EVERYWHERE

New Home

2010-12-13T15:58:00.004+02:00

Following a weekend-long writing spree which produced no less than four posts, I feel obliged to admit to myself and to you that I must have moved. This blog is now fully and truly a part of the 972 web magazine, an independent initiative launched by several Israeli bloggers who blog in English. It is there that the latest products of my demented mind are stored,specifically on this channel: http://972mag.com/author/yuvalb/

Moving to 972 did change the spirit of "Everywhere". I now put more emphasis on issues that concern other writers on the site. To say it's a "political" site doesn't really crack it. Everything in this life is political. I would say it's more of an Israeli site, dealing with the bigger issues tormenting this country from an activist, human-rights-minded perspective.

Having said that, my most recent post is about Chekhov. The one before it was about pizzas. This blog has not lost its spirit. It simply saught and found new edge, accepted a new home and adopted a new design concept. Please follow me to 972, where other fine blogs await your reading eyes. This URL will remain here, a treasury of memories for me and a resource for all who are interested in, well, everything.

The Amália Lesson

2010-09-15T09:38:00.003+02:00

Sometimes we get lucky. A dear friend working in the diplomatic community invited me and my girl to the grand opening of the Portuguese film festival in Tel Aviv. We didn’t even know what movie was to be screened, but enjoyed the port served in small glasses and the company of dignitaries wearing neckties. Israeli society is extremely informal and the attire common at events of the international community make one feel pleasantly “abroad.” Then we stepped into the theatre, the lights were dimmed and suddenly we were back home.

The film was named “Amália,” and told the story of Fado legend Amália Rodrigues. Its first scene showed a 1974 concert Rodrigues gave in Lisbon, only a few days after the Carnation Revolution was completed and the totalitarian Nova Estado regime toppled. As the singer joins her musicians onstage, the crowd erupts in protest. Someone yells: “Fascist!” another: “Your beloved Salazar is gone! What will you do now?”

Rodrigues, portrayed by the talented Sandra Barata, began singing, and I began thinking of the West Bank settlement of Ariel. In recent weeks the arts scene here gushed over the opening of the first center for the performing arts across the Green Line. Major Israeli theatres, among them the national theatre “Habima,” are scheduled to send their productions there in the coming year.

About 50 members of the Israeli theatre scene signed a letter stating that they would refuse to perform in the occupied territories. This won them plenty of disdain from the Israeli public and reprimands from the Prime Minister and the Minister of Culture. Quickly, this exceedingly rare act of protest by Israeli performing artists began to fall apart. Several of the signatories demanded that their names be removed from the letter, citing a “misunderstanding.”

Who's misunderstanding what? Amália Rodrigues misunderstood history. She refused to be the people’s voice against a corrupt and violent regieme. Historians now tell us that she did support dissidents in secret, and in the film she is shown bribing an official in order to free a poet friend who was taken a political prisoner. Still, in public she never said a word against Salazar and his murderous PIDE policing force. She drank chapmagne with him while others were tortured by his thugs. She could not see past the present moment to a future in which Salazar would be seen worldwide as Portugal’s greatest historical enemy. Her reputation survived (with a voice like hers, how could it not?), but it suffered as well.

The artists who agree to perform in Ariel, and those who fear voicing an opinion against the use of Israeli culture in reinforcing the occupation, see only the present and only the narrow local perspective. Around here, the occupation is taken with a shrug. Most Israelis accept Ariel as being “Israel proper” depite the fact it’s built in the very heart of the West Bank, designed so as to render direct transportation between Ramallah and Nablus impossible. We’ve been taught not to care that its sewage is polluting the water of nearby Palestinian town Salfit, or that it was built largely on land stolen from local farmers, or that its existence forces hundreds of thousands to go through humiliating checkpoints, or that its very existence is a huge obstacle on the way to the peace we all say we want.

The artists who accept such notions and embrace the settlements may one day find themselves facing a hostile audience (as they already would – abroad). Times change, regimes fall, occupations end. I would advise every Israeli artist to think about Amália Rodrigues, then think about singers who took the cause of human rights and liberty even when those were unpopular or unsanctioned: Mercedes Sosa in Argentina, Victor Jarra and Violetta Parra in Chile, Vladimir Vysotsky in the Soviet Union, Fela Kuti in Nigeria and more, and more. Think about all of them, dear artists, and ask yourselves who would you rather be.

(this post also appears on +972, the new joint initiative of English-blogging Israelis.)

How I Became a Time Zone

2010-09-13T12:19:00.006+02:00

Sorry, I will not go into the history of the Israeli summer-time dispute. No time for it. I went to sleep one hour ahead of everyone else here and left some work undone which I should get to as soon as this rant is through.

I do remember there being some fuss over the time question when growing up in the eighties. The religious parties were altogether opposed to the implementing of a summer-time. My parents explained their worry that it would interfere with prayer schedules. I sided with them instantly. The whole concept of “moving the clock” seemed ridiculous.

It doesn’t seem ridiculous anymore. This year, when the government decided to end summer-time two months before the rest of the world, in order to ease the Yom-Kippur fast, which ends at sundown, I found myself confused. First of all, if you care so much for fasters, why not end summer-time early in August and be kind to fasting Muslims? Besides, people fast on Yom-Kippur in order to suffer, fulfilling the commendment “and ye shall afflict your souls” (Leviticus 23,27), so easing it up sort of defeats the purpose.

Even if we accept the merits of such move, assuming that the lives of several particularly pious older fasters may be saved, the Day of Atonement is only a single day. Could we not switch the clock only for that day? Even minister of Interior Eli Yishai proposed this as a compromise, when the debate heated up an the Knesset.

It died down since, all compromises were rejected and Israeli winter-time clocked in on the night of Saturday, September 11th. The religious parties hold Israeli coalition by the dials and I suspect that the entire summer-time fiasco is simply meant to prove this. I myself accepted the verdict with a grumble, as secular Israelis often do in such cases, as when we’re deprived of public transport on Saturdays or the right to import pork (a restriction that did wonders to the local pork industry).

Then this evening, when the suns last rays bid me farewell over the foam of nucturnal waves at 18:00, when that gloom of winter began settling into my heart still enveloped by a sweat-moistened shirt, I decided that I will not bow. My time will be that of our proper local time zone. I’ll arrive early to meetings, I’ll probably miss a few, never mind. I deserve to be a member of humanity and live according to its timeline. If I last on Yom-Kippur, the achievement will be greater and my bonding with the almighty firmer. It’s worth it.

My cellphone was resistant at first, but then I simply changed my timezone to Cairo (our proper time zone, from which we swayed!) My girlfriend, who actually deserves credit for this idea, having brought it up when hope for national sanity was still in the air, soon joined me. We are now autonomous of the rest of the country, which is pretty odd. We went to watch the late show last night and it was really screened rather late.

Upon returning home we learned that we are not alone. The city of Givatayim, a suburb of Tel-Aviv, is contemplating turning itself into a time zone. There’s a majority for it at the city council and it would take two weeks to pass the municipal law. That would still provide the mostly secular people of Givatayim with a month and a half of acceptable light management. It would also make Givatayim an environmental spearhead: the skewed time structure forces Israelis to waste one hour more of electricity each night than they would otherwise.

Do our legislators care for the environment? It doesn’t seem so. Do they like playing power games that cause damage to all communities (the secular one for obvious reasons, the religious – for being now the target of great animousity)? I’d say – yup. If only they could switch their clocks as I did and turn into earlybirds, that would benefit to us all. Such, after all, is the schedule that makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise, and they’re a tad short on the last count.

(This was also posted on +972, a new local web initiative. Visit it!)

Wishes for a Year of Little Faith

2010-09-07T09:30:00.007+02:00

The Jewish new year begins as the cruel Middle Eastern summer draws to an end. My Non-Jewish ex-wife used to say: “Your New Years' makes sense. Something is actually beginning. Nothing is tangibly beginning on the first of January. Of course the days are getting longer but you really wouldn't notice that until late February.”

To be fair, we really wouldn't know it's autumn by the weather until October. Tomorrow is new years' eve, and I'm sitting here with both fan and AC in full blast, sweating nonetheless, but there was a small breeze here and there over the last few days, instilling hope in a sunburned heart. I pray for such breeze tomorrow evening, when we'll walk down to the synagogue to receive the new year and sing the most beautiful air I know, the one that is hummed by the congregation on that night just before it exclaims “Barchu et Adonai Hamevorach”, bless Hashem, the blessed one.

I don't believe in Hashem the blessed one, but I believe in beautiful airs. That's perfectly fine in Judaism. Even my religious grandfather, who used to take me along with him to his schul in Rehovoth on Rosh Hashana, could never commit to me that he actually believed in God. He believed in Judaism, he believed in the tradition, in the poetry of it and in what it did to family and community.

Maybe on this New Years eve I should look into that paradigm more carefully. Living in Israel demands a lot of faith. Peace talks have begun again. Do we believe they will lead to anything? 400 children of work immigrants, born in this country, are due to be deported tomorrow. Do we believe we can possibly still reverse the decision? Wages are low and the cost of living high. Could we ever get out of debt? On all three counts I would say my faith is rather low.

So here's my New Years' resolution: I'll put faith aside. Faith matters not. What matters is action. We have to keep doing, to keep trying to better this place even though it may not be improvable. A Jewish life consists of action: you perform the Mitzvot, you sing the beautiful air. You work to better this world, work for “tikkun olam”, though you know how stubborn it is. A solution to our troubled situation may never be found, but working to reduce harm on the day to day level is crucial. I will make it a tradition just as my grandfather made going the the Synagogue a daily habit, regardless of whether anyone was listening to his prayers.

In this world heating up gradually, we can't even trust in the weather cooling down. In “Three Men in a boat” J. K. Jerome describes an English summer in which "the good weather never came". This could be one such year for us. We've known a few: years of drought, of inadequate winter which didn't suffice to refresh us and soon was followed by another punishing summer. We'll celebrate New Years regardless and experience an authentic sense of renewal even at 34 degrees. I wish for all of you, whether Jewish or not, to feel such a sense of renewal and to have a year of little faith and many deeds. Shana Tova.

(Image: Snow in Tel-Aviv, 1950)

Sakhim, They Don't Mind When Other People Suffer

2010-08-16T12:30:00.018+02:00

A few months ago, a Hebrew blog emerged entitled: "Sakhim, they are everywhere". the term "sakhi" is Hebrew slang derived from Arabic. It was originally used among consumers of canabbis to imply "sober": either someone who doesn't smoke or one who does, but isn't effected. "Sakhim" is its plural form.

In recent months the term came to be used otherwise. It now represents the mainsteam, bourgeois Israeli, as compared to the offbeat urbanite. On the "sakhim" blog, the sakhi is described as "the typical, politically correct Israeli, bereft of self awareness."

The anonnymous authors add that: "Sakhism can be percieved by the sakhi as something cool or just. The sakhi is mistaken. while innovative forces always seek to advance and broaden the barriers of the possible, sakhism will forever draw backwards and inwards, to the mainstream, to the common, to the avarage. Sakhism is not dependant on social status or ethnic origin and it appears in the 2010 Israeli sphere in various forms."

The sakhim blog, mainly showing Israelis making fools of themselves in weddings and other social gatherings, gathered some interest, especially from Tel-Aviv newspaper "Ha'ir" which dedicated two front page stories to what it perceived as a new social divide in the city, that between sakhim and "hipsterim", who seek more experimental lifestyles.

The attempt to paint sakhim as the ultimate conformists and the hipsters as their opposites failed, mainly because hipsters tend to be equally conformist, albeit within their narrower communities, as well as miserable fashion victims.

"Ha'ir" hoped to depict a contemporary version of the split which existed in 1960's Israeli society among the "salonim" and the "tnua". At the time, the salonim, who took on a rockn'roll lifestlye represented western influence on Israeli society, while the tnua kids stuck to the values and dress codes of the Zionist youth movements. Today, foreign influences are everywhere. Both sakhim and hipsterim are westernized, not to say Americanized. They're really not all that different.

Having realized this, I stopped reading the Sakhim blog and went back to concentrate on other things, until today this blog carried the following photo gallery, taken from the Facebook page of a young soldier girl, which was and still is open to the public. The caption on top runs: "Sakhim, the army service is the happiest time of their lives."

This is indeed the girl's heading for her photos: "My military service: The happiest time of my life :)". in two of the photos she is seen mocking blindfolded Palestinians. Such photos are nothing new, we've seen blindfolded Palestinians fed Matzas before and made to play other games. It's that innocence, that Sakhi spirit in which the photos are presented, that draws my attention.

Are hipsterim less prone to be cruel towards helpless individuals when given the chance? Are they more prone to make a big deal out of someone doing so? I wouldn't bet on it.

There are rare people, like the ones who author the sakhim blog, who are appaled by the state of our society and put the time into crying rage, and even they do so in a sardonic manner that signals an acceptance of the dark reality rather than a desire to change it. In action, we're all sakhim in one way or another. We are all of us children of the occupation.

The City with no Mongolian Waitresses

2010-08-12T08:38:00.013+02:00

Last week the government of my country decided to deport 400 children of work immigrants. These children were born here, speak Hebrew and know no other surroundings, but they belong to the wrong ethnicity. Minister of the interior Eli Yishai cited fears for the "Jewish character" of the nation if these 400 kids remained in the country. "It's time to let these families know that the field trip is over," said Yishai.

Today Yishai proposed paying 1000$ US to any family of work immigrants who would just pack up and leave the Jewish homeland (to which his parents arrived as North African Jewish immigrants in the 50s). 1000$ arent enough to buy a decent sofa these days. Yishai's attempt to buy people's lives at such a sum shows what he thinks these lives are worth. Foreskin-crowned Goyim are to him no more than filth that can be bought out.

Funny thing is, Yishai has a point. If we are to follow Zionist logic, then slanted-eyed and black-skinned children really should be deported and the rest of the lot encouraged to leave. Zionism states that this land belongs to the Jews, not to the Chinks. Niggers - out! there is no black in our blue and white flag (except insofar as Ethiopian Jews are concerned, and we treat them with appropriate prejudice). This is the land of the Jews and we deserve it because of the great racism to which we were subjected.

It baffles me how short-sighted Zionism is. It really did start off as a way to escape the pogroms, to dodge violent and dark racism. The early Zionists saw only the murderous Russians and themselves, it didn't occur to them that Filipinos existed in this world and that one day they'll figure into the equation. Hell, they didn't even notice the Arabs. Theirs was "a people without a land going to a land without a people".

Today it's concept of a Jewish state ends up making Tel-Aviv the only modern, westernized city in the world where foreigners are unwanted by law by virtue of their ethnicity rather than citizenship status. A friend of mine sojourning in Berlin writes about the beauty of a Mongolian waitress who served him at a restaurant. This land will be thankfully clean of Mongolian waitresses as soon as they bite the 1000$ bait.

It's time to admit it. Our short-sighted forefathers have created a monster, and we've nourished it and helped it grow. Ours is a country where police will be soon searching for children in attics due to their ethnicity. Today a public debate over the fate of these children is raging, tomorrow the public may internalize the full meaning of the "Jewish state".

Our only hope is to ditch the whole Jewish state concept and replace it with something else, perhaps an "Israeli State", where little Yuval, whose parents speak Tagalog can feel at home. We could also search for some other term, one that would even allow Little Ramzi from Jaffa to feel that his native land embraces him lovingly.

(Artwork: "Roots", an iron sculpture by my mother, Orna Ben-Ami. Photo: A. Hay)

If You're Going to Jerusalem on Foot, Be Sure to Take a Tel-Avivian Duck With You

2010-08-08T15:25:00.023+03:00

The Preparation.

The drying up.

The 5:00 AM streetcorner.

The morning traffic.

The passing under a bridge the most difficult way conceivable because it was Anna's bright idea.

The Anna.

The roadside.

The raspberry juice served by complete strangers.

The right direction.

The snack.

The shofar.

The field where they grow milk containers.

The marshes of despair.

The legs that have just traversed the marshes of despair.

The evening walk.

The haystacks of a new day.

The flower I picked and brought home to Itka.

The laughing Catholic volunteer from Hong Kong named Ting Ting.

The mysterious home by the roadside.

The highway at Bab Al-Wad seen from above.

The yummy grapes.

The Elvis

The ditch I had to walk in.

The cupious amount of trash.

The twighlight in which I found myself again in the ditch.

The only road going into the city that didn't involve walking in a ditch.

The real gate of Jerusalem.

The first image of me in Jerusalem, taken by a little girl named Shoshana.

The arrival of the pilgrim at the temple (the Uganda bar and bookstore) and handing of the offering (Dakka 6 poetry journal).

The end.

BTW, while the title advice stands true. It's also advisable to bring a good friend along. I'm deeply indebted to Anna Wexler who sacrificed the wellbeing of her legs for this.

The story of the pilgrimage will appear in full in the Succot holiday edition of Israel Hayom. For more about the duck and its legendary creator Dudu Geva, read here.

Worse than Jewish

2010-07-31T16:14:00.016+03:00

Thursday night, the Israeli opera performed its rendition of Bizet's "Carmen" at Hayarkon Park. 70,000 culture enthusiasts came to watch poor Corporal Don Jose choose to defect for the love of a cigarette factory girl, only to get dumped for Escamillo the bull-fighter.

The performance was splendid. Rinat Shaham was both intense and precise in the title role. It was as though the open air inspired her to be a more powerful, charismatic Carmen that the one she was at the Tel-Aviv Opera House. Mayor Ron Huldai acted as the evening's MC. While sets were replaced between acts, he filled the audience up on the plot, some which became a little blurry due to cuts and omissions.

Huldai also gave some background on the opera but did not go into analysis and criticism. Thus a very crucial aspect of Carmen did not come up that evening in the park: the fact that it's a work full of ethnic prejudice.

Carmen is based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée. In the prose text, Don Jose is recounting his misadventures to a prison cell-mate. "I should never have gone with such a woman," he tells him. "After all, we all know her kind."

"Is she Jewish?" asks the cell mate.

"Worse," says Don Jose, "She's a Gypsy."

۞

For me as a Jew, it's almost calming to hear that the Roma were considered "worse" than us in Mérimée's 19th century Europe. They certainly are considered "worse" these days. In contemporary Scandinavia, for example, I found that disdain toward the Roma is largely acceptable and may be voiced freely, while antisemitism certainly isn't. Why is that so? Both ethnicities burned shoulder to shoulder in Auschwitz, did they not?

They did, but the Romani historical foundations and political lobbies were never very effective or efficient. This is partially how come French President Nicolas Sarkozy could this week announce his plan to deport all Romas without proper French documents.

Sarkozy, his Minister of the interior, Brice Hortefeux, and the Secretary of State of European Affairs, Pierre Lellouche, claim that French is swamped by Roma who moved in from the most recent EU members in the Balkans, that this had caused a culmination in theft and drug trade.

I don't doubt that Roma culture tolerates petty crime far more than mainstream European culture does, but Sarkozy has far greater thieves to worry about: corporate thieves who steal in a day more that what a Roma settlement would steal in a decade. Besides, even if the Roma are involved in crime, there is no greater crime than to reinforce a damaging stigma placed on a community and deem this community unwanted.

۞

It's sad to see this taking place in France. French Roma are known for being progressive and open. Traveling in rural France I often received lifts from Gypsies, pitched my tent among their trailers in Sts. Maries de la Mer, spoke to them and learned of their world.

Of all Roma societies, this is the one most welcoming to the non-ethnic Roma traveler, providing an alternative for those who couldn't take the burdon of mainstream French life. It's also open to the world - French Manouche Gypsies were the first to integrate western pop music into their musical repertoire. Modern Jazz would be unthinkable without the blessed influence of Django Reinhardt, pictured above.

French Roma had a modernizing influence on their Spanish neighbors and would doubtlessly have a similar effect on Balkan newcomers. By singling those newcomers out, Sarkouzy is causing great damage to their French brethren. He is identifying Gypsies in general as thieves, drug dealers and a burden on society. Worse than Jews? Much worse.

Is it any surprise that this is happening in the one European country where the Roma have become most integrated? The Jewish community of Weimar Germany was more modern and culturally assimilated than any other in Europe. Rather than embrace this, the Germans perceived the Jews as a threat and acted accordingly.

Europeans have portrayed the Roma as a treacherous woman who would pick your wallet or your heart, whichever she gets her hands on first. Gypsies have always been taken for a threat, so legislation against them is almost inevitable, but it is tragic and disgusting nonetheless.

۞

I can't really conclude this without a word about the semi-nomadic people of this land. This passing week. 1,300 Israeli policemen arrived at dawn to the Bedouine village of Al-Arakib, evacuated its hundreds of residents and demolished it entirely. Al -Arakib, a shanty town north of Beer-Sheva, had existed since before the founding of the state of Israel, but it's located within a ring of land around the city which the state wishes to preserve as "Bedouine free".

45 houses were demolished in the village, which means hundreds of homeless souls. The Israeli press paid minimal attention to the event. In the two largest newspapers it recieved no mention at all. In place of Al-Arakib, the Jewish national fund intends to plant a grove of pine.

Frankfurt Dream

2010-07-27T11:06:00.010+03:00

In my dream I was on the tarmac in Frankfurt's airport, gazing through the oval hatch at the air traffic controllers as they perform their elegant dance-of-the-orange-rods before the gargantuan airplanes. I soon got tired and wondered aloud when we would take off. The passenger seated beside me said that we were grounded and I might as well just leave the plane and go for a stroll.

So I walked out of the airport and into a nearby suburb of Frankfurt. It turned out to be an historical town, with quaint streets winding twixt medieval houses. Evening was falling and lights were coming on in the houses. One door was open, letting warm yellow light pour out onto the narrow sidewalk. From within I heard the chatter of young people and the shuffle of kitchenware. I walked in and up a steep staircase, an uninvited guest.

atop the stairs was a corridor running between many doors. Evidently, this was a students' apartment. Several young men and women from around the world walked here and there, speaking English to each other. Some on their way to the kitchen, some to see friends outside. The place seemed to be accustomed to strangers since no one paid me much mind.

Still, I felt uneasy being there. After stopping in the kitchen and chatting with some petite latino girl who was cooking lentils inside a great pot, I left the flat and returned to the street. I walked downhill, searching for river Main and for a glimpse of Frankfurt's famous skyline. The suburb had a modernist center with modest glass highrises and a waterfront cycle lane. at some point the river and the lane separated, the river disappeared among the rushes, and across the dark asphalt of the lane appeared home.

Home: a barren hill of chalk, topped with the separation wall. Mediterranean bushes grew on the slope, climbing over old stone ruins on their way to the concrete crest. The side of the bike lane closer to home was dustier. I was almost tempted to step over it and climb the hill but then stalled and looked back to the suburb of Frankfurt, which was there alright, and looked back to the Jerusalemite hill, which was there alright, and woke up.

(artwork: "Germany and Poland" by Joshua Neustein, taken from the Moonriver's fantastic treasury.)

A Working Class Borough is Something to Be

2010-07-25T12:51:00.027+03:00

The deeper you dig, the closer you come to the bone. Cities will teach you that.

Haifa is a three tiered one: Atop Mt. Carmel are the posh quarters, complete with pretty parks and a cinematheque. Halfway down is Haddar, the city's first "modern hub", mixing urban grit with pleasent residential streets. All the way down is the "Lower City", and that's where the heart is, the rugged, blue collar heart.

Each time I visit this neglected bit of cityscape, I go through something dramatic. My first true venture here was for an article in the Hebrew edition of National Geographic. The editor sent me and Eddy the photographer to seek out the seamen haunts. Is Haifa still a port city in the days of nearly unmanned, mechanized ships, that linger in the harbor for no longer than a day or so? Did it still have taverns? prostitutes? Tattoed nights? We took the train up and descended at the shadow of cranes.

It took us a little while to come up with a positive answer. The bars are hidden, but when you're in them, there's no mistaking them. Old timer Israeli sailors drink arrack and eat salami at the "Habanera", American musclemen, fresh off a cargo ship, gozzled it down at "the anchor", and there was "the Godfather", where Eddy took the sexiest photo ever of a woman smoking. Haifa was drenched with salt water alright.

On my second sojourn here I came with a broken heart. a girl dumped me in Tel-Aviv and I escaped north to ease the pain. I took a bed at the "Port Inn", truly a sweet little hostel, but through an unfortunate fluke got stung by some mysterious insect and spent the night awake, scratching myself, walking the empty, shabby streets and trying to write a love poem that would bring her back.

All I ended up coming with was a blog post about another city and another girl. When morning came, I straddled into old fashioned cafe "Shani" on the main drag, and got served good coffee with the words "good morning" sprinkled on it in cocoa powder, through some kind of a friendly stencil. That made my day. I swore to love Haifa forever, more than any girl, ever!

This weekend, though, I came to Haifa with a girl, so I had to balance my effections out somehow. You see her here standing on the atypically elegant Ben-gurion avenue, with its old houses built by German evangelists in the 19th century.

Never worry. She herself has a romantic history with the city. She and her legendary ex-boyfriend used to frequent a Romanian restaurant called "The fountain of Beer" and feast on its "Kostitza": some sort of a smoked, garlicky concoction of pork that is simply too amazing to describe.

A band was playing old favorites, pleasing the multitude of non-kosher Haifa-ites who croud this place on a Friday.

Since I hummed along, I got to sing into the microphone. You'll notice that I am literally pregnant with the Kostitza. Please don't show this picture to anyone.

This was a great little kickoff to the weekend, and I forgave Itka her nostalgia to the ex-boyfriend, but the streets were beginning to empty and we got worrying that the lower city was not really that great a place in which to pass a shabbat.

I mean, these days even the golden dome of the Baha'i shrine, the ornament of the city, is undergoing renovations.

So we went into the Anchor bar to drink the afternoon away, and met the mayor. Seriously, this is Yona Yahav, the Mayor of Haifa, in a bar.

It's not that romantic actually. You know that I don't have money for vacations. The weekend in Haifa was a work trip, an invitation extended by the municipality in honor of a new play in Haifa's municipal theatre. Mr. Yahav came to greet the culture correspondants. He has an agenda to promote with the press and the Lower City is at the heart of this agenda. There has been a huge investment in trying to beautify this area and bring fresh blood - particularly students, to live here. Yahav showed us a newly paved area between the Anchor bar and the port, and led us into a bustling, if mild-mannered, street party.

It starred the mild-mannered yet legendary trio of Shem-tov Levi, Shlomo Yidov and Yitzhak Klepter.

Yahav's plans for the lower city, which include moving the commercial port east and planting a marina in the current basin, are likable. then again, he should be careful not to over-gentrify this very unique cityscape, which is, in its horizontal way, as multi-tiered as the city itself. It certainly isn't all grit. It's a lovely place to feast, working class style, of course.

It's full of creativity: the graduates' show at the Wizo design academy was mind blowing

and expressed healthy liberalism.

To top it all, relationships between Jews and Arabs here are, if not impeccable, at least better than elsewhere in the country. Haifa knew the pain of the Naqba, but was also always the hotbed of cooperation between the societies, with the internationalist values of the working class helping build bridges. This poster uses the smile of an Arab real estate agent as a "seller" to a Hebrew-reading public. Such things aren't to be taken for granted around these parts.

The Lower City, shyly identified as "Downtown" on the signs, has no reason to feel inferior to the other boroughs and to look up to them. It thrilled me when I sought a thrill, It lifted my spirit when I was down. It's as good as they come. Not every city can be the celestial Jerusalem. I like my terrestrial Haifas served with garlic sauce.

How Shall we Sing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land?

2010-07-21T11:45:00.023+03:00

If there's anywhere that scares Israelis, it's Ramallah.

We have several good reasons not to go to Ramallah, even if we put aside the incident of the year 2000, in which two soldiers who lost their way and wound up here were killed by a mob. That event took place in the height of hostilities, immediately following the death of Mohamed A-Dura in Gaza. Still, it's a precedent, and many people here hate our guts.

So there's one good reason not to visit Ramallah. especially at night. Ramallah is not the capital of streetlights.

A second good reason not to visit Ramallah is that coming here is a criminal offence by Israeli law. No one checks us on the way in but we risk arrest, interrogation and then imprisonment or a heavy fine if caught on the way out. Palestinian police who find us must hand us over to the Istraelis. So that's another good reason not to visit Ramallah, especially if you have a nice Jewish face like mine.

But observe the photo above and you'll find one good reason to visit Ramallah. When was the last time you got served your coke bottle with a straw in it? that is so 1982!

Ramallah retains in it the charm of decades gone by. which is why we just had to come here and attend a Boney M concert. Boney M? You've got to be kidding me! what won't I give to stand with the Palestinian people who've known so much hardship, and sing with them that eternal anthem of oppressed nations:

By the rivers of Ba-ha-bylon (dark tears of Babylon)
Where we sat do-hown (You've got to sing a song)
Yeah-hey we we-hept (sing a song of love)
When we remembered Zi-ha-yon (yeah yeah yeah yeah).

facing all the arguments for not coming was the one decisive argument for coming: Disco!

Boney M were to appear at the open air theatre right outside the Ramallah Cultural Palace.

There were less hijabs to be seen here then on the streets, both because there's something deeply un-Islamic about lines such as "Rasputin, Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine" and because at least 30% of those present were internationals. I did find a few, though, dyed here by a glam boa scarf that someone waved over my lense.

And boy did we ever wave these glam boa scarves. Today's Boney M features only a single member of the original ensemble, the unbelievably energetic and lovely Maizie Williams. she totally justifies using the famous brand and the rest of her team was terrific as well. They strutted their hits: "Daddy Cool", "Sunny", the very applicable "Belfast"...

As well as Boney M's famous cover version of Marley's "No Woman no Cry".

Then suddenly the lights went out.

It was towards the end of "No Woman no Cry." The microphones died too and the band fell silent, but the audience kept singing: Everything's gonna be alright! Everything's gonna be alright!

It took Williams a second to understand that she was faced with the true spirit of Ramallah. If there's any city in the world that's used to the lights going out and knows that everything's gonna be alright, it's here. She returned to the front of the stage and swayed to the chanting.

When the lights returned. Everyone was in full form. and the rest of the evening simply rocked. We had only one major disappointment: Babylon was not sung. I can only assume that the festival organizers banned it for fear that the word "Zion" (as in "Zionism") would offend the audience. Sometimes deeper meanings are lost on people. The crown chanted "Babylon" harder than it chanted "everything's gonna be alright" but to no avail. A token identification with the local struggle was the best we got.

So we went away with dear Palestinian friends we bumped into, looking for somewhere to sit and weep. The best party in Ramallah these days is a house party. Grandma Aniseh died, and her offspring turned her old home into a popping bar: "Aniseh's House".

No one killed us.

No one arrested us.

It was only paying for our Taybeh beers in Sheqels that reminded us the occupation even exists. We pocketed the change and focused on the extraordinary hospitality of our neighbors, easing the shift between the glittery clothes we saw on stage and the uniforms we would meet at the checkpoint later.

Oxymoron City

2010-07-16T19:21:00.030+03:00

On our way to the birthplace of the redeemer, we bumped into a fan of his. Frère Christian was fueling a car belonging to his Trappist monetary. The contrast between his robe and the Renault was the first of many on our excursion. In fact, sharp contrasts and dichotomies would turn out to be a staple of the trip. Welcome to oxymoron country.

Take the contrast between the open countryside and the many walls running through it. This one isn't even the famous "separation Wall". It's another wall, shielding a road used mostly by settlers from Palestinian houses.

We were going to Bethlehem because such walls haunt my dreams. A short while ago I was in Beit Jala to watch the World Cup semi-finals screened on the separation wall. Afterward I found myself waking each morning with troubling visions of barriers and gates on my mind. I had to come and see what Beit Jala was like during the day.

I also wished to experience once more the intense feeling of being an illegal. As an Israeli, my government strictly forbids me from visiting any Palestinian city and returning to Israel through the checkpoints demands know-how and cunning. The experience of being only a few meters away from a home I may not easily reach was intense (though all ended well, thanks to the help of a few kind smugglers). Going through all of that through a few hours of a dark night, on which none of the world across the wall could be seen, left a mark on me. I had to come back for closure.

We took a tricky path in and were back in Beit Jala, where the contrast of the Jacir Intercontinental hotel and a distant Israeli watchtower greeted us.

This time, Itka and Ben couldn't come. Instead I was with Bea, who rears from the tiny princedom of Lichtenstein, and Ron, who rears from the slightly larger land of Israel. We came to the place where the game was screened. The screen was still there, along with the restaurant's menu, providing another peculiar combination.

I could see over the wall this time, there were other walls there.

It was the walls proximity to the town that shocked me so much on the initial visit. As Israelis, if we get to see the wall at all, we see it from afar. Here it's part of the urban fabric.

It's so much a part of life, some people find it funny.

Having taken it all in, we went on towards central Bethlehem, the city to which Beit Jala is a suburb. New contrasts abounded. The palestinian cityscape as seen through the windshield vs. our Israeli parking sticker stuck on it.

The old Arab city

Vs. the new Israeli settlement of Har Homa, across the valley and the wall from it.

The abundance of the market

vs. the empty shopping mall, a true indicator of the state of Bethlehem's economy. The only stores open offered overpriced goods for tourists. all prices were in U.S. dollars.

There was also the quaintness of the renovated central district

vs. the rustic outskirts.

And finally, the size of a normal human being vs. the doorway of the Church of Nativity.

Now that we mixed into the tourist crowd, I can show the faces of my brother and sister in crime.

All of us enjoyed the best of Bethlehem, its peculiar architecture,

its amazing children

its striking street names

its perfect kebabs, consumed at a hole in the wall restaurant with the best ceiling ever

and the company of Mohamed, a local zucchini farmer/real estate agent who joined us out of nowhere and chatted with us for nearly an hour.

We also all enjoyed the thrill of succesfully breaking back out to our side of the wall. I felt much better following this visit. The light of day changes everything.

The return to Israel of course provided the most intense contrast of the day. We drove directly across Jerusalem to the Hebrew University atop Mt. Scopus where graduates of the Betzal'el art school showed their final project in a massive exhibition. I found much of the stuff to be worthwhile.

In one of the corridors, guest of the exhibition were encouraged to participate in the exhibition by letting their creativity go wild.

I couldn't help but offer what was on my mind.

Ignoranceright

2010-07-13T15:06:00.010+03:00

We had a lovely couchsurfer stay over for two nights. Leora is an American art student who's just been through a "Birthright" trip and needed to recuperate before heading on a journey through Europe.

Leora is intelligent. She's seen something of this world, having moved away from her New Jersey home to the very unJerseylike mountains of North Carolina. She's creative and special and she's here to explore and learn. I would expect a person like this to benefit from a Birthright trip, as uncomfortable as I may be with the concept.

What makes me uncomfortable? According to the organization's website "Taglit-Birthright Israel provides the gift of first time, peer group, educational trips to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26." The youths are flown for free and journey Israel from a Zionist perspective. I have nothing against a Zionist perspective, its a legitimate perspective held by my very beloved parents.

Maybe it's just the name "birthright" that bothers me. A Jewish youth who's never been to Israel can arrive here and become a full citizen in a matter of weeks, while people born on this soil, whose great great grandparents were born here, are denied basic rights. Birth doesn't count for much in Israel, Ethnic background does.

Leora has the right Ethnic background to enjoy Birthright, yet she emerged from the adventure full of doubt. While having lunch together on Ben-Yehuda st. she asked me to give her my own angle to the history of this country. I started talking and soon found out I had to explain everything. She's never heard of the war of 1948, nor of the war of 1967. She did not know about the existence of the separation wall. They somehow managed to hide that eight meter tall atrocity from the eyes of the travelers.

At one point I brought up Bedouins. "Do Bedouins still exist?" Leora asked.

"They do." I said.

"We went into this tent and were served coffee by 'Bedouins', but I wasn't sure they weren't some kind of an historical people."

"Oh, they really exist, though the map won't tell you that. Most local Bedouins live in shanty towns in the desert, but these towns are "unrecognized" by the state, so they don't get connected to water or electricity." I asked to have a look at Leora's map, and pointed the area around Beer-Sheva, mostly blank of names. "This area isn't really empty. It's one of the most densely populated parts of the country, but the state wishes these people weren't there, so it pretends they're not there."

Oh, and if we have to admit they're there, why not present them as a Biblical-style people that pours coffee to Jews? I was beginning to lose my wits. Had Birthright been presented on the onset as an opputunity for Jewish girls to develop crushes on the armed bodyguards escorting them through the country, that's one thing. But the website does use the word "educational."

It's only "educational" if an effort isn't made to conceal any difficult truth, just as it's only a "democracy" if everyone gets equal rights.

"Do Bedouins serve in the Army?" Leora asked.

"They often do. They're considered excellent trackers."

"And yet they don't get water to their towns."

"Well, not to all their towns." I didn't want to fall into the Birthright trap and start telling things from a one sided perspective.

Nevertheless, I would love to see a birthright tour visit a Bedouin town like Rahat, pictured below, that is indeed connected to water. I would love to see the guide point out the poverty and decrepit infrastructure and then tell them this: "The money that could have made this place acceptable is used for the immigration grants of middle-class North Americans like yourselves."

I would love to hear him tell them to feel free and decide whether or not they wish to live in this country, but whatever the case, they must work to better it, to make it fair to all, because right now this isn't the case.

Away Game

2010-07-08T10:33:00.020+03:00

There's a place in east Jerusalem where the ramparts of the old city are only a few meters tall. A steep bluff renders scaling them difficult, but not impossible. I often dreamed of giving it a shot. Living in this country does that to the spirit. you see a wall, you want to get past it.

There are plenty such walls to work the imagination. Last night, for example, we took a bus from a terminal directly across that bluff to the town of Beit Jala - a neighborhood of Bethlehem. Beit Jala lies immediately across the separation wall from Jerusalem, which means Israeli law forbids us Israelis from entering it. There will be no checking of documents on the way in, but there should be on the way out. We haven't yet figured out a plan of how to dodge it. We risk arrest and interrogation leading to a fine of several thousand sheqels, but we just have to try. There's a wall there, you see.

Also, there was a game to be watched there, a football match. Friends belonging to the American and European journalist community let us know of a special event: A Beit Jala restaurant is to screen the world-cup semi-finals on the wall itself. Ben, Itka and myself decided to head down after a long workday. Neither of them has been in the Bethlehem area before. I visited it often in the 90s, before the seperation became definite. I had only faint recollections and was awed by the city that greeted us, with its fine exteriors

and interiors

All of which are now surrounded by the most insanely opressive prison wall.

Construction of the separation wall began following the second intifada. Israelis were told that it would reduce terrorism within Israel and thus many, progressive, human-rights minded Israelis, scared to death following a wave of bombings, supported its construction. Guess what? there really is less terrorism inside Israel. Guess what again: the wall isn't the reason for that. There are ways to bypass it (as we will prove later in the night, by being easily smuggled into Israel). If terrorism receded, it is thanks to a changed political situation and and a temporary, undeclared ceasefire. This ceasefire began before the wall was built, with the "Hudna" ending the second Intifada.

Moreover, the wall works on terrorism in the same way a dirty band-aid works on an open wound. For the time being it may trap some of the blood flow, but ultimately is infects the area, making things much worse. Imagine growing up at the shadow of this monster. What would you think of those who trapped you and your family? What sort of fate would you wish for them? and if an organization supported by God himself offered to provide them with a punishment, with your kind help, would you not offer your hips to the explosive belt?

The answer depends on one's mental condition. Palestinians across the wall are working hard to keep their mental condition good and avoid violent thoughts. The owners of the Bahamas restaurant in Beit Jalla are looking for advantages in the wall. For starters - it's a great place to post their menu.

Where do they get mussels? every single mussel in the world is to be found on the other side of this wall.

Anyway, the real talk of the town, every town on earth, from Beit Jalla to all the settlements surrounding it, was about another mussel: the Spanish Mussel eaten by Paul the oracle octopus, predicting a Spanish win in the game. Over a hundred people gathered outside the Bahamas to see whether Paul was correct. About half of them were Palestinians, the other half - foreign journalists and diplomats stationed in Jerusalem. For the most part we felt comfortable saying we're Israelis and using our given names, a bit less comfortable admitting we support Germany. The public in Beit Jalla was overwhelmingly pro-Spain.

Some supporters of Spain brought an authentic Vuvuzela.

As You may have heard, Paul was right. This photo, taken during the first half of the game, is the last image of me smiling.

I actually stopped smiling well before the final whisle was blown. During halftime I took a short walk in the vicinity of the restaurant and discovered this: a house surrounded by the wall on three sides. This family, who built its home with a view to the hills and to Jerusalem, found itself imprisoned for no fault of its own. The concrete is only a physical manifestation of the humiliation and intimidation these people have suffered by the occupiers, by us.

After seeing that, the Spanish could win and the Germans could grill their octopus for all I cared. It'll take a long time till football will actually matter for anything in this world.

The Wall

2010-07-06T19:26:00.011+03:00

A group of activists armed with spray cans marched last week in Warsaw in protest of the Gaza blocade. Among them were Palestinians, Poles, Israelis, and one celebrity: Israeli peace activist and former fighter pilot Jonathan Shapira.

Shapira first gained fame for refusing to bomb Palestinian targets from the air. He later became even better known as the protagonist of a pop song. His classmate, singer Aya Corem, authored a funny hit about her old crush for him. One line of the song sets Shapira apart from all other, run of the mill, members of the male species:

Mom Always says: all men are the same
One goes today, another will come tomorrow.
But mom never met Jonathan Shapira.

Oh, if mother only knew what Jonathan Shapira does where grandmother was starved and enslaved. At the end of their march, the activists performed an unexpected act of provocation: they sprayed grafitti on remains of the old ghetto's walls with the statement: "Free all ghettos, Free Gaza".

Organizations of Holocaust survivors were outraged, calling for Shapira to visit Yad Vashem and "get his history straight". Their idea of course is that Jerusalem's (truly incredible) Holocaust museum will teach him how much worse the Holocaust was than the occupation and make him rethink his deeds.

I doubt that Yad Vashem would do the trick. Personally, I come out of every visit to the place with a sense of double loss. I lost a great number of family members in the Holocaust, only to witness my nation lose it's moral path.

We, the Jewish people, have a great responsibility and privilege. As those who witnessed and suffered such horrors, we can be a beacon unto the nations and shine the light of human rights around the world. We have forsaken this responsibility, this privilege. Instead of caring for everybody, we decided to care for ourselves. Rather than making sure such thing will never happen again, we are making sure such things will never happen again to us.

Of course the Holocaust was worse than the occupation, much, much worse. Of course the holocaust and the occupation have things in common, many, many things. The wall of the Warsaw Ghetto has everything to do with the fence surrounding the Gaza strip. Ignoring that is akin to disrespecting the memory of the Holocaust's victims. pointing it out is fulfilling their legacy. Their loss can and must teach us to be humane towards each other, to shun state propaganda, to promote personal dignity and liberty to all and not to stand by when someone near us is suffering.

Their loss left us with a disaster that we must learn from. It's too bad mother never met Jonathan Shapira. Mother has a lot to learn from such an individual, one who keeps his eyes open and his compassion strong despite our horrible national PTSD. Of course there is no comparing to the Holocaust, but if we do not draw analogies from history we're doomed to repeat it every day, never mind on what scale.

Those who fear that Shapira's act is defaming the Jewish people and wronging the memory of six million victims should make absolutely sure they are not doing so themselves by supporting Israel's various policies. I understand their sensitivity and I respect it, but I am saddened by the immunity to the suffering of others that such sensitivity produced.

I'm glad that it did not have this effect on all hearts, and that a few are willing to make a stand. A simple sand cannon can clean the graffiti and return the Warsaw wall to its original condition. It'll take much more to make that wall as irrelevant as we wish it were.

(Top image shows grafitti found in the vicinity of Hebron.)

Utah

2010-07-04T16:21:00.011+03:00

For want of fireworks to stare at, I spend the 4th of July reminicing of my American years. There were nearly seven such years, split about half and half between two major cities of the East: Boston and DC.

In between I managed to slip nearly six months in a more exotic location: Salt Lake city, Utah. My ex-wife was a Salt-Laker and indeed a Mormon when I met her (she later left the church, a difficult and intense process). Her family all lived on the Wasatch front and we visited it often. I spent one entire winter there, one entire summer, plus many a Christmas and, well, 4ths of July.

Each 4th, a traditional picnic was held on Lin's grandparents' deck. We had burgers and green Jello pie (a local delicacy) on paper plates decorated with the star spangled banner. more stars and stripes were hanging from the trees. The house itself was full of pictures of WWII fighter planes, a hobby of Granpa's. On the floor was a furry rug about a meter deep. These were the most foreign surroundings in which a non-American can find himself. Blues dens in Mississippi slums are tuned into tourist haunts, a suburban SLC backyard never is.

The great majority of people on the deck were Republican and Mormon. Republicans were extra confident and talkative during the Bush years. Mormons, on the other hand, are secretive. Their religion cannot be discussed openly or in depth with an outsider since it features ineffable teachings, secret temple ceremonies et al.

This combination of the outspoken and unspoken complicated our visits to Lin's family. There were so many words I couldn't say: "Shit", "John Kerry", "The Celestial Room", "Abu Ghraib"... even "Oh my God!" is considered taboo in Utah-LDS culture. There was no alcohol in any of the starred and striped cups to help me face the challenge, nor even coffee.

I must admit, I loved it.

I loved Utah, I still adore it. It's the best place I lived in the States. Those mountains that grow directly out of the city, the broad streets, the drama of the west, and that of a split society: 50% devout, 50% irreverent. I loved the family too, it was warm and generous and made up of the most spectacular individuals. They accepted me so beautifully despite my being a gentile (this is the exact word Mormons use). A heathen married their offspring, depriving her of the right to the celstial kingdom, and yet they loved me and lavished green Jello on me.

Sometimes a place that seems the most wrong for us, is just right. The places in America I miss the most are not necessarily the progressive streets of Cambridge, MA. They are often places that challenged me as a liberal, a foreigner, an Urbanite. If I could make it across the room through that thick rug, I could make it across the nation and truly know its many realities.

Cookies

2010-06-30T11:56:00.013+03:00

Coffee dehydrates, must drink water. Water's boring, I shift to Coke. Coke dehydrates, I feel tired, drink some coffee, cycle resumes.

Jewish mourning traditions are wonderful, they really are. I even like our coffinless funerals that involve no beautification of death. Jews are buried in shrouds, the shape of the corpses clearly visible. The dead is dumped into the grave rather than lain into it. Before the act, the rabbi reads a line of the Mishnah: "Know where you came from and where you are headed, and to whom you will need to explain your deeds. Where you came from: a smelly drop. Where you are headed: the place of gravel, insects and worms. To whom you will need to explain your deeds: to the king of the kings of kings." Merciless? indeed. Poetic? 100%.

I also like the "shiva", the seven days of community mourning, during which the family receives guests and the memory of the lost one is recreated in conversation. I like it - in theory. In practice, it's exhausting. We are at my uncle and aunt's place in a northern suburb of the city. There's a long wooden table in the back yard, an espresso machine and plenty of good cookies. On the third day of the shiva, I'm completely choked with cookies. We're all bound to gain a few pounds thanks to this tradition. Indeed, we risk being soon afflicted with atherosclerosis and getting dumped into the place of gravel, insects and worms.

Ours is not a very traditional shiva. We eat warm food. We sit on normal chairs rather than low stools. We bathe and shower through this week. We do not observe the ban on leather shoes or jewlery. The mirrors in the house are not covered (by far Judaism's spookiest custom), but my grandmother is sitting there in the shirt she wore at the funeral, with its collar that was torn by the rabbi. It's truly a heartbreaking sight. She will continue to wear this shirt throughout the weeklong observence. The shiva doesn't let her nor us forget for a moment how much her life just changed. This is its purpose, this is its curse.

A very different challenge of the shiva is the "bar-mitzvah effect". I happen to suffer from mild prosopagnosia - a neurological condition impending recognition of people by their faces. My bar mitzvah was an absolute nightmare. I knew nobody there. My grandfather's shiva is even harder. At least at 13 I was quite sure everyone was there for me. I was supposed to recognize them, so a friendly smile and feigned recognition were always in order. Here many people have no idea who I am, others are my direct uncles. I do my best not to mix them up, and fail.

But there's a lot of love going around here. My aunt warmly hugs her two ex husbands to the astonishemnt of all, old friends of my folks appear at the door, thrilling them with their presence. My grandfather left behind a rich life story, fit to fuel many a conversation. The way he died, calmly and painlessly after having a beer and watching the England-Germany match, gives a great little story with which to break the ice. His last phone call, ten minutes before his heart failed, involved a detailed critique of the English team's disastrous loss, so we even get to talk about the world cup. I just hope Wayne Roony knows to whom he needs to explain his deeds the day he kicks the Bucket. Shimon Yaar is waiting for him up there with a dish of fresh cookies and a few tough questions.

In Memoriam Saba Shimon

2010-06-28T10:01:00.011+03:00

Last winter, when traveling with a friend to the outskirts of Berlin, we passed by the city's monumental Olympic stadium, built by the Nazis in the thirties. Suddenly I was stirred by a memory. "You know," I told her, "This is the place my grandfather wanted to visit more than anything else, and couldn't."

In 1936 Shimon Waldman was a champion long distance runner, competing all over the Middle East. He was accepted to the olympics, but then Hitler decreed that no Jews could participate and my grandfather was forced to stay at home. Throughout his life he kept a clipping from a Berliner Jewish newspaper. The headline reads: "Waldman Kommt nach Berlin!" Waldman is coming to Berlin, a celebrity, a power to contend with.

My friend took a photo of me running in front of the stadium, symbolically fulfilling that old aspiration. Unlike my grandfather, who passed away last night, I'm a slow enough runner to be caught by a cheap lens. The Athletic skill was not something I inherited, but I'd like to think that he did bequeath the athletic spirit to all of us.

Berlin's stadium was the only place my grandfather wanted to go to and failed. No other destination was unattainable, be it the finish line, a high rank (he was an officer in the British Army's Jewish Brigade and later the chief of Israel's military police), faraway lands like Peru, the ripe age of 96 or a home he dreamed of. He dreamed of quite a few and moved again and again, so besides the determination I should also credit him for the travel-bug-gene.

After WWII, still in British uniform, my grandpa visited Rome and happened to be on St. Peter's square when Pope pius XII came out to greet the multitudes. My grandfather did not bow as the others. Religion meant less than nothing to him, but he remembered that Jews were not supposed to bow before a human being and that fit well with his stubborn, irreverent spirit.

The Pope approached the only man on the square left standing, noticed the symbol of the Jewish Brigade on his shoulder, and said to him in Hebrew: יברכך ה' וישמרך - may God bless you and protect you, the opening words of Judaism's most potent benediction.

A man who's gutsy enough to stay standing has little need for God's protection. A determined human being fulfills his own wishes. The night my grandfather met my grandmother he returned to barracks and told his fellow officers: "Tonight I met the woman I'll marry." Sure enough, the beautiful Malka Shtul was to be by his side for life. This life ended last night, but the determination remains in us, a very fine gift indeed.

Germans

2010-06-26T15:56:00.016+03:00

The first time I ever met a German, I slept with her, or rather - next to her. I had no choice. I was 18 years old and trapped on a chilly mountaintop on the island of Crete. With me was a Geordie chap my age named Alex, whom I met on the ferry over. We missed the last bus descending to the valley and ended up building a campfire not far from two blond girls who were putting up a tent.

Finally we amassed the courage, invited them to sit by our fire and in return received an invitation to sleep the night in their tent. The chill was intensifying as we entered, they saved our lives, no less. I lay by the chubby one, careful not to disrespect my hostess despite the narrow space. She giggled through the night in her sleep, as sweet a person as I've ever known.

Hitler came up the next morning, as we all descended into the gorge of Samaria. I think I brought him up. I've been bringing him up since when meeting Germans, an act that simultaneously breaks and forms the ice. Ultimately, young Germans and young Israelis are like-minded about history, although I did find a few of my German friends to be undereducated about it. I would use German terms such as "Einsatzgruppen" (SS death squads, responsible for systematic massacres) and notice a raised brow. My teachers taught it, theirs didn't.

Then again, you speak to young Israelis about the massacre of Kafar Qasem, inspired by the same Einsatzgruppen, and recieve a similar raised brow. We never like to look at our own faults, but we do like to look at the faults of others and in that Germany is an underprevilaged nation. While all of Europe is taking the case of the Palestinians and faces Israel with hard questions, the Germans are forced to go easy on us. No one likes to have "Look who's talking" thrown in their faces.

This isn't a new story, of course. I heard that journalists who get a job with "Bild", Europe's most succesful tabloid, published in Berlin, must sign a form stating they will never write anything critical of Israel. These days, as international media screams in joyful rage, Bild journalists must be tearing their hair out much of the time.

The Bild is unhelpful, but in general the German media's dillema is a good thing. Bereft of the mandate to be unreasonable, it must be mature in its treatment of Israel. Those who read my blog regularly know exactly how much I encourage criticism of Israel, but if it isn't fair it's not pragmatic. Germany is a country that can produce mature, helpful criticism at this time, and I hope it picks up the glove and does so.

Not only the press is influential. Last night I had an astounding theatrical experience. Frankfurt's Mousonturm theatre brought to Tel-Aviv it's production of "My First Sony", a theatrical interpertation of a Hebrew novel by Benny Barbash. The director, Stephane Bittoun, is German-Jewish. He staged a terrificaly subtle presentation of one Israeli family's decomposition, one that is so humorous and elegant one doesn't quite understand how come it moves us to tears. This is the greatness of German theatre since Brecht. It does not seek to emulate life, thus it is life.

All the family's misadventures are recorded by one of the children on a primitive tape recorder. The entire play is a record of things that have been, which is what our present is due to become. Bittoun's all German crew treat Israel's enormously complex present with a mix of courage and elegance. Everything is there, the settlements, the Einsatzgruppen, the emotionality of being Israeli.

Itka and I were standing outside the Kameri theatre, wiping tears from our eyes. "My First Sony" was a promise. There's a culture besides our own that shares our history and has the capacity to contribute to our future. It's endowed with the sensativity to see what's happening here and the responsibility to treat it tastefully, carefully, maturely. I wouldn't expect much from "Bild", but other Berliners can be true allies to all of us here, Israelis and Palestinians alike.

I take that promise seriously and am glad for it. Hence, I will be rooting for Germany on Sunday as it faces England at the world cup. Somewhere out there, my kind German host from that Cretan mountaintop will be cheering along.

(Image on top is of my dear friends in Berlin-Neukölln, twin city to Bat-Yam, Israel.)

Caught in Candyland

2010-06-23T22:34:00.020+03:00

Once again I'm taking a photo of myself in the mirror of some lonely hotel room.

This time outside the window is a particularly mundane suburb of a particularly mundane city: Zurich.

Coincidentally, a few weeks ago I published here a post entitled “Föhn” It was all about Switzerland and how much I like it. I started it by wondering how come I've been dreaming so much of Switzerland recently, and really I have. That post did not contain a word about Zurich. Nor did I dream of Zurich, ever.

Not that it's not a pretty town, in its prosaic way

It's just too goddamn clean

No one would argue this, whether or not this is the home of the Dadaist movement, Zurich is just too clean and settled in its ways. You can even walk out of it into perfectly serene nature in a short stroll. I am only in the city for 24 hours. It's just not right that I was able to take these photos a short stroll away from the hotel:

Zurich makes me miss Israel/Palestine for how boring it is. I need action. Why in the name of the almighty Alpine God Toblerone did my workplace choose to send me here? They just sent somebody else to Istanbul to write of the anti-Israeli sentiment there. Here I can't even sense any such sentiment. Everyone is extremely sweet. Why did they sand me to candyland, where even the terrine is crowned with redcurrants and a pretty peach?

The answer is simple and tragic: They sent me to review a Rod Stewart concert.

Rod Stewart, there's a Zuricher rock star for ya, as safe as a stroll up the Banhoffstrasse. I miss the war! I miss the occupation! I miss the rise of fascism! I make a vow. If nothing saucy happens to me on my single evening in town, I'll never travel again to any city that's not been demolished at least once.

The early evening doesn't carry much promise. Myself and another journalist arrive at the venue, a hockey stadium, to review it. Then word's out on 2 things.

1. The journalists are extended a rare backstage invitation. The Danish producer Lars seems to have taken to us.

2. Frida from Abba is in the building.

We both head directly back to the catering hall, and witness a birthday surprise, presented to a crew member.

We also meet a few legendary musicians who are in Stewart's band, among them David Palmer, formerly with The The, and guitar hero Paul Warren.

We have a delightful dinner featuring local delicacies that really stink up the room.

Having digested, we meet Stewart himself. I recently published a post in support of artists who join the BDS and cancel their Israeli shows. When I interviewed Warren over the fondue, he drew a comparison between appearing in Israel today and in South Africa during the eighties. He himself played Sun City with Tina Turner at the time and said he felt “uncomfortable”. He added that Turner herself later came to the conclusion that she's made a mistake.

I ask Stewart about his choice to hit town at this time. “I have a contract and I intend to respect it,” he said, “A deal's a deal.”

A deal's a deal and a show's a show. His concert is rockier than I had expected, an extremely happy event.

I leave with “I am sailing” on my lips, trying hard not to think of flotillas. Backstage, the artists are preparing to leave for Germany that same night. I have to discover nocturnal Zurich on my own, if it indeed exists.

Here's a guy with dreadlocks. He tells me to go to “El Lokal”, on Gasner Alee. I take the train down. Young people are sitting outside by picnic tables, drinking homemade brew. The atmosphere reminds me of the Minzar. Not bad, but I have a Minzar at home.

Then comes my streak of luck.

They are not Swiss, though that would make for a better story. The girl is German, a doctor of virology. The guys are both Canadian tattoo artists. I bum a cigarette off them at El Lokal. They are on their way out, things were being to mild there.

The doctor leads the way. She leads us west.

Soon we are walking down streets lined with gray buildings, shabbier than anything I'd seen in Switzerland before. Alternative types, my favorite crowd, spill out of the many nightspots.

The first bar we enter has an altar with botanica candles.

The second one is further west, on a street filled with buxom prostitutes, drunken laughter, the sweet smell of weed and that of cheap grilled meat. We have reached Beauerstrasse in west Zurich, the city's street of shame. It too is lined with some smashingly urban alternative bars. Here is the scene, and the scene is rough and real.

Not being a fan of prostitution, I never plan to wax poetic about a city's red light district, but in the case of Zurich, it's seeing the dark side that gives the bright side meaning. Perhaps no place is incomplete if you just take the time to dig an inch underneath its surface. Who knows what tattoo artist you'd find there.

highway 13

2010-06-20T09:35:00.026+03:00

Despite a terrible bad back that kept her in bed for nearly a week, Itka joined me in Dimona. I went down to write about the surprising cultural revival in that dusty desert town. She needed a cure. "I think my back pain is a result of too much city tension." she said. "I need to go over the mountains and relax."

I empathized. I too needed to escape the familiar reality, catch a bit of dry desert air, be in a land without people. Recent events have turned me into a misanthrope. How unbelievably sad. We decided to catch a lift off of Dimona's plateau down to the Dead Sea and indulge in its bromide-rich air. Bromide in small quantities acts as a relaxant.

I took on the load as we left Dimona

The first lift took us to the very middle of nowhere,

though in a way we were in a very famous spot, only several electrical fences away from Israel's secluded nuclear reactor, which generates no elecricity (any better photo than this one could get me into serious trouble).

The second car was driven by a guy who's been living in the desert for four years now. Most of the time he spent in a secluded inn called "The Ashram". "I went there one day to fill up on water and stayed for years." He said.

Itka liked that. "I need a hippy environment" she said. The Ashram was in the very south of the Negev, 80 kilometers north of Eilat. the driver explained its location. We were to travel another 100 kilomerets south of where he left us, then turn right from the main road to a tiny road, then left to another, tinier road, then we're there. Trying to hitchhike to a place like that seemed like lunacy, but the lady with the aching back has made her request. On we rolled.

Two hours later, in the heat of the afternoon, we reached the first of the two turns. Highway 13 leads from nowhere to nowhere. we waited there for an hour or so. nothing happened.

Bored with all the gravel, she put her scarf over her head and asked: "would you have picked me up?"

I said: "Yes, if I were Marcello Mastroianni."

Finally we gave up and headed north. The first guy to give us a lift was a hardcore settler from the environs of Hebron. He was dressed in an orange shirt, a remnant of his days in the rebel movement opposing the evacuation of settlers from Gaza. he told us he was jailed at the time.

He really was a very nice chap, a lettuce farmer. We avoided the political stuff for an hour or so, then tones rose over the imprisonment of Ashkenazi ultraorthodox parents who wouldn't send their daughters to study with Sepharadic girls. thankfully this is when we reached the intersection: west to the West Bank, East to the Dead Sea. No time to discuss Baruch Goldstein.

The next car was driven by a mixed couple, and Arab man and a Jewish woman. This was the first time in my life i've ever met such a couple. I'm 34.

The couple took us to the Dead Sea's patch of luxury hotels. I was worried for my girl's back and wanted to check about prices. Could I spoil her? However, the heat had drained me and I ended up slumping on a bench in the midst of this peculiar oasis, drinking an ice coffee. She's the one who ended up asking around for room prices. None fell below the 1000 Sheqel mark. Insanity.

At least we knew of a youth hostel 30 kilometers up the road. A lighting engineer of children's theatre took us there in his shiny new Masda (he freshly divorced, and the car was his "gift to himself").

The place turned out to be full of automatic weapons. Some army commanders' course took over it for the weekend. There was no room left for us. We relaxed a bit on the balcony, right next to the Israeli version of an AK 47 (forgive me for not being better versed in the names of our weapons), then went to dip in the vaseline-like water.

By the time we stepped out, dusk has fallen.

We desperately needed a place to stay. North of Ein Gedi and up the mountain is another hostel, called "Metzokei Dragot". Neither of us had ever visited it. We found the number and were told by Eddy, the warden, that he'll be glad to pick us up from the main road and bring us to the crest.

We waited for Eddy at the intersection. It just happens to be the same spot where the road going along the Dead Sea leaves Israel and enters the West Bank.

The road up to Metzokei Dragot, at the top of a nearly vertical cliff overlooking the Dead Sea, winds sharply for about six kilometers in the dark. At the top is a military base with a massive antena and a small, fenced holiday village. The rooms were not to our liking, small spartan and asbestos roofed, each with three tiny single beds. None of them was worth the money charged by Eddy.

We offered to pay him for his trouble and gas if he drove us back down. Eddy refused. We asked about tents, knowing the place offered a few. Eddy said he didn't want to go into the trouble of setting one up for us. "I did my job. I'm done," he said.

What to do now? I was willing to take the blow, pay what he asked and give my woman rest for her vertebrae, but she wouldn't hear of it. "We're outa here," she said, and headed for the gate.

So there we were in the middle of the desert, walking down a steep road by the light of the moon. The heat of the day gave way to a magnificent dry breeze, we were cracking jokes about Eddy and about life, having a wonderful time all in all, until Itka remembered the leopards.

"What if a leopard springs at us?" she asked.

"I think you need to be a rodent or a fox to worry about that. they're not huge leopards around here."

"What about Hyenas?"

"I think they're only found north of Jericho."

"Why do you just think all these things? why aren't you sure of them?"

"Darling, I wouldn't really worry about Hyenas so much as I would about your back. It's 22:00 and you've been zigzagging around this entire country the whole day. Aren't you crippled already?"

She wasn't. in fact, her back didn't ache at all anymore. The adventure cured her.

We had to draw several conclusions:

1. Adventure can cure backache, at least in certain people.

2. Meandering for an entire day, crossing hundreds of miles without reaching a single destination is the best way to travel.

3. There's no escaping Israel. Even as you go into the emptiest portions of it, the settler from Atniel will be there, as will the reactor, the checkpoint and the guns. A group of Eddy's guests who witnessed the scandal came by to give us a lift down the hill. They spoke of the fotilla and said all its passengers should have been shot on the onset.

4. Bromide really works. We didn't get mad when our benefactors suggested the mass killing of hundreds. We didn't get mad when they spoke racistly about Bedouins, desert souls who would never have kicked us into the night as their Israeli host did. They described all Bedouins as rapists and killers, then called us: "rapist huggers".

We kept our calm.

We didn't get mad after returning to the roadblock, seeing Arab families with yellow license plates turned back at the roadblock, not permitted to reach Ein Gedi.

We didn't get mad seeing Palestinians youths who came to camp on the shore harassed by the soldiers. For once we were too stoned by peculiar minerals and tired to care.

We got a lift directly back to Tel-Aviv with two French tourists, watching the lights grow more and more numerous around us with every turn.

Pushing "Stop"

2010-06-15T17:09:00.011+03:00

At last I can afford to buy tickets to shows of visiting music stars. This is because they are sure to be canceled and the money is sure to be refunded. The cultural embargo on Israel has begun, and boy is it shaking us up.

I enjoy these little dramas the same way as I do the current World Cup matches - from afar. I read that the Pixies are coming. I read that a ticket to the Pixies show will cost over 400 sheqels. I read that the Pixies canceled their show. I read that the public is in an uproar.

Last night I read that Denvedra Banhart also canceled his show, appearently because eager Zionists were making him out to be "the Israel lover" for choosing to come after all, and he wasn't too pleased with being politicized (This is implied in his apology to his Israeli audience. A recent tel-Aviv concert by British indie band "Placebo" is said to have been turned into a nationalist rally, complete with flags and chants). Israeli fans find it hard to internalize that choosing to perform here is just as political an act as choosing not to. We have a lot to learn and local media will teach us none of it.

You should have seen my Facebook page last night, it's even more full of freak-folk-freaks than of people appreciating the ingenuity of Elvis Costello. "Devendra Benhart, You broke my heart" one writes. I hastened to comment: "It's Ehud Barak who broke your heart, honey. Keep your eyes on the money."

Israeli fans of those foreign stars, many of them educated urbanites, have a huge power to promote change in this country. an embargo by, say, the Coca Cola company, which caters to all, may produce public unrest that could promote reactionary forces in Israel's politics (as if those need any more promotion) but the artist embargo touches on the lives of dormant liberals, those who could make a difference but are too busy DJing.

That The cancellations shake them up, that's evident, Will they eventually take their anger to the streets of Sheikh Jarrakh and cause something to actually change? It's worth a shot. My impression is that the Tel-Avivian hipsters can no longer pretend that everything is just fine, and that's an important thing.

It's now important to help them focus their anger on the government rather than on the artists. That shouldn't be too hard. They love these artists, these artists break their hearts. Folks, mend this country and your hearts will be mended. You've got to fight the occupation for your right to party.

If you live here and side with me on this, make sure you make your voices heard. Open up the eyes of upset music lovers to their call to action. Soon we may be dancing again.

Get Thee to a Nunnery

2010-06-14T01:05:00.019+03:00

I've been very negative recently. I would like to write about something good, something indisputably good. I can only think of one such thing: The Minzar.

Is it the best bar in the world? Is it, rather, the most boring default destination for when nobody knows where to go? A true Tel-Avivian hears the words: "So let's just go to the Minzar" at least twice a week. Nevertheless, I opt for the first definition. The Minzar is the best bar in the world. The Minzar is the best place in this city. The Minzar is home. The Minzar is mother, ok, I'm getting carried away. No more Taybe on tap for me.

Let's tell this story as a story should be told, lets begin with once upon a time.

Once upon a time, in an ancient eon called the early 90s, when Sheinkin St. was still the hub of the dangerous, black clad bohemia, there were three bars worth mentioning in the city. The first was called the "Gloola" (pill) the second the "Midbar" (desert) and the third was the "Minzar" (Monastery or abbey).

I got to sip my first underage beer at the Gloola. My friend summoned the guts and asked some girl with black nail polish to buy us two pints. He called her "auntie", as that was the quaint slang of those bygone days "Hey auntie, buy us a couple?". I was surprised at how readily our newfound aunt assumed her criminal role.

We left the Gloola experiencing a dizziness previously unknown to either of us, pissed in an alleyway and started walking north joyfully. Soon enough we got beat up by two drunk English tourists, who thought they heard us swearing at them. We escaped them into a bar. That bar was the Minzar.

Actually no, that bar wasn't the Minzar. It was some other random place that - like the Gloola and Midbar - failed to survive the passing of the auntie years. I'm just desperately looking for an excuse to write about the sole survivor of those times, a seemingly charmless bar, perfectly undecorated, with bare tables spread around the alleyway about its entrence, with its one bathroom (of two) that only features a pissoir, all within choking distance of Allenby.

Call it Patriotism or Zionism, but I need to truly embrace at least one thing on our slender map. Love letters don't really call for excuses, I'll try to compose a quick one right now, and just get it off my chest.

Dear Minzar,

Is it because you are such casual place that I can practically visit you in my underwear? Is it because despite how casual you are, I once found myself sitting in your so called terrace, right next to a group that obviously just left an opera gala?

Is it because you serve Palestinian beer, making me feel that I'm fighting for a cause even as I'm getting myself silly drunk in the very napel of the bubble? Is it because besides this Palestinian beer you also serve that strong Belgian Maredsous that knocks everyone out for the evening?

Is it the wonderful artichoke and feta salad? Is it the veal sausages? is it the very fact that no one would expect a joint like yourself to produce anything better than a little bowl of peanuts, and yet you're one of my favorite restaurants in town? Is it Ari's spicy wings that nearly fried me alive from within just before the management made him subdue them? (I loved them just the way they were. ahhh!) Is it the pickles in the back room that can be subtly stolen when the beautiful blond waitress isn't looking?

Is it that beautiful blond waitress? Is it the equally beautiful not blond waitress who used to wear dreadlocks? Is it the other, even less blond waitress with the dark retro look? is it the other, fourth beautiful waitress? is it Ari and his lovely whiskers? Is it already five in the morning?

Is it the night Stellina cried on my shoulder tears that came directly from her broken heart? Is it that night that the Danish girl recognized me though we haven't seen each other for an entire decade? Is it the night Itka composed her beautiful crazy poem amidst all the noise and loud music in the main room?

Is it that our comfort zone is so small we can cross it in two leaps? (mind the stairs!)

Whatever it is, Minzar, I love you and all the monks and nuns who walk your narrow cloisters. I drink to you and to a city that only becomes itself after dark, and then grows more and more beautiful with every sip, every cig, every sound of laughter.

(all photos are from the Minzar's Facebook fan page)

Arabiyah Kushkushiyah

2010-06-07T14:42:00.022+03:00

I spent the better part of yesterday interviewing members of the old Zionist militia "Haganah" for an article. I fell in love with them, these beautiful, silvery moustached men and ever-young ladies. I believe that they were the right people at the right time and that what their struggle was justified. Zionism was once a neccesity, a reality, a calling.

It no longer is so for me. How does Zionism die in the heart? Here's a review of three major turning points in my experience. In other words: here's how I became a self-hating traitor worthy of being thrown in the sea with all the Arabs, in three simple steps:

1. When I was eleven years old, the first Intifada was raging outside my Jerusalem window. At the time the news was only about one thing: wild, angry Palestinian boy throwing stones at soldiers, who responded with rubber bullets. I couldn't believe the viciousness of the boys. Didn't they know that tossed stones could kill? There was some talk about that in the press too, how deadly a weapon they were. We' on the other hand were humane, using virtual toys as ammunition.

Then one day I saw, in the newspaper, a cross section of a rubber bullet. It was only rubber on the surface, inside it was metal. Yes, Rubber bullets don't tend to be lethal, but they can seriously wound and are the sause of many a lost eye. Toys? not quite. Those were rubber-coated bullets. Using the term "rubber bullets" was a lie, one intended to make us feel better about ourselves. Eleven year olds don't like being lied to. Step 1 was completed.

2. When I was fourteen years old and living in Washington DC, we read an exceptionally interesting book in class. It was “Black Boy” by Richard Wright.

In his record of growing up black in the deep South, Wright recounts how he and his childhood friends would stand outside the store of the town's only Jew and sing:

Jew Jew
How do you Chew?

and also:

Jew Jew
Two for five
That's what keeps
Jews alive

Bloody Christ killers
Never trust a Jew
Bloody Christ killers
What won't a Jew do.

I was shocked that antisemitism filtered also to the ranks of southern blacks, who certainly knew the taste of prejudice. How could that be? I wondered, then suddenly remembered how me and my friends would stand by the fence of our kindergarten's yard and wait for Palestinian women to pass by, on their way to Shu'afat or Anata. Once a lady would pass, wearing an embroydered dress and balancing a full basket on her head, we would sing zestfully, loudly, over and over:

Arabiyah Kushkushaiya
Yesh la Tachat
Shel Gaviyah.

A bozo Arab woman
Has an ass
Like a wineglass.

When my parents caught ear of this they strongly repremended me, but the memory remained supressed for nearly a decade. Once it surfaced, I was changed. I may have accepted rubber bullets for a while, but I didn't shoot them. The case of Arabiyah Kushkushiyah was different. I grew up in an environment in which intolerance was tolerated. I had to wonder how that was possible.

3. Watching this morning a clip of MK Haneen Zoabi speaking at the Knesset made me sick to my stomach. The speaker of the house, Reuven Rivlin, is pretending to silence the restless auditorium, while in fact not letting Zoabi, who was aboard the Gaza flotilla, speak a word. At one point he tells her to shorten her speech to a minute and a half. By that point Zoabi spoke only two sentences. She protests and he tells her: "you've been speaking for five minutes."

In my mind, I add words he leaves unsaid: "You've been speaking for five minutes, Arabiyah Kushkushiyah".

"You spoke enough, shut up or I'll shoot a rubber bullet into one of your dirty Arab eyes. Choose which."

The Knesset this morning stripped Zoabi of certain privilages reserved to its members and the campaign to remove her as public servent is ablaze. Right wing parlamentarians have recently worked hard promoting various initiatives that would deprive non-Zionist citizens of their rights. Today Minister of the Interior Eli Yishai proposed to strip of citizenship "Anyone who acts disloyaly towards the State".

In the days of the Haganah, such move was certainly not unthinkable and indeed no Arabs were members of the Pre-state Zionist establishment. My interviwees of yesterday were at war with the country's Arab population. Hell, one of these sweet grandmothers admitted to burning a village, with dynamite, not rubber or rubber-coated bullets. Yes, but this was in 1946, before the State was founded. It's now 2010. Our national idology has for years not been what it wishes to be, what it pretends to be. We have a bullet, a song and a speech to learn from. Let's be attentive to all three and change our way of thinking.

There

2010-06-06T00:29:00.017+03:00

I met my old lover on the street last night. She seemed so glad to see me, I just smiled. Later I dreamt of Madrid, the city in which we spent our only vacation.

In my dream I was south of Madrid, at an amusement park, with Itka. It was in fact Virginia's "King's Dominion" where my family used to go for fun when we lived in Washington D.C.

Ok, but in my dream it was south of Madrid, not D.C. and we only had that day to be in Madrid. Itka was in a sexy swimsuit and I was trying to get her to dress up so we make it to the subway train and hit town, otherwise we'd miss our last few Spanish hours. I did my best to excite her by describing Madrid's structure: East to west goes Gran Via.

South of it is the old center, north is Bohemian Malasaña. This arresting boulevard meets the corso Del Prado going north to south, with Uptownish Salamnaca and the beautiful park El Retiro to its east. So really Madrid is a cross.

It's the cross I bear, like anywhere in Europe, Europe that murdered my family, Europe that taught me culture, Europe that fed me fine chocolates, Europe that broke my heart time and again. I dream of europe like crazy. I dream of old loves, European old loves. I don't even miss them, I just dream.

I read of Swedish author Henning Menkel imprisoned in Beer Sheva's dour prison following his participation in the Gaza flotilla, and I nearly weep. My heart is Swedish, my eyes are Croatian, My feet are Italian. I'm not speaking poetically. My roots are in Europe. My grandparents spoke Polish, Hungarian, Russian and Romanian. I ventured into that continent as a teenager, seeking love. Found some love, still came back here. Why? Does being a Humus lover really make me a Middle Easterner?

Israel is the first colonial society that das no "mother country". There's nowhere for us to return to. When the state was founded this was even worse. Not even the U.S. accepted Holocaust refugees until 1949. We were all homeless souls doomed to the colonialist deed.

We still are. Following 43 years of brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, all partially paid for by my tax money, I would readily leave the Middle East if anyone offered me a foreign citizenship, but no one does. The world really is hypocritical. You don't like us being here? Show us the way out.

Currently the way out is only in dreams. I paid 1500 Euros worth to social security and another 1600 to Tel-Aviv's municipality over the past two weeks. I don't even have enough money to vacation by the sea of Galilee, never mind breath the moist air of Brussels. Maybe it's better that way, My friend Alma writes from Weimar that she feels threatened for the first time since coming there as a student, at least in Trukish grocery stores.

Nevertheless, she loves Thuringia. Here's a photo she took there, posted in an album entiteld "I can't believe I live here".

I can't believe I live here, in a land where right wing thugs throw smoke grenades into peace demonstrations, as happened tonight, where the army spreads doctored videos to try and cover up its viciousness, as it admitted to have done tonight. My old lover whom I've met on the street is going to spend the summer in Europe, blissfully. I know that this bliss is never complete, wherever we go we carry Israel on our backs like a cheap un-orthopedic rucksack, yet there's a comfort to being away, in green pastures where we once belonged.

Massada Maritima

2010-05-31T13:48:00.012+03:00

Note on June 2nd: following many debates, I decided to accept one point of my critics and soften the terminology of this post. I do not want to be anything like the Israeli government and media that carelessly throw around hard words like "lynch". this is not a propaganda piece, these words are meant to provoke thought.

Tonight at 7:00 PM, Jews, Arabs and foreigners will gather in front of the Ministery of Defence in Tel-Aviv to protest the killing of activists in international waters.

Even if there were weapons on the boats, The IDF should have prepared for such scenario and made plans to avoid a bloodbath. When a group of people tries to break through a border (and this isn't even our border, remember? We no longer "occupy" Gaza) it is the police that usually arrests them. In this case Israel sent commando units, trained to be trigger happy.

The result is so painful and dangerous that the Israeli public and media are desperately seeking ways to avoid looking them in the eye: "It was an honest mistake", "they were terrorists who wanted to lynch our soldiers". The word "lynch" is everywhere in the Hebrew media. In the name of anyone ever hung from a tree in South Carolina due to his or her skin color, I'm outraged.

Though certainly outraged enough to go out and protest (hell, I'm outraged enough to give up my citizenship right here and now), I won't be at the demonstration tonight. Duty calls: I am sent as a journalist to review the grandest and what may prove to be the tackiest cultural event in this country's history: Verdi's Nabucco, produced at the foot of Massada.

Up until this morning I didn't pay much mind to the cheesy, nationalistic aspects of staging an opera about enslaved Jews at Massada. I was even interviewed on television and said there's no harm in taking opera to the desert and throwing a couple of fireworks around. Now, however, I feel distraught, sick to my stomach. I tried to escape the assignment and failed. I'm doomed to this four-act masterpiece.

Massada, the mythical stronghold, the place Roman soldiers beseiged and then broke into by force, thus completing their assault against the Judean liberation brigades. What an exciting place to be tonight! Siege of course is a contemporary concept. This morning the Israeli air force bombed and demolished what was left of Gaza's small airport already defunct for nearly a decade. No one will leave the strip in the foreseeable future. As for braking in by force... hell, we make good Romans, don't we? Had the legion of Titus possessed helicopters, the two actions would have been nearly identical.

And opera, O opera! I love it so, but is this really a good time for the conductor to raise his baton? The Jewish Midrash Describes God as showing anger at the Israelites after they crossed the Red Sea. The Egyptians were drowned by the waves and the Hebrews sang songs of praise. "My creations are destroyed at sea, and you are singing?" he asked.

Several creations of the good lord were destroyed at sea this morning, and the soloists of the Opera will sing nonetheless. The bad timing is none of their fault, the tragedy belongs to all of us.

What will they be singing? an opera about imprisonment and tyranny, written only seemingly about Jews and Babylonians, it in fact meant to protest Austria's reign in Lombardy and other Italian regions. I'll take it as that and concentrate on Verdi's courage and genius. In the year 2010, Nabucco is an opera about Palestinians. Let its music ring out and be another voice of protest.

Föhn

2010-05-29T14:08:00.008+03:00

Why am I dreaming about Switzerland, night after night?

Is it because I want my county “cantonized”? I certainly wouldn't object to it. Imagine the territory between the Jordan and the sea split into cantons based on Arab or Jewish majorities, imagine referendums, a loose centrist government... something could come of this place after all.

Is it because I'm yearning for a Wilhelm Tell? Perhaps. A man must have a myth or two to hang on to, a healthy national symbol to call his own. We have the legendary amputee Joseph Trumpeldor, but he's famed for saying: "It is good to die for one's country" on his dying breath. I don't subscribe to this phrase. Poet Wilfrid Owen rightly noted that upon knowing the horrors of war -

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Knowing something of these horrors, I prefer to dream of Switzerland's pastures than the thorns of upper Galilee. The Swiss manage to keep Wilhelm Tell as a symbol. That's enviable. In this country, a man stopped at a roadblock and forced by soldiers of an occupying army a to endanger his son's life can only be a hero of the other side.

Why am I dreaming of Switzerland? Maybe simply because I miss it. I miss the days of adventure that led me like the through its valleys like the föhn, the warm wind.

Hitchhiking in the Bernese highlands, a driver warned me of the föhn. "It's an old wind that's trapped between the mountains" he said. "It comes into the valley and everything heats up, then everything looks very clear, the colors are sharpened, and afterwards people experience headaches."

This wind caught up with me in Interlaken, brightening everything. I felt no headache, I felt elated. The mountains sloped seductive, unattainable and just plain outragously gorgeous directly into the water. The chubby warden at the hostel invited me and an American girl for a fondue dinner at her home. We will buy the Gruyère, she'll take care of the rest.

A week later, near Lucerne, I discovered the wonders of raclette in the farm of complete strangers who were just a spontaneously hospitable. Who said the Swiss were cold and arrogant? I would like to introduce them to my kind hosts in Watwil, in Bern, in Fribourg, in Winterthur... Switzerland lavished its franks on a traveling street musician and was the easiest country in Europe to hitchhike.

One of the more memorable lift I cought there left St. Gallen in the middle of the night. I couldn't find much to do in the town and headed for the road. Two girls were already there, sticking their thumbs out by the side of eastbound road. I joined them.

One of the girls was Swiss, the other - a Bosnian Refugee. they were headed for the shores of lake Constance, to a Bosnian club that turned out to be a dump complete with vinyl curtains befitting a cheap bordello and an awful singer accompanying himself on a keyboard.

We went outside and built a fire on the waterfront. I played some songs for them on the guitar, then tried to get the Bosnian to tell me about her fresh war memories.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,

She preferred not to tell. "I've seen everything," she said, "that's all I can really say."

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori

Before dawn we ran out of firewood. Chill crept in. We walked back into the town of Rorschach, found an unlocked door and entered. We were in the hallway of a small apartment building, protected from the wind. There, on the stairs, we fell asleep like dogs, until some tennant of the building went down for the newspaper, bumped into us and invited us up for a cup of hot chocolate and a shower.

You may call this laughable. You may say, as many cynical Israelis would, that in real time Switzerland was not so keen on offering breakfast to refugees and to Jews. That's as may be, but we don't treat our refugees very well either. I don't see many Israelis volunteering to drive them inland from the Egyptian border, as Swiss activists did during the Holocaust (refugees who reached Cantons not bordering reich territory were not deported). You may mention stolen assets that were kept for decades in safes underneath Geneva's pavements. You may speak of arrogant Europeans who come here and take sides out of self righteousness. I'm no expert on such things. All I know is that I've been to the land of peace and that it treated me well, well enough that I would dream of it every night and wake up inspired.

The Last Outpost

2010-05-26T00:11:00.018+03:00

You really need to know the right Admiral to visit the fortress at Atlit. It's a closed military zone.

I'm a bit lucky with knowing those who hold keys to forbidden places. Knowing the right German journalist, I got to join her as translator to the village of Rajar, north of Israel's fenced border with Lebanon. Knowing the right creative taxi driver lets me go in and out of Ramallah, where I'm not legally allowed.

Now I've met the right admiral too. As part of a non-military-related joint project he actually requested me to visit the unreachable coastal gem, 70 kilometers north of Tel-Aviv. I'm grateful to him for the oppurtunity and for the base's sweet and knowledgable education officer for walking us through.

Atlit is even further off limits than the other two locations. It's only open to several elite units of the Israeli navy. The ancient fortress, dating back to 1217 AD, is situated on a narrow peninsula securing a quiet bay and keeping it hidden. This provides the navy's commando and other units with discreet conditions ideal for secret operations and training. Naturally, I was allowed to take no photos. The one above is from Google, taken from outside the base's fences.

Even deprivation has its advantages. Yes, the public is banned from this ancient paradise, but thus it remains paradise. Tall thistles were in purple bloom on the ruins that I haven't seen in coastal Israel since my childhood. They are extinct mostly everywhere here. Walking on a barely beaten path among enormous bushes of prickly pear, the fantastic stone walls, the blue skies and gushing sea, was an intensely sensual experience.

Putting a railing along the path or carving stairs unto the ragged rocks would doubtlessly kill the place in a way, not to mention opening a branch of some cafe chain nearby. The soldiers seem to be treating the ruins with utter respect. I saw no signs of vandalism, trash or recent damage. If only the Israeli army treated certain people this way.

Underground, in caverns dug by the fabled Templar knights, bats were screaming. At times more than 1000 knights resided in this Middle Eastern Mont St. Michel, under the spire of an octagonal Gothic church of which little remains. Octagonal it was indeed. Those were the knights who received the Temple Mount to live on. Al-Aqsa was their headquarters. The octagonal dome of the rock was their church and all their other churches were designed in its spirit.

Atlit's fortress, with its exceedingly tall towers and walls, was never conquered. King Friedrich II of the Holy Roman Empire tried to overtake it from within while staying as a guest. He ended up imprisoned in its dungeons. Muslims who attacked it from the mainland, leaving still visible scars on the forbidding walls, finally burned the fort's fields in anguish and retreated. At the fall of the crusader kingdom, Château Pèlerin on the Carmel coast remained its last outpost.

The knights, seeing no way to recover control of the Holy Land on their own, left to sea. Later came an earthquake and demolished their extraordinary town, leaving in its wake a few strange relics: the carved faces of a man and a woman on a pillar, a moat overgrown with wild coastal weeds and one huge tower, clearly seen from the Haifa-Tel-Aviv highway, awaiting days of peace when it will receive all who are hungry for ancient beauty.

Efros

2010-05-23T16:00:00.007+03:00

Itka and I are experiencing an apartment move that's lasting for nearly a month. It seems we're moving in with Murphy, of Murphy's law fame. First the couple that's vacating the new place got held up and stayed two weeks longer. We spent those weeks on friends' spare mattresses and couches.

When we finally moved in a week ago, we found the walls too badly damaged for us to paint them. The painters could only start working today. We're staying on a matress on the floor till they finish.

As a result, we're still transitory, even though we're home. We haven't unpacked the kitchen utensils yet and only eat what can be cooked in our one pot and scooped with our two spoons (like toothless elders we thus subsist mostly on oat meal). I've been wearing the same shorts for a while and she found scores of ways to refresh the look of her basic black dress. We bought the bare basics: toilet paper, shampoo, toothpaste. All else takes care of itself.

Guess what, it does take care of itself. We could easily keep living like this, simply and happily, with no need for our electric coffee-maker. I made coffee in the big pot today for the painters using one of the two spoons, hot black Arab stuff, pretty damn fine.

While stirring, I thought of my friend Efros, a black coffee efficionada who've been living on people's couches not for fiteen days but for fifteen years. Efros's story can be summed thus: she left Israel after her army service, a very young poet and playwright who recieved plenty of appreciation. She went to Paris and fell for a 39 years old French carpenter with a teenage daughter and lived with him in Belleville, where she discovered the world of Indian dance.

When the love affair fell through, she went on to India, then to England, gradually forsaking writng and all things modern and stable for the love of folk art. She went back to the carpenter in France, till that ended again, discovered the Gypsies and their music, chased them around Europe for a while, came back to Israel to herd goats and then discovered Cairo.

She learned how to Belly Dance and made a huge career of it, then abandoned that and went picking Kiwi fruit and flowers with the Bedouins in the Galilee and herding camels with the Bedouins in the Judean desert. She stays with us sometimes when hitting town, as well as with many others. At other times she stayed in tents or on rooftops. She has no address. This beautifully dressed, ever young gorgeous woman is a homeless person.

It's not easy. The politics of being a guest are demanding, even when you're as pleasent, attentive and generous a guest as she is. Sometimes the weight of the reambling life gets to the heart and she's hit with very somber blues, but more often than not she's a model of happiness, of freedom and of being oneself in the face of society's many demands.

If life Efrosized us for this month, it can only be a blessing, one to contemplate joyfully at night, in the empty room that's somehow perfectly full. I'll conclude with a song written for my birdlike friend. It was filmed at the Sde Boker boarding school during "Desert Poetry Days", at a performance that turned into an event against the Gaza war and got us all kicked off the scene, free to roam further.

Crying for Krung Thep

2010-05-20T20:01:00.010+03:00

I spent the day in Hebron, with its soldiers in full combat gear, barbed wire fences and tense atmosphere. Often, despite the dry clime and complete lack of seafood, my mind wandered to another city with its own soldiers, fences and tension, Bangkok.

It's not exactly ironic or surprising that Bangkok is in flames. I was there about ten months ago for a short spell and constanly thought to myself: this place is explosive. What will it look like when it combusts? I got the answer this morning. The front page of Yedioth Aharonot presented a startling image: the Central World Plaza shopping center on fire. Formarly this enormous mall was known as the "World Trade Center", another one bites the dust.

I don't really care much for all the luxury goods that were burned, but the sheer magnitude of the mall and its location at the very bustling heart of the city both give an idea of how really violent the situation in Bangkok is. I can't help but weep for it, pray for its recovery and nostaligcally post a few of the photos I took there on better days.

Welcome to Nowhere

2010-05-16T12:54:00.013+03:00

Welcome to Dahmash. Please have a seat.

People will say that my blog is all about gloomy Palestinian slums (my previous post was about Silwan). let them say so. There are certain things about gloomy Palestinian slums that make them interesting:

1. They are right in our backyard, though we almost never go there (My walk through Silwan was my first time visiting the neighborhood, and I was born in Jerusalem.)

2. We are very much responsible for how gloomy they are.

3. They are an endangered species worth seeing now, before Israel manages to demolish them entirely.

Take the "village" of Dahmash, in a fact a neighborhood of the city of Ramla, fifteen minutes southeast Tel-Aviv. It's not even "Palestinian" per-se, since its residents are citizens of Israel. Then again, they are Arabs, and therefore have somewhat limited rights. Let us observe: what rights do I have as a Jewish Israeli that the people of Dahmash don't?

1. My town appears on the maps. The state agrees that it exists. Dahmash does not officially exist, despite having been there since before the founding of the State of Israel.

2. I get my mail delivered.

3. my garbage gets collected. (points 2 and 3 are only fully true now, once I moved to Tel-Aviv from an Arab neighborhood in Jaffa.

4. I don't have to acquire electricity by improvised wire from my neighbor.

5. I don't have a huge auto-dump-site placed right next to my house, polluting the land and air for the children of the neighborhood. Needless to say, Dahmash was there before the dump's location was chosen, but again, it was there physically, not officially.

7. No walls are built around my community, protecting other communities from the "thieving nature" of me and my neighbors.

6. I can walk down the street directly to my house. Currently the people of Dahmash can as well: A gravel road winds by the dump site and leads them to the main road, but the municipal authorities surrounding the village are planning to block the road and force the 600 residents to make their way through the orange groves.

8. The police do not come daily to inspect my deeds.

9. No one is threatening to demolish my home.

Currently 13 Dahmash houses are set to be demolished for "illegal construction". Something is of course to be said for town planning and building ordinances, but not when those are dictated by racism. Dahmash's people can't possibly get a building permit, while residents of the surrounding Jewish-Israeli communities, the "Moshavim", can build freely. Those Moshavim are younger than the village and were founded with the blessing of the state.

A few years ago five homes in Dahmash were demolished. The people of the village tell of the Israeli demolition team and how they emptied the houses of the families' belongings. "They found the children's schoolbooks and threw them out with the trash." Tells Arafat, "The children ran over to them, confused, in tears."

which brings me to the final right I have which the people of Dahmash are denied:

10. I am being treated as a human being.

The final hearing over the demolition is to take place tomorrow. The people of the village have no real hope.

On Thursday we came there as activists of "Culture Guerrilla". We listened to their stories.

and then held a poetry event in Hebrew and Arabic.

The Culture Guerilla strategy is to later use the poems and the documentation of the event to try and stir media buzz around the issue. These activities bore fruit in the past, especially in matters of labor disputes. Most recently, a judge quoted one of the poems while ruling in favor of the Eckerstein factory laborers, who sought to organize.

However, when it comes to the right of Arabs we don't expect much of an effect. The state of Israel is full of "unrecognized villages" most of them Bedouin communities, some of considerable size. Under the Zionist ethos, there's no chance for them to change status.

The best we can do is be good neighbors and try and give a good show. The people of the village were extremely hospitable to us. they made us feel completely at home at their home, which is hardly a home and may soon no longer be there at all.

Home on the Range

2010-05-11T14:40:00.019+03:00

Sloping steeply directly across from the walls of Temple Mount, Silwan is dramatic.

It's dramatically ancient too. The western part of Silwan has been inhabited since Neolithic times. It is here that the residential heart of the city stood from the second millennium BC to Hellenist times. When the Ommayads arrived in the 7th century, they found the hills inhabited with cave dwellers. A thousand years later, during the 19th century, Yemenite Jews came up from the desert and lived in the same caves.

The days of caves are over. Silwan today is about houses. Since conquering East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel has been incredibly stingy about giving building licenses to the Arab population.

According to the Betzelem human-rights organization, 46,978 housing units have been built over the years on open land in East Jerusalem (designated as "municipal" since the occupation). All were built for the Jewish population. Not a single unit was built by or for the Arabs, who make up 33% of the city's population. Consequently, most Arab construction is deemed "illegal", and is designated for demolition.

The arab population grows naturally without anywhere to expend. the houses of Silwan are adorned with endless artificial add-ons, not all of which are fully sturdy. Silwan today is a dramatic mess, completely neglected by the authorities who would prefer to see it vanish.

Since the eighties, Israeli governments have been working to get houses here demolished. One excuse for the demolitions are the unavoidable illegal constructions, another is the need to expose archaeological remains "from the days of King David." The dead King David, whether real or mythical, counts for much more than do 45,000 living residents of the neighborhood.

Did I say neighborhood? We call Silwan a "village" as we refer to any Arab community. "Tamra" in the Galilee is a village, despite being twice the size of the "city" of Katzrin, a Jewish-Israeli community on the Golan heights. If Silwan were a village, its troubles could be considered smallish, but they aren't. They are dramatic.

Most dramatic of all is the problem of the settlements. The ElAd organization is using donations money to Judaise the neighborhood. I'm Jewish, I think any neighborhood in the world should be open to Jews, but I also read the Mishna. In the tome of Avot, Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakai asks his deciples what would be a true righteous quality in a person. Rabi Yossei replies: "A good neighbor".

If you go as an Israeli to live in Silwan, in an absentee property from which the tennents were kicked out by force, you're not there to be a good neighbor. Silwan attracts right-wing activists who don't believe in the right of Palestinians to live where they were born. Thanks to the 50 families living there today, life in the neighborhood is highly controlled by the military.

Indeed, thanks to them, to the humanist minded ElAd organization and to the generous municipality of Jerusalem, distrust is abundant. I've never taken a walk anywhere where my camera evoked so much suspicion. Most were convinced that I am working for the house demolition authorities, but I came to shoot Silwan's beautifully painted walls, welcoming the Haj pilgrims upon return

and its Esheresque staircases

and its abundant style.

I didn't at all intend to write an angry post, but it's enough to walk around with open eyes and anger appears: raw anger, frustrating anger, anger that is as intense as the topography and as grey as the concrete, anger as dramatic as this place is.

La Ville S'endormait

2010-05-10T08:02:00.018+03:00

I am sitting in an empty Jerusalem "sherut" van at 1:00 AM, waiting for it to fill up and take me to Tel-Aviv. It doesn't fill up, not even partially. I am the only one there, the last man in the city. The driver is smoking outside when I decide to leave on foot. Naturally, he begins yelling at me.

"Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say nothing, it's nothing, just sad dreams, or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them." I've quoted these words of Martin Amis once before, blogging from an internet cafe in West Berlin. I'm crazy about daylight, make no mistake, but there's something about being stranded too late at night in a moody city with nowhere to sleep. You get a free, precious lesson in the blues, and what could be more precious?

Jerusalem by night. The "Bass" is closed. The "Uganda" is melancholic. The green neon lights of a mosque over Silwan distinguish a finger pointing to God from the darkness about it. At dawn the song will rise from its tip to mix with others in the brightening sky, but dawn is far.

Someone lets me into the old Ron Hotel, today the "Jerusalem Hostel". The staircase over reception is still stately and lavishly carpeted as in the glory days. Reception itself is closed. In the lobby sits a silvery-bearded American, clearly a religious eccentric, across from an attractive girl in her early twenties. She's his daughter. They couldn't get a bed and decided to sit the night out.

I remember doing the same at the Genoa railway station, talking to a crazy Canadian neurologist in a bright red nylon rainproof jacket about some scary research he was conducting. What was scary about it? Can't remember, but the old unease follows me outside to the silent roadwork barriers on Jaffa road.

This is only the beginning. The ghosts of other nocturnal towns will haunt me as I walk. Where was I? climbing up the silent hallway of Bulgakov's Moscow home with Vola, whom I had just met at a club, her pointing out the passages inscribed on them by his fans: a black painted cat, a love letter... Scaling the walls of the Foro Romano at 3:00 AM and bumping into two slum rascals who did the same, a drunken boy and girl. We wandered into a garden where huge roses grew. I picked one and presented it to the girl. She laughed and warned me not to approach a certain fallen pillar. "This is a cursed place" she said, "people who go by it later die in strange accidents."

And there was the cold night in Frankfurt, watching television through a shop window on the Zeil and shivering. I could not afford a hotel, having spent my last pfenning on airfare, but at sunrise the airplane was to take me Utah, where the most dramatic love story of my life was to begin in earnest.

This is how it works. The loneliest, awful wee hours sometimes remind us how rich life is, and if they don't, dawn would, and if dawn won't, maybe the morning's first coffee, in my friend Keren's kitchen, with Glenn Gould playing on the old boom box.

Erotic Activism

2010-05-05T14:05:00.028+03:00

The nation of Lithuania was due to hold its first gay pride parade in a few days. Yesterday Lithuanian judges banned the event, citing "concern for public safety".

It's calming to see other countries dealing with issues that we have somewhat resolved. In Israel, three pride parades are held each year. The one in Jerusalem is always the focus of conflict, drawing murder threats from the ultraorthodox community, yet was never canceled. The Tel-Aviv parade is simply enormous. This year it is scheduled for June 11th. Its theme is "social change".

Please do not deduce that Israeli gays live in a shangri-la painted by Tom of Finland. Gay bashing is rampant and last year a massacre of gay youths took place at a Tel-Aviv community center.

Yes, the mass media placed several gay men and even a transsexual woman inside the "big-brother" house and changed the public's perspective a bit, but there's still work to be done. At the moment there is a single openly gay member of Knesset in office (Nitzan Horowitz of the Meretz party). Note that according to statistics, there should be about eleven more closeted gay individuals in the house.

But the problem isn't only a gay one. Israel's heterosexuals aren't free either. I can't think of a single member of Knesset who seems sexually liberated, and there should ideally be 120 of them. Our society is becoming more and more repressed, and we don't even notice it, confusing commercial sexual media content and tawdry fashion trends in girls attire for honest liberalism.

Sexual liberation should come from the bed of the layman. Thus I feel great pride in my own few actions of the recent times. Two weeks ago, I supported the right to gender ambiguity by narrating an experimental poetry event in full drag:

But this is softcore. For a year now Itka and I have supported alternative lifestyles by having an open relationship. It's a worthwhile challenge, but a challenge indeed, as we described in an article published a few weeks into the experiment.

You won't even believe how much criticism we recieved for living lovingly yet outside of typical monogamy. Thankfully, potential partners are not always so critical. After recovering from the initial shock and clarifying that they themselves could never maintain such relationship, they usually open up to the adventure.

Itka is an advanced activist in the field of sexual politics, currently running an internet campaign promoting more freedom of choice in matters of bodily hair and always on the battlefield for women's rights. Some of the campaigns are not so humorous and her activities have been known to cost her friendships. Not everyone understands the broader values and humanism for which she's fighting.

Now comes an opportunity to challenge another form of social oppression: clothes! Photographer Spencer Tunick, who paves the cityscapes of the world with naked bodies, is arriving to Tel-Aviv this summer and plans to shoot a naked scene in Tel-Aviv. Itka got both of us registered to appear among the multitudes and found herself interviewed to a local newspaper about nudism and art.

It was interesting to read the online comments beneath the short news item. Most of them were attacks on "leftists" who are destroying this country's moral core.

Leftists? If anything, I'd expect to be attacked for not being leftist enough. Gaza is under siege, The West Bank is a tightly-controlled, futureless territory. Human rights are of no concern to the state, freedom of speech is a diminishing commodity, and we indulge in erotic activism? Who gives a toss about our sexual emancipation when people are rotting in our prisons without due trial?

Then again, I see the connection. Our sexuality is political. It's no accident that the Israeli LGBT community is overwhelmingly supportive of the Palestinian cause, even though Palestinian society is deeply homophobic. The experience of freeing ourselves strongly enhances our capacity to care for the freedom of others.

Lithuania's judges are being reasonable. They seek to maintain conservative order. They know that nothing threatens the hyrarchical power structure more than a community of free, confident human beings. Our sexuality is power. Liberalism is a doorway to mutual support and political progress, especially in a land where religious zealots are constantly gaining more and more control. Breaking ground on issues of sexual liberty also advances this coutry's hard faught feminist struggle and the dignity of every person here. Let's punch bigotry and racism, intolerance and prejudice in one blow, and let's make it a sexy blow.

Jerome

2010-05-03T12:15:00.015+03:00

Six years ago, while I was living in Boston, my dad sent me two books as a birthday present. One was "Dancing Arabs" by Sayed Kashua. The other was "Life on Sandpaper" by Yoram Kaniuk.

I went through the Kashua book in two days and found it rather agreeable. Then came the Kaniuk. I knew him to be an experimental Hebrew author, a challenging one. His novel "Adam Resurrected", a peculiar tale touching on both the Holocaust and the gravel of Israeli deserts, whisky and sexuality, was turned into a theatre piece performed in an authentic circus tent. Another novel "His Daughter" was the darkest bestseller of Israel's 80s.

"Life on Sandpaper" turned out to be autobiographical in the wider, literary sense of the word. It opens with the words: "There was a war and I was wounded." The war was that of 1948. The teenage Kaniuk, who lied about his age in order to join the Palmach units, got shot in the leg on the slope on Jerusalem's Mt. Zion. Confused and somewhat shell shocked, he left the country as a sailor on a merchant fleet and wound up in New York. Here he spent nearly his entire 20s, working as a painter and living the Jazz scene. He was a close friend of Charley Parker and, having married a Broadway dancer, a familiar face in the glittier circles.

Stories of Sinatra, Brando and Dean aside, what made "Life on Sandpaper" sensational were the travel tales. Kaniuk and his friends found their way to Guatemala, to Newfoundland and to the further reaches of the American West. Everything in the book was written manically, rhythmically. I didn't realize that such writing could exist. Having swallowed it all, I went directly ahead and wrote a tale of my own travels in Eastern France to a similar beat. My life as an author was changed.

Two years later, while living again in Israel, I got a phone call. Ilana Shahaf of the Sde Boker educational center, an outpost of Hebrew intelligentsia in the Negev desert, asked a favor of me. She invited Kaniuk to speak of the desert in his works. He was freshly out of the hospital following a severe illness and needed a chaperon. Would I mind accompanying him?

I wasn't really into it. Kaniuk's writing was so good as to convince me he'd be an intolerable character. Ilana insisted and I found myself spending a whole day with my literary idol. on the long way south I learned more about him: his life through the bohemian 60s and 70s, running a theatre, drinking heavily and composing "The Last Jew", perhaps modern Hebrew's richest and most original masterpiece. I learned of the house north of Tel-Aviv which he shared in those times with his second, graceful wife Miranda, two daughters and a whole menagerie of animals, of his current life in the city, of the illness that very nearly killed him, of his astonishing sweetness and sense of humour.

In the desert, on a cliff top overlooking the Tzin valley, Kaniuk said: "People say the desert is beautiful, this isn't beautiful. This is awe inspiring. Paris is beautiful." Since then I was fortunate enough to visit Paris with him. He has become my most special and admired friend. Over the years I saw him go through at least one more serious illness and emerge victorious, publish two new books, have his work turned into a Hollywood film as well as into one of the finest television dramas produced here, make many other new friends and fortify his status as one of this country's true cultural treasures.

This week he is 80 years old, and completely in his prime. I can't remember myself being so glad at anyone's birthday, nor so greatful.

Nocturn in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket

2010-04-20T10:52:00.009+03:00

We were on a rooftop, at a nice party thrown by friends of friends in honor of independence day. There were wonderful chicken wings on the grill and a guitar going around. The sky over the Jerusalem, that sky which always feels somehow like a low ceiling, was warm and peaceful.

I came with Daniel the cellist and his boyfriend Hussein, as well as with the ever adventurous Daniella and another American girl named Emily, who got stranded in the country due to the volcanic ash. In fact, the roof was full of Americans, mostly that particularly lovely breed of religious J Street supporters. I was chatting to an attractive rabbi in the making named Annie. Then the fireworks started exploding over the city.

We turned our heads in the direction of the explosions. The fireworks were being shot from the rooftop of the Sheraton hotel. My mother used to work at that hotel when I was a child, when it was still named "The Plaza". I remember my seven year old's pride, standing on King George street among the plastic hammer yielding masses (this was before they invented the foam or the huge inflatable hammers with the flag printed over them) gazing at up at thunder and color, knowing that my mother worked at this hotel and none of the other kids' mothers did. I was closer to independence day than anybody.

This year I was further from it than most people I know. The legislating of the "Nakba law", which forbids Israelis from observing a mourning day for the Palestinian disaster of 1948, estranged the truly liberal-minded Israelis. What independence are we celebrating if we're not free to decide how we view history?

All in all, the current state of politics here hardly brings out the flag fiend in me. My Prime-Minister talks like the scariest extreme right-wing fringe party leaders in Europe, claiming, among other things, that African refugees take work from Israelis and threaten to turn this into a "third world country". His sidekick, the Foreign Minister, is a fan of totalitarianism, who models his politics after such enlightened leaders as Lukashenko of Belarus. The masses become gradually more affected by the fear tactics these two employ. Change-seekers like myself are now seen as "traitors". A song released to the radio on the eve of the holiday describes us as back-stabbers, literally.

Then there are the old issues, not improving one bit. When I was seven years old and gazed at the fireworks, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip was only 16 years of age, itself a child. Today it's 42. Jerusalem is a city where people are being thrown out of their homes simply because they're Arab. Hostile, reactionary fanatics move in instead of them, with no plans of being good neighbors.

Boom! Boom! the night over the Plaza - green and purple.

The fireworks in these days of white phosphorus bombs turned out to be the same as they were then: not sophisticated or high-tech, not choreographed even to provide even so much as a climax. Standing on that roof, a half-eaten chicken wing in one hand and a plastic cup full of whisky in the other, I found myself looking at that exact moment in my childhood, and that, of course, is enough to shake a strong man. My innocence, that of a child who does not even know he lives on a settlement in the West Bank, who believes his country is always right and will be growing stronger and more beautiful in days to come, exploded in my face, yet it did so so sweetly. Those fireworks resembled a bouquet of flowers that somehow ended up being brought to a funeral, but can't help looking cheerful.

Touched by the distant rumble, I even mumbled: "there's something nice about this nation after all." Hussein, sitting next to me, smiled quietly. Then the fireworks died down.

(artwork: "Nocturn in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket" by Whistler)

We

2010-04-18T11:06:00.016+03:00

Israelis who feel more and more estranged from the collective psyche have some thinking to do tonight. If Holocaust commemoration day, which was observed last week, is charged, then Israeli memorial day, which begins tonight at sunset, is truly a challenge.

Israel has a powerful collective identity. We say "we" a lot, referring to Israelis as a whole. This is rooted in Jewish culture. The Passover Haggadah direclty states: "In every generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt." Later on in the text, historical first person is introduced: "He took us from slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, and from mourning to festivity..."

Us?

Ok, let's fulfill our obligation and assume it was us. It shouldn't be difficult, since there's no baggage involved. "We" probably shouldn't feel bad for inflicting the ten plagues. Firstly, it was "him" who did it, not "us". Secondly, "we" were slaves. Alex Haley would have approved.

A week following passover comes yom hashoa - Holocaust commemoration day. "We" had our beards cut off on the street in the 30, "We" were starved and gassed in Birkenau, "We" were slaughtered in Babi Yar.

Yes, several of the people who live in this country are Holocaust survivors and can use the word "we" in its original sense. The rest of us should probably be more humble. We were never in Babi Yar. We have no idea what it feels like to be starved and tortured. Sabras poked fun at refugees who came from Europe in the late 40's, calling them "soaps". This state has for decades been delaying compensation payments to survivors.

The trauma of the Holocaust does of course filter to the younger generations. It is very real and effects the actions of the Israeli society and state, still, the collective Holocaust identity is problamatic. It carries even less responsibility than that of the Hagaddah. "We" may have inflicted one or more bullet holes on the SS men in the Warsaw Ghetto, but "they" deserved it big time. By the way, "They" are now in Iran and Gaza and even Jaffa and the Oval office. A collective fear and grudge can be an enormous political treasure.

Then comes Yom Hazikaron - memorial day. "We" mourn "our" dead, victims of the wars and acts of terrorism. The fact that hostility in the region is a current reality that tragically effects both "us" and "them" is forgotten. The idea that the definition of "we" may be expanded to include everyone who lives between the Jordan and the sea, or maybe even every human being, is not acknowledged. "We" are always the same "us", so "they" must always be the same "them". No chance we'll make this day a day of mutual mourning and of aspiration for peace. What? after Babi Yar?! You must be kidding us!

There are several brave individuals who challange this concept of identity. Tonight at 21:00 an alternative memorial event will be held in Tel-Aviv's Tmuna theatre. It is organized by "Combatants for Peace" and features the voice of Palestinian pain as well as the Israeli one. I attended the Tmuna event last year and left it tantalized. a song by Zeev Tene about losing a friend at war and a speech by Bassam aramin, whose ten year-old daughter was killed by soldiers, both left me in tears.

Tonight I'll skip the event and go have a low key dinner with friends, but trust me, I'm mourning. "I" mourn our fallen and their fallen and the very fact anyone has to die for this sad strip of gravel. Once "we" are no longer the issue, the actual dimensions of the tragedy are revealed, and the day becomes all the darker.

(Artwork by Samuel Bak)

Bipolar

2010-04-15T16:48:00.015+03:00

Tuesday night I was here, wearing a suit at the Tel-Aviv opera house, applauding the cast of Jacques Halevy's operaic masterpiece "La Juive".

Wednesday morning, a mere ten hours later, I was here, documenting the Tel-Aviv sewage system for an article and applauding its special emergency task force.

I later went down into the raw sewage myself and took this gentleman's place, removing clumps of hygenic pads, moist wipes and tampons which clog the pipes. All the while I was thinking back to the opera. The profound vocal combinations at the end of the second act haven't left me even when I was in shit up to my navel.

These ten hours are a good metaphor for life in this country. We keep moving between the truly wonderful and the perfectly sinister. An even greater contrast lurks ahead. Monday is Israel's memorial day, observed as an annual day of national mourning. Tuesday is independence day. The switch between the two occasions occures Monday evening at sundown, when suddenly the flags are brought back up from half mast and fireworks begin to shoot into the air.

The contrast doesn't end here. Independence day itself is also the Palestinian day for commemorating the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948. This year, Israel passed a law forbidding its citizens from observing the Nakba day as a memorial day. This infringement of our freedom of speech makes many of us want to do exactly that, if only to spite the authorities.

Call us juvenile, but this is a good opportunity for us to learn of what the Palestinians have been through as consequence of the war and to empathize. We'll also be celebrating our liberty to view history in any way we choose, a liberty of which the right-wing government currently seeks to deprive us.

With all due respect for family barbecues and our handsome flag, The only substantial thing we lose by trading independence day for Nakba day (or at least with Nakba-law day) is that sudden bipolar shift we are so used to. Hopefully, we'll survive the deprivation. This land is anyway sure to provide us with some unprovoked contrast which would baffle and confuse us. All we need to do is wait for it with open arms.

(last shot is by chief documenter of local contrasts: Alex Levak)

Cliff Notes

2010-04-12T17:04:00.025+03:00

1. Off Moher
Four quid a bed in no town
House and mist, not quite a world
Square sliced, elderly coupled was the evening
and what and what.

I used to wake up in such beds from nightmare home
Outside mist, inside no house
a pint of tea
There's a war here too they say
Money flows in Limerick's Shannon,
all protection, rots the boats,
It's green and burns slowly
like everything.

And what? I own no camera,
nor the dark road shaped like long me
or no town's late burger.
I own the unenveloped steel.

Oh, and yes,
the lust for heaths.

2. Saaremaa
Near here, I found a Soviet camp.
across camp fence, near here, a corridor,
in a corridor (dark), stepped on something.

Camera flash all I have.

Camera shows, in an instant, bunch of twigs
Sauna down the corridor. In an instant I'll see.
Soviet troop fled, left tub.

Near her, all I think, near her. Now are they?

3. Failed Nocturne
If we abide by lighthouse strategies, I won't get a lift to town.
won't get a lift to town
no lift to town
Promise me you'll leave a fiver at the pub.
By the order of the stone fence, so I vow.

And on the very night which is not night
too blue for night
too blue
Next to the German runaway I sit,
Camper wheels and wine, hopes for the aurora, and hey!

The fiver, Never left it. Done the vanishing act again.
vanishing act again,
vanished again.
Top of Scotland top of of tops
The grass and the cork. Everything's light. No fence in sight.

(photos were taken around Tagaranna cliffs, Saaremaa, Estonia.)

The 6,000,001st Victim

2010-04-11T13:46:00.012+03:00

A friend wrote me today, outraged. She is a non-Jew from a former Soviet country and is spending time here on an internship. Apparently, an American friend of hers visited her over the week before leaving the country. That American is a scholar of the Yiddish language.

When the American reached Ben-Gurion airport, the security staff detected Yiddish books in his luggage. That provoked their suspicion. A young, non ultra-orthodox man reading Yiddish? They took him to a back room for interrogation. When they found out he was staying with the former Soviet girl, they pieced the different clues together and deduced that she was a fancy hooker, somehow catering to clients who have a Yiddish fetish.

The American was kept under interrogation for a while, insisting that his hostess is not a prostitute and that he's not involved in the flesh-trade. Finally, the security agents faced him with a conclusive question: "Do your Yiddish books contain stories that portray Ultra-Orthodox Jews as involved in Human trafficking?"

I can't swear by this story because I wasn't there, but this is how it was told by my friend, and it's not all that implausible. Ben-Gurion security personnel are as known for their strange questions as much as they are for ethnic profiling.

Moreover, Yiddish does threaten us as Israelis. It's written in the Hebrew alphabet, yet we can't read it. It's been so firmly confined to either the aged or the Hassidic, that we suspect anyone else who takes interest in it. Yiddish was of course banned by early Zionists, who sought to create a new Jewish identity. In the Fifties, protesters used to stand outside the Yiddish theatre in Tel-Aviv and throw stones at the actors and audience as they left the show.

To this day, the attitude remains the same. My Belorussian friend Vola told me that Israel's embassy in Minsk refused to host the launch of the first Yiddish -Belorussian dictionary. Their explanation: Yiddish is not Israeli.

Tonight marks the eve of our Holocaust memorial day. I'd like to take this oppurtunity and mourn one of the more unique victims of that horror: the native language of my grandparents. The Nazis murdered millions of speakers of this beautiful tongue, itself a dialect of German. Had they and their offspring been alive today, Yiddish might have lived, and with it all the poetry, humor and wisdom of East Europe's Jewry.

As it is, we're left with a precious few who are dedicated to keeping it alive, among them are certain gringo potential pimp types and a few Israeli loonies, like Tel-Aviv's own Assaf Galai. Non-Jewish Russian animation artist (and possibly prostitute) Elizaveta Skvortsova produced this amazing clip for Itzik Manger's lullaby "By the roadside stands a tree". She gave us another gift we are unable to give ourselves.

In the song, The mother sings to her child of a tree that was abandoned by birds in wintertime. The child, compassionate, wishes to turn into a bird and sing for the tree. His mother sows him warm cloths, lest he is inflicted with Tuberculosis on those bare branches. Burdened by the weight of wool, the child can't take wing. "You love me so much mother," he sings, "that I can't become a bird."

I dedicate this song today in memory of those massacred and of their enormous cultural legacy, which we fail to respect.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

2010-04-10T12:37:00.013+03:00

They say all roads lead to Rome. They're wrong.

Yes, the roadblocks of the West Bank get a lot of justified bad publicity. However, When thinking of them we envision a long queue of cars in the heat of day, soldiers inspecting documents and giving orders to civilian Palestinians in Arabic words they barely understand. We seldom ever think of a small gravel barrier.

These barriers, the unmanned road blocks or "hasimot" (to be distinguished from "mahsomim") number over 500 in the West Bank. The one seen above was placed in 2002 between the village of Shufa:

And the city of Tull Karem, 6 kilometers to the northwest:

For centuries, Shufa relied on Tull Karem for trade and services. This remained the case after the Israeli occupation of the west bank in 1967. Then, in 1990, a small settlement named Avne Hefez was built right beneath the village, along with a small military base.

Since 2002 the old road leading to the village has been designated for the settlers and the military only.

Two barriers were created. One up the hill, near the village itself, the other - about amile away away, where the road would lead to Tull Karem. This one is a different kind of an unmanned block, made up of concrete slabs.

The villagers can still go to Tull Karem, on foot.

Well, not only on foot.

They can also take the long way around, through the town of Anabta. That road totals 25 kilometers in length and involves going through manned checkpoints. We don't all think that's a good idea. Yesterday, a group of Israelis who never had to go around anything to get home, went to the unmanned block at Shufa to express disdain.

We were joined by about a dozen Palestinians from Tull Karem (who had to be picked up by our bus at the concrete slabs and brought up the hill to the village). Shufa villagers themselves are not allowed to protest. The Army clarified that any political activity on their behalf would cause their village to be disconnected from electricity.

Many of the participants in the event are activists with "Combatants for Peace", an organization made up of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants, who've chosen to replace violence with dialogue. Among the activists was Nur, a Palestinian who had served time in Israeli custidy. He called Shufa a prison and joked that the Ktzio't jail, where he was held, has vaster grounds.

While Nur spoke, we recieved guests.

An Israeli activist explained to them that we came over for a peace-making activity. One soldier said: "Let's hope your efforts bear fruit". They then left.

On a different incident, when acrivists tried to take the Shufa barrier apart, soldiers shot at them.

Combatants for Peace have had their share of tear gas in Shufa before. This time they had no intention of causing havoc. Rather, the activity was infomative. We came to learn of the situation and also to meet the Tel-Aviv-Tull-Karem chapter of the organization.

The chapter's activists have been using drama as means of resolving animosity and bringing up questions for debate. They decided that if all the world's a stage, Shufa's blocked road would make a fine place for a presentation. "We are not a performing group" one Israeli activist clarified. "We think of acting as related to activism. Acting is about not sitting there idely, but stepping in and changing things."

In this case they were changing roles. The "soldier" on the right is Nur the Palestinian.

He played the incompassionate officer with a great deal of talent,

But at the end of the day, even the performance at the very site of the gravel barrier dealt with the conflicts and tragedies of the manned barriers. Some of the things we deal with are simply so dark or so absurd that they are truly difficult to discuss. Shufa's barrier is a place where no one goes and nothing happens. How do you act out a silent mound that's been there for so long it's growing bushes? How do you act on it?

Over the House, Large Hanging Fans

2010-04-08T10:22:00.009+03:00

On the table is a cat. On the cat is a newspaper. In the newspaper are two poems by Agi Mishol.

I came down to the hamlet of Kfar Mordechai to interview Mishol, One of Israel's best known poets. The interview itself belongs to my own newspaper and is to be published next week. But if I can't speak of Mishol, I'll at least speak of her home.

By now Mishol has lived in Kfar Mordechai, about 30 kilometers south of Tel-Aviv, for 37 years. Many of her poems touch on these surroundings. Her new book opens with a loving words directed at it. "This field is my prayer mat" she writes of the green expanse seen outside the window, and in another verse:

I wish I could shake words out of me
The way I shake pecan trees
till the nuts hit
the ground
So that the poem leads me
home.

I decided to explore that field, that tree, that home. The house itself is drenched in flowers, like everything in Kfar Mordechai.

I took the long way back to the highway, wandering through the fields, the pomegranate and persimmon groves, the vinyards. Magical? yes, and yet this is Israel, which Mishol knows well. "Pastorale" a poem out of the same book, opens thus:

Over the house, large hanging fans –
combat helicopters from the army base.

Underneath, the scent of rice has already faded
from the Thai workers' trailer.
The sorting machine grumbles in the shed.

Because of his wool hat it’s hard to know
whether he’s Tawa-chai or Nee-pon,
“Kahane was right” printed on the t-shirt
someone gave him.

At this time of year blossoms and fruit share the tree.

The streams, in this case Gamliel creek, just north of the house, are overflowing.

Nature and mankind cooperate in seemingly perfect harmony.

So close to all of this is our imperfect reality. Israeli urbanism, for example, is eating up the fields at an atrocious rate. No less than three massive towns can be reached on foot from Kfar Mordechai (seen here are the outskirts of Rehovoth, to the north). The military base mentioned in the poem, the Tel-Nof air field, is no more than four kilometers away from the Mishols' house. It was from here that planes took off to bomb Gaza during the onslaught.

So is this place good? is it bad? Is it a cosy home? Is it a slaughterhouse? Maybe we should simply learn from our poets and look in both directions.

(portion from "Pastorale" was translated by Lisa Katz)

Silence is Scary

2010-04-07T11:04:00.014+03:00

There's a situation here that is nearly too complicated to explain. It is also too explosive to outline. First the state publishes a gag order forbidding anyone from writing about the case. The press keeps mumm, but the blogosphere is exploding with information.

Then an actual figure involved in the story, a young journalist under secret house arrest, turns to bloggers and asks them to delete their posts. She is involved with a very serious legal issue and would prefer the flow of information to be minimized or at least controlled.

The blog posts are deleted one after the other, her Wikipedia page disappears. Those in the know get freaked out. The double mechanism of direct state censorship and censorship powered by intimidation managed to erase the information.

Then it starts leaking out in other ways. The foreign press, not subject to Israeli law, is publishing it freely. Jealous Israeli newspapers find subversive ways to hint at the existence of the story. Legal experts express outrage. One radio personality spills the information out while on the air. He is likely to be tried for contempt of court very soon.

We will all remain shaken for a while. Normally, it's the issue in question that should shake us the most: a revelation that the IDF has been assassinating Palestinian militants in disregard to supreme court orders. In action, it's this new experience with silence that scares us.

Usually it's the army that maintains gag orders, this time it's the court. Transferring authority from military and police establishments, which are subject to scrutiny, to civil establishments which are more immune, is one technique used by our current proto-fascist regime to grant itself flexibility. One example is the annihilation of the old immigration police, subject to the Department of Domestic Security, and the creation of the virtually omnipotent Oz unit, subject to the Ministry of the Interior.

So it's a different hand than usual that's shutting our mouths, and it does so for a long time (over three months now) and very effectively. That should be enough to spook us out a bit. What provokes actual horror is the combination of that notion with what we already know about those in charge: their disregard for our democracy (non-violent protesters are arrested, sometimes after returning from the demonstrations), their disregard for the legal system (as in the case in question) their perfect willingness to turn Israel into a highly controlled state, isolated from the rest of the world (You can talk all you want, Mr. Obama, we're not listening), their racist, militaristic views, which leave no room for opposition. Their perfect arrogance.

Netanyahu is known for mocking his opponents as cowards. "They are afraid! They are afraid!" is a typical cheer at his election rallies. Afraid is how he wants us, and That's a good point to consider. Let's stop being afraid, and let's make sure we use this affair as a means of criticizing, discrediting and weakening the criminal, anti-democratic rule to which we're subject.

You've Seen One City, You've Seen Them All

2010-04-06T10:41:00.010+03:00

O my hometown, I love you and I failed you. I betrayed you by leaving home for the day without my camera. There was still time to turn back when I hit Yeffet street. There, breaking my stride, was the Greek-Orthodox boy and girl scouts' easter march, complete with a bagpipe band. I chose to use my cellphone cam.

Then, when I met Daiva for a Sudanese lunch at the refugee quarter, it was already too late. No way to properly depict the impromptu decor of the restaurant's terrace. No way to capture the tangy aroma of the lamb and injera. The photo of the roll of toilet paper served to us as a napkin failed completely.

We then went to Daiva's place to break bread with salt for the holiday. She decorated eggs and we cracked them against each other in her own Lithuanian tradition. (notice the matza peeking from behind. That matza was blessed in a church.)

Armed with more decorated eggs, we walked to Jaffa and cracked a few with Itka, drank Lithuanian honey snapps in a little alleyway, scaled the fences of the old port's shipyards and met the mediterranean waters on both sides of the great jetty. O my city, How could I do this to you, snapping you with the cellphone cam as if you were a mere yishuv kehilati?

As the sun set, we went looking for a mimouna party. That evening marked the beginning of festivities for Morrocan Jews. They mark the birth of great scholar Mimonedes with a table full of sweets and dances in colorful garb. As you can see, we found a proper one. Seen dancing are Daiva, Kochavit and Itka, perfect partners with whom to expore Tel-Aviv-Yaffo-Glasgow-Khartoum-Vilnius-Casablanca on yet another typical day. O my city, it's anyway so impossible to frame you and shrink you into a snapshot, I might as well no worry and focus on the sweets.

The Swing

2010-04-02T12:55:00.013+03:00

Passing the Charles Clore playground after sunset, I witness a miracle. Scores of hardcore Hassidic families are enjoying the fancy swings and slides, sharing them with Muslim families from Jaffa. Fathers in black "kaften" coats and mothers in green hijabs stand around the same sandboxes, observing their kids with the same care. The kids themselves run around with the same joy, unaware of the big lie: that which states that they are not the same, that which is law in this land.

I walk among all of them, snapping shots with my cellphone, when a woman approaches me. By her long skirt and fair hair she seems to be a moderately religious Jew. "Who do you work for?" she asks me in English.

"Nobody, I'm documenting this for my own pleasure."

"Too bad, I was hoping you're a journalist."

"I am," I smiled, "but off duty at the moment. Are you a native english speaker?"

"Long story, born in Switzerland, raised in Canada. I was actually thinking of calling the press. This whole family of Arabs took over the big swing over there. They wouldn't let our kids on. I'm so sorry you were not here to see that. I don't understand how come such people are allowed to set foot here."

"'Such people', as in Arabs?"

"Yes."

"But even if they were pushy or mean, it doesn't neccesarily have to do with them being Arabs. People can be rude no matter their language or religion. Families can be difficult to handle." I catch myself trying to educate her and decide to cut it short. "I think what's happening here is gorgeous. It's worth the wait for the swing."

She looks at me with such disdain that I just quit the scene. You know what, she's right. She's got to be right. After all, the majority in this country agrees with her, according to a study conducted in 2007 by the association for civil rights in Israel, 75% of Israelis would prefer not to have an Arab neighbor. A study conducted last year by Tel-Aviv university reveals that 50% of teenagers believe Arabs should not be given full rights in Israel.

The irritated lady, whose kids had to wait for a swing, reflects the majority opinion in Israel, and in a democracy, the majority rules. Here is does more so than elsewhere. People would be racist. It's the role of constitutions and state institutions to keep such tendencies at bay. We have no constitution and our govenment prefers to fan the flames. With openly racist Lieberman and secretly racist Netanyahu running the country, this is the hayday of anti-Arab legislation and court action, from decrees allowing rural communities to ban Arabs from buying houses, to a ban on marriages between Palestinian citizens of Israel and West Bank residents.

We are in control of the big holy-land swing right now. Like a kid with his head in the clouds, we live in the illusion that this will never end, that we'll just keep swinging forever, but our violent attempts to kick the other kid off may cause everybody to fall to the sand. This will end with more than a bruised knee.

(artwork by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Yinka Shonibare)

Bake Your Own!

2010-03-31T16:01:00.008+03:00

I stopped keeping kosher on passover after baking my first matza. My ex-wife was a non-Jew who came from a religious home and loved the ceremony and symbolism of religious holidays. She came up with the idea: let's bake them ourselves.

The experience of baking matzot was so educational and so meaningful, that it made the restriction on consuming baked goods seem entirely meaningless. a matza must be prepared in no more than 18 minutes, from the moment water touches the flour, to the moment it's out of the oven. Preparing the matza in haste created a vivid simulation of the runaway experience. We actually felt as though we had only that night to excape from Egypt.

Passover is about keeping the story of the exodus in the culture and bequething it to the younger generation. Baking matzot does just that, eating matzot doesn't. I live in a country in which beer is banned from the taps for seven days. We can't buy breakfast cereal this week if our lives depended on it. Even soda bottles must carry a "kosher for passover" emblem on them in order to be sold (soda water included). What does breakfast cereal have to do with our mutual heritage? nothing. How does any of this bread-crumb paranoia educate us? It doesn't. In fact, it causes many to feel disdain towards the holiday. It's sacriligious.

Placing a culinary taboo can be effective in distinguishing a portion of the year as sacred and instilling a sense of uniqueness in people. However, in this case, it shifts the focus from the essence of the holiday to sheer nonesense, which is something Judaism's always been good at, as our various shabbat obssesions nicely reveal. The OCD behaviour common among the haredim at this time of year (they don't drink with the meals, lest a drop of water touched the matza and rendered it "chametz"), is further proof of that.

I call for a return to our roots. Lets seek reason, rather than act automatically on rules that have degenerated over millenia into idiocy. Let's eat lovely whole-wheat bread, pizza and hamburgers in a bun throughout passover, and lets bake matzot. I know it's hard to believe, but they come out tasty too.

P.S. Within minutes of publishing this post, top notch poet and editor Eli Hirsh added his two cents. He tells that in many Israeli communities in which chametz is difficult to obtain, passover has become the holiday of baking homemade bread. If anynoe needed proof that the restrictions beat the purpose - you've got it. Hirsh suggests mixing both baking experiences. I certainly have enough of an apetite to deal with that.

Lost in the Hills

2010-03-29T16:47:00.012+03:00

The nearby, forested hill, is Israel. The faraway, barren one, is the West Bank.

The Jewish National Fund has for decades been busy foresting large areas of Israel, mostly west of Jerusalem but also in the north and the Neguev. This is really an act of reforestation - much of the territory was covered with woods of oak and pistacia, nearlly all of which were chopped for firewood over history. The JNF chose to plant pine. It grows quickly and gives the landscape a pristine look reminicient of eastern Slovakia, land of our ancestors and where we'd probably feel more comfortable.

So, in Israel even a forest is political. However, as my Palestinian friend Philip pointed out to me years ago, when I ranted to him about our woods, even a political forest is nice. Here, two kilometers from the Green Line, we can enjoy locally made cheese and yogurt

as well as meet those who make it.

At this time of year, the hillsides are exploding with wildflowers. We walk among them, not knowing their names. This is our native country, but we are not strongly enough connected to its soil. Our "cousins" from across the fence will know what they are called. In Israel, even looking at a flower is political.

All we wanted was to have a peaceful day in the countryside, to greet springtime and enjoy the last drop of moisture on the ground before the punishing summer arrives, but everything evokes thoughts. The JNF is a discriminatory organization, preventing Arabs from acquiring land. It is now expending its reforesting activities to the West Bank, closely coordinating its activity with the state, so that it fits in with the occupation agenda. A ten minute drive from where we had our cheese is Bil'in, where the fence keeps an entire village away from its lands. The Israeli supreme court ruled that the fence must be moved, and the state simply ignores the verdict, and shoots at those protesting in favor of the court. The instant Slovakian forests, which conveniantly cover up the ruins of villages destroyed in 1948, are oxidizing the soil and preventing the growth of more wildflowers... There's no end to it. How simple everywhere else seems! How difficult it is to clear the mind and simply be, for one moment only, just so as to remain sane.

Walking in these woods is no walk in the woods, but the flowers do comfort. They deserve a word of thanks.

Kadima!

2010-03-25T01:31:00.010+02:00

When a bunch of Tel-Avivians, among them four journalists, one real estate agent, a cult folk musician, a single mother and a former Eurovision star, gather in an apartment in the city's Yemenite quarter, it can only mean one thing: that they are about to stage a play in Israel's largest sewege treatment plant.

"Kadima!" by Roy Chicky Arad (the guy in blue) was already staged twice in more concievable surroundings: Tzavta theatre and the Barzilai club. This Saturday night it participates in the first art event to take place among Tel-Aviv's filtering pools. It will be featured in "Redemption through the Gutters", a large scale artfest curated by the extra-talented Galya Yahav. (Here's the Facebook event, for all details.)

It may seem unethical for me, as a theatre critic, to function as an actor, so I'll hurry up and confirm: I would have given this show a dreadful review. It's a big anarchic mess, no one knows their lines (we're reading them off the page), most jokes are dreadfully juvenile, and the songs took thirty seconds to compose - I know this for a fact. I composed them.

But Kadima! (Hebrew for "onwards", but also the name of the Israel's major center-right party) does have one thing going for it: It makes one hell of a punishing political statement, and it does so in the rustic spirit of true satire.

The story is that of Tzvika Ofer (Yuval Segev), an IDF colonel whose negligance led to the breakout of the second Lebanese war. Ofer, scolded in Israel, escapes to Mexico and works there as military consultant for a dubius regieme. Then he meets a witch.

The witch tells him that she can send him back to one moment in his past. Ofer, cynical at first, finally decides to return to the days before the war's outbreak and prevent it. His wish is fulfilled, history is reversed. Elyakim Firstater (Moshe Ferster), the simpleton sodier who's abduction kicked off the war, is safe.

For lack of war, Ofer is discharged from the army and becomes CEO of the Trilanium weapons company, producers of a radium-spiked bomb called "The Smasher". Firstater himself gets a job there as a bomb-painter. sometimes fate just binds us with the wrong people.

Problem is, with no war in sight, the smasher has no market. The owners of Trilanium count on Ofer to produce one. When he learns of it, from the company's Chief Financial Officer, Benny Guetta (yours truly), he is in denial.

Ofer: but the IDF couldn't use the Smasher, the border is quiet.

Guetta: The folks at the Brussels office were hoping you could perk the IDF up.

Ofer: There was no war.

Guetta: This is solvable.

Ofer: Solvable?

Guetta: It's solvable, this lack of war, this endless wait for something to happen.

Ofer (loudly): They were expecting for me to arrange a war?

Guetta: There's no need to shout, let's speak softly.

Ofer: They wanted me to start a war? with whom?

Gueatta: Look, I am against wars, I hate wars. I was on the square where Rabin died, when they took him away from us. Then again, some situations are win-win. Let's imagine the "Smasher" were a success on the battlefield. It would have given it great promotion - advertisements on BBC, on AL-Jezirah... we could start a production line for the Smasher that could export abroad. People hear the word "war" and get startled, it's a real holy cow. But who could lose in such a war? If the Smasher works well, we may end up exporting it even to moderate Arab nations, like Morrocco or Jordan. It could improve our relationship with them and maybe even contribute to peace.

Ofer: The war?

Gueatta: Yes! War today isn't what you think, Tzvika, it's like peace, like peace - but with a dividend. Look at me, do I want war? Do I want battlefields? Do I want widdows and orphans? You know I'm left-leaning. No one wants war, but on the other hand, it's not a good idea to be stuck with marchendise.

At the end of the day, our bunch of clowns is a somber bunch. We've been through that war and we'll be through the next one, and the next one. Forever we shall be told that our security is the issue and that our army is the "Israeli Defence Forces", by those who pocket the dough. No dough for us, we play for nothing, just as we'll probably die for nothing sooner or later.

South of Jerusalem, North of Prague

2010-03-22T17:41:00.020+02:00

My friend Y the Spy is now writing for a huge daily newspaper. A few days ago she was sent on assignment to Hebron. She returned strongly affected. I wasn't surprised.

Yesterday, while putting final touches on her piece, she rang me up and asked a quastion: "What's the name of the area in Hebron with the narrow streets and the little shops, where the Jews live on one side and the Arabs on another?"

"Little shops? Open shops?"

"Yeah."

"That's strange, in Hebron wherever the settlers live the shops are closed by order of the army."

A little bit of questioning taught me that she was referring to the Casbah. "but how come you went through the Casbah?" I asked her, "Israeli visitors are not allowed in there."

"Not allowed?"

"No. Who guided you?"

"The soldiers."

"I guess with them you can go there. Anyway, that's what they pointed out? that Jews live on one side and Arabs on the other?"

"Well, among other things."

"You know, those windows you saw over the Casbah are the back of the selttlements. Did you also see the front side?"

"I think so. Yes."

"So you did see the parallel street, Shuhada street, where all the businesses are closed and the Palestinians are not permitted to walk."

Y the Spy seemed baffeled. "That area did seem pretty dead, but wait, not permitted to walk?"

"Yeah, only Jews and tourists are allowed to walk there, the army welded the doors of the Palestinian houses. They can only leave through the roofs and make their way down to the Casbah, where they may walk, and that's only the beginning. Are you seated?"

Y. the spy went to Hebron to write about the "Shimshon" regiment. When I first visited the city, the soldiers at the deserted street corners were from "Nahal" units, mostly kids from north Tel-Aviv suburbs who were raised to respect human rights. Seemingly, they brought up too many hard questions and were eventually replaced with soldiers closer to the political right. "Shimshon" soldiers made news during their taking of oath ceremony. They presented a banner claiming they will not participate in the evacuating of settlements. These pro-settler soldiers were seen as just the right stuff for maintaining order in Hebron's H2 sector, where several hundred settlers are terrorising a population of nearly 30,000 Palestinians.

"What did they say about their relationship with the settlers?" I asked.

"Not much. They said the settlers give them pizza sometimes."

"This is problematic, they don't get pizza from the Palestinians, if they did, they wouldn't be allowed to eat it, but the settlers are their friends. That's how come they let them do whatever they want, even beat up schoolgirls on their way home.

"They said they have an order to interfere when settlers are harrassing Palestinians" Y the spy said.

"Well that's as may be, but the taste of the pizza is still in their mouths. There's an olive still stuck between their teeth! who will they protect?"

Y the Spy is not naive, and her research of the Shimshon-Hebron question is to be thorough. I'm confident. But I was left upset. Avi Benayahu, IDF's spokesman, who arranged the tour, is the deciple of some great teachers.

When the Nazis allowed journalists and members of the red cross to visit the ghetto at Terezin (Theresienstadt), they were taking them to the only ghetto in Europe where kids were well fed and the Jews' dignity was preserved. Directly across the mountains was Poland and its horrors. Those were not mentioned on the tour. There's no need to lie, half-truths work just fine.

The IDF spokesman's unit piled obstacles before Y the Spy and her paper. Only barely did she recieve a permit to visit Hebron with the soldiers and speak to them (and even then, only to a chosen few). I assume that the Germans were equally smart, "not wanting" for journalists to visit Terezin and finally giving in.

Mr. Bnayahu should be very careful about where he gets his inspiration. As for us, we should be careful about where we get our information. Israeli journalists are dependent on the IDF's spokesperson unit. Brig. Gen. Benayahu is known to have put pressure on papers not to publish material he considered problematic. That material, such as exlposive evidence about the Gaza war that was minutes away from appearing in prime time, vanishes. When it boiled down to it, the reporters could not afford to lose Bnayahu's cooperation and be denied access to information. All media sources, including the paper for which I write, are faced with this threat.

In this case the newspaper cooperated by sending to Hebron a reporter with no knowledge of the city. It's a smart move as far as its relationship with Brig. Gen. Benayahu, the article will not be harsh, but we all end up with less information in our heads and a strange taste of pizza in our mouths.

P.S. one day later:

I'm naturally getting a fair bit of criticism for "comparing to the Holocaust". This is not a comparison. I am drawing an analogy, and the difference is great. If my little sister draws an angel and I say it reminds me of an angel painted by Michelangelo, that does not imply that I consider her as great an artist as Michelangelo was, nor that I think we're living in the Italian Renaissance. However, if she does have the potential to become a new Michelangelo, we'd better be aware of that and nourish her talent.

The Tenth Show

2010-03-19T12:58:00.017+02:00

I've been regularly reviewing the theatre for nearly a year now. If you think that's a fun job, you must be frequenting the theatres of another country, Narnia, for example. I don't think there's anywhere in the world where going to the theatre isn't risky business. The odds are similar everywhere: out of 10 shows, one will actually be wonderful.

Oh, but how amazing that one show is! Theatre may let us down most of the time, but when it doesn't, it changes our lives more potently than any other art could. I was fortunate enough to kick off my career as a critic with one such show. It was the Norwegian National theatre's extremely minimalist interpertation of "an Enemy of the People". Things went downhill from there, steeply.

To my surprise I discovered myself to be a rather harsh theatre critic, (some of the reviews can be found here) much harsher than I have been when writing reviewes of classical concerts. There, at least, the works performed are masterpieces to begin with. In Israeli theatre, the reverance paid to "original drama" ignores the fact that this culture produced a mere handful of great playwrights, perhaps only one.

Playwrights are a rare commodity. Italian culture, for all its glory, produced only two whose names are strongly imprinted in the world's cultural memory: Goldoni in the 18th centuri and Pirandello in the 20th. What makes us think that scores of worthwhile dramatists are surrently living in Gush Dan? What makes us think that they should all be permitted to direct their own plays? Allow the playwrite to direct her or his piece, and you have yourself a show longer by at least 20% than it should be.

Nor do we do such an outstanding job when adopting foreign plays. I had the dubious honor to be mean over theatrical interpertation with both the established repertory theatres (calling the Kameri's Yentel "a fiddler that fell off the roof") and the struggling fringe companies (recently writing of Nikolai Erdman's "The Suicide" at Herzlia ensamble, that spent the duration of the entire show wishing he would just hurry up and do it.) I'm a long-legged man and for a while wondered wheather it was lack of legroom and claustrophobia at the theatres that made me so bitter. I asked for seats with legroom and recieved them. No improvement was registered.

Still, I find that when friends who aren't frequent theatre goers join me for performances, they leave even more upset than I am. Those who are not used to the stage don't understand what a gamble it is. They go expecting to enjoy themselves and are shocked when they aren't. I have come to learn: most shows will be hard to bear or at least mediochre, it's the way of the world, and yet they are still all worth attending for that tenth one, that life-transforming one.

A few of my "tenth" shows of recent months are still playing: "The Great Magic" by Eduardo de Filippo and "Scapin's Deceits" by Moliere, both at Jerusalem's Khan theatre, and Arthur Miller's "A View from the Bridge" at Tel-Aviv's Beit Lessin theatre. One great young fringe production, Ronnie Brodezky's "For she is real" dealing with Kibbutz life, is returning to the stage. Phenomenal theatre of cruely explosion "Abu Ubbu at the butchers' market" by East Jerusalem's Al-Hakawati ensamble is still performed here and there.

The best show I've seen this year was the four-hour-long "Shukshin Stories" by Moscow's Nations theatre. It is also the source of this post's only image. The troup only visited Israel for a week, but if any of you are in or around Moscow, trust me, it's worth every ruble.

All of these are worth running to, and as you run, shed a tear for me who did the legwork for ya'll. Sometimes I nearly surrender and let myself drouse, often I looked more intently at the exit signs than at the stage, but I knew that I have to stay strong. the review must go on.

Talent

2010-03-17T12:44:00.020+02:00

From Lili Elstein's apartment Tel Aviv looks good. On one side are business towers, alight with the promise of prosperity.

On the other side, at the foot of similar business towers, is culture. Here is the plaza connecting the Israeli Opera house and the Kameri Theatre. The city's central library and fine art museum are less than 100 yards away.

Inside the apartment, the arts meet. The Ariel String Quaertet is giving a superb rendition of the third movement out of Brahms's third quartet, with a sculpture by Sigalit Landau in the background.

They then move on to an equally stunning bit by Beethoven. Never have I had chamber music be played this close to me.

To be honest, the whole setting is quite foreign to me. This is a gala evening thrown by Mrs. Elstein to benefit the Perlman Music Program, or "PMP". Years ago, Toby perlman dreamed up what turned out to be one of the most succesful programs for gifted young musicians in the States. This May, the program expends abroad, not to Berlin, nor to London, Nor to Tokyo, but to the Jerusalem Music Center.

Perlman explained to the guests that the decision stems from values bequethed to her by her father. If she can ever do anything that supports or promotes Israel or the Jewish people, she will.

Readers of my blog know that I'm hardly a staunch Zionist, but somehow this moved me, and not only Because perlman's personality is instantly captivating and enchanting. Yes, creating a top notch program like this is going to make this place better. Perlman is here to lift our self asteem. We are not the chosen people when it comes to politics, but we do possess some talent as fiddlers. I think it was Isaac Stern who once explained Jewish dominance of the violin by claiming: "They circumcise our fingers too."

One man who can certainly claim such fingers was present, Toby's husband, the legendary Itzhak Perlman.

Both members of the couple were there as musicians. They were playing the music of fundraising to some of Israel's most affluent. As Toby explained, the program is "extremely cost inaffective" placing a small group of young students in the hands of a relatively big staff, including Itzhak himself.

Enchanting Elstein's guests with the Ariel musicians, all of them graduates of the American program, helps even the cost out. When someone asked how the program is financed, Itzhak explained: "We changed the form of the handshake. The typical handshake is like this," and he presented his hand as if to be shaken, "but we changed it to this," and he presented it with the palm facing up, as though begging. Everyone laughed, but this is of course not a joke. In the U.S. the program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Israel's meanger budgets for culture neccesitate approaching the rich personaly. This country has negelected the arts so badly that they are our only hope.

The rich have regained their traditional role as patrons of the arts, without neccesarily being as knowlegable of the arts or respectful towards them as were the aristocrats of lore. Thankfully, the PMP event was highbrow enough to draw mostly true conoisseurs, such as cleaning detergent mogul Bruno Landsberg, who is Israel's greatest afficionado of second Viennese school composers (Shoenberg, Berg, Webern, et al.)

This made me more comfortable in such posh surroundings (I'm a socialist, for Marx's sake) and I endulged a bit in the elegance of the event. The wonderful carpaccio and sashimi

The fine decoration,

And my own oppurtunity to wear a tie (seen here with Haaretz English Magazine editor Tal Niv and musician, activist and prime media agent Roy Yellin).

The one element of the event I couldn't enjoy was the contribution element, so I'll try and conribute here in a statement of support.

This country is currently going to the dogs at great velocity. If it has anything going for it, it is spirit and talent. Let's put ourselves into this. Lets exhaust the spirit and talent. Let's be inspired and allow others to be inspired with us. Any penny that goes into the arts is sacred, regardless of the many other needs of our society. Any initiative that is meant to bring culture to our doorstep is sacred, regardless of how much we often deserve to be boycotted. If our high society contributes to the arts as a way of redeeming its soul, so be it, its soul is redeemed. On my way home I passed the Mann Auditorium, home of the Israeli philharmonic. People were leaving the building by the thousends. I asked them what they attended and learned that it was a Kabbalah even in which people cried in extacy and were healed and saw the light. Let's make sure tomorrow's program is different.

Cultura e Basta

2010-03-14T11:01:00.013+02:00

Tel-Aviv on a friday can be somewhat bizzare.

It's got its messiahs and those who make offerings of straberries, buns and pineapples to them.

It's got its enthusiastic chanters

and its occasional march of the queen's guards.

It's even got its alternative literaty stalls, run by a mixed staff of humans and cartoon animals.

This is Itka's "Bastarbut" stall, featuring the land's finest offerings in underground comics, poetry and progressive thought. It's about time I wrote something about this project, which was the gateway to many of my adventures over the past few years.

When I met Itka, she had a folding table at the back of her car and a couple of crates full of books and journals. Her idea was to take alternative Israeli literature, most of which is created around Tel-Aviv, and take it to peripherial towns.

Israel's smaller cities suffer from a dreadful lack of cultural activity. A city like Tiberius, for example, has neither a theatre ensamble nor any kind of musical ensabmle to call its own. The concept of young, ass kicking culture is unheard of there. Having said that, the north is rich with music festival and other events. If the comics and poetry get driven there by Itka's little Renault, they go the distance.

Since then Bastarbut (a name bombined of "basta" - market stall, and "tarbut" - culture) became an online store and a sort of an active organization producing spoken word events and supporting other cultural endeavors. This Friday, though, it still looked like the old idealistic traveling one woman show, the peddler's cart next to which we slept in the dirt in the Negev. It's a magnet of good people, too. We got a visit of honor from prime Lithuanian blogger Daiva Repeckaite.

and ended up jamming behind the books with prime Israeli hard rocker and master bratwurst maker Zeev Tene, actress Yael Appelbaum and the legendary Helene Berube.

If all of this looks like an advertisement to my girlfriend's business, you should know that it is not a business. Bastarbut doesn't pay off fiscally. The sales often don't cover the price of fuel to the destination, not to mention the trip back. It's one of those things that happen in this world because they must do, because goodness is there to be shared, even when it's melancholic goodness, as in Yanay Perry's heartbreaking comic book, or dirty goodness as in Merhav Yeshurun's poetry, or painful political goodness as in such journals as "Sedek". This is Hebrew culture's most profound goodness. It's well worth lugging around.

Being There

2010-03-11T20:57:00.014+02:00

I'm free to write here about any subject in this world, except journalism. I'm employed under a contract with Israel's second most widespread newspaper, Israel Haiyom, and have made a vow of confidentiality to it, which I intend to respect.

I will tell you though, that I suspect IH and myself are headed for a divorce, or at least a return to casual friendship. No blame. The paper and myself are just mismatched. It took us three years to reach this conclusion. That's not long. It took seven years before I realized such a mismatch existed between me and my ex-wife.

One way in which the paper and I are mismatched has to do with my love of "Gonzo journalism": Journalism that centers on the recounting of experiences. Before writing to Israel hayom, I specialized in such pieces. Once, for Haaretz, I tried to ride in one day the entire NYC subway system and go through each of its 468 stations. Another time, writing for the Hebrew edition of National Geographic Traveler, I disguised myself as a South African backpacker and stayed a week in a Jerusalem hostel. I learned more about my native city on that week than ever in my life.

One of my articles that appeared in the weekly supplement of IH, described a visit to Teufelsberg. An abandoned American intelligence facility outside Berlin. My friend Anna and myself climbed a barbed wire fence on a misty day (see above image) and explored the complex.

As we expected, none of the old equipment remained in the site. The huge globe-like canopies that used to shield sensative antenae are now hollow planetariums. Retreating after Berlin's reunification, the Americans made sure to even remove the screwes that fastened them to the floor, lest someone deducts from these the nature of the devices.

My editors found themselves pleasently surprised. Here was a story about nothing. Two happy-go-lucky travelers walk into a building that turns out to be empty. "This piece holds its water solely thanks to your writing ability" one of them told me. "It's refreshing, in the sea of revelations and exposures."

That was the end of it, though. I can't just refresh all the time, I need to supply the beef in order to bring home the bacon, to chat with celebrities and find out saucy stories, otherwise the readers will ditch IH for its competitors. I respect that. I'm not here to whine about the current state of the press and weep over how competition has cheapened the Israeli media to an intolerable degree, nor do I moan that political biases render the treatment of actual issues virtually impossible. I would like, however, to assert that I believe in what I do.

I believe that fine journalism is an art. I believe that it can be truly delightful literature. I believe that journalism can make a difference through the telling of stories. I believe that we can reflect the world in articles, we can reveal its diversity and complexity, capture its many ambiences and remind, daily, how fascinating it is. If anyone out there knows of an oppurtunity for someone who holds these beliefs, feel free to write me at yuvalba@gmail.com

I'll conclude by posting a few photos from Teufelsberg, and raising two toasts: one - for the wonderful people who've worked with me in IH, and with whom I still hope to freelance from time to time. Another - for the love of life and letters, and pictures, of course.

What's in a Flag?

2010-03-07T10:52:00.013+02:00

As we approached the demonstration, a Palestinian kid about ten years old stopped us, asking for IDs. He was playing the Israeli soldier to Israelis. I showed him my passport with a smile, not realizing what a complicated game of national identities was yet awaiting me.

We came to East Jerusalem to protest with the Palestinians. In the neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrakh, several families were kicked out of their homes to make room for extremist right-wing Israeli settlers. This is only a part in a scheme to "Jewify" East Jerusalem and enhance Israeli control of it. I'll leave the history of this scandal and its legal aspect to greater experts. My story today is one of symbols.

As we joined the great crowd that gathered in the neighborhoods soccer field, several flags were already flying, most were Palestinian, a few were red. The political left takes the cause of human rights here and elsewhere and I respect it for that. However, when more communist-inclined groups arrived, all of them sporting crimson flags, I started expecting Tovarich Lenin to come onstage and greet the proletariat masses.

In one corner, a woman was giving out blue and white flags with the word "shalom" (peace) replacing the hexagram of the Israeli flag. I decided to pick up one of these.

The first person to approach me over the flag was a Palestinian kid, about the same age as the joker who inspected me earlier. He was dying to hold it. I let him wave it a bit and show it off to his friends, then took it back. There were only four or five such flag in a crowd of 3500 people. I didn't want the kid to vanish with it. The demonstration was a cooperation and it was important to show that. If the TV cameras only caprute red, black, white and green, the Israeli public would feel estranged from the cause and the struggle would achieve little.

Next I was approached by a group of Palestinians in their 20s. "Get rid of this flag" a woman said to me, "get rid of your fucking shitty zionist occupation flag right now I tell you."

"Let's talk about this" I suggested.

"No, this is not open to dialogue. You are going to get rid of this flag right now. We are from the neighborhood and you are in our neighborhood now."

I lowered the flag out of respect for the locals, but on second thought and with some encouragment from friends, raised it again. Another Palestinian came over with similar tones, accompanied by an Israeli activist carrying a red flag.

"Put the flag away", the Palestinian demanded.

"Ok," I said. "But I don't have another flag. My country may have become ugly, but it's my only country and this flag is my only way of stating that I am here too and that Israelis support the struggle. Waving it here is my only way of trying to infuse it with new meaning. not an occupation flag, but one that can also represent opposition to the occupation."

They found the idea of infusing blue and white with new meaning laughable. After 40 years of occupation, the Israeli flag seems to be beyond hope.

"It's all I have," I repeated, "You don't like it, give me another flag." I was secretly hoping the Palestinian would remove the kaffiya he wore as a scarf and hand it to me, symbolically inviting me to join him shoulder to shoulder in the struggle. Instead, it was the Israeli who handed me the red flag.

"Stalin!" I retorted.

"What!?" he acted offended, "I am a communist, Stalin is my biggest enemy, he hijacked the values of communism to benefit his murderous totalitarian regime."

"This is the same thing Netanyahu and Lieberman are doing to Israel," I suggested. "If the red flag can be waved despite Stalin, the Israeli flag can be waved despite them, and don't tell me that Stalin is dead and that the occupation is still going on. People are still opressed under this flag all over China, North Korea, Transnistria, Cuba..."

"Listen," he said, "In Israel I would wave this flag proudly, but not here, east of the green line."

"I'm the opposite. I would never wave it in Israel. There I'll be taken as just another supporter of our augmenting fascism, but here, where everybody knows what I stand for, I would."

"Have it your way," said the Israeli, ready to seal the argument. Some other Israeli activist, a girl, hastened to add: "I just want to see you wave this flag after getting beaten up by soldiers and tortured by the Shin Bet. Why don't you try that and see if afterwards you still want to wave this flag".

"I understand what you're saying" I told her, "and that the flag scares and offends some people here, but you're not pragmatic. For things to change we need to be here together and try and influence public opinion. You don't want things to change! all you want is to be radical and beautiful in your own eyes!" It finally happened, I lost my temper. The Palestinian already vanished into the crowd, looking for someone less hopeless.

Onstage, Palestinian playwright and theatre director Samih Jabarin was attacking those waving blue and white flags. Afterwards Israeli activist Elisheva Milikovski came on and apologized to the public, saying the demonstration was inclusive of everyone who wanted to support the cause.

I remained there confused, with my flag at half mast, until the same little Palestinian kid appeared again, his eyes asking for it. I handed it to him and he ran gladly directly to the heart of the flag jungle. His flag was not captured by the media cameras. The demonstration, which was attended mostly by Israelis and was the largest mixed demonstration in a decade, was taken for another Palestinian gathering and didn't even make the front page of Haaretz.

Later that night I did get to hold a kaffiyah, a Palestinian friend handed it to me in a Shiekh Jarrakh restaurant, but my spirit was low. It was hard to see the Judean People's front and the People's Front of Judea fueding like this. We're doomed to our flags just as we're doomed to this situation. I hope to God we can somehow fold all of our differences away and make progress.

What I know because I'm a Jew

2010-03-05T01:50:00.011+02:00

This city I live in is meaningless. It may be destroyed.
This home I live in is meaningless. It may be burned.
This object I hold dear is meaningless. It may be stolen.
This person I love is meaningless. They may be shot tomorrow.
This business I built is meaningless. It may be shut down.
This job I value is meaningless. I may get fired anyday.
This country I love is meaningless. I may get deported tomorrow.
This God I worship is meaningless. He may not stand by me.
This neighbor I trust in is meaningless. He may hand me in.
This freedom I have is meaningless. I may be jailed tomorrow.
This life I cherish is meaningless. I may be murdered tomorrow.
This moment I take to think of all this is everything. I am free.

Aux Armes

2010-03-01T18:31:00.003+02:00

Sitting on a bus going through the slushy Polish countryside, I overhear a conversation about the two Warsaw insurrections, that of 1943, and that of 1944.

Oops. what is that about? I grew up learning of only one insurrection, the insanely heroic, ill-fated Ghetto uprising of 1943. I interfere the Pole and the Englishwoman who are chatting behind me and ask them about the other one.

The Pole then tells me an amazing story: As the Red Army was nearing the Vistula, in 1944, the people of Warsaw decided to take arms against the Nazis, in hope that Russian aid was near.

The Russians chose to wait west of the river and let the locals "do the job". While they waited, 250,000 Warsaw residents died in battle or were murdered by the Nazis. After two months of strife. The Germans kicked everyone out of the city and burned it to the ground as an act of revenge. 80% of Warsaw was destroyed, the carnage was greater than that of any other European city.

Dramatic, ha? How come I've never heard of any of this? I'm 33 years old, my roots are Polish, my people's history is strongly interwoven with that of the Polish people, but none of it was ever told to me in class, in Yad Vashem, in conversation about history... It seems as tough the Israeli education system makes sure we see no one's disaster but our own.

Is it an accidental hole in our education? I doubt it. Keeping silent about the suffering of others, or belittling it to the point that it's "not even worth mentioning", facilitates portraying us as eternal victims and the rest of the world as antisemitic. I hate to say so, but ignorance is a political tool in Israel, as it is in many other places.

It works, too. If you ask most Israelis about the relationship between Poles and Germans during the Holocaust, they'll tell you the Poles are an antisemitic people who handed Jews in to the Nazis gladly. No word about insurrections, about the murder of multitudes, about Polish prisoners in the camps, about destroyed cities.

We are vaguely aware of Poles who protected Jews, the "righteous among the nations". i'm glad about that, but even that is a Jewish issue. We know nothing of the disaster suffered by Poland during the war. The first time I arrived in this country, after finishing 12 years of Israeli schooling, I was stunned, no one told me any of this, and for a reason.

Last summer I traveled through Galizia with a group of Israeli guides who show the death camps to groups of Israeli schoolkids. the tour, organized by the polish government, was meant to show the guides "Polish Poland" so that they can give students background on the country, not only from a Holocaust perspective. Jewish and holocaust sites were also featured by the Polish planners, but they were not the focus.

For the most part, the Polish sites were canceled by the Israelis, who cared nothing for them. On several days we ended up visiting only Jewish sites, especially the remains of old synagogues, sometimes four in a day. Those additions to the program were truly moving places, relics of the tragically lost world of Galizian Jewery, but focusing on them beats the purpose: to learn more about something besides our own history.

It is very important that we develop empathy, because we seek empathy. It is also important because without empathy, compassion is impossible, and in our situation in the Middle East we must develop a capacity for compassion.

Knowing of the suffering of others is the key to both empathy and compassion. The Israeli ministry of education, especially under the current minister Gideon Saar, consciously keeps that information away from students, and not only in the case of Poland. prefer unquestioned patriotism to these two qualities.

Least Romantic City?

2010-02-26T20:22:00.008+02:00

Itka and I are off to Warsaw tonight, each as correspondant of a different paper (I had to let the organizers know that Israel-Hayom and Maariv are sharing a bedroom). The Poles invited us to attend the openning of the international Chopin year, including recitals by such legends as Kissin, Demidenko and Barenboim, plus a concert conducted by the artful Franz Bruggen.

200 years after his birth, Chopin turns out to be a hard sell. I had to give up on a major magazine article for the weekly supplement and settle for 800 words in the daily culture pages. That's a shame because I had a killer concept. Chopin gets me high. I hear the first notes of "Impromptu Fantasie" and my spirit soars. I could sell Chopin to Indonesian villagers whove heard nothing but Gamelan music their entire lives. I'll use those 800 words to the outmost, do trust.

Warsaw makes me far less ecstatic. I've been there twice so far (all photos are from the latest visit, last year) and each time found it to be Europe's least romantic city. It's none of Warsaw's fault, of course. It was known as the most perfectly demolished city of all those harmed by WWII. It then went under the hammer and sickle for too long. But There's more to this than bad history. I've heard it being described as "the epitomy of all that is not exotic", and found that notion spring to mind with every bite into the bland local sausages.

In other words, Warsaw is a city that demands an effort, it does not offer itself. With five days on our hands, we'll try and discover it. The hypothesis: it's wonderful, it's sexy, it's breathtaking. I'll update you later, as we emerge out of the alleyways of the Praga and the clubs off Marszałkowska. If we're still not into it, you're welcome to take our place in the philharmonic hall when Chopin turns 300.

Twelve Chairs

2010-02-26T17:39:00.004+02:00

I'm proud to say it was my idea, a little less proud that it was born out of my lack of success as a musician. "If I can barely fill up a bloody club in Florentine," I told Itka, "why don't I take the opposite approach? I'll play for a forum so small that no matter what happens, people will wind out being stuck outside."

We decided on 12 chairs, in honor of the famous satirical novel by Ilf and Petrov. We also decided to buy a huge bottle of vodka (3 liters) and let people drink as much as they want for the 30 shekels cover charge. Stellina, probably the sweetest person in this city, volunteered her apartment near Rabin square, and filled it up with candles.

It works. I've never had so much fun with my music. There have been four performances so far, each one completely different. The first was photographed by the talented Arnon Tussia Cohen, who produced the image appearing beneath. He's working on a series depicting people while they listen to music. The second show was nearly all conversation. The third feathured a guest star: Texas' own Zach Wheat and his anthem "Fuck You Tel-Aviv".

Last night there was relatively little storytelling and sharing of jokes, and more avant-garde trial and error. the totally corky Yael Birenbaum opened for me with her electric organ singing: "Get on top of me. Get on top of me." I couldn't help but reply with something equally pornographic and launched my own set with "Wintery sex in a Moscow Playground"

The much rootsier Ami Yares, sitting across from me on the couch, pulled out a guitar and played along to most songs, turning each one into an unrehersed duet. I was wearing a feathered bow fit for an Austrian widdow, in honor of Purim, Stellina dressed up as Peter pan. we drank nearly 2 liters of vodka and gradually lost control of the music, which is what music is for.

Granted, there were only 11 of us, and that is the closest I got to 12 so far. But this too is a source of pride for me. When the Mothers of Invention began performing there were often more musicians onstage than in the audience. They made their best music at the time. As a one man show, I can't compete with such feat, but a room full of friends isn't prone to artistically corrupt me.

On this link are the date for the next 12 chair show and Itka's email address. drop her a line and she'll send you the address.

Red Alert

2010-02-24T15:58:00.008+02:00

What a week. First the municipality of Tel-Aviv launches a campaign to stop Jewish girls from dating Arab boys. Two days later the government decides that all college and university students will be forced to take a course in Zionist ideology and history. I recommend Dimi Reider's extremely intelligent blog for background on both developments.

Dimi, by the way is more of an optimist than myself. He forsees these classes turning into protest events. I believe that our students, fresh from the army and perhaps not too knowlegable about history, will prefer to pass the course and not flunk in the name of rationalism. As for girls seeing Arab boys, here rebellion is more likely. These girls will have to somehow be scared away from their desire. I wonder what city hall has in mind.

When the city begins to interfere with our lovelife on a racial basis, it ceases to be a municipality and becomes a tool of enforcing racist policies. When the university begins to preach an ideology rather than research it and teach about it, it ceases to be an educational institution and becomes a tool in spreading nationalist dogma.

Where in the past have racist policies and nationalist dogma risen so dramatically and so quickly? Hold on! this is the forbidden comparison! make it today and you'll be thrown from an airplane tomorrow. Instead I will quote prominent historian and Israel-prize laureate Prof. Zeel Sternhall. He said that the only government since WWII that was as reactionary as the current Israeli one was Franco's Spain.

Prof. Sternhell wouldn't be as jittery as most of us about being thrown from airplanes. Two years ago he saw death before his eyes. A right-wing extremist tried to take him out with a bomb and wounded him. That attempted-assasin, U.S. born Jacob Teitel, was caught and put on trial, but the way it looks today, it's only a matter of time before Sternhell and his likes will be the ones taken to court and the various Teitels held as heros.

Sternhell's ideas, after all, negate those that will be taught in the obligatory course. They negate the truth of the state, which is now absolute. How long is it going to take before people who speak out are legaly seen as traitors? How dangerous is it for me to be writing these words right now, considering that they are to be read by others in a very unpromising future?

How near is that future?

Skirt Chasers

2010-02-23T15:57:00.021+02:00

Lets face it, the holiday of Purim really has nothing to do with the its supposed biblical source. I have no doubt that it predates the book of Esther, and was probably adopted from the very Persians who are vilified in that text. Jews, like persians, need at least one day a year to break loose. Catholics need one too, and have thus invented carnival.

Both Carnival and purim allow grown ups full freedom to choose a diguise and fulfill a fantasy (much more so than Haloween, which is mostly identified with kids) It should come as no surprise that both holidays are heaven for anyone who's interested in playing with gender identity. I love doing that, so it's a big shame that I'll be away for business on the holiday this year.

Stuck as I am in my boring, bearded, male persona, the least I can do is give my readers a Purim gift, a "mishloach manot", if you will. Thus, I decided to honor this earth's true masters of disguises and pay homage to a handful of great female impersonators

When looking for "female impersonator" on wikepedia, one gets automatically directed to "drag queen". In my understanding, this isn't precise. Drag queens exaggarate female attire and behavior, creating in a sense a third, comical gender that can be used to express gay notions, humor and critical content. Female impersonators are about illusion. Their art is tromp l'eoil, and it's an ancient art. check our this poster from 1896.

Even this guy is rather pre-stonewall. In his day, Julian Eltinge was such a star that he gave a commend performance before the king of England. I read somewhere that in preparation for his act he used to go as far as shaving the backs of his fingers. Eltinge was probably straight, and acted in several films as a man.

Fernando Marcano is one of the most beautiful women in Venezuela and a sort of a national symbol, well, if you're gay in Caracas, I guess, or otherwise a drag addict.

And here is Germany's Chris Kolonko. I happen to have met him face to face here in Tel-Aviv just recently, so I can tell you the airbrushing of this photo was completely unneccesary, the man makes a great woman in real life.

I couldn't help but finish the tribute with the picture of a real woman. This photo of a drag king is by talented Canadian photographer Tanja Tiziana. Drag kings, like drag queens, tend to take the portrayal of the other gender to an extreme. They have less of a choice, though. Women in convincing drag tend to look young. Playing it rough prevents them from being mere "drag kids". This one pulls of a nice look, without painting on a moustache.

These people are the answer to the whiny Israeli children's song: "why doesn't Purim happen twice a week." why? because we don't let it. Those who made Purim their profession enjoy it often. If this is indeed a day in which we break societal conventions and bounderies, then these are some subversive personalities, role models for our opressive day and age. Keep that in mind when you choose a costume this year.

Dark by Night, Dark by Day

2010-02-22T16:01:00.014+02:00

This week kicked off with two very interesting trips. The first was to Yad Haroutzim, one of Tel-Aviv's roughest nightlife districts. On Thursdays and Fridays the streets of the compound are the site of many a stabbing. Real life metal detectors are placed outside the clubs, and the music is as aggressive as the atmosphere. For some reason working class suburban kids love these vibes and descend on these streets by the thousands.

We came on a Saturday, as chaperons for our friend Goni, who had to take photos for a magazine article. The compound turned out to be dead. The dangerous energies gave way to the blues. It was thick blues, the sort of which I haven't felt in this city before. Yad Haroutzim felt like a container into which Israel's augmenting violence, waning education and diminishing values are dumped. We were there just as that trashcan was emptied, walking though the gloomy void that was left.

The following day we traveled 70 kilometers away, to Hebron. I used to come here often, mostly assisting the organization "Breaking the Silence", which gives tours of the city from a human rights perspective. For nearly a year I stayed away. As I expected, not much has changed. In fact, the only visible difference was that soldiers are no longer wearing full combat gear in the city. the destructive status quo, whereby Hebronites are perpetually held hostage, has rooted. No one threatens it.

Palestinians are still not allowed to walk on the main streets. The center of the city is a ghost town, in which 300 Jewish settlers are free to terrorize the Palestinian populatio with support of the army. Hebron feels like a container into which Israel's augmenting violence, waning education and diminishing values are dumped. Its streets at noon are as silent as Yad Haroutzim's streets on a Saturday night. Again that feeling of walking through an empty, dirty trashcan. Here it is, as photographed by Itka.

It's not too difficult to stay away from both Hebron and Yad Haroutzim. Israel looks great from the cafe in which I write this. Everyone is well dressed, educated and polite. We all enjoy liberties and rights similar to those of our brethren in Europe and North Amorica. Outside the window, good looking cars are climbing lazily up the tree-lined Ben-Zion Boulevard, passing the newly renovated national Theatre as they reach the top.

In reality, ours is a society in a state of crisis. The dark side of Israeli existance is getting darker. Many Israelis are struggling to cast more light: teachers, activists, volunteers et al. The government isn't helping much. It's more concerned about buying fake glasses and eyebrows and sending hit men for murder vacations in fancy Dubai hotels. Oh well, at least someone around here is having an authentic good time.

Meet the Mainstream

2010-02-14T15:05:00.015+02:00

Sometimes it's hard to be an oddball, particularly when you got to think you no longer were one. The ugly duckling is comfortable with the swans, the ugly swan is happy among the duckling. But sometimes they both have to visit the old neighborhood. Yesterday was such a day for Itka and I. It was Shavit's birthday.

The lovely Shvait is Keren's beyfriend, and Keren is Itka's friend from highschool. Both still live in the suburban town of Rehovoth, south of Tel-Aviv. This is the town in which Itka grew up, and which is incidently the cradle of my own family: both my parents were born there.

In order to stay in Rehovoth and enjoy its reasonable real-estate, one must embrace the values of the Israeli mainstream. People with such political opinions and liberal lifestyle as Itka and myself would find life there rather difficult. Even attending a lazy weekend party with Rehovotites turned out to be a challange, at least for myself.

To begin with, we don't own a television set. Consequnetly I found myself confused in most conversations. somebody would say some random word in a funny accent and everyone would laugh. I had to assume that it was some comical TV reference that all recognized, all but for me.

The other difficulty had to do with politics. The party took place in Tel-Aviv's Park Darom (literally South Park), a place where many religious and working class families, typically associated with the right, go to spend a fair Saturday. Our own section of the park was lined with blue and white baloons. Blue and white - because the theme of the birthday party, as organized by Keren, was "Israel". Only Israeli music was to be played and a karaoke machine equipped with Mizrahi songs allowed us to add noise to the park's commotion. Keren kept referring to me endearingly as "the shameless leftist".

Perhaps the most obvious cultural gap between us and the others was the most subtle one. It has to do with the Army service. Neither Osnat nor myself have served in the I.D.F., each for a different reason. The Army provides Israelis with a unique essence in their communication. It's a rustic essence that often makes me feel like an over-delicate Eton boy in conversations.

In the Army, you can't talk "high" or you'll be embarrassing yourself and others. It's very important to stay down to earth and never challange the other conversants with exclusive knowledge or opinions. This trait remains in the Israeli psyche. Even when I caught a some guy talking to his friends about his impending flight to Madrid with a layover in Prague, I couldn't get the conversation to be about either Madrid or Prague. Any mention of anything besides how much layovers suck, was ignored.

Keeping lowbrow is perfectly fine in a picnic situation, but these guys were keeping way lowbrow. I didn't buy it. These are intelligent people. They are Jewish, and Jewish society originally revered education. Israeli Jewish society, however, regards education as secondary and instead reveres the Military.

Are these wasted minds? I am a stuck-up misfit, no different from other trecherous deserters who are currently being demonized by Israeli politicians? Let's not get the quarrel started. It's a birthday party, for heaven's sake.

All in all, it was a good party thrown by lovely hosts. Once I got my go at the Mizrachi karaoke, I was feeling more at home. and once the guitar was out, South Park began to look pretty good indeed.

One day propaganda may make Itka and I into real personas non gratas. That day isn't here yet. As long as both "good Israelis" from Rehovot and Tel-Avivian post-Zionists can still raise a toast together, I'm glad. Currently, It doesn't really matter whether you're a duckling or a swan, so long as the pond is filled with beer.

Mirror, Mirror beyond the Wall

2010-02-08T19:10:00.010+02:00

Ok, so 15 Israeli soldiers enter Ramallah at night and arrest two European women in their 20s. The excuse: the two have overstayed their tourist visas. In reality these women were members of International Solidarity Movement, or ISM, a non-violent organization of international volunteers supporting the Palestinian cause.

The two women are then handed over to the loving arms of the Oz unit, the force created through a loophole in Israeli law to replace the old immigration police. The Oz unit is subject to the ministery of the interior and enjoys greater liberties than most policing forces on earth. In fact, it enjoys such unparralleled liberty, that its own people have acted more than once inside Ramallah, i.e. outside the recognized bordrs of Israel.

When the Oz unit or the I.D.F. enter the West Bank in search of foreign volunteers, they perform an illegal act, but legality is of little concern in Israel today. What matters is fear, and the young people who come here with ISM are what we fear.

We fear them because the turn the Palestinians into who we used to be. In the early years of the Jewish state, many Europeans came here to volunteer in the Kibbuzim and give a hand to the Zionist endeavor. A fair haired American girl, picking Bananas by the sea of Galillee, was a symbol of Israel's beauty. Once such a girl is murdered by an Israeli bulldozer, while serving as a human shield to stop house demolition in Gaza, we have to look at ourselves in the mirror and admit: we have become monsterous. This is what happened to ISM activist Rachel Corrie in 2003, this is what happened to us.

We don't like looking at ourselves in the mirror. We'd much rather smash the mirror by arresting and deporting (though we're not completely adolescent. The Israeli supreme court ordered the two Ramallah activists freed). Most Israelis would claim it's a crooked mirror and that ISM volunteers are impressionable kids at best, possibly antisemites.

I know this not to be the case. One night in Hebron I was with a group of Israeli activists. We were watching over an abandoned Palestinian house that the settlers threatened to take over. The watch was to last two nights, only until the Palestinians managed to renovate the interior and make the house livable for a local renter. I spent most of the first night by the fire in the yard, but was catching a serious cold and had to be indoors. Two ISM volunteers escorted me to their apartment, at the foot of Tel-roumeida and made a bed for me there.

I stayed up nearly till dawn, chatting with them and the other volunteers by the kitchen table. They were extraordinarily lovely. Those were good people who have come to build, not destroy, and who took no offence at my nationality. I challanged them, playing devil's advocate more than once. The challenges were met with attentiveness and willingness to discuss.

Later, a bunch of them came to stay with me in Tel-Aviv. I wanted to show them the other side of things and did. They loved it here, especially after having spent two weeks under artillery fire in Nablus. I remember one girl saying to me: "I am so troubled by how much I like Tel-Aviv. I didn't want to like it that much."

I said: "You shouldn't feel bad that Tel-Aviv is in a good shape. That is a good thing. You should wish for Nablus to be in an eqaully good shape. Once that materializes, your work here is done."