Khaled Diab, an Egyptian who lives in Belgium, and Anat, a.k.a. "Israeli Mom," became online acquaintances during the Second Lebanon War, via the ME Forum message board that Anat initiated. More than half-a-year later, Khaled has come to visit Israel.

He is blogging extensively about his visit, and Anat is writing about her observations on her blog, too.

This visit is not about group hugs, olive branches and another chorus of Kumbaya. Khaled and Anat are way too smart and clear-eyed for that kind of stuff. They don't always agree, but they are not afraid to listen to one another, and to face their own prejudices.

Khaled stayed at Anat's home for the first couple of days of his visit. Here's an excerpt from the post he called At home with the Zionists:

"...in the early days of the conflict, it was a simpler age, and Zionists were invariably portrayed as comic book villains – and how many of those have time to fit in a family, do the cooking, shopping and cleaning, in between all that villainy and political manoeuvring? Today, many more species of Zionists have been discovered by Arab political zoologists, but they are still, in the Arab psyche, essentially a dangerous and possibly deadly political animal which roams the Palestinian territories and occasionally neighbouring countries.

Given this backdrop, you can imagine how bizarre and surreal it felt to find myself coming down to breakfast in an authentic Israeli Zionist household! This weirdness was accentuated by the fact that it wasn’t so weird – that once you move beyond the conflict, you notice how they are just folk like us, as the Americans would say.

In Israel, they like to say that whenever you bring two Jews together, they will have three opinions. Well, after some empirical observation, I have come to the conclusion that if you throw an Arab or two into this mix, you're guaranteed hours of political debate for the whole family."

In the ongoing - and often ham fisted - attempts to humanize the faces behind the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, documentary director Yael Luttwak has come up with a rather unique idea: take a cross-section of Israeli and Palestinian women, put them on a diet program together, and watch what happens. The film is called A Slim Peace.

You can watch the trailer here - and see how even the simplest questions or ideas are political. When the Bedouin (Israeli) woman is told that the group of dieters will include Jewish settlers and Palestinians, but the film is not political, she immediately points out that it IS political - just by virtue of the participants' identities. When the American-born religious West Bank settler is asked to explain whether she lives in Israel or..?, she answers that the question is too political. When a young woman who is doing her graduate degree in biology in Tel Aviv is asked whether she prefers to be called Arab-Israeli or Palestinian, she shrugs and says she really doesn't care; then she explains how difficult it is for her to find a man, and again she is frustrated by the political reality in which she lives. A Palestinian journalist from Ramallah explains that she often overeats out of frustration when she has to wait for two hours to get through a checkpoint on her way to work - then confesses that the last time she felt good about herself was when she was in love, a long time ago.

This is how the director describes her film:

"In A Slim Peace, 14 women--Israelis, Palestinians, Bedouin Arabs, and American settlers in the West Bank--are brought together with the shared goal of losing weight and find out they have far more in common than they ever would have imagined. A Slim Peace takes a revealing look at the universal struggle for acceptance, understanding and personal transformation in a land of intractable conflict. This is a video diary made by the film's director."

Tel Aviv: 11.00 a.m., Rothschild Boulevard, corner of Mazeh Street. Memorial Day for Fallen Soldiers.

David Grossman at Levontin 7

This past Friday afternoon David Grossman, one of Israel's best-known authors, read some of his poems about love to a small audience at Levontin 7, a performance space in Tel Aviv. Since his son, Uri, was killed in Lebanon during the last days of the war last summer, he has appeared in public very rarely. So there were quite a few journalists present, including a television crew, but still it felt like an intimate occasion - perhaps because the space was so small, or perhaps because so many people there seemed to know one another. Some of the poems were sung to music, while others were read - like one about love discovered in middle age, which Grossman read together with an actress ("Perhaps it’s a pity that we did not met 20 years ago/An entire lifetime passed over me as if I were waiting / You did not know me when my hair was in braids/Or when I was pregnant").

Just before the end, Grossman touched indirectly on his own loss. He noted that we were two-and-a-half days before Memorial Day, and that "due to the circumstances," he felt a need to end the evening with a short reading from one of his novels, See Under: Love . The excerpt he read from is about a man named Wasserman, who is an elderly Jewish writer in a Nazi death camp, telling a story to one of the German guards. He tells the guard about a child war orphan, named Kazik, whom he and some other elderly Jews adopted. At one point they all take turns expressing hopes and prayers for the little boy's future, even as the ghetto is burning, the few survivors are being deported to death camps, and the whole world is going up in flames. And one of the old people says, "You know what I wish for him? I wish that he will end his days without knowing anything about war."

In Metulla last summer, during the war, while sitting in a hotel filled with journalists as rockets boomed outside, a friend of mine who is a photojournalist told me that he and his wife were wondering if they had made a mistake in having a child. "The wars will never end," he said. "And I don't want my child to grow up and go to the army, maybe die in some stupid wasteful conflict." I looked at him and didn't know what to say.

A month later we met at an outdoor cafe on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv, and I asked him how he was feeling. He shrugged and said that life went on, then smiled and told me about something adorable his child had done that morning while he and his wife were still lying in bed.

I always feel ambivalent on state-mandated sad days - like a lot of people, I guess. I don't like having my emotions tugged at, and I don't like uncritical emotions. And on Memorial Day in Israel, the grief is inescapable. The sun is setting now, and I can already hear the sad music on the radio. The shops and cafes are closed, the streets are quiet, and all the newspapers are filled with stories about bereaved families and dead soldiers. On the other hand, sometimes it is important to take a day to meditate and remember.

This year in Tel Aviv there are a few memorial events that are meant to add some nuance to the grieving. Beit Daniel, the Centre for Progressive Judaism in Tel Aviv, held a meeting for bereaved Palestinian and Israeli parents last Thursday. Tonight, after the official ceremony at Rabin Square that begins with a one-minute siren at 8 p.m., followed by the standard speeches and sad songs, there will be a performance event at Tzavta Theatre that will focus on the losses of the Lebanon War. It's called The Fallen One (חלל) and participants include David Broza , Rockfour, poet Rony Somek (born in Baghdad in 1951) and singer Shlomo Mizrachi, who will perform the national anthem in Jimi Hendrix style. According to the organizer, the point is not to be iconoclastic but "...to remind people that behind the wars and the death are human beings, and the generals need to remember...that they are responsible for lives." (Time Out Tel Aviv). The same Time Out article mentions an event called "Bereavement of Peace," that will also include bereaved Palestinian and Israeli parents, with a focus on universal loss - not just Israeli loss - in violent conflicts.



This photo,  from today's Maariv newspaper, shows a young man named Yonatan who died while rescuing wounded soldiers in Lebanon during the war last summer. Three days before he was killed, he wrote "I am going to die" on a piece of paper and had one of his friends snap his photo. According to the article, the sign was supposed to be dark humour. Instead, it turned out to be a prophecy.

My sister has an amazing talent for creative birthday greetings. Today she outdid herself. This is my nephew Gabriel...

So there I was, comfortably ensconced on a wicker chair at an outdoor cafe "somewhere in Tel Aviv." It was a lovely sunny morning and there was a perfectly prepared cappuccino on the table in front of me. I unfolded the International Herald Tribune, read the op-ed pieces, then started flicking through the stories - and when I reached page four, I got a headache. There it was, right beneath a positively scintillating article about a cheddar cheese aging live, online: British journalists' union calls for Israel boycott.

The union is called National Union of Journalists (NUJ), and it is Britain's biggest jounalists' union. From the IHT article:

"The boycott call was initially part of a broader condemnation of Israel's so-called "slaughter of civilians" in Gaza and "savage pre-planned attack" last year on Lebanon but was separated for a specific vote. The condemnation of Israeli military action in Gaza and Lebanon was approved by a wider margin."

::snip::

"The timing of the ballot was particularly delicate since a BBC journalist, Alan Johnston, has been held for more than a month in Gaza, making the boycott call seem one-sided."

Indeed.

Well. What does one say in response to this particular incidence of inanity? Quite a bit, it seems - and, interestingly, the best comments are on prominent British journalists' blogs (the previous link provides summaries of and links to those blog posts. Recommended click).

Toby Harnden, the Daily Telegraph's United States editor, wrote one of the most strongly worded posts about the NUJ vote. Excerpt:

"...if you read the [NUJ's] anti-Israel motions, you will spot a complete absence of any sense of journalistic impartiality. The 'slaughter of civilians' by Israel is condemned (no mention of suicide bombings or human rights abuses by Palestinian militias, needless to say), as is the 'savage, pre-planned attack on Lebanon by Israel' and 'continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hezbollah'.

What kind of language is this? It is tendentious and politically-loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness."

Olivia Lang, an NUJ member, expressed her opposition on the union's blog.

"As one member mentioned, the union will ineluctably be seen by some as anti-Semitic because of this particular stance against Israel which, despite being a ridiculous misconception, is also one that needs to be taken into account. Not least because such individuals can quite rightly ask, ‘why target Israel? Why not persecute other states with bad records internationally?’ And the union has no answer."

Okay, here's what I think. It's my birthday, so I can say what I want to. The IDF regularly commits stupid and cruel acts in the Palestinian territories. It sucks to be a Palestinian living in the Palestinian Authority. I know because I've seen how much it sucks. And these issues must be discussed - honestly, openly, fairly and (heaven forbid) without hysteria.

However.

I would like to draw attention to the fact that the Coalition for International Justice currently estimates that about 390,000 civilians have been killed in Darfur. And at least 62,000 Iraqi civilians have died a violent death over the last four years. That's just a little sample of the massive cruelties going on all over the Middle East. If a person who knows these facts still thinks that Israel is the biggest, baddest, most evil and satanic pariah state in the whole entire world, the one that deserves to be boycotted and despised above all others, well, then I think there is something wrong with that person. Emotionally wrong. As in, get thee to a therapist and figure out what's really driving all that gratuitous hatred.

P.S. No, I do not think that the entire British media is hopelessly biased against Israel. (for heaven's sake).

Captured for posterity (sorry, couldn't resist) at a Tel Aviv beach, where I was trying to recover from a post-seder hangover, in the soothing company of Their Fabulousness - Nominally Challenged and Noorster.

The whole world turned orange and an April dust storm blew in, covering everything in my apartment in a fine gold film. The camera doesn't quite capture the rather apocalyptic colour of the sky, of course!

Before Davide and I went to interview the refugees from Darfur, we were told that we must neither photograph them nor publish their surnames. If we violated those ground rules, we would  “…be responsible for endangering the lives of their relatives in Sudan,” warned a UN refugee representative who looks after the interests of the refugees from Darfur in Israel.

Israel and Sudan are officially “enemies,” which makes the status of the 300 or so Darfur refugees in Israel very complex, because Israeli law does not permit the granting of asylum to citizens of enemy states.  So when those refugees surrendered themselves to the Israeli authorities after crossing the border from Egypt, they were detained and jailed under the Law to Prevent Infiltration [from enemy states].  The stories of those jailed refugees, who had seen their families murdered and / or experienced horrible torture at the hands of the Janjaweed, were widely and sympathetically covered by the Israeli media, and many Israelis responded with horror: Given the all-too-fresh memory of what happened to the Jewish people during the Second World War, how could Israel fail to grant asylum to refugees fleeing genocide?  

Several Israeli NGO’s, under the umbrella of the Committee for Advancement of Refugees from Darfur (CARD), are calling on the Israeli government to find a humane solution.  Last year the Immigrant Workers’ Hotline and the Refugee Rights Legal Clinic at Tel Aviv University successfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a temporary review mechanism; as a result, the courts can now grant permission, on an individual basis and with the agreement of the Ministry of Defence, for Darfur refugees to be temporarily settled on host kibbutzim. We went to visit five of those recently released men at Kibbutz Maagan Michael, near Haifa.

Their names are Ali, Hussein, Hassan, Guzuli and Jama, and their ages range from 26 to 32. They share two Spartan rooms furnished with single beds and a table. There is a modest kitchenette outside each of the rooms, and a bathroom. Everything was spotlessly clean, but there were none of the little luxuries that most of we spoiled westerners consider near-necessities – no books, no portable stereo, no CD’s. The men work in the kibbutz factories and they are proscribed by law from leaving the kibbutz without written permission. But they have no complaints about kibbutz life, given what they went through over the previous few years. All spoke warmly of the reception they had received at the kibbutz. They had been assigned adoptive families that hosted them for coffee and cake on Friday afternoons, before the Sabbath meal in the dining hall; the families made sure their needs were taken care of and offered what one of the men called “psychological comfort.”

We sat on the beds and started the interview, but Hassan interrupted politely. What would we like to drink? They served us mineral water and Sprite, and insisted we accept pieces of homemade strawberry shortcake, baked by one of the adoptive families. Then they told us their stories.

Ali (32) used to be a farmer. He last saw his wife and newborn baby the day after a Janjaweed militia attacked his village three-and-a-half years ago. They killed 40 of his family members in one day. He, his wife and baby managed to escape to another village, but when Ali went out to collect some thatch to build them a shelter he was ambushed by some Janjaweed and taken to one of their camps. There he was kept in a 2 metre by 2 metre container for three days, without food. Every few minutes, his captors put a cobra in the container and then removed it, in a primitive game of Russian roulette. Released on condition that he become an informant, Ali managed to escape and make his way to Egypt. That dangerous journey took nearly two months, and it took another six months to receive UN refugee status in Egypt. Not that it helped much. According to Egyptian law he was forbidden to work, and the local UN office told him that only families were eligible for food aid.

But he had to eat, so Ali worked illegally, was caught and jailed for one week. When he was released, the police warned him that he would be deported to Sudan if caught working again. Meanwhile, his only two friends had received refuge in the USA and Australia. “I was starving, I was totally alone and I felt helpless,” said Ali. He had never heard of Israel, but someone told him that it was a democracy and he should try his luck there. So he did. He spent a total of 17 months in various Israeli jails before a judge agreed to his release. He does not know whether his wife and child are alive or dead.

Hussein (29) explained that he first heard of Israel during the two years he worked (illegally) in the Sinai. He met many Israeli tourists there, he said, and formed a positive impression of the country through those interactions. He smiled and spoke smoothly when he spoke of the time he spent in the Sinai, but as soon as he started telling us about what happened to him in Darfur, Hussein developed a pronounced stutter. And the second he finished recounting his ordeal, he quietly left the room and went outside to smoke a cigarette.

Like Ali, Hussein was a subsistence farmer. He was captured by the Janjaweed during a shootout with rebel fighters, accused of being a rebel and jailed for two weeks. His captors fed him only bread. “It did something to my stomach,” said Hussein. After Hussein was released, his uncle took him for the surgery necessary to unblock his digestive system, then smuggled him to Egypt “because we have tribesmen there.” But the tribesmen were nowhere to be found, and Hussein, too, found himself a refugee denied UN aid and forbidden to work. He stayed in Egypt for four years, but realized that he would never be granted permanent status and would always have to work illegally for a bare living. The Egyptians, he said, regularly humiliated him in everyday interactions.

So in May of 2005 he paid a Bedouin to smuggle him into Israel, where he was promptly detained by a patrol of border police. “How did they treat you?” we asked. “Great!” answered Hussein. “They took care me – gave me food, clothes and blankets. One of the officers spoke to me in Arabic. I wish I could have stayed longer with the army.”

All the men experienced different types of trauma, torture and loss in Sudan, but their stories about Egypt are remarkably similar: the Catch-22 of being simultaneously forbidden to work and denied refugee aid; humiliation at the hands of the Egyptians; the realization that they could not stay there indefinitely. I asked if they were worried about being perceived by the Arab world as traitors for saying positive things about Israel to journalists. “We don’t have any confidence in the Arab world after the way the Egyptians treated us,” one responded, as the others nodded in agreement. “And the Arab world didn’t do anything to stop the Janjaweed from perpetrating genocide on our people.”

Davide asked if they were learning to speak Hebrew. A little, they answered, bashfully demonstrating their small vocabulary. Then Hussein told us that a 76 year-old kibbutz woman named Jeanine volunteered to teach them Hebrew for two hours a week.

Of course we wanted to meet her. So I took Jeanine’s number from Hussein and called her, offering to come to her home because I assumed that a 76 year-old woman would be rather frail. “I’ll come to you,” she said, decisively.

Five minutes later a human energizer bunny with fluffy, short white hair and twinkling blue eyes, wearing jeans and a fleece jacket, came bounding into the room. She greeted us all, plonked herself on one of the beds, waved away the proffered slice of strawberry short cake (“I ate too much today”) and looked at me and Davide expectantly.

I asked if she would like to speak in English or Hebrew, with me translating. “I speak only French and Hebrew,” she said, “So you will have to translate.”

It turned out that Jeanine had immigrated to Israel in 1949 from Tunisia, and that she had been a schoolteacher for 35 years. She referred to the men from Darfur as “the boys.”

“Language,” she said emphatically, “Is crucial. If the boys want to buy a ticket for the train, how will they manage without Hebrew? The person who sells the ticket doesn’t speak English. When I heard that the boys were working full time in the factories, I knew they wouldn’t have time for ulpan classes. So I volunteered to teach them. And together we are discovering that there are many similarities between Arabic and Hebrew. Isn’t that right, boys?”

The five men looked at her affectionately and nodded as they responded in unison, like obedient schoolboys, “That’s right, Jeanine.”

“But if you’re from Tunisia, don’t you know Arabic?” I asked.

“Ah,” she said, with a mischievous smile, “You don’t know what a French colonial education is like. I was raised to speak only pure, proper French. My parents spoke Arabic to one another when they didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. So no, I don’t speak Arabic.”

Then she turned to Davide and said, in halting Italian, “My father’s family came to Tunisia from Livorno, about 300 years ago.”

We asked why the kibbutz had decided to accept refugees from Darfur.

Jeanine looked at me sternly. “Do you know what happened at the Evian Conference in 1938?” she asked. “When all the countries gathered to try to find a solution for the Jews of Germany and Austria but no-one was willing to give them refuge?”

Yes, I answered, of course.

“So that’s why,” answered Jeanine. “We knew that we had a moral obligation, after what happened to us.”

Did people mention that at the meeting? I asked.

“No,” said Jeanine. “They didn’t have to. It was understood.”

As we were driving away from the kibbutz, I asked Davide if he planned to use Jeanine’s quote about the Evian Conference in his article. “Of course,” he said.

“Because the paper will probably get letters from the knee-jerk anti-Israel crowd, you know,” I said, “Accusing you of being biased toward Israel for writing about the Darfur refugees while the Palestinian refugee issue is still unresolved.”

“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t think they can really say that, because I already wrote about the gay Palestinians who come to Israel for refuge, and what a hard time they have.” (more on that subject here).

Later I wrote an email about Jeanine to Jill, who’s living in London now. In her response she wrote: “Oh, that's what I miss about Israel:  the stories, the people, that unique and pure goodness of eccentric old ladies that sometimes shines out through all the crap."

"...a seder is only as good as the warmth and humanity of the individuals sitting around the table."
                               -from the 3 April 2007 diary entry of Karen Alkalay Gut

A couple of years ago Karen , fabulous friend and blogger extraordinaire, invited me and a foreign journalist friend to her family seder. She even arranged for her brother-in-law and sister-in-law to give us a ride up to her place, which is near Tel Aviv University. During the short drive, my friend asked about the history of the neighbourhood, which is called Ramat Aviv, and I started to explain that it was established in the early 1950's as a suburb of Tel Aviv, with housing preferences for army officers, but that now it was basically a nice, upscale suburb. Karen's brother-in-law interrupted and, waving his index finger waggishly as he smiled at us impishly in the rear view mirror, asked rhetorically, "You vant ze truth? Ze truth ees zet eet was an Ah-rahb veelage."

"Ah yes," I said, trying to keep up the banter, "We are now leaving the State of Tel Aviv and entering Zionist Occupied Territory."

But Karen's brother-in-law was too witty for me. "Not occupied," he said, with heavy irony. "Liberated!"

Passover is the holiday of freedom, but in the Middle East you are never really free of history. It's always there, confounding us and, in a way, enslaving us. Perhaps one day we will all be able to make peace with it, and even laugh about it as people do over issues that have been resolved and half-forgotten.

I used to be one of those annoyingly pedantic "sederistas" who was totally into discussing and interpreting practically every line of the Haggadah. Once, when I lived in New York and was but a callow youth, I hosted a seder at my apartment and invited a bunch of university friends - only one of whom was Jewish. The others spoke fondly of rolicking seders attended at their Jewish friends' homes when they were kids. But when they discovered that I had prepared a veritable graduate seminar on The Meaning of the Haggadah, they all found excuses to leave after the meal that divides the two halves of the seder was consumed. Um, I've gotta finish that research paper for Professor So-and-So, they mumbled, as they shrugged into their coats after dessert. But wait! I called out forlornly, We still haven't discussed the meaning of the four cups of wine...

I am sure, however, that they would have stayed for the whole thing if the ever-brilliant Nominally Challenged had led that seder. Take a look at his fabulous rendition of the Passover story for yet more evidence of his general, er, fabulousness.

I still think the symbolism in the Haggadah is fascinating, but these days I like to hit the highlights, belt out the old familiar songs, and focus on the company and the meal.  I do think it's interesting, though, the extent to which those songs and symbols have been incorporated into the Israeli cultural references.


Chava Alberstein

Several years ago, my friend Ilan introduced me to the version of Had Gadya (also spelled Chad Gadya) that Chava  Alberstein (never spelled Hava, as far as I know) composed at the end of the 1980's, at the beginning of the First Intifada. The original version, as it appears at the end of the Haggadah, is in Aramaic, with a few Hebrew words woven in; it's a cumulative song that my cousins, sisters and I used to sing at breakneck speed, laughing and stumbling over the words, at our family seders.  Back then we didn't know anything about its many interpretations - we just thought it was fun to sing. Alberstein's version is in Hebrew, with just the chorus in Aramaic - and she adds her own ending, which caused quite a stir at the time. (There is also a version in Ladino, called Un Cavritico, which provided the soundtrack for Pelephone's Passover advertisement this year). The Hebrew lyrics of Alberstein's version are here, and my translation is here; you can read about the interpretation of the song - and the controversy it engendered - in this article. Click on the arrow in the pink circle, below, to listen to Chava singing.


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This year my friend Shira invited me to celebrate the seder at her parents' home. "Come," she said, "There will be lots of laughs."

And so it was. Because, as Karen so wisely points out, the quality of a seder depends on the people around the table. And they welcomed me like family. We laughed all night long, we ate waaaaay too much (overeating is a long-established Jewish tradition) and we drank, um, quite a bit more than the requisite four glasses of wine. Below is a video clip of Shira, hamming it up over the Four Questions, while one of her brothers provides accompaniment on the guitar. It was a seder to remember. (Flickr photos are here).