Jerusalem Post: Footage shows terrorists using UN-marked vehicle.

Haaretz: IDF releases footage of militants loading rockets into 'UN' car.

Militants? MILITANTS?! Makes you wonder what side Haaretz is on.

Here is the Israel channel 1 newsreel during which this footage was aired. It’s the whole newsreel in Hebrew. Fast forward to minute 5:45 to view the relevant part. You’d better watch it soon, it probably won't stay there for long. Beats me why this isn’t on the IDF spokesman’s site.

What you will see are three short segments, filmed from an IDF drone. First you see ‘militants’ burying a bomb in the ground so if an IDF tank should come along they can blow it up. Next you see ‘militants’ loading a Kassam rocket into a UN vehicle. In the third segment you see ‘militants’ loading a Kassam rocket into a Palestinian Police vehicle. Then you see the vehicle driving along the road, and then you see it being blown to pieces by a missile launched from an IDF helicopter.

Here are two year old Dorit and four year old Yuval, may they rest in peace, the babes killed as they played by their home in Sderot last week, by one of these Kassam rockets, launched by ‘militants’. Sderot is a town in pre-1967 Israel, not far from the border with Gaza.






Update: Here is the footage. It’s been edited differently than on last night’s channel 1 newsreel. First section, you see a Kassam rocket being launched. Second section, you see something being buried in the middle of the road, men standing around watching. Third section, you see men walking along a wall, one of them carrying something, then the men pass through a gate in the wall and load the thing onto a UN vehicle, and close the back doors.

I've seen it on TV a few times more. It is far clearer on TV, much better quality. It is quite clear that what the man is carrying and loading into the vehicle is a long metal tube.

Israel is demanding the resignation of Peter Hansen, the head of UNRWA, who is trying to wriggle out of it all by saying it couldn’t have been a Kassam rocket because “the object looks more like a folded-up stretcher than anything else. Especially since it was being carried with one hand. A Kassam rocket would be too heavy for a man to carry with one hand”. The Jerusalem Post points out that “According to the IDF website, the Kassam rocket is about 2 meters long and weighs on average 5.5 KG (about 12 pounds)”.

By the way, the car that was seen blowing up, on the channel 1 footage that I linked to before, was apparently unrelated to the police car shown just before.

posted by Imshin 13:00

Some things give you a jolt however often you see them.

I remember the first time I saw a number tattooed on someone’s arm. I must have been about ten. I was on the bus home from school, the number thirty-three.

She was sitting across from me, a large woman who seemed to me to be in her fifties, wearing a sleeveless cotton print dress. Little flowers, I think the pattern was, although the colors were faded from age and use. She had one of those awful pale green plastic baskets everyone used for carrying groceries from the store in those days. And there, on the inner side of her flabby white forearm was a little blue tattoo, a row of hardly distinguishable numbers.

I remember being surprised that the numbers were so blurred.

There were a lot of people with those tattoos back then. You don’t see them as often nowadays.

posted by Imshin 10:53

The Age of Tinsel
"A celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knownness".

Precious. Found link (sort of) in rebecca's pocket (what she’s reading).

What happens is this: An Israeli model gets a little part in a soap on cable. For about a week, she is happy just to manage to learn the lines reasonably well (thank God there are no three syllable words). Then things start getting frantic. She’s continually on the front pages of the newspapers and gets invited to all the best chat shows; thirteen year-old girls scream when they see her on the street and crowd around her for autographs. She soon comes to the realization that she is a very talented actress.

Now this is where she gets it wrong. Instead of continuing to milk the local cow till everyone is sick of her (including herself), she gets greedy. And so, off she trots to Hollywood to find fame and fortune. Being so wonderfully talented and beautiful, she must share herself with the rest of the world, it’s only fair.

But (gasp!) no one is waiting. After about three years of hustling, she gets a tiny part (‘woman in store’) in some obscure TV mini-series, by pulling every last string she has (it’s a Haim Saban production). No one ever actually gets to see it, but she is hailed all over Israeli media as an international star, as the one who finally made it. When she comes home for a visit, after yet another year of waiting tables, she appears on all the chat shows as ‘our very own success story in Hollywood’, and lands an advertising campaign, selling a new fad diet. Three years later she marries a rich American Jew in his seventies, thus managing to save face at home.

(Don’t try and work out who I’m talking about, I’m not. I just threw that together using details from the stories of various local egomaniacs, and not only female ones)

I have a new motto (translation from the Hebrew): ‘Not Everything That Sparkles Is Gold’.

I find it, along with ‘Istra Belagina Kish Kish Karya’, extremely consoling. Helps me handle the loud, shallow, lazy, silicone-and-buttox, stupidity-is-beautiful, atmosphere that has overrun a certain place where I am paid to spend a large part of every day.

***************

On the other hand, sometimes glitz is good. I really have to get one of those garish cycling t-shirts - all the better to SEE me with. Oh oh, I forgot to tell you the best news ever – Bish got a bike, just like mine (a Giant Sedona hybrid) but bigger. Thank you, R.T., for all your help. We’ve just got back from our first ride together. He’s all aches and pains, but he had a good time. I am suddenly aware of how very fit I am. Yippee.

posted by Imshin 09:39

A few things
I told you Our Sis and Mister Our Sis visited the US, mainly New England, their first big trip without the kids, who are now nearly all grown-up. They spent Rosh Hashanna in a place called West Woodstock, Vermont, where they stumbled on Rosh Hashanna services in a beautiful reform shul in a converted barn (‘Not what you’d think. This was a lovely converted barn’). Used to Orthodox shuls, they said the service was strange but moving, and they enjoyed it. They were mainly excited about the very warm welcome they received from the congregation.

They said people were very warm to them, as Israelis, not only when they were among fellow Jews, but everywhere they went in America. Nice.

On the other hand, Our Sis told us that friends of theirs visited Europe. They weren’t received very nicely at all. At the border between, I think it was Italy and Germany, the German border police seriously hassled them, and Our Sis’s friend, the son of German immigrants, heard the policemen talking between themselves about giving these Jews a hard time. Jews not Israelis, note. The kids were apparently terrified by the unpleasant event and the family cut short their visit to Germany.

On another front, the situation in Sderot has been going from bad to worse. Increasing numbers of Kassam rockets, launched daily from Gaza on this southern development town in pre-1967 Israel, do not bode well for life after the disengagement, when the Palestinians in Gaza will be free to do as they like. Yesterday two little children were killed in Sderot by Kassam rockets.

posted by Imshin 10:02

Hag Succot Same'ach everyone
posted by Imshin 17:24

So why fast if one does not attach deep religious meaning to the act, if one does not ‘do it properly’?

I once heard a Jewish woman say that when she lit the Shabbat candles every Friday night she felt a connection to all Jewish women everywhere who were also lighting Shabbat candles, ushering in the Shabbat. And she also felt a connection to all Jewish women down the generations before her who had lit the Shabbat candles, and the yet unborn baby girls who would be lighting them in the future.

Fasting on Yom Kippur is also something we do and have been doing for many generations. This is a humbling thought. The essence of this fast, of this day, is also humbling. We beat our breasts as we collectively speak our transgressions, and together ask for forgiveness.

I haven’t been to shul on Yom Kippur for many years, so I haven’t actually done this for a while, but I can still hear the tune “And for all these oh Lord of forgiveness: Forgive us, pardon us, grant us remission.” Nostalgia has made the memory far sweeter than reality ever was. I used to be bored out of my mind.

You sometimes hear people saying defensively, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong, so I don’t have to fast’. You smile to yourself, because you happen to know one ore two things about those particular people.

Others aren’t taking any chances. You can probably leave your door wide open in Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur. The thieves are all praying and beating their breasts. They know that what they do for a living is wrong. They also know that tomorrow they will continue were they left off. Today they pray desperately.

Yesterday, Yom Kippur, I rode my bike through the wonderfully empty streets of industrial South Tel Aviv, through the deserted alleyways of the flea market in Yaffo, touching something that isn’t there on the other days of the year, not even on Shabbat.

When I came home I drank, two cups after the first trip, three after the second, so as not to dehydrate. Mine wasn’t a very ‘kosher’ fast.

But today I feel cleansed, and not just physically. There is a strength to Yom Kippur, however you choose to spend it.

Bottom line: Why fast? I’m not sure, but it feels good.

posted by Imshin 20:49

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