Some Links
Good post on recent events in Gaza and double standards, over at Lights in the Distance.

And there's a quite pleasant opinion piece about Israel in The New York Times.

Some guy called Clinton W. Taylor wrote a very intriguing article, which compares between the recent shooting of a wild animal in California and the United State's international behavior.
posted by Imshin 19:28

Bish has made me a Shoosha banner


I've put it on the left sidebar. I'll try to keep it updated, so that clicking it will always lead to the latest Shoosha photos.

This was Lynn's idea, more or less. I was hoping that if I did what she suggested, she'd cut short her hiatus. And lo and behold - a new post!
posted by Imshin 19:00

The Shoosha (2)
This blogger has inside photos of an Israeli killer kitten in training.

Tough Israeli cat showing some muscle




Tough Israeli cat looking sweet and innocent while working out the best strategy


And she attacks…


posted by Imshin 12:42

Its me who is the turncoat
I am the worst kind of snob. Most of my friends are lefties. If you were Israeli, and you saw me on the street in Tel Aviv, you would immediately recognize, by the way I look, that I am a lefty too. And you’d be right. The truth is that, and not only culturally speaking, I am a lefty.

So why am I badmouthing them all the time? Why have I purposefully distanced myself from them and their views? Is this part of my adolescent rebellion, spilling over into middle age?

Maybe I feel free to pull them to pieces specifically because I am one of them. It’s like Jews telling jokes that if told by non-Jews would be anti-Semitic. In a neurotic Eastern European Jewish way, I am pulling myself to pieces at the same time and that makes it okay.

There is also the negligible fact that I really have changed my mind about quite a few things, as a result of a serious shift in my perception of reality, and I’m kind of peeved that my former comrades haven’t seen the light along with me.

But I like the adolescent rebellion explanation best. Makes me feel young.

posted by Imshin 12:16

Shabbat Shalom.
posted by Imshin 20:05

More about that Star Trek episode
A reader, Hillel (Sabba) Markowitz, explains:

The point of the episode was that when Captain Kirk destroyed the computers that automatically calculated "casualties" and the "casualty implementation stations" the other side's computers were programmed to fire real missiles to punish "noncompliance" with the treaty.

As soon as he took action, both sides immediately began frantically trying to disable their missile strike capability as they realized what had happened.

Somehow, I do not think that this would occur with our current adversaries.

posted by Imshin 19:42

”It wasn’t me, Miss, I had nothing to do with it. It was THEM!”
There’s always one, isn’t there? When the teacher comes back into the class to see what all the ruckus is about, there’s always one who turns on his classmates. The other kids glare at him in disgust and in disbelief. How can he do this to them? Wasn’t he in the thick of it with the rest of them, just a minute ago, while the teacher was gone? But now she’s back he’s suddenly turned into this insufferable little weasel, pointing his bony little finger, sanctimoniously naming names.

It’s always someone else’s fault. It’s those wicked, trigger-happy settlers; it’s the money-grabbing, Mafia- controlled Likud Center; it’s the negligent goons that run the army; it’s the stupid, brutish police; it’s that criminal Sharon and his government of thugs that civilized people don’t vote for; it’s those embarrassing, badly-dressed Neanderthals who listen to that awful Mizrahi music all the time, and vote Likud.

It’s never us. No, we’re the GOOD Israelis. Just see what we have to deal with here. Please, come and save us from these cretins.

The worst of it is that not so long ago, I was one of the GOOD Israelis too, and I was saying the exact same things that they are saying now. And I had no idea that there was anything shameful about this.

You know, I always had the feeling that the teacher was just as derisive of the turncoat as we kids were. Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part.

There can only be peace when those in Israel purporting to be its main advocates learn to respect the rest of Israeli society (uncivilized as it may be), its views (moronic as they may be), and its chosen leaders (depraved as they may be).

And when they stop trying to distance themselves from everything unpleasant that happens here, by pointing an accusing finger at those among their brethren that are not to their liking. As if they don't live here too, as if they don't benefit from the security these military actions bring Israeli civilians, as if they are of beings of superior morality, unlike the rest of us.

posted by Imshin 16:06

I hate yesterday’s post. I spent the whole day trying to fix it before publishing it - rewriting, deleting bits, moving passages around. And after all that editing, I still hate it.

All I wanted to say was that I was sorry, but I seem to have made such a mess of it.

posted by Imshin 14:37

Shoosha’s favorite toy at the moment is a plastic bag scrunched up into a ball. It makes nice rustling, plastic bag-y noises as she plays.

Today I’m going to another funeral, the fourth in three weeks. All four, the burials of parents of friends - three mothers and a father. It seems I’ve reached a certain age. Four friends, none of whom know each other, every one an important part of my life, in a different way, symbolizing another side of myself.

It is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting; for that is the end of every man, and a living one should take it to heart.

Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) 7, 2 (From the new translation of the Holy Scriptures according to the traditional Hebrew text).

Today’s funeral, that of D, Sh’s mother, hits me hardest, for she too, and not just her daughter, has a special place in my heart.

posted by Imshin 08:28

Haunted with fears

“But now”, they continued, “We’re really afraid. Terrified. We make him take a cell phone with him wherever he goes, and when there’s no answer when we try him, like when there’s no reception where he is, we’re really scared. Mostly his mother is afraid. She can’t sleep at night. She calls him at all hours of the day and night. The message that “he called” resounds in our house like a statement: “great, he’s okay, nothing happened to him”.

Meir Uziel about his son. Not what you think.

posted by Imshin 06:45

Listening Project
Haaretz: The case of Atallah Mansour

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a multi-dimensional tangle. To start untangling it, we must put an end to our habit of looking at the other side through stereotyped lenses. The Palestinians, in Israel and beyond, are not necessarily one angry, violent, hate-filled mass. They have shades - there is a mainstream and there are fringes. The Israeli Jews are not necessarily all arrogant, blind to the other side's plight and haunted with fears. There is a wide mainstream among them that yearns for a quiet life and is ready to give up most of the territories, and there are fringe groups - on the left and right.

posted by Imshin 23:01

Feeling bad
Were I not Israeli, I would very likely be pro-Palestinian too. We don’t come over as very nice, do we? And maybe we’re not. But then we’re not in the business of being nice, although we try so hard. We’re in the business of staying alive.

Many years ago, I saw an episode of a science fiction TV series that left a strong impression on me. I can’t even remember which series it was. I’m not crazy about science fiction, but this episode had a powerful anti-war message that stuck in my memory.

The story was of a planet in which a war had been going on for so many years that, at some point in the distant past, they had decided to do away with the messiness of real battle. The war had evolved into a virtual war. I can’t remember how exactly it was organized but the gist of it, I think, was that people were killed by lottery.

It was decided that, say, five hundred people from one side, and three hundred from the other, had to die in a certain development of the war, and so five hundred people from one side, and three hundred from the other would be chosen randomly, and receive summons to come and be put to death. A war of honor, as it were. Very tidy. Thus the war never ended. Only the people kept on dying.

Things changed only when people from outside, the human heroes of the series, showed the inhabitants of this planet how absurd the situation was.

Thinking back on this story, it crosses my mind that the people on the planet had done the Western thing: they’d tried to eliminate an ugly, brutal side of life; they’d tried to make war prettier, with horrible consequences.

Another thought that comes up is that maybe those know-it-all human visitors should have butted out.

I have been loath to discuss the ongoing military operation in Rafiah, even though I have no doubt of its necessity. Besides worrying about our soldiers, I suppose I had been holding my breath to see if we could manage to pull it off without any nasty mistakes. No such luck.

I am so sorry that an Israeli tank killed those children in Rafiah, even if it was by mistake. I think of their mothers. My worst nightmare has come true for them. I can hardly begin to imagine their terrible anguish.

In the Intifada in the late 80’s, friends fresh back from reserve duty told that in some Palestinian homes that they had entered to conduct searches, they had come across little kids chained to their beds, to keep them from going out to throw stones, and maybe get shot or arrested. Can you imagine trying to bring up kids in such conditions?

Today’s Palestinian mothers must be the sisters of those kids. I wonder if they still chain them to their beds or if they’ve just given up.

I have been along the border with Egypt in Rafiah. It runs right through the middle of the town, very dense urban landscape. When I was there, in the late eighties, I remember people’s homes being right next to the border fence, at least in the central part of the town. I suppose a lot of the buildings adjacent to the actual border have been leveled since, to destroy existing tunnels and to prevent the construction of new ones.

Even if we get out of the Gaza Strip tomorrow, tunneling and smuggling of weapons and explosives from Egypt will continue, and the need to combat this will persist. Probably even the need to go further into the Gaza Strip to destroy weapon factories and workshops. Israeli soldiers and Palestinian combatants and civilians will probably continue to be killed.

I no longer believe that leaving the territories will give us any moral justification in the eyes of the world, when the need to defend ourselves arises again, as it surely will, even right after disengagement, as they’re calling it now, probably even, horror of horrors, during the actual disengagement itself.

The Israeli Zionist left is deceiving itself. Ceasing to exist can be our only atonement. Maybe even that will not suffice.

This is not to say we shouldn’t leave the territories. We should, painful as it may be. The only question is when and, to a lesser extent, how.

One sentence jumps out at me from Haaretz’s report of yesterday’s incident: “Dozens of children marched at the head of the procession”. These people were marching towards an area that was under curfew, in the middle of a military operation, and they put the kids in front. Cynical bastards.

You say they are the weak side, so they have no choice but to act as they do. And I say we are the weak side, because we have feelings of guilt when we kill, and they do not*.

Our guilt will be the end of us. The Palestinians’ strength is that they have no such shackles. And they make good use of ours.


______________________________
* I am aware that this is a generalization. Just as I know that not all Israelis feel guilty, I can imagine that not all Palestinians do not.

Update: R.T. to the rescue. He says it was an episode of Star Trek. I suspected as much.

Another update: A reader, Hillel (Sabba) Markowitz, explains:

The point of the episode was that when Captain Kirk destroyed the computers that automatically calculated "casualties" and the "casualty implementation stations" the other side's computers were programmed to fire real missiles to punish "noncompliance" with the treaty.

As soon as he took action, both sides immediately began frantically trying to disable their missile strike capability as they realized what had happened.

Somehow, I do not think that this would occur with our current adversaries.

Fighting in Rafiah
By Elliot Chodoff

The volume of nonsense appearing in Western media reports this week concerning the IDF operation in Rafiah in the Gaza Strip borders on the fantastic. Given that anything the IDF does is almost automatically condemned by these sources, and nearly any Palestinian terrorist act is met with at least understanding if not out right approval, this week has witnessed some of the most blatant distortions in both terminology and reporting seen in the current terrorist war.

The IDF began its operations in Rafiah early this week to attempt, once and for all, to neutralize two major security threats: the corridor along the Egyptian border which has been the target of countless attacks on IDF troops over the past four years, and the numerous tunnels which run under the corridor between Rafiah and its Egyptian sister city.

Last week, the deaths of 13 IDF soldiers at the hands of Palestinians in Gaza brought these two threats into sharp focus. Seven were killed in the corridor by roadside bombs, antitank ambushes, and snipers, and six were killed when their armored vehicle was destroyed by a roadside bomb in an operation to eliminate rocket factories in Gaza. In all cases, the weapons, ammunition and explosives were smuggled into Gaza through the Rafiah tunnels. This week it was decided to put an end to the flow of weapons from Egypt into Gaza.

Relatively high Palestinian casualties resulted, not from indiscriminate IDF fire, but from a number of behavioral phenomena on the Palestinian side. First, buoyed by their successes in the previous week, Palestinian gunmen made the often fatal mistake of thinking that they could take on the IDF in face to face combat. Second, the Palestinian gunmen used their regular technique of bringing noncombatants, especially children, into the combat zone. And third, Palestinian “bystanders” routinely exposed themselves to danger in the midst of ongoing combat.

Yesterday, the third of these phenomena led to the deaths of 8 Palestinians. In what has been termed a protest by the media, a group of hundreds of noncombatants mixed with gunmen marched toward the area in which IDF troops were engaged in combat against armed Palestinians. Ignoring orders to stop, including warning shots by a helicopter gunship and a tank, the crowd continued to approach until a tank shell, also fired in warning, exploded against an abandoned building. Immediate Palestinian reports of a massacre of 23 were soon reduced to 10, as some of the massacred turned out to be corpses removed from the hospital morgue. Later adjustments brought the total down again, this time to eight.

Naturally, Israel was condemned by the UN and most of the world for the incursion and the loss of life. It is patently unclear under which law this condemnation took place, as there is no provision in the rules of war for noncombatants marching into the midst of a firefight in mixed crowds with gunmen. It is also curious that the US abstained in the UN vote, even as reports came out of an American helicopter attack on an Iraqi wedding party left over 40 dead. Interesting how dangerous celebrations can appear when they include the indiscriminate fire of AK 47 assault rifles into the air.

Last but not least, some in Israel are using the incursion and the loss of life as evidence that Israeli settlements in Gaza are the root cause of all this evil. On this subject it should be clearly understood that regardless of whether one supports the Sharon disengagement plan or opposes it, IDF antiterrorist operations in Gaza will not end with the removal of settlements. They will only end with removal of terrorists.

posted by Imshin 21:10

North Korea arming Syria

A North Korean missile shipment to Syria was halted when a train collision in that Asian country destroyed the missile cargo and killed about a dozen Syrian technicians.

U.S. officials confirmed a report that a train explosion on April 22 killed about a dozen Syrian technicians near the Ryongchon province in North Korea. The officials said the technicians were accompanying a train car full of missile components and other equipment from a facility near the Chinese border to a North Korea port.

posted by Imshin 11:19

Jerusalem Day


posted by Imshin 11:12

The rally
The only thing worth listening to, amid the usual politicians' blah blah at last night’s rally, seems to have been Ami Ayalon’s speech.

I once knew someone who had been under Ami Ayalon’s command in the Shayetet. He said about him that he was “Ish katan gadol”. How do I translate that? A big small man? A small man of greatness? A great little man? Small in stature, but a giant in every other respect? You get the picture. This guy I knew who was under his command was also a man of greatness. He died trying to save people in a plane crash in Africa.

I think Ayalon’s speech shows great understanding, perception, and sensitivity.

"The Majority Decides" rally speech, Rabin Square, by Ami Ayalon, May 15 2004

I didn't want to come to this square and be a part of the politics of this rally. It was only the horror of seeing more of our soldiers killed that brought me here. I have no words with which to console the bereaved families. So instead I have come here, to this square, to shout out the truth as I see it.

I came, and find myself asking: Why are we here tonight? To tell the prime minister to get out of Gaza? He already knows we have to get out. To tell the prime minister that settlements should be removed? He knows that too. To tell the prime minister that he has a large majority that would support such a move? That's true enough, but that majority did not come to this square tonight.

So I ask myself: How is it that, at this crucial time, such a small segment of the public has come to this square? Why is it that Tzippi Livni, Ehud Olmert, Meir Sheetrit, Tommy Lapid and their colleagues are not here? If the majority indeed decides, how come there are so few immigrants here, so few residents of the Negev and Galilee, the poor districts and development towns? If we are the deciding majority, why did we give up so glibly on our religiously observant countrymen, who could not make it here because we scheduled the demonstration for Shabbat? The truth is this: The speakers on this podium – myself included – and you out there in the audience do not represent the deciding majority!

Let me tell you why the real deciding majority is not here. They are not here because we who stand in this square tonight have not managed to win the hearts of the deciding majority. We never created a real dialogue. Perhaps we never really
wanted to. We turned the settlers of Judea, Samaria and Gaza into enemies. We arrogantly turned them out. We monopolized the quest for peace. That is why the majority did not come here, although I know that, today of all days, they wanted to come.

This majority is sitting at home and keeping silent, despite the fact they want
peace no less than us. This majority wants to leave Gaza as much as we do. But they
want to do so after lowering the national flag to half-mast, observing a minute's silence, and wiping a tear at the shattering of their Zionist dream...

This majority will feel connected to us only when the pain of those slated to be evacuated drowns out the rejoicing of those who will do the evacuating. The deciding majority – those who came here tonight and the many more who stayed away – do not and should not care who ends up signing the accord that ends this conflict. But because the majority stays silent, it has no influence or power to decide, and therefore becomes meaningless.

Israel today has a prime minister who, I personally believe, wants to make progress. Where or why, I really do not care. I believe that after tough deliberations he arrived at the painful conclusion that all the Gaza Strip settlements must be evacuated. I believe he is capable of carrying this out, that he has the determination and the power. I believe that only he who feels great sadness on the day of the evacuation will be able to pull it off without finding himself in the middle of a civil war.

I believe that leaving Gaza is a small step for the people of Israel but a big step for the vision of a democratic Jewish state living in peace with it neighbors. It is a big step for the Zionist dream!

But to leave Gaza, we need for the majority to break its silence. It has to say – no, to shout out – what it thinks. We need an organized majority to tell the prime minister: "If you go ahead with this, we will be with you!" We need a big-time majority, not small-time politics. Gaza is no longer a matter of politics, it is a matter of preserving lives.

Therefore what we must do is speak not only of disengaging from Gaza, but also, most critically, or reaching consensus with those who are not here tonight but think like us. Like us, they know where we want to go. Like us they know the painful price we must pay to get there. Like us, they have red lines. Red line: No Palestinians will return to Israel proper under a final accord. Red line: Palestine will not constitute a threat to Israel's security. Red line: There will be no civil war in Israel.

That leaves the question of when it will happen, when will the day finally arrive? When every person standing here, and all those who think like us but stayed away, gets up in the morning, every morning, and asks him or herself what they are doing to bring that day closer. Has he written a letter to the prime minister, government ministers, Knesset members? Has she written to a newspaper? Has he signed a petition, or signed up others? How many? Has she demonstrated at the junctions, or put up posters? Does it burn like fire in his or her soul? This day will not come on its own, but only when we fight to bring it about.

posted by Imshin 23:28

The Canary and the Kitten
Shoosha helps me meditate. She sits in my hands, or she curls up on my lap, or she stretches out on my leg, and she purrs.

Should I forget myself and get up and go, she will wake and cry.

The gas is creeping up the mine. But the miners cannot see, and they blame the canary.

So I’ll just sit here with Shoosha, she’ll purr and I’ll breath. We’ll be quite happy and contented, on our little cushion, as we wait for the gas to reach up into our cage, and kill us.


posted by Imshin 05:51

home