At a glance, there really aren't that many "movements" in Judaism. Orthodox, reform, reconstructionist and conservative. That's pretty much it. Sure, there are some variations on this, but compared to the Christian world, Jews like to keep it simple.

Or do we? 

I decided to jump into the proverbial rabbit-hole of Jewish Denominationalism and discovered that there are more ways of being Jewish than there ever have been before.

Secular-As-Balls:

You still don't understand WHY Jews believe in G-d. Frankly, you think the whole "G-d Thing" is irrelevant. There's nothing about being Jewish that requires religion, customs, beliefs, worship, a love for Israel or the Jewish People. But if anyone DARES to slam the Jewish People or pretend that the Holocaust didn't happen, you'll be the first to kick their ass. It's like being an older brother: you can torture your siblings all you want to. But the minute some other kid tries to pick on your kid brother/sister, you're going to pound them into the ground. You express your faith (or lack thereof) by reading Heeb Magazine and going to the opening of the new Jewish Museum in your neighborhood. Just try to avoid the rabbi at all costs!

 

Hippiedox:

The product of Orthodox or immigrant parents, you voted for Barak Obama because he's cool like the new iPhone. You tone of voice moves between stoner and yiddishkeit, and your love for Matisyahu at times rivals the Lubavitcher Rebbe. You're more comfortable at Whole Foods than you are around your conservative in-laws, but you still feel a sense of sadness when a non-kosher restaurant opens near your shul. Kabbalah is your favorite pastime, because it's like being on a permanent acid trip.

See: Shemspeed, FrumSatire and "that guy" on the Birthright Israel trip.

 

Chabad-Could-It-Be: Thanks to Chabad's supply chain of eager rabbis, your small town of approximately ten Jews just got an Orthodox shul. Too bad for you that you have a shaved head, love bacon and still don't know what a mezzuzah is. But because you feel a cultural connection to Judaism, you decide to start attending services. You really hate the religio-political attitude of Chabadniks, but because this movement offers you the "real" Judaism that you cannot muster for yourself, you keep going back as an atonement for all the Friday nights you spent playing X-Box instead of reading the Good Book.

See: any Jew living west of the Mississippi river and east of Phoenix, Arizona.

 

Trans(gender) Denominational: You're an activist within Judaism. You want to reform (no pun intended) every corner of the Jewish World. Your obsession with Tikkun Olam really has nothing to do repairing the world as a whole, but instead concentrating on key issues within Judaism. Such examples include gay/lesbian rights, trans-inclusion, gender feminism, environmentalism and animal rights. You can't settle on one shul because they just don't address your "issues". Like a serial monogamist, you fall in love with one synagogue/rabbi and work the hell out of it until there is nothing left, then move onto another hot affair.

See: Union For Progressive Judaism, Barney Frank, and Kosherveg.com.

 

PolitiKosher: You love Israel. In fact, you're IN LOVE with Israel. There's something about the desert, the ruins, the graffiti and the bombs that just gives you this tingling feeling in your stomach. You think the Palestinians are secretly plotting your death and that if Netanyahu could just get his act together, the Messiah will surely come. Hopefully that person is you. Just in case, you've got your passport and a duffle bag filled with tallit ready to go.

See: Friends of the IDF, the Libi Fund and anyone wearing an "I Love The IDF" T-shirt.

 

Deconstructionist Judaism: Innovation is the tradition of the Jewish faith, and you are its greatest champion. You believe that G-d has a great sense of humor and personally marvels at your creative thinking skills. You pioneered such moments in Judaism as the chocolate seder, dog and cat bar mitzvahs, and menorahs hacked together from leftover Ikea stuff. You express your Judaism by taking Jewish ideas and making them better.

See: Moderntribe.com, Rabbi Laura Baum, Mel Brooks.

Many religions approach their movements like a ladder: the higher up you climb, the more "authentic" your faith. And generally speaking, the more conservative practice is usually what you're striving for. Judaism has a motto of horizontally-intergrated faith. A belief that Judaism is not a climb to the top, but rather a continuum that you place yourself on. More liberal? Slide to the left! More Orthodox, then move to the right.

Judaism, for me, is more like a spider web. A spider web starts by having a few pillars to hold it together. From these platforms, the spider is able to weave its web to the center. The purpose: to catch what the spider needs in order to survive. If one of the pillars that the web is connected to simply cannot hold the web, then the creative little spider finds a new anchor. If someone breaks the web from the inside, then the spider repairs it, differently than it was originally created. Still, the web stays intact. And every spider web is different, just like everyone's Judaism.

In Part I of this series, author Ilan Stavans explored Borges' self-identification as a Jew. Part II focused on Borges' infatuation with Kabbalah. Here, Stavans argues that Borges carefully styled himself as a literary son of Jewish precursors.

"Each writer creates his precursors"--Borges

Borges was the first, and for a while the only, supporter of Kafka in the Hispanic world. In an essay called "Kafka and His Precursors," published in 1951 and included in Other Inquisitions (1952), Borges writes in Eliot Eeinberger's rendition:

At one time I considered writing a study of Kafka's precursors. I had thought, at first, that he was as unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after spending a little time with him, I felt I could recognize his voice, or his habits, in the texts of various literatures and various ages.

Rather than offer a hermeneutic interpretation of Kafka, the essay then concentrates on a catalogue of echoes in Kafka's work: Zeno's paradox against motion, a fable by the ninthcentury Chinese author Han Yu, Kierkegaard, the anti-Semite Léon Bloy, and Lord Dunsany. Borges concludes:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant. Kafka's idiosyncrasy is present in each of those writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it; that is to say, it would not exist. The poem "Fears and Scrupules" by Robert Browning prophesizes the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we read it now. The word "precursor" is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as well as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter. The first Kafka of "Betrachtung" is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.

Without a doubt, Borges works to create Kafka as his own precursor: In 1943, Borges introduced, for Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires, Kafka's La metamorfosis. A few years earlier he talked about him (and about Max Brod) in El Hogar (July 8^th, 1938). Borges also included material by Kafka in his Anthology of Fantastic Literature (1940), co-edited with Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, as well as in his compendia Libro del cielo y el infierno (1960, also with Bioy Casares), Libro de los seres imaginarios (1967), and Libro de los sueños (1976). A third and four pieces by Borges on Kafka were in the form of introductions. The third was the fourth title of A Personal Library, Borges' last editorial project, published between 1985 and 1986 in Argentina and Spain by Emecé and in Italian by Franco Marco Ricci. His selection included Amerika and some short stories. The fourth piece is a prologue he wrote toward the end of his life, as part of a project called The Library of Babel paid by the publisher Ediciones Siruela in Spain from 1978 to 1986.

Why Kafka? First, Borges needed to see literature globally. He doesn't even mention his Czech origins and his German-language style. What matters to him are the reverberations of Kafka's motifs. Yet, the particular reverberation of Kafka that most interests Borges is, again, the Jewish connection. While he does not approach Kafka in the context of Jewish literature exclusively,  Borges is more interested in the Kafka of the Hassidic parables than the novelist of The Castle. His prologue to Kafka's tale, The Vulture, offers fresh views on Borges' opinion not only on the author but on Jews in general.:

Everyone knows that Kafka always felt mysteriously guilty toward his father, in the manner of Israel with its God; his Judaism, which separated him from the rest of mankind, affected him in a complex way. The consciousness of approaching death and the feverish exaltation of tuberculosis must have sharpened those faculties...

Two ideas-or more exactly, two obsessions-rule Kafka's work: subordination and the infinite. In almost all his fictions there are hierarchies, and those hierarchies are infinite...

A less overt tribute to Kafka than these essays, yet one that is equally significant, appears in the story "The Secret Miracle."  Like "Deutches Requiem," this short story has a single, unifying argument: the last hours of a prisoner about to be executed by the Nazis; and the two focus on a single concept: self-redemption. The former has a Jew as its protagonist, but it is narrated by an omniscient third-person narrator; the latter, instead, has a Nazi as its main character, and it is he who delivers the tale to us.

I will discuss "Deutches Requiem" in the next section: here, I want to focus on "The Secret Miracle," which owes much more to Kafka. "The Secret Miracle," was written during World War II and collected in Ficciones as a triptych with Borges' other Jewish tales: "Emma Zunz" and "Death and the Compass." (I included the three in the anthology Tropical Synagogues [1994]). It is more than a subliminal tribute to one Kafka, dead by then for approximately a couple of decades.

The story opens with an epigraph from the Qur'an, 2:261: "And God caused him to die for an hundred years, and then raised him to life. And God said, ‘How long hast thou waited?' He said, ‘I have waited a day or part of a day'." Borges sets the plot in Prague in 1943. In the first scene Jaromir Hladik, a translator and playwright arrested by the Nazis for being Jewish, is taken to prison. The first scene is emblematic, and highly Kafkaesque: it describes a dream Hladik has of a long chess game in which the opponents have been at each other for such a long time that they have forgotten what prize was to be. Even the rules of the game have been forgotten. Clearly, Borges is setting the stage for a rivalry between Jews and Nazis as ancient as the world itself.

It is in his cell where Hladik communicates with God, and this communication is the centripetal force in the argument. Hladik, we find out, is the author an unfinished drama called The Enemies and he knows that, if his life is to have any meaning, it is because of his authorship of this drama. So he requests that God grant him a miracle-a secret miracle, since only he and he alone will know about it. In the final scene, as Hladik faces a German firing squad, the universe comes to a stop:

The guns converged on Hladik, but the men who were to kill him stood motionless. The sergeant's arm eternized an unfinished gesture. On a paving stone of the courtyard a bee cast an unchanging shadow. The wind had ceased, as in a picture... He had asked God for a whole year to finish his work; His omnipotence had granted it. God had worked a secret miracle for him; German lead would kill him at the set hour, but in his mind a year would go by between the order and its execution.

In the very last line of the story, Hladik is shot to death on March 29^th, at 9:02 A.M. Even though no evidence of a finished manuscript of The Enemies can be found, the prisoner dies satisfied: his life has been justified. His justification, obviously, has to do with immortality, a theme, again, parallel to Kafka's. Borges' statement is clear: a writer's raison d'être is to leave behind the better part of his talent, and to struggle so that that contribution is finished, even if only "ideally." It is clear, to me at least, that in the face of tyranny and death, the Argentine understood what Jews in Europe were about: faith, endurance, and posterity.

Isaac Babel

Borges' interest in European Jews and in particular, the Hasidim, led him to a tangential interest in Isaac Babel, another Jewish author with few echoes in the Spanish-speaking world. In a "capsule biography" about him published in 1938 in the magazine El Hogar, to which Borges contributed between 1936 and 1939, he portrays Babel, who was still alive at the time, as a defiant Jew. Herein Esther Allen's translation:

He was born in the jumbled catacombs of the stair-stepped port of Odessa, late in 1894. Irreparably Semitic, Isaac was the son of a rag merchant from Kiev and a Moldavian Jewess. Catastrophe has been the normal climate of his life. In the uneasy intervals between pogroms he learned not only to read and write but to appreciate literature and enjoy the work of Maupassant, Flaubert, and Rabelais. In 1914, he was certified a lawyer by the faculty of Law in Saratov; in 1916, he risked a journey to Petrograd.

In that capital city "traitors, malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned: the category was somewhat arbitrary, but-implacably-it included Babel. He had to relay on the friendship of a waiter who took him home and hid him, on a Lithuanian accent acquired in Sebastopol, and on an apocryphal passport. His first writings date from that period: tow or three satires of the Czarist bureaucracy, published in Annals, Gorky's famous newspaper. (What must he think, and not say, about Soviet Russia, that indecipherable labyrinth of state offices?) Those two or three satires attracted the dangerous attention of the government. He was accused of pornography and incitement of class hatred. From this catastrophe he was saved by another catastrophe: the Russian Revolution.

In early 1921, Babel joined a Cossack regiment. Those blustering and useless warriors (no one in the history of the universe has been defeated more often than the Cossacks) were, of course, anti-Semitic. The mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain and spite. A couple of well-timed and flashy exploits enabled Babel to make them leave him in peace.

By reputation, through not according to the bibliographies, Isaac Babel is still a homo unius libri. His unmatched book is titled Red Cavalry.

The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes. One of the stories-"Salt"-enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems, and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.


Years ago I introduced Babel's stories into a Spanish-speaking audience. (An English version of the introduction to Cuentos de Odesa and Cuentos de Odesa [1993] appears in my book The Inveterate Dreamer [2001].) Borges' profile is a revelation because no two writers could be more different. Indeed, they are like and oil and water: the Russian, while a meticulous stylist á la Maupassant, focused on the physical (e.g., the Jewish body) and on political and social tensions in the early Soviet Union; the Argentine, instead, was an escapist concerned with the metaphysical. Borges' understanding of Babel, obviously, comes through secondary sources, as did much of his knowledge in general. Still, even if he had read his stories, and I'm skeptical about it, the connection between them would have remained tenuous.


Agnon

A stronger, and more vital influence on Borges came from a different direction, Israel, but through the same chain of association: the Hasidic world of Eastern Europe.  Agnon (aka Shmuel Yosef Czaczkes), was an Israeli writer, but among his earliest works was a translation of the Tales of the Ba'al Shem Tov. Whether Borges found Agnon through these tales, or through another means, by the mid-sixties Borges was sufficiently enamoured of Agnon's writing to devote a series of lectures to him.

Delivered  at the Instituto Cultural Argentino-Israelí in Buenos Aires, two of these lectures, one on the Book of Job, the other on Spinoza,  were eventually translated into English. It turns out that there was a third lecture as well.A chance comment with Neal Sokol-included in Ilan Stavans: Eight Conversations (2004)-in which I state that Borges never read Shmuel Yosef Agnon, prompted a Canadian friend, Carl Rosenberg, editor of Outlook, to send me, so as to correct my ignorance, a third, previously unknown and significantly shorter lecture by Borges. It was delivered in the same institution in 1967, approximately a year after Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he shared with the German poet Nelly Sachs.

In "On Sh. Y. Agnon," which I hereby reconstruct in English (the Spanish transcription is awful), Borges mentions, in passing, Agnon's edition of the Tales the Ba'al Shem-Tov. He also refers to Days of Awe, which Schocken issued in 1965 in the United States, under the supervision of Nathan Glatzer, with one of those elongated subtitles more suitable for poetry slams than for libraries: "Being a treasury of traditions, legends and learned commentaries concerning Rosh ha-Shanah, Yom Kippur and the days between, culled from three hundred volumes, ancient and new". But as the nonbeliever he was-and even less an enthusiast of religious rituals-Borges prefers Contes de Jérusalem (1959), which he read in the French rendition of Rachel and Guy Casaril. The anthology includes nine of Agnon's tales, among them "Forevermore," "Tehila," "The Whole Loaf," "Ido and Enam," and "Orange Peal: A Fantasy." Here is Borges:

I begin with some considerations that run the risk of appearing digressive but which should take us to the essential theme: the personality and oeuvre of our great contemporary, Shmuel Yosef Agnon. My ignorance of Hebrew-ignorance which I deplore but which it's late to remedy it-has forced me to judge him through Days of Awe, about the Jewish liturgical year; and Contes de Jérusalem. I'll limit myself to the astonishment I've experienced in these volumes, the latter especially.

Let me ask a simple yet complex question, which is what all questions are: What is a nation? My first reaction is to offer a geographical answer, but it would be insufficient. Instead, let us envision a nation as the series of memories stored at the heart of a people. George Bernard Shaw was once asked: How much suffering is humankind able to bear? His answer was that the suffering of a single individual is enough and is also the limit. In other words, the limit might be an abstraction, although the suffering itself is real. And so, if misery is impossible to measure in collective terms, how might one define a nation?

To me there isn't a clearer example of a nation than Israel, whose origins are almost confused with those of the world entire, and who reaches us today after much misery and exile. A nation is made of the accumulated memory of successive generations. In itself, memory is often approached in a couple of ways: as a barren collection of dates, names and locations; and as a catalog of curiosities. But there's another approach neither endorsed by historians, nor by students of folklore: memory as experience incarnated in people. This, precisely, is what I find in Agnon.

Contes de Jérusalem ought to be read like one reads Dante: as a series of tales, at once tragic and humorous; and as a set of symbols. Agnon enables us to appreciate ancient Jewish tradition through a game of mirrors. In it he also invites us to recognize the role of Hasidism. Unquestionably, the Hasidic tales compiled by Martin Buber and, in his early years, by Agnon too, left an indelible imprint on him. For instance, "Ido and Enam," filled with mystery, is the bizarre tale of a scholar who, in an act of revelation, sees ninety-nine words of an unknown language. Ninety-nine are also the names of God; the Tetragramaton, which is the hundredth one, is infallible. Indirectly, Agnon recalls in his pages the legend of the Golem, made out of sand by means of words by a Cabalist in Prague's Jewish quarter.

I shall now refer to "The Whole Loaf," a story about chance. It reminds me of Kafka, who is part of Jewish memory too. Agnon chronicles the infinite yet minuscule obstacles undergone by its hungry protagonist as he prepares for the Sabbath. Whereas Kafka was about the lack of hope, or else about a hope so remote it generates in us a terrible feeling of desperation, Agnon is patient: he waits because he's a believer. Indeed, one of the right decisions the Swedish Academy made recently was not to award its Nobel Prize to a writer of sadness and despair. Instead, it honored one who, like Bernard Shaw, also a laureate, is sensitive to tragedy but knows that a joyful conclusion to the human quest isn't altogether beyond us.

Another story in Contes de Jérusalem is about a country that could be any country. This one in particular is punished with a drought marked by an inexorably blue sky. Furthermore, enemies are always on the attack, the earth is barren and rivers are empty. The population is divided into two parties: on one side are the cover-headed, on the other the naked-headed. [...] The two parties are ready to destroy each other. Yet there's a single individual who is beyond any affiliation. He furtively leaves the city, praying for God to send a compassionate storm to stop the destruction. When the others find out, they excommunicate him. His sin: not to have alerted the authorities to his wishes.

A decision is then made to have everyone build a huge tent for protection from the storm, which must be large enough to cover the entire country. A commission is established to decide what name to give to the tent. Alternative commissions take the responsibility of studying the etymology and orthography of the chosen name. As the population wastes its energy in trivialities, God allows rain to fall-and the barren land is fertilized, just as modern Israel itself was fertilized. I hear a distant echo in Agnon's story of the Jewish tradition that says that every generation includes a total of thirty-six just men. By the way, this tradition was studied by Max Brod, Kafka's friend. Unacquainted with one another, these just men navigate the world and are replaced as soon as they die. Right now their dynasty redeems us.

Israel's memory is in Agnon-not an erudite but a living memory. He is known through a pseudonym; he didn't write for his own vanity. Somehow he knew he was the living memory of that admirable people to which, beyond the vicissitudes of blood, we all belong: the people of Israel.


The interest in Agnon is part of Borges' admiration for Israel as a young nation. His relationship with the Jewish state was ambivalent at first and only in later years-when he himself became an institutional luminary-did he soften his approach to it. It isn't that Borges was critical of Zionism. In fact, judging by his work, he seems to have a limited knowledge of it. International politics didn't interest him in the least. He seldom talked about Theodor Herzl, not even about Eliezer ben Yehuda, credited for the modern revival of the Hebrew language.

I said before that Borges visited Israel. He was there twice. The second time was in 1971, when he received the Jerusalem Prize. The first trip came at the invitation of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. It was in recognition of his philo-Semitism, and in particular of his positive views on Israel. He had been active in the Casa Argentina en Israel-Tierra Santa, a project that sought to build in Jerusalem an Argentine cultural center. He also was the first to write in Sur (no.254, September-October 1958). In the autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker, Borges stated:

Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Geneva days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediately sides. White the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week later, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:

Over whose acres walk'd those blessed feet,
Which fourteen hundred years ago, were nail'd
For our advantage, on the bitter cross.

Actually, Borges wrote three poems while in Israel, collected in  In Praise of Darkness (1969). All were later included in his Obras Completas. These poems have been rendered into English before. Herein my own version. First, "To Israel":

Who shall tell if you, Israel, are to be found
In the lost labyrinth of secular rivers
That is my blood? Who shall locate the places
Where my blood and yours have navigated?
It doesn't matter. I know you're in the Sacred
Book that comprehends Time, rescued in history
By the red Adam, as well as by the memory
And agony of the Crucified One.
You're in the Book that is the mirror
Of each face approaching it,
As well as God's face, which, in its complex
And hard crystal, is appreciated in terror.
Long live Israel, who keeps God's wall
In your passionate battle.



"Israel":

A man incarcerated and bewitched,
a man condemned to be the serpent
that keeps the infamous gold,
a man condemned to be Shylock,
a man wandering through the globe,
knowing he had been in Paradise,
an old and blind man who ought to tear down
the temple columns,
a face condemned to be a mask,
a man who in spite of humankind
is Spinoza and the Baal Shem and the Kabbalists,
a man that is a Book,
a mouth praising heaven's justice
from the abyss,
an attorney or a dentist
who talked with God in a mountain,
a man condemned to ridicule
and abomination, a Jew,
an ancient man,
burnt and drowned in lethal chambers,
an obstinate man who is immortal
and now has returned to battle,
to the violent light of victory,
beautiful like a lion at noon.


And "Israel, 1969":

I feared Israel would be threatened,
with sweet insidious,
by the nostalgia that secular diasporas
accumulated, like sorrowful treasure,
in the cities of the infidel, the juderías,
the twilight of the steppe, the dreams-
the nostalgia of those who, near the waters of Babylon,
longed for you, Jerusalem.
What else were you, Israel, if not that nostalgia,
the will to safe-keep,
from the inconstant shapes of time,
your old magical book, your liturgy,
your solitude with God?
I was wrong. The oldest of nations
is also the youngest.
You haven't been tempted by gardens,
otherness and boredom,
but by the rigor of the last frontier.
Israel has announced, without words:
you shall forget who you are-
you shall leave behind your previous self.
You shall forget who you were in those lands
that gave you their afternoons and mornings
and which you shall no longer cherish.
You shall forget your parents' tongue
and learn the tongue of Paradise.
You shall be an Israeli. You shall be a soldier.
You shall build the homeland with swamps,
you shall erect it in deserts.
You brother shall work with you, he whose face you haven't seen before.
Only one thing is promised:
your place in the battlefield.

There's a strange, triumphant, pompous (almost unBorgesian) tone and tune to these poems. They eulogize the Six-Day War figuratively, in the abstract, without placing it in context: The oldest of nations is also the youngest. Whoever is interested in the Arab-Israeli conflict won't get an uninterested picture though them. Instead, the reader appreciates a blind fervor. In these poems, the political Borges, a Borges I will discuss in the next section, makes one of his earliest appearances.

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Ilan Stavans was born in Mexico to a Jewish family from the Pale of Settlement. His work is wide-ranging, and includes both scholarly monographs such as The Hispanic Condition (1995) and comic strips in the case of Latino USA: A Cartoon History (with Lalo Alcaraz) (2000). Stavans is editor of several anthologies including The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories (1998). A selection of his work appeared in 2000 under the title The Essential Ilan Stavans. In 1997, Stavans was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and has been the recipient of international prizes and honors, including the Latino Literature Prize, Chile’s Presidential Medal, and the Rubén Darío Distinction. 

I was walking down Carlebach Street when the wailing air raid siren announced the biggest civil drill in Israel’s history. Though I’d timed a morning interview around it, (who wants to pause for two minutes of alarm?), I was otherwise unprepared. Unsure of what to do with myself, I stopped and stood at the edge of a sidewalk café, under the shade of the awning. I was still. I listened. The sound was barely audible, drowned out by the noise of construction and late morning traffic. I looked to the people around me for cues. Their conversations continued, coffees were sipped, cigarettes puffed.

A waitress, her blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, pointed to an underground parking garage across the street and reminded us that we were to head to the nearest “protected space.”

Not that we needed the reminder. On the heels of Netanyahu’s induction, most homes received a pamphlet accompanied by a colorful magnet: a map of Israel, carved into color-coded regions, edged by cheerful images—splashing dolphins, dancing camels, and a smiling skier in snow-covered Golan Heights. That skier is in a red zone—according to the key, if he hears a siren he must slide to a shelter immediately. Tel Aviv is colored like a ripe orange. In the case of a missile attack, I will have two minutes to get somewhere safe.

According to the “Recommended Equipment for the Protected Space” list on the magnet, I ought to bring 12 liters of water, food, a fire extinguisher, a TV, and a WIFI ready computer with me. And I’d better not forget to bring “things that will make passing the time pleasant.”

Home Front Command English Magnet Branding

I stuck the magnet on my already cluttered fridge. Now I take it for granted as part of my kitchen scenery.

As the practice alarm sounded, a sole café-goer stood as though he might head for the parking garage. But when it was obvious that none of his companions were going with him, he hesitated, gave a nervous laugh, and then sat back down. Office workers from a nearby building, led by clipboard-bearing managers, streamed like ants to the underground.

The waitress leaned in the doorway, watching. Though she didn’t actually do anything, she looked concerned—she squeezed her chin, and worriedly rubbed her lips with her fingers.

We looked at each other and she shrugged, “What is there to do?” she asked me.

I gave her a weak smile. Despite the June heat, the surging siren brought goosebumps to my skin as I wondered what would happen if we have a real attack?

Like many Tel Avivians, I have no idea where the bomb shelter nearest to my apartment is. I haven’t bothered to find out. Despite the fact that the drill was publicized for weeks in advance, no one I know took the time to figure out if their “protected space” is a bomb shelter, a stairwell, or a certain room in their apartment. If the alarm sounded, where would we go? And how would each of us carry roughly our own body weight in supplies?

Are we apathetic? Or are we in denial?

As I went about the rest of my day, I turned these questions over in my head again and again. But I couldn’t find the answers within myself. So I turned to Boaz, a typical Tel Avivi, for help. I asked him why he didn’t bother at least finding his bomb shelter.

“I’ll find it in the moment I need to,” he said.

“Really? So, when that siren goes off you’ll just magically know where to go? What, are you going to hop on the internet and look it up? You don’t think you need to be prepared?”

“How will it help me to be prepared?” he asked. “How does it help me to think about all this? No one has the energy to deal with these things,” he concluded.

I knew then what I’d been avoiding myself, what I didn’t have the energy to face—a scenario that included missiles landing in Tel Aviv would mean we were in the midst of an all out war. It would be the end to Israel as we know it.

What is there to do?

Sitting helplessly below slabs of cement doesn’t seem like enough. It almost feels like a joke… like dancing camels and the suggestion that passing time during a missile attack could be pleasant.

By now most of the Jewish world has seen the infamous video of Max Blumenthal interviewing kids on Ben Yehuda Street about their feelings towards Obama. The video is disgusting, shocking and a terrible shonda - unless you find yourself hanging around the ultra-Orthodox community where these feelings are the norm, regardless of whether you are drunk or sober. 

The kids were drunk and stupid, but the vile filth that is coming from their mouths cannot be excused. Drunken kids do stupid things, but calling for the shooting of the president and then saying that he hates America and is a terrorist is completely ridiculous. It is understandable if you dislike the man, but to call for his death, is not only wrong it's goes against everything you and your publicly displayed yarmulkes and tzitzit stand for.

 

 

There have been a lot of complaints about the video, specifically that he used drunk kids for his interview, but anyone who has spent any period of time in the frum community realizes that these views on Obama (and African-Americans in general) resonate throughout ultra-Orthodoxy and I am sick of it.

So I figured I would write about this on my Blog (for the purpose of having a wide range of people discuss the issue), Facebook and Twitter and I was attacked. Recovery Rabbi had the gall to reply on Twitter that he thought the video was comedy (it was obviously not) and that he ROFL. On Facebook I was told by multiple people to remove the video, which I certainly would never do and I had to tell one person who called me a disgrace to G-d to go fuck himself.

I don't believe in any way that this video represents the Jewish community, but I can guarantee you that if this was a bunch of drunken Muslims or White Supremacists (the kids on the video would be mistaken as such if not for their yarmulkes) there would be a completely different reaction.

Just because you are drunk doesn't mean you have excuse to disgrace the Jews and pour forth your racist filth. I'm pissed and ashamed of my community!  

Here is the Palestinian writer and literary critic Hassan Khader on the “Nakba Narrative.”

Despite the fact that the signed agreements shook the foundations of accepted Palestinian norms and expectations, the PLO did not fail to develop rhetoric that emphasized the extent of its continued commitment to, and perhaps even conformity with, the traditional Narrative, despite obvious contradictions.

He goes on to say:

There is a unique set of dynamics to this ring of contradiction, most which involve attempts to compensate for secretly deviating from the Narrative by engaging in more eloquent rhetoric that invokes the themes of the constants, the conjuring of memory and the supposed optimism of the will. All these compensatory gestures are effective only in preventing any accumulation of political wisdom, and lead us time and again to the same errors. Therefore, the Palestinians continuously return to square one, as if the sixty years of Nakba and a hundred years of conflict in and over Palestine, could not yield a moment of reflection or a single lesson learned.

Khader’s entire piece, thoughtfully translated by the American Task Force on Palestine, can be read here.

This is not the first time that Khader has characterized the Nakba as a form of ideological cage. An article he wrote for Al Ahram in 1998, on the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Israel, offered the following observation:

Palestine, in reality, was never a paradise; nor was it lost. It was a remote part of the Ottoman Empire, inhabited by poor peasant-farmers. The West Bank and Gaza, which were in and of Palestine, possessed the constituent elements for the perpetuity of Palestinian existence that might have stemmed the deterioration resulting from the annihilation of the larger entity.

However, for the idea of nakba to be complete, the idea of entity could not exist. Consequently, ‘refugee’ became the catchword for identity, which in turn required ignoring the existence of approximately 180,000 Palestinians who remained in that portion of Palestine that was lost. Their continued presence in their country was not viewed as proof of the impossibility of uprooting a people from their land, or as proof of their attachment to their land. Rather it was viewed as cause for embarrassment due to the certain contamination engendered by their daily contact with the usurpers of the land.

Those who read the entire piece will note that Khader is hardly generous when it comes to Zionist readings of Middle Eastern history. He also leaves his reader unsure as to precisely what his political conclusions are (commenters who might be tempted to explain this in terms of “traditional” Arab “duplicity” or “slipperiness” really shouldn’t bother).

But none of this should mask the significance of either his piece from 1998 or today’s offering, which appeared in the leading Arabic daily Al Hayat. Actually, those anti-Zionists who jump up and down with glee whenever an Israeli academic questions, say, the justice of the 1948 War of Independence might want to ponder Khader’s implicit challenge to the kind of historical representations contained, for example, in the opening paragraphs of PACBI’s call to boycott Israel. And, as this account of Palestinian intellectual responses to the 1998 Nakba commemorations shows, Khader is not alone in arguing against the “levelling, nationalist” explanation of the events of 1948.

Ultimately, to puncture the narrative of the Nakba, and to expose the political imperatives which underlie its pretensions to absolute truth, is to simultaneously dispense with the “original sin” theory of Israel’s creation. As Khader writes, the Palestinian leadership has wanted to preserve and deepen the Nakba narrative at the same time as pursuing negotiations with Israel. As a result, the past subsumes the present, so that the “collapse of the Palestinian national movement, and the disasters in education, health and human suffering in Gaza, are thus all rendered merely temporary problems that will pass and are not deserving of any attention.”

It’s an approach - or, as Khader puts it, a “contradiction” - that is no longer sustainable. Those who style themselves as “friends of Palestine” should stop perpetuating it. They might even want to think about how to move beyond it.

It’s common wisdom that Leonard Cohen is more than just a singer-songwriter: he’s also a poet, a sage, even a religious figure. “Leonard is this almost prophetic voice in music for me. He’s got this almost Biblical significance and authority,” said U2’s Edge in the 2005 concert film, I’m Your Man. That’s laying it on a bit thick, perhaps, but it’s an understandable reaction to many of Cohen’s songs. From ruminations about Jesus in “Suzanne” to the Jeremiad of “The Future”, his work doesn’t lack for profundity. While Cohen is widely accepted as a songwriter and a poet, however, there’s one thing that he’s rarely called: a novelist.

In fact, Cohen has published two novels, both of which be wrote before launching his music career at the age of 33. They have faded into obscurity compared to his better-known musical oeuvre, but the thematic depth and lively prose of both books show them to be more than just the scribblings of an immature writer or a brief preamble to a more significant songwriting career. And though Cohen is perfectly suited to his current role as singer-poet elder statesman, both The Favorite Game, published in 1963, and Beautiful Losers, from 1966, were criticized for their avant-garde literary experimentation and provoked outrage because of their violent, sexually explicit, and morally disturbing scenes.

By today’s standards, however, The Favorite Game seems rather tame. Written in the late 1950s and early 1960s while Cohen was living with friends in London, and later in his whitewashed, three-story house on the Greek island of Hydra, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of Cohen’s Montreal upbringing and his pursuit of a poetic vocation. Like Cohen himself, the novel’s protagonist, Lawrence Breavman, is the scion of a prominent Jewish family from the wealthy neighborhood of Westmount.

Also like Cohen, Breavman loses his father at a young age, has a painfully neurotic mother, and uses hypnosis to seduce the family maid. Most of the novel focuses not on his home life, however, but on his relationships with women and with his pal Krantz. As teenagers, the two friends spend their nights driving around downtown Montreal, trying unsuccessfully to pick up girls while amusing themselves with high toned conversations peppered with loud proclamations of their own genius. Eventually Breavman’s sexual drought comes to an end, but not before a few frustratingly incomplete, coming-of-age type encounters.

“Then he was in a room undressing her. He couldn’t believe his hands. The kind of surprise when the silver paper comes off the triangle of Gruyere in one piece. Then she said no and bundled her clothes against her breasts. He felt like an archeologist watching the sand blow back.”

Negative reactions to the book were in part because of its sexual descriptiveness, but also because of its saw-toothed criticism of the Jewish community. Breavman is not by any means ashamed of his Jewishness, yet he is contemptuous of his family’s style of Judaism. “Victorian gentlemen of the Hebraic persuasion,” he terms them.

“They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the donor’s book. Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfillment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.”

Despite such deliberate button pushing, the literary and moral incitements of The Favourite Game remain relatively low-key. Beautiful Losers on the other hand, Cohen’s second novel, still retains its power to shock readers 43 years after its publication.

The book is aggressively experimental. As Cohen’s biographer Ira Nadel puts it, Beautiful Losers “almost bursts its form” by “incorporating journals, letters, grammar books, historical narratives, advertisements, catalogues, footnotes, poetry, and drama.” Or, as Cohen himself put it, the book is “a love story, a road map through the wilderness, a joke, a tasteless affront, an hallucination, a bore, an irreverent display of diseased virtuosity, a Jesuitical tract, an Orange sneer, a scatological Lutheran extravagance.” But objections to Beautiful Losers ran deeper than readers’ discomfort with the book’s unfettered architecture.

The first section of Beautiful Losers is delivered by an unnamed narrator – a chronically constipated scholar of deteriorating mental health who is a specialist on the A – s, a nearly vanished North American aboriginal tribe. Though the book is set in Montreal, Cohen shifts his attention away from his own past to focus on larger themes, such as Quebec nationalism and the history of the Jesuits in colonial Quebec. The narrator is obsessed with Catherine Tekakawitha, the first Iroquois saint, and his disjointed narrative is riddled with invocations to her. His wife Edith was herself a Mohawk, though at the beginning of the book she has already committed a gruesome suicide at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

The second part of the novel consists of a long letter written by the narrator’s friend F., and only delivered five years after his death. F. is a Quebec nationalist and a disgraced member of Canadian parliament who, in a mirroring of real life events, blows up the statue of Queen Victoria on Montreal’s Sherbrooke Street. In their mutual need for each other the two characters have a Breavman-Krantz type of relationship, conducting the same kind of amused dialogue. In this case however, both characters are thoroughly stripped of any pretension to innocence. The fact of their bisexuality would have been more controversial in 1966 than it is now, but F.’s description of his affair with Edith can still raise eyebrows. The book’s signature scene is a trip F. and Edith take to Argentina, where their erotic exploits include being raped by a vibrator that has come to life and “learned to feed itself”, followed by a bath with an escaped Nazi who sells them a bar of soap made from human flesh.

Such episodes may be grotesque, but they are successful at provoking an intensity that is at the core of all of Cohen’s work. The shock factor of Beautiful Losers isn’t an exercise in masochism, but the distillation of experience to its most horrific, as well as its most euphoric elements. An acute awareness of the present moment pervades both novels, complete with all of its rawness and uncertainty. “We sought the peculiar tone of each peculiar night. We tried to clear away the static, suffering under the hint that the static was part of the tone,” F. says in Beautiful Losers. Sex in particular is a means by which his characters transverse the emotional distances that separate them and establish meaningful contact with other human beings. “When I see a woman’s face transformed by the orgasm we have reached together, then I know we’ve met. Anything else is fiction,” says Breavman. The narrator of Beautiful Losers expresses a similar sentiment. “For a blessed second truly I was not alone, I was part of a family. That was the first time we made love. It never happened again.”

As Cohen’s Canadian publisher observed, The Favourite Game has the quality of a first novel and it bears the traces of self-indulgence that accompany almost any kind of autobiography. Beautiful Losers is a progression, at a further remove from Cohen’s life, but the literary experiments carried on within its pages have an exploratory quality and suggest further developments. By abandoning the form of the novel it seems as though Cohen left something unfinished; experiments usually lead somewhere, even if it’s only to more experiments. Perhaps this is a small complaint against a man with no shortage of artistic achievements to his name. Reading Cohen’s books, however, and reveling in the ingenuousness of his prose, one can’t help but be a little wistful that he didn’t pursue the form further. As Cohen himself might admonish us, however, we should be thankful for what we’ve already got: two groundbreaking novels of the very first order.

How do you feel about Israel?

It seems like a pretty simple question, but any diaspora Jew can tell you that their thoughts on Israel are layered, complex, and emotionally charged. Makom and the New Israel Fund are organizing an event on June 18th in New York City called "Love, Hate, and the Jewish State." Jewcy is cosponsoring this event, and we'll be encouraging panelists and participants in the discussion to continue their dialogue here on the website.

You can learn more about the event here or sign up on Facebook. Below is a video of young Jews discussing their complicated feelings about Israel and social justice - you might recognize a Jewcy contributor or two in the mix.

 

 

The British Jewish community rarely seems to feature on the worldwide Jewish map. It may have been significant a century ago, although probably only then because a handful of its leaders had access to the corridors of power of the British Empire. Today, however, it is seldom the focus of international Jewish attention; in the context of Israel-Diaspora discussions, ‘Diaspora’ tends to be a synonym for America, and the other countries that comprise the Jewish world outside of Israel barely seem to feature in the discourse. Britain is no exception.

To be fair, there is reason for this. The British Jewish community numbered 450,000 at the end of the Second World War, but its population has declined to fewer than 300,000 today, the loss being variously attributed to assimilation, emigration (in part to Israel), and a low birth rate. Arguably, no other comparable community has suffered such numerical decline in the same period. And the numbers only tell part of the story; in his 1985 book Diaspora, the scholar Howard Sachar variously described British Jewish organizational life as “pedestrian,” its cultural life as “somnolent,” its religious-educational life as “exceptionally shallow,” and its religious establishment as “a bore.”

I don’t know if Sachar has visited the UK since that time, but if he were to drop in on us today, I’m not convinced he would issue quite the same report. Visit the leafy north London suburbs of Golders Green and Hendon, and you’ll encounter a growing range of kosher restaurants, creative educational initiatives and innovative organizations that are breathing new life into the community. Come on Shabbat, and you’ll find a mounting array of interesting spiritual possibilities, ranging from the inspirational Orthodox community of Ner Yisroel, the melodic traditional egalitarian community of Assif, and the funky band playing at Finchley Progressive Synagogue’s monthly ‘Shabbat Resouled.’ Come at the right times of year, and you’ll have opportunities to attend Jewish Book Week – an impressive literary festival by anyone’s standards – the Jewish Film Festival, and the real jewel in the community’s crown, Limmud.

The story of Limmud is a truly remarkable one, particularly given Sachar’s rather bleak view of British Jewry a generation ago. Founded in 1980 as a conference for Jewish educators based on the American CAJE model, it has become one of the great international celebrations of Jewish culture and learning. It attracts 2,500 Brick Lane Beigel Bake: One of the last vestiges of the Jewish East End of London. By Drew Eavypeople annually to its December festival, including some of the biggest names in Jewish music, politics and education, and, as its reputation has grown, it has inspired a whole range of Limmud spin-off events in 26 other communities around the world at the last count. In many respects, the success of other Jewish initiatives in Britain and elsewhere can be traced back to it too – a number of people behind some of the more creative endeavours that pepper Jewish life around the world today were initially or at least partially inspired by their own experiences of Limmud. It has even spawned a love child of its own – Limmudfest – an eco-friendly summer Jewish festival that is starting to have a whole unique impact on the community.

Its success can be attributed to a number of key factors. It doesn’t impose any particular version of Judaism onto participants; instead it provides open space for people to celebrate and engage with Judaism on their own terms. It doesn’t differentiate between those who know and those who do not – participants inevitably flock to hear big names, but everyone is encouraged to be both participant and presenter, and to contribute whatever it is they have to the success of the event. It is run almost entirely by volunteers – Limmud is a space for anyone – provided they can garner sufficient support from the team as a whole – to try anything, to push any boundary or to test any theory. In that regard, it’s a profoundly empowering space – the Judaism one encounters there is vibrant, creative and alive precisely because participants are given the opportunity to make it so. And yet, at the same time, Limmud is deeply committed to an implicit set of values that underpin virtually everything it does – community, responsibility, tolerance, mutual respect, openness, diversity – and somehow it creates a space in which everyone seems to instantly and organically understand and embrace those.

Limmud’s example teaches some important lessons about the future of the Jewish People. It demonstrates that it is possible to be a serious Jew without necessarily identifying with any particular denomination or belonging to a formal community. It demonstrates that if we provide an inspiring and empowering space that allows Jews to shape Jewish life and community, they can be trusted to do so in ways that are more creative, more inspiring, and more thoughtful than we could ever have imagined. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates that Jewish creativity can happen anywhere – even in a somnolent, shallow and boring place Manchester Jewish Museum, Cheetham Hill, Manchester. By Eadaoin Flynnlike the Jewish backwater that is (or once was) Britain.

The implication of this final point may well be that the geographically and ideologically-loaded language of ‘Israel-Diaspora’ has become somewhat redundant. The term, which has long been the standardised language of Jewish discourse, clearly differentiates between Israel on the one hand and everywhere else on the other, it merges all Diaspora communities into a singular bloc, and then often reduces that bloc down to its largest component part, the USA.

I don’t reject Israel’s implicit primacy in the duality. It is the centre of the Jewish world, what happens there affects Jews everywhere, and its Jewish religious and historical significance vastly outweighs any claims from any other part of the world. What I question is the duality itself. The Diaspora is not a coherent or cohesive bloc, it cannot and should not be reduced down to a singular entity, and that entity should not be captured or represented by the United States alone. If Jewish creativity can happen anywhere – and Limmud demonstrates that it can – we ought to develop a new kind of language that seeks to include Jewish communities everywhere, recognise their uniqueness, and empower them towards great things.

The language I believe we ought to adopt gives primacy to Jewish people over and above Jewish places, not least because our future may be far less reliant on ‘place’ than we often think. Place is not unimportant – it provides an environment within which Jewish creativity can either flourish or flounder – but ultimately it is the contribution of individuals or small groups of people that will propel us forward. Different places generate different responses in people, and it was precisely the stuffy and drowsy nature of the British Jewish Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in Britaincommunity that prompted a group of British Jews to first create Limmud and then transform it from a small conference into an international phenomenon.

Language influences the way in which we view the world and ultimately shapes policy. The language of Israel-Diaspora diminishes our view of the Diaspora, and turns millions of vibrant, varied and valuable Jews living throughout the world into a singular and amorphous mass. That fails to capture who we are, the nature of our experience, and the possibilities we could create. Change the language, and we might just start to change the results.

Jonathan Boyd is Acting Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London.  A former Jerusalem Fellow at the Mandel Institute in Israel, he is the editor of The Sovereign and the Situated Self: Jewish Identity and Community in the 21^st Century (Profile Books, 2003). This essay is being published in collaboration with  New Jewish Thought .

 

Concern. Apprehension. Suspicion. Mistrust.  Five years ago, it would have been an anathema to associate such words with an Israeli government’s attitude towards its closest ally, the United States. But, as the momentum has built towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s first meeting with US President Barack Obama, so have the keywords associated with the Israeli leadership’s criticisms of the Obama Administration’s policies in the Middle East.

Things didn’t used to be this way. While Israel and the US have certainly sparred over the years, sometimes quite fiercely, the level of skepticism displayed towards the present US administration and its diplomatic initiatives by the current Israeli government has at times exhibited signs of contempt. Unfortunately, this makes sense.  The two governments could not be more ideologically distinct from one another.

Rather than belabor the obvious differences between the respective leaderships – for example, their disagreements over how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program – it would be far more productive to pick apart the significance of Israel’s official posturing, and what it might mean. Why? Because the Israeli side of this story is the real story here. Not that of the Obama Administration and its breaks, thus far, with the policies of its predecessors.

Irrespective of how things actually turn out, Israel’s repeated indications of its displeasure with the Americans gives voice to a desire to be far more independent from the United States than Israel actually is. That Israel has become more beholden to American interests and support in recent years, particularly during the Bush era, goes without question. One of the ironies of President Bush’s much criticized ‘hands off’ approach towards the peace process was his government’s simultaneous subordination of Israeli to American strategic interests.

Whatever was good for America in the Middle East was also good for Israel, and vice versa. Two democracies, yet one purpose, as the logic went. That Israel found itself able to justify consistently lining up behind Bush, even when the results were disastrous – such as during the Second Lebanon War – is one of the sad ironies of the situation that evolved at this time. That’s why present Israeli protestations against the Obama Administration seem both so understandable, and also so deeply misplaced.

On the one hand, they exhibit justifiable, if wrongly purposed, expressions of Israeli anxiety about having to rely so strongly on the United States for its security. Considering how badly Washington managed its own affairs in the Middle East since the Second World War, let alone between 9/11 and 2009, and one can understand why. The Americans have consistently shown either a remarkable lack of local savoir-faire, or a frustratingly self-serving and destructive regional policy.

Yet, for Israel to use its differences with this administration’s initiatives in the Mideast as an excuse to vent forty plus years of its frustration with American policy in the region is a non-starter. Not just because it does not seem to have any effect on the Americans. As the US has repeatedly shown, it can be highly independent of foreign opinion. Even that of Israel. Rather, because what the Americans have said to date about what they want to do in the region is the exact opposite of what they’ve always done, that has led to so many disasters, including those that have impacted Israel.

Israel has many reasons to feel ambivalent about Iran. Since the end of the Cold War, the Iranians have backed and supported Israel’s two primary enemies, Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as positioned themselves as their own military adversary, albeit one located much further away. There is no question about it: Iran is indeed an antagonist. But to use the continued threat that Iran poses in such a calculating way, as both a means to fight American policy initiatives aimed at containing Iran, and as a way of de-prioritizing resolving the Palestinian question is wrong.

Not only does it tie too many enormous foreign policy objects together incorrectly. By turning the Iranian nuclear threat, peace with the Palestinians, and the Obama's Middle East policy into a single problem, Israel runs the risk of transforming the American government into a synonymous negative. Or, to be precise, to make indistinguishable Obama from Ahmadinejad from Meshal. They all become reduced, or so the excesses of the rhetoric suggest, into different instances of the same threat to Israel.

If there is something seriously troubling about the Israeli government’s disagreements with the Obama Administration’s Mideast policy, this is it. What makes it so loud, so to speak, so much a part of the debate about what to do about peace in the Middle East, is the nagging sense this imparts that there will never be any peace for Israel. That, no matter what we say or do, we will always find ways to help isolate ourselves above and beyond what the rest of the world has done to us already.

As published in the Jerusalem Report, May 18, 2009

With the maiden visit of newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington set for May 18, signs of an immanent clash between U.S. President Barack Obama and the hardline Israeli leader abound.

While both leaders will look to find common ground, papering over differences with diplomatic formulas, the rift may be unavoidable. The impending tension recalls previous encounters between Likud leaders and U.S. presidents from both parties.  This time the tremors will center not only on the Palestinian fault line, but also on Iran.

Netanyahu views the development of an Iranian uranium enrichment capacity as an existential threat to Israel that must be squelched. He is certain that Obama's "dialogue" with Iran is bound to fail, rendering inevitable an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear sites. An Israeli attack will be preceded by more punishing economic penalties on Iran of the kind mooted lately on Capitol Hill, and backed by AIPAC, the hawkish pro-Israel lobby. But sanctions-on-steroids are unlikely to blunt Iran's quest to join the nuclear club, serving only to clear away the final hurdles blocking a final push for preemptive Israeli military action.

Obama's way represents nothing less than a revolution in the Middle East: not the stillborn new Middle East the Bush Administration imagined could be midwifed by the force of American and Israeli arms, but a new order that will arise from the centripetal forces unleashed by a political earthquake. How does Obama hope to set in motion this tectonic realignment? Reading the tea leaves, one can divine an unfolding pattern whose contours will only be more fully revealed when Obama delivers a major speech to the Arab and Muslim worlds in Egypt on June 4, following meetings with Netanyahu, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.  

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Benny Morris is the picture of the contemporary Israeli intelligentsia. In Morris’ work, we find the disappointed politics of the old Labor Party, once dominant in Israeli politics, now consigned to barely 10% of the Knesset.

In Morris one can also see the frustrated idealism of the Meretz party, once the conscience of the mainstream left and progressive activists to balance Labor’s mainstream pragmatism.

Morris, like his country, was born in 1948. He was a paratrooper in the army, and in 1969 was wounded during Israel’s war of attrition with Egypt. He worked for twelve years as a reporter for the Jerusalem Post, which was at the time a major left-leaning newspaper in Israel.

The historian again saw action as a reservist in Lebanon in 1982, but refused to serve just six years later in the West Bank, and was jailed for his stance. That same year, he gained national fame with his groundbreaking study, The Birth of the Palestinians Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.

Through the early 90s, Morris was regarded as an ultra-leftist and an icon of Post-Zionism. But as the Oslo years wore on and hopes for peace dimmed from the pinnacle they reached with the Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, like so many Israelis , Morris grew more pessimistic and disillusioned.

With the Al-Aksa Intifada’s violence leaving hopes shattered during the early years of this decade, Morris started speaking much more about “Arab mendacity” and the desire of Palestinians and all Arabs to sacrifice everything for the sake of destroying Israel. This was most evident in a 2004 interview in Ha’aretz, where Morris criticized David Ben-Gurion for not expelling all the Arabs from the nascent state of Israel, among other things.

His newest book, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict illustrates the scope of Benny Morris’ work.

Benny MorrisMorris is an outstanding researcher. He digs down and assembles facts in minute detail. But as a polemicist, and in general as a thinker, he is not particularly adept. When he sticks to the facts, he has shown himself to be remarkably skilled at presenting them in an even-handed and thorough fashion, even when they do not support a view he holds. But when drawing conclusions or taking leaps of deductive reasoning, he tends to fall very short, with enormous, even prejudiced, bias coming through very sharply.

This too is well illustrated in his latest book. One State has three sections. The middle one which, though also flawed, is by far the best, details the history of both one- and two-state ideologies and strategies, from early bi-nationalism through to present-day diplomacy on the Oslo/Annapolis track.  

That history is not encouraging, with one solution after another being obstructed or rejected by one side or the other, sometimes both. But for Morris, the history is really two histories: one of pragmatic acceptance of partition of the land of Palestine/Eretz Yisrael on the part of the Jews, and the other the constant rejection of coexistence by Arabs.

Morris sets the tone in his first chapter, a review of the current rise of one-state thinking, largely among Palestinians and their supporters. He quotes, at some length, from Rashid Khalidi’s very worthy book The Iron Cage, accompanied by a flat statement that, despite Khalidi’s assertion to the contrary, Khalidi supports a single-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Morris offers no evidence for this assertion. He simply states it, based only on Khalidi’s exposition of the one-state position—an exposition that is clearly critical of the stance. And, one might add, an exposition that Morris himself would almost immediately imitate in this same book.

As Morris moves into his history of bi-nationalist ideas, notions of federated states and the various plans to partition Palestine, he works to trace a line from the earliest Palestinian and Arab opposition to Zionism directly and consistently through to today’s Palestinian proposals for full statehood and an end to the conflict. Morris, in his attempt to draw that direct line, makes no attempt to adjust his reading for circumstances. Thus, he sees the absolute rejectionism of Zionism by the Arab world before 1948 in the same light as he does the PLO’s gradual acceptance of a two-state settlement through the 1970s and 80s. For him, it cannot be possible that the Palestinians have come to accept the two-state solution as the only option, despite still believing that this is an unjust solution.

It seems that for Morris, Palestinian acceptance of a two-state solution can only be sincere if they recognize the legitimacy of the Zionist movement. That hardly seems a realistic standard. No Palestinian I have ever encountered, including the many who completely acknowledge that Jews have a historic, cultural and religious connection to the land, endorses a two-state solution on that basis. They do so because they recognize it is the only feasible solution.

This shouldn’t be such a leap. Morris himself has documented the fact that the acceptance by the Yishuv leadership, under David Ben-Gurion, of the Peel partition plan of 1937 was a tactic, and that Ben-Gurion never intended to settle for that small patch of land. It was a pragmatic decision. This is true today as well, for a great many Israelis—they don’t want to give up the West Bank, and certainly not any part of Jerusalem, but most remain willing to do so in order to end the conflict.

It is very telling that Morris’ analysis of the decline of the Oslo process makes no mention of the massive expansion of settlements. He pays a great deal of attention to the issue of expunging parts of the PLO charter (the amendments made have never been deemed sufficient by Israel) and the ongoing terrorism in the 90s. But he sees no role in the failure of the peace process for the massive explosion in the number of settlements and settlers in those years or the sharp decline in the Palestinian standard of living. This was due, in part, to the Palestinian Authority’s own corruption. However, the most direct factors were the increasing restrictions placed on Palestinian freedom of movement due to the settlements and their accompanying bypass roads, combined with the elimination of most of the jobs in Israel for Palestinians, as Israelis shifted to employing foreign guest workers from the Philippines, and Thailand, among other places, for menial labor.

Morris offers no alternative to the one-state or two-state solutions. He only suggests the revival of an old idea of subsuming, either by confederation or annexation, a Palestinian entity under Jordanian rule. The notion is far from the table, as it is an option that no one but a few Israelis desire. Beyond that, and not surprisingly, there is no constructive thought here.

In the final chapter, Morris does make some very important points about the problems with a two-state solution. The geography of partition has always been a major issue, one that has generally been understated. From the Peel Commission partition plan in 1937 to the Clinton Parameters in 2000, when one actually looks at the proposals on a map, they certainly don’t look like very practical alternatives. Also, the process of building an independent Palestinian economy is going to take a very long time, and even if successful, that economy is not likely to be on a par with Israel’s. And that will always be the comparison.

There are other problems with a two-state solution, and they’re getting worse every day.  Morris demonstrates one of the biggest: the anger and bigotry that decades of conflict have spawned. One example: “Israeli Jewish society remains largely secular, with Western, democratic values predominating. This can hardly dovetail with the authoritarian and religious values of Palestinian Arab society…”

Morris includes in his division Israel’s Palestinian citizens, pointing out the greater crime rates among Arabs than Jews within Israel’s borders. He conveniently ignores the universally accepted correlation between wealth and social status with crime rates and instead attributes the difference to the distinction between the Jewish culture and the Arab.

There are real reasons on the ground that a two-state solution is a lot more difficult than many people believe it to be. And I certainly agree that any one-state formulation is a non-starter. But Morris demonstrates what might be the greatest obstacle to any resolution: the irrational, bigoted hatred of the other. For him, there is no such thing as a trustworthy Arab.

Too many Israelis and Palestinians, as well as their supporters throughout the world, hold views of this type. Morris typifies the Israeli version. We’ve all heard a great deal about the Palestinian one, in places like the Hamas charter, or the Muslim one that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad displayed again so well in Geneva a few weeks ago. Until that mindset is overcome, hope is, indeed, in very short supply.

It was one of the most curious ommissions I'd ever read. Citing an Italian analyst's contention that Silvio Berlusconi is a "non-ideological authoritarian", a respected British news source, well-known for its dislike of the Italian leader, seemed to miss the point, at exactly the same time that Berlusconi was at his most ideological. Following ten days of media frenzy over the collapse of Berlusconi's marriage to Veronica Lario, The Economist had chosen to overlook the Prime Minister's increasingly open xenohobia in favor of focusing on his rising popularity amongst Italians. Reiterating his criticisms of multiculturalism, supporting a Milanese politician's proposal to reserve seats on public transit for "Italians only" last week, Italy's richest man is turning out to be every bit as conventional in his dispositions as one might surmise.

Nevertheless, its a forgivable error, especially for those who follow Italian politics, and can supply their own background information. In ever-greater numbers, Italy's voters are granting their controversial prime minister their support. How this could be the case, in a country in which over seven percent of the population is made up of immigrants, (and in which nearly ten percent of its GDP is created by them, as well) is subject to question. The obvious answer, of course, is that their rising visibility and importance to the country's economy is  stirring resentment at a time of decline, and the country's leadership is stirring the pot to deflect responsibility. As an editorial in the same edition of The Economist states, Italy's gross domestic product is supposed to shrink by 4.4 percent this fiscal year, and public debt will rise above 120% of Italy's GDP by 2011. If that's not a recipe for problems, little else is. And that's just scratching the surface.

"We are immigrants, not delinquents." Spanish language graffiti, Milan. Flying back to Milan from Tel Aviv last night, I was seated next to an Israeli software engineer, who told me that he thought Berlusconi's approach to Italy's "Muslim issue" was appropriate. "The Italians are faced with the same problem with Jihad as we are," he said. "One day, Europe will be dominated by these people, and something has to be done about it." Replying that my wife and I lived in a largely Arab immigrant neighborhood in the city, I argued that it was hard to see how Europe wasn't manufacturing many of these problems itself. Noting the presence of armed troops patrolling the streets here, driving camouflage Land Rovers through Arab areas in town, cradling loaded rifles in their arms, I said, "Whatever justification the security forces might feel it has to do so, at the same time its hard not to see such displays as provocative. "Bemet?" the engineer replied, in Hebrew. "They carry their weapons openly like that?"

Unsurprisingly, there is an air of familiarity to such exercises, one which Israelis know only too well. "Yes," I said in response. "The parallels are definitely there." In relaying this anecdote, I was reminded of a guy who used to frequent Old Jerusalem , my favorite Arab restaurant in San Francisco. Six foot two, with a consistently cleanly shaven head, whenever he'd put in an appearance, the fellow would inevitably waltz up to the counter and say to whoever was behind it in Hebrew with a big smile, "Nu, akol beseder?" (Everything okay here?) Not everyone who works there speaks Hebrew, with the exception of maybe one or two employees. I recall a friend remarking that this guy could "never get off patrol", even though he was "in San Francisco, not Nablus," on duty. I don't even know if the Palestinian owner of the restaurant assumed this was some kind of unconscious role replay. Mohamed was certainly accomodating enough. Besides, he'd grown up in Jordan.

Protest against inner city military deployment. Via Padova, Milan. "I love visiting Italy," said the software engineer, drawing me out of my memories. "The last time we vacationed there, we went to the Dolomites, and spent our time hiking in the mountains. You know, they speak another language up there? It sounds like a dialect of German. It makes sense, I guess. They are so close to Austria!" "Yes," I replied. "Italy is a much more linguistically diverse place than most people realize. Every morning I walk out of my apartment, I hear as much Arabic as I do Italian." Though I probably should have mentioned it at the time, I meant to tell the engineer that I hear Spanish, Tamil, and, quite frequently, Tagalog too. Indeed, the area of Milan where my wife and I now live is just about the most linguistically diverse place I've ever resided. One which, in its depth and complexity, could easily confound anyone raised on the idea that Italy is monocultural.

This is the first installment of a weekly column written from Europe

In his film Voices from El-Sayed, Oded Adomi Leshem tackles the often-neglected issue of Israel’s unrecognized Bedouin villages. Contrary to stereotype, Israeli Bedouins lead a sedentary, non-nomadic life. 170,000 Bedouins reside in the Negev Desert, in the south of Israel, in some 46 villages and small towns. It is rarely noted, however, that between 40% and 50% live in one of 36 unrecognized settlements.

The term “unrecognized villages” refers to settlements that the Israeli government refuses to recognize as ‘legal.’ Accordingly, they are not marked on any commercially available maps, and are denied state and municipal services, such as connections to the electrical grid, water mains, and telephone network. These communities are excluded them from health, education and transportation planning as well (scores of unrecognized Bedouin and Palestinian villages do not receive any such services). It should be further noted that none of these villages are new. Some predate the state of Israel, while others are decades old, established as a result of government attempts to resettle Bedouins in these same areas.

Leshem does not take the all too-obvious and well-trodden route of recounting the history of these communities, tracing the predicament of their residents to the discriminatory policies of successive Israeli governments. All of them, Labor and Likud without exception, from the establishment of the State in 1948 to the present day have continuously refused to acknowledge the rights of Palestinian and Bedouin residents to the very land on which they reside. Yet, neither do the director nor his interviewees point fingers either. Rather, Leshem explores what life in such a village entails for its residents. He seeks to show the friction between the lives Bedouins in such unrecognized villages lead, and of life in “Israel proper,” that is, in a society that presents itself as part of the developed, “first” world, one that prides itself for being at the forefront of industrial and technological innovation.

Leshem thus turns to the village of El-Sayed (alternatively spelled as el-Sayyid), a village that went unrecognized until 2006 and that is located about 11 miles east of Beersheba, on the road to Arad. The reputation of this village lies, however, not in its troubled relationship with the Israeli government, but, rather, in the fact that it serves as a home to a community with arguably the highest percentage of deafness in the world: about 5% of the villagers are deaf, 50 times the average rate in the general population. Given the extraordinarily high rate of hearing loss, deaf people in this community are fully integrated, and are neither marginalized nor considered abnormal. Indeed, the villagers have developed a unique sign language, spoken by all villagers, hearing and hearing impaired alike, which has attracted the attention of scholars.

Usurprisingly, Voices centers on the question of communication (or lack thereof), not only between hearing and hearing impaired, but also between Israeli Jews and Bedouins, between health providers and clients, between employers and employees, between academics and laypersons, and, obviously, between “recognized” and “unrecognized” citizens of Israel. It is here that the director distinguishes himself, for whereas much of this communication is dependent upon translators and mediators, Leshem masters his subjects’ two languages: Arabic alongside sign language.

The significance of this gesture is huge. As enthusiastic as many Israeli directors may be in exploring Palestinian and Bedouin lives in Israel, few have the linguistic skills to dub their interlocutors without the mediation of a third language (commonly English, if Palestinian or Bedouin interviewees do not know or refuse to speak Hebrew,) or of a translator. This is all the more true for those directors who have featured deaf subjects. In many films, there are oftetimes three parties to every communication, a fact that underscores the alienation and the distance of a filmmaker from their interviewee. Leshem, on the other hand, converses and interrogates the people of El Sayed directly. Thus his interviews present a flow of language, uninterrupted.

Voices soundtrack avoids music altogether and is instead made of speaking voices (when auditory language is used), from natural background noises, and from long silent sequences. It thus accentuates the transition between the different types of sound, making them all the more audible and punctuates—so Leshem says—the experience of hearing and not-hearing. While this approach is not altogether original, it does produce a haunting effect during the interviews done using sign language. Undubbed, we are allowed to hear the background noises alongside the gesticulations of the interlocutors, which are commonly covered by the noise of auditory language.

More specifically, Voices from El-Sayed explores the interaction of this unique community with the outside world. The film revolves around the friction between the villagers’ unique life Voices from El-Sayed Trailercircumstances and the assumptions that the Israeli state has about what it means to live in a modern country. Nothing in this context highlights this friction more than the attitude of the state to deafness, which it brands as an anomaly and an impairment to be corrected via technology, even eliminated through pre-birth detection and abortion. Thus, Leshem documents the initial encounter of the villagers with the Cochlear implant operation. The procedure, which is designed to provide a sense of sound to deaf and severely hard of hearing people, is included in the health coverage guaranteed by the government, and as Israeli citizens the villagers—notwithstanding the uncertain legal status of their settlement—are entitled to have it at no cost to themselves.

Surprisingly, this technology is not unanimously welcome in the village. Some of Leshem’s interviewees contend not only that they should not strive to alter the way in which they were born, but that a deaf person is actually in a better state than someone who is not hearing impaired. “A hearing person shouts all day,” says Juma, “and then his head hurts from all the noise. Being deaf is great. It’s quiet in our house.” Juma is very doubtful when another villager, Salim El-Sayed, decides to have his two year-old son undergo the procedure. A Bedouin family, Juma argues, does not have the discipline to go through the daily audiological training required to make the implant effective.

Yet primarily, Voices from El-Sayed seems to suggest, the friction between its Bedouin subjects and Israeli society is the result of the myopia of the state and of its “recognized” residents. A group of doctors and nurses from the Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba visits the village to introduce the procedure: notwithstanding the great proximity of the village to Beersheba, and, similarly, notwithstanding their familiarity with the Bedouin population, which relies on the services provided by the medical center, this is their very first visit to such a village; as shall become clear, they are completely oblivious to the discrepancies between the environment in which health services are provided in Israel and this specific context.

In a touching scene, Salim El-Sayed, his wife and son are at the doctor’s office immediately following the operation. They are given the external part of the implant for the first time, and are instructed as to how to operate it. They are told to charge it whenever the device is not being used, particularly at night. Yet, as noted, El Sayed is not connected to the electric grid. The villagers derive their electricity from small generators that they can only operate for several hours at a time, mainly in the afternoon and early evening. Doctors and parents are likewise surprised and baffled by this unexpected obstacle. Though they have visited the village and have been told of its circumstances, regardless of their good intentions, none of the healthcare workers note that the Bedouins’ limited access to electricity makes them incapable of taking full advantage of their services.

Voices from El Sayed is distributed by Go2Films

Yesterday, Israel celebrated Yom Ha'atzmaut, Independence Day. Across the country, people gathered in celebration. There was singing, dancing, drinking (this may very well have preceded the singing and dancing), fire-works, and everyone's favorite Israeli musicians. It was a time to let loose and for a short 24 hours, ignore reality. But when the smoke cleared and the cacophony subsided one couldn't help but acknowledge that even now, 61 years after the birth of the modern state of Israel, it's not easy being Israeli.

People often comment that the average Israeli looks about 10 years older than the average American of the same age. Granted the anti-smoking campaign hasn't caught on in Israel and people drive as if they're annoyed that the government would dare to inconvenience them with traffic laws, but these can't be the only reasons for the disparity.

Israelis look so much older than they should because their country is surrounded by governments and terror-organizations-in the case of Hamas and Hizbollah these are one and the same-hell bent on, "driving the Jews into the sea" or to quote the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "wiping Israel off the map." To the south west and north, respectively, are Hamas and Hizbollah, both trained and funded by Iran. To the North-East is hostile Syria, which also backs Hizbollah and hosts Hamas' current leader, the exiled Khaled Meshal.

The West Bank, on Israel's eastern front, is run by the Western-backed Palestinian Authority, whose leader Mahmoud Abbas made a speech on Tuesday expressly refusing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state: "A Jewish state, what is that supposed to mean?" asked Abbas. "...I don't accept it and I say so publicly." Abbas, who at one point denied the existence of the Holocaust, is considered "a moderate." No, it doesn't take a pessimistic outlook on life to conclude that for Israel-the one Jewish country in the world-the prospect of peace is pretty bleak.

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Is a memory something you have or something you've lost? - Woody Allen (Spoken by Gena Rowlands (as Marion) in ‘Another Woman')

 

Today we think of who we do not have and why, and then what that lack demands of us.

Tomorrow, about how we celebrate being alive to meet those demands.

Today is Memorial Day in Israel, honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terror, observed here a day before Independence Day. The connection is essential since it is widely recognized that without the former, celebrating the latter would be impossible, while always hoping that one day, this will not be the case. That there will be no more names on next year's list of the fallen. It is, in other words, a sacred day we wish with all our hearts we didn't need to observe, and in fact grapple with its necessity all the time.

Here's something I wrote about potential loss and war when my husband was commanding an APC in Lebanon II. I was essentially the least supportive war wife ever, because I didn't believe in the war. I later learned, from the Disney franchise of all places, that Hassan Nasrallah was counting on people like me to behave exactly as I did. (What does Disney have to do with the IDF and Hezbollah? Think Mufasa / Scar / Simba / Pridelands / Hakuna Matata / Circle of Life... Or just read the essay.)

In any event, Israel is not quite Western and also has a very small population - death by war is not something distant and abstract, since everyone has either lost someone or knows someone who has. As such, there are no Memorial Day sales and no Memorial Day home games and no Memorial Day picnics. There are, instead (not in addition), countless public ceremonies, school observances, lots of sad TV documentaries (and little else on) and public moments of silence when traffic stops all along the nation's highways. It's not a case where some of the country mourns its fallen sons and daughters and some of the country shops or watches baseball.

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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been a focus of media coverage throughout the world for decades. Yet, despite (or perhaps because of) widespread media attention in America, Americans often view this conflict from a distance, isolated from the painful reality by vast oceans and only a vague understanding of the participants’ motives. We often do not see that this conflict is actually an everyday struggle between real people, with names and faces never acknowledged by us. Palestinian artists, for example, have largely remained voiceless in the outside world, unable to find a forum through which to share their gifts. Even the most talented Palestinian writers go unnoticed, buried under silence. For this reason, it is such a joy to read Adina Hoffman’s biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammed Ali, My Happiness Bears to Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century. Recognizing the need to share Palestinian artists with the world, Hoffman has chosen Ali (known as Taha throughout the book), a close family friend, as the subject of her biography.

As a Jewish American writer living in Israel, and as a friend of Taha, Hoffman offers a unique view. Hoffman’s friendship with Taha allows her to create a much more personalized biography than is typically seen. She draws the reader into her own internal struggles as she attempts to find truth within the multitude of facts, perspectives, and emotions. Taha’s life has been marked by countless battles and horrors since the inception of Israel. He recalls each conflict to Hoffman, describing the deaths and poverty that have marked his family’s history. Because Taha’s account of events often sharply differs from those of Israeli Jews, Hoffman must strive to find truths within these conflicting perspectives. She tells the reader of her own confusion and guilt in placing herself within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hoffman knows that there is no easy truth to be found—in believing one side of the story, she is automatically forced to disregard the standpoint of her friend. These internal struggles serve to exemplify the helplessness the two nations feel in coming to understand and trust one another. It is because of Hoffman’s friendship with Taha that she is able to create a candid, thoughtful exploration of Taha’s works and their broader cultural context. Hoffman succeeds impressively, crafting a heart-wrenching portrayal of an amazing, humble, good-humored artist forced to live in the heart of an often oppressive and war-torn country.

Taha was born in 1931 in a Palestinian village, Saffuriyya, which was later destroyed by the Israeli army. As a Palestinian born before Israel’s independence, every significant step in his life has been influenced by the Jewish and Arab battles throughout his homeland. These cultural tensions subtly influence his art. For example, in “The Falcon,” Taha writes of a songbird’s death, using the bird’s terror as a broader cultural symbol. Taha writes: “Massacres and cities / were gathered there in its gaze. / [. . .] / That small bird’s fear / cannot possibly be / its alone! / [. . .] / The fear of that small bird / [. . .] / cannot be fathomed except / as the fear of the flock as a whole.”

The surface level of this poem concerns a viper killing a songbird. However, as is typical in Taha’s work, beneath that simple subject lies the larger themes of pain and fear. Although Taha rarely writes explicitly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he imbues each poem with painful cultural relevance. In relating each poem to the reader, Hoffman elegantly entwines Taha’s poetry with her own perceptive exploration of each piece. Because of Hoffman’s deft analysis, the reader is able to appreciate Taha’s cultural anger and frustration as well as his humor and joy through Cole, Hijazi, and Levin’s translations. Taha’s emotional complexity can be seen in one example of his poetry, when he describes the “hatred” he feels “after the rape / of the light of morning’s laughter,” and expresses his pain and rage at the Israeli domination of his people. Yet, after this painful, enraged moment, Taha shifts the poem’s tone, focusing on the ways that “the laughter / of a child” makes him become a happy fool, forgetting the conflicts and recognizing the joy in his life. Taha uses his art as a lens through which he examines his own complex emotional reactions to these conflicting emotions.

Hoffman also embraces this goal, focusing her biography not on historical events, but rather on “how he had seen it: to try, in other words, to convey the way such cataclysmic historical events look through the eyes of one exceptional man.” In Hoffman’s hands, Taha’s story simultaneously becomes both his own unique tale, and a microcosm for more universal experiences. As Taha describes, “In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But [there are] suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and [these] together, make . . . Palestine and Israel.” By focusing on the emotional complexities of his life, Taha’s poetry speaks to the reader through its themes of pain, hope, and humanity.

While Hoffman creates a powerful portrayal of Taha’s life and art, there are moments within the text when she seems to take on too much. Hoffman attempts to incorporate a broader national history and an analysis of Palestinian poetic movements throughout the text. As a result, there are passages within the story where she loses the reader, buried under a multitude of facts, dates, and names. At these points, Hoffman abandons the most fascinating element of the biography—her relationship with Taha. Luckily, these moments of dissonance are rare. For the majority of the biography, Hoffman skillfully portrays the cultural tensions that she and Taha must navigate. This emotionally honest portrayal of two people surviving amidst conflict makes Hoffman’s book an essential addition to the sparse Western literary corpus devoted to real people bridging the divide between Israel and Palestine.

Renee Chase, a former teacher, is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Denver.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite books was “Tintin in Tibet”, a rollicking tale of how the tufted one treks through the Himalayas in order to rescue his pal Chang, the sole survivor of a plane crash. Published in 1959, the same year that Chinese forces crushed the Tibetan uprising, the book was not just a breathtaking introduction to the perils of mountaineering. It was instrumental in establishing an emotional bond between western readers and the Tibetan people. Indeed, the Dalai Lama recognized as much when he gave the book an award three years ago.

You could reasonably assume that of all the myriad pursuits available to humanity, mountaineering is one which has an obvious affinity with the Tibetan cause. So what are we to make of the news that a mountaineering equipment cooperative in Vancouver is considering a ban not on Chinese products, but Israeli ones?

Reports the JTA:

“The Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC) will likely propose the motion April 30 at its annual general meeting in Vancouver, the Vancouver Sun reported.

Members of the Vancouver Teachers for Peace and Global Education, many of whom are members of the co-op, will likely introduce the motion.

The chain sells seamless underwear and a hydration system for hikers and bikers produced in Israel.”

I looked at some of these products on the coop’s website. They do sell a range of materials produced in Israel. They also - look at the bottom of this page - sell quite a few products made in the country that has ravaged Tibet for the last fifty years.

I’m not, by the way, advocating a boycott of Chinese goods. I’m just pointing out that double standards like these - coming from people who climb mountains and advocate “global education” - are almost comical. As the Calgary Herald says, “if MEC members can stomach bounding over the West Coast’s foggy trails in Chinese-made togs while the Chinese are harvesting the organs of the Falun Gong, what’s the problem with seamless Israeli underwear?”

Captain Haddock would have one part of the answer. It’s because these boycotters are troglodytes and ectoplasms.

 

UPDATE: I'm happy to report that MEC's management is rejecting the boycott proposal. Here is an excerpt from an email sent by MEC's Janet Stollar. Frankly, her words speak volumes about the malice of the boycott movement. 

I want to clearly state that MEC is NOT considering boycotting Israeli suppliers. Any information that you have read on the Internet or elsewhere on the subject of MECs potential from Israel has been written by individuals that have no association with our Co-op, other than potentially being counted amongst our 3 million members. They do not speak for MEC, nor do they represent our point of view on the political situation in Israel (We have no point of view on the Israel/Palestinian conflict).
MEC chooses suppliers based on their ability to make MEC-brand outdoor clothing and gear to meet our rigorous ethical sourcing requirements, quality and value expectations, and technical specifications. These are the criteria we use to make decisions as to where our goods are produced and we will continue to choose suppliers on this basis.

February 08, 2009

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Man on a Tel Aviv street (Mor Levy) 

I'm in the car, and we're travelling along, Zahi, Karim and me, up to Yafa cafe. We've just been to a solidarity meeting with Arabs and Jews where they read poetry in Arabic and Hebrew, and people from the Jaffa community came. It started with a minute's silence for those who died in Gaza. Mohammad, who was leading, had to stop two or three times because he couldn't talk, because he cried.

Jews and Arabs stood in a line on the stage and held each other's hands. System Ali rapped their poetry without music, to mourn. 

And now we're going for something to eat in Yafa cafe.

What no car, Zahi? What happened to your car? Zahi always used to come by and pick me up in a little white car. I don't remember the make. He'd come by when he didn't need to, even, just to be nice. Like, if I could walk there, if it wasn't even far, he'd come by just to take care of me. But anyway, now we're in Karim's car, working out why Zahi doesn't have his.

'Did you write it off?' I ask, turning to Zahi in the back.

'No – it was stolen.' Karim answers for him. Zahi's slow off the mark, he must be tired.

'Stolen–'

'Yeah, stolen. By some Jews.'

What do you mean some Jews? I don't say this. Because I remember the other day, the first day I met Karim, in fact, when we were sitting down to a dinner at Yafa cafe. A dinner with music and oud, and everyone gets up to dance, like Michel the owner and a beautiful girl. And Zahi's asking me if I recognise that kind of dance, if I know what it means, and I say, Zahi, you know some things we have everywhere, and he's, oh you have Arabs in London? And I say, no Zahi – some things are universal. Like what? OK, do I have to spell it out? Some things are universal, like sex.

Karim's to my right at the table, and opposite there's this Jewish woman with very short hair. It's grey and short, and she's always smiling with crinkly bits around her eyes. I think she's the only Jewish woman there, apart from me. This woman asks if we'll light the Hanukah candles. Michel looks around, and there's a menorah, but candles are nowhere to be found.

'Never mind.' Karim leans into me. 'Let's burn some Jews.'

I'm like, what? I don't know what to say. I need some time. Let's burn some Jews.He has a merry twinkle, the kind of goatee you'd find in Shoreditch, and American hip-hop clothes. 

The conversation has moved on slightly. The Jewish woman's spooning up kubbe and smiling again. And I still don't know what to say. OK, now I do. 'I think you meant that as a joke,' I tell Karim, 'but I found it offensive.'

'Why? Are you Jewish?' he says.

'I am, but even if I wasn't, you know, I'd still say it's wrong.'

'But I think it's funny!' the Jewish woman says. 'Don't you see? The power imbalance. Between our two groups. It's funny because of that!'

OK. So you feel better if you get the shit ripped out of you. Somehow, that way, you pay.

Back in the car with Karim, and he's still on his Jewish trip. I'm kind of tired. 'Listen,' I tell him, 'don't do that. You know it feels bad.'

'Jews – yeah, Jews are everywhere. They stole his car.'

I turn my face away. We're still driving, up Yehuda Hayamit. 'Enough,' Zahi says, but he's laughing and it's not enough, yet, for Karim.

'There's a Jew in the car! I can smell a Jew.' He's staring hard ahead. 'Smells like a Jew in the car.'

I slam out as soon as we arrive. Karim follows me and we're both pacing up the hill. We go into the restaurant and sit down – there are five of us at the table. Four men, and me.

'You're not still mad at him, are you?' Zahi asks.

'Why? What happened? What did he say?' Abed wants to know.

So I'm sitting here at this table with these guys in the restaurant where they always go, and I have to say it. 'We were driving in Karim's car, and he told me ... he said ... Smells like a Jew.'

The whole table bursts out laughing. Abed's laughing. Zahi's laughing, Mustafa's laughing. Karim looks around, then bursts out laughing too. I'm just sitting there and I really wish to be swallowed up by the ground. Instead, I push back my chair, and I go to the bathroom and all of it, Gaza, Jericho, East Jerusalem, the death and the killing, all of this hate, swells out of me, and I cry.

 

The reading and discussion of Benedictus, by Israeli playwright Motti Lerner, was an appropriate highlight of Staging the Middle East , a conference held at the University of California, Riverside in April. Produced collaboratively by an international ensemble, Benedictus imagines the 48 hours preceding a US attack on Iran, and explores the relationship of two childhood friends—an Israeli arms dealer and an Iranian politician—as they engage in secret meetings to prevent the assault. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Benedictus is the story behind its conception: a true story of individuals overcoming their own stereotypes for a shared love of theater, and the desire to see their cultures represented authentically on stage, together.

In Benedictus, the Israeli arms dealer, Asher Motahedeh, and an Iranian politician, Ali Kermani, meet in a Rome monastery to try to and prevent the attack. Motahedeh, who spent his childhood in Iran and was forced to flee following the 1979 revolution, wants Kermani to save his sister, who was already married with children at the time of the Islamic Republic, and still lives in Iran.

Motahedeh harbors complicated feelings toward his birth country; he reflects, “It was our revolution too...The revolution became anti-Semitic.” Kermani wants Motahedeh to persuade his American contacts in Washington to postpone the attack and endorse Kermani’s run for political office. It’s a possible deal, but both men wait for the other to carry out their end of the bargain first, because neither (for good reason) fully trusts the other’s word. The result is a stalemate that Kermani sums up eloquently, “Braver people would have already stopped this madness.  But there aren’t braver people here. Only us.”

The team behind the play included Mahmood Karimi-Hakak , an Iranian-American director, Roberta Levitow , a Jewish-American dramaturge, Daniel Michaelson, a Jewish-American designer, and Torange Yeghiazarian , an Iranian-American artistic director of Armenian descent. The group developed an obvious closeness from working together, and everyone showed up for the conference—some having travelled from as far as the East Coast and Tel Aviv. But it took a lot of effort for this closeness to develop. Lerner and Karimi-Hakak spoke with great candor of the preconceptions each brought to their first meeting.

Motti LernerAs a prelude to developing Benedictus, the artistic collaborators rented a house and lived together for a week. The initial atmosphere was tense. The attempt even to hear each other, let alone understand each other’s narratives, was “emotionally exhausting.” “I had a vision of what an Israeli looks like,” Karimi-Hakak told the audience of the play, “[With] a couple of warheads on his head aimed at Iran. I went to fight.” Yeghiazarian explained how she had been raised with the idea that Israel is an extension of the European colonialism of the nineteenth century, and therefore should not exist. Naturally, Lerner felt wounded by this notion, and doubtful that a creative collaboration could ever be possible: “The idea that my existence is unacceptable is not a good basis for dialogue,” he said.

Yet Lerner’s attitudes towards Iran made the Iranians uncomfortable. Lerner also felt threatened. “I feel that Iran is a huge threat to me personally,” Lerner told the audience. Fear and anger could have torn the collaborators apart. Instead, these real life and death stakes invoked by the Iran-Israel relationship are what motivated them to work together despite their weariness. “We will be driven by a desire to save the world,” Lerner said. “That’s the only way plays can be written.”

Roberta Levitow, an American Jew, described feeling a kind of insider-outsider dichotomy when she was first approached about the project: “Well I guess I have affiliations with the Middle East,” she recalled saying. “I’m Jewish.”

Mahmood Karimi-HakakMichaelson, the designer in the ensemble, found a way to get the collaborators literally on the same page. A professor who teaches courses on mediation at Bennington College, Michaelson suggested that each person be put in charge of one day, responsible for introducing their culture with an emphasis on the “personal not political” (a notion which also became the guiding principle when they sat down to create the play). Food proved to be a useful and appealing entry-point to acceptance, with the exception of dinner one night when Lerner introduced a plate of chopped cucumbers and tomatoes as an “Israeli salad.” “It’s a Persian salad!” Karimi-Hakak interrupted, to the audience’s laughter.

Ultimately, Lerner and Karimi-Hakak discovered deep commonalities aside from the contentious dish, specifically the feeling of being connected to a country but not necessarily to all of the actions of its government. “I found similarity of [feelings with]that in Motti,” Karimi-Hakak said. “He’s connected to his fatherland but not necessarily to the behavior of his government. We are two strangers pulled in two different directions.”

The cultural compromises were a precursor to the inevitable creative compromises that go hand-in-hand with any collaborative project. Lerner admitted with amusing Israeli bluntness that he still did not really understand the purpose of setting the play in a monastery—or including the character of the monk—but wrote it into the script because this was a collaborative effort. Levitow felt strongly about the idea.

Torange YeghiazarianOn one hand, it’s easy to understand Lerner’s perspective: the monk does little in the play aside from deliver sandwiches, and the monastery is merely the setting where Motahedeh and Kermani speak candidly. But on the other hand, the monastery provides a western Christian backdrop that is foreign to both of these men, an almost clinically neutral space that minimizes the “otherness” between estranged friends who once shared a culture, and a revolution that dramatically changed both of their lives.

Motahedeh and Kermani are quite similar, despite the fact that one one wears a turban and the other dresses like a business shark. The monastery’s hidden tape recorder covertly records their conversation—a “disembodied ear”—but cannot penetrate their shared language of frustrated hopes from before and after the 1979 revolution, as well as their current stakes, which are no less than survival. While the Americans are important political manipulators, and the Church’s goodwill provides them with a space to talk, in this setting, we realize that the conflict between the Israeli and Iranian is as personal as it is political. Perhaps the resolution will have to be personal, where the stakes are the highest, and a shared language of thwarted conflict and oscillating hope might be possible.

One audience member remarked during the discussion that some of the characters were stereotypes. For instance, the Jewish arms dealer is always offering monetary bribes, the American politician (ripped right out of the Bush era) cares about nothing except oil and the political game. Could the characters have been more iconoclastic, the story more daring, partial, and prone to offend? Absolutely. But perhaps that wasn’t the group’s aim. Lerner and Karimi-Hakak were satisfied to see an “Israeli peace voice” and a “guy in a turban who makes sense” on the stage. They consider it a compliment that both Jews and Iranians have walked out of the theater complaining that the play was prejudiced against Jews or Iranians, respectively.

Too often we appraise art solely from the perspective of “product,” forgetting that there is a whole process behind it. Benedictus in particular demonstrates how the power of art to “affect change” lies not only in its interaction with viewers, but also within the artist, in collaborations between artists, and in the stories they decide to share. “We have become great friends,” Karimi-Hakak announced at the end. Occasionally, real life is more uplifting than the fears and conflicts we project onto the stage.

“You can only imagine what would happen if Israel dealt with its internal political enemies or dissenters in such a fashion,” writes Richard Cohen of a new Human Rights Watch report detailing the appalling abuses of human rights entailed by the continuing rule of Hamas in Gaza.

“Of particular concern is the widespread practice of maiming people by shooting them in the legs, which Hamas first used in June 2007, when it seized control inside Gaza from Fatah,” says the HRW report. And there’s this too: “Abductions and severe beatings are another major concern. According to ICHR, unidentified perpetrators physically abused 73 Gazan men from December 28 to January 31, causing broken legs and arms. Human Rights Watch documented three such cases of Fatah supporters assaulted during and after the Israeli offensive, as well as one case of what appeared to be a politically motivated house arrest.”

This particularly harrowing story does not, thusfar, appear to have inspired any demonstrations from the “We Are All Hamas” crowd who took to the streets to protest Israel’s invasion of Gaza earlier this year:

In the case resulting in death, at around 6 p.m. on January 4, 2009, members of the al-Najjar family were sitting outside their home in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City when four men wearing masks and carrying AK-47 assault rifles approached the house. Two family members who were present told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen wore unmarked black uniforms and ammunition vests, but the family did not identify them as Hamas. When the gunmen ordered everyone to stand up and raise their hands, the head of the household, Hisham al-Najjar, age 55, protested, the two witnesses said. An argument ensued and one of the gunmen fired a shot, hitting no one. At least five women inside the house came rushing out, and in the chaos the gunmen opened fire, killing Hisham al-Najjar and wounding ten members of the family and a family friend. The victims ranged in age from a 12-year old girl, Ahlam Hisham al-Najjar, who was shot in the leg, to Zakkia al-Najjar, 70, Ahlam’s grandmother, who was shot in both legs. Human Rights Watch observed the bandages on both her legs.

“After the gunmen left, I saw a sea of blood,” said Amar Hisham al-Najjar, 25. He told Human Rights Watch that the gunmen shot his father Hisham in the chest, the abdomen, and the legs.”There was no electricity and no ambulances because of the war, so we tried to stop the bleeding and got our friends to drive the wounded to al-Shifa hospital, where my father died,” he said. “The Hamas police at the hospital questioned me about what happened, and they said they’d get back to me, but there’s been nothing. I’m not accusing anyone, but we demand a real investigation.”

Human Rights Watch is hardly regarded as a friend of Israel. Many Israel advocates view them as a foe, pure and simple. I’ve always thought that take is too crude. Of course, HRW’s reports should not, a priori, be regarded as beyond challenge or reproach. But to portray them as a mere cog in the Israel demonization machine is, as this new report demonstrates, deeply unfair. What’s really interesting here is whether HRW’s documentation of the hideous character of Hamas rule will compel at least some of those who regard the Islamists as a resistance movement to think again.

The day before the start to the Durban II conference (aka the let's-bash-Israel party), a number of nations backed out, including Germany and Australia. This is welcome news, particularly as word quietly leaked out last week that President Obama and State Department officials were reportedly thinking of reneging on Obama's previous decision not to join in on the "fun." As of April 19, the U.S.'s official decline of the invitation held strong, though Monday is still a day away. As of Sunday, other nations which had declined to attend included Holland, Canada, the Netherland, New Zealand, Israel and Italy.

The Durban Conference will take place from April 20 - 25, which also happens to fall during the week of Yom HaShoah, or the day of remembrance for those slain in the Holocaust. The symbolism of picking this particular week in which to hold the conference has not been lost on many. The day of remembrance also reminds us of why the state of Israel was created. By trying to get the world to forget about the Holocaust, those who hate Israel (and deny the Holocaust) hope to make the world forget the rationale behind a Jewish state (the one nation in the world created to provide an entirely save haven to those survivors of the wholesale attempted slaughter of an entire people) and attempt to slander and defame the nation of Israel. The people behind this are, shall we say, not the most savory, or historically knowledgeable/honest, people.

Durban II will begin today, purportedly to tackle issues of racism and prejudice.  If only that was the true rationale behind the United Nations conference, then there would be no major bones to the United States's participation. However, if history can be our guide, and Durban II is anything like its (shameful) predecessor, than the tiny nation of Israel wil once again become the awful enemy of human rights, peace, love, puppy dogs and rainbows, rather than the real abusers, such as tyrant-dominated countries and countries known more for thei horrendous track records with human rights, than for any goods and services. (Libya's place on the Human Rights Council: anyone remember that gem?) Even off-his-rocker Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be attending, so to assume this meeting will be based on any form of reality, is to be terribly naive. Sadly, the only thing which can be expected from this conference are just more meaningless condemnations of Israel. The only racism to be discussed in this conference will be the rampant racism vollied against Israelis and Jews. Way to go, United Nations!

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You may have seen some ads on our website for a program called MASA. While we're happy to accept their money, it's also a pretty cool program we think you should know about. MASA "enables young Jews from all over the world to spend a semester to a year in Israel on any of over 160 programs." That means you could spend time in Israel studying Hebrew, doing an internship, or anything else that suits your interests. If you recently lost your job, are thinking of going back to school, or just haven't figured out how you're going to ride out this recession, getting involved in MASA is not a bad idea.

 

To learn more about the program or apply, check out their website.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

January 02, 2009

Amir is not his real name, although that’s what’s written on his business card:Taxi Amir. I never find out what his real name is. Amir’s a Muslim from Palestine but his mum was born in Jerusalem and eight years ago he got Israeli ID.

We’re driving back from Bethlehem. Amir’s ID allows him to cross the Palestine-Israel divide in the hills by Beit Jala and Walada. Amir moved recently to Jerusalem where he worked on the buses, cleaning, picked up Hebrew, and started driving a taxi round the city and beyond.

‘I saw I had to learn Hebrew very good and very fast,’ he says. ‘So I listened and asked questions and then I learned to read. I took anything with Hebrew on it and at first I couldn’t understand – I just looked at the words – but I learned bit by bit. Now I read a Hebrew paper every day.’

It’s not that easy for Amir, getting fares. The other day a woman of about 50 jumped into his cab and they were driving along and a couple of lights in he puts the radio on – just softly. It’s Arabic, though, the music that’s coming out.

‘Oh my God!’ says his passenger, throwing open the door. ‘You’re an Arab! Why didn’t you tell me you're an Arab?’ And she’s gone without even paying the fare.

A lot of people assume Amir’s Jewish. His Hebrew’s perfect, but it’s more than just the words you use – it’s the confident way you say them that makes the difference. We stop at a checkpoint on the road from Walada to Jerusalem. Amir winds down the window and addresses the soldier: ‘Ma hamatzav achi–what’s up brother?’ It’s pouring with rain and the soldier glances briefly at me in the back. ‘Tayeret’ says Amir – she’s a tourist. The soldier waves us through.

‘You have to speak to them first,’ Amir says. ‘Then they relax. If I’m just sitting here silent the soldiers get scared and take the whole car apart. I’ve been through here with four people in my car and they let us pass. Another time, I was alone and they opened everything – it was 20 minutes before they let me go.’

Then there was the couple in their 30s. Amir was cabbing one day in Jerusalem, downtown. His Arab cabbie mate was up ahead – there was a queue and Amir told the couple his mate was first. ‘We don’t want him, he’s an Arab,’ they said. ‘We’ll take you – we want a Jew.’

It’s not easy to tell what Amir is. There are no special identifying signs. His taxi has yellow Israeli plates, and its only adornment is an air-freshener, swinging the colours of the US flag. Amir himself is dark, semitic, but not too dark. He’s 26. His mother wants him married soon – his younger brother’s a father already, at only 23. It’s just not easy finding her – the right one. But girls like Amir, they really do.

There was this woman, only 22, who took the the cab especially for him. There was a line of cabs all calling her – Taxi! Taxi! Monit! She’s strolling along and they’re all calling to her and she ignores them, every one, until Amir. This fine-looking woman spots him, stops and saunters back, bending into the window as he winds it down.

‘How much to L–’ she says.

He tells her 50 shekels. Much too much. Wants to make sure she’s getting in for him.

‘That’s cool.’ She jumps into the front seat. And they’re just sitting there talking and she’s all, how old are you, what do you like doing, where do you go? Are you married? Do you have any kids?

After a while, she says, ‘So where are your family from? Morocco, Tunisia, Iraq?’ And he says, ‘No, I’m an Arab, they’re from Palestine.’

She just sits there, frozen, arms clamped rigid to her sides: ‘Oh my God! I would have started something with you right now. I thought you were a Jew.’

Last Saturday morning, I switched on Fox Soccer Channel for the first of a series of World Cup qualifiers which the station, a veritable lifeline for football lovers in America, was broadcasting. A live feed from Tehran appeared on my screen. On the pitch, Iran was battling Saudi Arabia.

My two small boys dashed in and asked me - as they invariably do - "Who ya cheering for, Daddy?" I had to think about this one. They are too young for a lecture on Middle Eastern politics and I knew that if I said "neither," I'd get pressed as to why. When you're seven years old, you have to cheer for someone.

I thought for a few more seconds. I noted the electrified crowd. I studied the Iranian players, many of them groomed and pouting in the style of Manchester United's Ronaldo. It struck me that what seems banal and irritating in the context of the European game is positively subversive in this context. "Iran," I mumbled. Blank looks. "The white team," I clarified. On hearing that, my contrarian sons decided to go for the green team - the Saudis. Islam's civil war was now in our living room.

I've seen the Iranians play impressive football in the past, but on this occasion, the action off the field was more compelling. This being Iranian TV, every time the ball went out of play, even for a second, the cameras would sweep to the Presidential box, where Ahmadinejad and his unsmiling cronies sat looking thuggish and self-important. Whether or not you were actually in the stadium, there was no forgetting Mahmoud's presence in the house.

As Saudi Arabia snatched a 2-1 victory, I remembered the story of how Saddam Hussein's son Udai ordered the feet of the Iraqi national team to be whipped after they lost a vital match. Defeated in this crucial qualifier, Iran, which has played in the last three World Cup tournaments, has virtually no hope of going to the next one, next year in South Africa. For Ahmadinejad, revealing the nationalist lurking inside of the Islamist, this was little short of a disgrace.

I haven't heard, yet, of any Iranian players being dragged into the chamber of horrors that is Evin prison. Instead, Ahmadinejad focused his wrath on the Iranian coach, Ali Daei. No matter that Daei, as a player, enjoyed the same status in Iran as did Bobby Charlton in England or Roberto Baggio in Italy. Reported The Guardian:

Daei was fired as team coach after Iran lost 2-1 to Saudi Arabia in a vital World Cup qualifier at Tehran's Azadi stadium on Saturday. The match was witnessed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, who is said to have been instrumental in ousting him.

Ahmadinejad had hoped a victory would bring him political capital before the presidential poll in June. The desire to score a propaganda coup even prompted the president's fans to credit him when Iran took a 1-0 lead. But the euphoria evaporated in the last 12 minutes and Daei's fate was sealed as a mass mobile phone text to Ahmadinejad's supporters went out, reading: "Due to the importance of national public opinion to Dr Ahmadinejad, Ali Daei has been forced out."

Ironically, as Daei was falling upon the mullah's sword, Israel's World Cup bid was also being decided. Playing Greece in Ramat Gan on Saturday night, the Israelis managed a disappointing 1-1 tie. They played another match against Greece the following Wednesday, one they absolutely had to win; they lost 2-1 after conceding a penalty to the Greeks late in the second half.

The worlds tyrannies will have their representatives at the 2010 World Cup. Football being the most global of sports, it necessarily encompasses those countries which hold their leaders accountable and those countries which have their leaders imposed on them. Judging by current form, both North Korea and Saudi Arabia have good reason to believe that they will be flying to South Africa.

But we will be denied the spectacle of Iran and Israel playing - and perhaps being drawn against each other - in the most glorious contest which world sport has to offer. In some ways, that will come as a disappointment to those campaigning for the exclusion of Israel from global competitions, especially as South Africa has become fertile soil for such braying mob politics. You could say that, in the end, it was not the politicians who decided their joint fate, but the players themselves. As Ali Daei might tell you, there is an inherent fairness in football which is absent from politics.

Except that football is not so pure. Missing in the coverage of Israel's dashed World Cup hopes - the Israeli press was utterly scornful of the national team and its coach, Dror Kashtan, with Yossi Sarid practically frothing at the mouth - was a reminder of why Israel was playing Greece in the first place. Being located in Asia, Israel should be playing in the Asian qualifying group. However, most of the states in that group refuse to play against a country they don't recognize.

Were Israel allowed to play in its own region, its chances of qualification would be virtually assured. Europe, where it is forced to play, is a much tougher prospect. Those disappointed that they won't now be greeting the Israeli team with banners denouncing "Zionist apartheid" will probably take some comfort from the fact that while Iran was denied by the ball alone, when it comes to Israel, the boycott was the opposing team's twelfth man.

The seeming sweetness of Israeli author and auteur Etgar Keret in a phone interview feels startling at first, given his reputation for writing stinging short prose that flies to the heart of the human condition — and then needles it further by setting it amid the danger and uncertainty of daily life in Israel.

But in conversation, he comes across as being devoted more to his parents — Polish Holocaust survivors — and their legacy, than to his own mounting reputation as Israel's pre-eminent author of contemporary letters.

Keret, 41, has long identified with his parents, who, both just teens when the Nazi onslaught ended, fled Europe for the Holy Land.

As a child, "I would pretend to be a local, even though I grew up here all my life. I always kind of felt like an extension of them," he says from his home in Tel Aviv.

 

The full interview can be found in the Albany Times-Union. You can read the rest by clicking here.

 

A Facebook search for ‘Gilad Shalit’, the 21-year-old Israeli conscript who was captured by Palestinian militants nearly three years ago, brings up 240 results. ‘Bring Gilad Shalit Home!!!!!!! (NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!)’ demands one group. ‘Gilad Shalit is still alive!’ insists another. On the two-year anniversary of his kidnapping, nearly 85,000 Facebook users pledged to change their status to ‘is waiting for Gilad Shalit for 2 years!!!’

Last Sunday, Shalit's family set up a protest tent outside the outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s residence in Jerusalem, hoping their manifestation would put pressure on the government to reach a deal with Hamas over their son’s release before the government shift later this month. Yesterday, on the thousandth day of his capture, it became clear that the latest prisoner-swap negotiations for Shalit's release had failed.

Just 19 years old and fresh out of school when he was kidnapped in June 2006, Corporal Shalit cut a scrawny figure in his baggy army uniform. In Israel, his image became ubiquitous and is now firmly imprinted in the national consciousness. Much like Ron Arad, the air force navigator who has been missing in action since 1986, became the human face of the conflict with Lebanon for Israelis, Shalit has come to embody a great deal. He is a symbol for Israeli humanitarianism, Palestinian barbarism, military weakness, and political impotence – depending on who you ask.

The fallouts over the latest stalemate in the Egyptian-brokered prisoner-swap negotiations between Hamas and Israel have laid bare some fractures in Israeli society. It is widely seen as the outgoing government's latest – and last – failure. Many argue that Olmert's inability to secure a deal for Shalit's release will make the job harder for future negotiators. However, it is not simply Israeli officials’ bartering and diplomatic skills that have been found wanting in this process - so too has Israel’s political confidence. And it is questionable whether Olmert's successors have any more of it than he does.

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