In today's International Herald Tribune: an op-ed by a former IDF officer named Avi Azrieli,  who is also the author of this book, makes a lot of sense to me.

"Israel's recent hopes for peace, fueled by the disengagement from Gaza and elections won on plans to cede the West Bank, have given way to another war and to grim talk of eternal fighting. Israelis now speak of the Arabs' hate as a chronic disease that Israel is destined to live - or die - with. To revive its hopes, Israel must dare to consider a change of paradigm: transform itself into a Middle Eastern country."

Read the rest here.

Just as the eye began to heal, the computer died. And so young she was, too: only 9 months old.

Corrosion, the representative at the IBM laboratories told me glumly. You must have used the computer outdoors. (Yeah right, it's ever so damp at my local cafe). The repair fee was close to the price of a new laptop, and no the warranty wouldn't cover "neglect."

Reality check: suicide bombings and Katyusha barrages never made me cry, but the loss of my computer - and my data, and my time and my money - made me burst into frustrated tears. I think I scared the IBM rep a bit, but she was unmoved. No warranty coverage for you.

My new computer is not an IBM.

I have a huge backlog of work and emails to catch up on, so my blog break will extend for a couple more days. Meanwhile, here's something to watch:


Itai Anghel

During the third week of the Israel-Hezbollah war a fascinating report was broadcast on Uvda (Fact), a highly respected investigative news show hosted by veteran journalist Ilana Dayan.

Itai Anghel accompanied regiment 931 of the Nahal Brigade (infantry) to a battle that took place on the night of August 6-7 in Houleh, a Hezbollah-controlled village in Lebanon that is about 2 kilometres north of the border with Israel. Anghel documents the fierce battle that took place using a camera equipped with a night vision lens. I think it is quite possibly the most significant piece of reporting to come out of the war.

Itai generously sent me a link to his report that includes English subtitles. You can watch it below (length, 25 minutes).

A few things to know before you watch: With the exception of the officers - Avi Dahan and Biche - all the soldiers are reservists in their 20's and 30's who did their three-year mandatory army service (ages 18-21) in the unit; in other words, they are civilians who responded to emergency call up notices. A small bit that was edited out includes an exchange between Itai and the reservist with glasses, during which the latter explains that in civilian life he lives on a kibbutz and leads nature hikes. There are a couple of minor errors in the translation but they don't detract from the impact of the report, which is compelling and intense. Note especially Itai's observation, in voice over narration, at the very end. (I won't spoil it for you, but I think it says a lot about how people can draw very differing conclusions from the same events).

Note: Please DO NOT embed this video on any other blog/publication.  

Tech update: For those who cannot view the embedded video, copy and paste the following code into a new window on your browser. If that doesn't work then I'm afraid I don't know how to help. http://switch248-01.castup.net/cunet/gm.asp?ClipMediaID=209947&ak=63628786       

Eli Lake wrote an article about the report for the New York Sun, here.

An ant bit my eyelid. Now it's swollen shut and I have, for some  strange reason, a low grade fever that's making me feel all yucky. Hmph. So that, plus a whole lotta overdue work, is why no major posting lately, although there's still a lot  - too much, actually - on my mind.

Meanwhile, a culture break.



Adi Nes, one of Israel's most famous artists, will be featured on a BBC World segment called destinationART: Israel, about Tel Aviv's dynamic contemporary art scene. The details appear in .jpg above; click to enlarge if you can't read the fine print. Broadcast times:
Saturday August 26, 14:30 GMT and 21:30 GMT
Sunday August 27,    03:30 GMT and 10:30 GMT

I blogged about Adi here (including some examples of his wonderful photographs), and wrote an article about him for Haaretz that is reproduced here.

Speaking of photographers, a few days ago my friend Eyal Ofer called and asked if I knew any popular pick up places in Tel Aviv that were not bars or clubs. Without hesitation I answered, "The dog run at Gan Meir." A couple of hours later Eyal called me from Gan Meir (Meir Park, named after Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv) and said, "You were so right!" (I love being right). Below are some of the photos he took. If you like Eyal's work, you can see more at www.pbase.com/yalop.

A friend who is married to a well-known Israeli literary figure phoned me mid-morning on August 13 to ask, in a voice that cracked a bit, if I had heard the news. No, I answered. Who was it? (because between July 12 and August 15 every sentence that began with "have you heard?" meant that someone we knew, either directly or by one degree of separation, had been killed). Grossman's son, she answered. It was Uri Grossman. I had to tell you, but please promise you won't mention it to anyone. His parents haven't contacted his older brother yet, he's backpacking in South America, and the news won't be published until they find him and tell him.

So I walked around for the next 10 hours with the heavy knowledge that the son of David Grossman, one of Israel's most famous and beloved authors, had been killed in battle only a few days after his father, together with Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, published in Haaretz newspaper an open letter that called upon the government to negotiate a ceasefire with Hezbollah.

I was in a taxi, on my way to meet my friend Chani, when the news was released at the end of the 8.00 p.m. news broadcast, as is the custom. In a netural voice the announcer recited the names of all the young men who had been killed that day, ending with, "It is now permitted to announce that the name of the twenty-fourth soldier who was killed yesterday is Uri Grossman, 20, son of the author David Grossman. That is the end of the news, from the Voice of Israel."

Later I found out that at least five acquaintances who work in the Israeli media had known about Uri's death all day, but not one of us had mentioned it. I told one friend that I was really touched by this show of respect. He looked at me strangely and said, "It's basic, no?"

I think it is very difficult for someone who is neither Israeli nor a Hebrew speaker to understand why Israelis mourned Uri Grossman's death collectively. Although it was surely not his purpose in writing this piece for the Guardian's Comment is Free blog, Arthur Neslen shows how easy it is for an outsider to misread Israeli culture. 

David Grossman's son was not a political symbol. His death was not "one of those moments when icons are brought low." Israelis who didn't know David Grossman personally joined him in mourning his son's death because David Grossman was the voice that expressed our intimate feelings - about family and about death, for example. His stories for children are so well known and beloved  - stories like the Itamar series, or Uri's Special Language ( “Uri is almost two years old, and he’s beginning to talk,” it began. “Even Uri’s parents don’t understand what Uri is saying.”), which he wrote when his son was two years old. And because his novels, like Someone to Run With (for teenagers) and See Under: Love are such beautifully written expressions of both universal themes and uniquely Israeli experiences.

Although Grossman is usually grouped together with Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua under the rubric Generation of the State - novelists who started to write after Israel's founding in 1948 - he is in fact the only one of the three who was born after 1948. Yehoshua and Oz rose to prominence in the early 1970's with novels like The Lover (Yehoshua) and My Michael (Oz) which are iconoclastic and individualistic compared to novels by the previous generation of writers, the Palmach Generation, but are still very much concerned with grand themes like the Future of the State and the Situation of the Jews. Grossman, who became famous in the mid-1980s, is also concerned with these themes, but he approaches them from a gentler, more accessible and human perspective, and he is much more in touch with the current Zeitgeist. It is impossible to imagine Oz or Yehoshua writing the lyrics for a smash hit Hebrew hip hop song, for example.

Grossman simply knows how to express what we are feeling. So when his son died, we thought about all the people we knew who had been killed or badly wounded over the last month, and we identified with him because we knew so many grieving families and friends of dead soldiers who were going through the same pain. Because this is a small country, and everyone knew someone who had received an emergency call up notice for combat duty in Lebanon, or someone who had died or been injured, or someone who had lost a loved one. And I knew a lot of people who responded without hesitation to those call up notices, even though they were ambivalent about the way the war was being directed and even though they left behind jobs and small children. And we knew David Grossman would express our inarticulate thoughts, which is what he did in the eulogy he wrote for Uri. It was published on August 16 in Yedioth Ahronoth, and I have translated it below. But first, I would like to correct a few errors in Mr. Neslen's article.

I asked a lot of people - friends, the staff at my local cafe, the guy who works in the corner grocery, taxi drivers, journalists - whether it was true that "students in high school are required to paste the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) coat of arms of the Sword and Olive Branch into their copybooks and write under it the caption 'Our army hates war and wants only peace.'" They all looked at me with complete puzzlement and told me that they'd neither undergone such an experience in school nor heard of any such thing.

It is not true that the contacts Israelis make during their mandatory national service (which is called sadir in Hebrew, not miluim; miluim is the term for reserve duty) set them up for jobs in the future. That concept is as outdated as the English old boys' network. Strong and lasting friendships are formed in the army, it is true, but the most prestigious jobs in contemporary Israel are in high tech, and one does not become a computer programmer in a combat unit.

Also, many Israelis are ambivalent about the army's role in the West Bank as an occupation force rather than a combat force, but that is a huge issue that is way beyond the scope of this article. I raise it only to point out that, while Yariv Oppenheimer, the secretary of Peace Now, who is quoted in the article as saying that he felt like "killing" those who refused to serve in Lebanon (and please, let us not take the word "killing" too literally), does oppose the occupation, he makes a point of serving his annual reserve duty because he also opposes the politicisation of army service. If the Left thinks it's okay to refuse service in the West Bank, then the Right will be justified in refusing to evacuate settlements. And beyond that, to steal a phrase from Mr. Neslen's article, lie dragons. (P.S. I do have friends who have refused to serve in the West Bank. It was an incredibly difficult decision for them, they did pay a high price for it, and I do not feel comfortable judging them because I have never served and I understand how complex their feelings are).

Much has been made of the fact that, according to polls published during the first two weeks of the war, the vast majority of Israelis supported a military response to the Hezbollah attack of July 12. The poll results were often interpreted by those who had - shall we say - a certain agenda to mean that Israelis were a bloodthirsty lot who wanted to wade into Lebanon and kill lots of people. Er, no. I don't think so. People simply thought that, after six years of Hezbollah's cross border incursions, abductions (including the bombardment and attempted abduction of civilians in Al Ghajar), military buildup right on our border and Katyusha bombardments, enough was enough. The army needed to secure the northern border to prevent further Hezbollah attacks. Whether Israelis were right or wrong in believing that military action would achieve that goal and whether they understood the long term consequences of the military actions are different questions. The point is that nobody was sitting around sharpening his bayonette and muttering "let me at 'em." Nobody wanted war, for heaven's sake. It's just that a lot of people thought it was a necessary evil, to deal with what was perceived as an existential threat.

Finally, and I say this as gently as possible, I think it is in poor taste to take the death of a 20 year-old boy-man and try to make it into a negative political symbol - a means of taking Israeli society to task for perceived wrongdoings or a lack of political correctness. That is a very unkind thing to do in the face of the Grossman family's pain, and I hope very much that none of them ever happens to read Mr. Neslen's article.

The eulogy appears below. It is long and it is much more beautiful in Hebrew (Hebrew link here; thanks, Joni), but I did not have the heart to edit it.

*****

Uri Grossman

Uri my dear,

Over the past three days almost every thought has begun with the word “no”. No, he won’t come back. No, we won’t talk, and no we won’t laugh. No, there won’t be another boy like that, with the ironic look in his eyes and the fabulous sense of humour. No, there won’t be the young man who was so wise beyond his years, no there won’t be that warm smile and healthy appetite. No, there won’t be that rare combination of determination and gentleness, no there won’t be his straightforwardness and his wise heart. No, there won’t be any more of Uri’s infinite gentleness, and no there won’t be his inner quiet that calms every argument. And no we won’t watch The Simpsons or Seinfeld together, and no we won’t listen to Johnny Cash. And no we won’t feel your strong hugs. And no we won’t see you talking to Yonatan as you gesticulate wildly, and we won’t see you hug your beloved sister Ruthie.

Uri my love, throughout your short life we all learned from you. From your strength and your insistence on going your own way. For choosing your own path even if there was no chance you would succeed. With astonishment we watched your struggle to be accepted to an officers’ training course. You knew you would be a good officer, and you were never satisfied with being anything but the very best you were capable of. And when you succeeded I thought, Here is a man who has such a simple, sober understanding of his own abilities. He is completely free of pretension and arrogance. He is completely unaffected by what others say about him. His source of strength lies within himself.

That is the way you were from the time you were a child. You were a child who lived in harmony with himself and his environment. A child who knew he belonged, who knew he was loved, who knew his limitations and understood his uniqueness. And truly, when you forced the army to submit to your will and accept you as an officer, it was clear what kind of an officer and human being you would be. And now we hear from your friends and your soldiers about the officer and the friend, about how you would wake up before everyone else to arrange everything and go to bed only after everyone else had fallen asleep.

And yesterday, at midnight, I looked at the house that was quite a mess after hundreds of people came to visit and comfort us, and I said, Well, now we need Uri to help us tidy up. 

You were the leftist of your battalion, and they respected you, because you stood by your beliefs while carrying out all the missions you were assigned. I remember your telling me about your “checkpoint policy,” because of course you spent a lot of time at the checkpoints. You said that if there was a child in the car you stopped, you always started by trying to calm him down and make him laugh. And you always reminded yourself that the child was about Ruthie’s age, and that he was very afraid of you. And how much he hates you, and that he has reasons to hate, but in spite of that you would do everything in your power to make that terrible experience easier for him, while simultaneously doing your job without compromising.

When you entered Lebanon, Mum said that the thing she feared most was your “Eliphelet’s Syndrome.” [Eliphelet is the hero of a poem by Nathan Alterman, about a naïve soldier who unquestioningly sacrifices himself for others; the poem was set to music and sung by Arik Einstein, amongst other famous Israeli singers. According to the Hebrew bible, Eliphelet was the name of one of King David’s sons]. We were very afraid that, like the Eliphelet in the poem, if it was necessary to save a wounded soldier, you would run straight into the line of fire, and you would be the first to volunteer to “restock the supply of ammunition when it ran low” [a line from Alterman’s poem]. And that just as you were your whole life, at school and at home and during your army service, just as you always volunteered to give up your furloughs because another soldier needed the break more than you did, or because someone else’s situation was more difficult  – so you would behave there, in Lebanon, in the terrible face of war.

You were my son and also my friend, just as you were to your mother. Our souls are connected to yours. You were a person at peace with himself, a person whose company was a pleasure. I cannot express properly the extent to which you were someone to run with [reference to the title of Grossman’s novel for teenagers, Someone to Run With]. On each of your furloughs you would say, “Dad, let’s go talk." And we would go out together, usually to a restaurant, and sit and talk. You told me so many things, Uri, and I was so proud to be the keeper of your secrets. That a man like you chose me as your confidante.

I remember how you deliberated once whether or not to punish one of your soldiers who had committed some disciplinary offense. You really suffered over that decision, because you knew it would enrage your soldiers, and also other officers who were more forgiving than you of certain offences. And you did pay a high price for your decision to punish that soldier, but afterward that event became one of the legends of your battalion – a sort of measuring stick for proper behaviour and sticking to the law. And on your last furlough you told me with bashful pride that your commanding officer held up your decision as an example of correct behaviour for an officer.

You lit up our lives, Uri. Mum and I raised you with love. It was so easy to love you with all our hearts, and I know that your short life was a good one. I hope that I was a fitting father for a boy like you. But I know that to be your mother’s son means that you were raised with generosity and kindness and infinite love, and you received all of that in plentitude. And you knew how to appreciate that, to be grateful and not to take any of it for granted.

For now I am not going to say anything about the war in which you were killed. We, your family, have already lost this war. The State of Israel will have to do its own self-examination. We will retreat into our own pain, surrounded by our good friends, enveloped in the enormous love that we feel today from so many people, many of whom we didn’t even know, and I am grateful for their boundless support.

I only wish we all knew how to provide this kind of support and solidarity in different times. This is perhaps our greatest and most treasured national resource. I wish we knew how to be a little gentler with one another. I hope that we succeed in extricating ourselves now, at the very last minute, because even more difficult times are waiting for us.

I would like to say a few more words.

Uri was a very Israeli boy. Even his name was very Israeli, very much a Hebrew name. He was the essence of Israeli-ness as I like to see it. The kind that has been almost forgotten, that is sometimes considered almost a curiosity. Many times I looked at him and thought that he, like Ruthie and Yonatan, was almost an anachronism. Uri with his uncompromising directness and acceptance of complete responsibility for everything that happened around him. Uri who was always the one to take initiative, who was always completely reliable. Uri with his deep sensitivity for suffering, for all emotional pain.

Uri was a man of principle. That word has often been mocked over the past years. Because in our mad, cynical, world it is no longer “cool” to be principled. Or to be a humanist. Or to be truly sensitive to the suffering of others, even if the Other is your enemy on the battlefield.

But I learned from Uri that it is possible to be both principled and cool. That we do need to uphold our values and defend ourselves simultaneously. We have to insist upon upholding our values in the face of temptation to give in to power and simplistic thinking, to give in to the corruption of cynicism and contempt for humanity, which are the true, great curse of those who have lived their whole lives in our disaster-prone region of the world. 

Uri simply had the courage to be himself, always, in every situation, and to find his own voice in everything he did and said, and that is what protected him from the destruction, pollution and constricting of his soul.

Uri was also incredibly funny and witty. It is impossible to talk about Uri without mentioning his hilarious brilliance. For example, when he was 13 I once told him: “Imagine if you and your children were able to fly to outer space just as people fly today to Europe.” And he smiled: “I’m not so attracted to outer space, you can find everything on planet earth.”

Or another time, we were driving in the car, and his mother and I were discussing a new book that was attracting a lot of attention and talking about various authors’ reviews, and Uri who was 9 years old piped up from the back seat: “Hey, you elitists, remember that there are simple people back here who don’t understand a word of what you’re talking about!”

Or for example Uri, who really did not like figs, once held a bunch of dried figs in his hand and said: “Remind me, aren’t dried figs just regular figs that sinned in a previous life?” Or when I once hesitated over accepting an invitation to Japan, Uri said: “How can you not go? Can you imagine what it’ll be like to visit the only country in the world where there are no Japanese tourists?”

Dear friends, on the night between Saturday and Sunday, at twenty minutes before three in the morning, our doorbell rang. The voice at the intercom said it was from “the municipal officer,” and I went to open the door and I thought to myself, “That’s it. Life is over.”

But within five minutes, when Michal [Grossman’s wife] and I went into Ruthie’s room and woke her up in order to tell her the horrible news, Ruthie, after her first tears, said: “But we will live, right? We will live just as before, and I want to continue to sing in the choir, and that we will continue to laugh as always, and I want to learn to play the guitar.” And we hugged her, and we told her we would live. And Ruthie also said: “What a fantastic threesome we were, Yonatan, Uri and I.”

And you really were a fantastic team. Yonatan, you and Uri were not just brothers, but soul mates, with your own world and your own private language and your own sense of humour. And Ruthie, Uri loved you with all his heart and soul. He always treated you with such gentleness, and I remember how during our last phone conversation, when we were so happy that the UN was about to declare a ceasefire, he insisted on speaking with you. And how you wept afterward. As if you already knew.

Our lives are not over. We have just suffered a very hard blow. We will draw the strength we need to absorb the blow from one another, from our togetherness, from Michal and from me and from our children and also from the grandparents who loved him with all their hearts – “neshumeh,” they called him, because he really was all soul – and from your aunts and uncles and cousins and from all your many friends from school and from your comrades in arms who accompany us here with such concern and deep affection.

And we will also draw our strength from Uri. He had such a plentitude of strength that it will serve us for many years. He radiated such strong vitality and vibrancy, such warmth and love, and his light will continue to shine on us forever – even if the star itself is extinguished.

Our beloved one, it was our great privilege to live with you. Thank you for every moment you were ours.

Mom, Dad, Yonatan and Ruthie

I'm exhausted, and so are most of the people I know. I worked pretty much every waking hour between July 12 and August 15, so of course I'm physically tired, but more than that I am spiritually drained.  I have more or less sorted out my thoughts and know what I want to write, but lack the energy to do so. Today I'm going to relax, and I'll try to write something tonight or tomorrow. Meanwhile, here are some links to keep you busy.


Gadi Taub

Gadi Taub, author of several books (including popular stories for children), one of Israel's best-known and most important social critics and possibly the only professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who rides a motorcycle to work, has started a blog. If you're looking for intelligent insider's analysis that deviates from the usual blah blah of the 60-plus talking heads on the nightly news, then Gadi's blog is definitely the place to visit.

Last week an article he wrote for Ynet, The Arrogance Behind the Radical Left, caused a lot of controversy around here. My friend Ilan, about whom I wrote here, wrote a response in Hebrew, which I'll try find time to translate and post later today. This week Gadi has an interesting piece in The New Republic (free registration). There are links to both articles on his blog and he intends to post new material on a regular basis.

More links:

Anat, who blogs at Israeli Mom, has started a forum called METalks for people of the Middle East to get to know one another and exchange views in a civil manner. Her online team includes an Iranian and a Lebanese, both of whom she met because of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. She describes her initiative in this post, excerpted below:

So, what is METalks.com about? I want it to be a platform to allow people of the Middle East a place to interact and create some sort of positive dialogue. The emphasis here is certainly on the positive. I don't think we need yet another place where people will bicker, fight and insult each other. I want a place where opinions can be expressed, yet an overall respectful tone be maintained.

I also want to bring together those voices of the Middle East that call for peace, human rights, democracy and the associated values. Being an online forum, I realize that we're going to have all kinds of people joining, not all of them necessarily promoting those ideals, yet I hope that we will be able to create a strong community where diverse opinions can be heard, discussions can be held and yet a general line be maintained promoting these ideas, at least by the site's staff and core posters.

Rinat Malkes is mentioned prominently in an article written by Assaf Carmel for Haaretz; Carmel describes the scene at Kibbutz Goshrim, right near Kiryat Shmona, where Israeli and foreign reporters gathered to cover the war. My favourite bit is:

Malkes...gives quite low marks to her colleagues who have arrived here only recently: "Most of the foreign reporters came here with a very low level of knowledge. The only thing they know is that they are on the Israeli-Lebanese border. Beyond that, they really are not au courant about the mess. Yesterday, for example, I was speaking with a reporter from the Spanish newspaper El Pais and what she said still grates on my ears. She said that she couldn't understand why the Israelis can't sit still for a single minute without killing anyone. This annoyed me both as an Israeli and as a journalist. I tried to talk to her, but when I saw how much knowledge she lacked I just stopped and walked away."

Charles Malik, one of the contributors to the Lebanese Political Journal, has been writing up a storm of insightful analysis over the past week. I recommend starting with the piece he published on August 13 and then reading them in order to the most recent. Charles also asked me to publicize his call for home video clips of the war; he's posting them on his blog, using a new technology that's still in beta phase. There is a real shortage of videos from Israelis (hint hint).


Other stuff:

I was interviewed by phone on C-Span on August 10. Click here, scroll down to the August 10 show and click on "Washington Journal entire program" to view. It doesn't seem to work in Firefox, though.

The BBC's World Have Your Say solicited an email exchange between me and Rania El Masri, who teaches at Lebanon's University of Balamand. I'm not quite sure why I agreed to their request, since the question of "who won?" absolutely disgusts me (a); and because the request to participate came from the BBC's Arabic service, with whom I had a rather negative experience (b). You'll see from the tone of my letters that I was pretty irritated and exasperated that day. Let's hope the ceasefire lasts long enough for me to recover my emotional equilibrium. ;)

Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, near Kiryat Shmona, on Sunday August 6

As Davide and I drove into Kiryat Shmona on Sunday afternoon, the sirens were wailing; we could hear the thundering of outgoing tank artillery and explosions of incoming missiles. All the businesses were closed, the traffic lights blinked on amber (because who would stop for a red light when missiles were falling?) and there was no-one on the streets but soldiers - plus, incongruously, one large-bellied white-haired man with a slightly mad look in his eyes who wore shorts, a T-shirt and flip flops and stood at the entrance to an apartment building. Those who could afford to leave Kiryat Shmona had done so; the ones left behind were the poor, the sick and the elderly.

The nearly abandoned city reminded us of scenes in Hollywood movies set in Grozny - or Sarajevo, circa 1992. Brush fires set off by Hezbollah rockets blazed everywhere, creating a thick pall of smoke that dimmed the usually bright Levantine sunlight. Bits of ash floated about like snowflakes, the smell of smoke permeated the air and was absorbed in my clothes and hair. And the constant booms, explosions and sirens provided loud background music - a live, post-modern version of Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor for this long shot of Apocalypse Now: The Middle Eastern Version.

I took the photo above at the entrance to Kibbutz Kfar Giladi, on the outskirts of Kiryat Shmona, a few hours after Hezbollah missiles killed 12 reserve soldiers who had gathered there in response to their emergency mobilization notices (tzav 8). A group of young soldiers told us that we could not enter the kibbutz - and to be honest I didn't really want to, because it looked as though it was just one big inferno -  so we stood near the Channel 2 reporter who was preparing to report live from in front of nearby Tel Hai Academic College. One of the Channel 2 sound guys was lying on the hood of their car, his back supported by the windshield and one leg crossed casually over the other, as he idly filmed the brush fires with his digital camera.


Channel 2 live news feed from the entrance of Kfar Giladi.

I greeted them, took a few photos and chatted a bit with the soldiers. Then the sound of incoming rockets became a little too loud for comfort, so Davide and I decided it was time to leave. We were going to stay in Metulla, just a couple of minutes' drive up the road. Unfortunately the only road to our destination took us right through an area that was frequently bombarded by Hezbollah. The fields on either side were ablaze from fallen missiles and the road was covered in thick smoke. Davide shifted to a higher gear, pressed down firmly on the accelerator and cursed in Italian as I took some photos through the window of the speeding car - like the one below.



Then we arrived in Metulla and stopped for a minute to look at the view. This is what Kibbutz Kfar Giladi looked like from Metulla.



Kibbutz Kfar Giladi aflame, as seen from Metulla.

A group of painfully young soldiers asked me what newspaper I worked for and whether I would take their photo and send them a copy by email. So I did.



And so we arrived in Metulla, which is actually closer to the border than Kiryat Shmona (read: on the border), although one can easily walk from one town to the next in just a few minutes. And yet, very few missiles had fallen on the picturesque little resort town, which was founded at the end of the nineteenth century. We heard a lot of booms and nearly all the town's residents had left, making it feel eerily empty, but there was absolutely no physical damage. The ironic explanation is that Metulla is actually too close to Lebanon - that if Hezbollah were to launch rockets on the town they'd basically be tossing missiles into their own back yard. There is no "no man's land" between Metulla and Lebanon, as I will describe below.

After we checked in I went to sit in the dining area of the hotel, which was occupied exclusively by various members of the press who'd come to cover the war. Quite a few had come from Baghdad, and one of them- a seasoned combat photojournalist -  told us he was a lot more afraid in Kiryat Shmona than he'd ever been in Iraq. At least in Iraq you knew that you were safe in certain areas; in Kiryat Shmona the missiles fell everywhere and randomly, so it was impossible to take a calculated risk.

Everyone was hunched over a laptop - the photographers were uploading and sending their photos and the print journalists were filing their stories. Meanwhile the television mounted on the wall was tuned to Channel 10 news, which was broadcasting live coverage from Haifa's Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood, upon which several missiles had landed about an hour ealier.

Together with a young Arab (Israeli) woman, who was working as a translator for a major North American newspaper, I watched the scenes of rescue workers digging frantically through piles of rubble in an effort to extract the wounded. It was the same type of scene that had been broadcast frequently on both Israeli television and on LBC over the previous month. In fact, the scenes were pretty much interchangeable - collapsed buildings, frightened people, dusty, bleeding bodies, audible shouting, uniformed rescue workers, ambulances. The only difference this time was the location (Israel instead of Lebanon) and the language in which people were shouting - Hebrew and Arabic, instead of only Arabic.

I asked the young woman, who was working as a translator for a major North American newspaper, if she was from Haifa. No, she said, she was from a village in the Galilee. As we sat together and watched the news, exchanging the occasional comment in Hebrew, I was acutely aware of the many, many layers of irony and symbolism in that scene - and indeed in the events of that day.

In the morning 12 reserve soldiers - men who had been called away from their civilian lives to fight for their country - had been killed by a Hezbollah missile right near Tel Hai, the place where Joseph Trumpeldor, one of the heroes of the early Zionist movement, famously said, "It is good to die for our country"
(טוב למות בעד ארצינו), after he sustained a mortal wound during a battle with Arabs in 1920. And then in the evening of that same day Hezbollah missiles landed in Wadi Nisnas, the Haifa neighbourhood that is a symbol of peaceful Arab-Jewish co-existence, killing  two Arabs and one Jew. As I mentioned in my previous post, the office of Al Ittihad (Unity) newspaper was also hit in that bombardment. For years, the editor of Al Ittihad was Emile Habibi, author of The Opsimist, proponent of co-existence and 1990 recipient of both the PLO's Al Quds Prize and the Israel Prize.

So there we were, the Jewish Israeli woman and the Arab Israeli woman, sitting in a hotel on the Lebanese border, both working for the foreign media, listening to the booming of Israeli artillery and Hezbollah rockets outside, watching as wounded and dead Jews and Arabs were pulled from the wreckage of their apartment buildings in Haifa. More symbolism: neither of us had grown up speaking Hebrew, but it was the language we had in common.

Amir Ben David wrote a very moving article about the symbolism of last Sunday's events for this week's Time Out Tel Aviv. If I have time, I'll translate and post some excerpts in the next day or two. (Hebrew speakers can find the article on page 23). He also took a wonderful photo in Wadi Nisnas: a portrait of Emil Habibi, with the damaged Al Ittihad building reflected in the glass that protects the author's sad, expressive face. It looks as though he is mourning the destruction of his dream.


The photo taken by Amir Ben David.

After Davide finished writing, we walked down the street and ate a huge steak dinner at HaTachana, a popular meat restaurant. Business was booming - the place was packed with journalists and IDF officers, plus a group of tough local farmers who informed me that one of them lived in the most northern house in Israel. "Do you want to see it?" they asked.

Then Jill called me on my mobile. "Where are you?" she asked. "Oh, about 150 metres from Lebanon," I answered airily. Pause. Davide grinned and Jill and I broke into laughter. "I couldn't resist the drama," I told her.

Back at the hotel, I fell asleep while watching a re-run of Law & Order: SVU, which was a bit hard to hear because it competed with the booms, then woke up at 5.30 and decided to see what was going on outside. I'd been told that the soldiers returned from Lebanon around dawn, and wanted to see if I could get some photos.

Unlike Kiryat Shmona, which is mostly a low-income development town, Metulla is a prosperous town, with an economy based on agriculture and tourism. It is famous for its beautiful guesthouses, natural vistas and fresh, clean mountain air. I walked down a street lined with guesthouses and stopped at an apple orchard that abutted the border fence with Lebanon. The fruit was ripe, but since most of the workers had fled the area there was no one to pick it. I plucked a few apples and put them in my bag, then walked over to the fence whilst munching on the really delicious fruit and stood there, looking up at Lebanon and wondering if there were any Hezbollah guys looking back at me. I wondered what would happen if I waved. At one point, just for the childish thrill, I stuck my foot under the fence and thought, "Wow, my foot's in Lebanon, I'm eating an apple in Israel and there's a war on. Weird."


The apple orchard



The fence at the edge of the orchard.



The view of Lebanon above the apple orchard (photographed with a regular camera, no telephoto lens)

As I walked around Metulla I saw many pretty, neat little homes, all empty and all clearly owned by house-proud types. Several times I saw wrought iron imported garden furniture on patios, the chairs carefully tipped forward to rest against the table so as to protect the seats from the morning dew.


A pretty, neat little Metulla house. The hills behind the house are in Lebanon.

The base was a few minutes' walk from the apple orchard. There were some soldiers sitting around outside, but they told me that the guys inside Lebanon wouldn't be back that morning. They'd walked the two kilometres inside the previous night, and they'd stay there until much later in the day. I didn't ask any more questions, just sat around with them for a few minutes and chatted. They told me they were sick of talking to foreign reporters and glad to hang out with what one guy called "one of us." One of them remarked that he bet the people of Congo would probably be thrilled to have a small percentage of the media attention Israel was getting.

They were reserve soldiers in their twenties and thirties and they were exhausted and quiet. Unlike the group of young soldiers I'd photographed the previous day, they were not at all enthusiastic about facing combat. They remembered the last time they'd been in Lebanon, before the 2000 withdrawal, and they did not want to go back. They wanted to go home. "What are you doing here?" asked one of the guys, in quiet wonderment. "I work with a foreign journalist," I told him. "But don't you know how dangerous it is here?" he asked. "I would never come to this place if I didn't have to be here."

One of the quietest guys was giving bottled water to one of the many pure-bred dogs that wandered around Metulla - pets that had been abandoned by their owners, who had fled south. The dogs seemed to have lost their sense of danger due to the constant booms: On several occasions I saw beautiful canines flopped on the middle of the road, completely oblivious to the approach of a noisy armoured vehicle or the driver's loud honking. Their ears didn't even twitch. The only way to move the dogs was to physically grab them by the scruff of the neck. Even then they reacted slowly and passively.



A reserve soldier giving bottled water to an abandoned dog in Metulla.


After awhile I started to wander slowly in the direction of my hotel. It was still early, but I wanted my coffee. The streets were very, very quiet and there was a slight breeze: all I could hear was the sound of chirping birds, the gentle creaking of tree branches and the humming from an electricity pylon.  Ah yes, it was indeed the calm before the storm.

Boom! Crash! (shit). A middle aged woman who was mopping out the office used by the local famers' council (she told me she hadn't left Metulla because she had nowhere to go) poked her head out the door and said to me in a scolding tone, "Don't wander around! Those are incoming missiles! This is not a game!"

For a minute I dithered between taking cover on the spot and making a quick dash for my hotel, which was just around the corner. Hmmm. Coffee or death? Tough one, that. No, not really. Coffee won easily. Anyway, the barrage stopped before I even finished walking the short distance.

Directly across from my hotel there was a charming Ottoman-era stone house that had been converted into a guesthouse called Beit Shalom (House of Peace). I noticed it then for the first time because the owner had put a recording of Etta James on at full volume. "At last," Ms. James sang joyfully, "My love has come along/my lonely days are over/and life is like a song."

I figured that any man who played Etta James in the morning must have good coffee, so I headed over.

The owner's name was Chaimke. "Chaimke," I said. "Do you have good coffee?" He expanded his chest proudly and said, "I have the best coffee in Metulla!" "And do you have wireless internet access?" I asked, "Or is that too much to hope for?" "Not only do I have wifi," he answered, "But I increased the speed to 2.5 gHz for the journalists. You can sit in the garden and surf while you drink your coffee." "Chaimke," I said, "You are a prince among men. I would like a double espresso with hot milk on the side."

And so I sat myself down at one of the tables in the shaded garden, placed my laptop on the mosaic tile surface and checked my email while Chaimke brought my coffee. It was a beautiful garden. Water tinkled quietly in a carved stone fountain, the birds twittered, the leaves rustled gently in the breeze, the sun shone, Etta James continued to sing about love and the artillery boomed every few seconds. Tweet tweet tweet, sang the birds. "At last...." sang Etta. Tinkle tinkle tinkle, chattered the water. BOOM! answered the artillery. Such a lovely, pastoral scene in wartime northern Israel.

After awhile Davide joined me and we went inside for Chaimke's famous breakfast (he asked us to eat in the dining room because there was too much to carry out to the garden and all his wait staff had fled south).


Chaimke's famous breakfast.

As we ate I tried to discuss the morning newspapers with Davide, but it was hard going because Chaimke kept interrupting us. "Mix the salad dressing well," he instructed, "It's made from my own olive oil." or "Try the yogurt, it's the house specialty." "The cheese is all made on the premises - that's garlic flavoured, that's olive, that's onion..." or "Do you want to try some of my homemade pickled herring?" No, no, I demurred, patting my more-distended-than-usual stomach. "Oh but you must," he insisted. "It's really something special." Sigh. So I ate some pickled herring to shut up please Chaimke, while Davide drank more coffee and looked askance at this bizarre Jewish delicacy. "It's an acquired taste," I assured him.

After awhile the booms became much louder and more frequent. Then instructions to head for the bomb shelters were issued via a scratchy PA system. I looked at Chaimke and asked where the shelter was. "Oh," he said calmly, "Don't worry, we never go down to the shelters around here."

Huh. Well, when in Rome...

We went back to our hotel across the street in order to check out, head down to Kiryat Shmona and from there to do a story in the Golan Heights. Problem was, the bombardment became really fierce at that point. The sirens kept wailing, over and over and over (shut up already!) and the sound of exploding incoming missiles sounded as if it were coming from right outside. After awhile my head started to hurt. Nobody else seemed the least perturbed, though - especially not the pretty red-headed Eastern European reporter who was deep in flirtatious conversation with a drop-dead gorgeous IDF officer. I was in the middle of an IM chat with the sandmonkey at the time (so glam, IM'ing a guy in Cairo while the missiles were falling in Metulla), and suddenly I couldn't type as accurately as usual. I felt totally off balance. After the seventh siren (I recorded the sixth one here), my friend Nir, an Israeli photojournalist who was staying at nearby Kibbutz Goshrim, sent me a text message: "Let's get the fuck out of here."

Ech. We had to meet Nir in Kiryat Shmona. Not a fun prospect. But there was no other way. So we put on our flak jackets and drove ever-so-speedily to meet him in the empty parking lot of the deserted Kiryat Shmona shopping mall. Except that Nir wasn't there - the bombardment had gotten so bad that he'd taken cover in the underground parking lot, where there was no mobile phone reception. We ended up waiting, crouched in a doorway, for a very, very long 10 minutes. Lots of booms, shall we say, and mighty close.

As soon as there was a break in the barrage Nir showed up and we drove off to the Golan Heights. Within five minutes we were in a different world. We drove into a Druze town and saw groups of men sitting on plastic chairs outside a cafe, smoking nargilehs and drinking coffee. Everything looked normal and quiet; the booms sounded like faint, distant thunder.

Then we were out in the open countryside, and it was so beautiful.


Golan Heights.


Golan Heights.



How ironic, remarked Davide, that we're safer in occupied territory than we are inside Israel proper.

Then he took out his mobile phone and started to dial a number with one hand while holding the steering wheel with the other. "Davide!" I said in a scolding tone, "Please don't make calls from your mobile phone while you're driving. It's dangerous!"

Sami Michael

Yesterday I went to Haifa to interview Sami Michael. You can read more about  this famous Israeli author, who is listed as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, here.

After finishing the interview, I recorded Sami speaking a bit about himself in Arabic. The video is below (Arabic speakers will have an opportunity to giggle when I speak a bit at the end), and below that is the short post that I wrote for the BBC's Arabic website. I'll write a long post about what I saw in Kiryat Shmona later tonight or tomorrow (truly, I will).




Three of the thousands of metal balls that are packed into each of Hezbollah's missiles. They splatter everywhere, leaving holes in cars, buildings - and people. Well over one hundred missiles have been landing in Israel every day since July 12.

Okay, I'm in Metulla, right on the border. The barrages are pretty much constant and we had six sirens between 11 am and noon. I was in the dining room of the hotel where a lot of journalists are gathered (WiFi and coffee), waiting for things to calm down and recorded the segment below: A siren goes off, and everyone's so used to hearing them that they don't even move or react. Going to Kiryat Shmona now. More later....

(I forgot to mention: If you listen carefully, you can hear the "whump" of explosions in the background. All the sirens were accompanied by falling missiles; the noise got louder when the siren stopped. Oh, and a bit of extra symbolism: The TV was broadcasting the photos and names of the people who were killed the previous day at Kfar Giladi, just down the road).

Hello,

I'm not Lisa, and I've been appointed to make the following announcement:

Ms. Goldman has gone to northern Israel where she may or may not have access to the internet. In any case, she will be back by Wednesday, and she will resume blogging and answering your emails at the earliest opportunity.

Please keep commenting and understand that it may take up to two or three days for your comment to appear on the site.

And yes, she will take care.

jill: hi babba .... do you have your miklat [bomb shelter] sorted??

Etgar and Samir

Samir El-Youssef and Etgar Keret, two of my most favourite human beings on the planet, will be jointly interviewed on Radio Open Source at 7 p.m. EST tonight (Thursday, August 3).

Listen here. (live or recorded).

Sarah Ellison wrote a piece about the Israel-Lebanon blogging phenomenon for the July 28 Wall Street Journal, with prominent mention of yours truly and this Lebanese blogger, whose latest posts can be found at the Lebanese Political Journal.

The direct link to the piece is here, but it's by subscription only so I've pasted the article into a separate webpage on this blog - link here.

As missiles and hostile rhetoric fly back and forth between Lebanon and Israel, bloggers on both sides are talking to one another.

Lisa Goldman, a 39-year-old Canadian-born Israeli blogger in Tel Aviv, wrote in a recent post, "Will this turn out to be the first time that residents of 'enemy' countries engaged in an ongoing conversation while missiles were falling?"

Bloggers from Lebanon and Israel -- some on the scene, others around the world -- are providing live updates of their experiences, commenting on each other's writing and sometimes linking to blogs across the border.

Read the rest here.