I’ve been watching the history channel. Two films about 9/11 in a row. Details. Reliving the details.

Is this what happens when you can’t agree what something means, three years on you are still rehashing the details, over and over again, minute by minute, second by second, till you’re sick of them*?

I remember a detail. I am in the post office. I am in a hurry because Youngest is at her ballet lesson and I have to pick her up in about five minutes. And there is this big long queue. No one is saying anything. Do they know? I ask myself. Have they heard? No one seems tense or nervous, no one except me. I am hysterical. I know I am hysterical. I’m sorry I took Youngest to her ballet class. I’m sorry I didn’t keep her close to me at home. I want to have her near me, to hold her to me, and keep her safe. I am anxious to pick her up and hug her tight. I am terrified I may never see her again.

The queue moves slowly, I am going to be late. Finally I am next. A woman rushes in. Her mother is waiting in the car, could she please cut in front of me? And I open my mouth and I yell at her that I am late for picking up my child, no she can’t cut in front of me, she can wait in line like everyone else. She looks at me strangely. Everyone in the queue is looking at me. Who is this nutcase? I should be embarrassed but I am too agitated to care.

Am I the only one here who knows that the sky has just fallen in?

=========================

*Afterthought: I meant no disrespect to the memories of the victims when I talked about rehashing the details.

What bothered me was that the films I saw today didn't once mention that someone did this, that it didn't just happen.

If you had been fresh off the spaceship from Mars, and you had watched these films, you would have thought that 9/11 was probably a very unfortunate, freaky air traffic accident, and that the real culprits were the people who designed and built the Towers so shoddily (first film), or no one at all (second film). In the second film, a guy shouting enraged threats at 'the people in the Middle East' was regarded with patient compassion, something about not judging people on such a day and that his words were clearly just the result of his terrible fear. On the other hand we got to see a lot of people holding hands and singing 'Imagine'.
posted by Imshin 17:36

Not a natural disaster
An excerpt from Uri Elitzur’s column in the weekend edition of Yediot Aharonot (my translation):

No. The occupation is not the cause of terrorism, and the end of the occupation is not the goal of terrorism. This is all in our heads, but the mindset of terrorism is completely different. Palestinian terrorism isn’t interested in winning so as to create a state. It wants to create a state so as to win. Ehud Barak offered them a state without winning, and they turned it down in panic. They don’t want to create a state; they want to destroy a state. If a Palestinian state is necessary in order to destroy the State of Israel, so be it. But don’t confuse the means with the end. It is the same with Chechen terrorism, and of course the Muslim terrorism in America. Its purpose is not to end any occupation, or to create any state. Its purpose is to destroy and terrorize so as to destroy and terrorize.

This goal is so arousing and exciting, and seems so attainable, that young educated people are prepared to die for it. Fanatic Islam is not a new invention. It is a dormant volcano that has erupted in the past, but has been sleeping now for hundreds of years, till something in this time, in this decade, caused it to awaken and again spurt fire and smoke. What is it?

This question brings us back to Russia. The fall of the Soviet Union left a void that someone is going to fill. At the moment, temporarily, the United States is the sole world power. The slot of the second world power is empty, and this is an unnatural situation. Someone has to fill the part, and Islam is contending for it. This is an arousing and exciting goal, one worth dying for: the growth of the Islamic World Power, as an equal adversary of the American World Power. Not every youth that puts on a bomb belt is aware of this definition of his goal, but even subconsciously he senses that something huge is happening, and he is its servant. This is a deep, primitive gut feeling, rolling like the echo of tam-tam drums between the countries of Islam and the various focal points of terrorism. You have to be a bit primitive to pick this up and understand what is happening. This is why George Bush and Vladimir Putin understand. This is why most of the decision makers in Israel do not grasp it at all.

posted by Imshin 10:51

Almost 2 years later, we were sitting with Patty and several others at a table over brunch, and we asked her about a couple of very funny photographs that we'd had taken at a luau in Hawaii. Some very muscled guys in Hawaiian garb had picked her up - she's very thin and slight - and were holding her horizontally, like a rolled up rug. She's a lone woman in a very dignified job, and well, guess you had to be there, but it was funny. We had the pictures blown up to 8X10s and my husband and his partner presented them to her in her office a while later. We asked her about the pictures, without thinking. She got a funny look on her face, and said that they had been up on the wall in her office, and went down with the Towers.

It's the mundane that helps us grasp the horrific.
posted by Imshin 08:08

Shai writes about Efraim Kishon films.
posted by Imshin 18:00

This must be the cutest thing I have ever read. That Yonah, just have to eat him up. Don’t miss the matching photos (of the ‘I’m in a mess here, and what do those big people do? They take photos!’ variety).
posted by Imshin 17:29

Lisa, obviously far more savvy and worldly than me, has something to say about that Guardian article on the subject of Tel Aviv nightlife I discussed here and here (‘discussed’ makes what I wrote sound so much more intelligent, and less silly, than it really was, don’t you think?).

Lisa actually has a nightlife (in Tel Aviv), unlike me. Well, I do have a nightlife, I just spend most of it sleeping.

Anyway, she calls the Guardian reporter a hack. Precious.
posted by Imshin 13:03

Police State continued
It was great fun at first. We marched down the main road leading from Givat Ram to the government buildings. Givat Ram is the part of the Hebrew University constructed during the years the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus was an inapproachable enclave surrounded by Jordanian occupation (this is an interesting story in itself). Thousands of other students, all marching peacefully together, chanting, some holding banners, surrounded me. It felt really good, really together, you know?

I was completely unaware, of course, of the disruption our procession must have been creating for people who needed to use that particular piece of road. Maybe they needed to make it on time for their shift at work, or to attend an important business meeting, or maybe they really needed to get to the kindergarten on time to pick up the kids, whatever. But I didn’t think about that, or about the aggravation they must have been feeling. It was early afternoon, the middle of a working day, but still it just didn’t cross my mind.

I’d been to political protest demonstrations before, mainly peace rallies, in Kikar Rabin, Kikar Malkhei Yisrael as it was still called back then, but this was the first time I had actually got on a bus to Jerusalem to demonstrate in front of the government buildings. It didn’t cross my mind to ask who had chartered the bus, who was footing the bill, or if maybe I was being manipulated by bigger forces. I just got on the bus.

The thing that got me on that bus, more than anything else, was guilt. Most of my friends were rushing from job to horrible job to pay for their tuition, cleaning houses, schlepping in supermarkets, doing the nightshifts. And, if they were lucky, they got to scramble for the meager scholarships given out by strange organizations like the Association of Tunisian Jews, or the Fund to Aid Students from Afula. Me? I got a monthly allowance from generous parents, just enough to get by, hardly enough to go wild, but quite enough for me to realize how very lucky I was.

And so – bus to Jerusalem to demonstrate for lower university fees. I wanted to do my bit for my friends.

It was when our procession arrived at its goal - the government building - that I started to realize that this was more than a nice big happy picnic. A row of about twenty or thirty border police, maybe more, were waiting for us in the street, there were more on the hill. They had on helmets with plastic covering their faces, they were holding big plastic shields, and each one of them had a big, black baton hanging down from the side of his body. On each side of the row of armored border police stood more policemen with gas masks on and what looked like guns for shooting tear gas. I was shocked.

‘What do they think we are going to do?’ I thought to myself in horror. This was scary. My heart was beating so hard that I thought I could actually hear it, over the chanting. ‘What sort of Police State is this?’

Then we took our places on the hill across from the government building, I’m not sure which it was. I’m not very familiar with that part of Jerusalem. I reckoned if we behaved ourselves, the police would leave us alone. They’d soon see that their estimations of our potential danger had been exaggerated, that we were all just well behaved students, exercising our freedom of speech in a cultured, orderly manner.

And then it started. First there was a halfhearted attempt to march down off the hill, towards the ministry. Then some young men from the crowd started baiting the police, yelling obscenities, throwing stones at them, just four or five young men, in different corners of the crowd. ‘Where did they come from?’ And in a second the mounted policemen were on the hill, all around us, galloping after the troublemakers, grabbing hold of them. I think I remember one of them getting a taste of a baton. Really scary.

Boy, was I naive. It seems obvious to me now, eighteen or nineteen years later, that the demonstrators had to create a provocation, they had to clash with the police, otherwise a demonstration of that size would have gone unnoticed and unmentioned. The more violence, the more blood, the more arrests, the better. The organizers knew it; the police knew it. The behavior of these youngsters wasn’t a spontaneous emotional eruption. It was planned.

I was the innocent, manipulated into experiencing what felt like disproportionate police aggression, manipulated into thinking ‘This is a Police State’, my normal youthful feelings of alienation exploited, ripened for recruitment into a certain way of thinking.

Luckily for me, this didn’t happen. Even though I didn’t understand what was going on, I just turned and walked away in disgust, and never came back, ever.

This is not to say that the police don’t go overboard sometimes, even in this case, or that there could be a better way of dealing with inciting elements in a large gathering of people than bashing them with batons or spraying them with tear gas, but this all happened quite a while ago. I have read that police forces around the world have come a long way in crowd control technology since then.

In New York, during the demonstrations against the RNC, as in all demonstrations, the police were perhaps the only thing really standing between the demonstrators and chaos, violent riots, maybe even, God forbid, lynching. This may sound ridiculous to some who were there, but we have to remember that, as in all demonstrations, not everyone was there for the same purpose.

For the quiet well-behaved, law-abiding demonstrator, police reaction to any minor disruption of the peace will always seem like overkill, like senseless brutality, but the sad truth is that the line separating between a peaceful demonstration and an angry, violent, uncontrollable mob is very thin and easily crossed, and some want nothing more than for this to happen. Preventing it is a grave responsibility facing any police force. A skillful, experienced force must be able to sense a warming up of the atmosphere, even before most of the demonstrators are aware of it, and stem it in the bud, or bud it in the stem, or whatever the d@%n expression is.

I take off my hat to the NYPD, which seems to have done an excellent job of keeping the peace. Maybe some people got arrested, but I haven’t heard much about people actually being physically harmed. The orange net idea sounds excellent, unpleasant perhaps for those caught by it, but you have to admit it saves the police from using those terrible batons.

* * * *

There is another thing that I don’t think the protesters in New York were aware of, and I pray they never will have to be, something that everyone who goes to a demonstration in Israel these days is aware of, I think, no matter what the matter at hand. A large demonstration in the streets is an excellent target for terrorists.

Imagine what a bomb, even a relatively small one, could do to a large crowd like that. The police were also there for the demonstrators’ own safety, yet another issue that they must have been very aware of, but the demonstrators could not see from where they were standing, yelling ‘pigs’.

[This post has been my reaction to a commenter here.]

posted by Imshin 09:14

Look, Dad, I'm in the paper. Sarah Bronson wrote about our Blog Meet in Haaretz.
posted by Imshin 08:30

How would you like to die today, Abd?
There are two options for a dog like you, who cooperates with the Yahood.

We can drag you through the streets and then string you up in the square in pieces, your memory forever blackened, your family ostracized.

Or you can die killing Jews and become a Shaheed, forever honored and celebrated, your family looked after.

15 terrorist attacks thwarted in August.

posted by Imshin 06:17

The need to be uniform
When I was three, I was sent to Miss Mc___’s kindergarten and elementary school for the dramatic arts, or something on those lines. I wore a grey skirt and blazer, a white shirt, a tie, and on my head I wore a grey felt hat. I’m sure I looked very cute. The uniform must have cost a fortune.

I was very happy at Miss Mc___’s. There was a spaceship in the yard, a proper one you could go inside, all covered in tin foil. It was 1969 - space travel was all the rage among pre-schoolers. We had ballet on the curriculum. I regarded myself very poor because I couldn’t do what I think was known as ‘The Splits’ (for my Hebrew speaking readers, this is what we call ‘shpagat’), but I absolutely adored tap dancing classes, because we wore old-fashioned royal blue cotton dresses and red tap shoes.

I often tell incredulous Israeli audiences, as an anecdote of my weird English upbringing in early childhood, that I could tie a tie-knot when I was three, or maybe it was four. They find it hard to grasp the concept of sending children to kindergarten in something akin to ‘madei aleph’ (army dress uniform), but far more restraining and strict. So do I.

To wrap up the story of Miss Mc___’s excellent establishment, where I participated in two grandiose dramatic productions (one of them was called, I believe, ‘Rocket to the Stars’, proof of my previous point about the era we were living in), I was just getting to feel at home there, and nearing the elusive life goal of managing to do ‘The Splits’, however painful, when I was unceremoniously yanked out, and moved to the local Jewish school. New uniform, just as grey and severe. No spaceship.

The world lost a tap dancing phenomenon (not).

My personal experience of the, at first painful but eventually liberating, switch to the inventive world of Israeli school un-uniforms, a few years later, will perhaps be the subject of another, longer, post. Or maybe I’ll write a book about it. Anyway…

… a few days before school started last week, Youngest mentioned that her friend ‘Wave’ (Just checking to see if you remember what that is in Hebrew. Hint: Gold medal…) has already got her new school uniform. Panic. What school uniform? ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’

Grrrr.

Not to worry, though. No felt hats, no blazers, no ties (no navy blue knickers, no white or grey socks only). The new uniform consists of a T-shirt, in whatever color you want, as long as it has the school emblem on it. I rushed to the store, which was like a madhouse (mine obviously wasn’t the only child to forget to tell), and grabbed one pink one and one purple one to tide me over. I’m going to get a few more this morning.

It’s the new fad in Israeli schooling. T-shirt equality. They seem to reckon that if all the kids wear more or less the same T-shirt, then they won’t notice that some have expensive NIKE sneakers, and some…er… don’t. Silly, but they mean well.

It crosses my mind that school uniforms are antithetic to learning, to creativity, to individualism, especially in the guise of the crazed, enforced uniformity of my toddlerhood in the North West of England. But then, so are schools (antithetic to learning, to creativity, etc).

School uniforms could be conducive to discipline and order, but strictly enforced discipline and order, as opposed to discipline and order that come from within (how do we create that non-violently?), are also antithetic to learning, to creativity, and to individualism, in my mind.

In short, I’ve no idea, and I’ve spent far too long on the subject. Time to wash the dishes.

posted by Imshin 11:44

Butterfly
Shoosha seems to have emerged from her little illness last week a new cat. She now quite likes being handled. Perhaps she enjoyed the pampering she got and wants more of it.

posted by Imshin 07:25

Priceless
The great American Police State.

posted by Imshin 01:16

I know you won't be reading this, you're far too busy having a good time before the IDF whisks you away into manhood, but Happy Birthday, Our Sis's Eldest.
posted by Imshin 23:11

Nasty.
A woman was stabbed to death in broad daylight in Manchester, England, by a man who was seen reading a Koran. Another woman was critically injured.

That's how it started here. Then they progressed to bomb belts.

Care of Yael.
posted by Imshin 22:48

Shoosha wasn’t well last week. Eldest was the first to notice something was wrong. “Ima, you can see she’s not happy. She's not smiling at all.” What? She never smiles.

She just lay on the kitchen table with her head on a kitchen towel for two days. Even the pigeons in the window didn’t interest her.

I am ashamed to say I took the worst kind of advantage of her pitiful condition. For two days she received an abundance of TLC, all the strokes and hugs she usually wouldn’t hear of. She wasn’t actually unhappy about it. She may be a tough little Israeli street cat, but when one is ill one needs ones Ima.

She’s better now. Must have been one of those 48 hour things. No doubt my TLC did the trick.


Look at that face only an Ima could love.

People who have met her actually say she is better looking in real life. Not very photogenic, like her old lady.

posted by Imshin 22:02

Mail:

Dear imshin,

I've just read the guardian article about Tel Aviv nightlife you linked in your 5th September entry and I can't find most of the quotes you highlighted there.

Nowhere does it contain the words 'military regime' - which I agree would have been idiotic. Maybe the guardian decided to clean up the text a bit after you'd got hold of it, but now it just reads like a pretty straight piece about some spirited partying and I can't really see the harm in it to be honest.

best wishes

J

Thank you for your comment, J. Curiously, I can still see the passages I quoted when I access the article, 'military regime' included.

I agree that there is really nothing actually wrong with the article. What annoys me is that a publication like the Guardian refuses to write anything about Israel without mentioning the oppression of the Palestinians, no matter how frivolous the subject.

Imagine if everything you ever read about Russia, say about the Bolshoy Ballet, or a new book, always mentioned Russian cruelty to the Chechens, or everything written about China, like touring the Great Wall or the latest hairstyles of Shanghai women, included a snide comment about China occupying Tibet. It sounds absurd, doesn't it? But this is exactly what the Guardian is doing here.

Can you understand how frustrating it is for us, to be forever perceived as far far worse than those vast and powerful nations?

I actually think the OTC recreation drug mentioned is interesting enough in itself, without the tedious mandatory moralizing.

Update: Apparently J was subconsciously blanking out the bits of Guardian idiocy his mind didn't like :-)

'military regime' - still there.

I wish I could do that.

Update update: Now J is feeling rather silly, but he shouldn't really. I'm happy. Anything that gets me to write :-~

posted by Imshin 17:47

Sad irony

“We decided to make Aliya because of our daughter. Beslan is a small town and we wanted to give her a good education ... that decision saved the life of our only child. If we hadn’t come to live in Israel, our whole family would have been there on the first of September, at the festive ceremony, like in previous years. It was a big holiday in Beslan. Not only pupils and their parents came. Our grandmother used to come... and so did former pupils...

It was always a very moving ceremony, when a first grade pupil was carried on the arms of the older pupils, everyone with flowers and smiles. My brother and I both graduated from that school. And then the terrorists came. We don’t care if they were Chechens or anything else, these are not human beings; these are wild animals. For three days we have been glued to the TV, and we know most of those harmed. It is a small town, everyone knows everyone else.”

Thus Igor Chaldayev, who left Beslan for a new life in Israel, with wife Natalya and ten year old daughter, Vilena, just four months ago. One of those buried yesterday was Rosa, Vilena’s teacher.

“…We are trying to protect the child, not tell her what happened. She thinks it ended well, she doesn’t know that some of her friends... were killed there.”

From this morning’s Yediot Aharonot.

posted by Imshin 16:45

I’m so out of it.
Or am I?

As Tuesday's suicide bomb attack in Beersheba demonstrated, the conflict continues; Palestinian frustration is boiling less than a 20-minute drive from Tel Aviv. Yet the party goes on, driven by a desire to escape the grim realities of Israeli life.

In the past four years of the intifada, Tel Aviv's nightlife has gone from strength to strength. Larger and better bars, and clubs that would put London, New York and Paris to shame, open and close regularly to satisfy fickle tastes.

Such idiots at the Guardian. I know I’m over the hill, but I actually don’t know anyone who takes the drugs described or goes to these places. And I'm as Tel Avivi as they come. They talk about it as if it’s like this all-encompassing thing. Ho hum, I know more people who go to public sing-a-longs (ugh!) and belly-dancing lessons, how uncool of me.

But don’t you just love the oh-so deep dime-psychology? – it’s the Intifada you see. It’s not just a bunch of kids having a good time. They don't seem to be able to see Israel or Israelis (or Palestinians for that matter) in any other context. Hey, we're human beings, you Bozo!

When drawn on the subject, most Tel Aviv residents favour compromise to achieve peace with the Palestinians.

And he learns this from chatting to random clubbers, just as likely to be residents of Tel Aviv’s diverse satellite towns, while in various states of drug abuse?

But on the whole they try to block out the military regime

Huh? They declared a military regime in Tel Aviv and I didn’t notice?

and the oppression of Palestinians

I’m sure these kids are thinking of nothing else, before they down their little white capsules of a Friday night

I actually think the club owner guy handled the reporter’s inherent twerpiness quite well - a certain polite cynicism in his answer seems lost on our intense Guardian idiot:

"I can appreciate it isn't much fun living in a refugee camp, or in the West Bank," Mr Bar Yitzhak said. "But I think it is hard for people elsewhere to imagine what it is like for someone to come to your favourite bar or cafe and blow themselves up.

"We are in the middle of the barrel of a gun, yet everything is still so alive."

Thank you Bish, for the link. Hmmm, do you think he was hinting that he'd like us to finally be cool in our old age and try this stuff out? Naaaah. He's an Israeli man. He never hints. He just comes right out with it.

posted by Imshin 19:07

Unmasked: The Mystery Man
I have often wondered if I would recognize Gil on the street, having seen his photo. He seemed to be the blogger (now ex-blogger) I had most chance of running into. After Thursday I can say for sure that no way would I have recognized him on the street. Unless we were both on our way to a Blog Meet, that is.

Walking along towards the Blog Meet on Thursday, I spied David (Treppenwitz) and Zahava getting out of their car with Yonah and two ladies who turned out to be Mich (Tonecluster) and Sarah (Chayyei Sarah). I recognized David and Zahava immediately - couldn’t not have actually, David’s blog offers an extensive family album, which I have perused at great length, on a number of occasions. They all look so nice (for Settlers!!! ;-)).

So now I had to decide if to surreptitiously pass them by in the shadows, and introduce myself later, or make myself known right away, and thus A. enjoy the advantage of not arriving alone B. get another chance to practice my very subtle introduction line (‘Hi, I’m Imshin. Who are you?’). C. be able to pretend to be a normal non-shy person.

I think I was very brave to just walk up to them, like that. What if I’d been mistaken, and in fact they had been the local chapter of one of the Israeli crime syndicates? I hear their octopus-like tentacles are far-reaching these days. Yonah in his stroller could easily have really been the Godfather in a wheelchair, in disguise. And a very devious disguise too. Even hardened criminals would immediately have been disarmed by that happy little chuckle of his.

Anyway, enough beating about the bush. On to the business in hand:

Thank you Rahel and David for filling me in. I knew you would. Mystery man was apparently David of Rishon Rishon, whom I have only recently discovered. I was convinced he was from the town of Rishon Letzion, because of the name, but apparently there is a far more interesting and thought-provoking explanation.

For some reason his link isn’t working on my browser right now (maybe it’s because of all the traffic from his Instalanche, lucky fella!), so you’ll just have to look for the explanation yourself.

Update: Link to explanation is working now.

posted by Imshin 17:28

We didn’t want to let the girls read the morning paper today. The photographs of the dead and injured children were just too awful. Youngest rebelled, demanding to read the articles, but promising not to look at the pictures.
posted by Imshin 17:02

Surprise surprise
Ali Abdullah, an Islamic scholar in Bahrain who follows the ultra-conservative Salafi stream of Islam, on the bloodthirsty massacre of hundreds of children in a school in Southern Russia: 'I have no doubt that this is the work of the Israelis, who want to tarnish the image of Muslims.'

Brought to my attention by John Williams, whose new address seems not to be working, although yesterday it was fine. John?

posted by Imshin 16:59

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