I spend quite a lot of time surfing around the Arab blogosphere, often via links I find on the fabulous Arab aggregate blog Toot.

Sometimes I find depressing, dehumanising "all evil Israel, all the time" blogs, but mostly I find insightful, thoughtful and fascinating musings that make it clearer than ever that we all have a lot more in common than we think. I'm going to write a longer post about that subject, with links to some of the blogs I've just discovered or have been reading regularly for awhile, in my next post.

Meanwhile, I just found this post by a Lebanese blogger who linked to me (and wrote some awfully nice things about me that are making me feel all humble and grateful) after he discovered the Israeli blogosphere. He thinks we Israeli bloggers are great, by the way. Here's an excerpt from his post:

"Not knowing about 'them' is the worst crime we can commit. It invalidates them as humans, as if they don't even matter. They are Stalin's faceless enemy, the rabid dog, the evil blood suckers whom it is righteous to kill. Our papers definitely need to start covering more than major political events in Israel. We should remember their tragedies. 'They' already have a massive internal debate going on about the Palestinians, the war in Lebanon, and the wall. Given the reception Elias Khoury's book has received in Israel, it seems the Israelis (including the official IDF education officer quoted in the Forward) are recognizing the Nakba. Why deny the Holocaust?

At first all this unquestioning and uninformed hate makes me angry, but in the end, it's truly depressing, especially after reading the uninhibited first person narratives in the Israeli blogosphere."

So I'm sitting with my friend at a cafe last night when my mother calls on my mobile. She tells me that she has bought the vanity products I love and cannot find in Israel, and wants to know if she should FedEx them now or wait until I get back from a conference I'll be attending abroad next week, in case the package arrives while I'm away. (it is very, very cool to have a mother who is both uber-generous and an uber-shopper).

"Oh, by the way!" she says. "I saw the 'ex-CIA chief' on the Jon Stewart Show* last night. Do you know who Jon Stewart is?"



I do.

"Well," she said. "Jon could hardly keep up with him! He really has a fantastic sense of humour."

*Top row of video clips, second from left (next to Tom Selleck) - initials E.H.

When I was 8 years old, I found a book in the library about the early years of the Nazi movement in Germany. It was illustrated with black and white photographs, many of which showed children in Hitler Youth uniforms - either giving the Nazi salute or holding up signs and banners written in German Gothic script. I took that book to my religious studies teacher, who was a Holocaust survivor, and asked her what the words on those signs and banners meant.

She snatched the book out of my hands and asked, in a scandalised tone, where I had found it.

"In the library!" I answered, hurt and puzzled at her reaction. I was a bit (okay, a lot) of a teacher's pet in those days, and this teacher in particular was very indulgent toward me. I expected a pat on the head for my curiosity, but instead I received a rebuke.

"Little girls should not look at things like that!" she responded angrily. "You should be enjoying your childhood!"

She refused to translate the words for me, saying that I didn't need to know "things like that."

But as I progressed into the higher grades, my religious studies teachers proved to have a rather different attitude. My school became more hardline and the newly hired Orthodox teachers were reactionaries, not intellectuals in the tradition of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom I admire very much. I am sorry to say that some of them taught us the Holocaust was a divine punishment for the Jewish people becoming secular.

Even at that young age, I didn't buy the divine punishment explanation.  Then why were so many religious Jews murdered? I wondered (but didn't ask). And babies and children? And if God is full of mercy, then why would he mete out such a terrible punishment? And furthermore, were my teachers trying to imply that non-Jews didn't suffer as well? And weren't they God's creation too? And so on and so on.

No, this was not an epiphany. I did not decide to reject religion because I had some stupid, thoughtless teachers. I was a pretty religious child; my evolution toward secularism took place much later, in early adulthood  - incrementally, with much thought, and not as a result of any specific incident.

I did not like the way we were taught about the Holocaust in school. I did not like the message that we Jews were a hunted, tragic people. But still, I was obsessed - for many years - with trying to understand that incomprehensible evil. My sisters used to laugh at me a little, because I went through a long stage of reading everything I could lay my hands on - from Anne Frank's diary to much more explicit historical documents that gave me nightmares. Once they asked if I could name all the concentration camps in alphabetical order. And it turned out that I could. (I can't, anymore).

I remember the time my mother whispered to me, at the kiddush lunch following a cousin's bar mitzvah ceremony, that the relative at the next table - the one who had just pinched my cheeks and told me what a beautiful young lady I was becoming -  had been a Mengele twin. Where is his twin? I asked. In and out of mental hospitals, answered my grandmother.

Even today, I still see old people in Tel Aviv with the tell-tale tattoo number on their forearms. And I shiver every time.

I've given up trying to understand why it happened. I think I just undrerstand that not everything can be understood - like the human capacity to be cruel. And the power of mass psychosis.

I'm late with this post about Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day). Last night I was busy being depressed - because I always get depressed on the eve of Yom HaShoah - and  watching the news about the horrendous terror attack on Dahab, which made me even more depressed. And today I was busy with more prosaic stuff. But I did purposely choose to have my morning coffee at the outdoor coffee bar on Rothschild Boulevard, so that I would be able to participate in that awesome collective moment - the siren that marks two minutes of silence, when an entire nation stands still and remembers.



But still, even though I remember, I am ambivalent about how we should remember - and so is my sister, as she wrote in this powerful post.

And as for the issues of God and faith after the Holocaust, I think that this article by Yair Sheleg in today's Haaretz sums things up rather well.

And Bradley Burston also wrote a nice piece, too. Read the full article here, and I'll end this post with an excerpt.


"Sixty years on, the Holocaust bears different lessons for all of us. Some believe that the lesson is do unto others before they do unto you. Others believe that the lesson has much more to do with compassion and tolerance even when it may seem undeserved, when the blood cries vengeance. War does that to you. It replaces compassion with hatred.

Just this once, however, it might be time to look at the Holocaust for what it remains - a wound that will never heal, an experience that is beyond our experience, comprehension, or puny, wrongheaded automatic comparisons to current events.

Just this once, after all these years, let us honor the victims and survivors with introspection, with compassion, with modesty, with respect, with awe."

Quite a few people have written that they experienced difficulties in registering to leave comments, so I contacted Dr. Blogware and he showed me how to enable comments without registration. Remember that if you don't sign your name, your comment will be from "anonymous."

I will be moderating comments for now, so they won't show up immediately.

If your comment doesn't appear within a reasonable amount of time, you might find the reason in the commenting rules. Or you can send me an email to complain.

Who's that guy, just a-walkin' down the street?



It's Kais Nashef, the Palestinian-Israeli actor who played Said in Paradise Now.

I found the photo above (click on the link to see all the comments) while browsing through Klemantin's Flickr account. Evidently she just happened to have her camera with her when she saw the actor with his wife, Lara Shahad Zouabi, on Tel Aviv's Dizengoff Street.

The tongue in cheek comments in Hebrew made me snort with laughter:

Anoota: What a hottie!
Lucia: Hot. No doubt.
Klemantin: Girls, calm down.
JeckyS: Ha! It kills me that the sign on the door in front of his wife says, "Push."
Klemantin: That sign is definitely in the right place.

I wrote about the first time I saw Kais, following the Tel Aviv premiere of Paradise Now at the Cinematheque, where the film is still playing, here.

More recently, he played Amir, a theology student in love with Manar (Clara Khoury, who starred in The Syrian Bride and Rana's Wedding), in the Israeli television series Parashat Hashavua (The Weekly Portion, Hebrew Wikipedia entry here).

Parshat Hashavua kind of sucked me in toward the end of the series and made me wish I'd watched it from the beginning (thanks to the wonders of cable, now I can - it's available in re-runs with a click of my remote control). It's directed by Rene Blair (I wrote about him here) and is about four different Israeli couples: Amir and Manar, who are Arabs from Haifa; Alisha and Alia, who are Orthodox Jews; Shaul and Hagar - she's a teacher of progressive Judaism and he's a jazz bar owner; and Yonatan and Dalia, who have a "troubled marriage" and a lovably precocious daughter.

There are lots of memorable scenes, but I particularly like the one when Manar comes to visit Amir shortly after he moves from Haifa, which is a mixed Arab-Jewish city, to Tel Aviv. They're standing in the kitchen of the friend's apartment he's staying in (the friend is abroad), while he makes coffee at the stove. Manar asks him, "So how is Tel Aviv?"

"I don't know...," Amir answers slowly, as he stirs the coffee in the finjan, his back to Manar. "Tel Aviv is strange... You don't hear Arabic here. It's not like Haifa. In Haifa I could believe in the illusion of co-existence."

On the other hand, if a bunch of Jewish Israeli girls women are lusting in a Flickr comment thread after the photo of an Israeli Arab actor who lives in Tel Aviv, maybe there's more to co-existence in The Big Orange than Amir knows. 

Yes, I was there. My photos of today's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv are here. A description of the day's events and some photos are below. I don't usually like to write raw reportage, but it takes a rather unique mind to step back and offer insightful observations on the same day of a bombing, while the adrenalin is still flowing and the facts are still coming in. And I don't have that kind of mind. So...

Raw reportage.

Noorster and I were sitting outdoors at a cafe on Yehuda Halevy Street, just two minutes' walk from my apartment, when we heard the explosion. By coincidence, I happened to know all the people sitting at the tables near us. In fact, we'd worked together a couple of years ago, in a nearby office tower. We all remembered the time we'd been sitting at our desks on the 26th floor when there was a bombing just below our building, and there was a distinct sense of deja vu as we looked at each other and chorused, "Pigua?" (terror attack?).

Today's explosion was so loud and so strong that we thought it was just down the street. But it turned out to be at the old central bus station, a seedy area of cheap shops and food stands about 15 minutes' walk away. It's a place where poor people, junkies and foreign workers live. Incredibly, the bomber hit the exact same shawarma stand that another suicide bomber had exploded himself in just three months ago. That time, no one was killed. This time the bomb was a lot bigger - and it was packed with long nails.


The suicide bomber, 16 year-old Sami Salim Hamad, from the village of Qabatya, near Nablus.

Two years have passed since suicide bombings stopped being a near-daily occurence, but  as far as our reactions were concerned - well, we fell right back into routine: don't get too excited, maybe it was just a gas explosion; oops, there are the sirens; how many?; a lot, must be a pigua; start making phone calls ("did you hear? Are you near a television?" How many dead?"); and then go on with what you're doing. Nobody ran away, nobody yelled, nobody even looked worried or excited.

But I figured I'd better get over there, just in case one of the journalists I work for needed some on the scene reporting.

The problem was, I didn't know exactly where the bombing was - just the general direction: "thataway."

So I called Rinat, knowing she'd be able to get all the details from the news desk at Ynet, where she works. I caught her at the hairdresser's waiting to have her hair cut. She hadn't yet heard about any bombing, but said she'd check and get right back to me. If it was a bombing, she'd have to run over there to cover the story for Brazilian television.

The first person to call me was actually my friend Samer, who lives in Ramallah and works for a major North American television news station.


Samer

"Lisa," he said. "There was an explosion in Tel Aviv. Did you hear?"

Yes, I'm waiting for details, I answered. I'll get right back to you.

Then I laughingly told Noorster that the Palestinian journalists have better information about what goes on in Israel than I do. My friends at the next table were amazed. How do they find out so fast? they asked. C'mon, I answered, they have access to the same beeper services that we do. What did you think?

Rinat called back and yes, it was a major pigua. She picked me up in a taxi, and we drove over to the scene.


Rinat (red shirt) with Brazilian TV

By then, 10 minutes after the explosion, the wounded had already been evacuated to the hospitals. There was police tape around the immediate area of the bombing, and the place was packed with jostling reporters, cameramen and photojournalists. And the morbidly curious, of course. As usual, we all kept arguing with the border police, soldiers and policeman who wanted to keep us away from the site while we wanted to get closer to take photographs and interview the rescue workers. It's a small country and there are a lot of bombings, so the reporters and the cops know each other. When one photojournalist tried to duck under the police tape a border policeman grabbed his upper arm and shoved him back, saying, "Nir, you do this every damned time! Get the hell back! Now!"

And as usual, reporters and photographers greeted each other with openings that might have sounded bizarre to others - "Hey, what's up? Haven't seen you since Sharon's stroke!"

I took photos and talked to eyewitnesses. One man told me he'd seen the bombing happen right in front of his eyes, but he couldn't bear to go near the wounded. "I felt so bad," he said. "But I just couldn't stand it. There were body parts and blood and screaming people and it was just horrible. I didn't think I could do anything for them. I ran away."

Others were in shock. One woman collapsed on the ground and began retching uncontrollably. Another woman told me that there had been long nails in the bomb and they flew everywhere.  A man who had come to look for a relative found out that he was dead and began to cry on the shoulder of a policeman.



As I stood taking pictures of the forensic investigators in their white coveralls collecting evidence, I saw rescue workers pull a lifeless body out from under the debris of the shawarma shop and heave it onto a stretcher.





Then the chief of police arrived to give the standard post-attack press conference, so we all crowded around - with me and Rinat just behind his right shoulder. Suddenly my mobile phone, set on silent and stuck in my back pocket, vibrated. I pulled it out and saw a text message from Diana: "You're on Channel 2. You look very serious. xoxo." I looked into the Channel 2 camera and smiled slightly for Diana. Later we spoke on the phone and she said her twin girls had insisted that I was smiling at them, but she hadn't been sure. I was, I was, I told her.


Moshe Karadi, Chief of Police



Rinat (far left) and me - live, from your local suicide bombing, as seen on Channel 2

I took some more photos from just behind a police barrier. A lot of morbid people were crowded around, looking on curiously. Just behind me were two small boys - about 9 years old, I guess - speaking Arabic to one another. The man standing next to me, a rough looking character,  turned around, looked at them fiercely and said aggressively, "Are you Arabs?!" The boys looked at him fearfully and shook their heads negatively. I looked at the man and said, "You know what? Shut your mouth." Later, when I got home, I turned on the television to watch the news and discovered that one of the wounded was, in fact, an Arab. His name is Rami Biara.


Rami Biara

Between calls from the BBC (guess who's gonna be on the radio again tonight?), calls from Samer and a couple of other Palestinian reporters in the West Bank, and calls from correspondents I work with, I uploaded my photos and started to write this post.

Then Allison called from Eilat, where she's on vacation with her family. "Hey," she said breezily. "I'm in La La Land down here. What's going in the real world?" I actually thought she was joking. But she wasn't. Read about her take on our conversation here.

As for all the politicians' bla bla, well I really have nothing to say. Islamic Jihad took responsibility. Hamas refused to condemn the bombing (such a surprise!). Saeb Erakat, the Palestinian Authority spokesman, condemned the bombing in the name of PA President Mahmoud Abbas (also a huge surprise!). Ehud Olmert said there would be an Israeli response. (I'm shocked. Not.)

And so it goes on. Nine dead, 68 wounded. And it won't be the last bombing, of course.





For a sober and intelligent take on today's bombing, I strongly suggest reading this post by Arash, an Iranian who is currently working on his doctorate at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

...whom I've neglected for weeks because of work and a general feeling of being overwhelmed:

"Just wanted to let you know that if you ignore this, I’m going to change my name to Fatima the journalist from the West Bank.

(Maybe then I’ll have better luck with you answering my calls and emails)."

 

Madeleine cookies don't do much for me, but one bite of matza evokes memories of every seder I've ever attended since I was able to talk.

I remember the pink dress with the belt and big buttons I wore to the seder when I was eight;  I remember the year I prepared the bowls of salt water and ended up basically saturating the H20 with NaCl and nearly burning everyone's tongue off.

I remember my late grandmother, who couldn't cook to save her life ('though her mother and daughter were in a class of their own) but definitely knew how to set a beautiful table. She ironed the heavy white tablecloth, put me to work polishing the silver candlesticks, unpacked the gold-rimmed plates and heavy silverware from their padded and velvet-lined cases and carefully decorated each small plate of homemade gefilte fish with precisely one piece of green lettuce, one slice of orange carrot and one large dab of red, beet-sweetened horseradish.

I remember opening up the haggadot to prepare for each seder (a job I took very seriously) when I was a kid, shaking the matza crumbs from the previous year out of the binding and seeing the pages with the ten plagues dotted with spilt wine drops and written up with notes from previous years' preparations ("Adina sings here"; "Jackie reads this").

I remember belting out all the songs with my sisters, and giggling when my older cousins jokingly pronounced Had Gadya as Chad (like the country in Africa) Gad Yeah.

I remember the sense of slightly desolate regret I felt the one year I did not attend a seder - when I was in a village in a remote area of Himachal Pradesh and couldn't face the 16-hour bus ride down to New Delhi and the Chabad House there.

I remember my mother's famous sponge cake with fresh strawberries, and each year I shake my head in wonder when I remember her ability to cook gourmet seder meals for 20 relatives on two consecutive nights - and everything from scratch!

I also, for some bizarre reason, tend to think about the seder scenes in two movies that I love: Crimes and Misdemeanors and The Garden of the Finzi Continis. 

In Woody Allen's Crimes the seder takes place in the late 1940s, in Queens, New York. The family is arguing over whether or not there is a God and if there is a God, whether he punishes evildoers. The father is a rabbi, and he insists that not only is there most definitely a God, but his eyes see all. The father's sister, an atheist and a socialist, asks how he can believe in an all-seeing God after the Holocaust.

In Vittorio de Sica's interpretation of Giorgio Bassani's unforgettable memoir, the elegantly attired family (dinner jackets for the men, evening dresses for the women) are sitting around their gorgeously appointed table in early 1940s Ferrara, trying to pretend they don't feel the restrictions that Mussolini's fascist government has placed upon the Jews. They're singing Who Knows One and laughing as they point their index fingers in the air to indicate the chorus and first verse of the 13-verse song ("Who knows one? I know one! One is God, who is in the heavens and on the earth"). The phone rings, and one of the characters goes to answer. But there's no one on the line. He returns to the table and explains to his father that it was a wrong number. But then the phone rings again and again, and each time the scenario repeats itself. Slowly, with each answered ring met by silence on the other end of the line, the singing trails off and the family becomes apprehensive. They sit in tense silence as the phone rings yet again. But this time the person on the other end speaks; he is a family friend and yes he was the one who called before. Aaaaah, everyone sighs in relief, and they resume singing with almost giddy joy.

It's a small, small bloggers' world

This year my sister invited two friends to my mother's house for the seder - Wendy and Joey, who met because of the blogging connection and ended up being married by another blogger, who's married to this blogger, who is one of the co-founders of Global Voices Online, to which I contribute the roundups of the Israeli blogosphere.*

And this year I was privileged to be invited, together with another blogger (and friend) to the family seder of a wonderful friend whose generosity never ceases to touch and humble me.

But I forgot to bring the box of pralines I bought as a gift at Max Brenner.

*A post-modern twist on Had Gadya - a kind of joke for "members of the tribe."

I love the smell of burning hametz in the morning;

Smells like...Pesach.*

*See quote number 12.

Curious to hear the greeting?

Click on the link!

Last Saturday I went to see Noorster's fab new apartment in Florentine *, which has its own entry in the Hebrew Wikipedia - not to mention an eponymous mid-1990s TV series by Eytan Fox, director of Walk on Water. 

I looked at her cream-coloured walls and modern bathroom, thought of my own crumbling - though admittedly cheap - hovel and reminded myself that it is, indeed, time to find a new place.

After we'd finished admiring her light-filled new pad, we went out on an urgent mission to find coffee - the stronger the better - and fast. On the way to the cafe, which turned out to be packed with French tourists (sleekly tanned French mother to small son running toward oncoming traffic: Roger! Qu'est ce que tu fais?! Non, c'est tres dangereux! Tres, tres dangereux je dis!) I photographed the corner grocery, because I loved the colours. And the name: It's called "The Blessing Market."



*New Yorkers: think Alphabet City pre-late 90's gentrification, but without the street gangs and drug users and with better weather. I know, it's hard - but try.

It's a fool-proof method. Tried and true.

When a friend and I ordered breakfast at my local cafe on Friday, the waitress told us we couldn't have our eggs fried sunny side up, as requested.

Why? Because the eating of softly cooked eggs was recently forbidden by the ministry of health.

I decided to have a salad.

There you have it - a photo of my ballot.

I voted for Meretz, although I did consider Peretz for a couple of weeks. I knew that there was almost no chance of the next government showing any imaginative initiative regarding the conflict, and that the best I could hope for was unilateralism. We all seem to be quite stuck around here, and I don't expect that to change any time soon. So I based my vote on issues of social justice - women's rights, benefits for the poor, and so on.

One of the things that impresses me about Meretz is that a lot of community activists in the towns on the periphery have spoken to me enthusiastically of the party's work on their behalf - even though those same community leaders are die-hard Likud voters. It seems that Meretz activists frequently visit underprivileged areas, talk to the community about their needs and then work to get public funds to pay for them. And they don't make a lot of noise about it, either. I also know a couple of candidates who are quite high on the list, and know they are people with genuine integrity. So... Meretz.

Then, on election day, I met my favourite candidate stumping for last-minute votes on Rothschild Boulevard. An ultra-Orthodox woman who believes in separation between religion and state is my kind of candidate. So I took her photo, shook her hand and told her that she was a big part of the reason I'd voted for her party.



She had a lovely, warm handshake.

I'm sorry the party received only five mandates, but I'm completely unambivalent about my vote.

After two days of heavy rain, and even a mini-tornado in the Galilee (click on the link  to watch some amazing footage of the twister), the sun came out and spring returned this afternoon.

Walking up Rothschild Boulevard after a mid-day meeting in Florentine, followed by lunch in the courtyard at the always excellent Doda, I passed quite a few couples snuggling together on the benches and chairs around the outdoor coffee bars.

Like this one:

Imagine the following scenario:

You call the New York Times and ask for Thomas Friedman's home number. And the receptionist gives it to you, without asking any questions - not even your name.

You call Thomas Friedman at home, his wife answers and says, "Tom! Phone for you...!"

Tom comes to the phone, you introduce yourself and say that you read his column about an ex-CIA chief who just wrote his memoirs and you'd like to read the book and write about it for your own newspaper, but it's not available yet and could he help you obtain a copy.

Tom says, "You know what, I don't have any copies, but here's the home number of the ex-CIA chief. Call him, tell him you got the number from me and ask if you can have a copy of the book. I'm sure he'll be happy to help."

So you call the ex-CIA chief and his wife answers. "He's watching an interview he did on television right now. Could you call back in 20 minutes?"

Sure, you say.

You call back in 20 minutes and the ex-CIA chief answers. You explain your burning need for a copy of his book and he immediately says, "Come to my house tomorrow morning between 9 and 10. Here's my address, I'm on the 10th floor."

So the next morning you go to the ex-CIA chief's home and it turns out to be a modest apartment in a normal, middle class neighbourhood. He answers the door himself, ushers you into the small room he uses as an office, pulls a copy of his new book out of a plastic shopping bag and gives it to you. You shake his hand and thank him, he reminds you to mention the name of the publishers in the article and asks if you'd be so kind as to send him a copy once it's published.

Then he escorts you to the front door, thanks you and says goodbye.

If you replace all the above institutions and people with their Israeli equivalents, then you'll more or less have a picture of what I did last night and this morning.

I swear.

Tel Aviv was just a struggling little cluster of buildings before the 1930s Bauhaus explosion. This is an older, pre-Bauhaus building - probably mid-1920s - on Rashi Street. I like its "crumbling gentility" look.


And here is a classic Bauhaus building, post-renovation.