Obama’s inauguration enraptures Israelis
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Politics, War
With the Gaza ceasefire apparently taking hold, Israelis have been happy to have something new upon which to fixate our attentions in the news. Something hopeful. US President Barack Obama’s inauguration yesterday and the festivities surrounding it this whole week have kept Israelis enraptured.
The one exception to this trend might be American immigrants to Israel, who tend to be a Republican-leaning crowd, often because of the popular perception that the American Right is more friendly to Israel than the Left. This perception might or might not be true, but Americans living in Israel are certainly wary of Obama’s alleged lack of Zionism.
So despite citing nightlife-themed parties surrounding the inauguration which took place in Tel Aviv as well as Jerusalem, a Haaretz piece from earlier this week points out that mainstream American organizations were shying away from the event:
Neither the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel nor the American Israeli Action Coalition – two non-partisan groups – have planned any special activities to mark the swearing-in of the new president. A spokesman for Israelis for Obama, a small group that was formed before the elections and operated mainly online, told Haaretz the group had dissolved after completing it’s only goal of seeing Obama elected.
But even though George Bush is considered by the people here to have been a great friend to the country, most Israelis are optimistic about new blood inhabiting the White House. The Associated Press even hints at some more literal connections between the Israeli appetite for inauguration news coverage and the Gaza ceasefire:
Obama’s inauguration became the lead story in Israeli media, which had been dominated by coverage of the Gaza offensive that began with a massive air bombardment on Dec. 27.
The front page of Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, featured the smiling Obama and his wife over an English headline: “Good luck.”
Seemingly timing its withdrawal to Tuesday’s inauguration, Israel had already pulled most of its troops out of the ravaged Gaza Strip after a deadly three-week offensive aimed at halting years of militant rocket fire. But the crisis is not over, with reports of shooting along the Israel-Gaza border, and with Israeli soldiers poised to resume the assault if Gaza militants break a fragile cease-fire.
Maybe it’s simply a matter of the incoming president’s rock star-like status, but Obama buzz is not relegated to Democrats – even when it comes to Americans living here. Summing up the feelings at last night’s parties, today Haaretz quotes a young reveler named Guy Simen:
“Even people who did not support Obama are excited, because they know the whole world is watching this event – and they feel close to home. They know that now we’ve elected a man who is supposed to change the world and many people are proud to be Americans.”
Image courtesy lostintransitzine from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
An Israeli soldier’s story
IDF soldiers mourning at the funeral of a fallen comrade.
Our rabbi’s oldest son Didi, an army medic, was part of one of the first units to enter Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, and was lightly injured in the face by shrapnel. In the midst of his four-day hospital stay, Didi’s close friends Nitai and Dagan were killed in one of the war’s regrettable ‘friendly fire’ incidents.
Let’s let Rabbi Schlesinger take over.
After being discharged from the Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, Shira drove him home to Efrat to change into his dress uniform and then to the Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery to take part in Nitai’s and Dagan’s funerals.
I never knew that Nitai’s parents had such a warm kesher (connection) with Didi. At the funeral, Nitai’s parents, aunt and siblings hugged Didi, thanking God that he was only injured. Didi spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday sitting Shiva with the family. He was part of them.
I returned home on Thursday to see Didi for the first time since I had left for the States. I saw my child in pain – my child was bereaving. He could barely smile and wasn’t ready for conversation. He was clearly in a Shiva mode. He had lost his spark….
Om Saturday night we drove up to Pisgat Ze’ev, a very large neighborhood in Jerusalem (the size of a city) to do a Shiva call. As soon as we walked into the Stern home, Reuven, Nitai’s father noticed that Didi had arrived. He called out “Didi, get over here!”.
Didi went over to Reuven, they hugged and cried – and then Reuven let go and said lovingly “Beat it kid, before I break down.”
Shira and I waited among the many Menachamim (consolers) to get close to the family. We finally got close in order to offer our condolences – when Nitai’s parents Reuven and Sarah both looked at us and asked:
“Are you Didi’s parents?”, we answered “yes” and then they both exclaimed together “Mazal Tov – you have received a gift from God – you have a lot to be thankful for.”
We were overwhelmed with a combination of joy and extreme sadness.
As the rabbi’s wife, Shira, wrote soon after Didi’s injury, “Life/reality for these young handsome strong wonderful “boys,” because they are boys/children that have to grow up so fast and so suddenly, is so different here than anywhere in the world. The pride that they feel within the unit with their friends is so intangible, that only they can understand.”
Didi will always carry a small piece of shrapnel around embedded in his cheek as a reminder of the war in Gaza. But he, and all of the boys and men who fought in this war, will likely carry around something else far deeper in their soul.
The Radiohead – Israel connection
Radiohead is known for being one of the most innovative bands on the planet. Dudu Tessa is not. However, Tessa is a well known genre-jumping Israeli singer-songwriter. Tess grew up in the Hatikvah neighborhood of Tel Aviv and put his out first album when he was just thirteen years old and has released four more albums. So what does Tessa have to do with Radiohead you ask? His first single, “Ezei Yom” (What a Day), features Jonny Greenwood, mostly known for his work as Radiohead’s guitarist and keyboard player. According to Ynet (Hebrew link), Greenwood visits Israel quite often, which makes sense since his wife is Israeli and he met Tessa through family friends.
You can listen to the resulting song in the YouTube video I embedded below.
Radiohead’s relationship with Israel actually has quite an interesting back story. In 1993, several months after the band released their first single with minimal success, the song “Creep” made quite a splash on the charts in Israel due to well respected DJ Yoav Kutner’s incessant playing of the single (which was introduced to him by a local representative of EMI). And the rest is history. Radiohead was rushed to Israel to keep the buzz going and actually ended up playing their first gig outside of the UK in Tel Aviv. Weeks later they garnished some buzz on a few midmarket California stations and then career making radio station KROQ played it and they’ve snowballed into one of the world’s most popular, innovative and influential bands.
Good story, eh?
A tragedy of the Gaza war
One of the most heartbreaking tragedies of the recently completed Operation Cast Lead is the story of Dr Izzeldin Abuelaish, a Palestinian gynecologist from Gaza City who works at Israel’s Sheba Hospital near Tel Aviv.
Abuelaish, a fluent Hebrew speaker and known among his colleagues as an advocate for peace and coexistence, had been a regular interviewee on Israeli news broadcasts during the 22 days of war. On Friday night, three of his daughters were killed by an Israeli shell at the Abuelaish home. The IDF said gunfire had emerged from the home, a claim Abuelaish denies.
What set this tragedy apart from the other innocent Palestinians and Israelis who were killed during the war is that it played out on television According to a report by Ben Lynfield in The Independent, Abuelaish’s raw anguish -captured live on Channel 10 – forced Israelis to take their first real glimpse of the suffering and death caused to Palestinian civilians
Shlomi Eldar, the Channel 10 correspondent, his own voice choking with emotion, repeatedly noted Dr Abuelaish’s connection to Shiba Hospital as he held out his mobile phone, allowing viewers to hear the physician cry and sob: “My daughters, they killed them, Oh lord, God, God, God.”
“I want to save them but they are dead,” Dr Aboul Aish said. In a video of the interview, available on YouTube, the physician can be heard imploring for help while a shaken Mr Eldar pleads on air for anyone in the army who might be viewing to let ambulances reach the Aboul Aish home in the Jebalya refugee camp. “Maybe something can still be saved,” he said.
The IDF allowed ambulances to come straight to the house, and the doctor’s other daughter, niece and brother were rushed to Israeli hospitals – first to Barzilai in Ashkelon and then to Tel Hashomer near Tel Aviv.
Abuelaish, who did his residency at Soroka Hospital in Beersheba, was adamant he had not allowed his house to be a Hamas firing position. “They should just admit they made a mistake. There is no shame in making a mistake, but don’t deceive the nation,” he told the Independent.
Israel Television reported that autopsy reports showed traces of Grad rocket fragments in the head of one of Abuelaish’s daughters, the kind of weapon fired by Hamas, and not the IDF. But there has been no followup on that, and it appears that the IDF shell was the cause of the loss of life.
The high civilian casualty count in the Gaza operation has been attributed by Israel to the fact that Hamas both used civilians as human shields and fired from inside major population centers. Most people I know are able to use that as justification for retaining a clean conscience over the civilians killed.
But the Abuelaish case makes it impossible to ignore the victims on the other side. We can blame Hamas for the deaths of the Abuelaish girls, but we can’t just shirk off responsibility, and say ‘tough luck’. Otherwise, we become as inhuman as our enemy seems to be.
If quiet rains down on the South of Israel now due to the Gaza operation, will the loss of innocent life have been worth it? Perhaps. Could it have been achieved in another way?
Doubtful. But the images of a grieving Abuelaish, a man who epitomizes the possibility that Israelis and Palestinians can one day live together in peace, were a chilling reminder that even in winning a war, we are all losers.
IFCJ’s TV ad campaign
The Zionist community might be a little queasy about its relationship with The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. After all, can supporters of Jerry Falwell and the Gush Katif crowd really share a bed comfortably? But the fact is, Chicago and Jerusalem native Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein’s organization has done amazing work when it comes to fostering support for Israel.
Last month, Eckstein was interviewed on the decidedly Jewish-flavored Shalom TV, where he defended his work with characteristic eloquence, speaking about how terror groups’ publicity campaigns in South America, for example, must be offset by his own.
Eckstein is no stranger to TV. His very own Journey To Zion program, which has been airing for about a year and a half on Christian television networks in the US, provides a pulpit for Eckstein’s introductory Jewish teachings.
And for the past several months, the IFCJ has been running TV ads on Fox News – something which no other pro-Israel informational organization has had the nerve or means to do. The spots (example here) may be sensationalistic, and they may stray from the latest trends of pushing an image of Israel as a nation of high-tech and supermodels, but they’re poignant, and they have yielded results.
This past March, back in the early days of the ad campaign, the IFCJ reported having raised enough funds to make a difference:
IFCJ funded the renovation of 32 public bomb shelters in Sderot at a cost of $1.5 million. In addition, the organization has recently pledged to upgrade 400 bomb shelters in privately-owned residences in Ashkelon at an expected cost of $2 million.
Even Haaretz is taking note, running a story last week on the campaign under the headline “Jewish charity brings U.S. viewers Israel’s version of the war in Gaza.”
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