lizrael update

Burnin’ for you again.

Jews are the only people who burn their food on purpose.

Anyone want toast? It’s fresh.

Burnin’ for you.

My nostrils are burning because bread is burning outside. Everywhere.

Last year when we burned chametz on Erev Pesach, I remember there was a group of people standing around and these old Nachlaot men were orchestrating and smoke was going into this woman’s house and she was screaming at them and it was a balagan.

Anyways, we’re going out to do it in our Katamonim neighborhood now. It will probably still be a balagan, one way or another.

Remember this? I am fortunate enough to get a sequel ths year, and this time, my brother and fiance will be there too.

Israel, Pesach, 5766, Matza, Family, Next year in Jerusalem, Home, Conflict, Resolution.

And lastly, a word courtesy of William Wallace:

“Freeeeeeeeedooooom….”

wiev - fo - tniop

I sat backwards on the bus today to see what it would look like to lose everything.

Basa and buses!

Ichs.

Dragged over to Bar Ilan during our supposed Pessach vacation to take a final in Family Law (in Judaism). I was never very good at the halacha finals in high school, and some things never change. The moed bet is in September.

BUT! I got to ride the new #5 bus line to work from the central bus station! It routes exactly how I expected - turning left past Yaffo street up Herzl to Begin and then dropping out next to the mall and then on to the Malkha train station. Beautiful. Dorky, but beautiful.

We’re not in the Golan anymore, Toto.

A text from Warsaw.

My brother texted me from Warsaw, Poland today. In 60 years, how things change.

Mantra: Language barriers are mutual.

I keep forgetting…

Language barriers are mutual… at least when you start out an English speaker. I keep forgetting that while I am shy about speaking up in class in Hebrew, some of my classmates are shy about speaking to me, or anyone, in English. I keep forgetting that while I don’t understand every item on the hourly radio news update, a lot of other people aren’t getting the funniest jokes in popular American movies.

And most importantly, while I read the Hebrew newspaper a bit slowly, it could take hours for others to read the myriad of articles we get for class, 99% in English, no matter what the professor’s native tongue.

On buses and facelessness.

The bus closest to my house is the 18. But it’s not the ideal bus. Today I raced through the hard rain to the bus stop a bit further, where the 18, 4 and 24 all stop, because lately, I’ve been waiting for 15-20 minutes for the 18 near my house.
I waited a good 5 minutes. The 18 showed up.
Right behind it was another bus, the 4, so m y trek wasn’t all for naught.
Butit wasn’t the 4, it was the 18, a second 18, so I felt stupid after waving the first one past and climbing on to the second one.
I go through this type of frustration every other day.

But on the second 18 was my landlady’s husabnd’s Philipino caretaker. I don’t kinow her real name; the landlady calls her Leah.
She smiled at me eagerly and I smiled back as eagerly.

I haven’t thought long about how faceless Asian workers are here in Israel. They are pretty faceless, though. The funny thing is, I actually feel a comfort in their presence even though I am torn at the Asian worker paradox.* They speak better English than Hebrew. They seem like warm and pleasant company. Perhaps this is a ridiculous thing to assume, but that is how I feel, and being around someone who also doesn’t feel like they belong (and in a far worse predicament) makes me feel a little bit warmer inside, and perhaps, a bit connected to their lives.

*The Asian worker paradox: They are a help, and apparently necessary, and a good deal, but they become comfortable and begin to identify as Israeli, and have kids here who don’t know their parents’ home country, and so they are this odd, out-of-place population in Israel. Then it becomes hard to send them back because the kids are technically Israeli. There are other aspects of the issue, you can read about it in this past weekend’s JPost article, “Far From Home”.

The Right Stuff.

Daniel Pipes, a new kind of Israel-basher

By Bradley Burston

I used to be an American Jew. And then I read Daniel Pipes. “As Israelis go to the polls,” Dr. Pipes wrote this week in an article that originally appeared in the New York Sun, “not one of the leading parties offers the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs.” Dr. Pipes goes on to admit “a certain frustration” with the apparent unwillingness of Israelis to go out there and do the right thing: bring the Arabs to heel, by use of overwhelming force. The article, entitled “Israel Shuns Victory,” sets out a kind of self-test for us, listing nine different options by which Israelis from far left to far right, and moderates in between, all “manage the conflict without resolving it,” “ignore the need to defeat Palestinian rejectionism.” and “seek to finesse war rather than win it.” This is not the first time Dr. Pipes has let Israelis have it for letting him down. In a 2003 speech to college students, cited on his Website www.DanielPipes.org, he suggested that Arabs will not truly accept Israel’s existence until Israel “punishes violence so hard that its enemies will eventually feel so deep a sense of futility that they will despair of further conflict.” Where did we go wrong? “Wars are won, the historical record shows, when one side feels compelled to give up on its goals,” Dr. Pipes writes, indicating that Israel will win only when Arabs are forced to give up their goal of eliminating a Jewish state. He notes, by way of inference, that the wars in 1948-49, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 failed to persuade them. I guess we didn’t fight hard enough, or well enough. I suppose if I were living in, say, Philadelphia, Dr. Pipes’ frustration, disappointment, and prescription for setting things right, might make perfect sense. In fact, a number of our readers who live in North America, some of whom regularly use the word coward to describe Israeli moderates, have any number of suggestions for us as well, up to and including the use of weapons of mass destruction on Palestinians, apparently in an effort to change their minds about us. That said, I have a couple of questions. The first concerns people like Mahmoud Masharka, 24, of Hebron. Masharka was apparently disguised as an Orthodox Jew when he set out hitchhiking late on Thursday and was picked up by a car in which four Israelis were travelling. He then detonated the bomb belt he was wearing, incinerating the car and killing everyone inside. Does Dr. Pipes really believe that people who crave a violent, Jew-murdering death are really going to accept Israel if only enough military force is applied? Is Dr. Pipes telling us that people who celebrate the sacrament of suicide are going to think differently of us if we send in more tanks, bigger bombs, more F-16s, more Apaches, more infantry brigades, more commandos, demolish more homes, demolish more olive trees, demolish what little is left of the Palestinian Authority? I understand that we have disappointed the analyst with the Harvard pedigree. But if he’ll allow me one more question: Since when did we become mercenaries for Daniel Pipes? After reading Dr. Pipes, I’m not sure I can be an American Jew anymore. I guess, at long last, I’ve become an Israeli. Unlike Dr. Pipes, I can’t bring myself to win the war against the Palestinians. At least not the way Dr. Pipes would have me do so. I guess the guy’s right. My friends in my IDF battalion couldn’t do it either. Of course, there might be another explanation. One that might fit a guy who lives 6,000 miles away and lets us know we don’t have the Right Stuff to show these Arabs what for. Daniel Pipes is a new kind of Israel-basher. He is an equal-opportunity hater of Israelis. None of us is good enough for him. We lack the will to fight like the man he quotes as a role model for us, Douglas MacArthur. From unilateralism to transfer, nothing we come up with is good enough for him. Try as we might, we just can’t seem to win his war for him. I guess he’ll just have to do it by himself. Haaretz, Spin Cycle, 1.4.06

Olmert’s first words.

Ehud Olmert, in a statement, after his party received the most mandates:

“In the near future we aspire to fashion the permanent borders of the State of Israel, as a Jewish and democratic state with a permanent Jewish majority. We will attempt this through negotiations with our Palestinian neighbors. That is our hope; it is also our prayer.… There is no peace more stable than that based on an agreement. An agreement can only be based on negotiations, which must be conducted on the basis of mutual recognition, already signed agreements, the principles of the road map, and of course the cessation of violence and the disarming of all terrorist organizations.

“At this moment, I turn to the head of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and say to him in the simplest, most straightforward way that people can speak to one another: For thousands of years we were bolstered by the dream of the complete Land of Israel in our hearts. This land, in its historic borders, will always remain the yearning of our souls.… In recognition of reality and understanding of our circumstances, however, we are ready to compromise and give up parts of the land that we love, where the best of our sons and fighters are buried and, with a heavy heart, to evacuate from there the Jews who live there in order to allow you to fulfill your dream and live alongside us, in your state, in lasting peace.…

“The time has come for Palestinians, like us, to come to terms with the partial fulfillment of their dreams, end terrorism, abandon hatred, embrace democracy for themselves and look to a future of coexistence, compromise, and peace with us.… If the Palestinians manage to act in the near future, we will sit at the negotiating table in order to determine a new future in our region. If they do not, Israel will take its fate in its own hands, on the basis of consensus at home and deep understanding of our friends in the world, first and foremost the United States and President George Bush, and will act in the absence of an agreement with the Palestinians. We will not wait too long, the time has come to act.”

Jerusalem Post 31.3.06