How Gaza’s playing in Middle America
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Politics, Travel, tv, War
Some of the items on board one of the ships bound for Gaza. The army said none of the supplies were lacking there (Photo: Jerusalem Post)
Not known for it’s propensity to get involved with Middle East issues, some residents of the coastal city evidently thought there were some human rights violations taking place on Israel’s side, enough so to make a public call to lift the blockade on Gaza at the city’s Monument Square the day after Memorial Day was observed there.
There was a downpour at the time of the planned protest, so I don’t know if anybody showed – it wasn’t in the local daily paper the next day. But later that day, meeting a couple of old (non-Jewish) friends for a beer, I got a hint as to the reaction that most Americans may be having to the international incident that took place off of Israel’s shores.
“I don’t know what everybody else thinks, but what I saw on TV was the Israeli navy commandos rappeling down onto the ship and being beaten like hell with bars and clubs by the supposedly peaceful passengers on the ship,” said Bill, an electrical foreman for most of his life. “If I had been there with a gun, there would have been a lot more than nine of them dead.”
Regardless of the tactical and conceptual errors that Israel may have made in regards to preventing the flotilla from reaching Gaza, it appears that any level headed person is going to be convinced that once the actual incident began – after Israel repeatedly offered to bring the supplies on board into Gaza via Ashdod port, and after Israel repeatedly warned the ship to not enter Israeli waters – that Israel’s actions were defensive – and that the only ones who think a ‘massacre’ took place are the ones aligning themselves with Hamas and Iran.
Haman rears his ugly head
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Politics, War
Ahamadinajad, Assad and Nasrallah - a summit of the villains with humous. (Photo: AP)
It was like one of those scenes Batman or Austin Powers where the idiosynchratic but well-costumed villains stage an evil summit to hatch new plans for world domination. There’s some eerie synchronicity going on – we’re gathering to hear the Megilla reading in Israel and around the world, being reminded of Haman’s plan to wipe out the Jews. And generations later, these anti-Israel professionals – one, Nasrallah, actually in his best Penguin meets The Joker garb – are gathering around humous and eggplant salad to discuss the very same thing.
We’ve sat down at the peace table with some unsavory folks in the past – Yasser Arafat anyone? But even that was within the realm of possibility, as he talked about making peace with Israel and living side by side, even if his actions didn’t resemble his words. And King Hussein and Anwar Sadat always seemed like level-headed leaders, even when they were our enemies, so it was no great leap to find commond ground with them when the time came.
But what about the terrible trio of Assad, Ahamadinajad and Nasrallah? Are we ever going to be able to sit around the humous table with them? Or is it going to play out like a Purim story, where one side has to triumph over the other? Stay tuned, same Bat time, same Bat channel.
The week that was
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, War
The pace of news events developing and exploding into headlines is always seemingly propelled by steroids here in Israel. There’s never a minute to rest, and the news addiction that most of the public suffers from isn’t helped any by half hour radio bulletins, that annoying beep beep beep of the hourly news reports and nightly hour-long TV newscasts that are holy in some households.
But even veteran observers are hard pressed to remember a week of news events – aside from wars and intifadas – that rolled in like a tsunami, pushing the previous one off the front page with an ease that is creepy and disconcerting.
First up at the beginning of the week was the disclosure that police had arrested an American immigrant – Yaakov Teitel – a resident of a West Bank outpost on suspicion of murdering two Palestinians in 1997 and carrying out a string of previously unsolved hate attacks against other targets, including planting a pipe bomb outside the home of prominent left-wing Israeli professor Zeev Sternhall which injured him, and sending a bomb package to a family of messianic Jews from Ariel, seriously wounding their 15-year-old son.
This was huge news and the media covered it from every angle, from settlements spawning extremism to questioning whether the Law of Return which enables all Jews to immigrate to Israel should be reconsidered, or at least more stringent.
But no sooner had we started to digest this horrific news, Israelis were presented with something even more uncomprehensible the next day. The police announced they had caught the suspect in the brutal murder of six members of a Russian immigrant family in Rishon Lezion last month. It was considered the worst murder case in Israel’s history, with many pundits speculating that it involved the Russian mafia and a hired killer.
However, police said that the suspect, Damian Karlik, 38, who was arrested with his wife, parents and two other female relatives, killed the Oshrenko family because he had been fired as a waiter a couple months earlier from the family’s restaurant.
Dmitry Oshrenko fired Karlik, who was headwaiter at the Oshrenkos’ high-end restaurant Premier, after accusing him of stealing a bottle of vodka. Karlik said he felt humiliated and began to nurture his hatred for his former boss. Expressing no remorse at the murders, which included two young children, Krilik allegedly bragged to the police that he was a “bad motherfu**er.”
Disoriented at the front pages of our newspapers being turned into True Crimes magazine, we felt things returning to ‘normal’ yesterday with the disclosure of a dramatic high seas capture by Israeli naval commandos off the coast of Cyprus of the “Francop”, an Antigua-flagged freighter packed with 3,000 Iranian rockets and shells headed for Hizbullah in Lebanon.
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If it had achieved reaching its destination, the shipment would have provided Hizbullah with almost the entire rocket arsenal they unleashed against Israel in the 2006 Second Lebanon War.
Israeli sources say the shipment violates not only the UN Security Council resolutions from the 2006 war, but also those that forbid Iran from engaging in any arms exports. More importantly, it shows how Iran is attempting to incite the region, coming a day after Hamas in Gaza tested an Iranian-supplied rocket that has a range to reach Tel Aviv.
But hey, these are headlines that we’re familiar with -Iran, rockets, terror. However, by this morning, I found myself yearning for one of those days when the worst thing that could happen was The York Yankees winning the World Series, or narrow-minded citizens from my home state of Maine repealing same sex marriages. Both of those items are indeed reflections of a sorry state of affairs, but I’ll take them over the world gone crazy pace of news events we’ve had to put up with this week here in Israel.
Danger, danger everywhere
Tel Aviv bathers live in fear of sand rash.
The annual ranking of 144 of the world’s nations based of how peaceful they are perennially places Israel near the bottom of the list, with countries like New Zealand and Iceland fighting it out for the safest (New Zealand edged out its competitor this year, with Iceland’s financial collapse evidently pushing its residents closer to derangement which influenced its drop to fourth place.)
The index was collated by the Economist Intelligence Unit for a think tank called the Institute for Economics and Peace. It uses a weighted mix of 23 criteria, including foreign wars, internal conflicts, respect for human rights, the number of murders, the number of people in jail, the arms trade, and degrees of democracy (The US is ranked number 83 and Britain is 35 – last for the third year in a row is Iraq). Even Iran (99) and Syria (92) are allegedly safer than Tel Aviv.
It’s kind of bizarre to find us ranked so low, given that criteria. I could see it if we were looking at benchmarks like susceptibility to sun dehydration, or possibility of heart attack due to pushy, obnoxious neighbors, or likelihood of stroke due the number of commercials during Channel 2 programming.
But Israel dangerous like Pakistan and Congo? Unless you’re in Sderot (and when was the last time someone was injured by a Kassam there?), a settler living in an illegal outpost, or a Palestinian terrorist in the scope of the IDF, I don’t think so. Of course, all that could change if Iran makes good on its threat to annihilate the Jewish state, or if Hamas or Hizbullah decides to raise their profile in their agression against us.
But right now, if Israel is the fourth most dangerous country in the world to live in, someone had better tell these people on the beach.
Iran’s New Year “Nowruz” An Ecological Bridge To Make Peace With Israel?
Filed under: A New Reality, Environment
Jews in Israel and the world over are busy now celebrating Passover, while Christians ready themselves for Easter. Iranians, we learn had their own celebrations this time of the year, coinciding with the vernal equinox on March 21.
Iran’s political makeup and leadership may not be making many friends these days, but its annual festival Nowruz, or the Persian New Year festival, is being celebrated in a number of countries, and by several different religions as well.
Nowruz spelled also Nowrouz or Nouruz, which means “New Day” in Persian, officially marks the first day of Spring in the Persian calendar and corresponds to the Spring Equinox which is marked on Western calendars as March 21.
The holiday is not only celebrated by the Iranians, but also by countries in Central Asia, South Asia, Western China, The Crimea, and by a number of ethnic groups in Balkan countries such as Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia. The holiday marks the period when the sun crosses the celestial equator and creates equal day and night.
The sun and fire are important elements in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster and the festival is observed by this ancient monotheistic faith. In fact, Nowruz is one of the seven most important Zoroastrian festivals the festival is also observed by the much newer Bahai faith which also has its origins in Iran.
The founder of the Bahai religion, Bahalulah, placed much importance on the observance of this annual change of seasons and Bahai faith members the world over eagerly await this event.
Legend has it that this festival, which has it origins in ancient Persia around 600 BCE, is the basis for the Jewish festival of Purim which also comes around this time and is based on the lunar calendar. The festival is celebrated by a number of Muslim communities, including among the Alewite and Alevi sects.
Signifying rebirth, some of the main customs of the holiday includes spring cleaning and inter-family visitation.
As in other holidays that celebrate the New Year, it is believed that what people do on Nowruz will affect them for the remainder of the year. Certain flowers such as tulips and hycinths are placed in the home. Like before Jewish holidays, new clothing is also purchased. Another nice custom involves something sweet being hidden somewhere outside the home, and whoever finds its and brings it inside will have a better year. Families also visit the graves of loved ones on the last Thursday or Friday of the old year proceeding festival.
Faith plays an important role in spreading environmental awareness, and joint environmental concerns can unite faiths. Nowrouz and its many derivations means so much to so many people, it may yet be an excellent ecological “bridge” to unite peoples the world over.
This post was written by Maurice Picow and first appeared on the Middle East environment news site Green Prophet. To subscribe to the newsletter send an email to contact@greenprophet.com.
[Image via Hamed Saber]
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