israeli politics

Roy Liran came for a short visit from the north to give me his new book, but we spent half the time running down to the shelter.  I was particularly anxious to get down there because I felt responsible for our guest, but suddenly I realized I was pushing everyone else out of the way to make room for us, as if poets deserve extra protection.   I’ll have to be more careful of my manners in the future.

But it’s a beautiful book and I can’t wait to hear him read and discuss it. He’s one of the only people I know that can write in two languages.

And oh yes, there were three people injured in the last rocket attack on Tel Aviv.

 

 

 

barrages – Oct 27, 2023 Read Post »

israeli politics

This has been a day of rockets to the left, rockets to the right.  We’ve been dodging them and now I’m past going to sleep.  Night

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blog, israeli politics, my life in tel aviv

when I dance with my husband of almost 44 years, he does everything to ensure that I don’t know the next step, to keep me on my toes, so to speak.  He doesn’t do that with other women, and he doesn’t do that in our life, so I think he’s training me for war.  

“There’s going to be a war at the end of the holidays!” I’ve said to friends, who didn’t even acknowledge my cry with a question.  “Don’t go into Gaza,” I’ve been screaming for the past three weeks, and now I’ve begun to breathe because I see just a bit of logic in our movements. I kept thinking we were like the British Army in the American Revolution, standing in formation to shoot while the wily Americans shot from behind. 

All this I learned from getting caught up in the music while getting my foot stepped on repeatedly while dancing with my husband.

I still love dancing with him!

 

dancing in war Read Post »

blog, israeli politics, my life in tel aviv

What a great evening! It began with a siren that Ezi assured me was not worth hiding from – “It’s pretty far enough away,” and I went into Bob McBarton’s zoom meeting with Adam Mansbach with my heart still beating double time. 

But the meeting about “The Golem from Brooklyn” was so much fun and yet so profound I forgot about the world outside, even when we spoke about the moral responsibility of power. 

Then the meeting was over and the news was on and another few barrages brought me back to reality.  

fun break Read Post »

israeli politics

For the past 18 days, my life has been governed by rockets.  It’s not like Gaza – we have warnings – 90 seconds to get to a shelter.  And the way I walk I make sure to stay nearby.  Yesterday, as I was walking home from the hairdresser, I was thinking how beautiful the neighborhood is with its fruit trees in the front yards – but suddenly I realized that most of the houses are closed, and even if there are people at home, they’re probably in their shelters if the alarm goes off, so I’m on my own in the middle of the street.  

And then I got close enough to home where our apartment is, and the relief was unbelievable.  But before I got to the bathroom, the alarm went off and we were down stairs in the shelter – grateful for the shelter, but unable to go back to living after that.

Funny, no one mentions the rockets we’re getting every day.

It’s like this all the time – nothing like the bombing in Gaza but constant and extremely nervewracking.  The thing is, if they’d just return the hostages, we’d stop.  It’s as simple as that.  

rockets – oct 25, 2023 Read Post »

israeli politics

We keep talking about the hostages, the hostages who were freed, the children, the rockets, and so on, but all this takes away from what I think is the big plan.  I think Hamas has been planning for the past two years to take over this country and get rid of us.  The first step was to pretend that they are negotiating with Israel for an exchange of their prisoners for the bodies of our soldiers.  Bibi was promoting Hamas instead of the Palestinian Authority in the West as if Hamas would take over the leadership of all the negotiations of the Palestinians.  After misleading us about keeping things quiet for the time being while building an underground city with the vast amounts of money given to them by Qatar through Israel, the second step was to terrify us into leaving the strip by raping, murdering and committing acts of savagery while taking hostages (apparently the promise was 4000 dollars and an apartment for each hostage).  The third step was twofold – to lure us unto Gaza and fall into the pre-prepared traps. and while the army is busy being destroyed by this, to invade from the south to the entire unprotected country, meeting the Hizballah in the middle.   This would do the trick.

I think we should try to focus on the bigger plan and not worry about how we appear to the press.  

Ezi says I am a poet.

the big plan – oct 24, 2023 Read Post »

israeli politics

Maybe if they stopped bombing us, we’d stop bombing them… If they have a million displaced persons, we have 120,000 families looking for places to stay because of the rockets.  If we have fewer casualties, it’s because we have a warning system that they could have built as well.  And sometimes pieces of shattered rockets fall on us, so we stay sheltered.  We scurry out and scurry back in.

The 222 hostages have still to be identified and listed –  none of them are guilty of a single crime – almost quarter are still in diapers, or back in diapers.   They all have families – some still alive – who know nothing about their physical state much less their mental state.   These are to be exchanged for 100 odd prisoners who were arrested because they tried to kill us.  This seems like a strange inbalance, but, okay, we would do it. 

I don’t think sufficient accurate information has reached the West to allow a reasonable judgement on what should be done.  Sure, we don’t get all the information either.  For example, we haven’t seen footage of the massacre in the areas down south – no rapes, no beheadings, no fetuses ripped from their terrified mothers.  We just hear a few of the stories that survivors tell.  

We have 4 tv channels:  One is so rightist that I can’t bear to watch it, the others have Arab commentators, moderators, photographers, and guests – almost in proportion to the population of people living here.  I’m watching Lucy Aharash (who begins her broadcast with  ‘masa el nur’ (good evening in Arabic) right now as I write because I have to know whatever I can at any given moment.  Sometimes I watch CNN or new in France to get a bigger picture.  I still can’t absorb anything because I’m not able to concentrate, and I worry about the all the people who are suffering because of the brutality of Hamas, and the unpredictability of Hizballah.

Orit calls to ask Ezi if a half a ton bomb from Hizballah would flatten her house.  He says yes, but assures her it won’t come to that because we’d flatten Lebanon.  Just before that Joe calls from the States to ask if it’s true that we’re rounding up local Arabs.  I hope not – because I have an appointment tomorrow with an Arab doctor, and I have to pick up the prescription from an Arab pharmacist, and some of my neighbors are Arab, and- oh, I forgot to write one of my aged Arab colleagues to see how he is faring…

 

 

 

 

bombing – oct 23, 2023 Read Post »

israeli politics

“Yeah, yeah,” a close friend writes. “You’re posting a lot, but what’s happening with you? How are you reacting to this mess?”  So I’m going to bore you.

In the effort to maintain a full time job of taking care of an aged woman (me), I have not been volunteering to help out the hundreds of thousands of internal refugees in Israel.  Apart from money, clothing and good will, I have done pretty much nothing.  And they are so needy, so traumatized and so helpless in this confusing situation, it is pretty awful.

i try to help out my friends, who have become crazier by the minute from all the stress, and buy as much as I can from any shop that has managed to stay open, but that’s it.

And I haven’t helped my family much either, except to shield them from my fears and anxieties as much as possible.  In the last month I did share my expectations of a war, but they shut me up, and I was wrong about the exact date.  

All I can do is offer to share my apartment and my erratic cooking.  And hope they don’t need to take me up on it.  

I’m hoping that at least some of the supplies sent yesterday and today got through to the people of Gaza, and didn’t get grabbed first by Hamas, but I doubt it.

And I try very hard not to let the bestiality of the raid on October 7, the brutal murders and the dreadful kidnappings, affect my attitude to the Gazan people. 

All this is very exhausting,  So basically, I’m pretty sedentary, try not to watch news, and cheer up my friends as much as possible.  

And pray people don’t get swayed by the false propaganda going around…

 

so what’s new? – oct 22, 2023 Read Post »