Yossi Gurvitz, a journalist who blogs at Friends of George ("Left-liberal criticism in the tradition of George Orwell") has a guest post from his friend Adi Ginat, who is currently backpacking around New Zealand and Australia. Adi is 27, lives in Tel Aviv, and is a Bezalel Arts School graduate. She used to work for Ma'ariv newspaper and blogs on Live Journal,  here. Her guest post on Friends of George is called Things one sees from there.

I offered to translate it into English because I think it's an interesting description of the disappointment many young Israelis feel upon discovering that their "progressive" peers abroad have pretty strong negative opinions about Israel, but little knowledge or understanding of the nuances or complexity of its history, conflicts and society. Some of the (Hebrew) commenters think Adi is being patronizing or simplistic, while others who have had similar encounters identify with her account. I am not expressing an opinion either way - just putting the text out there for non-Hebrew speakers. I think Adi and Yossi would be interested in some thoughtful feedback. Hebrew speakers - check out the original, 'cause my translation is not exactly a work of poetry. ;)

Things one sees from there

Let's suppose for a moment that you were  born in a small town in Germany. Or Marseilles. Or even  further away - New Zealand. Yes, New Zealand.

And what’s wrong with New Zealand? Green hills, peace and harmony, sheep, snow-capped peaks and soaring cliffs.

Of course you didn’t grow up surrounded by the untamed natural vistas for which New Zealand is famous. Most likely you were raised in one of the suburbs of Wellington, the gray and dull capital city. In a nice little bungalow with large rooms, wall-to-wall carpeting and a fireplace with a chimney that has long since become blocked up due to lack of use. Your father is an accountant, your mother a teacher. You have an older brother and a younger sister. There’s no dog, but there’s a pampered white cat. And two cars in the garage. 

They named you Timothy, Robert or maybe Caitlin, but everyone calls you Tim, Rob or Kate. Like everyone else, you went to the local school and amused yourself on warm afternoons by riding your skateboard. In the evenings, you went to the cinema with a few friends to see the latest Hollywood film. You watched avidly as the ill-treated Bruce Wayne grew up to become Batman, pursuer of justice. Or maybe you preferred older films, like the one about Luke, from the farm on the remote planet, who became the greatest Jedi knight. One thing you know for sure: The world belongs to the underdog. Because where’s the drama in a story about a character whose heroic future is obvious to everyone? Give us some dungeons, school bullies and shattered dreams.

So between comics, movies and computer games you graduated from high school. You wondered, like everyone else, what you should study at university. Absentmindedly, you checked a few options on your application form. Que sera, sera. In the end you were accepted to the University of Canterbury, or Otago or maybe even Auckland. You took out a low interest student loan from the bank, to repay after you finish your degree. Or maybe your parents gave you tuition money. As long as you don’t have to work for a living while you’re studying diligently for your degree in chemistry, philosophy or psychology. You live in a drafty rented house with six other students. The fridge is full of cheap Tui beer and the dishes in the sink haven’t been washed for a week. There’s a poster of Jimi Hendrix on the bathroom wall and a small television in the living room. All in all, you’re doing pretty well. Your class assignments aren’t particularly difficult, and every week there’s a free screening of a Hollywood film at the campus auditorium. You even found a girlfriend – a French girl who’s here on a student exchange. She’s a nice girl, even though you’re not too sure you’re into French rap. The Lemonheads are much more your thing.

And in the evenings you all sit in the living room, everyone with his laptop, checking your email and typing your assignments in Word and planning your future. And the future looks pretty good. Maybe you’ll do a graduate degree – the scholarships flow like water, and drought has never been a problem in New Zealand. Maybe you’ll go traveling around the world. Or live in England for a few years. Or Australia. Maybe you’ll just find a job. The unemployment that resulted from the global economic crisis a few years ago has dissipated, and New Zealand is desperate for young, educated minds.

And you are educated, there’s no doubt about that. You read avidly and keep your finger on the pulse of world events. The president of Iran, famine in Africa, Tony Blair, North Korea, human trafficking – and the conflict in the Middle East, of course. Of course.

Like everyone else, you saw the piles of rubble in Beirut on television, and the photo of the pillars of smoke in the newspaper. Later you understood that the photo was photoshopped, not that that makes much of a difference. After all, your French girlfriend has relatives in Beirut. By a miracle they were rescued from the bombardments of the Israeli army, which only understands the language of force. Just like that, for no reason, they invaded a foreign country, trampled on the rights of the indigenous residents and achieved independence at their expense. If they were a little less aggressive, they might learn from the British how to absorb territories. Who knows better than them? But no, the Israelis prefer to plunder, to oppress and to murder. Terrorists. And not just ordinary terrorists, but terrorists that are supported by the United States – which, as everyone knows, is the source of all evil.

The brutal capitalism of the United States makes you feel like vomiting, and not for nothing do you sleep with the writings of Noam Chomsky under your pillow. Actually, you used to be a Marxist – but then you understood that Marxism wasn’t relevant in a world without a proletariat. The proletariat of today is the foreign worker, who chose of his own accord to immigrate and bring his wretched fate upon himself. So you abandoned Marx with contempt, and the only thing you retained was his attitude toward nationality. Nationality, you have understood, is a bad thing. And the only thing that will save the world from complete annihilation is freedom from the fetters of the nation state. If a foreign army were to invade New Zealand, you claim, destroy Wellington and Rotoura and even end up knocking on your door in Christ Church, you would surrender. What’s the point of going to battle in the name of political interests? Your ass is much more valuable. Anyway, the only war you ever experienced was for the world cup in rugby. Which, in any case, you haven’t won since 1987. And did anything bad happen as a result of that?

So what’s Israel’s problem? With all its capital and all the latest weapons, why won’t it give the Palestinians a state? They’re such an oppressed people, you think, while watching the children of Jenin staring out of your television screen. They live in refugee camps, their olive trees are stolen from them and they are forced to make do with old-fashioned Russian missiles that usually miss their targets. It’s no wonder that their grief and boredom lead them to commit extreme acts like suicide bombings. And their brave leaders – they do so much for them! They raise money from France to build more palaces and open more bank accounts in Switzerland because, as everyone knows, money is important. But what can they do when the other side – Israel – attacks them incessantly using terrorist methods? Can’t the Israelis just for one moment put aside their bleeding pride and march toward a new day – one without weapons, nationality, walls and bullying?

Because as long as they remain intransigent, they stand to lose more. All their highly developed armaments and the strong back of America, the biggest military power in the world, will never triumph over the blazing Palestinian eyes, the dusty green scarf, and poetic justice!

And you know you are right. You grew up, like the rest of your generation, on the deeds of superheroes, and on Hollywood films, and in the evening when you watch the news from around the world, while hugging your French girlfriend with one arm and holding a can of beer in your free hand, you know with absolute certainty that there is no other solution – the underdog must be victorious. 

 

                                                David Furst for AFP

So the government appointed no less than two committees - one headed by noted attorney Professor David Libai (who is also former co-counsel to - eechs - Moshe Katsav) - to waste taxpayer's money while they try to decide what we should call that deadly 35-day, um, conflict we had up on the northern border last summer.

[Meanwhile thousands of municipal workers throughout Israel are planning to strike because they haven't received their salaries for more than one year].

There are, it seems, a few problems.

Firstly, is it okay to call it a war if war was never declared? And if it is okay, then how to explain to the residents of the north why no state of emergency was declared and no government aid provided?

Secondly, the most popular name - actually, the de facto name - is the Second Lebanon War. But that's a bit problematic because the 1982 IDF invasion was never called a war, either: It was called Operation Peace for the Galilee, and it was officially a military operation. So if last summer's war was the Second Lebanon War, does that mean we have to declare that the 1982 invasion was a war, too? Other proposed names are "Peace in the North" (irony, anyone?) and "The Northern Shield War."

And thirdly, of course, Israel's position was supposedly that the, um, military operations in Lebanon were against Hezbollah, not Lebanon.

Bradley Burston has more on the name that war story (which he calls "outsourcing history"), here.

Oy, all these absurdities. Must dig out my old Kafka novellas.

Oh yes, and today at 2.00 p.m. sirens will sound for the biggest nation-wide civil defense drill ever. Except in Sderot and along the northern border, 'cause the government figures the drill would just add to the residents' post-traumatic stress disorder. To which Idan has this and this to say.


Theodore Herzl

I wonder what Herzl would've said if he'd known, way back in 1897, that nearly 60 years after the establishment of his Judenstaat, it would still be fighting wars with its neighbours on a regular basis?

A popular joke amongst Israelis traveling in India goes like this:
An Indian asks an Israeli backpacker, "So how many Israelis are there?" The backpacker answers "Around 7 million." The Indian then asks, "And how many in Israel?"

Around 50,000 Israelis visit India each year - mostly backpackers, a large proportion of whom are on a gap year between the end of their army service and the beginning of the rest of their lives. They comprise only a minuscule proportion of the total number of foreign visitors to India each year, but Israelis are the only ones who have a tendency to travel in packs, and to cluster in certain places. In Delhi they stay at the Hare Rama, one of the grottiest guesthouses in Pahar Ganj, a seedy area near the train station. In Goa there is Tel Aviv Beach, and during the summer Israelis stay in spots around Himachal Pradesh (HP), most notably in a little village called Bhagsu Nag, near Dharamsala.

The presence of Hebrew-speaking backpackers is so overwhelming in these places that they have come to resemble little Israeli colonies in India. Some speak of an Israeli invasion, and one Israeli woman wrote her doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon. The locals who run the restaurants and guesthouses often speak a bizarre version of idiomatic Hebrew that is notable for its hilarious syntax. Hebrew signs for various services - from internet cafes to rickshaws - are posted everywhere, and the restaurants serve falafel in pita, hummus, shakshouka and jachnun. Mostly, everyone gets along well - but there are always some louts who have to spoil it for everyone else, and there have been several reports in the Israeli press of young people behaving badly in India. Sometimes they cause offense without meaning to, because they are ignorant of local customs - like a couple that was fined for kissing in public - but I often saw people who were just inexcusably rude. (Yes, yes - there were plenty of rude tourists from other countries too). The popular weekly satire show Eretz Nehederet  (A Wonderful Country) did a hilarious skit about the Ugly Israeli in India that you can view here.

So "shanti" has been integrated into the Hebrew vernacular, we have popular Indian eateries in Tel Aviv, plus thousands of India veterans wandering around the country, satire skits, doctoral dissertations and now...the documentary film.

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Hummus Curry.

The film was shot last year in Bhagsu Nag, where I spent a couple of months in 2000. Back then there were a lot of Israelis, but their presence was nothing compared to what it has become, as seen in the film.

The clip below shows Shoresh, a local businessman who runs a guesthouse and falafel stand (Falafel Mazal), posting signs for his super blowout dinner to celebrate the Jewish New Year. Will he win the popularity contest with the local Chabad missionaries emissaries? (oh yes, they are here too).  There are more clips here; the woman named Shirley in this clip teaches yoga at Chandra Yoga, in Tel Aviv.

Shoresh at Falafel Mazal (english subtitles)

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Over at Thoughts from Israel, a guy who calls himself simply "Israeli Blogger" describes the latest diplomatic fracas between Egypt and Israel.

Last week, Israel's Channel 1 broadcast a documentary about an incident that occurred in the Sinai during the Six Day War. According to the Egyptian media, the film shows that MK Binyamin (Fouad) Ben Eliezer, then an IDF officer, ordered the massacre of unarmed Egyptian POW's. According to the director of the film (which I did not see, because who watches Chanel 1 anyway?), the film makes no such claim and the Egyptians have totally misinterpreted the film. Meanwhile, some Egyptian members of parliament are supposedly calling on their government to declare war against Israel (uh huh) over this alleged incident and it is - naturally - all over the Egyptian press. (Haaretz's article is here). Things got so bad that Ben Eliezer was "advised" to cancel his trip to meet the Egyptian minister of energy (he took the advice).

Yup, a major diplomatic incident over a documentary film about a wartime event that may or may not have taken place 40 years ago.

Israeli Blogger wonders why the Israeli and Egyptian versions of this story vary so wildly:

"Why are the Israeli and Arab versions of the same event always so different? I can think of three possible explanations:

• Option 1: Arabs are saints. Israelis are evil. Arabs always tell the truth, and Israelis always lie and distort reality.
• Option 2: Israelis are saints. Arabs are evil. Israelis always tell the truth, and Arabs always lie and distort reality.
• Option 3: Arabs are human and Israelis are human. Arabs think that they are saints and that Israelis are evil. Israelis think that they are saints and that Arabs are evil. When Israelis speak - Arabs think Israelis are lying to cover up crimes. When Arabs speak - Israelis think this is anti-Israeli propaganda. Neither side is willing to accept that no one here is a saint. No one likes to belong to a group which is not "Just" or "Moral". People defend their own side, and try to prove that the other side is evil. It is so difficult to accept that your own side is also wrong, that people find it much easier to believe that the other side has evil intentions and is twisting the facts. As a result, both sides see the other as evil or crazy, and the words and actions of one side are constantly misunderstood by the other (e.g., the Al-Aqsa events).

Any other explanations anyone?"

Israeli blogger has been hosting some very interesting comment threads, with Israeli and Arab readers / bloggers participating in the dialogue, so you might want to surf on over there to take a look and express yourself - not about the documentary (unless you've actually seen it), but about his question.

Given all the publicity garnered by the cases of Haim Ramon and Moshe Katsav, the subjects of gender relations and sexual harassment are hot topics these days. A couple of weeks ago, Time Out Tel Aviv chose to highlight the issue via an article about Miriam Libicki, a 25 year-old art student (at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada) who has drawn a series of comic books about her experience as an army clerk on an IDF base in the Negev.

Raised in a religious home in Ohio, Miriam immigrated to Israel as a teenager and volunteered for service in the IDF. Classified by the army as excessively emotional and sexually ambivalent, and possessing poor Hebrew skills, she was not considered suitable for a job in Intelligence or as a medic, so instead she was sent to do clerical work at a base in the middle of nowhere. "The service was unbelievably boring, but I don't regret it, mostly because that experience was the inspiration for my comics. Army service exposed me to an aspect of Israeli society that I wouldn't have experienced otherwise."

The comics series is called Jobnik!, which is Israeli slang for someone who did their mandatory army service in a low-prestige job - like clerk or a truck driver.  You can read the first five pages of each comic book on Libicki's site, Realgonegirl. As the Time Out reporter wrote, "'[Libicki] touches on some types of sexual harrassment, but focuses primarily on her personal experiences in the army...and she tries to provide for non-Israelis a picture of our soldiers that is a little less superficial and cliched."

...

The Time Out reporter goes on:

"Libicki describes accurately the aggressiveness of Israeli men, especially the macho-macho men of the IDF."

"I don't have anything against Israeli men," responds Libicki. "Some of my best friends are Israeli men. But in the army they encourage them to be terribly macho. Perhaps they behave differently at home, but my experience was of men who had a really hard time with emotional intimacy. When a lot of young guys live together, it's not an environment that really encourages emotional intimacy in a relationship. Women in the army know that their sexuality is one of the things that they can use. They always told us in the army, 'Open another button and you'll get everything you want.' I didn't personally experience sexual harassment from someone who was more powerful than me, but it was definitely common."

For me, though, the most touching and interesting of the Jobnik series is on the pages where Miriam uses intimate experiences to engage in painful self examination and apply them to the complexities of Israeli society and politics.

Take a look at the first three pages of Jobnik Manifesto, for example:








If you like the series, you can order them via the Realgonegirl website, or buy them at this shop if you live in the Tel Aviv area.

In the end, I think the Time Out reporter was reaching a bit too far in trying to use the Jobnik! series as an example of sexual harassment. It is definitely a problem in the IDF (and I can line up my women friends to tell you stories for days on end), but that's not the point of these comic books. For me, the series is simply a deeply intelligent, thought-provoking window into an aspect of real life, Israeli style.

Yes, yes I know - I've been a bad, bad blogger for the past few weeks - er, maybe months.  It's not that I don't love the blogosphere; I do, truly. I've just been kind of angry and sad for a long time, stuck in my head with Big Thoughts About the State of the World, and I didn't want my mood to spill over into my writing. Whinging and bitching just ain't my style. This morning, however, whilst twisted in an asana at my favourite yoga studio, a ray of Levantine sunlight struck my rubber mat and brought with it a moment of yogic enlightenment: Time to shake off this crappy mood and get back into the blogging groove. Alors, I am preparing a couple of long posts that might or might not stir a little bit of controversy. Meanwhile, there are some links below to keep you interested and coming back.

Link number one:

Recently I discovered a fascinating blog by a Palestinian who lives in Montreal. Nizo, who seems to be the polyglot I was always too lazy to become, writes in English, French, Arabic, German and....Hebrew! (Really impressively good Hebrew). Nizo's writing is thoughtful, insightful and sometimes hilarious. In a post called Drunken Ponderings: In the Tub with Argov, he starts off by recounting an incident at work that had me snorting with laughter:

"I was on a three-party conference call with a local customer and a vendor in California who could not produce his widgets fast enough. The [French speaking, Quebecois] customer was understandably frustrated and since I'm the assembler, I had to speed up my own production to make up for the delay. Typical scenario.

Since my customer's command of the English language leaves much to be desired, I also played the role of interpreter. When the mild mannered Californian explained that he won't be able to deliver due to raw material issues of his own, the customer lost control and addressed the vendor directly.
He bellowed:
'(By not getting the parts), Nizo will be retarded, and then I will be retarded. In the end we will all be retarded'.

I had to quickly intervene and explain that by 'retarded', the customer meant delayed. In French, the word for delay is retard."

But how is this incident connected to Mizrachi singer Zohar Argov - or to ignorance, tolerance, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, shaheeds and hot baths with martinis, all of which are topics of this post? Read on to find out....

Link number two:


Gadi Taub, whose new book, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism (Hebrew) was just published, recently wrote a guest post on the blog of Ali Miraj, a British Muslim politician. The attention-grabbing title of the post is "True Zionists Must End Occupation." Exceprt:

"Israel’s friends are not doing it much good by justifying Israel’s settlements in the West Bank. By so doing they are only helping their opponents in identifying Zionism with settlements, and from there the road to delegitimising the right of Jews to self-determination is short: the occupation cannot, and should not, be justified, and if Zionism is equated with it, than Zionism cannot be justified as well.

The equation is, however, false. Because Zionism and settlements are in sharp opposition to each other. From its inception Zionism was not about redeeming land, it was about the right of all peoples to self-determination… "

Read the rest here. Please leave responses to the article on Gadi's blog rather than on mine.

Link number three:



Idan Gazit

In a post called Not in my name, Idan explains why he no longer reads or watches the news, and then segues into a lesson on democracy that would be an excellent teaching tool for high school civics teachers.

Excerpts:

"In the months since the war I have spent a lot of time soul-searching about Israel and my (admittedly complex) relationship with her. Out of disgust, or (worse) simple ennui, I have taken up a vow of news celibacy that would make a Buddhist monk proud. As soon as the war ended and it became clear that nothing, but nothing changed, no lesson learned, no epiphany experienced among our leaders — I simply got off the news treadmill."

...

"I bet I’m not alone in this, especially within the neon confines of the Tel Aviv bubble. Left to stew in a vacuum devoid of news, I’ve been thinking a lot about apathy and the bliss of ignorance. I’ve been thinking about the lack of national direction we all feel, even if we rarely admit the depths of crap we are mired in — at home; not in the mud of Lebanon or the sands of Gaza. I’ve been thinking about where I will go when Israel ends, and what the world will look like at that point."
...

"Not in my name!

I wince every time I hear it, because it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what democracy means. Democracy means that you must care enough about something you think is wrong to get up and make your voice heard, and thus influence the hand on the steering wheel. Democracy might also mean getting up and trying to convince others that you would make a good driver — but in reality the elected are rarely qualified or good, merely wealthy and well-connected, so I’m ignoring that aspect. Your civic responsibilities as a citizen do not end at the voting booth, they are only beginning — and this is a fact that has been lost on today’s Israel.

Forget all of the hackneyed crap about how “living soft” has erased Israel’s morals and backbone. Our founders, by and large socialists, understood the meaning of civic duty (not to be confused with one’s military service, which is a different thing entirely). They understood that making a country better requires participation, and that true participation means taking your country into your heart, for better and worse. You cannot truly celebrate national successes without mourning the failures. This had nothing to do with their politics: one cannot care without feeling. Like any emotional relationship, the pain makes us balk, and so we conveniently forget how democracy works:

In a democracy, if you are a citizen, everything is in your name. The stuff you don’t like, too."

...

Link number four:

In honour of Purim, my fabulous friend Nominally Challenged (Nomchy?) serves up a hilarious- and fabulously erudite -  interpretation of the Story of Esther.

So, what is Purim?

"Essentially, it's a sort of Jewish Halloween, except, of course, in all the ways that it isn't. Firstly, it's in late winter (the Gregorian date varies because, like all Jewish festivals, it is based on the lunar calendar) and this is patently not like Halloween, which is in late autumn (yeah, ok, fall ...). Secondly, you don't go around bugging people for tricks or treats, but you are supposed to send gifts of food to people, and to give alms to the poor. Thirdly, well, in fact, it's nothing like Halloween at all, except that you get to dress up."

...
And what's the story all about?

Oh man, it's such a long story - there was this Persian king, his evil vizier, a beautiful queen... It's a plot that no Hollywood scriptwriter could hope to beat. Check it out, here.

...

Photojournalist Spencer Platt won the World Press Photo Award for the photo above, taken in South Beirut on 15 August, 2006 - the day the ceasefire took effect.

Mai Ghoussoub, a London-based Lebanese writer who died on 17 February, analyzes the power of this image in an article called Beirut and Contradiction: Reading the World Press Photo Award.

Excerpt:

"...I overheard two young Lebanese arguing about the same photo. Both were in their 20s and very "cosmopolitan". One said: I think this is a great photograph, it shows us as we are, not people associated only with war and destruction. The second one was appalled and said: this is the "new orientalism" - instead of the women depicted in Delacroix's classic orientalist paintings, today we have these modern, model-type Lebanese women against a background of war and poverty."


What do you think?