Happy Birthday, Bish my love.
posted by Imshin 10:23

Shana Tova
May the coming year bring many blessings to us all.
posted by Imshin 17:06

Arafat – not exactly a self-made man
DogfightAtBankstown links to this article in WSJ about how the KGB invented Arafat. Riveting stuff. The Straightjacketed Saint over at Dogfight etc. attributes it to Andrew Sullivan for some reason, but I can't find anything about it on his blog and he didn't write it. The guy who wrote it is Ion Mihai Pacepa, a Rumanian who was the highest ranking intelligence officer ever to have defected from the former Soviet bloc, or so says WSJ.

Update: The Saint has rectified: Andrew Sullivan linked to this on the 23rd. His permalinks seem to be inaccurate (this can happen to big important bloggers and not just to us mere mortals?).
posted by Imshin 16:48

Apropos the splendiferous festivities on the wondrous occasion of Shimon Peres' eightieth birthday, for which I paid but wasn't on the guest list:

Things are far worse now than they were before the Oslo Accords, for us and for the Palestinians. I am saying this as one who was once a staunch supporter of these accords. Things are not worse because terrorism takes its daily toll on ordinary Israelis and because life for the Palestinians is unbearable in the shadow of the Israeli tanks. Things are worse because where there was once hope for a better future for Israelis and the Palestinians living here alongside us, now there is none.

My belief in Oslo was based on my personal acquaintance with some of these local Palestinians. They wanted a bit of what we had. They wanted to be able to run their lives themselves. I wanted it for them too. So did most of my friends. But it never happened. What happened was that for various inner-Palestinian political reasons they couldn't accept a leadership other than that of Arafat and his cronies. And they got it. Some of them said, quietly, that what they got was far worse than what they had before. Israeli rule was exchanged for the rule of Palestinians who came from without ("Tunisians"), foreigners who knew nothing of Israel and the life the local Palestinians had been watching and wanted a piece of. They enforced their rule over the local Palestinians brutally. Their torture chambers made Israel's prisons seem like summer camps. Furthermore, they saw no need to learn from Israel's example of proper administration. And most of all, they hadn't internalized what the local Palestinians had: That Israel and the Israelis weren't going anywhere, and it would be better to get along with them and compromise, compromise.

They came, these outsiders, and commenced poisoning the few sweet water wells that they found. Palestinian society is a young society, and children are more susceptible to indoctrination. An old-new hope was fuelled, a completely unrealistic but very compelling and seductive hope, not of coexistence and peace with Israel, but of ridding this land of its usurpers.

Yes, I know, the failure of Oslo was not one sided. Israel wasn't lilywhite, either. But while support for a Palestinian state among regular Israelis increased steadily all through the Oslo years, with many of my right-wing friends, formerly opposed to Oslo, voting for Ehud Barak and his left-wing government in 1999, Palestinian leadership was just as steadily instilling among regular Palestinians the belief that Israel was weak and destructible.

It is a rather dreamlike belief of some in Israel that the deportation of Arafat, a completely justified action given that he broke every promise and agreement he made in order to get in, but maybe not very wise, will somehow turn back the wheel and obliterate the adverse results of Oslo. It won't, of course. The wells have been poisoned, their water no longer fit for human consumption. It will take years and years for the water in them to be clear and sweet again, if ever.

For the same reason, Israelis, who believe that talks can begin again where they stopped as if nothing has happened during the last three years, are just as deluded.

So I don't mind that I wasn't invited to Shimon Peres' egotistic celebrations. I wouldn't have gone even if I had been the guest of honor. His wonderful vision of the New Middle East, which I still yearn for, is further away than ever.

I still believe in compromise, compromise, but never in suicide, suicide.

posted by Imshin 18:55

An admission of guilt
Okay, I can't stand it any more. I just have to come clean. I'm feeling guilty about what I wrote about the Shari Arison thing here and here (on the comments). Sometimes I get carried away.

Please don't hate me for it. I couldn't take it.

We-e-ell, you can hate me a little bit if it will make you really happy.

posted by Imshin 21:52

Traveling in a convoy
I didn't really explain the Hevr'e thing and a Canadian lady on Michael J. Totten's comments took offense. She also lives in a community, she said. But the Hevr'e is not a community. It's more of a clannishness of people who aren't necessarily related, a sort of sticky group mentality. It's blunt and intrusive and at times vulgar. It's loud and warm and protective. It's an often-overbearing familiarity that automatically makes every Yitzhak an Itzik, and every Avraham an Avi. It's often extremely embarrassing and must seem completely Neanderthal to the outsider. But it functions as a powerful support group when the going gets rough.

Many people here regularly meet up with their Hevr'e from high school, from the youth movement, and above all, of course, from the army unit. Even when everyone has long gone their different ways. Even after twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years. Some meet once a year, some once a month. People will come from all over the country and sometimes from abroad too. Parents, siblings, widows, widowers and children of those of the Hevr'e who were killed are often part of these meetings too.

The Israeli Hevr'e mentality, I'm told, is particularly noticeable to those traveling in the Far East. Israelis, who go there en masse after the army, apparently travel in large, noisy, rather badly behaved groups. These groups are created largely over there. The first thing the kids do when they land is look for other Israelis. A friend of mine told me that he was once spending the night in a remote village in the Himmalayas with four other non-Israeli hikers he had not previously met. "You can't be an Israeli," One of them asserted. "You're on your own." It is no coincidence that, out of the eight tourists kidnapped last week in Colombia, four were Israelis (you'll remember that another two Israelis were released) while the other four were of other nationalities (two Brits, a German and a Spaniard).

Even a natural loner like myself, who often stays at a safe distance from the happy-go-lucky rowdiness of the Hevr'e, finds herself feeling a little lonely in its absence.

A popular Israeli book for pre-schoolers by Lewin Kipnis tells the story of The Three Butterflies (It seems to be out of print. We had our copy passed down to us from Our Sis's boys). A butterfly goes out to play, fluttering about in the meadow. After a while another butterfly appears and they decide to play together. Then another one comes and all three are fluttering about together in the meadow. Suddenly it begins to rain and the three butterflies start looking for cover. They reach a flower and ask to take cover inside it. The flower agrees but says it only has room for one butterfly. The butterflies say indignantly that they are friends and they won't be separated, and they fly away. This happens twice more. Each time they reach a flower, which agrees to give refuge to just one butterfly, and they refuse to be parted. In the end, they manage to survive the rain. The sun comes out and they go back to fluttering happily around the meadow. They have survived the rain and have stuck together, without any one of them taking the opportunity to save itself by deserting its friends.

Notice that the butterflies' acquaintance is fleeting, but when the rain starts, they have a strong feeling of mutual responsibility. This is the essence of the Hevr'e.

There was a time when I was obliged to read this story to my girls on a daily basis. Back then the story's message used to annoy me. I reckoned that if each butterfly had just gone into one of the flowers all three would have been less endangered. Their chances of personal survival would have been greater. I disliked this herd mentality, and what I saw as preparing the kids for the army before they could read. Today I am more reconciled to this thinking. It is probably the survival tactic that has got us this far. Yes, there is sometimes something idiotic and obstinate in putting friendship first. But that is the Hevr'e. And it is an indispensable part of the Israeli way of life, like it or not.

posted by Imshin 16:38

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