I got a call from a customer in Kfar Saba this morning telling me that she couldn’t meet me at the apartment I was painting for her because the police were still picking up bodyparts near her house in the aftermath of the latest suicide bombing. Two boys and the bomber were dead. So I went to work anyway and saw for the first time that a barricade was set up at the edge of town as police checked the occupants of every car. Later, as I was finishing up my job, my customer showed up, approved the work and paid the bill. Neither of us mentioned the bodyparts, or the barricade, or the war.
Then I was home, just a few kilometers away, preparing for my daughter’s birthday party. Her little friends showed up as planned and we made music, painted a mural, ate birthday cake and had a juggling show. The war was not mentioned but our bubble is becoming more fragile.
Last Friday my son ran a 3 kilometer section of the annual Ra’anana marathon. His first time. It was fun. We all cheered. Then I dropped off the family at home and went to the Rantis action on the Green Line with 200 other Israelis who proceeded to demolish army closure barricades with their bare hands. A token resistance to the occupation. Those of us feeling smug about our activity should take heed to the comment following my previous report. Until we (Israelis) stand with our Palestinian cousins and share the risks of their rebellion, our actions will have little impact on the larger Israeli public. Who among us has the strength, the courage? Could the blacks in the United States have achieved the civil rights reforms in the sixties if it were not for the solidarity of a few whites that marched with them. Then again their citizenship and the US constitution protected them. But some were still killed. Then again, in Israel we have no constitution and the Palestinians have no citizenship. ………..
Tonight I was at a political meeting in Tel Aviv with some leftist movers and shakers, and we watched our army on television bombing Gaza and Ramalla in retaliation for the earlier bombing. A celphone call came in from Hebron from the Christian Peacemakers Team. The settlers there were on the rampage there, burning Palestinian cars and setting fire to the Market. Nothing about this on the television news. Some of us went into action calling the army, the police, and all the major media and wire services. It’s amazing how much activity can be generated when everyone at a meeting has a celphone. Half an hour later we saw the settlers being subdued (gently) by the army on television.
It could be that Sharon intends to beat the Palestinians into submission while herding them into ever smaller areas, then call those areas a State and tell them to take it or leave it. After all, the American colonials got away with the same tactic with the Native Americans. Why not Israel?
It’s all pretty depressing.
Thursday, March 29, 2001
Sunday, March 18, 2001
Life on the Israeli Riviera • Part 2
I went to work today with a new worker. He’s a nice thirty-something middle class gentleman from Peru who came to Israel six months ago with a starry eyed Zionist dream that has been shattered by the reality of today’s Israel. Ever since his boyhood he has nurtured a naive vision of a caring Jewish State that is completely at odds with the militarist Israel of 2001. What a cosmic joke has been played on my friend by the emissary of the Jewish Agency in Lima. In Peru he was a respected manager of a major hardware store chain, an officer at his synagogue, and a solid member of the middle class with a nice home. In Israel he is staying at a slummy Absorption Center (immigrant’s hostel) with his wife and two kids, and has found his skills and experience irrelevant in a society that really doesn’t care why he came here, and even less about his welfare. So now he’s my painting helper working for wages that I’m ashamed to be paying. So where does that leave me?
Am I also a victim or a protagonist of this Zionist game that shuffles the Jews of this world out of their homes and into a matrix of beaurocracy and government control in order to provide more children to become Zionist cannon fodder. I hope not. But I do wonder most days about the reasons for my children becoming Israeli, and I hope the answers that come are the ones that will allow me to sleep at night when my children are grown. I took them from a secure home in the heartland of America and brought them to a land where the next day might be the last. But surely our Civil War will end and we will finally come to terms with our Palestinian cousins and learn to share this land with all who live here. Am I also naive?
Among my Israeli leftist friends I am the only one who actually goes out every day and builds calluses on my hands in order to put food on the table. But they are the ones with the rigid ideologies about the working class and the theories about the means of production and the political structures that will bring us all a final equality, brotherhood, sisterhood, and all that crap that died with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. I would be happy for the killing to stop and the people to be able to go to the store for a loaf of bread without having to confront a conscript soldier from Russia or Brazil who has closed the road and makes our grandmothers climb over mud and rocks to get around the road that is closed but they let them go around it.?.?! Only some times they shoot at them because they are really not supposed to go around it. . . . for a loaf of bread, or going to school, or looking for work. . . they shoot at them.
Yet I live in a town not 7 kilometers from the aforementioned scenario. And here my eight-year-old daughter can walk herself home from school without a care in the world that some jerk with a gun will accost her and humiliate her. Why can my daughter have that freedom and her counterpart in Qalkylia cannot? Why can we be safe in our little bubble of security and they cannot? Why are Jewish human rights somehow more important than anyone else around here? It’s a little belated to keep pointing to the Holocaust as a reason for all our oppression of our neighbors. My dad was in a camp. I hate the Nazis too. But for G-d’s sake that was fifty years ago already. Let’s give it a rest! The world won’t forget. We’ve made sure of that. Maybe it’s time to show how magnanimous we can be, and open our doors, our arms, our hearts, to those who have unfairly borne the brunt of our redemption.
Am I also a victim or a protagonist of this Zionist game that shuffles the Jews of this world out of their homes and into a matrix of beaurocracy and government control in order to provide more children to become Zionist cannon fodder. I hope not. But I do wonder most days about the reasons for my children becoming Israeli, and I hope the answers that come are the ones that will allow me to sleep at night when my children are grown. I took them from a secure home in the heartland of America and brought them to a land where the next day might be the last. But surely our Civil War will end and we will finally come to terms with our Palestinian cousins and learn to share this land with all who live here. Am I also naive?
Among my Israeli leftist friends I am the only one who actually goes out every day and builds calluses on my hands in order to put food on the table. But they are the ones with the rigid ideologies about the working class and the theories about the means of production and the political structures that will bring us all a final equality, brotherhood, sisterhood, and all that crap that died with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. I would be happy for the killing to stop and the people to be able to go to the store for a loaf of bread without having to confront a conscript soldier from Russia or Brazil who has closed the road and makes our grandmothers climb over mud and rocks to get around the road that is closed but they let them go around it.?.?! Only some times they shoot at them because they are really not supposed to go around it. . . . for a loaf of bread, or going to school, or looking for work. . . they shoot at them.
Yet I live in a town not 7 kilometers from the aforementioned scenario. And here my eight-year-old daughter can walk herself home from school without a care in the world that some jerk with a gun will accost her and humiliate her. Why can my daughter have that freedom and her counterpart in Qalkylia cannot? Why can we be safe in our little bubble of security and they cannot? Why are Jewish human rights somehow more important than anyone else around here? It’s a little belated to keep pointing to the Holocaust as a reason for all our oppression of our neighbors. My dad was in a camp. I hate the Nazis too. But for G-d’s sake that was fifty years ago already. Let’s give it a rest! The world won’t forget. We’ve made sure of that. Maybe it’s time to show how magnanimous we can be, and open our doors, our arms, our hearts, to those who have unfairly borne the brunt of our redemption.
Saturday, March 03, 2001
Life on the Israeli Riviera • part 1
We had our annual Purim parade here in Ra'anana today. Our main street, Rohov Ahuza, was packed with people watching float after float of enthusiastic children playing instruments and having a good time. The mayor of Ra'anana led the way in an open American style convertable automobile. Security was everywhere, making sure that the Israeli elite and their children could have their fun depite the dirty little war going on outside our secure municipal bubble.
Our quiet upper-middle class town of 60,000 is about 20 kilometers north of Tel Aviv, just a little bit inland from the coast. Another 7 kilometers to the east of us is the Green Line and the town of Qalkiliya, a Palestinian community that has been a locus of Intifada activity, with a strangled economy and little hope for the future. I wake up every morning trying to come to terms with the dichotomy between my life and theirs, between the life I provide for my children and the funerals that they have for theirs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fat cat or stock option high tech wiz kid like so many of my neighbors. No, I go out every morning and get dirt under my fingernails or covered in paint as I fix up the houses and apartments for my better off neighbors. In the local lingo I'm called a Shiputznik, one of the few Jews left in Israel who is willing to get dirty for a living.
Life can be quite surreal around here. Having a street festival for Purim while our army and vigilante settlers are killing a few more Palestinians is just the tip of the iceberg. We also go to the park and have picnics on Saturdays, throw lavish birthday parties and chat about the relative merits of a vacation in India or Peru. Our tree lined main street is full of sidewalk cafes and dress shops that are frequented by the fashionable ladies of Ra'anana. We have a country club where the good people spent time swimming or working out in the gym while catching up on local gossip.
All this has been built on the systematic exploitation of Palestinian and now foreign workers.
Oh yes, now that we and the Palestinians are busy shooting and bombing each other, Israel has become one of the world's largest importers of cheap foreign labor. They don't get visas, their employers do, and then the Chinese, or Philipino, or Thai workers are held in a kind of indentured servitude at the whim of the employer. Just outside Ra'anana there is a huge Amdocs (a high tech company) building going up that has within its barbed wire compound a collection of at least twenty huts which house the captive foreign labor. They are the kind of huts that you might have in your garden to keep tools in, or your dog.
So that's it in a nutshell. Life on the Israeli Riviera. Just one more thing. This isn't a war of national liberation that the Palestinians are waging here. No-one in their right mind believes any more that it's possible to establish two states on this itty bitty piece of land with everyone already living on top of each other. No. We're having a civil war. There is only one country here. Call it Israel, call it Palestine or call it any damn thing you want. The facts on the ground are here to stay. The settlers are not moving. We're all settlers here! And the Palestinians aren't moving either, or the 250,000 foreign workers, or the 1,000,000 Russians, most of them Christians, who arrived over the past ten years. I wish the dumb politicians would just declare a state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, give everyone the vote and get on with building a democratic nation. Anything else is just BS.
Our quiet upper-middle class town of 60,000 is about 20 kilometers north of Tel Aviv, just a little bit inland from the coast. Another 7 kilometers to the east of us is the Green Line and the town of Qalkiliya, a Palestinian community that has been a locus of Intifada activity, with a strangled economy and little hope for the future. I wake up every morning trying to come to terms with the dichotomy between my life and theirs, between the life I provide for my children and the funerals that they have for theirs. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fat cat or stock option high tech wiz kid like so many of my neighbors. No, I go out every morning and get dirt under my fingernails or covered in paint as I fix up the houses and apartments for my better off neighbors. In the local lingo I'm called a Shiputznik, one of the few Jews left in Israel who is willing to get dirty for a living.
Life can be quite surreal around here. Having a street festival for Purim while our army and vigilante settlers are killing a few more Palestinians is just the tip of the iceberg. We also go to the park and have picnics on Saturdays, throw lavish birthday parties and chat about the relative merits of a vacation in India or Peru. Our tree lined main street is full of sidewalk cafes and dress shops that are frequented by the fashionable ladies of Ra'anana. We have a country club where the good people spent time swimming or working out in the gym while catching up on local gossip.
All this has been built on the systematic exploitation of Palestinian and now foreign workers.
Oh yes, now that we and the Palestinians are busy shooting and bombing each other, Israel has become one of the world's largest importers of cheap foreign labor. They don't get visas, their employers do, and then the Chinese, or Philipino, or Thai workers are held in a kind of indentured servitude at the whim of the employer. Just outside Ra'anana there is a huge Amdocs (a high tech company) building going up that has within its barbed wire compound a collection of at least twenty huts which house the captive foreign labor. They are the kind of huts that you might have in your garden to keep tools in, or your dog.
So that's it in a nutshell. Life on the Israeli Riviera. Just one more thing. This isn't a war of national liberation that the Palestinians are waging here. No-one in their right mind believes any more that it's possible to establish two states on this itty bitty piece of land with everyone already living on top of each other. No. We're having a civil war. There is only one country here. Call it Israel, call it Palestine or call it any damn thing you want. The facts on the ground are here to stay. The settlers are not moving. We're all settlers here! And the Palestinians aren't moving either, or the 250,000 foreign workers, or the 1,000,000 Russians, most of them Christians, who arrived over the past ten years. I wish the dumb politicians would just declare a state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan, give everyone the vote and get on with building a democratic nation. Anything else is just BS.
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