israeli politics

Remember Gaza - 23.10.24

In the middle of the evening the siren went off, and we escorted our guests to the shelter.  My friend was speechless from terror, and I didn’t succeed in making her situation easier with my silly attempts at humor.  It made me realize how lightly I’m taking the sirens, and what a terrible thing they are.  As soon as our company left to make their way home (with great trepidation), we turned to the news, and when there was nothing on the Israeli channels we went to CNN.  There we saw the situation in north Gaza, the terrible injuries, the damage, the suffering.   When the news turned away from the middle east, we switched to France, and saw an interview with a man in Beirut who pointed out that the Israeli government  built shelters for its citizens while they were killed on the streets.  

I do indeed bless the shelter we visit frequently, and I complain about it all the time.  How is it that the floor was not finished and I have to wear shoes when i go down there?  The tenants built the shelter in 1970 and didn’t notice then that the contractor had forgotten to even out the concrete floor.  The laws to build shelters with apartment buildings came later, and the government never paid for the shelters.  Why should the Lebanese or the Gazans build shelters?  After all, who would attack them?  

We, on the other hand, have always been under attack, and I can remember different stages of my life in different shelters.  

This doesn’t justify anything.  It just points out some facts.

Gaza is always in my mind.  I will always remember walking the streets there, learning about the orchards, my daughter playing with the children… I will always remember how simply I identified with the people there.  Those days will never come again.

 

remember Gaza – 23.10.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

Another Wake-up - 23.10.24

I wake up with a curse, and race out and down the 2 flights of stairs.  By the time I get there, the boom sounds.  

Nobody feels like talking.  We’re all in pajamas and half awake.  Yes, we’re functioning, but in no mood to joke around.  

Most of our neighbors are either at work or  too frail to descend.  They have chairs in the hall that most of the people in the country rely on.  

And it just occurred to me that some of the people who came down yesterday were gone today – either they left for a safer place or they stayed in bed.

 

Another wake-up – 23.10.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

automatic reaction - 22.10.24

if you know the drill, it’s automatic.  We wake up to the alarm and are down in the shelter in a minute and a half, just as we hear the boom.  This rocket came just at the time in the morning when kids would be off to school and others off to work.  But it’s a chol hamoed so many people are on vacation, and only the special schools work.  That meant our shelter was full of kids with special needs who were on they way, people half dressed, and sleepy-eyed neighbors who hadn’t woken yet.  I looked at them and thought what the people on October 7 must have felt when their towns were invaded with murderers – the confusion, the terror.  The reactions of the autistic children to the noise and the strange shelters seemed perfectly normal considering the situation.

automatic reaction – 22.10.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

Something just exploded.  I’m lying in my bed reading my mail (for the first time in weeks), and there’s a sudden boom.  We don’t move. “What was that?”  “I don’t know?”  We both know it was an explosion, but we’re not moving.   

We’ll find out soon enough.  I’ll update you.

okay.  it was a rocket. it missed me.

 

what blew up – 21.10.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

sick, sorry - 21.20.24

It’s embarassing to be sick at a time like this – when there are holidays and there is so much to do, and so much going on.  But sick I am.  It began last week some time when I saw that I was having trouble getting through the park I love so much, a simple park that you could ride through with your tricycle. And then I blamed the olive trees – that are just yielding beautiful fruit.  I wrote about them years ago:

Allergic to olive trees,

I cannot imagine

life without

these ancient friends

twisting their histories

whispering various truths

dropping their fruit

in my hungry

ambivalent lap

But it isn’t just the trees.  I sat at my kitchen table today for half an hour wondering how I would get up.  All my vital signs seem to be okay but when Ezi suggested that I go to the doctor I said, “What?  And have him break his five year record of not touching me?”  I think I’ll take an allergy pill instead. 

I’ll let you know.

Reserve General Ahasan Diksa is been eulogized all day today, and what they say about him overwhelms me – it isn’t about his courage, although he was courageous, it isn’t about his leadership capabilities, although he was a leader – but it is about his character as a human being and his warmth.  I once heard him talking to his men about not losing their sense of morality. 

I hope that the reincarnation the Druze believe in brings us a new generation of people like Ahasan Diksa.

 

sick, sorry – 21.20.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

Best of Times, Worst of Times - 10.19.24

We could have slept well last night, thinking that there is now a chance for the return of the hostages.  But we were awakened at seven with a siren and soon discovered that the Hizbullah were hopping mad.  

So once again I spent the day as close to shelters as I could.  Since yesterday was a day for coffee houses and the day before for parks, it marked a real difference.  And now, instead of thinking of the wonderful possibilities of mutual respect I’m damned worried.

We’ll have to see what tomorrow brings.  One thing for sure, we’ll be in our literary sukkah tomorrow at 12 EST (7 p.m. Jerusalem time) reading poems of our literary guests.  I’ve invited Louis Carroll.  The link is here. 

what I have to say about it is here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00144940.1987.9935272

 

But if you don’t have the patience to get the academic language, the idea is that Carroll uses nonsense words for universal meaning.  So Jabberwock is like Sinwar, or, say Hitler, or any evil monster.  And there’s a nameless hero because there’s always a good guy who wins.  But there’s also always another villain waiting the sidelines, even when everything seems totally normal.

  

Best of Times, Worst of Times – 10.19.24 Read Post »

israeli politics

Don't Gloat - 18.10.24

I keep saying this.  If we rejoice at the death of an enemy, we descend to the depths of the enemy.  What we should be concentrating on now is how to get the hostages out, and how to get ourselves out of Gaza and get the reconstruction started.  And we need to make sure that we don’t mess it up, and start reversing the hatred that has been infused into the veins of the Gazans for so many years.

 

Don’t Gloat – 18.10 Read Post »

israeli politics

Sinuar's End

it was an accident. For over a year we’ve been saying that Sinuar has to be killed and then yesterday, as we were leaving the manicured park, with its perfect little paths and planned water ways, the news came. Sinuar has been killed.

The connection we felt to those horrendous moments where the photograph showed his body, mangled from the drone after his hand been shot off – was terrifying.  The picture disappeared from the internet a moment after, but I couldn’t help thinking of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who’d lost an arm in captivity and then was one of the six ‘protecting’ Sinyuar before he was murdered.  Everything seemed connected.

Should we rejoice? Should we despair?  The fact that Sinyuar had money and fake passports with him indicates that he was about the leave the country, to escape, and that would have left us in even more darkness about the hostages.   

And the hostages seem every day to become more and more relatives, loved ones, about whom we know more and more.

We are so involved in all that goes on here with this terrible situation – that it keeps reminding me of the television show I loved in my childhood – Walter Cronkite – who enacted scenes from history as if they were news and ended every program with:

“What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times… and you were there.”

sinuar’s end – 10.18.24 Read Post »