Ooh ooh ooh, guess who I just saw on channel 1 news – Rinat! Our Rinat! She was in some room with a load of politicians, probably some Knesset committee or other (We were just in the middle of a minor family crisis so I wasn’t really listening).

Okay, I know she works for the Knesset Channel so I shouldn’t be surprised, but I’ve never watched the Knesset channel.

Rinat certainly stood out among all those balding inflated egos. You can’t mistake her fresh, bubbling personality.

I know how you feel. I’ve been down that path
When I was young, I was often excited and intrigued by the strangeness of having experienced Israel both as a foreign visitor, a tourist, and then, by contrast, as an Israeli, as a local.

I visited Israel twice as a small child, before we made Aliya. The country left a deep impression on me. I had sensed something fresh and vibrant that I loved.

There was an apartment building that was being built as we drove up Sea Road in Haifa in the taxi. The sound of the workers hammering; the bright summer sun; the wind in my face through the open windows of the taxi, still with no air-conditioning back then; the strong smell of the natural Mount Carmel vegetation. I was intoxicated.

When we came to live in Haifa a few years later, I was already filled with love for the place. For years I tried to relive that first drive up the mountain, and identify the exact apartment building that I had witnessed being constructed.

What I was really trying to recapture was a moment filled with excitement and freshness and happiness. It was one of those rare magical moments, a moment of love and awareness.

* * * * * *

I recognize the sentiments expressed by those opposed to Bush, crushed by his success at the polls. I recognize the frustration, anger, and sadness they feel, faced as they are with the stupidity and ignorance of people for not voting for the right candidate. I’ve been there myself.

In our case, not only had they elected the wrong guy, they had done it just a few months after someone from their side had murdered our prime minister.

We couldn’t help thinking, like the prophet Elijah who said to King Ahab, all those years ago in this very same land, “Hast thou killed and also taken possession?” (Kings I, 21, 19)

They had murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, they had murdered peace, and now they were electing into office the very man who had stood up on that balcony above Zion Square in Jerusalem, as the crowds below him held up banners of PM Rabin in an SS uniform.

Can you imagine the bitterness and bewilderment, not to mention the fear for the future?

It is a privilege to have been in the position to see things from more than one angle.

I have been a tourist in Israel, experiencing the country as a foreigner; and I have been as a native Israeli, the smells and sights so familiar, so ordinary, my previous life as a non-Israeli fading into a hazy memory.

I confess to having harbored a secret frustration that democracy gives the same vote to me as to ignoramuses and imbeciles who cannot be made to see sense; who are not controlled by the same moral values as I am.

And I have come to see how arrogant and foolish and narrow-minded I can be, thinking that I know better, thinking that I have the mandate on common sense and on knowing what's right.

“Are you sure”, Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh urges us to ask ourselves at all times.

I know that if I answer yes, I am lying to myself. It’s just that, far too often, I forget to ask.

FYI
I've been having some problems with my e-mail yesterday and today, so I may not have received your e-mails, if you sent any.

It’s not over till the fat lady sings



Word on the street in Israel is that Suha is keeping him alive till she can get her fleshy paws on every last cent.

According to that most excellent of Israeli daily publications, Yediot Aharonot, Suha and Muhammad Rashid, Arafat's financial advisor, are the only ones who know the numbers of the bank accounts where the dying ra'is keeps his fortune, at least three hundred million dollars, according to Forbes, much of it purloined from the Palestinian people.

That's why Suha rushed over to Ramallah, like a bat out of hell, to take over the handling of the dying husband she hasn't bothered visiting for three years, and swiftly had him moved to her territory, Paris. She wasn't taking any chances of him mumbling the account numbers to anyone else.

According to Yediot, Rashid and Suha each know about different bank accounts. Suha and Rashid don't like each other very much.

It's like American daytime TV, without the good-looking actors.

By the way, Ehud Ya'ari, top Israeli commentator on Arab affairs, said on Israeli TV channel 2 evening news tonight that Yassir Arafat died yesterday lunchtime, and that since then everything we've been hearing has been politics.

Update: Ah, a commenter on Silent Running enlightens us:

Accessing those swiss numbered accounts is a new ball game since the swiss had to change the rules a year or so ago. Even if you are co signatory you can no longer access without swiss inheritance documents. However whilst the holder is alive you can transfer pretty easily. So I guess the "coma" situation will assist the transfers. Otherwise the swiss banks will get another windfall like they did 60 years ago.

Kindly brought to my attention by Alisa.

Anti-Israel bias on BBC? Unheard of! Unthinkable!
A few days ago, John Williams wrote:

I have just watched the most anti Israeli programme I have ever seen on British television. It was on the BBC at prime time and goes by the title of 'Spooks'. The plot concerned the attempts of a right wing Israeli group who murdered a peace negotiator in order to stop any two state agreement. Although there were passing references to the idea that the right wing group, the November committee who advocated a greater Israel, were hated by the more liberal Israelis the whole script was an excuse to attack all Israelis who,

Deliberately murder peace activists who stand in the way of bulldozers

Cease to be human when they don IDF uniform, all except the refuseniks that is

The November committee employed a code when dealing with perceived enemies - Nablus stood for surveillance - Bethlehem stood for threats and intimidation - Jenin stood for assassination. I might have the order for the first two mixed up but Jenin = targeted murder.

I could barely believe the level of bias.

John suggested we check who was behind this episode and where they stood politically. He’ll make a serious writer of me yet. Didn't come up with much though.

Bish is much better than me at doing that. He would have found their whole life story down to what they wrote on the door of the loo (john) in high school.

So the writer was Ben Richards. I can only suppose it is the same person who wrote these books and who, according to this, was obsessed with Salvador Allende as a child. Okey dokey.

Creator of the series was one David Wolstencroft
Director Cilla Ware
Producer Andrew Woodhead

Executive Producer Jane Featherstone commented about the series: "We felt it was important to look at the use of intelligence as a political tool, at how politicians attempt to influence the security services.” Okey dokey.

How about the use of entertainment program(me)s on British state funded TV as a political tool?

Naaaah.

How do I, as one of those nasty Israelis, feel about this?

Tired mainly.

Later:
Mind you, what can you expect? I mean, just look at this (not that one has anything to do with the other)



These people are raving lunatics. It's just incredible, isn't it?

Via Harry's Place and Eric the Unread.

Still later:
An answer:

Why is it so hard to imagine that not everyone thinks like you? Are these people so arrogant, so self-smug that they truly believe their way is the only way?

US presidential elections
Well, it’s over. That’s a relief. Can we all be friends again now?

Obviously not.

BBC and Sky News reporters were so somber yesterday. I swear one Sky News reporter was near to tears.

The obligatory don’t-worry-I’m-still-here post
Three murdered in Shuk HaCarmel; about thirty wounded, that’s if you don’t include the sixteen year-old perpetrator. As I see it, his PFLP operators murdered him.

When Eldest was little we used to take her to Shuk HaCarmel (Carmel Market) quite a lot. She used to love it. When Bish took her, she would ride high above everyone on his shoulders, looking at the stalls, at the busy shoppers rushing this way and that, at the people selling stuff, shouting and singing about their merchandise to attract buyers.

When she came with me, we used to finish the grocery part as quickly as possible and make our way through to the Nahlat Binyamin pedestrian whatsitcalled, where we would watch the vendors setting up their stalls for the popular Friday creative fair. We used to buy fresh pita with labane from the Bedouin women and find a nice spot on a bench, preferably near the Russian string quartet.

One time, Eldest was tired. She put her head on my lap and stretched out on the bench, not noticing that her legs were pushing at the scooter that was parked at the end of the bench. There was a great crash as the scooter toppled over. Thankfully, the rather rough-looking owner of the scooter, who was working in a nearby store and who rushed over, was nice about it.

Then there was a pigua (terror attack) in Shuk Mahane Yehuda in Jerusalem, sometime in the mid-nineties, one of those ‘Victims of Peace’ piguim. We still believed in that back then. After that we never took Eldest to the shuk any more.

Now she’s older, she wants to go. She reckons she can get more clothes there for less. I have had bad experience with clothes from the shuk. You pay less, but the clothes don’t last long enough to be handed down to the next child, so not so cheap in the long run. But my daughter has a businesswoman streak in her (she didn’t get that from her parents, must have come down sideways from her Aunt Our Sis), and impressive organizational abilities (she is the only one who can get me off my behind to DO anything) so I suppose we’ll be going there some time soon.

We weren’t there this morning though, thank God.

Separated at birth III
Here's another one.

Suggested by someone. I said I wouldn't give names, but at first I did, because, I reckoned with myself, he is a blogger. Then I remembered that he isn't a blogger any more, so he counts as an ordinary reader, and, by managing to keep shtum for so long (how do you do it?), he has re-earned his right to anonymity.

Refusenik hypocrisy
I can find no difference between right-wing and left-wing refusal to serve. Both are just as unacceptable. This said, I am disappointed with Yishay Mor’s inability to be open enough to argue in favor of right-wing refusal. I would expect him, of all people, as a refusenik himself, to be, at least, understanding of the right-wing refuseniks.

And I am disappointed with the weakness of his argument against them.

He brings up Yigal Amir. I find it hard to see the relevancy. Yigal Amir is not a refusnik and no one, as far as I know, is calling him one, besides Yishay. Yigal Amir is a political assassin.

He brings up the rabbis inciting to refusal. Also a diversion, although more relevant, seeing as a religious Jew is expected to act as instructed by his rabbi. But when we talk of refusal, it is always a personal act - one man or one woman standing up and being prepared to pay a personal price for his or her convictions.

“I refused,” Yishay explains, “because I believed that my act was an extreme measure required to protect the existence of Israel as a just, democratic state.” But right-wing refuseniks may see their refusal as an extreme measure required to protect the existence of Israel, period. Moral equivalence? Democracy and Justice versus Self Defense and Physical Survival. Who is to judge between them?

It’s the occupation, silly, Yishay says, more or less. But right-wing refuseniks don’t think it’s the occupation at all. Right-wing refuseniks think it’s the village where they were born and where they grew up. It’s where their parents and brothers and sisters and cousins, and everyone they know, have all lived for thirty years.

I am disappointed with Yishay, who seems to be an intelligent, sensitive person. I am disappointed that he seems unable to see that not only has he no right to “object to their refusal on moral grounds”, but that if his own refusal, which he sees as justified and moral, is legitimate, it actually gives theirs a moral legitimacy too. That is the essence of the democracy that he claims he wishes to protect.

Live from Ramallah: “I’ve no idea what I’m talking about, but the BBC pays me a lot of money to say it.”

I love the way this Barbara Plett person solves the riddle of apparent Palestinian indifference to Arafat’s departure and why only the foreign correspondents were shedding tears of sadness.

But as he boarded the helicopter with faltering steps, he also stood for something else: for a people exhausted by war, bereft of hope, abandoned by their brothers, and fearful of the future.

Perhaps that is why so few Palestinians saw him off. In him, still, they see themselves.

Very touching, I'm sure. I even wiped a little tear from the corner of my eye while reading it*. But what does it mean?

[*Ooh you little fibber, Imshin]

I have some alternative suggestions:
How about - many of the Palestinians are relieved to be rid of him.

How about - many of them know only too well that it's his fault that their lives are in such a bloody mess.

How about - maybe you don't actually know what your talking about, you ***** ****** ***** (censored).

Enough said. Ehud Yaari has claimed all along that this has not been a popular uprising.

Thank you, John Williams, for pointing this out. Have I mentioned John’s new book?

Eldest’s much anticipated sleepover party with her girlfriends tonight was in danger of cancellation when the apartment flooded this morning.

This year we’re not going to be around for the big event. Last time, which was a few years ago, remains in our minds as a trauma. So the three of us, Bish, youngest, and I, are fleeing to the peace and quiet (we hope) of a modest hotel on the sea front - near enough to be called back if needed, far enough to get some sleep. Two birds in one swoop.

I know what you’re thinking. Don’t worry, they’re good kids. They won’t be wrecking the place.

We have really nice plumbers, amazingly enough. I can hardly believe it only took me nineteen years in Tel Aviv to find them. It’s an efficient little company, very un-Israeli. The boss guy actually rang, after the very nice, efficient workman (albeit a bit chatty) had left, to make sure we were happy. I thought I was dreaming. It’s the third time we’ve had them in and they’ve always been great.

Oh, but once I'm at it, I can't help saying something about Arafat. We watched the footage of him in his pajamas in disbelief. I love the bit where he tries to kiss the hand of the Egyptian doctor to his right, and when the doctor notices, he rapidly pulls Arafat's hand towards his own mouth. At first it embarrassed me, but after watching it a few times, it won me over.

You have to admit he has charm, even critically ill, probably dying, ugly as sin, looking like one of Snow White's seven dwarfs.



It gives an idea of the enormous cultural differences. Can you imagine any western leader, even on his or her deathbed, allowing anyone to film him or her dressed like Noddy*? They'd rather just die there and then. And no one would dream of taking his photo like that without his consent, even if he or she couldn't decide for himself. Pride seems to take on different manifestations for different peoples.

Then again, that's his thing, isn't it? Popular leader, close to his people. It's fitting that he should look like an Egyptian Fallah. That's why they love him.

Everyone here is talking about what will happen the day after. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we? I'll make do with my inner reaction to the physical image, which, it appears, has given me ample food for thought.

_______________________

*Dave, Noddy/Arafat would be a good 'separated at birth', don't you think? But I'll leave that to you, dear. I'm trying hard to be reverant and respectful to my neighbors here.

Afterthought: Another one that comes to mind would be Suha and Yasser/Miss Piggy and Kermit. Teehee.

So many exciting things happening and I have no will to write about them. Does this mean I am on a blog break? Maybe I should officially announce a blog break. Every time I do, I suddenly have lots to write about.

Interesting evening in Israeli politics
The Knesset voted on disengagement. It was exciting.

I love John Williams' stories. They help me reconnect to a place that is so very familiar I can easily conjure up its sights, smells, and sounds in my mind at any moment, but at the same time a place that is so far away from the life I live that I sometimes feel that it is no more than a vague memory of a dream I dreamt long ago.

I love John Williams' stories, but not just because he tells of life in the town where I was born. I love his stories because they are funny and touching and insightful, in an unassuming, down-to-earth way.

I have been moved and inspired, more than once, by his open, sincere, and humorous descriptions of the challenges, big and small, some of them very big, that life has put in his path.

Now I’m proud to be one of the first to announce that John's stories are available in book form, so we can finally read them as they should be read - curled up in bed, on a Saturday afternoon.


You can order your copy here.

Like a cat in a tree
Last night we had one of those ‘no-partners-invited’ workplace parties organized enthusiastically by co-workers who are having extra-marital affairs with each other and who need a legit excuse to meet up in the evening (God, I’m getting cynical). The rest of us would rather be at home with our families, of course, but we have to go too, otherwise we will be regarded as ‘Sotzyomatim’.

‘Sotzyomat’ is a derogatory term derived from the so-called socio-metric exams, which are extremely popular in this country, mainly in hierarchal organizations like the army. The lofty idea behind the ‘Sotzyo-metri’ is to provide a relatively impartial tool for evaluating the quality of workers, by making use of the knowledge of co-workers and immediate subordinates. It is regarded as a good way to check workers’ social skills and popularity. In practice it is mainly used for getting even.

So a ‘Sotzyomat’ is someone who would be given low marks should he be unfortunate enough to have his peers evaluate him. In a country where ‘the Hevre’ rules supreme, no one wants to be a ‘Sotzyomat’.

‘How was it?’ Bish asked when I got back. ‘Well’, I answered, ‘if we hadn’t become vegetarians eight years ago, you and I, we wouldn’t have been able to eat as much meat, during those eight years, as was roasted and devoured in one evening, by fifty, odd, people.’ They had some guy in to do an Argentinean barbeque. They all said it was delicious. I had some lettuce salad. I still had to pay the same seventy shekels as everyone else. I tired of arguing that point long ago.

I actually managed to be quite uncharacteristically sociable, except to certain unappreciative parties (Some of you might have been lucky enough to catch my Calimero post on the subject, written on Monday of this week, and deleted inadvertently on Tuesday).

But without a doubt, as far as I was concerned, the focal point of the evening, which took place in the garden of a co-worker’s moshav home near Ben Gurion airport, was the cat in the tree.

As I was stroking one of the numerous dogs that were wandering about enjoying the tidbits people were sneaking them, someone who knew I was partial to cats, asked me if I’d seen the cat in the tree yet.

And there he was, perched contentedly on a spacious wooden shelf at about my shoulder level, under the leafy branches of a medium sized tree (by local standards). He seemed to have everything up there, shelter, various little toys hanging from a metal frame, food. ‘He never comes down, you know’, the younger sister of our Moshavnik co-worker explained, seeing I was looking at him. ‘What do you mean he never comes down?’ I asked. She explained that the dogs would tear him to bits, so he just stays up on his shelf. She said that they suspect he comes down in the middle of the night, when the dogs are asleep, but that no one has ever actually seen this happen.

I must admit I was appalled at this self-imposed imprisonment. I thought of Shoosha, a house cat that never goes out, having a more interesting life than this cat, even though he has in his close vicinity a cat’s paradise of endless fields and abundant prey. And then the thought dawned on me. I am not unlike this cat.

I sometimes find my job stifling and unsatisfying; once in a while a boss may come along who behaves in a way that upsets and offends me; because I am busy at work I don’t get the opportunity to fully explore other talents and capabilities.

But it’s all so comfortable. I just sit there on my tree and get my monthly salary on time, no matter how hard I worked that particular month. It’s always the same salary and not very big, but it always arrives. And I am safe. I know what is expected of me, and what I have to do to survive. It is a minimum danger situation.

I know I have the option to make a run for it. I can get past those dogs and make it to the excitements of the big wild world, but do I dare venture into the dangerous, unsure, insecure unknown? Can I handle jungle life? How do I know if I can survive out there?

I think I’ll just stay here, up in my safe, familiar little tree, thank you very much.

Talking about taking things for granted, could you believe that these are all just a short bike ride from my door?







Bish made a lovely album of this morning’s bike ride.

Israel is not a country*
A turning point in my understanding of Jewishness and Zionism came a few years ago, while reading a chapter in a Hebrew book called “The Broken Chain – Polish Jewry through the ages, Part II. Society, Culture, Nationalism”, edited by Israel Bartal – Israel Gutman, published by the Zalman Shazar Center, Jerusalem in 2001. The chapter, written by Sabena Levine, was about efforts that were invested in developing Jewish secular education in Poland in the 19th century, as an alternative to the traditional Torah study.

The reality Ms. Levine described was familiar. It sounded very similar to the ongoing struggle, in Israel today, to modernize the education available to children in the ultra-Orthodox communities. It blew my mind to think it was happening in Poland well over a hundred and twenty years ago. The interest and involvement of the Polish authorities in Jewish education was also something completely new and intriguing for me.

It was a breaking down of a stereotype. The old black and white footage had always made it all look so primitive, so basic, reinforcing my tendency to think of Jewish Poland in terms of constrictive ‘Fiddler on the Roof’-ish shtetl life, with the community ‘parnass’ handling the tense, groveling relationship with the local landlord, and everyone near starvation level.

As always, stereotypes shrink things. The Jewish community of Poland was not only sizeable, it was also complex and diverse; it was a whole world. And it does not exist any more.

And that is what hit me head-on, like a freight train coming straight at me, as I read – it does not exist any more. It was totally destroyed, completely annihilated, and no one remembers, and no one cares. Poland lives on, without its Jews, the Jews that had been there for a thousand years, and it doesn’t make one bit of a difference to anyone. A whole world, and it’s like it was never there. The Jews were never there.

The idea many people in the west seem to have about Israel and Israelis is completely stereotypical too. Some flippantly say that Israel should not exist, that the Israelis should just go back to where they came from (Where they came from? Back to the communities they left? What are they talking about here? Poland? Iraq? Libya? Iran?). They don’t care enough to take two minutes to think about what that means.

Or, they suggest, they could all just live together like one big happy family, those Palestinians and Israelis. (Why such a fuss? Where’s the problem? They’re all just a bunch of hairy Neanderthal savages anyway). The Arabs may very well slaughter all the Jews? No great loss. Anyway, they had it coming.

I read on the comment section of a blog recently that Jews have no history in the Middle East. I was amazed that no one bothered to address this accusation. For even if you believe that the Bible is just a fairy story and that the Jews of today have no connection to the Jews of old (in spite of ample scientific evidence to the contrary), how is it possible to ignore the fact that about half of Israelis are the descendants of Jews that were pushed, squeezed, and bullied out of most Arab and Muslim countries, including those bordering with Israel? This isn’t ancient history; this is the history of the twentieth century. To ignore this fact, when discussing what’s to be done with the historic aberration that is modern Israel, is ignorant and inhumane.

Not unlike the ancient Jewish community of Poland, only far more so, Israel is also a whole world, complex, diverse, continually developing in different directions.

You'll have noticed I haven’t been writing much lately. This is because I have been very busy with my 'day job'. But then I woke up this morning, and it crossed my mind that, in a flick of an eyelid, my whole world could disappear, just like the Jewish world of Poland, leaving no trace. We’re all so busy with our little lives; petty workplace politics; worrying about balancing our accounts; getting angry about injustices; feeling offended by things people do or say. And tomorrow it could all very well be gone and forgotten.

This is true for anywhere and everywhere. Life is impermanence and change. Life is unexpected. Nothing should be taken for granted. But is it not exhausting to have to live every day with the frightening knowledge that hundreds of millions of people, in all five continents, believe most deeply that the particular little world that you happen to inhabit is the most obscene, wicked sin and should, by right, cease to be?

____________________________

*Forgive me for appearing to ignore the fact that this extremely depressing article actually mainly discusses anti-American bias in Britain and not anti-Israel sentiment. I have been haunted by the assertion that “Israel is not a country”. Thank you, Alisa, for the link.

Update: I see the article made the Guardian. That's good. I hope their readers are listening, although I do fear they will think she's exaggerating. I know I do. Noticed by Harry.

Youngest is going on her first hike with the Scouts today. I wish Mum could see her in her Khaki.

Poor little Shoosh had her little operation today. She's feeling much better now.