You’ll say I don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ll say I’m a foreigner and I can’t possibly understand, and how dare I presume, and what business is it of mine anyway?

I know I am a foreigner, I know I should just butt out, but blogging has made me a bit of a big mouth. I get this uncontrollable urge to speak when it would be wiser to shut up. It’s a wonder I still have a job.

So I’ll say what I want to say. What will happen? You won’t read me anymore? You’ll write nasty things about me? I can always just turn off my computer, you know, and not turn it on again for six months. This has happened before, not recently, but if I feel like it, who’s to stop me?

It’s just that I have a question for American bloggers this 12th of September:

Was that the best you could do?

I wanted to know how you were feeling this year, but you just sent me over to last years posts. Many of you didn’t even bother to do that (not even a ‘I’m shutting down for 9/11’). Some of you just continued business as usual, as if nothing had happened.

And if you did write something it was the same thing as you wrote last year - more memories, some prayers, a few flags. It stuck in my throat, like a sandwich made of last week’s bread. Is that it? No fresh revelations, insights? Anybody?

I got a very strong feeling that the anniversary of 9/11 was a bit of an annoyance this year, a nuisance. It crept up while everyone was busy with other things. It got in the way of much fun being had with some authentic historic forgeries, that will or will not make a difference to something or other, for some reason.

Oh no, I could hear you thinking, but not daring to say, Not 9/11 again, just when we’d managed to forget all about it!

There is a word I am thinking about today. The word is DENIAL.

Oh, I know all about denial. What happened to you is pretty heavy. We Israelis, we always knew we were a shitty little country. We’d rather French VIPs would have the good manners to refrain from saying it in public, but we don’t really blame them. We’re bluffing, see? We’re used to being slapped in the face, first on one cheek and then on the other, and then kicked in the gut for dessert.

But you guys, you’re on top of the world. Should you fall, well, you’ve got a long way down.

It’s quite simple really. Think about a guy with cancer. He knows something is wrong, but he can’t deal with it. It’s too big. But the thing is, if he doesn’t get checked, he won’t get diagnosed. If he doesn’t get diagnosed, he won’t get treatment in time. If he doesn’t get treatment in time, and the only treatment is harsh and violent, he will soon die a horrible death.

There is a price to be paid for denial.

A British policeman spied for the Saudis, and has admitted he supplied them with a large amount of information, from police databases, about people and organizations that interested them. The man was born in Yemen and immigrated to Britain as a young man. He did it for the money, apparently.

More encouraging news is that members of England’s football (soccer) team and their manager, visited Auschwitz Nazi death camp in Poland last Tuesday, while they were in Poland for a World Cup qualifying game against that county's national team. Apparently it was some of the players themselves that asked to visit there.

Thank you to Bish and John Williams, for reading the Guardian and the Independent for me.

An Israeli blogger experiences the Academic Boycott first hand. Quite incredible, considering the subject he was researching.

And from the same blogger, a settler's perspective on the Jewish civil war we are being led to expect come evacuation date.

[By the way, Jeffrey, I am actually Not a Fish, but seeing as its nearly Rosh Hashanna, I'm prepared to compromise and be a Gefilte Fish, till Yom Kippur.]

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'.

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.

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.

Shai writes about Efraim Kishon films.

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).

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.

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.]

Look, Dad, I'm in the paper. Sarah Bronson wrote about our Blog Meet in Haaretz.

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.

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.

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.

Priceless
The great American Police State.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-~

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I enjoyed Benjamin's account of the radical change in his politics. Very readable, despite it's length, and very illuminating.

The Lesson and the Responsibility

Imshin, I was reading your views about the pornographic nature of the photos from Russia and normally I would agree with you 100% but I have just seen a horrific scene where a grieving mother was weeping over the bodies of her dead children. My wife and I were incensed but then it transpired that the local people had asked the cameraman to expose the murderous nature of Islamic fundamentalism!

It was then I remembered one of the most enduring images of horror of the 20th century...the little girl running down a road in Vietnam with her skin hanging from her scorched body. That image did more to galvanise anti war sentiment than all the mortality statistics combined. I think the fundamentalist bastards have shot themselves in the foot big style.

Sooner or later people have to realise that even if Israel had never existed the fundamentalists would still be killing in the Philippines, Kashmir [which kicked off in 1948 before Israel existed], Indonesia and East Timor, Russia and Sudan...Israel is the front line of our defence against these child murderers.
John

But why show over and over again, out of all the pictures, on all the channels, the bare breast of a young adolescent girl? Shameful.

I fear most people in the west will not learn anything from this horror. This is seen as a local matter, the direct result of Russian cruelty towards the Chechens.

Not till something on this scale happens in Paris, John, will people begin to grasp what is happening, maybe not even then.

The BBC kept saying last night something about Russian authorities seeing the hostage takers as responsible for most of the deaths. This drove me crazy.

THE HOSTAGE TAKERS WERE ONE HUNDRED PERCENT RESPONSIBLE FOR EVERY LAST DEATH IN AND AROUND THAT SCHOOL. Even if every child that had died there had been shot in the head by Russian soldiers, something that clearly didn’t happen of course, their blood would still have been on the hands of the hostage takers. Is this not clear? Is this not obvious? What is this sickness, this perverseness, to blame the deaths of these children on anyone but those murderous fiends who created this horror?

Update: More gems from the BBC:

European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels offered their condolences, but said the EU would ask Russia to explain how such a tragedy could have been allowed to happen.

BBC world affairs correspondent William Horsley says the EU statement implies concern not only about the behaviour of Russian security forces at the siege, but also about Moscow's reliance on harsh military force in Chechnya.

As I was saying...

Update update: And that isn't even the worst. Here's more about BBC nastiness.

Why did you come, tonight?
Asked the intriguing Expat Egghead (Where’s Cathy? Where’s Cathy? I kept wanting to ask him. Silly me.*). And I said, “Curiosity”, without thinking, not quite happy with my answer, even as I gave it.

There was a sense of community last night. This was clear, after the initial weirdness of fitting real people to what were previously just words on a screen. It has been there all the time, of course, this camaraderie. We are a community. And everyone who came knew this, and that is why we came – to meet old friends, at last.

*What I really wanted to ask the Expat (Adrian) was the big why (‘Are you mad?’) question. I wanted to ask a lot of people a lot of questions, but I’m not very big on mingling and asking questions. Just introducing myself, and demanding to know who you were, and then remembering this data amid the sea of new faces, was effort enough. Easier to just plonk myself down next to someone friendly and familiar and stay there.

So I came away with a feeling of not being completely satisfied. More ! More! Maybe next time we can do that thing I hear they do in singles parties – when you have to switch places every five minutes so you get to speak to everyone.

But how can I complain? Even if I didn’t get into serious deep discussions with everyone (with anyone?) I can now add to my memory storeroom - Rev. Huatou’s sweet, soft eyes; Rinat’s freshness and amazing smile (great Hebrew!); Allison’s ability to make me feel at ease (and then make me want to dive for cover by saying nice things about me to other people :-P ); Rebecca’s brightness and energy (Glad she was there, managed to get something off my heart - just in time for Yom Kippur); David, Zahava, and Yonah’s extreme heimisher-ness (Oh Yonah, to eat him up. What a smile, kein ein hora); Mich’s surprising familiar-ness, considering she lives in Canada (...actually went to Youngest’s Matilda school, would you believe it? Small world. I hope it’s okay to divulge this); Rahel's gentleness (watch out for those elm roots, you've got me worried now); Harry’s knocking me over by saying he had worked out who Bish was (clever clever clever); Brian Blum’s… wow - Brian Blum!; Dave’s not so ozziness (He doesn’t look anything like that koala bear); Civax’s deeeeeep greeeeen eyes; Shai not being at all what I expected; Jennifer being exactly what I expected (not fair, I’d seen her photo); Gil Ben Mori being so very English (the real thing, clipped BBC accent with just a hint of London); Lisa’s interesting story, oops… erm… never mind, (fun fun fun); Noa’s lovely red hair, warm smile, and oh, that gorgeous green top, I couldn’t tear my eyes off it (where did you get it?); Sarah cracking me up by introducing herself to everyone as Chayyei Sarah – a Torah portion (‘Hi, I’m Chayyei Sarah’) (and I so wanted to ask her about the fencing…);

Alisa, at last, finally we meet, dear Alisa;

and Gil, Gil, Gil. How I miss his clear voice.

There was just one person I didn’t get round to, and the curiosity was just killing me. By the time I had noticed him, I had finished most of my beer, and somehow couldn’t find it in me to go and butt into the conversation he was having and demand to know who he was. My bad, as Meryl says, I think.

Now, who have I forgotten? Who will never link to me again? I beg forgiveness. I'm amazed I've remembered this many. Anyway, Adrian promises to publish the list, so I'll soon know how well I've done.

I loved meeting you all. I had a wonderful time, thank you all, and special thanks to whoever came up with the location. Excellent choice.

Update: Here's the list. I did very well.

He's not on the list, my mystery man. So who was he? Beard, blue shirt, yarmulka, slim, medium height, could have been wearing specs, I'm not sure, came with wife and baby. Anyone?

I am very upset, no, I am extremely angry, about the gleeful coverage of the Russian hostage situation, by the cable news channels. Again and again, they are showing unedited footage of naked children coming out of that school. This is pornography.

It’s not as if they care two figs about those poor kids. If they cared they wouldn’t show it, like they stopped showing the people jumping out of the WTC.

I will not supply a link. No news service deserves it.

I’ll write about last night when I’ve cooled down. I’m too agitated right now.

Update: ‘Hostage situations going very wrong have happened in the West too’, says the expert on Sky News, citing Waco, among others.

I try to think of any hostage situation that did not go very wrong, besides Entebbe, that is. Terrorist hostage situation I mean, not your random, fruitcake seeking attention hostage situation.

I am sickened by this awful story, sickened and saddened beyond words.

Blog Meet tonight. Oh dear, all those people. And Bish has a meeting so I can't take him to hide behind.

Benjamin was there. Here is what he saw.

Brrrrrrr.
I know.

Via Eric the Unread (I read you, dear)

Every Israeli mother’s nightmare. Probably not just Israeli mothers. This makes me feel weak in the knees.

What about the democratic right to hold different views?
I accept that American elections are really none of my business, even though their outcome will probably have more impact on my life than on many American lives, moreover, I really understand very little about American politics, but I just don’t get certain aspects of these demonstrations in New York.

The impression I am receiving is that the people demonstrating, some violently, don’t want a political party and its supporters to hold a convention in New York… erm… because they see things differently?

Whatever happened to “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”?

I’m sorry I don’t have anything moving to write about today’s murders. I just don’t. I used to take writing about these events on this blog very seriously, because I knew a lot of people would pop in to see if I were still alive. But writing about a pigua means feeling it, living it, in a much deeper way than otherwise, and I don’t really want to do that.

You get this heavy feeling after a pigua and I don’t want that feeling to linger. There are those whose lives were taken; I hear there were children among them. There were those who survived but whose lives will never be the same. There are the families of both kinds. Life for them now becomes a desperate struggle to cope.

I don’t want to wallow. What I really want to do is go out on my bike. Today I bought a little light for riding at night, in the bike shop on the corner by work. I already have a flickering red light that goes at the back. Today I got a yellow light for the front.

It’s late. The girls are starting school tomorrow. What do I do with all this energy? I don’t want to wallow. And they’re in bed, bags ready, favorite clothes neatly folded, waiting for tomorrow morning.

It’s decided. I’ll go.

Update: Hey R.T., I mended my first flat! You'd have been proud. Your words of wisdom, 'It's just a bike', were a great source of comfort!

16 Murdered in Beer Sheva; at least 91 wounded (figures updated)
Two buses drove out of the central bus station in Be’er Sheva this afternoon, and blew up at nearly the same time, as they entered the center of town. 16 people were murdered; over ninety were wounded, many severely.

If you’ve been reading some of the other bloggers on a regular basis, Meryl for instance, you will know that this is no surprise. Security forces have been preventing such attacks all the time, every day. It is inevitable that sometimes they should slip through. Nothing has changed besides Israel putting up a fight to put an end to it all. The Palestinian Authority is quite happy for the bloodshed to continue.

This is the first time buses have blown up in the southern town of Be’er Sheva, though not the first terrorist attack in that town.

Why Be’er Sheva you may ask? Easy, NO APARTHEID WALL there! They haven’t got around to building the Peace Fence in that part of the country yet, so it is relatively easy to infiltrate from the Mount Hebron area.

Olympics – one last word.
There was something about the way those American track athletes were built that left all of us ladies breathless.

I hear the Americans weren’t all that popular in Athens.

They were eating their hearts out, those Greeks, that’s why. Iraq-shmiraq – forget it. They couldn’t help but see their lady folks drooling.

That old green-eyed monster is very bad for ones mental health.

Afterthought: Some lady bloggers don't like beach volley ball. I am led to understand that this is because they suspect men's motives for watching the women's games. What? They sincerely think women who watch the Olympics are watching the men just to see who wins? Hah.

The girls and I said our goodbyes to the summer vacation on a little overnight excursion to Jerusalem. What vacation? I ask. I worked all summer! But the girls start school again on Wednesday.

We stayed here, a friendly little B & B hotel. The girls loved it, because they said it felt ‘beitee’ (homelike). I liked it too. It had this lovely smell, for one thing, and I suppose because it really was beitee. I know the guy there, which is always nice. I’ve been meaning to go and stay there for a long time, but never seemed to get round to it.

The location proved very convenient for us, and there was no problem with parking. Next time we’ll take Bish, but that means Shabbat, which is less fun in Jerusalem, I think, when you’re secular.

One thing that struck me was that, because all the restaurants are kosher in Jerusalem, there are plenty of dairy places, which meant lots of choice for me, being a vegetarian. The restaurants all seemed to be full, by the way, and people sitting next to the windows. Nice.

Actually, talking about location, I managed to get lost with every turn. I do have a good sense of smell in Jerusalem, as I was there during my army service. What this meant was that every time I took a wrong turning I knew it immediately, but it was too late. We began the holiday with an unplanned tour (okay okay, we were lost) of Mea She’arim, no less.

To say we were not suitably dressed would be the understatement of the year, so it’s lucky we were in the car. I'm told that the residents can get rather unpleasant, when presented with the challenge of a bare female shoulder, or thigh. In our case it was mainly Eldest's unabashed Tel Aviv-style display of her midriff that worried me.

It was worth it though. The girls were fascinated. We do have quite a lot of religious people living in our area, even ultra-religious - it is possible to see bearded men sporting fur hats, shiny kaftans and knickerbockers passing our building on their way to shul on a Shabbat... er... Shabbus - but the girls had never seen anything like Mea She'arim.

Afterthought explanation: Our visit to Mea She’arim was not just a quick whip-through. We were actually stuck in a traffic jam in a narrow winding alley for about twenty minutes, long enough to read most of the pashkevils (ultra-Orthodox-style street posters) along the way. The interesting ones were dire warnings to women about the wig thing.

After twenty minutes stuck behind that nasty truck, I was convinced. No Indian wigs for me!

Mental note: Be careful who you say hello to in restaurants.
So the real story seems to be this: It’s the US that has been spying on Israel:

Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday that the FBI began investigating suspected Pentagon mole Larry Franklin after tailing the Minister of Political Affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, Naor Gilon, who met an AIPAC representative for lunch. Franklin reportedly approached their table and engaged in a warm conversation with them.

(my emphasis)

Hmmm, maybe I shouldn’t go to the Israeli-Anglophile BlogMeet on Thursday (in my Zoro mask), after all. I could very well finish the evening in the torture dungeons of the US Embassy on Hayarkon Street!

Well, that may be so, but my Shoosha is proving invaluable in the War Against Pigeons which is raging on my kitchen window ledge.

She’s not six months old yet. Imagine what she’ll be capable of when she’s fully grown.

Via Meryl.

Our Alex
The reason I haven’t said much about the Olympics is that Israel wasn’t participating in my favorites. I like the athletics, the running, of course.

And now there’s Averbuch. I’m very excited about Averbuch and I’m waiting to see it, all tense.

He’s gorgeous, for a start. And …er… well, he’s gorgeous, that more or less sums it up for me.

And it’s happening now. I wonder how long it will take, because we’ve still got to go running ourselves.

Update: Oh well. At least he's gorgeous.

Allison has been profiled this Friday on normblog. Nice.

You may notice something a bit different here. A few people had been complaining about my blog giving them problems, so Bish had a look at my template. He was up till 3:30 last night cleaning up the errors in my html, poor Bish. I hope things have improved a bit now. He also tidied up the fonts and some other things.

GOLD!

Some of us had to work :-(

I was so busy I didn't even have time to listen to it on the radio. Only heard when I got home :-((

But I did get to see him get the medal and hear HaTikva. F#@k the 'Guardian', it felt nice :-)))))

Here is a fence, built to keep apart two peoples of two different religions, two peoples who are not able to live together. What is it called, this fence? Is it called an Apartheid Wall? No it isn’t. It is called a PEACELINE.

John pointed it my direction. Thank you, John.

From now on, maybe I won’t call our fence a security fence, anymore; maybe I’ll call it a PEACE FENCE.

Laurence Simon is Full of Crap, but I’ll forgive him, because he has lots of advice on getting hugs out of cats.

This morning Shoosha ran passed me in the dark as I made my way to the bathroom and nearly knocked me over. I actually smashed into the corridor wall. Then when I got back to the bedroom, she was sitting in the doorway and I didn’t see her (she’s black, the lights were off). I trod on her, she squealed and scratched me, and then skulked away hissing, poor thing.

I’ll try the crawling-towards-her-and-smothering-her-with-my-favorite-sweater ploy when I get back from work. I’ll have to get the sweater down from winter storage.

;-)

More Yoav Biran (Foreign Office guy
Jonathan has been kind enough to let me know that Yoav Biran, director general of the Israeli Foreign Office, was interviewed by Haaretz as well. He doesn’t say exactly the same things, but some are similar. Any way, the point is that you can read for yourselves.

He fully accepts the assessment that Israel currently has no partner on the Palestinian side to negotiate with and is satisfied with growing realization around the world that is the reason for the freeze. "Recently, I haven't heard from any serious source, in quiet diplomatic conversations, any genuine thinking that Yasser Arafat is good and beneficial. Without much exaggeration, the whole world agrees he is an obstacle and if there is any argument, it is only on how to minimize the damage he causes." Biran thinks that the war in Iraq and the removal of Saddam Hussein were positive developments in the region.

Biran does not despair over the chances of improving Israel's standing. Despite the harsh criticism directed at Israel, he feels the country's position is still strong. It is valued as an important diplomatic player and its close ties with the United States are respected. He supports the initiative of Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom to strengthen ties with Europe and also feels that in the Arab world all is not lost. In his many conversations with Arab figures, Biran says, he has learned that since the 1991 Gulf War, most moderate countries do not see Israel as an enemy or a threat.

Took day off. Got up early with Youngest (yawn)and headed for Yaffo port. Despite early hour, were still about three hours too late to catch the fishermen coming in. Oh well.

We did get to see one fishing boat, but all the fish coming out of it were in coolers (I want my money back).

Youngest was only really interested in the stray cats hanging around, apparently still licking their lips after the morning feast.

Came home. Now waiting around till Eldest awakes (this could take a while), before continuing the planned activities of the day.

Important news: Israellycool has moved.

The Shoosha Blues
I ache to give Shoosha a hug, but she won’t have any of it. She’s just not a huggy cat. I have to accept this.

She has this gorgeous sleek black coat. I really need to hold it and stroke it, but I have to remind myself to hold back. This is not what this cat wants. I must not force myself on her. Sometimes I can’t help myself and I am bitten, or scratched.

Ho hum.

Eldest adores her, with or without hugs, and gushes over her endlessly, coming up with about twelve cutesy names for her a day.

Me? I ache for a hug.

Afterthought: Before you say anything, I once had a huggy cat. I know they're out there.

I suppose I'll have to make do with humans for hugs. Luckily I have three very huggy humans living with me.

Isn’t the women’s marathon something? They’re amazing these women. How can they keep up such a pace for such a long time? Two hours into the race and they’re far faster than Bish and me even dream of, in our little thirty minute jog in the park of an evening. And it's even hotter there than along the Yarkon River.

I’ve been enjoying the route as well. The scenery looks familiar, somehow. And what about that Japanese runner? Small, short legs, and she’s leading - inspirational.

Update: She won! Wasn't it suspenseful? And they're saying that number three, the American, is Jewish, but you can never believe these commentators on channel one. An Israeli runner participated. She finished forty-something. I'm dead proud of her too.

Update update: Is too Jewish, according to Dr. Funk, who was even kind enough to point me to the evidence.

Pan-Arabism 2004
Yoav Biran, Director General of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, is retiring soon. He was interviewed by Yediot Aharonot this weekend and had a few surprising things to say. He pointed out that many in the international community, including Arab countries, expect Israel to do the dirty work with regard to the Iranian nuclear threat.

He also told of his many meetings with Arab leaders over the years, leaders of countries not necessarily openly friendly to Israel. Itamar Eichner elaborates (my translation):

In his meetings with Arab leaders Biran heard interesting things, different and opposite to what the same dignitaries say about Israel in the media. “There are Arab leaders who attack us in the media, but in closed conversations confess that they admire Israel. If you want to be a Zionist, all you have to do is visit an Arab country and hear what its leaders think about us: about the Israeli capability, about the technological development, financial and military, about our standing in the world and especially about our special relationship with the United States. Israel is known in the Arab world as a country that, when faced with a real problem, finds a real solution. Again and again, they bring up the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor”.

Biran reveals that in conversations he held with Arab leaders he heard hair-raising attacks on Arafat: ”The Israeli public expressions of animosity towards Arafat do not come near to the level of animosity and hatred you hear in private from Arab figures. You hear names like liar, swindler, and even expressions of street-profanity and curses. It even embarrassed me as an Israeli. An Arab leader of a country with which Israel does not have relations, told me that if he was in one room with the prime minister of Israel and with Arafat, and he had a pistol with one bullet in it, the Israeli prime minister would have nothing to be worried about…”

Update: More and a link here.

Affaire du lycee Montaigne

anti-Semitism in France : the courts say YES
Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 9:07 AM

Dear friends,
You may have heard this year of the ugly anti-Semitic incident in which an 11 years old Jewish boy was molested by two older Arab boys in his school, the Lycee Montaigne, located in the center of Paris. This lasted for about 6 months before the affair was understood by the parents who then complained to the principal of the school. The two Arab boys beat the Jewish boy and bullied him, shouting "dirty Jew" at him and other anti-Semitic jeers. They stole from him, and there was no reaction neither from other pupils who saw what was happening, nor from any teacher.

After the complaint of the parents, the principal called for a disciplinary council, one of the bullies recognized the anti-Semitic insults, the other, who did the actual beatings, did not. The medical evidence which the parents brought to the school was sufficient and the two Arab boys were expelled. They are sons of diplomats working in an Arabic embassy in Paris.

Then, started an outcry by some of the teachers who considered this much too harsh a sanction. They called an organization fighting against racism, the League for Human Rights (Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, LDH), made a big issue of the matter in newspapers. The newspapers and the media in general spoke a lot about the "injustice" done to the expelled boys, while, for a long period, they had ignored the actual anti-Semitic incidents, as they are prone to do when the culprits are Arabs, and when they mentioned them, they called these either "usual school turbulence" or "conflict between communities".

The parents of the expelled boys then, with the support of the group of teachers and the LDH, complained and sued the school board and the ministry of education for an unjust measure. Such a complaint is treated by an administrative tribunal in France.

The administrative tribunal convened, and heard the lawyers for the parents and the teachers supporting them. They never heard the molested child, nor his parents, nor his lawyer. Based on the complaint it decided that the two expelled boys should return to the school, after the end of the present school year, and condemned the ministry of education to pay them damages of $1200 to each boy.

An administrative tribunal in France is entitled to judge procedures only, not to judge the actual matter. In this case it judged on the actual matter.

The ministry of education and the parents opposed this decision in an appeal court. Imagine what will happen to the Jewish boy if he sees his tormentors back in school. The execution of this judgment means in fact expelling the victim from the school. The judgment will be rendered in August, when all France is on vacation, and the lawyer of the parents is very pessimistic, based on many recent cases in France where complaints about anti-Semitism were minimized and usually dismissed by the French courts. In this case, the administrative court judged that, based on the accused boys declarations, the anti-Semitic acts, even though recognized by the authors, were not numerous enough to justify expelling the authors form school. So, for this French court, a certain level of anti-Semitism, even though illegal (it is against the law in France to proffer anti-Semitic or racist remarks in public), is acceptable.

The parents of the molested Jewish boy have asked me to publicize this as widely as possible in the media, in America and elsewhere, because it is only through publicity outside of France that we have a chance of avoiding the return of the bullies in this school. If the judgment of the administrative court is maintained it is a clear signal to all anti-Semitic children in all French schools that they have nothing to fear for attacking Jewish children in schools or in the streets. The lesson has been quickly learned: since the judgment, at least 5 Jewish youths have been attacked with knifes in France. In the latest incident children, coming out of a Jewish school in Paris, were attacked by an Arab young man throwing bottles onto them from his window, in front of the police. He was brought to the police precinct, and the mother of one boy who protected the children in her car came to lodge a complaint. The police officer receiving the complaint let the man go free, saying that he had been called "dirty Arab" by the children (primary school). Nobody was witness of any insult; the insult was most improbable as the man was at his window on the fourth floor of his building when he started throwing bottles on the kids. The police officer had learned the lesson. She preferred to let the man go rather than start a legal procedure which she knew the court would dismiss, thus losing her time.

If the present judgment is upheld, no street nor school will be safe for Jewish children in France next year.

I beg you to disseminate this information as widely as possible. If journalists want to know more, I'll put them in contact with the parents of the molested boy. This has to be published in America, French representatives have to be confronted by this, only such pressure can change the present tragic course of events.
Thank you in advance
Norbert Lipszyc

Read this excellent article by Mark Steyn, as posted by DFME, about Europe with regard to the welfare supplied by the USA.

I was astounded when, after the targeted killing of Sheikh Yassin in Gaza, someone wrote to me that Israel had no right to do such a thing, because it endangered American troops in Iraq. I think that was more or less the wording, I can’t check because I deleted the e-mail long ago.

Now I can think of plenty of reasons for not killing Sheikh Yassin, although I wholeheartedly support that action and others like it, this is war and he was one of the main enemies, but I really fail to see the connection to American soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Some Americans get very annoyed with Israel when it doesn’t function solely with the USA’s interests in mind, as they see them, before its own, even if this endangers Israel’s very existence. They think that, if such a dilemma should arise, Israel should always choose to act against its own interest, because the USA is footing the bill.

That is a hard one to argue, moreover I don’t like to argue it, because I don’t want to be seen as ungrateful, when I’m not.

I believe Israel and all its citizens are very aware, on a very daily basis, of how much it owes the USA. The need to balance our security needs with USA interests is something that I am sure our leaders take very seriously. This claim by some Americans is therefore certainly worthy of our attention, even though on occasion it may seem to us a bit loopy.

I am continually amazed therefore, that these very same Americans seem to make no such accusations where Europe is concerned. In fact they utterly support Europe when it repeatedly damages the interests of the USA, that most generous of benefactors.

But how can this be? Defending Europe costs them a far greater percentage of their tax money than the defense of Israel. But these Americans seem to have no problem with the Europeans, who, unlike Israel and the Israelis, are quite convinced that they live their lives of quiet affluence and peace because they are better people, definitely far better than the Americans, and that their happy, relatively carefree existence has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that they are enjoying the military protection of the USA, paid for by the very American taxpayers they so despise.

Could it be that these particular Americans actually buy into the Europeans’ pompous and ridiculous belief of their inherent superiority over the Americans? Could it be that they too have forgotten that twice during the last century Europe plunged itself, and the whole world with it, into a nightmare of death and destruction, which only came to an end when the USA intervened?

Naaaah, these are educated people, they couldn’t be that idiotic.

I first read about this John the Baptist Cave thing in Yediot Aharonot. I said to myself, ‘Well, if it’s in Yediot Aharonot it must be a hoax’. Another reason it seems dubious to me, even though I know little about archeology and even less about John the Baptist, is that I would imagine that if there was anything in it, the Israeli archeologists would have elbowed their way in, and muscled the foreign archeologists out long ago. Stands to reason, doesn’t it? But I could be wrong.

Afterthought: On the other hand, it could be the policy of Israel, and its Jewish archeologists, to butt out of Christian archeological digs so as to avoid religious tension.

Hmmm (2)
Now I wonder why Our Sis sent me this...

Rules of English

1. Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
3. And don't start a sentence with a conjunction.
4. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
5. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat).
6. Always avoid annoying alliteration.
7. Be more or less specific.
8. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are (usually) unnecessary.
9. Also, too, never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
10. No sentence fragments. No comma splices, run-ons are bad too.
11. Contractions aren't helpful and shouldn't be used.
12. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
13. Do not be redundant; do not use more words than necessary; it's
highly superfluous.
14. One should never generalize.
15. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.
16. Don't use no double negatives.
17. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.
19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
20. The passive voice is to be ignored.
21. Eliminate commas, that are, not necessary. Parenthetical words
however should be enclosed in commas.
22. Never use a big word when a diminutive one would suffice.
23. Kill all exclamation points!!!!
24. Use words correctly, irregardless of how others use them.
25. Understatement is probably not the best way to propose earth
shattering ideas.
26. Use the apostrophe in it's proper place and omit it when its not needed.
27. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
28. If you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times: resist hyperbole; not one writer in a million can use it correctly.
29. Puns are for children, not groan readers.
30. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
31. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
32. Who needs rhetorical questions?
33. Exaggeration is a million times worse than understatement.
34. Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.

Actually, I know exactly why Our Sis sent me this :-p

Oh well, at least I have a good excuse - I'm a bloody foreigner.

Update: John writes

On the subject of ending sentences with prepositions, people often recount a story involving Winston Churchill. When an editor dared to change a sentence of Churchill's that appeared to end inappropriately with a preposition, Churchill responded by writing to the editor, "This is the kind of impertinence up with which I shall not put." His purpose, of course, was to illustrate the awkwardness that can result from rigid adherence to the notion that prepositions at the end of sentences are always incorrect.

Rear guard. Childbirth at fourteen.

This is what blogs are for, so people can read things like this.

Via Truegrit.

Done it!
At long last we’ve done the shopping for the new school year. Every year I get the school books ready at the beginning of July, but somehow this year I didn’t get round to it, and suddenly it was August.

It’s not really so bad. I fax the list to the book store and the next day they call to tell me it’s ready. This morning I was there at seven o’clock sharp, so as not to have to queue. Then we went to Office Depot to get supplies.

We used to go to Dyonon, the university store, at the end of August, which was always awful. I get very uptight in small crowded places and Dyonon is certainly that at this time of year. Office Depot on Yigal Alon Road was very pleasant. There is a multi-story car park there, very civilized, and the choice of exercise books was much to my daughters’ approval. Youngest got everything with something called Pucca, whatever that is.

I am intrigued, as I believe a lot of Israelis are, by Tali Fahima, a young Israeli woman who was arrested last week on suspicion of aiding Palestinian terrorists. She had apparently been getting a bit too pally with Jenin’s most wanted Palestinian, Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades commander Zakariya Zubeidi, for the Shabak’s (General Security Service) liking.

She seems to have taken the move from the periphery to the center (from Kiryat Gat to Tel Aviv), and the consequential value and belief switch it can often instigate, way too far. But I really don’t want to get into dime psychology here, or discuss the ‘It must be love, love, love’ angle. This is a hard one to avoid because, based on Fahima’s severe, dry image, hair pulled back, schoolmarm-ish specs, sharp business-like dress code, it is amusing to see the attraction to a man with a definitely thuggish charm. You get the strong impression that Fahima would definitely steer well clear of any man who looked like Zubeidi if he were a Jew, if he were a native of her home Kiryat Gat, a southern-ish development town (she cites his hard-luck story as what differentiates him from the gangster she originally took him for, but I have yet to meet the gangster who doesn’t have a heartbreaking hard-luck story, all true mind you, to help him gain entry into the beds of well-meaning, gullible young ladies).

I am also a bit perplexed by her paradoxical complaint that the unfriendly reaction she has received from the Israeli ‘street’ is proof of the lack of freedom of speech in Israel. I ask myself why she thinks she is the only one who deserves freedom of speech. What about the freedom of speech of people who wish to tell her that they think she is a traitor? (Although they really should have the sense to leave her mother alone. Sadly a lot of people have little or no sense).

Friends point out, on her behalf, that if she had grown up among lefties she would have a strong emotional support system protecting her. This is probably true, but I really do fail to see the relevance.

You see the thing that differentiates Tali Fahima from all the other lefties, going out on a limb for their views, is her background. She comes from a very poor family, even by Kiryat Gat standards. Her mother brought her and her two sisters up on her own, scraping a living as a cleaner, but mainly unemployed. She says she grew up in a very right wing environment and friends from home say she took great pride in her army service. Then two years ago a change came about her.

In Yediot Aharonot this weekend, one of her former bosses explained that they had no choice but to fire her because she was surfing to hostile Palestinian websites from the office computer, and posting comments on them, and refused to cease when asked to (and very rudely, if the account is accurate). Since then she hasn’t been able to get a job. This is unfortunate, she looks like an intelligent girl, if a bit of nutcase, but under the circumstances, I can understand potential bosses seeing her as a liability.

Update: Wise words on this subject, as usual, by Shai, here too.

A rare treat!
I’m all out of chocolate, so here’s a photo of me ascending a rather steep path in Rosh Pina.

Photo taken by Youngest.

Pride and Prejudice (Updated)
Today, on an Israeli satellite channel, I saw ‘Fictitious Marriage’, an Israeli film that was made in the eighties. We’re a racist society, here in Israel, that’s why we regularly get to see Israeli-made movies on TV telling the story of Palestinian suffering, actually mainly on the state funded channels. The film took me back to a period in which it was clear to me, at least, that we really were in the wrong; when the Palestinians were an integral part of our daily lives and we mistreated them.

This situation, as described in this film, and the bad feelings of many Jewish Israelis, including myself, brought us out into the streets, en masse, demanding a change. The public pressure, coupled with the second Intifada (the first Intifada, in my view, was between 1936 and 1939, against the British, while the current conflict is no intifada, it’s a war) resulted in the Oslo Accords, and the conceding of power over a sizable portion of the territories, and a large part of the Palestinian population in the territories, to self-rule under Arafat, on the way to independence and statehood (racist society, remember?).

Watching the film I could well remember the sentiment and identify with the message. I also could understand how completely different the situation of the Palestinians is today. They had a wonderful opportunity to build themselves a better life and they squandered it. What a terrible waste. And they took most of our goodwill and threw it back in our faces, ‘You suckers’.

Today they are no longer a part of our lives like they were before. Murderous terrorism, the likes of which we had never seen, never imagined possible, the horrible, distorted child of those very Oslo Accords that were meant to solve the problem, forced us to shut many of the Palestinians out. Other people are doing the work that once was theirs. They can no longer get into their Peugeot 404’s (the last car made to last for ever) and drive from Han Younis to Rishon Letzion. The sons of the real live versions of the laborers from Gaza in ‘Fictitious Marriage’, have probably never seen the new skyscrapers in Tel Aviv, besides on TV, and they certainly weren’t the ones to build them.

Even the affluence the Palestinians enjoyed during the Oslo years, when Israelis flocked to the West Bank to buy everything from furniture to dental treatments, is long gone and forgotten. It disappeared overnight, when they decided to go back on their promise to give up the road of violence, and attacked Israel in the autumn of 2000, hoping to extort a more favorable deal that way.

But they have something their parents never had, these children of Oslo and the Terror War. They are no longer invisible. They may be seen as the enemy, but that in itself is a sign of some respect, is it not? Love is best, of course, admiration - even better. But where that is lacking, for obvious reasons, hatred is far better than derision, or worse, indifference.

And thinking about this, I can understand why Palestinians should prefer the Israeli Right to the Israeli Left, whatever they may say to the cameras or to the idiotic, pasty-faced Europeans in Birkenstock sandals who frequent Jenin and Ramallah. Because the Israeli Right sees them as adversaries, while the Israeli Left sees them as miskenim (I’m not sure how to translate that, maybe ‘unfortunate wretches’).

The Israeli Left is motivated by pity and guilt, and there is nothing more degrading than being pitied. I’d rather be hated and feared any day, than be pitied.

Update: For 'misken' - one suggestion is 'pitiful wretch'.

And a reader comments: "more and more I see articles exclaiming "Why can't the Israelis see that the occupation is destroying their country and just end it!" - completely oblivious to the fact that millions of Israelis (and Jews in the Diaspora) DID reach this conclusion at the end of the 1980's, the result being Oslo, and the elections of Rabin and Barak with mandates to seek peace through an end to occupation.

Today it is as if Oslo never happened, Camp David never happened, Taba never happened.

I have gotten to the point where I don't even read articles that might be critical of Israel unless I can see that they at least mention Camp David in 2000."

And maybe this is a good time to say that the new policy is NOT to give reader's names. I always worry about this, so I've decided to just not put people's names and finished, unless they specify that I can.

Update update: Yael has the links.

And the reason I hate nightshifts is that I am a zombie for the rest of the week. So I am now a zombie. Hulllllllo there. Zombie is a bit like drunk. I slept a few hours this morning. Now I have to stay awake till evening if I want to recover by tomorrow.

Now you know why I don’t like flying through time zones (and why you are unlikely to see me face to face unless you schlep yourselves over here, ‘cos I won’t be going over there). It’s the zombieness.

Actually the night was quite good. I got a lot done.

Why I haven’t been blogging
What happened was that one day I discovered that I could invest very little of myself in my job and get exactly the same salary. Civil servants, nu. There was, is, I believe, in my department, an atmosphere of nonchalance, of irreverence, of things-will-work-out-by-themselves-even-if-we-don’t-work-very-hard-or-worry-ourselves-or-stay-late-or-take-things-very-seriously. Easy street. This was the preferred attitude of a young boss who came. And everyone loved it (Even though things didn’t work out by themselves. Things went rapidly down hill and stayed there).

I hate to admit it, but for a long time this situation suited me down to the ground. I was burnt out from the pressure of the former, more dedicated, more work-yourself-to-death-and-get-shouted-at-for-you-efforts attitude to the work that was strictly enforced by the tough previous boss.

And then Mum was ill and that demanded much mental energy, even before the period that she was lying on her deathbed. And I had started blogging, also a time consuming occupation, and much more rewarding than work. My job, my livelihood, could not have interested me less. So after my initial shock and disapproval of the new situation, I just settled into it, too timid to do anything about it, on one hand, and too distracted to really care, on the other.

Then one day I woke up and was horrified by what I saw. My department was a shambles, an unrecognizable shell of the fearsome, efficient, person and time consuming machine that it was before, the famous machine that had got the job done better than any other, that had held the admiration of the whole organization.

And then I spent a long, long time being angry and disappointed at the powers that be that had let it reach this point, while denying it was their fault and pointing the finger everywhere else. I was angry and disappointed and offended.

This led me nowhere good.

And now I have had a change of heart. I have looked at myself and seen that I have contributed to this situation, to this negligence. I enjoyed the situation and took advantage of it to my own ends.

Just because I could get away with not doing my best, not doing even near to my best, just because I could, just because that was what everyone else was doing, was inexcusable.

Maybe they were doing their best after all, it was just that their best was less than what I thought it should have been, or what I knew I could do.

It feels uncomfortable to be even thinking such thoughts, never mind writing them down (pompous twit). But I fear that modesty (coupled with unrealistic perfectionism) created the problem in the first place. I have been too modest, too shy, too insecure, and, yes, too lazy, to formulate my ideas clearly and convey them forcefully.

And now I have decided that this must change. It’s time to stop grumbling about what’s wrong and to start trying to do something about it, quietly, starting with my own little corner.

So instead of my head being full of ideas for the blog, my head is full of ideas for work. And this is as it should be, as Mary Poppins says.

I don’t want to stop blogging. John Williams suggests I should “declare that you are only going to write when you feel it is absolutely necessary to speak out against something?” That sounds about right. I do so declare. Although I will still be writing about the silly, little things as well. This said, I will probably start writing with a vengeance, now. Isn't that always the way? (I see Allison is thinking the same thing). So don't give up on me just yet.

There. Now I feel so much better, to have got that out.

To start I have volunteered for an irregular night shift tonight (Friday night, missing the opening ceremony) and have made a mental note that I will not grumble, complain or think any bad thoughts about it, even though I hate night shifts.

If you can bear or Rich people’s problems

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with wornout tools;

Rudyard Kipling, summing up my feelings about my situation at work.

Note: This post has been severely edited. I'm sorry to have edited it, but I said a few harsh things about my workplace and decided that it was better to edit it. So I did. Edit it.

That's meant to be a dancing bear up there but it doesn't always work.

Back from Rosh Pina.

Lovely cool weather, nice B&B, good food, pleasant company, lots of rest.

Can’t tell any more about it just now because I’ve got to recuperate. Motion sickness. I get very bad motion sickness, especially when I sit in the back of the car.

Besides, my hair is in a terrible state. Motion sickness or no motion sickness, got to go have those shocking silver roots seen to.

Going away for the weekend. Back sunday evening.

I’m reading The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, first lovely book in a series about a lady detective in Botswana. It is so very African, naive, yet down to earth, and it is full of surprising little gems like this one:

Mma Ramotswe read the remainder of the letter, which as far as she could make out was meaningless jargon which the attorney had been taught at law school. They were impossible, these people; they had a few years of lectures at the University of Botswana and they set themselves up as experts on everything. What did they know of life? All they knew was how to parrot the stock phrases of their profession and to continue to be obstinate until somebody, somewhere, paid up. They won by attrition in most cases, but they themselves concluded it was skill. Few of them would survive in her profession, which required tact and perspicacity.

Tee hee.

Needless to say, the author, Alexander McCall Smith, besides being extremely skillful in his portrayal of his most captivating heroine, is also a law professor.

What a sweet idea! My girls will love this. Thank you Jennifer.

A funny thing
The first of August 2004 was the thirtieth anniversary of my family coming to live in Israel. I had been planning a grand celebratory post, full of depth and meaning (ugh).

But on the day I forgot all about it.

Last night we were in Netanya.
‘Look what the fence has done for Netanya,’ Bish commented as we drove past Independence Square in the center of town.

Remember Netanya? Netanya of the Park Hotel Passover Massacre, when thirty people, many of them elderly, were slaughtered as they sat down for the ritual Passover Seder meal in the dining room of a hotel; Netanya of numerous other terrorist attacks in recent years; Netanya that had become a ghost town because people were too scared to leave their homes, not to mention stay at the beachfront hotels.

Last night the center of Netanya was alive and buzzing with activity. People everywhere, hundreds of them, happy, carefree. Just a mid-week summer night in a vibrant holiday resort. Municipal banners promised Tu b’Av festivities (the Jewish festival of love) somewhere, but we could see no sign of them, just people having a good time out on the town. We could hardly get past with the car.

Netanya is not an affluent place, it never has been, even though the meaning of the name is ‘God gave’. It is laughable to talk about those wealthy Israelis eating off the carcasses of the poor Palestinians when discussing Netanya.

The fence has allowed the ordinary people living there to once again go about their lives in safety; it has brought back the tourists, enabling the locals to make a living. I am sure people in Netanya are extremely grateful for the fence. The fence has been a blessing for Netanya.

* * * *

While we’re on the subject of blessings, Mazal Tov to the young couple whose marriage (the night before on Tu b’Av, how romantic) and the subsequent Sheva Brachot celebration in one of those beachfront hotels, gave us the opportunity to witness Netanya’s amazing transformation for ourselves.

And I haven’t forgotten the wedding anniversary of Our Sis and Mr. Our Sis today. Mazal Tov to you too!