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.

 

off subject – bathrooms – 5.9.24 Read Post »

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.

 

hate – 5.8.24 Read Post »

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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israeli politics

i may buy a tent - may 5, 2024

I have heard so many opinions about the river and the sea in the past few days that I find the threads impossible to unravel.  

First, of course no one is happy about the war.  But some people really think it’s simple.  Shoot them all.  or Make a single state. or go back to Poland.  (That one really gets me.  My brother reminds me that our grandparents had a big house on the marketplace before they were killed and the place was bombed, destroyed – I should have kept the key) 

In any case, I’m lost as far as making a logical and satisfying organization to all the arguments – and certainly no solution.  

I look at the faces of the demonstrators and think how wonderful it would be to talk with them like human beings. not about politics – but mabe about shoes, cooking, horses, etc.  It’s not like there are good people against bad people and we have to get rid of the bad people.  They’re all good and they deserve attention.   how can they all be made to understand that simple fact?  everybody’s right.  now let’s see how we can all be satisfied. 

A peace tent.  yes. that will do it. sure.


i may buy a tent – may 5, 2024 Read Post »

israeli politics

Hard to get the news - 5.4.24

From here, in New Jersey, I find it hard to get the news about Israel and Gaza.  Whatever happens in graduation ceremonies here have nothing to do with what’s going on there.  So I’m stuck with reading the news in Hebrew papers. like the Times of Israel

https://www.timesofisrael.com/

It too doesn’t tell me much, but my internet connection is pretty bad, so I can’t even evaluate what I’m getting.  

And evaluation is what is desperately needed.  Especially poetic evaliation. As William Carlos Williams wrote “It is hard to get the news from poems/but men die miserably every day/for lack of what is found there. – 

And here, my internet connection seems to be fading – i’ll explain quickly.  With a situation so complex, no single perspective is sufficient, and sometimes only a very specific instance can provide a true taste of reality. 

As I walked into a kind of Mom and Pop pharmacy just now, a customer was talking to the druggist.  I only heard the last line “Jews don’t belong here,” before he went to sit down.  

I bought my cough medicine and left.  I’ll never know if he was talking about me,  himself, or the druggist, or if he was giving the punch line of a joke.

But I kind of feel that moment shows something of the uncertainty of the feeling of being a Jew in the US right now.

 

hard to get the news – 5.4.24 Read Post »

blog, israeli politics, my life in tel aviv

divestment: another look - 5.3.24

Watching the kids screaming divestment from Tel Aviv University makes me wonder if there is any awareness of the large percentage of Arab students who gain professions at this very university.  I don’t think the students who learned from me want that university to disappear.  

I may be wrong now…

I mean I went to visit some of my former students who were in mourning last week (stop me if you’ve heard this one – I loved that moment too much to forget it.  The first thing they asked me, after a quick glance at each other, was about something that really troubled them all the years.  “yes, I said, before the question got asked, “It was Coke.”  I get asked that a lot.  I used to come to class with a can of Coke every time, and from the way I behaved, it was clear to them that there was something else in that can…

I don’t think that’s a reason to divest from the university, though.

 

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israeli politics

Stats - 5.1.24

Walk down the aisle on the plane, I count what movies are being watched.  Do people tune in Israeli or American films?  Me – I only got up from my seat after watching “The Monkey Park” which reminds me of many of the forgotten Israeli novelists I knew in the sixties and seventies.  But when I got back from giving the stewardesses and stewards a good story when Ezi and me tried to get into the bathroom together, I could not bear the quaintness and escapism of the Hebrew films everyone had tuned into.  I can’t believe Israelis watch them.  I escape with the memories of American history.   

stats – 5.1.24 Read Post »