We are about to embark on the last day of the civil new year. Our plan is as follows: we are expecting to be exhausted at the end of a long hard day of work, but would like a proper glass of champagne on this occasion, and not on an empty stomach. So we’re setting our clocks back 2 hours, ordering in early, at 10 will celebrate midnight with a lot of kissing and drinking, and be in bed by 11. We wouldn’t be able to get a reservation at a decent restaurant anyway, and have no desire to be out there taking the new year seriously, and don’t want our friends to be driving with all those crazies out there.
More to the point, this is not the kind of year I want to celebrate. I know, I know, there were no suicide bombers in Israel this year, because they few there were met with opposition on the way, and just a couple dozen rockets by my count. But I can’t get the memory of the Hizballah building and arming before my very eyes just opposite Metulla, and I don’t know if we’re going to have a brilliant 365. If there’s no war, on the other hand, I expect a wonderful year.
Here’s an interesting note. On the UN map of Israel, there is no capital city. Take a look” here. And there are some other irregularities one might find strange. Actually I found the whole UN site a bit strange. Is it me? I have a photograph of myself at the age of nine, standing with my uncle Leibe and my father in front of the UN. We are all very proud – two Holocaust survivors and a ‘free’ girl – secure in the fact that the existence of the UN would now mean there could be no more injustice.
It is as if we had an electronic book of Kafka that we actually could enter, as if the long halls and the clerks sitting outside the offices for the sole purpose of keeping us out had come to life. Even our accountant can’t figure out what’s happening to the Israel Association of Writers and the Bureau of Income Tax. We have a government deadline of January 3 and cannot apply for the grant we’re eligible for without a certificate from Income Tax. The clerk, who seems to be there every other day, or every day we don’t call, answers our urgent question by snail mail, and says she needs documents that haven’t existed for well over twenty years. I call up the chair of the Federation of Writers’ Unions for some moral support, but he can’t talk to me because he’s busy filling out tax forms and trying to figure out how he can account for some money donated to his organization well before he joined it. I’m grateful it’s not really real, that it’s only a fictional reality, a kind of video game. But I can imagine us disappearing into the screen, getting lost in the virtual mazes of the castle.
Bureaucracy is actually much easier in this country that it used to be, the banks are easy to work with, utility bills are easy to pay by standing orders at the bank, i can usually get to a real person and discuss any problems i might have with service and/or payment, etc. etc. But those big bureaus, they’re murder. The rules get more and more complex so only the most sophisticated people can get through.
What a messy mind I have. Despite the unhappiness I have about the present government in Israel, despite my constant complaints, despite the news, I get more patriotic every day. I’ve been reading Hebrew women’s poetry of the twenties and thirties and thinking that if only my aunts had been able to get here instead of Auschwitz they would have been privileged to fall in love with this land. That’s an amazingly sentimental thought for me, but there it is.
Am I right? Am I left? yes.
Cholent – takes up the whole day. It doesn’t matter what you did before or what happens afterward. The day is filled with Cholent. Terrorist attacks, murders, etc. all fade into the background when you’ve had cholent.
An American friend tells me that she can’t stand the tension in Israel, it shortens her life. But we live on an average of 2 years longer than Americans. Is it the tension? Health care? Cholent?
I am watching the evening news. Most of the time we’ve got something going on Friday night and I don’t get to see any of the three channels that give different variations of the same stories. But tonight I am recovering from having run myself into the ground yesterday and can’t doing anything but switch channels. Say we’re talking about how Netanyahu is trying to entice Kadima members away from Livni. One channel talks about Netanyahu’s lack of ethics, another at Livni’s vulnerability as a woman, another at the movement toward the right of the government. All are correct. But I would ask about the ethics of Mofaz as well. In fact I would ask about the ethics of the democratic system in the parliament: Livni is the only vibrant ideologist left to oppose Netanyahu, and perhaps she isn’t a powerful enough leader (after all her maneuver to remain in the opposition hasn’t given her additional strength) but her oppositional position was the one people voted for. She won the majority of the votes.
But enough of this kvetching. It is my fault for not getting involved in a major way in politics. In Israel it is very possible for an individual – or a group of individuals – to make a difference, and I have consistently backed down when I saw it was too much trouble.
When did it occur to me that tonight is Christmas? So much going on around here I only had time to breathe at 10 and only then realized it’s time to hang up my stocking. Santa’ll never have time to fill it. Well, Season’s Greetings and all that any way.
We were busy with an evening of Yiddish poetry – from Sutzkever to me. I only wish Sutzkever could be there, but he’s not in great shape now so only his daughter made it. But there was Rivka Bassman and Moshe Lempster and many more from here and abroad. The festival will go on for 2 more days in the municipal library. Longer than Christmas.
At last Israel television has a program about the accusations of Goldstone Report. Many of the responses I know to be true because – as you know – I was watching the war live all the time. I saw Gazan men using children as human shields, rockets coming out of schools, people responding to the flyers warning of the bombing of their houses by gathering on the roof of the house and shouting to the bombers – who of course didn’t bomb. I saw phosphorus bombs – but the ones I saw were high up – for illumination, not for injuring population. There were injuries, but the bombs were never directed at people. Why would we want to bomb the flour factory when we stopped the war every day so people could stock up and we ship food there all the time? An American friend of mine said the other day that we just wanted to pummel the Gazans, to punish the people for the rockets we could have stopped. But it doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t we have stopped the rockets if all that was needed was some sensors in the tunnels? It just doesn’t make any sense. The only thing I really want to know is why we haven’t had an internal independent inquiry.
i mean the GOLDSTONE CRITICISM doesn’t make sense
Tonight is no good – The whole Shalit thing is postponed until after Christmas.
Strange how I almost forgot Christmas – even though it was just announced a house was discovered from the time of Jesus. In Nazareth.
So Merry Christmas to All
While we wait to see if Gilad Shalit will be “traded” we entertain some tourists from the mid-west. Who is “Gilad Shalit?” they ask. “What did he do to get captured?” “If he wasn’t in Gaza but on Israeli land why did they capture him?” “How did they capture him while he was sleeping? Isn’t that unethical?” “Why haven’t they let the Red Cross see him?” “Why have there been no communications with him?” “Who are the prisoners they are trading him for?” Their simple questions remind me how we have ignored the total outrage of his capture in order to get him back.
