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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by Imshin 17:33

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by Imshin 17:40

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

Where's the camera? Maybe it's time for some fresh Shoosha snaps. You wouldn't believe how she's grown. And her coat is so lovely and shiny. (This is Imshin attempting small talk)
posted by Imshin 19:00

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

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


posted by Imshin 17:31

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted by Imshin 17:29

Sderot: A Kassam rocket attack. A three year-old child and a fifty-year-old man murdered. The child’s mother is critically wounded. Five others also suffered injuries.
posted by Imshin 16:25

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

Update: Not as bad as initially reported - they're talking of seven wounded.
posted by Imshin 22:32

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

posted by Imshin 19:59

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

posted by Imshin 19:35

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