A must: Silflay Hraka on France’s impressive military accomplishments.
posted by Imshin 20:25

Fluey Shabbat ramblings
Well, I’m sorry to say we didn’t get to Mitzpe Ramon. I’ve been in bed since Wednesday, feeling sick and sorry for myself, getting up only to feed the girls and hazily publish a post here and there. Funny that my hazy posts managed to attract a bit of attention. Why is that? It’s the same when I’m really tired. I seem to write best when my head isn’t working and I’m writing with my stomach. This hardly makes me feel good about myself but there you are. Anyway, I was quite sure I’d be better by Friday, so we made plans for the trip. By making plans I mean we decided to go. I couldn’t find the energy to pack any bags.

Well, on Friday morning I was worse, so we stayed home.

I spent the weekend reading, mostly. I’m reading Ben Gurion’s biography by Michael Bar Zohar (the abridged version). It’s a bit gossipy for my liking, so far, not enough analysis, and the Hebrew is way too flowery, but it’s the only Ben Gurion biography they had at my local public library. I hear Shabtai Teveth’s is the one to read. I don’t really like reading biographies, but this one’s an easy read for a bed ridden fuzzy brain.

Not being able to sit for long by the computer, I typed out newspaper articles and some of the longer blog posts and read them in bed. A few weeks ago, I bought the Friday editions of both Yediot Aharonot and Maariv. You already know we subscribe to Haaretz. Bish and I were both struck by the enormous amounts of paper we were needlessly consuming. It may not be very cheap typing out articles but at least we’re not supporting such shameless waste.

So what’s been happening?
That Diane has been back for a while, you probably already know. Lynn B. has a new, attractive, home via Blogmosis. She links to this excellent frogginess about the big mistake of what’s left of the Israeli left.

“Now that the Olso bubble has burst (a process that began at Camp David and Taba and reached a peak at the Passover Massacre), the Labour party ought to be preparing themselves for the future. They do not need to take on the Likud position, as proven by the more pragmatic and moderate statements of Shinui. But some how, the Labour generals can't stop fighting for the last peace. They can't give up that dream that somehow, in some way, they're going to make a peace-maker out of Arafat. They're preparing their new Maginot Line - or road map - irrelevant of what reality might present. They're presenting their magic solutions irrelevant of whether they're suited to the conditions of peace”. Read the rest, it’s really good..

And more on the same subject by Bret Stephens in the Jerusalem Post. He discusses Mitzna’s contempt for his countrymen and women who see things differently from him and why that makes him the wrong choice for prime minister.

I must admit I’m a bit tired of all this talk. The mainly left leaning papers here are busy trying to dissect what they perceive as the illogical herd behavior of the majority of the nation. They can’t understand why hungry people in development towns would rather vote Likud. There is constant frustrated chatter about this on serious TV discussion panels, as well (the kind only lefties and Bish ever watch). If we are to believe the more prominent and vocal commentators, all we have to do is get out of the territories and a new morning will dawn, peace will reign ever after in the Middle East and the development towns will be paved with gold. In short the Messiah will be at the gates of Jerusalem on his white donkey. They claim that regular people can’t see this because they are being fed a false reality by the right. This is rather absurd considering that it is they (and not the right) that more or less dictate the agenda of the media. According to the prevalent punditry, this entire war thing with the Palestinians is no more than a political spin to keep the people from noticing that they are hungry and miserable. The thing is that most regular people don’t seem to buy this. They do perceive this Terror War as an existential threat and would probably rather be hungry and poor than dead or worse. What is amazing actually, is that in spite of all this free propaganda the left gets from the media, the people seem unmoved.

Meretz is exasperated that despite all their good deeds in slums and development towns, the residents of these places won’t vote for them. They just can’t understand it. But it’s quite logical really. The people living in these places can clearly see Meretz fighting for Palestinians’ rights more than for theirs. And besides, is there anything worse than accepting charity from someone who pities you and, you suspect, despises you? This, by the way, could be one of the reasons why the Palestinians don’t seem to be too enamored by the Israeli left either, besides in a rhetorical capacity. At least the right bestows a measure of respect on them by perceiving them as a threat.

This whole election thing is making me sick. I’m not feeling very hopeful about the ability of creating a decent government. It just doesn’t add up, however you look at it.

And while we’re on the subject, I’ve been reading that some bloggers seem to think that ”Aleh Yarok” (Green Leaf) is a good bet as a protest vote. Well, for your information, an article in Haaretz’s secondary growth, Tel Aviv local rag Ha’ir, a few weeks back revealed that Green Leaf number one, Boaz Vechtel, is actually ultra-radical-left-wing (sorry, no link, they don’t have an online presence). Be careful what you do while under the influence.

So what else have we got? Iraq. Oh, yes, Iraq. I’d nearly forgotten.
Haaretz interviewed former UN biological arms chief, Richard O. Spertzel. He explains why the U.N. inspectors won’t find anything and why the only way to disarm Saddam is by force (duh). I wonder what the O. stands for.

Tom Paine, who I regard as one of my main BlogDads (although he had a different name back then) cheered me up no end in my sick bed with this hilarious Donald Rumsfeld press briefing. And if that was not enough, he cracked me up with this description of what a space shuttle flight would look like if the whole crew were Israeli. Not to be missed.

Tom Paine wrote the aforementioned biblical press briefing as a birthday gift for Judith Weiss of Kesher talk, who has this gem to offer (no connection to the biblical stuff). Tom has thrown down the biblical gauntlet, suggesting we all do our bit for the birthday girl. What does he want from me? Can’t he see I’m not well? (Sneeze, sniffle, sniffle, cough, splutter). In my distress I cried to the Lord, and he heard me.
Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a deceitful tongue.
What shall be given to thee? or what shall be done to thee, thou false tongue?
Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper.
Woe is me, that I sojourn in Meshech, that I dwell in the tents of Kedar!
My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace.
I am for peace: but when I speak, they are for war.

That about sums it all up, but not very suitable for a birthday celebration. First one to come up with what that is, gets to be Knesset member for Shas (If it’s a man. If it’s a woman, she gets to marry a Knesset member for Shas and raise his seventeen kids).

This is too much for me. I’m going back to bed. By the way, there is a prison near Beer Sheva called “Ohalei Keidar” (the tents of Kedar). Maybe there is hope yet, and this is straight from the mouth of King David himself.

While we’re on that positive note here’s another comment about the leaky Israeli prosecution, written by a lone ranger who doesn’t think Liora Glatt-Berkovich deserves a medal. Somehow I don’t see him becoming CNN’s White House correspondent any time soon. Never mind. I’m rambling. Anyway, I’m being unfair. There was another in Maariv, but most of you can’t read that, can you? This is just as well, because it’s full of inaccuracies. On the other hand, I thought this one, in Ynet very amusing. Hebrew readers should go read it. Like the best Yiddish jokes, it just doesn’t translate. Sorry.

* * *

I was awakened by the warmth of the soft afternoon sun on my face. I could hear the sounds of a happy family in the street below. The young couple had taken their little children for lunch on the beach and they had now brought them to see their grandparents. What I was hearing was the happy meeting. The grandmother was asking her grandchildren if they had had a good time, and what they had eaten. The son was off to park the car and the daughter-in-law was chatting to her father-in-law. ‘Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy’, I whispered to them from my bed. Happy carefree moments like this are precious and far too brief.

A photo of my mum's I have always loved has her reading a bedtime story to R.T. He is about three and is listening with what looks like a detached air. The wonderful thing in the photo is my mum's face. She is completely engaged in what she is doing. The story and her little boy are all that exist at that moment. She is reading to him with all of her being.

The framed picture of Mum I have put on my desk at work portrays a similar scene. Mum on the beach with my two girls. The girls are much younger than they are now. It's a sunny winter day like today and they are collecting shells. Here too, she is completely engrossed in the serous business of finding the best shells. I know that when they get home, she will sit them down in the kitchen to paint the shells with goash paints. What a lovely time they are having. The girls are probably staying with my parents for a few days. They will come home in a few days time and I will find their little plastic bags of painted shells among their things, along with their drawings and their freshly laundered and nicely folded clothes. Mum reveled in family life.

On Thursday Dad said it's been eight weeks. I'm not counting the weeks. I'm looking at the dates. Here's the Hebrew date, kaf gimel - tomorrow; here's the Gregorian date, 28th - Tuesday. One month. Two months.

Last night I had a dream about her. No, not a dream. A nightmare. I woke up in a fright at one o'clock and was afraid to go back to sleep. I ran into the living room to find Bish like the girls do. We sat together till three and Bish made me laugh.

Nothing can really prepare you for this loss, can it? I asked youngest if she remembers collecting shells with Grandma. She doesn't. But she remembers going to the beach with Grandpa and Grandma and playing in the sand between them. Everyone has their own memories.

Update: A reader comments: "Regarding the vote in development towns: you may be right that people there are voting for the Likud because they believe that is the right choice in the situation, and I'm not saying they're wrong, but you should not ignore the tribal nature of much of this vote. In the Post they quote people saying they will always vote Likud because of the way the left and the Ashkenazis treated them in the 50s! This whining about past perceived wrongs is uncomfortably like the Arab world which loves to go on and on about being "victims"."

posted by Imshin 18:16

We’re off to Mitzpe Ramon tomorrow, till Saturday evening, so I’ll wish you
Shabbat Shalom right now.

This photo was taken by Dr. Michael Rebhan, during one of his visits to Israel. Go see. There are some beautiful photos of other parts of Israel too, and some of Sinai. The very first photo of the center of Tel Aviv is very near where I work.

posted by Imshin 23:00

A shooting attack claims three Israeli lives south of Hebron.
posted by Imshin 22:16

Found it!
Here’s that post about guilt (or lack of it) that I wrote a hundred years ago in September.

posted by Imshin 17:15

Thank you Meryl.
Meryl Yourish, one of the better bloggers around in my opinion, has, on quite a few occasions, embarrassed me by writing really nice things about me. I have just realized that I have never thanked her. This is for the latest.

posted by Imshin 16:30

This is just what I’ve been telling my landlady.
Let me give you some advice. If stopped by a policeman in Israel, do not, I repeat, do not, try to offer him money in return for letting you off. Do not suggest working it out between you. Do not hand him your passport with some “green” notes accidentally folded inside. If you do this, there is a good chance of your being detained for questioning. Now this doesn’t mean that there are no policemen or women in the Israeli police who wouldn’t accept your money, if offered. There are. Quite a few, judging by the stories in the paper, when they are eventually caught and arrested. But you have no way of knowing if the policeman standing before you is one of them. Offering a bribe to a policeman on the street is not standard procedure and could turn out to be very unpleasant. Corruption in the Israeli police is not an organized group behavior of the sort we were exposed to in movies like “Serpico”. It’s individual.

So where is this police corruption prevalent? On the street level, I think it’s mostly in Vice. This is where the big money rolls and police raids do a lot of damage to the pockets of the owners of the illegal casinos. A tip off before a raid can be worth a lot.

How about leaks to the newspapers? Quite common, I think, but it seems to me that they are usually not perpetrated for money but for self-aggrandizement. The logic is that the more a young officer’s face and name appear in the paper, the more familiar he’ll be to the bigwigs when he comes up for promotion. It’s a style of advertising, even though it can be self-defeating. An early leak can ruin the case. This logic works just as well for the bigwigs too. If they want to get ahead, they have to have a “public presence” as it were. The best journalist for criminal affairs and THE person to leak to is Buki Na’eh, who writes in Yediot Aharonot. If you want to know what’s happening in the police, he’s the guy to read. I bet the criminals never miss his column.

I have long suspected that a lot of the leaks attributed to the police in bigger investigations are actually leaks from the State Prosecutor’s office. This is never sorted out, because there never seems to be a serious investigation to find the source.

When the Cyril Kern loan thing was leaked, one of the first things said was that someone from the State Prosecutor’s office hurried to say that the leak must be from police sources. This made no sense at all. From then on it was obvious to me that the leak must have been from someone in the State Prosecutor’s office.

All this makes me think of something nearer to home. Literally. When we moved into this apartment, a few years ago, I was delighted at having my own indoor parking place for the first time. My delight was slightly marred by the resident cats who decided my car bonnet was a good place for them to relieve themselves and also the occasional large drops of water that hit my head, Japanese torture style, on my way to and from the car. The water was seeping through from the garden, located directly above the underground car park. This winter, which has been rainier than usual, I have noticed that the drops have turned, in places, into a thin continuous flow, indicating that the cracks had widened. This was bound to happen. So I mentioned it to my landlady. I just rent, I’ll probably be long gone before the building collapses, but it needs seeing to and the longer they wait, the harder it will be to deal with.

The ease with which attorney Liora Glatt-Berkovich leaked a confidential Justice Ministry document and the ideological justification she finds in this act are pretty shocking. Exactly how common is this? Today’s Haaretz editorial amazed me by saying that there was absolutely no justification to instigate an investigation to reveal the source of the leak because it was not “a highly classified state secret, and the publication caused no harm to the national interest”. I could hardly believe what I was reading. What we’re talking about here is a severe breach of trust by a top civil servant and they say something that in effect means she had every right to leak it and the state shouldn’t discipline her for it. I accept that the police interrogation of the journalist she leaked it to seems unjustified, especially as the source had already been revealed by the time he was questioned. But what they are suggesting is that a breach of trust is fine because it’s only a criminal investigation. So it’s not in the national interest to effectively fight crime?

Turning a blind eye to leaks for years is exactly what brought us to this state of affairs. The drops have become a flow.

The Attorney General, Elyakim Rubinstein doesn’t seem to be doing his job very well. This is nothing new. There are many questions about his conduct over the years. Why no indictments in the Bar-on case, for instance? It was his first test and he failed it dismally. He just seems too weak and too susceptible to pressure to do his job properly. Why burrow out this particular source, but not others that came before? It sounds like Sharon gave him a call too, not just Mitzna (who apparently saw nothing wrong in ringing him up to personally demand his investigation of corruption be finished by Sunday).

I think the Haaretz editorial is not clean of foreign interests (why are you laughing?). It looks like they are making a statement to their other sources and potential sources, who are probably very worried right now. Haaretz is encouraging them that their deeds are not amoral but completely justified and in the public interest.

In Haaretz weekend magazine that comes out today, Arye Caspi announces that these are the last days of Israel’s democracy, because of the conduct of the right and that this is probably the last time we’ll be going to vote (I told you they were hysterical). I’d say encouraging state prosecutors to take the law into their own hands is also rather detrimental to Israel’s democracy.

Ari Shavit seems to understand the absurdity of what his newspaper is doing, when he points out the problematic conduct of the media, among others:

“The question is: Why does every child in Israel know about Cyril Kern's $1.5 million, whereas only a chosen few know about Yisrael Savyon's $2.5 million? The question is: Why does every child in Israel know about every stupid thing done by every Likud small fry, whereas only few know that the person closest to Mitzna received $2.5 million from the straw man of a Russian mogul who was about to take control of the Israeli telecommunications monopoly?”

I was sitting Shiva (mourning) for my mother when the Gad Zeevi/Bezeq thing was made public (which is what Ari Shavit is talking about) so I sort of missed the whole thing. I wasn’t aware that this was Haaretz’s scoop. It’s interesting that they haven’t followed it up as scrupulously as they have the Cyril Kern loan and they seem to have effectively played down the connection to Mitzna.

If Liora Glatt-Berkovich doesn’t go to prison, and I have a funny feeling she won’t, what is this telling us about our judicial system?

Update:
* Haggai says: “I think the drop-by-drop water torture method is credited to the Chinese, not to the Japanese, although they both might have used it in the past.”
* Bish says that considering no other leaks are ever investigated and even though she was breaking the law in what she did, it was wrong to ferret out Glatt-Berkovich just because this particular leak harmed the Prime Minister just before election time. He points out that no one is in the right here, everyone is acting on his or her interests and as he sees it, Glatt-Berkovich is actually the least guilty party. Today Bish was elected as chairman of an organization representing people in his chosen profession. I’ve told him I no longer respect his opinion since he’s now a politician.


posted by Imshin 15:54

More corruption but this time Haaretz isn’t covering the story
Why not? Because the suspect is Mitzna. They certainly took their time, but at long last, Mitzna is being investigated* for one of the corruption allegations*. I’ve been reading about the allegations of corruption in Haifa* against Mitzna* (who is mayor of Haifa) for a while now. I'm told it's been all over the local papers there for ages, but the only national paper that ran the story up till now was Maariv. This particular charge has to do with his being suspected of being bribed by a Haifa contractor firm. According to this* Hebrew source Mitzna has demanded of the General Attorney that the investigation be finished by Sunday, and TV (I forget which channel) said he even rang him up personally with this request (that doesn’t sound right at all).

I can’t believe that Haaretz still hasn’t published a word about this online. It has to be on tomorrow’s print version front page. They just can’t be that biased.

By the way, they’ve discovered who leaked the Sharon loan investigation and gave the confidential document to Haaretz newspaper. It was the state prosecutor attorney Liora Glatt-Berkowitz who was working on the case and admits it was ideologically motivated, so as to help Sharon’s rivals in the elections. This is really nauseating. It is, of course, giving ammunition to far-right and ultra-religious factions who already claim that the prosecution and the whole judicial system are biased against them.

Hey, I know, maybe Glatt-Berkowitz should take up the Mitzna investigation. Then it’s sure to be finished by Sunday. Maybe before. And I bet I can guess the outcome. What a pity she’s been suspended.

The funniest thing is that the whole country is covered with banners telling us that Mitzna is honest. How embarrassing.
____________________________
* Hebrew links.

Update: OK so it appeared on Haaretz English updates at 02:40 am (23 Jan). Why am I so petty? Is it their fault I went to bed? Actually, I now realize I didn’t check their Hebrew online version. Oy! Egg on my face. But still, the story was running all day. Say it did appear on the Hebrew version earlier on, how long does it take to translate?

Ah, here is the print version. You won’t believe this: It’s on the front page! Yippee. My faith in the world is restored! So what if it’s in such small print? Does it matter that it’s underneath a big headline (unusual for Haaretz, they don’t even give terrorist attacks big headlines) about what Cyril Kern told the South African Justice department about the Sharon loan? Note the headline if you will on the English version: ”Police raid Haifa city hall for evidence against
Mitzna”. Smooth. The print version Hebrew headline, although very very small, is less annoying: “The police commenced an investigation against Mitzna on suspicion of accepting bribery from Haifa building contractors”. (My translation)

Sadly, I will continue to read Haaretz, Alisa, and continue to be aggravated by it. A. Bish refuses to stop our subscription, and B. No other Hebrew paper comes near to it in quality and depth.

posted by Imshin 22:09

A car laden with half a ton of explosives, as well as cooking gas canisters connected to a detonator was seized by the IDF yesterday. The four men in the car fled. Two back into Palestinian Authority area, two apparently hid in nearby Israeli Arab town Umm El-Fahm. The car was blown up in a controlled fashion. It made a nice big bang. Of course, the idea was to have people blow up as well.

Hizbullah have been busy on the Northern border too.

Interesting article by Amira Hass in today's Haaretz. She writes about the great interest the Palestinians have in the Israeli elections. They are apparently all following them very closely, not just the leadership and the intellectuals, but regular people, as well. They see them, she says, as their only hope for change. They are hoping Mitzna will win. It seems they find it hard to understand why he won't.

“Almost without exception, Palestinians begin every conversation with the question: "Does Amram Mitzna have any chance of winning?"

Everyone - smiling secretaries in the offices of Paltel (the Palestinian telephone company), the greengrocer who has relatives in an Israeli village, the psychologist who treats children for trauma, a member of the Preventive Security Force who spent 15 years in an Israeli jail, the shopkeeper who bought his grocery with the money he saved in the United States. Some do not even bother to wait for an answer and respond on their own: "Isn't it logical for Israelis to vote for Mitzna after Sharon failed to bring them peace and security?"”

But as I see it, Sharon didn't bring peace and security because peace and security were sadly not to be had. This, of course, was greatly due to the actions of the Palestinians themselves, during the last two years.

If the Palestinians gave me any reason to believe that they were seeing things differently, I would maybe thinking again about who to vote for, although I must admit, the more I see and hear of Mitzna, the less I approve of him.

What could they do? You may ask. Well, if I could see some sort of move in Palestinian opinion polls against terrorist attacks, for a start, or some sort of popular call to put an end to them; some serious attempts to discipline Islamic organizations would be nice, as well. But how can they do these things? You ask. They are under curfew and closure, after all. Well even in the West Bank they are not under curfew and closure all the time, they seem to have plenty of opportunity to rebuild weapon workshops and organize terrorist attacks the minute the tanks roll out. And in Gaza they have always been free to do something to change the situation, but chose not to. On the contrary, no one prevents the Islamic organizations there in their attempts to provoke us into reoccupying Gaza’s cities by daily launching rockets and mortars on Israel towns and villages, in the Gaza Strip and inside pre-67 Israel alike. They are busy fighting each other there, but not because of the attacks on us.

The Palestinians could have made a marked difference in these elections, at least as far as I'm concerned, if they had wanted. Not by winking towards the party of their choice, but by starting a popular movement calling for peace and compromise with Israel. Couldn't do it? Well, that's just too bad, because my fingers can't put the piece of paper saying "Emet" (the letters representing the Labor party) in the envelope next Tuesday, either. They've missed yet another chance to better their situation. So what else is new?

Update: Miranda sees the Amira Hass article as no more than part of the Haaretz pro-left election campaign. Could I have been completely led astray by my fascination with how the other side sees us? Could be. The thing is, I may not appreciate Amira Hass’ bias, but I don’t think she completely lacks journalistic integrity. I don't see her inventing a story, although her Palestinian friends and neighbors probably say one thing to her and another to each other. I once saw a documentary about her and her life in Ramallah. One scene showed her during a Palestinian Authority press conference. I think it must have been before The Terror War. She was the only one to ask them the difficult questions - about reform and democratization. I usually don’t read Amira Hass’ articles. I know the Palestinians are suffering and I’m sorry for them. I just think it is them who hold the key to change and, unlike the Intifada in the 80’s, this time I feel no guilt. I wrote a post about this in September but my archives seem not to be working again. Anyway I can’t be bothered to be lectured to, although Hass is less of a whiny moralizer than Gideon Levy.

posted by Imshin 17:03

Lots of rain today and yesterday. There was even some flooding in Tel Aviv and surrounding towns.

This is quite near where I live. One guy rang up the radio to say he was sitting on his steering wheel, the rest of the car being under water. He said the police came to rescue him, but they got flooded too. Quite a lot of people had to be evacuated from their homes, and two kindergartens too. My youngest was very worried about this. "Did they drown?" She asked me. The traffic has been awful all day. I hope it's cleared up, because I have to go to South Tel Aviv soon. I walked to work so I haven't had to tackle traffic so far today.

posted by Imshin 17:20

OK so here is the list you’ve all been waiting for: 100 songs that changed the world as compiled by Q4music.com, which modestly claims to be The World's Greatest Music Magazine Online [I don't think much of the name, I hate Q-ing and I certainly wouldn't do it 4 music (groan)].

Hmmm. Let's see what we've got here.

I think they should be defining what “changing the world” means. Notice the ethnocentrism, for one thing.

I would personally have placed “The Internationale” somewhere near the top, however I may feel about it personally. It was the first thing I thought of when I read that someone had taken the time to make such a compilation. But it seems it didn’t even cross the minds of the deep thinkers who made the suggestions for this list.

Now don’t get me wrong, I really like some of the songs on their selection, well the ones I’ve heard of before at least, but it beats me how anything by the Spice Girls could be said to have changed the world.

posted by Imshin 22:52

I know, I know
But I can't help it*. That's why I can't have comments.
___________________________
* Feeding the troll.
posted by Imshin 19:43

Once upon a time, Bish and I met a man with a wonderful smile and light in his eyes. He told us how he had cured his cancer by positive thinking.

Because I’m interested in Buddhism and I used to wear a lot of Indian clothes (I stopped because they’re all have to be hand washed and they tend to fall to pieces very quickly) people assume I’m into alternative medicine. Different types of alternative medicine are very popular in Israel and there are a lot of schools and practitioners. People often ask me if I can recommend a doctor that practices Chinese medicine or a reflexologist and that sort of thing. I can’t.

After one very expensive bad experience whereby Bish exposed a charlatan homeopathy practitioner to whom we took eldest (our friends who so warmly recommended her refused to believe us and continued to be taken in), we’ve more or less steered clear, besides “fun” things like massages and so on. The charlatan homeopathy practitioner died of cancer about a year or so after our partaking of her services, if you could call them that, and the ensuing unpleasantness of Bish telling her what he thought of her. A case of the shoemaker going barefoot, perhaps? [You may think this is a callous thing to say, but I'd say scaring a sensitive, impressionable eight year-old into thinking she has all sorts of imaginary illnesses is a pretty mean trick to pull to get her parents to fork out, don't you?]

Sadly, chemotherapy couldn’t cure my mother’s cancer, but I know a lot of people who got a second lease of life as a result of modern treatments for cancer, horrible as they may be, such as chemotherapy, surgery, radiation. There may be many more men and women with wonderful smiles and light in their eyes who have cured their cancer miraculously without the benefit of modern medicine. I just don’t know any of them.

It has been suggested to me that instead of being a modern western country, sending astronauts (er.. astronaut) into space (Have you seen the NASA site, by the way?), a prominent innovator in agricultural technology and contributor to scientific research, Israel should be a bit more like her Arab neighbors in the way of life of regular people, a bit more humble and simple. We should try and fit in better. Bish says he regularly had this said to him on a European pro-Palestinian forum he used to frequent.

Maybe they have a point, I think. Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could all live more modest lives, with more of us making our living simply, off the land? This would serve two noble objectives: Not making our neighbors jealous, and saving the environment. I would love to live a life of self-sufficiency.

Then I look out of my window. I live on the second floor of a sixteen-story building. The view from my window includes some trees, a lawn, a lot of sky, a busy road and quite a few other high-rise buildings (Oh, and what is that I see over there? A large Meretz banner, no less!). I ask myself how we are to feed all the people who live in all these buildings, if we decide to put a stop to technological research, stop the tractors and send the farmers out with their oxen to till the land.

It’s all very picturesque, all this back-to-nature stuff. But back-to-nature people I know can hardly feed themselves, never mind the whole country. Maybe we do have to starve to fit in, in the Middle East.

If we were all starving, I wonder, would they accept us? We’d still not be Moslems, and we’d still be controlling a part of Dar-a-Salaam (but for how long?).

I am reminded of the Jewish pioneers a hundred years ago. They were poor and hungry. They lived off the land and died of malaria, just like their Arab neighbors. And they weren’t even controlling the country. I don’t remember them being very popular round here, either.

But wait a minute. We do have people who live like this today, ideologists who have left the cities for a more natural way of life. They live like our forefathers did, in the mountains in shacks, living humbly off their small family farms. Take the late Netanel Ozeri, for instance. Until Friday, he lived over on Hill 26 near Hebron. He had a little organic farm there, and lived simply and humbly with his wife and his five children. His neighbors apparently didn’t appreciate his back-to-nature approach to life very much.

Isn’t it ironic that the very people who do see the logic in living simply, and strive to live like the Arabs, are the very people who are perceived by many, if not most, as the main obstacle to peace?

[By the way, have you read how those crazies handled the funeral? God help us all!]

Update: It seems that, based on this post, people have got the impression I support those fanatic outlaws on the hills. Well I don’t. I think they should be in prison.

posted by Imshin 13:29

Most adults don’t get it. How do you explain to an eleven year-old?
Eldest’s class (6th grade) had special activity today at school about the elections. They split up into groups and each group had to prepare a presentation about a different group of parties. Class students who belong to a special interest group about current affairs led the groups. Eldest’s group had to present the case of the Arab parties. Eldest said she found she couldn’t contribute anything, because she knew nothing about the Arab parties. When she told me about this, I pointed out that it’s difficult to throw the Arab parties into one group without making inaccurate generalizations about them.

Then we started talking about “the situation”, going a bit further than talking about the fear of terrorist attacks, this time. When she made some rather simplistic statements, I tried to point out the complexities. She was frustrated. The conversation had started with her asking me for whom I mean to vote. I tried to explain what had happened that caused me to change my choice of party from last time. Difficult. I had to keep it concise because I didn’t know at which point she would lose interest. I couldn’t leave her with a one-sided view, either. I didn’t want to persuade her or to indoctrinate her. So I tried to telegraphically explain things from other viewpoints as well.

The end of the conversation had me explaining why the checkpoints were necessary and then, so she could understand how it feels on the receiving end, asking her to imagine a situation whereby her weekly trip to the Music Center in Yaffo (which she recently forfeited), would take three or four hours each way, instead of ¾ hour and she would have to go through checkpoints each way, checked by strange, hostile soldiers, shouting at her in a language she couldn’t understand, pointing weapons at her. At this point she abruptly decided it was time for bed.

We had spent the evening visiting yet another optional middle school with her. The checkpoints dilemma was about the most frustration she could take and she retreated into bed with the ever-reassuring magical world of Harry Potter books. She’s reading them again. I thought we’d seen the last of them after the twenty-second time she read them when she announced she’d finally had enough. Obviously not. I can understand her. It’s nice when you can easily tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Hey, in Harry Potter, you can even tell from the names.

posted by Imshin 23:40

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