Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

Okay, so my worst fears come true. We’re not prepared, we haven’t done our homework on who’s in what ship, and what they’re planning. We decide to enforce the blockade (remember Kennedy? remember Cuba?) in international waters. We send these guys in who are expecting peaceniks and get attacked. They turn up the heat, all hell breaks loose.

I woke up to it this morning, like when a nightmare comes true.

Demonstration doesn’t take long to materialize.

I don’t like the blockade but these things are not so simple. I don’t think the soldiers could have behaved differently once attacked. Of course I would have put rice in their tanks and not boarded, since it’s clear that the flotilla can’t be the ones determining what goes into a country, especially a country that’s throwing rockets at us all the time. And they certainly can’t be the ones setting the precedents. But because there were so many different people on those ships, with all kinds of different goals, much much more care should have been taken. Nevertheless, I repeat, El Kayda and Iran were running this show.

Think the guys on the boat towards Gaza are going to try to find out something about Gilad Shalit while they’re there?

It was just a thought.

“Don’t you get this little flotilla thing?” my friend says, “They’re playing the Exodus card!” My friend has a theory that every Jewish ‘success’ story is being reproduced by the Palestinians. Nakba=Holocaust Day, etc… “You let these boats in to Gaza, they’ll be coming in by the millions!” He says. Well I’m no British. But I don’t think the flotilla has the same motivations as the Jewish immigrant ships in the 40′s. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the people behind the Turkish backers of this little escapade are El Kayda, but who am I to complain? I’m just someone born in London because my parents were turned away from Haifa port by the British and sent back into the arms of the Nazis.

The heavy hamsin lifted and the sky is as blue as if there had never been a brown lid over our city. As though we can all see more clearly. Me, I see some pretty amazing hummingbirds from my window, but my vision is purposely limited to what I see before me. I am not thinking of the rockets that come regularly from Gaza, or the ship heading toward Gaza (why do we just let it go in there? They’re already armed to the hilt and just mean to do us harm. What’s a few more rockets and fertilizer going to do?) I am not thinking of the religious divisions, or the fire yesterday in the north destroying all that wildlife. I’m just sitting on my porch, sucking on a straw, and enjoying the fact of a Friday afternoon. There is Vision and there is vision.

A Cohen, for those who have been asking me, is one of the priestly class, who served in the ancient Temple. The descendency is patrilineal, very carefully registered, and kept pure. A Cohen, for example, is not allowed to enter a cemetery. Or marry a divorcee. That’s we were not allowed to be wed according to the Rabbinate here. But the law also says that if the Rabbi didn’t know that the man was a Cohen and the woman was a divorcee, the marriage counts. That’s why we are both legally and religiously wed. As if it really mattered.

All you really need for a jewish wedding is a ring, the prayer, and two witnesses, as my mother once tested. It was a joke in the playground, and she was 8 a boy put a cigar band on her finger and said the prayer. Doesn’t sound like much, my grandfather took them to the Rabbi to have the wedding annulled.

I love weddings, especially those that connect different societies. Last night I went especially crazy with a supermulticultural wedding party, slashing through the societies in Israeli like crazy. Lots of Arabic and pseudo-Arabic and Greek and rock music, all of which are common in this country, but lots of Arab dancing as well. I was drenched.

Because Shusha is well over 14 years old, and quite arthritic, she does not descend the stairs without slipping, and has become accustomed to the elevator. That’s why I wanted to make sure that when she hears the siren warning of an attack, she will agree to go down to the shelter. I couldn’t get the Nigerian cleaner to understand that today. I spoke to him, and opened the door of the shelter, but he dropped his mop and stood at attention, assuming this was another one of our memorial alerts.

So we inspected our shelter – the phone doesn’t work, the stairs need sweeping, the battery lights need to be changed. There’s no water, but otherwise, the chemical toilets are fine and the chemical filter works. Let us hope we’ll never need, and that no one ever will have to hide from bombs.

Lots of furor on campus lately – but only on the part of the faculty. There are petitions to sign – against the boycott of Israeli scholars, against the refusal to permit Chomsky physical access to Beit Zeit university. There is a site that ‘watches’ israeli campuses, and constant articles in the papers about how good or bad we’re doing. There are petitions concerning the cleaners in Tel Aviv university, and a faculty activist list. The only thing there isn’t is a place for faculty to meet and discuss things together. In all these years, we’ve never managed to get a normal faculty club. So we never meet.

My mind is still not quite working from the cold I keep catching, but the haze is clearing slowly, and there are so many things I’ve been wanting to write about i dont know where to begin.

Let’s start with the subject of who comes through and who doesn’t. Noam Chomsky got turned away by the Israelis from giving a lecture at Beir Zeit University this week. I’m pretty sure it was a blunder and not policy because he’s been there before, he isn’t that important, and he’s spoken here in the past. But it nevertheless reflects a kind of paranoia that we’re feeling, a fear that everyone outside it dangerous. So when Elvis Costello cancelled his concert here, we said good riddance. Anyone who doesn’t want to come here doesn’t deserve us. Of course we don’t have any politicians who can explain to us or for us at the moment, so we just keep going on getting more confused and defensive.

In Metula I thought alot about borders. Ricky lives in the last house, where the ‘good fence’ was, and when the borders closed she and her neighbor went to beg the soldiers to let in the endangered Christians. Now almost three quarters have returned to Lebanon, even though it meant jail, and only one quarter – about 2000 – remain. I met a few of them, but none struck me like the ticket taker at the Nikmat Hatraktor concert on Tuesday evening. It was the eve of Shvuot, where we read the chapter about the convert Ruth, and as I sat with a young Arab poet, listening to her read, I saw his eye light up. Although there were only three of us at the table – Ezi, me, and Nariman – and no one else was listening, he began to draw closer, as if mesmerized by her poetic beauty. Finally he was standing behind her, reading the text as she read, and I asked him if it was not lovely. He nodded and she turned to him, gratefully. You understand? Yes. Where are you from? Lebanon. She turned away. She didn’t know how to continue. They shared a language and a love, but it was clear they were coming from opposing background, and it was too complicated to work out.

When I got married in Cyprus, thirty years ago, there was another couple waiting in City Hall with us, from Lebanon. He was Muslim and she was Christian and they couldn’t marry in their land. Ezi had bought a little pocket calculator in Duty Free and while we were waiting for them to end the ceremony he played Mendelson’s Wedding March for them, but we too never really talked.

Of all the political subjects that overwhelm our senses, the difficulty of remaining a humane human being in an inhumane society, the constant state of anxiety in which we live at the present time, etc, what overcomes my senses on this Friday morning is the smell of my neighbor’s cooking. We usually manage to close our windows in advance of what we call the ‘soup attack’ but this morning I am still recovering from intensive days at the festival and classes and a poetry reading for arc 21. Friday morning is also usually for shopping, cleaning, and various chores but i will stay home this morning and smell the soup.

i lied – Friday morning is much too important to waste recovering. There is a Shabbat ahead, and the usual innumerable preparations.

May 19, 2010

Metula is an amazing mix. Here’s three examples:

Along with all the Shvuot-decorated tractors, there comes a little wagon with Vietnamese workers coming home from the field.

I look out of Ricky’s window and see the Hizaballah community over the hill has grown greatly since last year.

When I asked an Arab poet to read to me in Arabic, the security guard came closer to listen, and there was great admiration in his manner. Where are you from, he asks her, and she tells him of a Muslim village. And you, she asks. Lebanon, he answers. Tzadal. Her body turns slightly away.

The poetry festival, incidentally, is full of surprises. The Tractor’s Revenge, an amazing rock group, performed the medieval poems of Ibn Ezra last night, leaving me breathless. Pictures perhaps tomorrow.