I happened to catch the tail end of a talk our Minister of Defence, Benny Ganz, talking about the food crisis in Lebanon just now, and how we have to find a way to help. But when I tried to find out more, I wasn’t successful. There are articles such as this one. https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/lebanon/lebanon-declared-hunger-hotspot-by-humanitarian-organisations-1.1191277. But we have to find a way to help. I’ll get back to you on this.

Ganz has proposed helping through Unifil – the article is in Hebrew. Now I found it in English.

But is there no way to get food directly across the border? We’re so close… Hizballah would do everything to prevent it, but – there must be a way.

yes. i have lost it. Recurring infections finally got me down. I recognized the symptoms of the same infections that hospitalized me 14 months ago and although it was caught in time, the consequences of such strong medication in a time of such heat were totally debilitating. I had to cancel my life.

Except for one main goal – getting a booster for Ezi so he can start getting back to a normal existence. Right now he has no antibodies and if he catches the virus the consequences are serious. But so far no luck. And maybe the booster is dangerous anyway. We’ve been through the round of doctors and friends who could help but noone has any ideas, and probably they are busy with their own corona conflicts, so there is nothing to do but stay at home for another few months.

Okay, enough kvetching for the day. Tomorrow, as they say, will bring a solution, or a conclusion.

We used to spend every Fourth of July at the Ambassador’s, eating hotdogs and drinking coke. But they moved to Jerusalem and sold the house on the sea, and we stopped getting invitations anyway. So I can’t even feel the celebration of democracy that always made me very emotional in the past. It’s different than Independence Day here, which is about the creation of an independent state and less about the concept of independence.

I don’t miss the fireworks, though. Fireworks always make me look for shelter.

so I was thinking that independence day would work personally as well as politically. Ezi has a letter from the doctor instructing the clinic to give him a vaccine. This would be the beginning of our freedom. But the clinic has demanded a letter from a contagious disease specialist – without even directing us to where we might find out where a person like this might be found.

And me, I’m going to a doctor this afternoon who will send me for tests and by the time something is diagnosed, I’ll be in Albania. But i’m pretty sure we’re talking kidneys, and I’m going to get a bigger dose of antibiotics than I got last year in the hospital. so if I disappear, you can send flowers to Internal medicine ward D in Ichilov. I’ll be lying in the hall, so maybe you should send them to the house when I get back.

And maybe not flowers. Maybe a nice shrubbery.

So while I try to figure out where my office account is and how I can upload it, while I still haven’t found out where my domain is. I’m trying to understand the subject I wrote about yesterday – tradition. I was talking about art and how a style was created that was uniquely Israeli in the thirties and forties – even though I have yet to find a painting from those days where a camel actually looks like a camel. The palm trees, the sea, the women in long solid color skirts and long blouses – often with some utensil on their head. Ah, Guttman, Rubin, etc. Then Simon, Sebba becoming more and more abstract… then… well you can look it all up. And I’m sure that most artists are acquainted with what happened before they started painting. But I think of all the paintings that were sold, that are in private collections, or that are hanging in somebody’s bedroom or living room, and I wonder what the tradition really is – what was thrown out as a scribble because the managers of taste didn’t know about their development, or didn’t like their background, or felt it wasn’t representing the country properly. I mean it is only in very recent years that Palestinian artists have begun to be known and to influence the mainstream. How amazing this thing called tradition is. how arbitrary. how silly. how powerful.