israeli politics

getting into trouble - 5.13.24

My father was always scared of getting into trouble.  He was right – he was living during the McCarthy period and there was big trouble for him if he go caught up in those inquisitions.  Now I’m seeing lots of students keeping their mouths shut, folding up their virtual tents (no those they got from Quatar) and stealing off into the night.  Most are leaving because their lease is up and it’s the end of the semester, but many are leaving because they’re literally scared.  And justifiably.  The demonstrators are violent and whether they are demonstrating at the gates of the university or the Hilton, they mean business.

What exactly is their business?  I can’t believe the queers for palestine don’t realize that in Gaza they would be thrown off roofs.  I can’t believe they don’t know what horrors await those who actually lived under Hamas await them.  I can believe they enjoy making a statement of independence. 

Years ago when BDS first started making noise, I mentioned the necessity to avoid allowing this on campus to a colleague.  She responded that they have a point and maybe it would wake us up.  I stopped talking to her – not intentionally – but it was more like avoiding a flame after I’d been burnt.  She is now one of those in charge of solving the problem of Tel Aviv University being cut off from the world.  

getting into trouble – 5.13.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

getting the News - 5.13.24

amazing how different the same news is from the US and from Israel.  The order of events, the details, the meaning.    The news here begins with the condemnation of the widespread killing of civilians in Rafa.  We are shown stubs of limbs (stubs with wounds long healed) along with the repeated excoriation of violence.  In Israel, the same report on Rafa says we are focussing on the outskirts of Rafa, very aware of avoiding civilians.  The point made is that Sinuar is not in Rafa and it is important to look elsewhere.  Rafa is not what we care about, but the renewed bombing from Rafa on our villages and Ashkelon.  

That’s just one example.  The news here is full of pain – Biden is willing to sacrifice his reelection for Israel.  Bibi is hoping for that.  

I want to put all the information together and shake it up and then sort out the pieces and put it all together again.  

I want to make sure all the Israelis who have left Israel because they can’t stand the politics go back to vote so they can help fix what’s wrong with it.  They don’t have to stay there – but they now realize that their lives are altered by what is going on there.  It’s time.

 

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israeli politics

who's right? - 5.10.24

There’s an old story about judgement that Tevye quotes in “Fiddler on the Roof.”  A judgement was asked to be made of the rabbi in a complex case.  One contestant gives his case, and the rabbi agrees, “You’re right.”  Then the other presents his arguments, and the rabbi pronounces, “You are right.”  “But. Rabbi,”  says his assistant, “They can’t both be right!”  And the rabbi answers, “You’re right too.”  

To me this has always meant that despite absoluite truths, absolute justice doesn’t exist, and compromises must be achieved.  How?  Only through direct discussion.  In some disputes, no judge can say who is right or wrong.  It takes direct and open-minded dialogue between two leaders who are of open-heart and mind and wish to solve the problem.

That we don’t have.  

at least sixty years ago, a teacher of mine, R.J. Kaufman, leaned with his elbows on the table and clapped his hands hard.  “This,” he said, “is the definition of pain – two objects trying to occupy the same space.”

He paused, and clapped again “It is also the definition of love.”

actually, he twined his fingers together and twisted his hands.  it was incredibly moving.

So since I picked up a copy of Nathan Thrall’s book which won the Pulitzer yesterday, and I wasn’t in the mood to read, I found what seems to be a more important audible book by Nathan Thrall, The Only Language they Understand

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=The+Only+Language+They+Understand%3A+Forcing+Compromise+in+Israel+and+Palestine&crid=16R4PA0OSPWHS&sprefix=the+only+language+they+understand+forcing+compromise+in+israel+and+palestine+%2Caps%2C609&ref=nb_sb_noss 

who’s right? – 5.10.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

I went down to visit Lot’s wife the other day.  I visit her occasionally near Sodom where she looks out at the Dead Sea just to ask her what she thinks of the mass murder of her neighbors and the Divine judgement she just couldn’t accept.  She doesn’t usually answer during the day, but sometimes in the summer she shed a salty tear, accepting her eternal punishment even though she can’t bring herself to agree with it.  “We must always look back,” I think she muttered one night, when I was sitting with her, cooling down from the unbearable passion she lives with. “Nothing is as questionable as a punishment of an entire population for the malevolence of their leaders. Even if the population is just following in the path of those leaders in order to survive.” 

(It’s only near dawn when a little dew falls and her lips can actually part, but when she gets going, she’s quite the chatterbox.)  

“The ladies in Sodom didn’t have a say in those perversions of their menfolk, but how could I separate them?  The big question is – whether you can stop evil without harming the good.”

I left her like that, frozen in her weeping, and knew on the long trip home, that I too had become salt.

too obvious? 5.9.24

too obvious? 5.9.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

off subject - bathrooms - 5.9.24

well not just bathrooms.  it’s more political than that.  it’s about women and batherooms and how bathrooms were not designed for women.  I’m sure it’s not just me, that a lot of people have written about this, but in NYC I find it more prominent.  First off, in NYC there are very few public bathrooms.  We all know this, but we have sometimes to be reminded that the reason was the danger of men using the bathrooms for illegal fornication.  How terrible.  One would think that prudishness was in the past, but then someone also says, “No – it’s an economic problen!”  Of course that could be solved by charging money for using bathrooms.  That would create another problem – only rich people could have access to the toilets.  So what if there is a public npo for maintaining public toilets?

The biggest problem for me, however, is not the availability of toilets – women have always have had limired access ro roilets vecause of the modesty issue and the danger of invasion.  So we learned to hold iit in.  The problem is that toilets are a big problem for women.  Women have to remove some of their apparel, sometimes soiling that apparel by contact with the floors.  And because women have to worry about their vulnerable bodies making physical contact with unclean surfaces, they have a tendency not to sit but to partially squat, damaging their accuracy in hitting the toilet and not the floor (where their jacket is trailing).  And cleanliness afterward is challenging when you can’t reach everywhere necessary.  

And when you finally emerge from the bathroom, sometimes exhausting at all your gymnastics, you are usually met with a companion who complains, or thinks about complaing, “What took you so long?”  “Did you see the line?”  With all those adjustments a woman has to make with her encounter with public toilets, everything takes so much time the lines have to be long, and the women more desperate to get through them.  

But it’s not just public toilets.  Bathrooms in general are hostile to women.  The shower, for example, that comes from above when she doesn’t want to get her hair all wet and catch a cold.  She in fact wants to get the water down below – but it doesn’t get there without alternative plumbing.  

I actually have much more to discuss on this subject, but you probably think I’m a pervert.  I just miss the public toilets in Dizengoff Center.

 

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israeli politics

hate - 5.8.24

I’ve never understood hate.  As a friend began to spew hatred of Israel and Judaism yesterday, I found myself responding to her in kind.  My voice raised to her level, and she immediately withdrew.  Not because she believed me, but because she loves me and had never seen me angry before.  But she has since been barraging me with propaganda – the rapes and mutilations never occurred, the children of Gaza are not any more human shields than I am in Tel Aviv, the Arabs of Israel have been kept from education.  These are all lies that I know from experience with the people involved, and she knows that my own shelter I  have shared with Arabs, that we are all protected because the law demands we build shelters in municipal areas.. I know witnesses to the rapes and murders.  I have taught Arab students and felt pride in their amazing accomplishments. It is also known that we were drawn into the terrible bombing of Rafiah by the murder of three soldiers from Rafiah.   The reversal of these facts by my friend in her emails to me show me how deeply hate can overrise facts and friendship and love.  

We are still friends.  I refuse to allow her hatred to overcome my love of her.

 

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israeli politics

Di Shteyn

 In Israel today is Holocaust Memorial Day.  But I am in New York, so I went to Di Shteyn.  On 83rd and Riverside Park there is a stone, promising in 1947 that a memorial both to the Warsaw Ghetto Heroes and the Holocaust victims would be built in this place.  It wasn’t built, but there are annual memorial ceremoniea in this beautiful spot.

81st Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsUUVKrNqIA

The ceremony is moving.  The stone is not.  It’s a marker only, promising that what will come will be important and eternal.  But all there is is a stone, a shteyn.  That stone itself tells it all.

I had never heard of it until I read Jeremy Eichler’s book, Time’s Echo,  And then I started asking.  Only my cousin, Susan, knew of it.  She sent me the link of the video with no explanation.  That too is an appropriate response – so little tells so much.  If you don’t know you don’t deserve to know.  

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