The Anonymous logo

I’ve been a big fan of Anonymous. A self-proclaimed loosely knit group of international hackers, Anonymous has positioned itself as a defender of freedom on the web, whether that’s safeguarding free speech or protesting against misguided media tycoons.

Now, apparently, they’ve put Israel in the cross-hairs. In a chilling video released today, the group pulls out every anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist canard found on the worst Israel-hating sites and threatens to “systematically remove Israel from the Internet” until “the police state [Israel] becomes a free state.”

Anonymous is not a trivial force to be toyed with. When MegaUpload was taken down recently, the group hurled denial of service attacks at both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice websites, taking them offline for brief but still ominous amounts of time. To protest the proposed SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) that was winding its way through the U.S. Congress, Anonymous went after the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Who is Anonymous? No one really knows. It’s a collection of hackers with no organized body or leadership. Someone who gets pissed at something that the person regards as throttling the rights of the downtrodden can, through various chat rooms and forums, rally like-minded Internet renegades to the cause. The hackers are smart, although no one knows how many of them there are and whether they’re all a bunch of bored teenagers or middle-aged baby boomers looking for the next thrill beyond another Lexus in the garage.

Being the target of Anonymous is scary, but truthfully the group has never caused any long-term damage (the effected websites always get back up to speed eventually), although that doesn’t mean they can’t in the future.

The problem for me is that, in the past, I’ve cheered Anonymous on: I don’t want the Internet overly legislated by Hollywood cronies who refuse to update their business models to the 21^st Century and turn something like 95% of the world’s young adults into virtual criminals.

But the video posted this morning, with its symphonic Lord of the Rings style music and text-to-speech voice over, is too much. Some of the wording: “Through the use of media deception and political bribery, you [Israel] have amassed the sympathies of many. You claim to be democratic, yet in reality this is far from the truth. In fact, your only goal is to better the lives of a select few while carelessly trampling the liberties of the masses,” and “For too long we have tolerated your crimes against humanity,” and “Your Zionist bigotry has displaced and killed a great many,” and “You are unworthy to exist in your current form.”

The video also warns Israel against attacking Iran and claims that Israel has ““taken steps to ensure a nuclear holocaust.”

The video is probably not a coordinated production of the entire group, but rather one Anonymous member’s revolting rantings. So condemning Anonymous as a whole may be premature. Still, an Anonymous video will undoubtedly garner more views and publicity than the Israel’s usual detractors. The site’s Facebook pages has several tens of thousands of “likes.”

Perhaps in the days to come, the video will be condemned or recanted. Maybe even by someone with a face.

I won’t place the video here in this post, but if you must see it, here‘s the YouTube link.

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IDF insignia

We know a girl named Liat who lied to get out of doing army service. Despite living a secular lifestyle, she told the army she was religious, which gave her an automatic exemption. She then made matters even worse: instead of signing up for national service, which most non-haredi religious girls do, she instead fled the country where, last I heard, she was selling Dead Sea products in a Florida mall.

Liat’s story was the subject of many Shabbat conversations in our family, with the clear consensus being that, if not quite a traitor, she was still committing some serious ethical breeches through her dubious decisions.

Now it looks like Liat and others like her won’t have it so easy. A new bill winding its way through the Knesset (it’s now being prepared for its second and third readings by the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee) would force girls caught lying about their religiosity to enlist…or even be put on trial.

Currently, there are three conditions for girls to be exempted from military service for religious reasons: keeping kosher, not traveling on Shabbat, and the more fungible category of having a “religious lifestyle” in their home. Girls studying in religious schools get an automatic exemption without even having to apply; students in non-Orthodox schools must testify before a local rabbinical committee.

While I’m 100% in favor of cracking down on liars, there are echoes in the proposed bill that remind me of recent outrages regarding conversions, where the rabbinical authorities have retroactively annulled conversions where the convert has been “caught” no longer keeping Shabbat, for example.

To be sure, no one (well, almost no one) wants the religious police checking into your private business. But the conversion debacle is not the same as this new bill; it’s more a matter of contemporary religious extremism never before mandated in Jewish Law, while army service is a national, (nearly) universally accepted law.

Naturally, any change having to do with the religious status quo raised quite a ruckus in the Knesset. United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni spoke out against the legislation, saying it “reeks of underhanded opportunism” and is unacceptable, according to The Jerusalem Post. He called for the bill to not apply to national religious and haredi girls. Is he suggesting that those sectors never lie either? Or just that girls shouldn’t serve in the army, period?

Coalition chairman Ze’ev Elkin from the Likud countered that the bill would only apply to girls who lie (or who stop being observant after receiving an exemption), and therefore wouldn’t affect haredi girls anyway (unless they are sinning in their hearts, wink, wink Jimmy Carter circa 1977).

According to the IDF’s Manpower division, hundreds more girls will join the IDF, should the bill pass. How’s that for honesty?

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An international panel of distinguished judges, comprising experts in both design and in Holocaust Education, selected the 16 best posters from more than 300 submitted by design students from France, Israel and the Czech Republic. They were asked to present works on the theme of Holocaust commemoration, with an emphasis on the nature of memory and the plight of children.

The three finalists designed posters that stood out for their originality, beauty, and meaning.

The work by Veronica Novakova, a designer from the Czech Republic, portrays a well-known childhood punishment. “Traditionally, to correct a child’s errant behavior, an adult will force the ‘naughty’ child to write his misdeed over and over again, until he ‘learns his lesson.’ In this case, the misdeed is written by a child who is forced to denounce his friendship with a Jewish friend.

Designer Martina Cejpova also explores the effect the Nazi anti-Jewish policy had on children. “In her poster, she depicts a universally-recognized image from childhood: a hopscotch board, chalked onto the pavement. This particular game, however, is marred by a hateful symbol of discrimination drawn onto its cross-arms – the yellow star. Its inclusion here indicates that the insidious and pervasive hatred perpetrated by the adult world has also filtered down to the world of children, destroying their innocence.”

French designer Boris Grzeszcak deals with another theme in his work – the nature of memory. “His black-and-white poster presents a striking image of a scarred tree cut to expose the rings. A deep gash cuts to the very core of the trunk, where the word “emet” (truth) is written in tiny letters… [The artist says,] ‘The truth resides in the act of remembering and above all, never forgetting these dramatic events.’”

Peter Chmela of the Czech Republic says, “This poster wants to show the impotence of Jewish children against the Nazi soldiers. I tried to illustrate this theme with a big contrast between soldier and child.”

Yael Boverman, Israel: “The object that a survivor carries throughout a lifetime enables him or her to keep their memory alive. The closet symbolizes a collective closet, reflecting the repressed memories of the Jewish people as a whole. For every survivor, the memory is forever present under the thin veil of everyday functioning, represented by the new shirts, but at the bottom of the stack, there always lies the shirt kept from a different time – the persisting memory of a past that refuses to be abandoned.”

The project is funded by the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF), together with Yad Vashem, Israel; Mémorial de la Shoah, France; and the European Shoah Legacy Institute, Czech Republic; in cooperation with the Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme.

In addition to the posters, there is also a lesson plan that provides tools to aid students and teachers in discussing the more universal aspects of memory — as well as the challenges facing those who use the visual arts to commemorate the Holocaust today.

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At issue: a 2006 decision to transfer the contents of the Archive’s warehouses from Jerusalem to Arad, to storage facilities managed and operated by a private contractor under the BOT (build-operate-transfer) model. The installations are due to be begin operations in 2017.

As reported on Friday by Megafon News, (a new independent worker-owned online Hebrew-language publication): “In addition to the protest measures taken by the archivists, Tel Aviv University researcher Maya Mark [has] published an online petition against the move, that has already been signed by more than 700 people.” Actually, at this point there are over 1,400 signatures. Israelity readers are welcome to add theirs but please read to the end before signing it, as there are two sides to this story.

“The petition lodges serious complaints against the State, the Ministry of Finance and the State Archive’s management who are responsible for the privatization initiative… Mark claims that ‘such a move is in contrast to the state’s obligations to maintain responsibility for the spiritual and cultural treasures that are important to its citizens’”.

The petition also claims that transferring the materials to Arad comes in direct conflict with the Archive’s central main mission: to make the materials accessible and available in the public domain. Mark: “After the transfer to Arad is complete, any research request will require transporting materials a long way from Arad to Jerusalem and back. Researchers will have to wait a whole day and even more to get service, “says Mark.

The petition also raises concerns that warehouse privatization is only the first stage of a larger program to fully privatize the State Archive. “Such a move would turn the archive employees into contract workers and significantly worsen their employment conditions… Says Mark,’If this trend persists, soon the National Archives of the State of Israel and all the enormously valuable materials that within it, will be mostly in private hands.”

Megafon News’ report continues: “But it seems that the most disturbing of Mark’s claims is that the privatization process will severely damage the privacy of citizens with the dangerous exposure of archival material containing sensitive, classified information. Mark claims that the State’s initiative could lead to ‘a situation in which the most sensitive material with high levels of confidentiality, such as minutes of government meetings and personal information about citizens, will be in private hands”.

Megafon News’ reporter Maayan Dagan obtained a response from Deputy State Archivist Ruth Abramowitz, who said, “A 2006 government decision determined that the State Archive warehouses would be moved to Arad. Other Archive units and employees will remain in Jerusalem.

“‘The choice of Arad was born out of a collaboration with the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and Galilee which seeks to strengthen the outlying areas. Arad decided to establish a storage facility for historical material and facility for temporary material, as opposed to the current practice. At present, temporary material not intended for permanent safekeeping is stored in warehouses belonging to and managed by private individuals at a cost of more than NIS 10 million per year, all without the Archives’ supervision and without having to meet the Archives professional standards”.

Abramowitz also said that “to date, the State of Israel had not built a facility for maintaining its historical material, even though preserving this material is stipulated in the 1955 Archives Law.” She further noted that the present warehouses were full to overflowing and, for the past decade, unable to receive additional historical materials.

Abramowitz: “The state chose the BOT method so that the private concessionaire would build the facilities and operate them for 15 years, according to the requirements listed, and at the end of the period transfer the facilities to the State.”

Abramowitz clarified that the Archives are not being privatized. “The facility is – and will remain forever – state-owned with operations alone conducted on its behalf by a private franchisee. I mean, this is not privatization. The government remains in ownership, holding all supervision and control, and reserves the right, at all times, to terminate the contract should the agreement be violated.”

As for the matter of employment, Abramowitz said that a small number of workers would be transferred to other public service positions, without compromising their tenure, conditions or wages.

Abramowitz did not relate to the petitioners claims that sensitive information and private information such as medical, psychiatric, social welfare records, adoption records, etc. could be made public. Nor did she relate to claims that the roads between Jerusalem and Arad are unsafe and undeveloped. (Personally, as one who braves the Jerusalem potholes on a daily basis, I think that last one is a stretching things a bit).

Storing our national archive isn’t a matter of immediate survival but the preservation of a national record is critical to our long-term collective memory. As the petition points out, the State is obliged to maintain its spiritual and cultural treasures and make them available to the public. The State Archive has made good use of the Internet in uploading a large number of movies to its YouTube channel but the online archive is less satisfactory, as the website presents only fraction of the Archive’s database.

The Archive promises that it “will continue to update and expand the database over time, and will eventually be able to display all unrestricted information to users”. That should come sooner, rather than later. As one weary commenter posted at the end of the Megafon article, “Isn’t it about time to scan and upload it all?”

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Janis Ian in Israel in the early 1980s with top DJ Yoav Kutner

It brings Ian a warm and fuzzy feeling – “the promoters were no more surprised than I was, it’s fantastic,” said Ian, adding that she’s looking forward to returing to Israel.

“The older I get, the more I realize that I might not get another opportunity, so I take that into consideration when I accept offers to perform.”

Janis Ian today (Photo: Peter Cunningham)

When asked if she had any problems, as a humanist American liberal, coming to perform in Israel, which has been the target of a cultural boycott among a small percentage of artists, Ian said absolutely not.

“I try really hard not to comment on other countries, when I’m not there to experience what goes on there. I have enough problems commenting about my own country,” she told me.

“Nobody’s pressured me not to come, and anyway, I don’t believe in cultural boycots, so it’s not an issue for me.”

Which is a good thing for the fan who will be flocking to Reading 3 on January 20, 21 and 22 to see Ian perform her long list of hits, including “At 17,” “Jesse” and “Society’s Child.”

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On December 16th, 2001, when Wayback Machine visited The Jerusalem Post, the headlines were concerned with an IDF crackdown on the Palestinian Authority in the wake of shelling from Gaza, a falling Cost Price Index and relations with PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. JDate was the dating site of choice for Jpost readers.

The lead story on Ynet on December 17th, 2001, (only available in Hebrew at that time), was about victims of a shooting attack. Other stories included the opening of a second McDonald’s franchise in Jerusalem and the Bank of Israel’s fight against forged checks while online messaging pioneer ICQ offered up its ultimate tip guide and Ynet ruminated over who would be its choice for Person of the Year. Cupid.co.il was the premier dating site for Hebrew-speaking Israelis at that time.

That same day, December 17th, 2001, Haaretz also ran the story about the West Bank attack victims. US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said the US had no plans to invade Iraq and Arafat called for an end to violence against Israel. (It must have been true ’cause it was in the papers!) And JCupid, the English-language version of Cupid.co.il, was offering an end to lonely singledom.

Wayback didn’t crawl Globes around January 2002. It visited Globes on November 8, 2001, at which time the financial news headlines were concerned with, among other things, the acquisition of cement block maker Ytong, the public sector workers strike and the short-lived reopening of troubled Phoenicia Glass Works. There were no dating ads; the one advertiser was a bank.

Israelity didn’t get started until 2005. When it did, it looked like this:

And what of our own Israel21c? Unfortunately, due to its archive structure, the Wayback Machine isn’t able to reconstruct its “snapshot” — good thing I made a screenshot some time ago for another posting!

The Wayback Machine is operated by the Internet Archive, which collaborates with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. It’s great fun to go in and crawl around.

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But for most of the summer, it looked like this…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Sadly, it still does look like that in Jerusalem’s Sacher Garden, where the truly homeless continue to reside in the cold and wet. The next chapter in the Social Justice movement remains to be written in 2012.

Some chapters were closed in 2011, which marked the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the homecoming and start of a brand new life for Gilad Shalit after over five years of imprisonment by Hamas.
Photo: IDF Spokesman via Wikimedia Commons

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak were present at Shalit’s release — so much so that they were accused of being publicity hounds (does no one know anything about politicians?) — and Netanyahu’s image was used to create the first Israeli photo meme.

There were other beginnings as well. A rare sand cat was born at the Ramat Gan Safari…
Photo: Tibor-Jager

Jerusalem held its first marathon and got its first Light Railway…
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Dead Sea was not selected as one of the New 7 Natural Wonders of the World…

Photo: New7Wonders

On the other hand, the nomination campaign may have served to draw public attention to the salt lake’s plight — just this week, Israel Corporation subsidiary Israel Chemicals reached an agreement with the Ministry of Finance on terms for the Dead Sea’s rehabilitation from excessive salt harvesting. It’ll be interesting to see if this promise, along with many others made in 2011, will be fulfilled in 2012. Here’s to that, and to a hopeful and happy New Year!

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Maccabee t-shirt for sale on Australian website

Hanukah is probably the most confounding holiday on the Jewish calendar. If we move beyond the toys and the gelt of 20^th century Christmas catch-up, the story itself has been interpreted in so many ways that it’s difficult to get a lock on the pshat (the simplest understanding).

For what is Hanukah? Is it the tale of a miraculous jug of oil that lasted for eight days, which today is commemorated in our lighting the candles on the hanukiah (the Hanukah menorah)? Or is it an historical account of a great military victory reestablishing, however briefly, Jewish sovereignty in our ancient land?

The answer is both…and neither.

It was “parent’s night” at the mechina (the pre-army seminary) where our daughter is spending a year before being drafted; a year of studying, volunteering and learning to get along with a group of forty other 18-year-olds (I wrote about it here). Part of the evening included a parent-child activity where we read selections from the first and second books of Maccabees, the two primary Biblical-era texts that refer to Hanukah (but which did not make it into the Hebrew canon).

The books present very different messages from the holiday. In First Maccabees, written about 40 years after the event itself by someone who presumably participated in one way or another, there is no mention of that universally known jug of oil at all; it’s all about the rebellion against the idolatrous Greeks and their assimilated Hellenistic Jewish wannabes. The second book, written 100 years after the first, downplays the military success and introduces the oil with an emphasis on God and miracles.

Historically, the attempt by the rabbis of the Talmud to sideline the fighting narrative makes sense, explained the head of our daughter’s mechina. There was at the time both a struggle between the rabbinic and priestly leaders for ascendency (the Maccabees were priests), and a desire to caution against military hubris (while the Maccabean revolt was successful, the next Jewish rebellions led to both the destruction of the Temple and the expulsion of the Jews from most of the land of Israel, definitely not events to emulate).

Seemingly ignoring the historical post-rebellion fall out, modern Zionists have eagerly adopted the holiday as emblematic of the brave fighters who liberated the land in our days. Whether that represents a miracle depends on one’s political and religious orientation. But there is no lack of Maccabean symbolism: many of our sport teams are named Maccabi and, in a striking irony, so is the Israeli version of that greatest representation of Greek culture the Olympics (dubbed the Maccabiah Games).

But there’s a darker side to the Hasmonean era military victory that tends to be whitewashed. The Maccabees were religious extremists; their goal was to rid the country of not only its Greek overloads but to compel the overwhelmingly secular Jewish population to adopt more stringent religious practices. Anshel Pfeffer, in this weekend’s Haaretz cites the late Christopher Hitchens as referring to the Maccabees as “bloodthirsty religious fundamentalists.”

Clearly over the top, but that interpretation seems chillingly appropriate this Hanukah as modern day extremists are once again bent on imposing their rigid agenda on the wider population. Open any Israeli newspaper in the last two weeks and it’s all over the front page:  – from coerced separation between men and women on buses and sidewalks, to the removal of women’s images on outdoor advertising in Jerusalem, to the truly horrendous verbal and spitting attacks on an eight-year-old girl for “lack of modesty” revealed during a weekend TV news show. And don’t even get me started about what’s going on with the “price tag” burning of mosques, unprovoked uprooting of Palestinian olive trees, and now even Jewish attacks on Israeli army bases.

Is this what the pioneers intended when they adopted the symbol of the Maccabees as their own?

Perhaps what we need today is to look at the story truthfully and learn from it with eyes wide open. To quote from Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Religious power without accountability, without compassion and tolerance, necessarily leads to corruption (as happened, by the way, to the original Maccabees once they assumed the throne in ancient Judea).

The time has come to meld the two books of the Maccabees. Let us focus on light – the key symbol from the second book – as a metaphor for clarity; for the kind of clear thinking that can temper the violence of the first book. It’s as critical today as it was then. That would be a true Hanukah miracle for our times.

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For my part, I noticed the, by and large, lack of kippot or covered heads for women, so it was a clearly mostly secular crowd. It wasn’t until I saw one of the signs that mentioned “הדרת נשים”, that I realized it was another protest, one of many of late, demanding respect for the exclusion of women. And so, when the woman across from me — wearing a sheitel — asked what the protest was about, I was able to tell her. And she nodded, along with others in the bus.

The only reason I now know the term hadarat nashim, or exlusion of women, (I originally wrote dignity of women, as it was first described to me), is because it’s become a catchphrase in our daily language over the last few weeks. After the recent spate of incidents on buses, with women being told to sit in the back, to segregate themselves from the men, people are speaking out in the streets, in the newspapers, and on the buses.

I learned the term at a parlor meeting with Councilwoman Rachel Azaria, who’s becoming well-known in these parts for her great work on the part of young families in Jerusalem, but primarily for having her portfolio taken away by the mayor for petitioning the High Court of Justice to immediately remove gender barriers in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods that were erected during Sukkot. It was once more of a ‘gender studies’ kind of term, a friend of mine told me, whose sister teaches gender studies, but has now become much more common, because we appear to need to understand the concept in these parts.

In the meantime, back to the protest. Got off the bus, just across from the plaza in front of the former Hamashbir department store, where the protesters were gathering and dancing to some Hadag Nachash being blasted from the speakers.

And who should I bump into but Rachel Azaria, just making her way into the crowd, and getting ready to speak. We said hi, and I told her thanks for teaching me the term hadarat nashim. She responded, “You would have learned it sooner or later.” True, I told her, but more memorable to learn it from her.

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Panoramic photography, states Wikipedia, “is a technique of photography, using specialized equipment or software, that captures images with elongated fields of view. It is sometimes known as wide format photography.” (Click here for more about the methods used to create 360 images). Panoramic photo images have been around since the mid 1800s; this one of Jerusalem was taken in the early 20th century.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

As with everything else photographic, clearly, the technology has evolved. Take, for example, this amazing 360 degree panoramic photo of the Galilee.

Tel Yodfat, Galilee, Israel in Israel

The Church of All Nations is located on Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, next to the Garden of Gethsemane. Click on this photo — the link will take you to a panoramic view of the Church, the Garden and the walls of the Old City, courtesy of 3D Israel.

Israeli company Simply Live has developed a highly technologically advanced 360 degree video camera (only last week presented at the Bezeq Expo innovation showcase). Click on this photo of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre — the link takes you to their site where you can view an interactive video that allows you to enter and move through the Church interior.

A fascinating if politically charged panoramic view of Israel’s coastline as viewed from the West Bank is available at MyIsrael.com. The site owners are very blunt about the purpose of the wide-angle shot: they wish to show how vulnerable Israel would be to an attack were pre-1967 borders to be reinstated. It takes only one look to see why the situation here is complicated.

Even on its own, the image is complex: a very wide-angle view (MyIsrael.com say it is the largest publicly available) with interactive controls so that viewers can zoom in on highly detailed close ups. Photographer Yaal Herman provides several pages of explanation on how the photo (really hundreds of photos stitched together) was accomplished. Click on this thumbnail to see the full version.

Whatever the political future holds, we can still hope for stability, quiet and — dare I say it? — peace. A few weeks ago, I was in Bethlehem once again for the annual Papal Peace Run. Instead of a highly secured, quick in-and-out, I would like to be able to return one day at my leisure to visit the Church of the Nativity. Till then, I will visit this way — and invite you to do so, too. Happy holidays to all.

Church Nativity Bethlehem in Israel

Grotto of the Nativity – Church of the Nativity, Betlehem in Israel

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