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Have any lessons been learned from Rabin’s assassination?

Thursday marks the 14th anniversary of the death of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin – certainly one of the cataclysmic events of Israel’s short history.

The divisions among the country’s citizens which led to Rabin’s assassination are still very apparent, with venom from both the Right and Left toward each other spouting freely without any attempt to mask the hatred. The Right blames Rabin and his followers on the Left for the failed Oslo process and the Left blames the Right for the environment that enabled an Israeli to take the life of a prime minister.

While most of the country mourns Rabin’s death and marks each anniversary with sadness, there’s a not so small minority who don’t take part in the collective grief and go about their business like any other day. It’s not a holiday that brings the country together.

Still, there are attempts at unity. President Shimon Peres opened the 24 hours of commemoration saying that the former prime minister’s vision of peace will not be abandoned. The state ceremony, held at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem, was attended by Rabin family members, ministers, members of Knesset, and students from schools throughout Israel.

“Israel’s young generation has kept in their hearts the knowledge that such a despicable murder mustn’t ever happen again,” said Peres. “When the criminal took Yitzhak’s life, he intended to extinguish all hope for peace as well, but his plot will not succeed.”

Peres added that while peace has many enemies outside of Israel, there are also many skeptics within Israel’s own borders. He added that “Rabin’s assassination delayed the entire process and hampered the diplomatic course, but the understanding between us and our neighbors has grown, and its urgency has not changed.”

Memorial ceremonies will continue Thursday throughout the country, and the state ceremony is scheduled to take place in Mount Herzl cemetery at noon.

I remember leaving my newspaper that night after putting out the Rabin assassination edition thinking that Israel was in mortal danger from within, and wondering if we would survive. 14 years, we have perservered, but still have many lessons left to learn and internalize about what kind of country we want to build here.

Let the children stay

There hasn’t been a more sensitive issue on the Israeli table the last few months than that of children of foreign workers. Over 1,200 children of non-Israelis – mostly from Africa, who have been working in Israel for the last decade – are in danger of being deported by the government, despite the fact they were born here, speak Hebrew, and aside from the coveted identity card are as Israeli as anyone else.

The catch? They’re not Jewish.

This week, an interministerial committee was supposed to tackle the issue ahead of a November 1st deadline that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had set to come up with a solution to their plight. Their decision – to enable the children to remain in Israel through the end of the school year, and then we’ll see.

The campaign to deport the children is being led by Interior Minister Eli Yishai, the leader of the Shas party. He’s been adamant that the children of foreign workers not be given residency or citizenship in Israel in order to preserve the Jewish nature of the country.

According to Ha’aretz, Yishai does not object to Monday’s decision to postpone deporting the children and their parents until the end of the school year, saying this was for “humanitarian reasons.” But he stressed that he will not agree to any further postponements and will vehemently oppose granting the children citizenship or residency.

Allowing these children to stay in Israel “is liable to damage the state’s Jewish identity, constitute a demographic threat and increase the danger of assimilation,” he said, adding that he would give up his ministry if the government decides to let the children stay.

On behalf of all forward looking people in Israel, let me say that we look forward to the day that happens.

Minister for Minority Affairs Avishay Braverman, representing the humane side of Israeli society, said he couldn’t envision Israel resorting to deporting the children, who want to stay here, serve in the army and be productive members of society.

According to Ynet, he referred in a speech to a precedent established by prime minister Menachem Begin in 1977, where he granted Israeli citizenship to 179 Vietnamese refugees who escaped their homeland on boats after a regime change occurred in Vietnam. No country agreed to take the refugees in after being pulled out of the sea by an Israeli cargo ship.

“The State of Israel will be blemished should those 1,200 children not be accepted as Israeli citizens. It is humanitarianly the right thing to do. The issue must be solved and we are obligated to acknowledge them equal citizens of the State of Israel,” said Braverman.

It’s clear what the right thing to do here is. And if I need to risk the possibility that one of my children might one day want to marry an Israeli who isn’t Jewish, it’s a small price to pay.

Nice sentiments help Obama win the Nobel

I went away for a few days camping and came back to discover that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel peace prize. I was so surprised that I wondered briefly if while I’d been away I had got stuck in some kind of time warp, and a whole year had gone by.

It seemed a far more likely explanation than that the Nobel prize committee had actually decided to award a US president, in power for just a twinkle of the eye, with a peace prize for doing – nothing actually.

I’m a fan of Obama, and I admire what he stands for and the promise he holds. But that’s all we’ve got so far – just a promise, and a few statements about peace and goodwill to all men.

The peace committee said the prize was “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, while Time Magazine added that it was “primarily for his work on and commitment to nuclear disarmament.” From where I sit, however, with Iran threatening to blow Israel off the planet and fast approaching the nuclear capacity to do just that, Obama’s sugary wish to disarm the world seems pretty frivolous.

I don’t often agree with Republicans, but Michael Steel, chairman of the Republican National Committee got it right when he said: “What has President Obama actually accomplished? It is unfortunate that the president’s star power has outshined tireless advocates who made real achievements working toward peace and human rights.”

Here in this region of the world, where conflict is in your face, and peace seems so elusive and unattainable, there are many people working on the frontlines of the peace movement who really do deserve a prize.

They face the conflict every single day, and still continue working for change, even at great cost to themselves.

What about Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish , the Palestinian doctor who lost his children in the bombing in Gaza, and still campaigns for peace? What about the founders of Parent’s Circle , an organization set up by Israelis and Palestinians who lost loved ones in the conflict but use their bereavement to fight ardently for peace, people like Robi Damelin, who wrote a public letter to Ynet warning of the terrible cost of the intifada as talk grows of the possibility of a new third intifada breaking out in Israel?

What about the dozens and dozens of peace organizations here where Jews and Arabs work side by side, bringing people together, and trying to create a different reality. Every one of us could cite an example. These people aren’t just making nice speeches about peace, they are actually out there making it.

If we are really lucky, in four years from now, Obama will actually deserve a Nobel peace prize, but as we all know, nice sentiments don’t always lead to action. In the meantime, couldn’t the Norwegians find someone who’s actually achieved something?

A different kind of tower on 9-11

I may have been one of the few people to have almost totally missed the horrifying events of September 11, 2001.

I was in miluim (reserve duty) and stationed at the military prison at the Megiddo intersection on the way to Afula. It housed a couple thousand Palestinian security prisoners who were awaiting trial for alleged crimes ranging from belonging to a terror organization to throwing Molotov cocktails at cars, to planning terror attacks, to probably just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As a military policeman, until that year, my duties each year at whatever similar prison dotting the country that I was sent to entailed, opening alot of gates, accompanying prisoners to see their lawyers, doctors, families on visiting day, and bascially enabling them to receive the basic neccessities of food, shelter and medical care. Unarmed and at arms length of the prisoners, we MPs were always watched over by armed to the teeth combat soldiers, sitting in tall guard towers with birds eye views of the primarily outdoor compound.

But this year, due to a combination of budget difficulties and shortages of IDF units, our miliuim assignment was to take over the towers and guard a different batch of MPs. On 9-11, I received the noon to 6 pm shift and the midnight to 6 am shift. However, instead of one of the towers facing inward toward the prisoner action, I got the plum position of the tower facing the bustling Wadi Ara road, Road 65, which led to the Megiddo intersection. The directive – to make sure there were no attempted infiltrations.

What that really meant is that I got to watch traffic for six hours, and sing as many Beatles songs as I could remember. It was another uneventful shift and nearing the end, the only item of interest was a car pulled over to the road right outside the fence, with the driver changing his flat tire.

At one point, he looked up at me, and over the din of the traffic, shouted out something. I couldn’t really make it out and asked him to repeat it. I could only hear “plane… crash…building.”

I smiled and nodded, and counted down the minutes until my replacement arrived at 6. He told me to go straight to the command tent and see what was on TV, that I wouldn’t believe it. When I got there, there were about 50 soldiers gathered around the TV.

“What’s going on?” I asked one friend. He filled me in on the chain of events, each one seeming more infathomable than the previous. I wanted to sit down, glue myself to the TV and try to comprehend the enormity of the events as they were still unfolding. But I had to eat dinner, shower, and try to sleep for two or three hours. Because at midnight, I went back up the tower for another six hour shift.

By the time I saw the sunrise on September 12, the rest of the world was in shock and mourning the thousands of casualties. I climbed down from my tower, trudged to my tent, and fell into a long dreamless sleep.

Nostalgia Sunday – 9-11

In five days, it will have been eight years since September 11, 2001 and it looks like this year’s 9/11 anniversary is going to pass without much media fanfare. (Unless something happens, of course, and you know what I mean by “something”). So I thought I would finally share the story of what happened to me that day and how I ended up in a refugee camp in Amsterdam.

Yes, the International Red Cross runs — or ran, at least — four refugee camps in Amsterdam but for the life of me, I cannot tell you where exactly I was sent to stay from Schiphol Airport. That is because 9/11 was, as we Israelis say, a big “balagan”. I can tell you that when I landed there at about 1:30 on a stopover en route back to Israel, the airport was functioning normally. I can tell you that at about 2:15pm, I saw a bunch of people over at the airport lounge staring, transfixed, at the bank of TV screens. I traipsed over in my high-heeled boots to see all the screens, save one, tuned to CNN’s coverage as the first tower was hit. That last screen was broadcasting a bike race. This was Holland, after all.

My initial reaction was, “I’d better buy a pair of comfortable shoes because I think I’m going to be here awhile.” So I trundled off to the Timberland store and purchased a pair of slides, during which time the second tower was hit. I went back to the lounge and watched as news of the Pentagon attack came in. That damn bike race kept on going. Then Schiphol, in the first of a number of panicked moves, announced that it was shutting down the televisions — ostensibly to keep people from panicking.

News began circulating among passengers that airspace around the world was shutting down, and people began rushing towards the various airline counters, trying to find out what was happening to their flights. “You’ve got to get organized,” I said to the KLM counter attendant who was busily shooing the Israelis away from her space. She looked at me and said something completely un-Israeli. “I don’t have to get organized,” she said. It was my first encounter with the concept known as the Dutch Uncle.

On a grander scale, Schiphol decided to do the exact same thing. They decided they didn’t have to get organized. The airport announced that it was shutting down, that all passengers had to vacate the premises, and take their luggage with them. And then, Schiphol proceeded to unload all the suitcases, all at once, from all of the planes. 18 baggage carousels began disgorging bags, one after another, without any rhyme or reason. People were crawling all around through a maze of suitcases. Six hours later, I found my stuff.

For me it was an eye-opener as to how quickly systems can break down. Imagine if Schiphol had been an attack target, as management apparently feared. Someone, however, was astute enough to call in the Red Cross — and that is when things did, indeed, get organized. Red Cross staffers came in with bottled water, soft drinks and potato chips. Also, as the hotels in town were now completely full, they had arranged for transport to take us to a place where, they promised, KLM would be able to see to our flights and where there was a place to sleep. And so, with suitcases in tow, my new, comfortable shoes, and visions of Anne Frank in my head, I boarded a bus full of strangers and rode out into the cold, wet, dark night.

And ended up in an enormous refugee camp on the outskirts of Amsterdam where I handed over my passport, was registered, and in return issued a tan fleece blanket, a KLM washkit and some supplies produced for the Red Cross by a company called De Ridder B.V. These included a toothbrush pre-embedded with toothpaste…shampoo packets… and paper underwear, pairs of which the KLM staffers — sensitive as always — had jokingly put on their heads.

The name “de Ridder”, is Middle Dutch for ‘knight’, ‘rider’, ‘horseman’. The Crusader aspect of the name was lost neither on the company, whose logo at the time was a knight in armor on a horse, brandishing a sword and shield with a red cross on it, nor on myself. (The logo has since been downsized to a knight with a sword and shield but no horse). I stood there in the communal washroom, looking down at the shampoo packet, and realized that the Crusades were still going on. I knew the attackers knew they were fighting a holy war, and I also knew that the attacked didn’t know this.

I couldn’t find any Israelis till I ran into Mira from Rehovot who told me she’d heard that all the Israelis had banded together immediately and gone en masse to another camp. “I don’t feel comfortable here,” she said. “There aren’t any other Israelis. I’m going back to the airport. I heard they’ll put you on a plane if you go there.” And there went my only homeland connection.

I spent the first two days and nights in my refugee camp, as I’ve come to call think of it, in a haze of jet-lagged confusion, wrapped in a blanket, watching the endless hours of wreckage, feeling like the end of the world had come, eating junk food (the Red Cross kept us well-supplied with kuchen and krispen), and watching a group of Sudanese boys playing on the two foosball tables. I asked one of them what the letters on his sweatshirt stood for and he spelled out the name of an international relief agency, explaining that he and his friends were on their way to be resettled in the US. Oh, it suddenly hit me. These were real refugees.

So I snapped out of my funk. Chatted with people who kept on coming in and heard their stories: one couple’s flight had been turned back an hour out of Chicago, another rerouted to the Nova Scotia airport in only their summer clothes. Stuck to the KLM staffers like the proverbial white on rice and on the third day they called my name over the camp loudspeaker and told me El Al had arranged a flight back to Israel. KLM were pretty complimentary about El Al’s functioning — apparently there were other airlines that didn’t get organized.

At the airport I ran into my pal Mira who — despite her best efforts — had made no more progress than I. “They’re all Antisemites here,” she said. “We’ve been sleeping on the floor. They didn’t even give us a blanket.” She stomped off to try her luck at the El Al counter while I was hustled onto an ISSTA charter flight to Ben Gurion Airport. Granted, it was my worst travel nightmare come true: flying with a planeful of unwashed, guitar-playing post-IDF grads after their year in the Far East but at least I was on my way home.

So here’s how I would rate the whole experience:

Tel Aviv unwanted in Toronto?

Misguided protests from loopy bastions of the artistic Left over Israel’s policies regarding the conflict with the Palestinians have resulted in a new height of absurdity.

Some 50 artists, actors and filmmakers, including Jane Fonda, Wallace Shawn, David Byrne and filmmaker Ken Loach, have accused the Toronto Film Festival in an open letter of protest of “complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine” over its spotlight this year of Tel Aviv.

The City-to-City program at the festival, which runs from September 10-19, is highlighting Israeli films like Kirot, Jaffa by Keren Yedaya, The Bubble by Eytan Fox, and Phobodilia by Yoav and Doron Paz, films with festival co-director Cameron Bailey “explore and critique the city from many different perspectives.”

However the open letter by the artists, prompted by Canadian filmmaker John Greyson pulling his short film “Covered” from the festival, claims that the program “ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories.”

“Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.”

Are these people serious? When did everything that happens in Tel Aviv, or any other part of Israel, suddenly get tied like a pretzel to the conditions of Palestinians? Even Bailey, in defending the decision to focus on Tel Aviv admitted that “Tel Aviv is not a simple choice and the city remains contested ground.”

Does that mean that Tel Aviv is occupied territory?

As the New York Times reported, “One thing is certain: What might have been one of the festival’s less noticed film series is going to get some attention when it opens on Sept. 11 with an 8:45 a.m. screening of “A History of Israeli Cinema, Part 1,” directed by Raphael Nadjari.”

Refugee models

Interesting item in Ha’aretz Gallery this week: The Tees Factory brand has put together a photography project/marketing campaign for its latest catalog, using African migrant workers from Tel Aviv in order to promote awareness of the campaign to deport them.

The catalog depicts four Africans, all of whom were found on Chelnov Street in South Tel Aviv, wearing items designed by Tees Factory. Of course, as the article points out, there’s something of a gap between a fashion catalog selling several-hundred shekel tee-shirts and an issue that is supposedly being exposed. Particularly when you find out that the ‘models’ were paid NIS 50 and a tee-shirt, a common barter system among professional models in Israel, according to Ayala Amit, the Tees Factory founder.

The label ‘Tees Factory’ is based in Tel Aviv and sold at several stores and clothing fairs. Made in Israel, the design motifs “are a mixture of Jamaican street culture, 50’s [sic] and 70′ [sic] Americana and our very own local Tel Aviv chic,” according to their Facebook page. The company also

“holds a strong dialogue with the local music and nightlife scene. Through working with local musicians on joint projects, supporting live shows from abroad, endorsing music events with local artists and dressing local DJs and musicians for whose work we have respect for.”

Well, you can’t say they didn’t have their heart in the right place. Just a slightly flawed method for publicizing the issue.

Speaka da language

Here’s a fun concept to contemplate from the University of Haifa. A recent study showed that the more empathy one has for another, the lighter the accent will be when speaking a second language. That’s what Dr. Raphiq Ibrahim and Dr. Mark Leikin of the Department of Learning Disabilities, and Dr. Zohar Eviatar of the psychology department found and published in the International Journal of Bilingualism.

I gotta say, it makes sense. When I’m feeling ‘Israeli,’ and that is a completely random occurence for me, depending on a number of factors such as level of restedness, if I’ve eaten recently and am feeling confident about what’s going on in life in general, my fluidity and accent in Hebrew are much smoother and my conversational Hebrew flows. And that also relates to empathy, because if I’m feeling good, I can also be empathetic. Make sense?

Maybe. But these researchers were getting at something else slightly more serious, more on the coexistence level of life in Israel.

According to them, accents, whether from the average Hebrew speaker trying to speak English or the average English speaker trying to speak Hebrew, are a dead giveaway. (Although my mortgage banker recently thought I was English, not American.) But why, asked the researchers, is there an accent and what are the factors that make one speaker have a heavier accent than another? One possible explanation is derived from the socio-lingual field, which claims that socio-affective elements have an effect on accent and that the second language constitutes an image label for the speaker in the presence of a majority group.

“Israel is a perfect lab location for testing the topic of second languages, because of the complex composition of its population. This population is made up of immigrants who learn Hebrew at an advanced age; an ethnic minority of Arabs, some of whom learn Hebrew from an early age, and others who learn the language as mature adults; and a majority group of native Hebrew speakers,” the researchers explained.

The study divided the participants –- students from the University of Haifa -– into three groups: 20 native Hebrew speakers, 20 Arabic speakers who learned Hebrew at the age of 7-8, and 20 Russian immigrants who learned Hebrew after age 13. The participants’ socioeconomic characteristics were identical. The results showed that the accent level of Russian immigrants and of native Arabic speakers was similar. It also revealed that for the Russian immigrants, the higher the ability to exhibit empathy for the other, the weaker the accent. Amongst the Arabic speakers, there was no link between level of empathy and heaviness of accent.

The researchers’ hypothesis is that in the group of Arabic speakers, there is the factor of sociopolitical position, and, as to be expected, a lack of natural empathy for the native Hebrew-speaking population. That led the reseachers to conclude that both personal and sociopolitical aspects have an influence on accent in speaking a second language, and that teachers giving instruction in languages as second languages, especially among minority groups, must relate to the social and political connections when teaching.

Go share that tidbit of information with your ulpan teacher.

A new take on the news

Hebrew Book Week began this week, and the Haaretz newspaper marked the moment by replacing many of their regular journalists with writers and poets for Wednesday’s edition, reporting the news as they experienced it.

With the exception of business and sports, the country’s top writers — David Grossman, Etgar Keret, Haim Be’er, Yehudit Katzir, Nurit Gertz and others — covered the news of the day, from Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s speech and the visit of U.S. envoy George Mitchell to the ongoing dramas of former President Moshe Katzav’s trial and the motives behind entertainer Dudu Topaz’s recent criminal actions.

The writing was entertaining, and familiar, in that the writers recounted the news in their voices, not the usual objective voice of the reporters (not that Israeli reporters are always so objective)…In writing about Dudu Topaz’s fall from grace, Ram Oren, Israel’s best-selling author, talks about being painfully jealous of Topaz and how Topaz will turn this event into a book opportunity. Keret, in recounting his brief interview with Defense Minister Barak, tries to work in the fact that Barak was speaking at, and they were meeting in, his former school. Shahar Magen was charmed by the arrival of new giraffes at the Ramat Gan Safari and Sami Michael introduced the whole lot:

“What have we done to your newspaper?…Is the author’s point of view necessarily different from that of the reporter, directly touching the live flesh of exposed reality? And what, in any case, is the link between life and literature, between news and fiction?…My colleagues featured as guests in this enterprise have answered the call to serve as reporters examining the profound link between labor and poetry, between reality and imagination.”

But my favorite piece was the weather report, written by poet Ronny Someck:

Summer Sonnet

Summer is the pencil
that is least sharp
in the seasons’ pencil case.
With it I compose
a billet-doux
to the seamstress who snipped
from women’s clothes
collars that had hidden napes
and lopped
an inch or two of winter
from the bottom of their dress.
Perhaps this year too
it will be hot
in the low-lying spots.

Meet Israel’s newest cabinet minister

Ruby Polishuk is an Israeli cabinet minister who has no idea what he’s doing. Luckily he’s fictional.

Polishuk is the main character in the series of the same name which Channel 2 started airing a couple weeks ago every Sunday and Monday evenings. Modeled in part after the British political satire The Thick of It, Polishuk is a sometimes hilarious, sometimes frightening, but always entertaining series poking fun at Israeli society and the upper echelon who, through sheer luck or political expediency, end up in the corridors of power.

The series stars Sasson Gabai, who shined in the film The Band’s Visit, as the bumbling Polishuk, who rises from well-meaning, but largely incompetent back bench MK for the fictitious National Liberal Center party to his ministerial appointment following the arrest of the current minister on suspicions of pedophilia.

Polishuk’s handlers – party leader Humi Schalit, played like a Tommy Lapid tribute by journalist Amnon Dankner, and Schalit’s A-type, foul-mouthed media advisor Kozo Avital, played by Guy Loel – are solely concerned with keeping the new minister out of the spotlight and quiet in his corner as minister of advancement in society. And they woefully fail, as Polishuk becomes a laughing stock/everyman hero.

The rapid banter and earthy language are true to the nature of Israeli culture, said the show’s creator, writer and director Shmuel Hasfari.

“I talked to people who surround the ministers and MKs – like drivers and secretaries and aides. On a show like this, the dialogue, besides being ‘harif’, has to be precise and to the point. There’s no time for nonsense. So, if you took a full day in a minister’s life and reduced it to five minutes of highlights, I think it’s pretty accurately reflected in our show,” Hasfari told me.

How plausible is the show? Way too much, says Hasfari, who in an illustrious theater career has become known as an outspoken supporter of left-wing causes. However, Polishuk clearly plays no favorites in skewering both the left and right sides of the Israeli political system.

“It certainly frightens me that there are likely several Polishuks in the Knesset,” said Hasfari. “It’s all part of the problem of our electoral system here. All you need is a strong, charismatic leader like Ariel Sharon, or Rafael Eitan or Lapid, and you can bring in another 10 or 12 MKs on your coattails, who are totally unknown. Does anyone really know who the Shas MKs are? Out of the 120 MKs, there are probably 50 Polishuks, but probably not as nice as him.”

After Polishuk, I’ll never watch the Knesset channel in the same way.

 

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