Food is an important part of a balanced diet

Ich bin ein Berliner

On June 26, 1963 Jack Kennedy spoke four words of German during a speech in Berlin, "Ich bin ein Berliner," and drew a large line in the sand in front of the Communist menace. What JFK mean to say was, "I am Berliner," of course. For years I went about my business believing a common misconception that although well intended, what Jack's words had actually meant was "I am a jelly-filled donut." You see, a 'berliner' is a particular type of German pastry similar in many ways to American jelly-filled donuts. As it turns out, there are some exquisitely precise and pedantic rules in the German language (insert your own joke on German national stereotypes) dealing with who gets to say "Ich bin Berliner" (an actual Berliner) and who should say, like Kennedy did, "Ich bin ein Berliner," (everyone else) meaning, "I'm not a real Berliner but I'm saying that I am in solidarity with you."

You are what you eat

If it's true that you are what you eat, then during the Hanukkah season most Israelis should say with JFK, "I am a Berliner." The only difference is that we call our berliners "sufganiot."  

Traditional Jelly-filled Hannukah Donuts (Sufganiot)

Holiday-specific foods figure large in Israeli culture and Hanukkah is no exception. If you're not familiar with the Hannukah myth, it goes something like this (and I'm oversimplifying things here greatly): 

• Greeks conquer Israel, use the Temple for... whatever.
• After rebelling against the Greeks (Syrians really, but let's not get into that just now), the Maccabees decide that they should rededicate the temple. Sorry, the Temple. 
• To do this, they needed a special kind of oil to light candles for eight days. Problem is, they can't find the right kind of oil anywhere. After much searching they do find one container of oil, good for maybe one day of light. 
• Undeterred, the decide to use the oil and light the lights.
• When they go and check on the empty oil container the next day... a miracle! It still holds enough oil for one (extra) day!
• This business with the oil goes on for eight more days until extra quantities of suitable hydrocarbons can be found or manufactured.
• Ta-dah, the Festival of Lights is born.

Fast forward roughly twenty-two hundred years and the way we celebrate the festival of lights is by eating as many oily foods as we can cram into our bodies. Deep-fried hash browns? Bring them on. Deep-fried 'Berliners'? Let me have a dozen. Per family member. Per day. 

The Higgs Boson

Hanukkah is the time of year when cardiologists go on high alert (think CPAs on April 14th) and hospitals stock up on industrial grade degreasing agents. I don't want to overstate matters, but these donuts are not your run-of-the-mill jelly-filled poseurs. The obscenities that you can buy at any Krispy Kreme are a light and fluffy souffle by comparison. 

Let me put it another way. The scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have been hard at work looking for something called a Higgs boson, which is the subatomic particle that actually confers mass to everything. Just last week we heard from them that they thought that they had found evidence for the boson but that it wasn't quite conclusive yet.

Silly, silly, physicists with IQs in the high 190s. If you are going to look for the particle that makes up mass, shouldn't you be looking for it in something well, massive? All you have to do to find the boson is ship some of our donuts from Israel to Geneva and stick them into your accelerator. Results guaranteed.

CERN, looking for bosons in all the wrong places.

Darwin Wept

When I came to live in Israel in the late 90s, it was easy to escape the torture-by-fritter that sufganiot embody.  Back then, all sufganiot were filled with some sort of reddish jelly (strawberry or raspberry, it was difficult to tell from the flavor alone). Large, oily, and hardly fresh, they were easy to avoid. I'm sure that they were enticing to kids, but having even one during the eight days of Hannukah was more than enough.

And then they mutated. In a display of adaptability that would have made Darwin weep with joy, the donuts became smaller and started adding flavors and textures. It started out slow. For a couple of years a limited number chocolate-filled donuts appeared, still large but you could tell at a glance that these were not your grandpa's donuts. Then they subdivided like single-cell organisms and became smaller; more flavors started showing up at the bakery: dulce de leche made its entrance, then vanilla, then coconut, halvah a couple of years later. 

And now we're surrounded, there is no escape.

To make matters worse, they're only here for the Hannukah season and then they're gone. Get them now or make do without them for a year. Damn.

Did I mention they're delicious?

Happy holidays everyone!

Beer

Last week I had the opportunity to taste for the first time two beers produced in the area. On Wednesday I went out with some friends to a micro-brewery that's been operating for a couple of years now and tried their wheat beer. On Saturday, we were invited to a very interesting tour of Nazareth; when that was done we found ourselves with some friends at a wonderful restaurant that served, among many others, Taybeh beer.

One of these two beers was atrocious and the other one was really good, which led me to think that I really should blog about the experience. I kept thinking about it as the "Zionist" beer vs. the "Palestinian" beer. I was already to make all sorts of analogies between the two beers and their methods of production, maybe trying to stretch the analogy to encompass a larger statement about the entrepreneurial culture in each of the peoples, natch, the very culture of the two peoples.

Sometimes, I'm just full of crap.

I got pulled into the trap of seeing everything around here, including food and drink, through the lens of national conflict. Beer wouldn't be the first victim of this distortion. Some idiots on both sides have been waging an ongoing battle of falafel. Yes, falafel. Little balls made out of garbanzo beans, deep-fried in oil and served in a pita. A battle of that. Who can make the bigger falafel portion and so get into Guiness's Book of World Records.

I understand about national pride and looking for ways to bring honor to your nation, but falafel? Really? What's next, changing the words of the American anthem? And the burners red glare, the chickpea balls bursting in air. Not only does it kill the metric, it really doesn't have that ring of authenticity, does it?

Silly, I know. So why is the drive of nationalistic politics so seductive? No, not seductive, that implies that there was some persuasion involved. So ingrained. I didn't see it coming and it got me good. It might have been Albert Einstein that said, "I don't know what fish talk about, but it isn't water," and that is the best explanation I can give. This nationalistic mumbo-jumbo works on all of us because it is so pervasive. It just permeates every aspect of our living to where we don't even notice it. Like fish and water, it has become part of the context in which we live, defining so many of our choices without us even being aware of it.

So last week I went out twice with friends and had two different beers. From one of those beers I'll happily have a second and a third glass. From the other, let's just say that the glass I already had was worth three: first, last, and one too many. And no, I'm not going to tell you which was which.

Just to close the subject, some more words of wisdom from W.C. Fields:

I never drink water. Fish f*** in it.

Rain

Several decades ago, the inimitable Isaac Asimov published a short story called "Nightfall" about Lagash a world without night. Lagash had six suns of varying luminosity that took turns shining upon the world, sometimes with a large amount of light, sometimes with very little. The practical result was that the Lagashians had never seen the stars, hadn't developed any concept of what the universe looked like beyond their own planet (how could they, really) and so on. They would have happily lived on like that except for the fact that every two thousand years or so night fell. Once, every two millenia, only the smallest, dimmest of Lagash's suns was left in the sky and when Lagash's large moon eclipsed that, darkness fell. As expected, shenanigans ensued.

Here in Israel we hardly have any rain. It's not as bad as Lagash not having any night but I imagine that the feeling is similar. I've lived in other dry regions in the past: Southern California certainly qualifies, but it just doesn't compare. Living in SoCal I was aware of the need to conserve water, sure. But the lawns were always green, there were rivers and streams that flowed year-round, and if he water we drank always tasted a little funky (the result of having it piped hundreds of miles from the Colorado river), then that was a small price to pay.

Here in Lagash, er, Israel it's different. When the weather forecast on the radio calls for rain, you can just hear the smile on the announcer's voice. There is even a special word in Hebrew for the first real downpour of the year, "Yoreh." Our need for water is so strong, and our relationship with the stuff so tenuous, that I know of no other culture where it is acceptable to toast someone with just water in your glass.

So it's been quite a surprise to us all that for the last four days there's been water pouring for the sky in sheets. Cats and dogs doesn't begin to describe it. I can't remember when was the last time that I could see the traffic lights reflected on the wet pavement. This really is very unusual. The "rainy" season in Israel, such as it is, usually comes later in the year, most often on a Thursday and then it's gone. So this is very different, it's a sure bet that tonight's news will be filled with video of streams running and the people that went down just to see water flowing, not from a faucet, but naturally.

And so, a final word of wisdom from Douglas Adams:

I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

Have you no decency sir?

By now we should all be inured to the incredible callousness of the professional politician, a subspecies of the common twerp whose only qualities are loyalty to the party's leader and a low-level cunning and brutality that no doubt come in handy to that same leader every once a while. Sort of like Luca Brasi but without the charm and the elegant manners.

Please meet: Rabbi Meshulam Nahari. Member of the Knesset for the Shas party and Minister of Nothing in the current Israeli Government, party-hack extraordinaire.

As you may of may not know, here in Israel we have a number of political parties that under the cover of religion have taken racketeering to levels of excellence not seen since Caligula made his horse Senator in Rome.  Which might very well be where we got Meshulam Nahari. In my imagination it went down something like this:

A bunch of the Shas guys where sitting around the table some time ago, shooting the s*^t, as wise guys trend to do. They were probably congratulating one another on how smart they were, how they managed to extort some in ungodly amount of money from a government too weak-willed to stand up to them. They might have had something to drink but not necessarily. 

Anyway, Wiseguy No.2 tells the leader about Caligula's horse stunt.

-"For real?", exclaims The Leader, "he really got his horse a job in the Senate?"

-"Just so," answers No. 2, "although I think that they waived the whole wearing-a-toga bit for him."

-"Now THAT is real power," adds No. 3, "getting an unthinking brute into the Senate."

This was beginning to feel like a challenge to The Leader, a real test of his political prowess. So he gives the matter some thought and comes up with this jewel:

-"Appointing a horse to the Senate is nice, but that's not so much of an accomplishment when you're already Emperor of Rome. I'll bet you anything that you want that I can do him one better. If Caligula could get a horse appointed to the Roman Senate, I'll bet you that I can get not only an unthinking brute but a real horse's ass elected to the Knesset."

-"Yeah, right.  And how exactly are you going to accomplish that?"

-"I have some ideas. Do you know Meshulam Nahari?"

In truth, it might have gone down a little differently, but you get the idea.

And what, you might ask, has gotten me so riled up about someone so demonstrably small, so obviously insignificant, so absurdly dumb as bad ol' Meshulam. Well, here it is:

Gilad Shalit (you remember him, don't you?), went to the beach with his dad on the Saturday following his release. Good for him I say, the beach sounds like the right place to decompress and spend some time with family. So far, so good.

Enter the horse's ass. The YNET news service has quoted him saying that instead of going to the beach, Gilad should have gone to the synagogue and recited the traditional prayer of deliverance.

You. Little. Shit.

Religion in Israel is not only big business, it's big politics too and of course right now there is no bigger potential political asset than Gilad Shalit and his family. I'm sure that any party would be happy to have Gilad's endorsement.  However, there are oodles of distance between wishing for Gilad's endorsement and openly, cravenly, seeking to cash in on his notoriety. How Gilad feels about religion is no one's business but his own, how he wishes to spend his time is a decision left only to him. And to you, Minister Meshulam Nahari I say this:


Have you no shame, sir? 

And lest we think that this was Horsey acting on his own, it turns out that he's been 'tasked' by Shas' Great Leader (that's the Leader's boss, in case you're wondering) with "bringing these people [the Shalits] closer to religion." 

Well, Meshulam. If you were to stand on your Leader's shoulders, and he were to stand on the Great Leader's shoulder in turn, you still wouldn't reach Gilad's ankles, so where exactly do you get off telling him what to do or to whom and what to pray for? Do the world a favor and after you apologize contritely to Gilad and his family take a step back and just STFU. OK?

_______________________________________________________________________

Mmmmh. That was kind of a long and very angry rant, wasn't it? Pity to waste it. If you, dear reader, would be so kind to help along I think that we could keep this train of thought going for a little longer in the comments section just below. 

If you disagree that Nahari is an idiot I would really like to know why. If you agree, could you help illustrate to the world just how dumb he is? 

Personally, I think that Nahari is so dumb that he's a taco short of a combination plate; a melon ball short of a fruit salad; and that if you moved his plate five inches to the left he'd starve to death.

Your turn.

File under: Different jackal bites man

Three different people, all of them Israeli, have taken the trouble to point out that it was the Islamic Jihad that took responsibility for the recent rocket attacks on Israeli civilians. It is possible from reading the previous entry of this blog to mistakenly assume that it was Hamas that launched the rockets.  It was not, let that be clear.

It doesn't make the least bit of difference.

It is important not to fall for the trick that the fact that it was Islamic Jihad somehow absolves Hamas of culpability, it doesn't. Hamas rules Gaza, they are responsible for what happens there. There's a reason that Hamas hasn't held democratic elections in Gaza and it all goes to the same point. They rule by force and fear, and they simply did not exercise that force to cow Islamic Jihad into behaving like civilized human beings.

So the whole convoluted 'logic' of this situation is as follows:

1. Israel releases prisoners after reaching an agreement with Hamas;
2. The exchange strengthens Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority and Islamic Jihad.
3. Islamic Jihad, feeling their masculinity threatened, come to the conclusion that they must do something to enhance their street cred; and what better way is there to show how courageous, valiant, gallant, and noble they are than to shoot rockets at civilians?
4. Hamas quite obviously doesn't feel obligated to prevent such attacks and pretty much allows Islamic Jihad to do as it pleases, as long as it's directed at Israelis.
5. Palestinians from Gaza shoot rockets at Israeli civilian populations resulting in dead, wounded, and quite a bit of damage.

Put another way, Islamic Jihad and Hamas are in a contest to see who has got the biggest... rocket launcher, and the way to keep score is by dead and wounded Israelis.

Mmmmh, that makes perfect sense, don't it?

File under: Jackal bites man

Over a thousand Palestinians convicted of terrorism were released just a few days ago in return for Gilad Shalit. Last night rockets were fired at Israeli population centers in the south of the country killing one and wounding several. (link)

There is a logical fallacy that goes by the Latin name of "cum hoc, ergo propter hoc." Or in simpler words, correlation does not imply causality.  This is all to say that I shouldn't jump to conclusions just because the attack on civilians in Israel closely followed the release of the Palestinian convicts. I really shouldn't, but it's hard not to.

One would think that releasing over one thousand prisoners would qualify in anyone's mind as a "confidence building gesture."  A gesture that maybe would inspire the Hamas leadership to seek some sort of understanding with Israel. Apparently not.

_____________________________________________________________________
In related news: the sun will set tonight in the west and rise tomorrow morning in the east.

What else does Gilad Shalit owe his country? Nothing, I thought. Shalit himself begs to differ.

I was going to pass on commenting on the release of Gilad Shalit from captivity. Quite frankly, it's been covered well, covered to death, and commented almost as much. Click here to read a really good piece by Bradley Burston on the strange pride we all felt around here on seeing Shalit returned, regardless of the enormous price we paid and the risks we're all taking even after paying it.  There are other pieces of course, there are even timelines with detailed explanations of what happened and where if you're really interested.  To all this river of comment I'd like to add my two cents worth.

Duty

What duty does a soldier owe his country after five years in captivity?  I asked myself this question fleetingly as we all waited for Gilad to make his way from the Gaza Strip to Egypt to Israel.  My answer of course was "none." If anything, we owe him.  Whatever duty he had to us he's paid in spades and then some. So I waited, together with millions of others, to see the pictures and the video of Gilad landing the Tel-Nof air force base where he was to meet his family.  The pictures were slow in coming. Obviously someone had given strict instructions to keep the flashes and the intrusiveness of the camera lens to a minimum around Gilad.  So the first pictures we saw were of a young man, pale and rail thin, dressed in his army uniform, carefully exiting a military transport.  Let me emphasize something that you might have missed just now:

Dressed in his army uniform.

Wow.

As it turns out, the people handling his return had the presence of mind to bring along uniforms (in the different sizes) for Gilad to wear. The important part was that they also brought civilian clothing and that the assumption was that Gilad would change into civvies before going home.  It was Gilad that asked for the uniform.  

The second image that so stuck in my mind was Gilad coming down from the helicopter to find the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister, and the Head of the General Staff of the State of Israel waiting for him.  And what does he do, this bespectacled slip of a man? After five years in captivity he stands ramrod straight and snaps a perfect salute to his commanding officers:

First Sergeant Gilad Shalit reporting for duty, sir.

It's not true that a picture is worth a thousand words, this one was worth only eight, but they're the right eight (and no, he didn't actually say the words, he didn't need to).

Keep this image in mind when you think next of devotion to duty, of courage, of presence of mind, of strength, of grace under pressure.  I'm not a soldier so I don't get to salute 1st Sergeant Shalit, but I can take my hat off to him.

File under: Man Bites Dog - Politician keeps his word.

Regular readers of this space must have by now sussed the fact that there is no love lost between Bibi and myself; not that he would know me from Adam's off ox if he met me on the street, but still.  As a rule, I find that Bibi is, in the words of The Economist, a "serial bungler."  That his government is based on cronyism and that his comb-over is frankly pathetic.  You know the old saw that goes "How do you know a politician is lying? His lips are moving."?  That's Binyamin Netanyahu for me.  Bibi is a brilliant, gifted communicator, this makes him the master of doublespeak.  "Two states for two peoples," he said not long ago.  Yeah, right.

And so, I find myself in the very awkward, very strange position of praising the man for keeping his word.  When hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the street to demonstrate for a better life I took a look at what Bibi was doing about it and concluded, repeatedly, that he didn't have a clue.

Apparently, so did he.

I say this because what Bibi did was outsource clue-getting to Prof. Manuel Trajtenberg.  Essentially, BN formed a committee (the preferred way for politicians to kill an issue) headed by Prof. Trajtenberg and gave them carte blanche to research the issues that came out of the protests and make any recommendations they saw fit.  He also kinda promised to adopt the recommendations.

And then a man bit a dog, or a politician kept his word. Quickly after the Trajtenberg Committee presented its report Bibi brought the matter before the whole government for its approval, and failed to get it. Undeterred, he engaged in the arm-twisting and politicking he is known for and brought it around for a second time and this time, managed to pass it.  Bibi? Really?

Wow.

On the face of it the main recommendations of the committee are not all that dramatic, but around here they amount to a sea change.  For example:

• Gradually open up all manner of protected markets to imports.
• Get more of the ultra-orthodox to work, mainly by diverting money from subsidized Torah study to more productive types of education.
• Slowing down, ever so slightly, the growth in the budget of the Defense Ministry.
• Increase participation of private firms in public transportation and diminishing the influence of traditional monopolies.
• Actual implementation of the Compulsory Education Law of 1984 that mandates free education for all from the age of three.

There's more but you get the idea.  Not bad I must say.  I don't agree with all of it and I don't think that this will be enough, but it's a good start certainly.

However, I find that I must steal a line from Aladdin, "now for the caveats, provisos, and quid-pro-quos."

1. Manuel Trajtenberg is a  clever man. He knew going in that any recommendations too much at variance with the current government's policies would be ignored, so none do.  We're getting "social justice" that can pass through the Bibi-filter.  Could be worse.
2. It ain't over til it's over. (link) The usual predators in the Knesset are already salivating over how much they'll get in return for allowing the government resolution to be turned into law.  How much they'll water down the better provisions, how they'll insert extraneous garbage to benefit their little band of supporters, etc.  Par for the course, but that is exactly the type of behavior that sparked the demonstrations in the first place.
3. Bibi might just be Bibi.  It might very well be that all this is a complex and sophisticated exercise to convince rubes like me that Bibi listens and wants what we want, and doing nothing.

Praising Bibi.  Whew, that was hard! I'll have to remember not to make a habit out of it.

This is getting to be a habit

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Prof. Daniel Schechtman of the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology.  Heartfelt congratulations go to Prof. Schechtman on this marvelous achievement. (link)  As I understand it, his discovery and understanding of quasicrystals changed the way we understand matter and made possible all sorts of useful applications including really good razors.  So, from myself and on behalf of the men and women around the world that shave with a razor let me just say, "Thanks, Prof!"

It seems to be that since the early 2000s (naughties?) some Israel-based academic wins a Nobel prize every couple of years.  Far from diminishing their accomplishments, this happy fact makes all of them shine all the brighter and if some of that shine should rub off on us ordinary folk, then all's for the best.  Winning once is a fluke, twice is a coincidence.  More than that and you begin to feel that there might be something there.  What a great piece of news.

                                                                                                                                                                   

On related news: the sun will set tonight in the west and rise in the east tomorrow morning and summer ended on September 23rd. 

File under: Man Bites Dog. Numskull CEO loses her job.

Remember the 450,000 I wrote about a couple of weeks ago?  I neglected to mention that what started the whole social protest thing was a consumer revolt against the high price of dairy products as symbolized by the small fortunes that families everywhere had to shell out for a small tub of cottage cheese.

In most of the world cottage cheese is nothing special.  Something that gets eaten once in a while, a staple of athletes and those that still harbor the delusion that dieting will make them thinner.  In Israel though cottage cheese is big business.  It is widely consumed and its price over the last few years simply sky rocketed.  And so, at some point early this summer people simply decided to boycott the cheese.  

The rest of that story is easily told: Consumer boycott - cheese companies ignore it - boycott grows bigger - cheese companies act even more arrogantly - boycott reaches crazy big proportions - cheese companies suddenly realize that maybe, just maybe, they should be paying attention - boycott becomes a total blackout on cottage cheese purchases - everyone involved in the production of cottage cheese blames someone else for the high prices.  And then everyone involved in the cottage cheese industry gets hammered to a pulp by the angry public, supermarkets are avoided, the cash cow of cottage cheese suddenly runs dry, PANIC, recriminations, special offers on cottage cheese.  Yada, yada, nada.

And in the middle of all of this is the Tnuva Dairy Company.  Originally a farmers' cooperative it grew and metastasized over the decades into a too-large, too-similar-to-a-monopoly company owned by foreign investors that recognized a good deal some time ago and bought it. To say that Tnuva and its head, Zehavit Cohen, acted arrogantly during the whole deal would be like saying the moon is made of cheese (of course the moon is not made of cheese, if it were Tnuva would have mined it by now).  Really, it would be difficult to convey how aloof, how disconnected, how creepy this numskull acted through this whole thing.  Think "let them eat (cheese) cake" and then multiply it by the number of udders in a rather large herd of cattle and you'll get some idea of how bad it was.  

So anyway, this morning the papers reported that Ms Cohen quit her job at Tnuva.  She's got other jobs at the investment firm that owns Tnuva, so don't feel too bad for her.  Still, she's out and that certainly counts as a victory.


(Note: Numskull blogger got Ms Cohen's name wrong in the original posting and corrected it.  Apologies to Ms Cohen for getting her name wrong in the first place.)

The Day of Atonement and Bicycles

In a few days Israel will shut down.  No TV, no movies, no entretainment of any kind.  No cars on the streets, absolutely no business open for any reason.  Evening comes and in synagogues all over the country a rams horn will be sounded to herald the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, holiest day in Jewish calendar.  Jews all over the country will go and pray to their god, asking for forgiveness and for another year to live in which they'll be able to do whatever it is that they do.  For twenty-five hours they'll pray and they'll fast and the ones that do it for real will try to find their peace with their god.

In a few days Israel will shut down.  No TV, no movies, no entretainment of any kind.  No cars on the streets, absolut... wait, no cars on the streets?  REALLY?  That means that I could ride my bike in the streets, up and down the highways and not be mowed down by the notoriously aggressive Israeli drivers, doesn't it?  Yes, it does.

And there you have it folks, the religious fault lines of Israeli society out where everybody can see them.  That thing with the bikes?  I was not making that up.  It's a beautiful sight to behold.  As night falls more and more kids take to the streets on their bikes; dozens, hundreds of them moving slowly or fast in groups from three to fifty.  Last year our family took a long trip from Kiryat Ono where we live down to the Tel Aviv beach and back, roughly 18 miles all in all.  Along the way we saw all twelve tribes having a ball.  My kids love to ride a bike, needless to say they await Yom Kippur breathlessly.  And god you ask?  Well, were you to ask my boys they'd tell you in all honesty that it would be god-damned shame to waste perfectly good, empty roads on the one day when you can enjoy them.  The greatest part of this whole deal is that there is no law that prohibits using a car during Yom Kippur, it's just something that we all do, period.

A couple of years ago, just before Yom Kippur I told a friend of mine how much my children were looking forward to the holiday.  Steve (that's my friend) is a deeply observant orthodox Jew that moved from the States to Israel so that he could practice his religion to the full.  Steve looked at me all funny, thoroughly confussed.  It took us a couple of minutes to figure it out that Steve had no idea that the biking thing took place.  For him the very thought that a Jew would do anything else during Yom Kippur other than fast and pray was totally alien.  

So I was shocked by his ignorance, and he was shocked by my... well, by me.

So if you want to see Israel in all of its multiple-personality glory, drop down in a couple of days, just in time for Yom Kippur.  Lunch's on me. 

And here's something that you don't see everyday: Nuance

So Mahmmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority goes to the UN to ask them for a state and even before a vote is taken the question on everyone's lips around here is: Is it good for us?

One might have thought (ok, I thought) that opinions would be neatly segmented along political lines.  Left-wing doves would think it's a good thing and right-wing hawks would think it's a bad idea and that would be it.  Onto the next discussion.

Boy did I get that one wrong.

As it turns out there's a range of nuanced opinions around here and they don't segment along any traditional lines.  They don't segment along any lines as far as I can tell.  I've had left wingers explaining patiently why going to the UN is just a stunt that ultimately hurts the Palestinians chances for a state.  On the other hand I've heard right wingers explain that Abbas' little stunt would work out in our favor, giving Israelis a focus around which to rally and to show unity in the face of adversity and so on.

Nuance in political analysis in not something we encounter readily over here.  Not only that, the punditocracy in the papers and on TV were quick to give grades to Abbas, Bibi, and Obama (like any of them would care).  They (the pundits) were the ones with the clear-cut pronouncements, the ones with the unsubtle analysis.  By comparison with the pundits, the cabbie that drove me home from the airport a few days ago was subtlety itself, all nuance and shades of gray, looking at the situation from twelve different angles and reserving judgement until more information came in.

Really.

Someone said once (it might have been Bibi) that the root problem of Americans on the world stage is that they have no sense of history, that for them anything that happened more than ten years in the past happened "a long time ago" whether it'd be the Inquisition or the Battle of the Bulge.  By the same token, the problem of Jews and Arabs is that they have no distance from history.  Everything that ever happened is kept painfully close as though it just occurred, whether it is the Hebron riots eighty years ago or the burning of a synagogue in York (and I'll let you guess when that one took place).

Both of these images are crude stereotypes of course, but they are instructive in a way.  Having no sense of history and having no distance from historical events both lend themselves to having absolutist, naive views of policy and how to react to unfolding events.  And the best antidote to such views is nuance.

Food for thought.

What would I do differently if I were in Bibi's shoes

I got called out on the one and only comment to the last entry.  What would I do, where I in Bibi's shoes, or at least in his position?  Good question, that.

Off the bat I would say that what I would like to see from Bibi is more of a mindset change and less specific policies at this early point in time.  That said, some ideas:

1. Lower or eliminate duties and excise taxes that are there just to protect the artificially high profits of some local manufacturer.  For example, some types of breakfast cereal have 100% to 300% duties imposed on them.  Why?  What possible purpose could that serve other than to protect a local manufacturer's bad habits and to line the government's pockets with my money. 
2. I won't debate here whether having a value added tax (VAT) is a good idea or not.  Let's say that it is, just for the sake of argument.  What peeves me off is that they add VAT on top of duties and taxes.  So my breakfast cereal (or my car for that matter) has an initial cost of say, $2, then they add another $2 on duties, and then they add 16% VAT on $4!  Does that make sense?  Didn't think so.
3. Buying or renting an apartment in Tel Aviv is very expensive.  No matter what the government does that is not going to change (sorry protesters, live with it).  That said, there's quite a bit that we could be doing to alleviate the burden.  The big reason that housing is so expensive in Tel Aviv is that Tel Aviv is where life happens in Israel.  Business life, entertainment, whathaveyou.  Added to that is the fact that getting into Tel Aviv is very difficult.  There's little or no effective public transportation and taking a car is inconvenient and expensive, so why would anyone would choose not to live in Tel Aviv?

Here's a radical idea.  Invest in infrastructure, say good rail or the sort of 'rail on wheels' that they pioneered in Curitiba, Brazil.  By that I mean connect the periphery to the heart in a way that is effective, safe, quick, and inexpensive.  I live about eight miles from downtown TA and getting from my door to say, the theater, is nigh-well impossible without using the car.  Give me a good alternative and I'll use it.  And I'm confident that I speak for millions.

And here's a depressing thought.  I'm writing this paragraph almost a week after I wrote all of the above ones.  In that time, the Palestinians went to the UN to ask for a state of their own and Bibi got the chance to go there and look all grand and statesman-like during his speech to the general assembly.  It's sad comfort (but comfort nevertheless) to see that in this at least we're like every other country.  When the head of government (president, chancellor, prime minister) gets into trouble on domestic issues, it's always a good idea (for him) to go abroad and be seen to be taking care of the country's business.  Above the fray, as it were.  Can't even fault Bibi, the Palestinians served that one up all on their lonesome.

Update: 450,000 march and Bibi still has no clue

"It is better to keep silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt."
Quote variously attributed to George Elliot, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, and the Talmud among others


OK.  This threatens to get repetitive.  450,000 people show up around the country to demand a better life and Bibi et al. do nothing.  But I can understand that, Benjamin Netanyahu wants you to know that he's a smart, clever, intelligent fellow and if he were to opine on this movement we would know him for what he is.

Here's a clue for you Bibi, because you obviously don't have one.  These protests that you've seen grow from week to week didn't sprout fully formed like one of your wackadoodle foreign policies.  They are the public face of the private resentment we (I'm one of the 450,000) feel after years and years of callous mismanagement of our country.

And they're not about just one thing, be that the price of food, the high rents in the center of the country, or any of a dozen others.  The protests, the marches they all come from a deeper discontent that will not go away with a few words and the appointment of a "blue ribbon committee" to investigate matters.  If it's any relief, Bibi, they're not about you specifically either, so they won't go away when you do (as you surely will).  They're about us, about the country we want for ourselves, and our natural desire to not be taken for suckers.

Now, two possibilities present themselves.  Either Bibi already knows all this and behaves as he does out of sheer malice, or he doesn't know all this (but should) and anything I write here will make no impact on him.

"You can lead a horse's ass to knowledge, but you cannot force him to think."

Quote attributed to Dorothy Parker.

Happy Birthday, Gilad

Corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted by Hamas more than half-a-decade ago.  Not taken in battle, not a prisoner of war of a foreign country.  Kidnapped by a band of thugs.  Since then, he languishes in a Hamas cell, isolated from the world, with not even the Red Cross to visit him he's denied even the most basic rights accorded to prisoners everywhere.  And that is because he's not a POW, he's a hostage and his kidnappers are not soldiers, they are thugs.  But I've said that about them before haven't I, that they are thugs?  What else can I call them?

To return Gilad, Hamas demands that hundreds of Palestinian terrorists are let go. The numbers change, names are added and erased from the list but that's the core of it.  These terrorists are currently in Israeli jails and are given food, shelter, medical treatment, access to communications and the Red Cross and other international organizations monitor their conditions.  Many here feel that it's more than they deserve but that's beside the point.

But what Hamas wants most is not their murderers back, most of all they want to establish a sort of equivalency.  To make an Israeli soldier kidnapped at gunpoint seem the same as a Hamas terrorist, caught and tried and jailed after killing civilians in a terrorist attack.

There's no equivalency, but you can see why the thought would appeal to the leadership.

That's what they want.  We just want our kid back.  We want to make good on Israel's promise to its soldiers that none of them will be left behind.

Six birthdays in captivity for no crime, just for being a conscripted soldier in the Israeli army doing his duty.  There is no hell, but in this case I wish there was one so that the cowards that did this and are still doing it could have a place where they could rot forever.

New Species Identified. Please meet: The Israeli Macho

Years and years ago I remember picking up a book in a dentist's office called How to be a Jewish Mother.  It was written with tongue wedged firmly in cheek and it started with the disclaimer that you needn't be either Jewish or a mother to be a "Jewish Mother."  You could be a Scottish lorry driver as long as you fit the pattern.  Not high culture admittedly, but it did the job of keeping my mind off the impending root canal as I waited.


With that as context please meet another specimen in the same genus, The Israeli Macho (macho macho israeliensis).  Although m. israeliensis  was identified roughly sixty years ago it didn't become clear that is really was a separate species of macho until recently (zoologists have very arcane rules for this sort of thing and I'm no expert on how the process works.  By the way, and individual does not necessarily have to be either Israeli or male to be classified as m. israeliensis, although it certainly helps.


It used to be that m/ israeliensis was a simple species to identify, even in the wild without those helpful little signs that zoo keepers and TV news producers sometimes provide.  To wit, it used to be a male, 50 years of age or more, in politics, and retired with senior rank from the military.  Quietly observing the macho in his natural environment one could usually hear at least some of his very distinct calls, the most popular of them went something like "...we will pursue these animals/terrorists/saboteurs/criminals to the end of the world if need be, and if they are already dead we will pursue them into the jaws of hell, just so that we may do justice on them again."  I'm very bad at imitating the calls that animals make in the wild and even worse at transliterating them but you get the idea.  Some variations on the call: "No price is too high for security."  "We are the Sparta of the modern age."  "We are tough, we are smart and clever, you can't hide from us."  "Ice and iron flow through our veins."  Yada, yada, nada.


Nowadays, m. israeliensis is a little harder to identify.  For one, it's often a woman, for another, they've learned how to mask their call to mimic that of the common diplomat (legatus vulgaris).  So now we get former Foreign Minister (and current opposition leader) Tzipi Livni chiming in with, "terror must be fought with force" despite the fact that she's a woman, and Culture Minister Limor Livnat contributing this jewel, "We will strike with all our might, so that no one doubts us. Israel's well-known detterance capabilities will prevail once again." 


So much easier when they went around threatening to kill people they disliked.  Wait, wait, they still do. Speaking about the recent wave of terrorist attacks Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu said, We killed the leaders of the organization that sent the terrorists. But that is only the first response.”  Not to be left behind, Defense Minister Ehud Barak--m. israeliensis extraordinaire-- actually threatened decapitation.  This paragon of clear and rational thought informed us that "the chances are very high that his (the attack's planner) head will be separated from his body."


M. Israeliensis's natural environment is the government campus centered on the Knesset (parliament).  This presents another problem in identifying him (her? it?).  The place is lousy with a related species, the Member of the Knesset (Clitellata-Hirudinae).  The problem for the amateur zoologist is that the macho can disguise itself as an MK as it stalks its prey.  Did I mention that Macho is a predator?  It is, it stalks reporters and eats ratings.


A few days ago, some of our neighbors from Gaza went psycho and decided that killing a family of Israelis on their way to a beach holiday sounded like really good sport.  A couple of other psychopaths decided that this would be a wonderful opportunity to bomb civilian targets.  These were cowardly attacks that no sane country in the world would allow to go unpunished.


These are acts are murder, especially heinous in being indiscriminate, almost random.  I understand and agree that they also have a symbolic aspect.  They are a provocation to Israel, trying to goad it into doing something stupid.  They are a challenge to its sovereignty and to its security.  Clearly they demand a reaction that is larger than just capturing the men that committed the crime and bringing them to justice (although I would be very happy if we could accomplish that at least).  Last week's murders are all these things and more; what they are not is grist for the mill of posturing politicians eager to feed their hunger for exposure.


I'm all for bio-diversity and preservation, but I'll make an exception in this case.  I wouldn't share a tear if macho macho israeliensis were to go the way of the dodo.

300,000 people demonstrate in Israel, and the government doesn't have a clue why

Remember the 70s movie Network?  In it, Howard Beale, a news anchor with declining ratings, goes off his rocker and starts ranting and raving, urging people to open their windows and scream with him, "I'm angry as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."  And they do, by the thousands. Craziness ensues.


Fast forward 35 years and the central streets and squares of Israel are filled with people quietly, cogently, and simply saying to the powers that be that we really are mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.  No shouting from the rooftops, no threats, just row upon row of honest citizens living in tents.link  The sad part is that those in power are completely deaf to what is really being said.


People in power, especially those in government have asked the protesters - some tentatively and some dismissively - 'what do you want?'  Expecting of course a list of demands that could be haggled over.  What 'they' fail to get is that there is nothing specific that the demonstrators want.  Oh sure, affordable housing, affordable education, Gilad Shalit back, you name it.  But it all boils down to something very simple.  We want our lives to belong to us.  


How about taking a little less in taxes and returning a little more in tangible benefits?  Would that be so hard, that they money that I pay in taxes might actually be used to my benefit?  At the end of the day (and the days have been long indeed), the protesters want the government to understand that our lives are our own.  That they money we make belongs to us and that they take some of it away, and not as is the case today, that they money we make belongs to the government and that they'll leave us some of it so that we can keep on making money for them.


To understand this simple truth, that our lives belong to us, would require for the government to change its collective mind.  Not change its opinion or its position.  Change its mind.  Literally, stop thinking that an over-large, over-bearing, arrogant behemoth knows the solution to the country's problems, and start thinking that it, they, whatever, are here to serve us.  To allow us to grow.  The government is too large, it takes up to much space, it suffocates life, and for it to make the protesters happy, it'll have to shrink itself and its role in society.


This brings to mind yet another picture, Creature Comforts.  In it, a very funny Brazilian panther explains in a sentence what the government of Israel simply cannot get through their collective head, "We need more space."