August 19, 2005
Jeepers! Smadar just walks out of here as I am wishing her agreat vacation in Eilat and I turn on the news and there's a katusha there. No matter how we try to ignore the world, it infiltrates.
I keep thinking about starting my own false messiah movement - it would certainly give us a sense of spirit. And those kids jumping up and down on the synagogue at Kfar Darom had nothing else but spirit and that looked like fun for a while - at least for them. Of course we'd find a better rhetoric and do our brainwashing with a more sophisticated base, and we'd try to make our Messiah a bit more realistic...
It might give us a little focus too, a nice false messiah of our own.
MY Messiah, however, would be the kind that includes everyone in her vision -- EVERYbody gets renewed and participates in the jubilee...
I always want to quote my friend Rena on Israeli politics, but always hold off until I get her okay, so it's always too late to use it. We've moved on to another crisis. So here's her unapproved-as-yet voice: "I heard some guy belly-aching about how misrad hashikun has abandoned them, and they're stuck in this hotel and they dont' know where their things are, and it just amazes me that he expected that he wouldn't make arrangements and leave voluntarily but chose to stay there until the last moment and be dragged out kicking and screaming, and now he wants to know why the government hasn't made appropriate accommodations for him. Jesus. The entitlement just slays me." Here Here.
Spent some time with Raquel Chalfi the other day. She has made her office in a corner of Nona and spends all day taking care of her family's artistic heritage. It takes enormous efforts on her part and seems Sisyphean to me. She's trying to raise fund to preserve her mother's sculptures and writings, her father's and her uncle's work. There are, for example, published and unpublished interviews of people in Tel Aviv about their histories, sculptures that belong in museums, and thousands of poems. Here is her proposal.
August 20, 2005
Two items I keep wanting to emphasize about the disengagement. One is the behavior of the soldiers. These are the boys I know - the ones than CNN always foregrounds are guys I've never met and never heard of. The ones who empathized with others and fulfilled their duty at the same time - thinking, feeling soldiers - are the boys who come home with stories. More of this later
On another level is the sad fate of the animals who are getting left behind - family pets, guard dogs, etc. - the hebrew story is here.
. There is an emergency call for these animals, and you can contribute. For details you can email gilad@letlive.org.il or dafna@letlive.org.il. I will do that first thing in the morning.
August 21, 2004
I want to quote Uri Avnery in full.
THIS WAS THE DAY
August 18th, 2005 - a milestone in the history of the State of Israel.
This was the day on which the settlement enterprise in this country went
into reverse for the first time.
True, the settlement activity in the West Bank continues at full speed.
Ariel Sharon intends to give up the small settlements in the Gaza Strip
in order to secure the big settlement blocs in the West Bank.
But this does not diminish the significance of what has happened: it has
been proven that settlements can be dismantled and must be dismantled.
And important settlements have indeed been dismantled.
The settlement enterprise, that had always gone forwards, only forwards,
in a hundred overt and covert ways, has been turned back. For the first
time. (Yamit and its settlements were not in Eretz Israel, and therefore
their evacuation in 1982 did not constitute an ideological break. But
this time it happened in "the Land of our Fathers".)
A historic event. A message for the future.
This was the day on which the message of the Israeli peace movement
finally got
through. A great victory, for all to see.
True, it is not us who did it. It was done by a man far removed from us. But, as the
Hebrew saying goes: "The work of the righteous is done by others." Others: meaning
those who are not righteous, who may even be wicked.
At the beginning of the settlement activity, during one of my clashes with Golda Meir
in the Knesset, I told her: "Every settlement is a land-mine on the road to peace. In
due course you will have to remove these mines. And let me tell you, Ma'am, as a
former soldier, that the removal of mines is a very unpleasant job indeed."
If I am angry, profoundly sad and frustrated today, it is because of the price we
all have paid for this monstrous "enterprise". The thousands killed because of it,
Israelis and Palestinians. The hundreds of billions of Shekels poured down the
drain. The moral decline of our state, the creeping brutalization, the postponement
of peace for dozens of years. Anger with the demagogues of all stripes that started
and continued this March of Folly, out of stupidity, blindness, greed, intoxication
with power or sheer cynicism. Anger over the suffering and destruction wrought on
the Palestinians, whose land and water were stolen, whose houses were destroyed
and whose trees were uprooted - all for the "security" of these settlements.
I have also sympathy for the plight of the inhabitants of Gush Katif, who were
seduced by the settlers' leadership and successive Israeli governments to build their
life there - seduced either by messianic demagoguery ("It's God's will") or by
economic temptations ("A luxury villa surrounded by lawn, where else could you
dream of this?") Many people from the remote townships in the Negev, stricken with
poverty and unemployment, succumbed to these temptations. And now it is finished,
the sweet dream has evaporated and they have to start their life anew - albeit with
generous compensation.
The television networks did us a great favor when they reran, between the scenes of
the evacuation, old footage of the founding of these settlements. We heard again
the speeches of Ariel Sharon, Joseph Burg, Yitzhak Rabin (yes, he too), Hanan Porat
and others - the whole litany of nonsense, deceit and lies.
During the last few years, the peace camp has been seized by a fashion for despair,
despondency and depression. I keep repeating: there is no cause for this. In the long
run, our approach is winning. Now it must be emphasized: the Israeli public would
not have supported this operation, and Sharon would not have been able to carry it
out, if we had not prepared public opinion by voicing ideas that were far removed
from the national consensus and repeating them countless times over the years.
This was the day when the settlers' ideology collapsed.
If there is a God in heaven, He did not come to their rescue. The messiah stayed at
home. No miracle occurred to save them.
Many of the settlers were so sure that a miracle would indeed happen at the very
last moment, that they did not take the trouble to pack their belongings. On television
one could see homes where the uneaten meal was still on the table and the family
photos on the wall. Sights I remember well from the 1948 war.
All the boasts and bluster of the pair of settlers' leaders, Wallerstein and
Lieberman (who always remind me of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the two villains
in "Hamlet") went up in smoke. The masses did not stream into the streets all over
Israel and use their bodies to block the forces sent to empty the settlements. The
hundreds of thousands, including the opponents of the disengagement, remained at
home, glued to their television sets. The mass refusal of soldiers to obey orders,
promised and incited by the rabbis, just did not happen.
At the decisive moment, the reality we always knew about was exposed for all to
see: the messianic-nationalist sect, the leadership of the settlers, is isolated. In their
behavior and style, they are foreign to the Israeli spirit. The hundreds of settlers
who have lately been seen on television, all the men wearing yarmulkes, all the
women wearing long skirts, with their interminable dancing and their endlessly
repeated ten slogans, look like the members of a closed sect from another world.
"It looks as if we are not one but two peoples: a people of the settlers and a people
of settler-haters!" moaned one of the rabbis when his settlement was emptied. That
is accurate. In the confrontation between the lines of soldiers, who were drafted
from all strata of society, and the lines of the settlers, it is the soldiers who, in this
unique situation, represent the people of Israel, while the settlers embody the
negative side of the Jewish ghetto. The unending bouts of collective weeping, the
meticulously staged scenes designed to evoke images of pogroms and death marches,
the monstrous imitation of the frightened boy with his arms raised from the famous
holocaust photo - all these were reminiscent of a world that we thought we had
shaken off when we created the State of Israel.
At the moment of truth, the Yesha leaders found that no part of Israeli society
stood up for them, except the gangs of male and female pupils of the religious
seminaries, who they had sent to Gush Katif. The bedlam they created on the roof of
the Kfar Darom synagogue, when they viciously attacked the soldiers, put an end to
their hopes of winning public support. But even before that, the settlers had lost the
crucial battle for public opinion when their real purpose was revealed: to impose by
force a faith-based, messianic, racist, violent, xenophobic regime, with its back to
the world at large.
But most importantly, this was the day when a new chance was born for achieving
peace in this tortured land.
A great opportunity. Because the Israeli democracy has won a resounding victory.
Because it has been proven that settlements can be dismantled without the sky
falling. Because the Palestinians have a leadership that wants peace. Because it has
been proven that even the radical Palestinian organizations hold their fire when
Palestinian public opinion demands it.
But it must be clearly stated: this withdrawal carries with it a great danger: if we
stop in the middle of jumping over it, we shall fall into the abyss.
If we do not progress rapidly from here to a settlement with the Palestinian people,
Gaza will indeed turn into a platform for missiles - as Binyamin Netanyahu is
prophesying (which may well be a self-fulfilling prophecy). In the eyes of the
Palestinians, and the entire world, the withdrawal from Gaza is - first of all - a
result of the armed Palestinian resistance. If in the coming weeks we make no
progress towards a negotiated agreement, a third intifada will surely break out, and
the whole country will go up in flames.
We must immediately start serious negotiations, declaring in advance that within a
specific time-span the occupation will end with the establishment of the State of
Palestine. All the main elements of the settlement are already known: a solution for
Jerusalem in line with the Clinton proposal ("What is Arab will belong to Palestine,
what is Jewish will belong to Israel"), withdrawal to the Green Line with an agreed
exchange of territories, a solution of the refugee problem in accord with Israel.
This was the day that will go down in history as the day on which a great hope was
born.
Not the beginning of the end in the struggle for peace, but certainly the end of the
beginning.
A small step towards peace, a giant step for the State of Israel.
And what does a good Tel Avivian do in August? Beach.
Tel Baruch in this case. Great facilities, showers, chairs, sun umbrellas, a lovely (probably illegal) restaurant, and blue blue sea. The only thing missing were the lifeguards. Not enough of them anyway.
Dahlia Ravikovich managed to kill herself today, after so many years of wanting to.
August 22, 2005
The funeral is probably just beginning now - I got too spooked by the memorial service to continue to the grave side.
We showed up early to the Journalists' House where it was to be. There were a few people in the big entrance hall, and it turned out that the service was going to be conducted there. I was flip, answering hungry interviewers with my little theories about suicide as being a chemical imbalance, remembering the first strange time I met her, saying nothing about the depths of her feelings, my own guilt at backing away from her in her great and prolonged need. But when they brought the body in, and the real and serious mourners (like Yael Dayan and Yudith Hendel and Yossi Sarid) and others who were influenced by her, and loved her (like Ilan Schoenfeld, and Rony Somekh, and Miron Isakson and many others) appeared, her greatness and kindness suddenly struck me with great pain. Yael Dayan began the ceremony by expressing her guilt at not being able to save her, and until I could tell her that the last time I had spoken to Dahlia she had told me that Yael Dayan was her salvation, I couldn't calm down. And then Miri Aloni asked me to ask if she could sing in her memory. That moment touched me even more: Miri Aloni is so much a symbol of national joy and tragedy because of her singing with Yitzchak Rabin just before his assasination.
But even though Yossi Sarid and the Chair of the Hebrew Writers Association spoke, there was no core to the service, no speech that finalized her life, her writings, her cultural significance. Perhaps it was because she was beyond a single speech.
Or because she was a woman. Very much a woman. And a little girl. Very much a little girl. All ages, all together.
Here are some poems of hers that I translated.
Maybe I'll go to the funeral after all.
Of all the media that was there the first two to arrive were from International Woman (Hebrew) and Ynet (in English as well). So their sites are the ones to watch for. Maariv and Yidiot are conducting long and extended forums on the significance of her death. Most of them are in her praise, but someone even wrote that she was a leftist. At the memorial service even that bastion of the right, Geula Cohen, was present, so the papers don't always register the feelings representative of the people.
My 'little theories' about chemical imbalance, by the way, infuriated my friend Schulamith, which made me go home and think about why I denigrate suicide, and don't want to connect it with depth of spirit. I think it's because i don't want suicide to be considered a spiritual alternative, but an illness. And I believe Dahlia would have agreed.
August 23, 2005
At the crowded beach today - with two sweet little girls, watching all the families around me, mothers and grandmothers and children, I was mindful all the time of the others. Hof Metzitzim, or "Peeping Tom Beach," is next to a relatively new beach, walled off, for religious people - who alternate days for men and women. Its women's day today and many women and children in long skirts and snoods disappeared behind the wall.
At the same time, in Sa Nur, the last of the fanatics are standing on the roof of the old British police station, poking a long stick at the soldiers wasting their time and energy (and more of our taxpayers' money) on resistence. Setting themselves off from the plebians of society (us), the extreme religious have brought themselves to a place where reality is of their own making, and all connections with others become dangerous to their fabrications.
Even though I wanted a wall between me and the terrorists with all my heart, I have always hated the walls, the artificial separations, have always had an instinctive desire to break them down. As a child I didn't notice it so much, just found myself bored in the women's section of the kippele shul. I used to creep down stairs to sit next to my brother, where the real praying took place, and i was young enough to get away with it. And although when we moved to a more 'conservative' synagogue, and found the mixed audience a bit distracting, I still felt more involved.
The first time I became conscious of the real problem with walls was in Jerusalem in 1965, when a guy named Hashim took me out one night and I found myself on the other side of Mandelbaum gate. I was only as part of a major compromise - Because my parents had wanted me to go to Stern College and I wanted to go to Cornell, wanting to be part of the bigger world. They wouldn't support Cornell so I went to the U of Rochester and took jobs to support myself. Then they wanted me to stay home and I wanted to go to Greece. So we compromised with Israel.
And I loved Israel - because of its openness, its inclusiveness. I loved everything that had to do with its culture - except when I met that wall in Jerusalem.