his wife and the rest of the clan, apparently). I'd only ever seen it from the outside, because it’s kept locked.

The other tombs were mainly the burial places of rich Jews of the era (Roman period – about 1800 years ago) who wished to be buried near to him and were transported from all over the Jewish Diaspora of the day.

I’m so glad I had the opportunity to revisit Beit She’arim as an adult. I can now better understand why my parents were so drawn to it when they were relatively new to this country, and preferred bringing foreign visitors there than to the more obvious choices in the vicinity of their Haifa home, such as the rather kitschy Bahai Temple.

Tallrite: Palestinians deserve regime change. A positive commentary.

It’s amazing to see how flexible Yediot Aharonot is about reporting the facts, even when they later turn out not to have been the facts. According to Yediot, the most popular and widely read newspaper in the country (Haaretz’s readership is tiny, the Jerusalem Post’s - microscopic), the fate we had thought had befallen that most imaginative of girls on the train in Paris was far more horrible than any of you read in your national papers – the swastikas weren’t just written on her body, they were carved there; her hair wasn’t just cut, it was shaved off; and her baby’s stroller wasn’t pushed over, the baby was kicked.

That was a whole two days ago. Yediot apparently assumes that the entire body of their readership possesses the collective IQ of an ant and the memory of a rabbit. In this morning’s paper they write about it all being a hoax. Forgotten are the blaring headlines screaming of swastikas scraped on female flesh. ‘I drew them on my stomach myself’ they now quote her as saying. Do they think we can’t remember the accusations they bandied around at the beginning of the week?

What worries me is that they obviously really don’t care, and this is only one example among many.

--

I have noticed that habitual liars appear to feel no embarrassment on being caught. Everyone around can be visibly cringing, as if it were they who had just been exposed, while the person in question is quite untouched, oblivious of the ridicule or disgust felt by all present.

* * * *

The story of swastikas carved on the bare flesh of a young lady sounds familiar. I distinctively remember reading a similar story somewhere a while back (was it on a blog?) and remember thinking that if this was true it should have been front-page news. Could this messed up young lady have been living out a popular French urban legend? Creepy.

You can do something: You can tell them how you feel.
Kiwi Bob has kindly supplied the relevant e-mails and even a letter to cut and paste. Send away!

==========================

ecu@un.org - United Nations

civis@europarl.eu.int - EU Parliament

info@curia.eu.int - EU Court of Justice

Subject: The building of the Israeli security fence

To Whom It May Concern:

When Israel builds a fence to keep out terrorists, the UN and EU are
up in arms because it makes it difficult for terrorists to kill more Jews.

When terrorists shoot (point blank!) an 8-month-pregnant Jewish woman and her 4 little girls, there is absolute silence from your organizations.

The security fence is a temporary and nonviolent way to reduce terrorism. The fence is a proportional response to the ongoing Palestinian Campaign of terror. When the terrorism stops, the fence can be taken down.

The route of the fence was designed to save the lives of innocent people. Israel has the right and the duty to protect its citizens from terrorist attacks.

Since the erection of the security fence there has been a 90% decrease in the number of attacks against Israelis-from an average of 26 attacks per year before the fence to three attacks after the fence was built.

The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that areas of the fence must be
adjusted in order to relieve Palestinian hardship. Unlike any other country in the region, Israel has an independent judiciary. Israel, a democracy committed to the rule of law, will comply with the Israeli Supreme Court's decision.

The security fence is not a wall, as the court states. The majority of the fence is constructed of barb wire-8.5 kilometers of the fence consists of concrete slabs, in order to prevent sniper fire.

There are many disputed security fences around the world-India has
constructed a fence in the contested area of Kashmir, and Saudi Arabia has constructed a barrier in an undefined area along the Saudi Arabia-Yemen border-yet only Israel's security fence has prompted an International Court of Justice ruling. See this website:
(www.washingtoninstitute.org/
distribution/PCE465.doc)

Israel is willing to make painful sacrifices for peace. Israel has
made peace with Jordan and Egypt, and gave up the entire Sinai-land
larger than the current state of Israel.

If you think your indifference goes unnoticed, count the number of messages you will receive world-wide in the next 48 to 72 hours on this subject.

Respectfully,

Oh goody!
Guess who got contractions and went off to the maternity ward this morning?

How exciting.

Update: I didn't read the comments. IT'S A GIRL! (I have this urge to go lululululululu, but I don't know how to)

This is 19 year-old Ma'ayan Na'im. She was murdered today by Palestinian terrorists.

I should be making all sorts of informative and opinionated comments about the International Court of Injustice, about the security fence. Mind's a blank. Has been for a while, you'll have noticed, no doubt.

It’s such a joke, that decision of theirs, or opinion, or whatever they're calling it. A sick joke. And an especially sad joke for people like Avi Ohayoun, whose two small sons were shot in their beds in Kibbutz Metzer by a heartless savage desperate freedom fighter, while their mother was reading them a goodnight story.

They would still be alive if there had been a fence at the time their murderer decided to steal into their home. Their bedroom was so close to the fence's much-discussed and disputed route. How painful for their father that their deaths should be brushed nonchalantly aside as inconsequential, irrelevant, by those great and wise judges in The Hague.

A sad, sick, cruel joke, but a joke nevertheless. One of the wounded in today’s attack was a young Arab man from Yaffo (Jaffa). He called for the Arab Knesset members to resign, because of their vocal opposition to the security fence. It seems his experience has brought him to the realization that the fence protects him just as much as it does his Jewish neighbors.

I never run for a bus. Matter of pride.

Slightly nervous this morning, laden with the fresh news of a ‘pigua’ in Tel Aviv, I made a run for the bus. It was just that I could clearly see the security guy on board, through the window, with his neat khaki safari jacket. ‘This is the bus for me this morning,’ I thought and kicked up my heels. They don’t have security guys on all the buses.

Just before leaving home, I had whispered to Bish that maybe Eldest shouldn’t get the bus to her art class this morning. Maybe she should walk. We thought about it for about a tenth of a second and both agreed that there was no reason to mention anything to her.

You see we’re not particularly scared or worried. I’m more concerned about accidents or perverts, if anything, with regard to Eldest roaming around on her own.

But for a few minutes after you start to realize that there are more ambulances than usual racing past the busy street corner on which you live, you get a little tiny bit jittery. Only for a minute and then life goes on. Two minutes into my spinning lesson I had forgotten all about the Pigua, and only discovered about the lovely young woman that had been murdered and the numbers of the injured, when I got to my office later on.

We hear ambulances. We put on the radio. A bomb, a bus or a bus stop in South Tel Aviv. But I have to go to work. By bus :-p

I’m so glad Karen Alkalay-Gut is back.

‘This International Court of Injustice will self-destruct in five seconds.’ Kerfoom. The International Court of Injustice is dead! Long live the right of nations to defend their civilians!

I’ve been trying to work out if there is a polite way of saying f--- off. There isn’t.

Update: Leif.

Still no news about the vote on Sunday. Bish reckons they didn't vote on it yet.

Note: If you haven’t seen the third film of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and haven’t read the book, and you mean to see or read one or tother, you might like giving this next post a pass.



The difficulty of letting go
We saw ‘The Return of the King’, the last chapter of the ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, on Friday evening. I am left with the image of Frodo Baggins standing in the heart of the volcano, over the furnace of lava, unable to let go of the ring, even though he has traveled for many months and endured terrible hardship in order to do just this, even though he knows the very future of his world depends on it. Everyone watching is silently shouting, ‘Let go of the ring! Let go of the ring already! What’s wrong with you?’ But the ring is so strong. It has such a hold on its possessor.

‘It’s only a film,’ Bish reminded Eldest when things got too scary for her, ‘It’s not real.’ But how many times have each and every one of us stood over the abyss and been unable to let go of the ring, just like Frodo? Our rings may not be golden and magical. They don’t even have to be ‘things’. In fact they’re usually not. They can be a person, a situation, an idea, a belief, or even a figment of our imagination. But their hold on us is just as firm, just as unrelenting. And we find it just as hard to release our grip, even when we know for sure that letting go will free us.

Sometimes we stand there on that spot over the abyss for months, sometimes for years; some rings we continue to clutch for eternity, pathetically murmuring over and over and over ‘my precioussss’, till the end of time, never to be free.

Even though Frodo’s ring had evil, magical powers that had a strong hold on him, our task is still far harder than his. He had to let a material object fall into a furnace that would destroy it forever, and at the same time destroy its hold on him. Our rings are imprinted in our minds; their hold is not really dependant on anything outside of us, even though we are certain it is.

Letting go of our rings means that we must not only accept change, it also means we must actually change ourselves, and no one can do that for us.

I have so many rings I don’t know where to start. That’s a good excuse now, isn’t it?

Happy Fourth of July to all Americans.

Bish goes to the Knesset and learns about how democracy works
On Sunday, the Ministerial Committee for Legislation will vote on Bish’s bill draft. No kidding. He has a bill draft, a suggestion for legislation he wrote and has been promoting.

I’m so proud of him. He saw something that was wrong, something that in his view needed changing and, unlike the rest of us who just whine and whine about injustice and do nothing, he set about making a difference.

He’s no politician, my Bish. He’s not even a lawyer. He had no previous connections to politicians, no funding, and no backing, besides the small non profit organization he was recently elected to chair, which represents a few hundred of his professional peers.

He sat up nights at the computer, working out the details, then he sat with the NPO’s legal advisor and they worked on the draft. The legal advisor thought it would never work. He’s a nice guy, even if he did write our marriage agreement and later, much later, confessed to Bish that he hadn't thought we’d stay married for more than a year (he very perceptively thought the bride was a nutcase). It's just that he doesn’t seem to have much fighting spirit in him.

Then Bish started meeting with Knesset members and government ministers to try and get them interested in the bill (‘I’m going up to the Knesset again today, dear’). A few members of the NPO helped him get appointments with politicians they knew or knew people who knew.

Bish’s initial idea was to suggest that the relevant ministry use his bill draft, or their own draft based on its ideas, as a government bill. But the ministry clerks in question proved extremely hostile and refused to even read it. Their minister, on the other hand, did read it and liked it, and suggested Bish found Knesset members who would promote it as a private member’s bill.

Imagine our amazement and excitement when Knesset members from the coalition recognized the bill’s potential and took it up. It is going to be brought before the Knesset as a private bill, hopefully with government backing.

On Sunday, the government will vote if to give it such backing, the government that is in the form of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation. That means, among others, Finance Minister Bibi Netanyahu (Bish couldn’t get a meeting); Justice Minister Tommy Lapid (‘He was very nice, very impressive, but he looked so tired’); Minister for the Diaspora Natan Sharansky (‘What a lovely man, smiling eyes’ – smiling eyes is a big compliment in Bish’s book, maybe the biggest).

For years you feel like you are hitting your head against the wall every time you come in contact with government bureaucracy. It is so amazing to think that a private citizen like Bish can try to make a difference like this, if he sets his mind to do so, and can get this far. This has been an uplifting experience, an experience of what democracy means.

Even if the government decides not to back the bill, it will still be put before the Knesset, but it has a far better chance with government backing. I’ll keep you posted.

By the way, the bill still has a long way to go even if the government decides to back it. The bill that will eventually become law, God willing, will probably be much changed from Bish’s draft, maybe unrecognizable. You can read about the legislation process for a private member’s bill in Israel in the Knesset site.

The good news
I really don’t see how I could possibly leave the girls and Bish for more than a week at a time. Sigh.

One of my friends in my Tuesday evening art class is going to India in August. Her daughter is there, you know the ritual Israeli after-the-army trip, and she’s going over to visit her (To make sure she’s not overdoing the mushrooms and so on and so forth). In our last lesson, she was telling us about her plans. I suddenly realized I wanted to go too. I hadn’t been aware of this before.

And then yesterday there was an article in Yediot Aharonot about these two girls who organize spiritual trips for women to India. It sounds a bit too fluffy for me, but maybe I’ll give them a ring, get more details. Don’t hold your breath though.

Back to real life, the good news is that they’re not canceling Youngest’s special bus to school, next school year, after all, but we’ll have to participate in paying for it. Phew! Youngest was very nervous about this, because if the bus had been canceled she would have had to start taking the public transport. This in itself is no tragedy, I was getting the bus to school when I was her age, but then I didn’t live in the busy, hectic center of Tel Aviv. My bus line served a quiet neighborhood.

I can’t complain about having to pay, we can afford it. But it does seem unfair for those who are less fortunate than us. One of the mothers suggested that the canceling-the-bus exercise was a “Door in Face” manipulation, so we wouldn’t kick up a fuss about having to pay. If so it worked beautifully, but someone else reckons the real reason was that the parents managed to get an article about it in a local newspaper, so the powers that be backed down to avoid more fuss.

For those of you who have just switched on, Youngest doesn’t go to our neighborhood school, but to a school a bit further away with a class for what I call ‘Budding Matildas’. Youngest wasn’t very happy in her previous class and she’s really having a good time now. She has far more friends, and the teachers seem better equipped to deal with her temperament (which tends to be on the stormy side, bless her).

From today she joins Eldest on vacation. A whole two months to go. Summer vacation tends to be a strain on working mothers, although far less for me now that they are both quite big (Eldest is nearly 13 and Youngest is 9). (Aren’t I the cool collected one? Don’t believe it for a minute, it’s an act. By the end of August I promise you I’ll be a nervous wreck, even more than usual).

Isn't it awful that all of these people are popping by and I can think of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY? What sort of a hostess am I?

Where's the camera? Maybe it's time for some fresh Shoosha snaps. You wouldn't believe how she's grown. And her coat is so lovely and shiny. (This is Imshin attempting small talk)

Enough of that.
Four year-old Afik Zahavi came to the kindergarten this morning and was killed by a Kassam rocket. He lived in Sderot, a town inside Israel, near the border with Gaza.

Six seconds is all it takes for a Kassam rocket to land after it has been launched, according to the mayor of Sderot this afternoon. How will we protect Afik’s friends, and friends of 49 year-old Mordechai Yosefov, once we have disengaged from Gaza?

(updated) Yesterday’s rant was a reaction to, among quite a few other things, the witch-hunt currently being conducted in the media against Meni Mazuz following his decision to close the corruption case against Arik Sharon. I am not innocent enough not to realize that Meni Mazuz could very well have been given the position of Attorney General specifically so he would close the case against Sharon. But some of the things being written completely ignore Mazuz’s main assertions in his decision and continue to chant exactly the same things that were being written beforehand (if I read about that damn leaked out of context conversation of Gilad Sharon’s one more time…). You get the feeling the writers didn’t even bother to read his decision, or if they did they did so extremely selectively.

Sever Plotzker, whom you know I usually admire, took the cake on Thursday (is that the correct expression?) when he suggested (in the print edition of Yediot Aharonot) that maybe the whole Greek island project didn’t really exist, that it was a fictional invention concocted for the sole reason of bribing Sharon in such a way that would evade detection. This idea is so absurd I’m surprised Plotzker, a top financial reporter, wasn’t embarrassed to write it, albeit in a thinly disguised fashion.

What was he saying? That David Appel employed architects, surveyors, archeologists, advertising companies, and who knows what else, for months, spending many millions of dollars, all so he could give Sharon a measly $650,000? Come on, couldn’t he just have put the whole 14 million in an account in the Cayman Islands for the Sharons and finished? I’m sure they would have been far more appreciative (and probably would have managed to come up with a creative way to launder it).

The funny thing is that if, as Plotzker claims, Appel concocted this elaborate bribing scheme just to get his building concessions near the town of Lod, well Sharon didn’t supply the merchandize, did he? Appel didn’t get the building concessions after all. No one did. It was turned down. Thus Plotzker was unwittingly strengthening Mazuz’s claim of lack of evidence of what he calls ‘hayesod hanafshi’ (I can’t think how to translate that, the only thing that comes up is the ‘mental element’, and that’s all wrong) - that Sharon understood that he was being bribed and for what purpose.

Amnon Dankner wrote some acerbic comments about this witch-hunt in Maariv, only in Hebrew though.

Update: Joe G. says: "You could say "criminal intent." If you really want to get fancy, it's "mens rea." However, my law dictionary includes "mental element" as an option, so you're on solid ground".

Ooh, 'mens rea'. Eldest and me know that from Legally Blonde. How exciting!

Sderot: A Kassam rocket attack. A three year-old child and a fifty-year-old man murdered. The child’s mother is critically wounded. Five others also suffered injuries.

Something has happened. In Gaza. They're talking of dozens of casualties. Soldiers.

Update: Not as bad as initially reported - they're talking of seven wounded.

‘From the foam of a wave and a cloud / I built a white city’
This is my favorite Naomi Shemer song. It’s about my home.

A cultural dictatorship*
One morning, in the early days of April 2002 I think it was, I turned on the radio as I always did and tuned in to the Voice of Music’s morning concert. The Voice of Music is a classical music radio station belonging to Kol Yisrael, the Voice of Israel, Israel’s state radio service.

It was a difficult time. People were being killed daily en masse on buses and in crowded public places. Sending the girls off to school every day made me feel like a negligent mother. Finally, after months and months of restraint, we were just beginning to strike back in an attempt to bring back some sense of security to our beleaguered streets. Our soldiers were in the West Bank cities, endangering their lives to protect us by going from house to booby-trapped house, rooting out terrorists. And our hearts were there with them.

Listening to the Voice of Music had always had a calming effect on me. Every Friday, I would tear out the week’s music schedule from Haaretz’s weekend supplement and take it with me to work, where I would mark my favorites and make an effort to tune in at the appropriate times. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, I’m no highbrow and not very knowledgeable, but I know what I enjoy.

And this morning was no different, except that someone had slipped in something that didn’t seem to be on the schedule, a piece called “War – there is no logic in it”, or something on those lines. I can’t remember who the composer was and it didn’t really matter to me much. What mattered to me was that someone was hijacking a state radio station to make his or her private political statement, which was in direct opposition to government policy. Under the circumstances, I was very upset. I felt betrayed.

I didn’t hear the piece. In fact, I was so dismayed that I switched station, and didn’t tune into the Voice of Music again for about a year and a half. I still don’t listen to it very often.

This was just one moment of awareness. I have gradually become more and more sensitized to the fact that certain political viewpoints dominate many aspects of public life in Israel, often in contradiction not only with government policy, that’s freedom of speech after all, but also with the facts or with common sense, while other political viewpoints, just as interesting, just as worthy, just as intelligent, and sometimes far more sensible and coherent, are completely ignored, as if they didn’t exist.

On the Head Heeb’s comments, Danny said, for instance, that, “What makes (Rotblit’s) song even more childish is the fact that the Israeli Left is not even in power”. But there are no democratic elections in Kol Yisrael’s music stations or in the state prosecution or in the media.

Maybe Diane was right after all. Maybe I didn’t move left in my early twenties because it pained me to see a twelve year old Palestinian boy washing the floor of a Tel Aviv restaurant at one o’clock at night, or an old woman making her way slowly with her sacks and her donkey along the sandy road to Han Younis, occasionally looking up at the sparkling white villas in the settlement on the hill. Maybe I never really believed that the Palestinians deserved a state of their own alongside ours, or that we would all be better off as a result.

Maybe all I wanted was to belong, just a lonely immigrant child trying desperately to fit in, by holding the right beliefs, by thinking the right thoughts. Maybe I was intimidated by the ever-powerful cultural elite that continues to high-handedly dictate the appropriate views and opinions in this country, and nonchalantly brands the renegades ignorant, dangerous, primitive, childish, irresponsible, inept, morally corrupt, mentally ill, or just plain stupid, even if they have been democratically elected, by an unmistakably large majority of the people, to rule the country.

I’m not trying to say that the semi-official opinions propagated by Israel’s cultural dictatorship are necessarily wrong. They are often wise, noble, and wonderful. But it is wrong to shut out other voices. It is wrong to ridicule and belittle what anyone else has to say, even if one disagrees vehemently. It is wrong to illegitimize those who dare swim against the prevailing cultural current, by claiming they have ulterior motives.

Once one becomes aware that this is happening, one cannot help but see it manifesting everywhere one looks. And one cannot help but begin questioning the wisdom of the very opinions and views that must be forcefully upheld in this fashion.

The Israeli right has been shouting this for ever and I personally always thought it a ridiculous claim. I have only in recent years begun to be able to see what they were talking about. No wonder so many people holding alternative opinions in this country feel so alienated and detest anything that sounds or smells remotely ‘smollanee’ (lefty), even the really good stuff. We all ultimately lose.


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* The idea of calling it a cultural dictatorship is Bish’s.