Home on the Range

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)