Sometimes Nostalgia Can Be Tough
Imshin, born and raised in Haifa, but now living in Tel Aviv, is disturbed by television pictures of her old stomping grounds.
Watching the initial shaky footage on TV, R.T. and I immediately recognized one of the spots in Haifa where rockets had fallen at lunchtime today. I haven’t been in that particular part of the city for at least twenty five years. Oh look, there’s a fountain there now, I thought to myself.
It’s hard to grasp that this could be Haifa, where I grew up. Sleepy Haifa, where nothing ever happened. It gives me this creepy chilling feeling, of horror invading my childhood memories. Do you know what I mean?
I got this feeling a couple of years back, when the bus I used to ride to school blew up, at the bus stop I used to wait at, killing school kids who now went to my old school. I hadn’t been there for years and years and there it was on the television screen, distorted by death and destruction.
It’s like something weird is happening in your mind. It’s like having a nightmare while you’re wide awake, in the middle of the day.
A Well-Earned Rest
Carmia from the group blog Kishkushim, which has been posting faithfully from the front lines in Haifa — had a difficult Friday, but is hopefully enjoying a peaceful weekend a little further south. She deserves it.
I wish I could say that there’s nothing to report in Haifa, but we just had our first siren. I thought it might just be another false alarm but we heard three katyushot land and the explosions were really powerful. I screamed against my will with each boom. After we thought it was safe, we went back to the living room but jumped back right away to the hallway when we heard a fourth, even louder missile hit.
Hearing ambulances.
My electrical cable from the computer just burned and my laptop’s battery is very old so it will last me only for a few more minutes. I will not be able to blog for a while now.
My boyfriend and I will try to drive to Ashdod soon. His parents and siblings live there and we always visit them every second weekend. With these missile strikes though, I’m not sure how safe it is to be.
So Far Away
Daniel Cohen is a native of Haifa and a partner at Gemini Investment Funds, an Israeli venture capital firm. Three weeks ago, he packed his bags and headed to California to be his company’s Silicon Valley representative. Normally, his blog is dedicated to promote Internet Start-up (and Music) activity in Israel.
But not right now. He writes:
It’s so weird… I left Israel 3 weeks ago – everything was calm, status quo was maintained, no danger in site. 3 weeks… and look what has happened. I have been walking around with the desire to write something about this, but it’s so difficult. What can I write about?
My parents? They are in Haifa, living the sirens and shelters on an hourly basis. I must say, they are very cool about it, not sure I would have felt the same.
Tel-Aviv? I talk to my friends, and it seems that Tel-Aviv is just as far from Haifa as Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley? Everybody is talking about Israel… Usually that’s a positive sign for us, but I much rather hear people talking about business in Israel as opposed to fighting in Israel.
Internet? That totally doesn’t make sense. How can I write about YouTube or MetaCafe or eSnips when there is such a mess back home.
So – I write about nothing. I hope things will calm down soon.
So Far Away
Daniel Cohen is a native of Haifa and a partner at Gemini Investment Funds, an Israeli venture capital firm. Three weeks ago, he packed his bags and headed to California to be his company’s Silicon Valley representative. Normally, his blog is dedicated to promote Internet Start-up (and Music) activity in Israel.
But not right now. He writes:
It’s so weird… I left Israel 3 weeks ago – everything was calm, status quo was maintained, no danger in site. 3 weeks… and look what has happened. I have been walking around with the desire to write something about this, but it’s so difficult. What can I write about?
My parents? They are in Haifa, living the sirens and shelters on an hourly basis. I must say, they are very cool about it, not sure I would have felt the same.
Tel-Aviv? I talk to my friends, and it seems that Tel-Aviv is just as far from Haifa as Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley? Everybody is talking about Israel… Usually that’s a positive sign for us, but I much rather hear people talking about business in Israel as opposed to fighting in Israel.
Internet? That totally doesn’t make sense. How can I write about YouTube or MetaCafe or eSnips when there is such a mess back home.
So – I write about nothing. I hope things will calm down soon.
We Don’t Wait For the UN; We Help Our Own Refugees
Gavriel and his family decided to do more than watch television and feel badly for the refugees from the north. They decided to help.
The missiles have been falling on Israel’s northern cities for a week now. That’s a long time to stay in a bomb shelter. Especially for the kids. That’s a lot of sleepless nights listening to explosions. Especially for the kids.
Not surprisingly, many families are packing suitcases and travelling south to get away from the danger and the chaos — anywhere else in the world and they might even be described as refugees, albeit temporary ones. As they leave, carring with them the anxiety of leaving their homes and possessions behind, I can only wonder at how they held out as long as they did.
One such family is staying with us right now. They arrived the night before last with their three kids (3, 9 and 15), all exhausted and shaken — especially the three year old who walked around saying “boom boom boom.” That’s all a three year old can say to describe the experience of having explosive laden rockets flying randomly over his house and exploding nearby, day after day…..
For many Israeli families the move South, while stressful under such traumatic circumstances, is not difficult in practical terms. Many have cars for the trip and friends or relatives ready to welcome them.
But not all are so fortunate. Not everyone has a car. Not everyone can afford extended time without work. Not everyone has family or connections where the missiles have not reached.
The family staying with us doesn’t have a car and had to write a check to pay for a taxi to bring them all the way down to our town, Beit Shemesh, a two or three hour drive. And they don’t know us, having been sent to us only because we volunteered on a list of willing hosts. They’re staying with strangers — welcoming strangers, but strangers nonetheless. And even they consider themselves lucky compared to those who don’t have the money for such a taxi ride, or for whom volunteers have not yet been found to host them. There are still families remaining in the North, never straying far from their basement shelters and praying the warning sirens give them enough time.
Compared to what they go through, this war seems like little more than a top-of-the-hour fixation for the rest of us. But if we examine the effect of our own sense of personal powerlessness — our inability as concerned citizens to make the missiles stop, to shelter our people from danger — we realize it eats away at all of us. Especially our own children. I can see it clearly in my own kids, with their anxious questions about bombs, and need for reassurance that we would move them if they were in danger.
So far, the best thing for our kids, and for us, has been this chance to help another family. It has been a chance to attach this distant problem to a real-world face, and to do something to help. When these three kids and their parents arrived, our own kids were so excited they even cleaned their rooms to make them feel welcome.
Abnormal Normality
Yael discovers that while life in Tel Aviv may look the same as it always has, everything has changed over the past week…
In everything normal, the war intrudes. You meet with a new possible colleague to collaborate with and before you start discussing the studies you might do together, you, of course, do the so where do you live kinda small-talk. You find out that he and his wife are playing host to his parents, her parents, his brother’s family consisting of 4 small children, her brother and her sister’s families consisting of an additional 9 children between them, not including their 3 own children –in a two and half bedroom flat. Their families hail from the northern towns under attack. What else to do? The few other family members who live in safe areas are playing host to the rest of the siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and so forth and have taken in as many as they can. You are joined by another colleague, an Arab-Israeli who looks worn out. He too has family sleeping piled on his floor from the same region and he additionally is worried about members of his wife’s family that are in Lebanon.
You try to focus on the issues at hand and end the meeting deciding another is in order but it looks like we might have some common ground for collaboration (yo, Yael has got a lot –A LOT– of reading to do on visual perception and its link to cognition and graphics, thud. Totally new area for me and very exciting).
Then you go to another colleague’s office and make a conference call to a potential PH.D. student that you really want to work with (she is fabulous) and whom you and everyone in the department are trying to get into the program. She is sick in bed with the flu and has just moved from Ramallah to Bethlehem. She has been awarded a scholarship already by our department and found out today that she has another one waiting from the university in general but a major snag has occurred– her Masters degree program at the Jordanian University she attended did not have a thesis component. We were all gnashing our teeth collectively during the conference call, while she also sniffled and sneezed her way through it, as we tried to figure out how to fight the powers that be that insist that a rule is a rule. We jointly stress about how we will get her to important meetings when terrorist attacks close off access from the West Bank. We find no solutions only things to continue stressing about and some things to try and hope and hope and try.
Bring Them Home
Photo by Harry
Living Like a Refugee
The blogger who calls himself the Rock of Galilee normally lives a quiet life in the north where he owns a bakery. Now he is checking in from Jerusalem where he has sought relief from Hizbollah rockets, and worries as he hears rumors that his bakery has been damaged or destroyed in the attacks.
He recently posted about running into his fellow villagers who have fled their homes.
My wife ran into a bunch of people today from our village. One lady said she had put the kids outside in a little swimming pool when she heard a missile incoming. She grabbed the kids and ran inside and the boom was so loud she was sure it has hit the house. It had actually hit the neighbor’s house. Too close for comfort, she finally evacuated with her family. She saw another lady whose husband works for the police in Haifa. I didn’t see this on the news, but she said the main police station got hit, and now her husband has a few days off. I thought he worked in the courthouse, so it could be the main courthouse got hit and my wife misunderstood. It seems like our neighborhood is sustaining a lot of damage right now.
The (Reggae) Beat Goes On
Harry informs us that
Ziggy Marley will be performing next week despite the fighting in the north and despite the marijuana and hash draught. Bet he has a good hook up in Tel Aviv. His original venue was Achziv beach just south of Nahariya, so they ended up moving it to Ra’anana. Major respect for him coming.
The Story Behind the Girls Writing on the Missiles
Lisa does some digging and clears up the story behind pictures that have been used to vilify Israel:
The image above caused a huge storm of outrage in the Arab blogosphere. Huge. You wouldn’t believe how huge. The widely-read Gulf-based Palestinian blogger who was the first to post it received so much traffic that he had to move the photo to another server. Many others, including several I know personally, posted it and expressed their disgust. Israeli children taught to hate! Lebanese children are dying and they’re happy! They’re no better than… (fill in the blank, I don’t want to go there).
Below is the story behind the photo – from the source.
I phoned Sebastian Scheiner, the Israeli photojournalist who took the photo for Associated Press (AP), explained that the image had given a really terrible impression and asked for the context. He sketched it out quickly and fluidly, but asked me not to quote him. So I spoke with Shelly Paz, a Yedioth Ahronoth reporter who was also at the scene and agreed immediately to go on record. She was quite shocked to learn how badly the photo had been misinterpreted and misrepresented; and she told me the same story Sebastian did, but with more details and nuance.
The little girls shown drawing with felt markers on the tank missiles are residents of Kiryat Shmona, which is right on the border with Lebanon. And when I say “on the border,” I’m not kidding; there’s little more space between their town and Southern Lebanon than there is between the back gardens of neighbouring houses in a wealthy American suburb.
No, how close is it really?
Well, there’s a famous story in Israel, from the time when the Israeli army occupied Southern Lebanon: a group of soldiers stationed inside southern Lebanon used their mobile phones to order pizza from Kiryat Shmona and have it delivered to the fence that separates the two countries.
Anyway.
Kiryat Shmona has been under constant bombardment from South Lebanon since the first day of the conflict. It was a ghost town, explained Shelly. There was not a single person on the streets and all the businesses were closed. The residents who had friends, family or money for alternate housing out of missile range had left, leaving behind the few who had neither the funds nor connections that would allow them to escape the missiles crashing and booming on their town day and night. The noise was terrifying, people were dying outside, the kids were scared out of their minds and they had been told over and over that some man named Nasrallah was responsible for their having to cower underground for days on end.
On the day that photo was taken, the girls had emerged from the underground bomb shelters for the first time in five days. A new army unit had just arrived in the town and was preparing to shell the area across the border. The unit attracted the attention of twelve photojournalists – Israeli and foreign. The girls and their families gathered around to check out the big attraction in the small town – foreigners. They were relieved and probably a little giddy at being outside in the fresh air for the first time in days. They were probably happy to talk to people. And they enjoyed the attention of the photographers.
Apparently one or some of the parents wrote messages in Hebrew and English on the tank shells to Nasrallah. “To Nasrallah with love,” they wrote to the man whose name was for them a devilish image on television – the man who mockingly told Israelis, via speeches that were broadcast on Al Manar and Israeli television, that Hezbollah was preparing to launch even more missiles at them. That he was happy they were suffering.
The photograpers gathered around. Twelve of them. Do you know how many that is? It’s a lot. And they were all simultaneously leaning in with their long camera lenses, clicking the shutter over and over. The parents handed the markers to the kids and they drew little Israeli flags on the shells. Photographers look for striking images, and what is more striking than pretty, innocent little girls contrasted with the ugliness of war? The camera shutters clicked away, and I guess those kids must have felt like stars, especially since the diversion came after they’d been alternately bored and terrified as they waited out the shelling in their bomb shelters.
Shelly emphasized several times that none of the parents or children had expressed any hatred toward the Lebanese people. No-one expressed any satisfaction at knowing that Lebanese were dying – just as Israelis are dying. Their messages were directed at Nasrallah. None of those people was detached or wise enough to think: “Hang on, tank shell equals death of human beings.” They were thinking, tank shell equals stopping the missiles that land on my house. Tank shells will stop that man with the turban from threatening to kill us.
And besides, none of those children had seen images of dead people – either Israeli or Lebanese. Israeli television doesn’t broadcast them, nor do the newspapers print them. Even when there were suicide bombings in Israel several times a week for months, none of the Israeli media published gory photos of dead or wounded people. It’s a red line in Israel. Do not show dead, bleeding, torn up bodies because the families of the dead will suffer and children will have nightmares. And because it is just in bad taste to use suffering for propaganda purposes.
Those kids had seen news footage of destroyed buildings and infrastructure, but not of the human toll. They had heard over and over that the air force was destroying the buildings that belonged to Hezbollah, the organization responsible for shelling their town and threatening their lives. How many small children would be able to make the connection between tank shells and dead people on their own? How many human beings are able to detach from their own suffering and emotional stress and think about that of the other side? Not many, I suspect.
So, perhaps the parents were not wise when they encouraged their children to doodle on the tank shells. They were letting off a little steam after being cooped up – afraid, angry and isolated – for days. Sometimes people do silly things when they are under emotional stress. Especially when they fail to understand how their childish, empty gesture might be interpreted.
I’ve been thinking for the last two days about this photo and the storm of reaction it set off. I worry about the climate of hate that would lead people to look at it and automatically assume the absolute worst – and then use the photo to dehumanize and victimize. I wonder why so many people seem to take satisfaction in believing that little Israeli girls with felt markers in their hands – not weapons, but felt markers – are evil, or spawned by an evil society. I wonder how those people would feel if Israelis were to look at a photo of a Palestinian child wearing a mock suicide belt in a Hamas demonstration and conclude that all Palestinians – nay, all Arabs – are evil.
And I wonder why it is so difficult to think a little, to get it into our heads that television news and photojournalism manipulate our thoughts and emotions.
Links to anti-Israel websites with that photo placed prominently next to the image of a dead Lebanese child have been sent to me several times. Someone has been rushing around the Israeli blogosphere, leaving the link to one particularly abhorrent site in the comments boxes. And it makes me really sad that the emotional climate has deteriorated to this point.
The moderates of the Middle East are locked in a battle with the extremists. And look what they did to the moderates. Without blinking, without thinking, we fell victim to the classic “divide and conquer” technique. We work hard for months and years to build connections, develop our societies, educate ourselves, promote democracy and free speech… And they destroy it all, in less than a week. And we let them.
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