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Heavy metal envoys from Israel

As relations between Israel and Turkey have hit a new low, due to the belligerent tone and policies of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, there diplomatic ties between the two countries have been tenuous.

Israel currently has no ambassador in Ankara, and Erdogan recently severed more channels of cooperation between the two countries in the military and economic fields, as well as threatening to send war ships to accompany a future aid flotilla to Gaza.

So who’s going to come to the rescue to salvage the Israeli-Turkish relationship? An Israeli metal band!

Israeli metal speed metal band Orphaned Land have developed a big following in the Arab world over the last decade due to their fusion of hard rock and Middle Eastern motifs, and just good old headbanging music loved by metal fans no matter where they are.

Their shows in Europe are dotted with fans from places like Iran, Lebanon and Syria – countries which don’t officially recognize Israel. And one of their bastions of popularity over the last few years has been Turkey. So while, the Israel-Turkey relationship is heading south, Orphaned Land and its charismatic leader Kobi Farhi, traveled to Istanbul last week and performed 5,000 Turkish fans.

Calling the scene “insane,” Farhi told Ynet that “in our reality, we’re in a mess with Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey, and then an audience comes to see us from all these countries. We become stronger and unwillingly turn into ambassadors. It’s amazing when you understand how much courage these people have.”

The concert, part of the Unirock Open Air Festival, received a lot of media attention in Turkey according to Farhi, and he felt that despite the nadir in relations between the governments, the people of Israel and Turkey had bonded.

“Yesterday night I felt like I had won, like I had been awarded the privilege of doing something important in this world.”

Here’s a clip of Farhi talking to a Turkish audience last during a show last year.

Nostalgia Sunday – 9/11: The international view

Often, I write with seeming fondness about the days when Israel had only one television station, or the days when radio and newspapers were the primary news delivery systems.

Now, it is true that there was a certain charm in being able to walk down the street at 9:00pm on a sultry summer night, listening to the sounds of the news broadcast emanating from the open balconies and never missing a story. Nonetheless, when all is said and done, the situation today leaves us better informed. In addition to channels 1, 2 and 10, 23, 24, and the Knesset Channel, we also have a variety of radio stations, cable television, satellite television as well as, digital terrestrial television, (which I’ve complained about at length on another occasion). And the Internet, of course.

All these forms of communications media have served have made us more worldly, brought us in line with Western trends in music, fashion and popular culture. In addition, they lay out a smorgasbord of news broadcasts from all over the world to watch — if you’ve got the stomach for it.

Since I firmly believe that knowledge is power and that people should know about things they don’t agree with, or even like, I took a look at how the media in other countries was reporting the story of the day: a look back at the decade following 9/11. (Sad to say, the weekend attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo was only a blip on the international news radar).

Some outlets were unsurprising, like Russia Today, with headlines like “American aggression breeds terrorism”, “Post-9/11 crusade created more enemies” and “US war on terror: the longest-ever knee-jerk reaction”. One of the milder reports, almost sweet in a way, was entitled, “What’s this ‘nineleven’ you conquered us for?” Take a look.

Britan’s Sky News’ interview with Dan Rather is a rather depressing outlook on the declining quality of news reporting over the past 10 years.

Given Israel’s strong identification with the events of 9/11, the Israeli news networks presented stories that were similar to their US counterparts: interviews with families and preparations for 9/11 memorial ceremonies. France 24 created an excellent timeline chronicling key events since 2001. China’s CCTV International went for a slide show of the new memorial, Tribute in Lights.

But I must say that the most impressive item comes from Al-Jazeera in English. Their 47 minute-long documentary, The Image War, essentially pits al-Qaeda’s media and public relations skills against those of the United States, and is truly worth watching, if not enjoying.
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How bad is the neighborhood getting?

On the same day the daily papers in Israel splashed headlines across their front page about the Egyptian mob that attacked and laid siege to the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, nearly lynching the six Israeli staffers inside, US President Barack Obama wrote a commemoration for the tenth anniversary of 9/11 that appeared in The Jerusalem Post.

The articles about Cairo described a frenzied mob of some 5,000 Egyptians swarming the embassy after breaking down a concrete barrier and the Israeli security guards being holed up behind a metal door and having to be extracted by Egyptian commandos upon the special request of Obama after a phone call from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Obama’s essay included a reference to the ‘Arab Spring’ that has swept across the region over the last year that perhaps he may have changed had he written it after the Cairo incident. He wrote:

“Meanwhile, people across the Middle East and North Africa are showing that the surest path to justice and dignity is the moral force of nonviolence, not mindless terrorism and violence. It is clear that violent extremists are being left behind and that the future belongs to those who want to build, not destroy.”

The weekend’s violent extremism against Israel in Cairo shows that the US president is perhaps being a premature in his assessment, and causes great reason for concern in Israel, as it should in the US.

For those of us who have taken for granted the peace treaties we have with Egypt and Jordan, enabling at least two relatively incident-free borders (although last month’s attacks from infiltrators from Egypt show that even that is tenuous), the reality that we may unfortunately soon be returning to the days of being ‘surrounded by enemies’ is indeed a depressing and frightening thought.

Foto Friday – The 9/11 Memorials

The horrific events of September 11, 2001 resonated strongly with Israelis. Firstly, because Israel is no stranger to terrorism. Secondly, because Israelis feel a close kinship to New York City — for many, New York is America. Israelis also understood immediately that the 9/11 attacks were directed not only at the United States but also at her allies.

In 2003, the Israel Postal Authority (now the Israel Postal Company) commissioned artist and Israel Prize laureate Michael Gross to create a commemorative stamp. The Postal Authority described the stamp as having an “X image, a symbol of erasure and cancellation, with the yellow and black lines, marks the towers and the airplane in red is seen hitting the towers. The work is therefore seemingly simple, but is actually very complex connecting between the artist’s personal agony to that of America and the entire world.”

I’ve written previously about my personal experience as a 9/11 refugee (really!), and find it hard to believe that it has been ten years. The world has changed a great deal over this time and we have little idea of what will happen tomorrow — hopefully things will be peaceful. Probably they will not. But at this moment, right now, today is a quiet day and it seems right to revisit the 9/11 Living Memorial in Jerusalem.

The 9/11 Living Memorial, located in Jerusalem’s Arazim Park, commemorates the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and stands as a reminder of shared loss and a call for collective understanding.

The monument, which includes a metal beam from the wreckage of the Twin Towers, was dedicated by Jewish National Fund (JNF) in 2009. It was designed by award-winning Israeli artist Eliezer Weishoff and was one of the first major international memorials to the victims of the attacks. It is also the only site (outside of New York) that lists the names of those who lost their lives in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. The Postal Company last year issued a new 9/11 Living Memorial stamp.

Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, has expressed the Israel-US connection very beautifully in an essay published in The Jewish Forward, calling the monument a ‘Testament to the Shared Pain’”.

Oren also notes the link between the 9/11 Living Memorial and the new Reflecting Absence memorial that will be inaugurated on Sunday at the World Trade Centre site.

“Fittingly, this solemn masterpiece was designed by Israeli architect Michael Arad, a veteran of an IDF commando squad and son of a former Israeli ambassador to the United States. Two countries, two memorials, inextricably linked by the same sorrows, strengths and hopes.”

An Israeli-Palestinian encounter

The workers from the Palestinian town of Azariya who are remodeling our house bring their lunch with them every day. At around noon time, they wash up, bring their food out to our back yard table and spread it out for a communal lunch.

One day this week, I stayed home, tasked with the heavy chore of carrying our house contents outside so vacate the floor space in order to put in new tiles. I felt like one of the guys, sweating away, and felt that even more so when they asked me to join them for lunch.

I brought out some plates and soon fresh pita, tins of sardines, hummus with extra harif (spicy sauce) and chick peas were spread out on the table, along with a big bottle of Coke.

So there we were, Masri, Yusef, Ahmed, two other workers and myself sitting around the backyard table eating away. I had already gleaned over the week of small talk that most of them were married, with children, and often worked in my town of Ma’aleh Adumim. In general, Israelis don’t have much of a chance with face to face encounters with Palestinians, so I wasn’t about to pass this one up.

“So,” I said to Masri who seemed to speak Hebrew the most fluently of the bunch. “What do you think about what’s going on with the Palestinian Authority and the UN this month?”

Hiring Palestinians and eating lunch with them is one thing, but asking about politics, and about the issue that’s the crux of our century-long conflict is something else. I wasn’t sure if I had crossed a line of Jewish-Arab, employer-employee relationship, and if I’d had asked a question akin to “How’s your sex life anyway?”

But Masri looked at me and said, “look, we just want to work, feed our families and go home. We don’t care about politics.”

I asked him if he was an Israeli citizen and he said yes. I then asked him if he would prefer to be a citizen of a Palestinian state, and he also said yes.

We returned to eating in silence, and after a while, they started talking in Arabic to each other, and I started to clean up. The next time we spoke, Masri asked me about measurement for our new sink. That was much easier to talk about.

 

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