Tao and the Jewish State

There is a certain stately progression on the Day of Remembrance for the Fallen (Yom HaZikaron). 

Around 4 pm.  TV programming starts dying off; almost every channel wraps up programming for the next 24 hours or so. The only ones left are the Israel broadcast channels and they've moved on to somber things. Radio is still working, but every station is broadcasting low-key, minor-chord music.

7pm. Showers all around, we all change into white or black shirts. Joking dies down gradually.

7:30. Start walking up the street to Kiryat Ono's "Gan HaGiborim" (Heroes' Garden). A rather beautiful square park that is almost never used during the year. There are no games for the kids there, no stores, no coffee shops. Just a large, well-tended garden and a spartan wall with names on it. This is where we honor the fallen from our little town. It's not far, maybe ten minutes away, walking slowly.

Along the way we meet people that we haven't seen in a while, the normal impulse to greet them effusively is muted. What's the etiquette here? The day of mourning has not yet started, but it's very clear that smiles and hugs are no longer appropriate.

We make it to the garden and find a perch on the low wall that surrounds it. My nine-year old son and a friend of his are with us and we want them to be able to see. We wait.

The square is filling up. It's close to 8 o'clock and I can see three men walking fast up the avenue, trying their best to make it to the square before the ceremony starts. I can tell that they're seriously weighing whether to break into a trot and from their faces I get the distinct impression that they think it would be undignified and inappropriate to the time and place. 

At any rate. They make it to the square just in time.

8 o'clock. The lights in the Heroes' Garden are dimmed and the air-raid sirens start. Not up and down, but constant and relentless. And in that great and terrible noise I hear the scream of every mother that has just been told her son has died in battle. I can hear sirens going off in the neighboring towns like some tortured chorus singing at the gates of Hades. Can the human heart resonate to a siren like a glass of wine to a high note? For sixty seconds at 8 o'clock last night, like every year, this becomes a pressing existential question.

And then the siren is over and the ceremony begins. The flag is lowered to half-staff and the town's mayor gets up to speak. We leave. He's ok, the mayor, but after him comes the cheap pol that is Kiryat Ono's rabbi, and him I cannot stomach. So we leave.

Next morning, 10:55 am. I am standing on the overpass above Highway 4, waiting for the siren. I want to be with others when it goes off, I want to see the cars stopped on the highway. Cars are already stopping, people getting out slowly. The sirens go off, time stops for two minutes. A late model Mercedes on the highway is speeding past the  cars that are stopped on the shoulder. Through the windshield I can clearly see the driver. Suddenly, the dime drops on  the driver: Today is that day, and now is that time. He slams on the brakes, fishtails to the side and gets out of his car. Even from the overpass I can tell that he is deeply embarrassed.

Yom HaZikaron, 11am

And for most of the country that's it. That's our day of mourning. Sure, the TVis still in quiet mode but life is slowly getting back to normal. There are things to do and not a lot of time to do them, for tomorrow is Independence Day and we must get ready for the celebrations.

Officially, Yom HaZikaron ends tonight, a second before Yom HaAtzmaut commences. I am told that the founders of the state did this on purpose, so that it would be clear to all of us for all time what was the price we paid for our freedom. I get it, I really do. It's a Tao thing, no black without white, no joy without sorrow, and from the sorrow cometh joy. 

The problem is that it ain't working. We are not Taoists here. We can't absorb the interplay of Yin and Yang in its entirety, so instead we cope. We leave the Yin behind slowly, trying to honor the dead but conscious that we'll be having the party of the year tomorrow.

Can we honor the fallen as is their due, and then be joyous tomorrow?

The truth is, we can't. So I see my fellow citizens moving away from Yom HaZikaron while still in the middle of it. It's inevitable I guess. The sentiment from the price we have paid is too raw, too exposed. We need to put distance between Yin and Yang. We cannot accommodate the darkness and the light in the same space so we force a gap between them. 

I wish the powers that be would move Yom HaZikaron up by a day and give us 24 hours between one and the other. I want us all to be able to mourn the fallen and honor their memory for a full day. And then I would ask for an extra day to shift from sorrow to joy. Is that too much to ask?

Winners and Losers

So, over one- hundred people killed, millions of dollars in property damages on both sides, entire populations under siege, and two weeks later we really must ask ourselves, who the fuck won?

Sorry, did the adult language above offend you? I don't often write using expletives but sometimes they are completely necessary. I am angry and frustrated by the results of operation ""Pillar of Defense." If for no other reason that neither I nor most of the civilian population in Israel have the least idea what it is that we were trying to accomplish. I assume that it had something to do with stopping rockets, mortars, and other assorted instruments of death from raining down on us. OK, that's a good objective in that it is measurable at least. Of course we must ask ourselves why now, why not six months ago, why not a month from now. It's not like the rockets are a new thing, they've been doing that for a while, and I would hazard a guess that, left to their own devices they'll probably keep doing it.

Here the cynic will say: "it happened just now because it couldn't happen before during the U.S. elections."
Me: "I guess I can see that. Maybe. But what woul have been so wrong about next week, or next month for that matter?"
Cynic: "Next month are the Israeli elections. The whole circuswas designed to portray Bibi as strong, enhance his credentials as leader of the nation in her time of dire need. You do that before the election, dufus, not afterwards. Duh."

Maybe. Maybe the guys in the tinfoil hats are right, but I don't buy it. It's not that I don't feel that the current leadership isn't venal enough to do such a thing. I do think that, and of course they are. Venal? They'd throw grandma under the bus and hold her down while she's run over if they thought it'd help them any. But as much as this hurts me to say, this not venality, it's posturing. It's macho bravado gone terribly, terribly wrong. From where I stand this looked nothing so much as two assholes bragging about whose car has got the bigger engine and then, bizarrely, deciding that the best way to settle the argument would be not with a drag race, but with a friendly game of chicken. And just to make it interesting, why don't we put the whole of the civilian population in the backseat. What could possibly go wrong?

So? Who won? Well, it sure as shit wasn't us. I don't think that there is anyone that thinks that the Hamas guns have gone silent for good. "Pillar of Defense"? Don't crack me up, big stinking pile of... well, you get the idea. So, if we didn't win, was it the psychopaths that won? No, not them either. If you don't believe me go ask el-Jabri, now rotting in the ground.

So who won? No one.

A Nation of Cynics

Two very different men jumped into the political arena last week: Noam Shalit, the engineer from the north and the father of Gilad Shalit and Yair Lapid, the TV and newspaper personality and son of the late Tommy Lapid, TV and newspaper personality, Knesset member, and government minister.

I was surprised to see that the reaction to their announcements was very similar. Cynicism. A knee-jerk reaction that these to must be joining the political game for personal gain. That they couldn't possibly be doing what they're doing for, let's not say 'pure,' but at least untainted reasons. I found these attitudes to be widespread, in the media, among friends and family, almost everywhere.

It's hardly surprising. We live in a place that seems to feed cynicism and feed from it. A long line of politicians have shown us that we have plenty of reasons to suspect their motives. This applies to politicians from all sorts of parties and not just recently but for a very long time. I'm sure that among our Knesset members there are some that truly think of themselves as public servants; it's just hard to see them. They are buried under the mountain of cheap political operatives whose main driving philosophy is "what's in it for me?" It is these same operatives that benefit from feeding the cynical wave. If everyone is just looking out for him or herself, goes the logic, then there's little sense in exchanging one bum for another.  Shalit and Lapid however, appear to be pols of a different sort and that should worry the entrenched interests. 

Yair Lapid

Consider Lapid's case. Lapid's entry into politics is a good example of an argument against self-interest. It's hard to see how getting elected to the Knesset, even if he makes it there as the head of a largish party, and even if he's named senior minister in the next government, will benefit him. Certainly not financially. Knesset members and ministers make good money, but not when compared to the kind of money that Lapid made until last week as a news anchor (not to mention the income from his regular column in a major newspaper and his very many speaking engagements). The bottom line is that he'll be taking a large cut to his bottom line. So it must be power, right? That's what must be driving him. Well, maybe. To some degree. Even if he's named minister of something relevant (and quite a few of the current batch of "ministers" don't really have enough to do to fill up their days), it'll take time and a lot of effort to make changes, so I don't see how that can be perceived as being any more fun or more fulfilling than his current positions, where he enjoys a great deal of influence and doesn't have to deal with the very dirty business of politics.

Noam Shalit, in a quieter moment

Shalit's case is different, of course. Noam Shalit's job for the last five years was getting his son released from his Hammas kidnappers. He did this by putting pressure on the politicians to do their job. In the process he built an organization that mobilized a huge chunk of the country. Five years later and after bringing Gilad home he must have looked in the mirror and seen a changed man, how could he not. As it happens, Sweetie knows Shalit slightly, having volunteered extensively for the Gilad campaign. She confirmed my earlier intuition, that whatever faults Shalit might have, cynical self-interest is not one of them. I'll bet pounds to pennies that Shalit truly sees public service as a way of giving back. 

Shalit is running within the Labor Party, so I wouldn't vote for him for all the tea in China, but that's because the Labor Party is a dud. Stupid choice of party for him, but not a cynical one, not by a long shot. I've read in quite a few articles that his running for office is an abuse of his notoriety (this one's a good example). Really? I wonder how these writers would feel if Shalit had picked a party that they themselves favor. Food for thought.

Which brings another thought to mind. If Bibi was expecting for Shalit to exhibit some sort of misplaced loyalty and support him in the next elections, he must be sorely disappointed. 

Bibi's future?

And speaking of Bibi (I can't seem to write a single column that ignores him), he reacted to the news of Lapid's entry into politics by being dismissive and derisive in what was clearly an attempt to hide how distraught he really was. Bibi would like nothing better than to make us all believe that Lapid is just as cynical, just as manipulative, just as self-interested as he himself is. Because if we take Lapid at his word, then Bibi is toast.

Two quotes to wrap things up:

Cynicism is the intellectual cripple's substitute for intelligence.

Russell Lynes

Factionalism is the abiding human need to create group conflicts based on religion, politics, race, gender, class 

or whether toilet paper should be pulled over or under the roll.

from The Cynic's Dictionary

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?

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.

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.)

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.

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."