Israeli Oscar nomination imitates life
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Life, Movies, coexistence
A scene from 'Ajami'
The bad news – if it wins, some of the actors might be in jail instead of at the ceremony in Hollywood.
The film, about the lives of Arabs and Jews in the impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods of Jaffa, uses amateur actors to capture the gritty realism that prompted its nomination. However that realism spilled over into… um… reality last week when two brothers of the film’s co-director were arrested for fighting with police in a scene that could have been pinched directly from the film.
According to an AP report, Yaron Shani, a Jew, and Scandar Copti, an Arab — shot “Ajami” on location in the rundown, scrappy neighborhood of the same name in the city of Jaffa, and used local residents to play the main roles in the film. One of them was Copti’s brother, who along with a third brother, was arrested in the skirmish over alleged drug use.
Residents said that on Saturday evening, two teenagers were burying a dead dog when police arrived, suspecting they were hiding drugs. When they questioned the youths, Arab neighbors, who generally distrust law enforcement, came to the scene, some scuffling with police.
Tony Copti, 29, who appeared in the film, told The Associated Press that police are often harsh with Arab residents. After confronting police, he and his brother Jiriass were handcuffed and sprayed in the face with pepper spray before being taken away for questioning, he said.
Police said they briefly detained the men for attacking officers, releasing them after questioning. They gave no further details.
In the ‘Ajami,’ police enter Ajami to arrest a drug dealer and neighbors protest, allowing the dealer to slip away. In the next scene, Jewish police blame Arab residents for preventing them from cleaning up the neighborhood.
“The story in the film, that’s how it really happens in Jaffa,” Tony Copti told AP.
While the whole incident was greatly unpleasant for the principals, it may inadvertently drum up better publicity for the film than a full page ad in Variety.
Sheikh Jarrah in your face (book)
Filed under: A New Reality, Blogging, General, Life, Politics, coexistence
For a few Fridays now, there have been demonstrations in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in east Jerusalem against the move by Jewish settlers to remove Palestinian residents from homes they claim are Jewish-owned.
Over 20 protestors on the Israeli Left were arrested at last week’s demonstration, which drew over 300 people. And tomorrow, sparks are expected to fly when a counter-demonstration by members of the extreme Right like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Baruch Marzel takes place opposite the Left demo.
While the media in Israel has been covering the protests, most of the information coming out – both in terms of mobilization for these events -as well as the play by play of what’s going on there – have been disseminated through social media sites like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, along with a slew of blogs.
Rather than waiting until the nightly news to watch footage of arrests of protests, viewers can go straight to YouTube and watch the unedited action.
According to a story in The Jerusalem Post, activists and journalists both described a situation in which protesters were relying on the Internet to try and affect change on the ground and raise awareness of the arrests made during demonstrations in the neighborhood.
“It’s all Facebook, e-mails and Twitter,” said Didi Remez, a human rights activist, who has become noticeably involved in the Sheikh Jarrah protests as of late. Remez was arrested during a protest there last Friday.
Remez also said that distant audiences, like American Jews, who might be deprived of Sheikh Jarrah coverage due to the mainstream media’s lack of interest, were instead staying abreast of the situation via social networking sites.
“The American media is for some reason refusing to cover this,” he said. “Even though it’s becoming a major issue in Israel. And still, despite that, there’s a lot of awareness [of this issue] among Jewish Americans, the reason being that they are increasingly connected through Facebook, Twitter, blogs and so on.”
Sure enough, this morning, my Facebook page was full of posts calling on people to mobilize against the Right demo tomorrow.
Hagai El-Ad, the director of the Association for Human Rights in Israel and one of the protesters arrested two weeks ago, said that the use of new media was a driving force behind the success of the Sheikh Jarrah protest organizers. But, he added, that’s only part of the battle.
“Yes, the mobilization happens online,” El-Ad added, “but the end result is the most classic form of civil protest.”
Mobile clubbing in Tel Aviv
Filed under: A New Reality, Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Pop Culture, coexistence
Tel Aviv’s fun-loving clubbers won’t be denied. Following the police closure on New Year’s Eve of some of the city’s prominent night spots due to alleged overcrowding, the dance-deprieved residents are taking their moves to the streets in protest.
The plan? To take portable music players and their headphones and silently dance all night at Gan Meir park in the middle of the city – in an act of mobile clubbing.
May, one of the event’s organizers, told The Jerusalem Post that the clubbing community feels that the city and the law enforcement agencies are trying to delegitimize them.
This is our way of protesting in a quiet and fun way, so that nobody can claim we are disrupting the peace.
For several years now the city has been corralling all the nightclubs into special enclosures – city zones that are dedicated to nightlife – and many people feel that it’s ruining the character of the city that is well known for its open and festive atmosphere. We feel that what the police did last week was going too far. We understand the need for safety, but we feel that they are picking on the wrong people. Instead of going after places because they are overcrowded, the police should be going after the places where there are fights or where alcohol is being sold to minors.”
On New Year’s Eve the police closed down 10 clubs, which they said were dangerously overcrowded. Shortly after midnight, the officers turned off the music, sent the partygoers away and issued 30-day closure orders to the clubs’ owners.
Tel Aviv’s finest said that on New Year’s Eve, officers inspected 148 nightclubs, of which 10 were closed down, some because of overcrowding, some because of fighting and some because they were selling alcohol to minors.
According to the police, some of the clubs were found to have more than two-and-a-half times the permitted amount of people. A spokesman told The Post:
“We have no desire to ruin the city’s night life, but those kinds of levels present a real danger. Never mind a bomb, in such close quarters even a fight or fireworks going off can lead to disaster.”
Whatever the result of the conflict, Gan Meir is going to be the place to be tonight – after shul, of course.
Nostalgia Sunday – Gil Gibli Investigates Past Crimes
Filed under: Art, Crime, General, History and Culture, Nostalgia Sunday, Profiles
Artist Gil Gibli is perhaps best known in Israel for the pen and ink cross-hatched portraits of Israel’s business elite that illustrate the pages of business daily Globes each evening. But Gibli is also a noted police forensic sketch artist — whose work has been cited in international professional literature — and when he looks back at the past, he often does so as an investigator into crimes whose trails have gone cold.
On his website, Gibli describes several cases where his forensic art brought the truth to light: reconstructing a portrait of Warsaw Ghetto uprising leader Pavel Frankel (pictured left) based solely on eye-witness accounts, bringing together two Yom Kippur War compatriots after 35 years, and the most chilling case: identifying a man, a nameless drifter, killed in a terror attack. The story – and Gibli’s uncanny ability to elicit details from eye-witnesses – was documented in the award-winning documentary No. 17 is Anonymous.
More of Gibli’s work may be found at his virtual gallery. He’s also a jazz aficionado and portraits include a series of jazz greats - more nostalgia, but of a cooler, gentler kind.
Gibl’s YouTube channel has several videos (in Hebrew) about his work.
A dark day in Rishon Lezion
Three members of the Oshrenko family who were discovered dead on Saturday.
The security fence, for all its ugliness and negative implications, solved the problem for the short term. But the problem facing Israel today can’t be solved by a fence or wall – unless each Israeli builds their own and isolates themselves.
The news that greated people on Saturday, or Saturday night if they’re religiously observant, talked of police calling it the ‘worst crime’ in Israel’s history being committed. A day after her Revital Oshrenko celebrated her third birthday in her Rishon Lezion home with her family – grandfather and grandmother Edward and Ludmilla, both 56; parents Tattiana, 28, and Dimitry, 32; and 4-month-old brother Netanel – the whole family was stabbed to death and their apartment set on fire in an apparent effort to cover up the murders. Some of the victims were said to have been stabbed repeatedly.
Rescue services only discovered the bodies when they were called to the home after a report of a fire. While a gag order has been placed on the police investigation, family friends and acquaintances, including Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov and the mayor of Rishon Lezion, said that the family members were model citizens.
Suspicions are rampant that the murders were ‘business’ related, pertaining to restaurants and clubs catering to Russian immigrants that Dimitry owned and operated. The murder is just the latest in a series of sensationalist killings that have taken place this year in the country, where non-terror murders were once considered a rare occurrence.
I would kind of prefer it going back to the old ways – at least then you knew who the enemy was. I still feel safe here, walking around at night, or sending my children unsupervised on buses. But slowly, with Israel’s social fabric in danger of being ripped asunder, there’s a growing sense of lawlessness – when I’m out jogging at night now, sometimes I think twice about running past a group of teens gathered at a street corner – it’s a feeling that a security fence will be powerless to prevent.
Scroll wars
Filed under: Crime, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Politics, Religion, War, coexistence
A sad byproduct of the tragic media war we’re currently engaged in is that Zionists and Palestinian nationalists seemingly can’t even agree on what the region looked like 2000 years ago. Forget about the possibility that we just might have common ancestors – if the “facts on the ground” are disputable today, then all the more reason to dispute what they were in ancient times.
Because for hard-core dogmatists, much of the “whose land is it, anyway” debate boils down to whose land it was back in the day. For many years, the Palestinians have been excavating the Temple Mount, with Israelis decrying the destruction that these excavations have allegedly wrought. Many have even posited that the digs have a goal of finding and destroying any evidence of a historical Jewish connection to the area, with a nationalist agenda.
Archeology and nationalism can go hand in hand easily. In the best cases, they can even build bridges of international cooperation, as we saw this past winter with the Italian government’s interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
But in Jerusalem, where high-stakes heists and sleuthery are known to rear their heads every now and then, sometimes the powers that be feel the need to exert their power in order to maintain an edge in the information war.
And that’s how it came to be that a crack team made up of several Israeli bureaucracies came together to put the sting on two area Arabs this week. The Undercover Unit of the Jerusalem Border Police, the Intelligence Office of the Zion Region, the Archaeological Staff Officer of the Civil Administration and the super-specialized Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery all worked together to recover what experts are calling a Second Temple-era Jewish legal document.
As the AP tells it:
Undercover Israeli officers foiled an attempt by two Palestinian men to sell an ancient, valuable papyrus document on the black market, police said Wednesday. The men were arrested at a Jerusalem hotel Tuesday after a sting operation lasting several weeks, police said. The 1,900-year-old Hebrew document, previously unknown and valued at millions of dollars, was rescued, and police showed it to reporters.
…. They are suspected of violating Israeli antiquities laws by illegally possessing and trafficking in archaeological artifacts and could face several years in prison if convicted. Police are trying to determine how the document fell into their hands.
This specimen of Second Temple-style Hebrew calligraphy (pictured), written on six square inches of papyrus scrolls seems to be from around the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it could help (Jewish nationalism-tolerant) historians to better understand what life was like in the region some 2000 years ago, about 500 years before the birth of Muhammad.
Amir Ganor, director of the Unit for the Prevention of Antiquities Robbery at the Israel Antiquities Authority, explains:
“From an initial reading it seems that this document deals with the property of Miriam Bat Ya‘aqov, who was apparently a widow. The deciphering of the entire document by expert epigraphers and historians may shed light on how the people of the period managed their affairs and supplement our knowledge about their way of life. What we have here is rare historic evidence about the Jewish people in their country from more than 2,000 years ago, during the days following the destruction which sent the people of Israel into exile for a very long time – until the creation of the State of Israel.”
A ‘tail’ of two cities
Filed under: Crime, General, Israeliness, Life, coexistence
It's the dog days for Jewish and Arab neighbors near Jerusalem.
There are many residents of Azariya however, like laborers, construction workers, remodeling experts, who work in Ma’aleh Adumim with the proper Israeli identity card – either a work permit or a Jerusalem residency card.
However, it’s not too difficult to cross the road and climb the hill separating the two communities. And that’s what one 13-year-old Azariya youth did a couple weeks ago. My eight-year-old son’s friend Ephraim was out walking his dog near his home, when the teen grabbed his leash and ran off with the mutt.
Ephraim ran home to tell his father, who called the police. They arrived pretty quickly, heard the story, and said they would look around for the pooch. Ephraim, of course, had no idea that the thief was from Azariya, but the police warned his dad that there wasn’t much they could do if he was not from Ma’aleh Adumim.
The family put up signs and scoured the neighborhood over the next few days, to no avail. Then by chance, when Ephraim was walking home from school, he spotted the 13-year-old crook. He ran home again, his mother called the police and they picked up the youth for questioning. Aside from discovering he was indeed from Azariya, they weren’t able to get any useful information from him about the dog, and they released him.
Ephraim’s father had a lead though. The next day, he went to a construction site and asked around if any of the workers were from Azariya, and a couple of them said yes. He explained the situation to them, and they said they would try to find the kid and his family and help locate the dog.
That night, Ephraim’s dad got a call from one of the builders who told them, “We found the family and the kid, but there’s no dog here. They said he ran away.”
But, they added, don’t despair, we’re going to search around and look for the dog. Ephraim’s dad got another call a while later from the builder turned detective saying, “We found someone who said they saw the dog, so we’re getting a search party together in that area.”
The next morning, the builder called Ephraim’s dad and said, “We found him, and we’re sending him back in a taxi – he should be there in a half hour.”
Sure enough, Ephraim’s dog showed up chauffered at his home and eight days after he was abducted, had a joyful reunion with his family. Later that morning, Ephraim’s dad went to the construction site and gave the worker a cash reward for taking matters into his own hands, and helping to forge a ‘good neighbor’ policy between Ma’aleh Adumim and Azariya. It should be a lesson for all of us.
Christmas vacation
Filed under: A New Reality, Israeliness, Life, War
Palestinian youths throw stones towards border police in Issawiya in east Jerusalem (Photo: Reuters)
Operation Cast Lead (reminder to the IDF Spokesman: work on those titles) is no laughing matter. Borne out of no alternative to constant rocket attacks on its southern communities, the military campaign against Hamas in Gaza has resulted in hundreds of deaths and injuries – and so far, more rockets landing in Ashkelon, Sderot, Netivot and even Ashdod, some 25 miles away from Gaza.
I got an inkling that the operation was impending when my daughter came home from her police shift on Thursday and said she had been briefed about mobilizing in the South when the army attack began in order to keep calm in the communities where retaliation from Hamas was likely.
On Saturday night, however, she was still patrolling her usual areas around Jerusalem. Evidently, the response to Operation Cast Lead among the Palestinian population in the West Bank and around east Jerusalem was serious enough to keep police troops very busy.
“There’s all kinds of riots going on here,” she said on the phone around midnight, “so they can’t send us to the South.”
As a parent, I’m not sure which option I prefer – having her quell rioting in the streets of east Jerusalem, or being in the direct line of Kassam fire by helping the residents of the South stay calm.
I’d actually prefer the skiing in Aspen. But the week between Christmas and New Years is a world away in this Israelity.
“Israel Stops”
Yesterday (November 25) was “Israel Stops” day – a day dedicated to promoting road safety in Israel. It was the culmination of a month-long ad campaign, in which several well-known media personalities (including one guy known for his promoting a traffic safety system) urged Israelis to take it easy on the road. At 7:30 PM, there was a “moment of silence to commemorate victims of the tragedies on the road,” followed by a concert in Tel Aviv, starring pop singer David Broza.
The event was sponsored not by the Transportation Ministry or police, but by a private group called “Or Yarok” (Green Light), which works to raise consciousness
among drivers to develop safe driving habits. Prior to the concert, Or Yarok outfitted the Nokia Arena in Tel Aviv with 11,000 paper doll cutouts, stand-ins for the 30,000 Israelis who have been killed in road accidents since the state’s creation.
Things have been getting better on the road safety front, Or Yarok says, thanks to new, modern highways, like Road 6 (“Cross-Israel Highway”), and new road infrastructure projects in the center of the country. Israel Radio reports most accidents on Israel’s roads, and the majority are not on the nice, new roads around Tel Aviv, but in outlying areas in the Galilee and Negev. There, narrow two lane roads without streetlights are the norm, and drivers in a hurry are tempted to take foolish risks, passing slower cars ahead of them in the oncoming traffic lane. Sometimes drivers calculate wrong and aren’t able to get back into their lane in time – and that’s when you hear about the accidents where drivers and passengers are injured, or worse. Add to that the usual percentage of bad drivers, like drunk kids and sleepy truck drivers, and you have a recipe for road tragedy – which is why, unfortunately, we need events “Israel Stops,” and visual reminders of all we have lost (like in the photo).
The most dangerous roads, based on accident statistics, really are country roads that have become inundated with drivers, due to the expansion of Israel’s population. Part of the latest economic rescue program (yep, Israel has them too!) includes billions of shekels to upgrade road infrastructure, which will presumably include some of these unsafe roads. Meanwhile, there are systems like this one, which help keep drivers on track with hi-tech sensors and wi-fi alerts. What if the government were to give a tax credit to everyone who installed a system like this in their car? Any Knesset members out there reading this blog?
A tenuous coexistence
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Religion, coexistence
The Yom Kippur shutdown usually works. Whether you’re a secular Jews or a non-Jewish resident of Israel, you know that on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, you don’t drive or play music in public out of respect to those who are observing the holiday.
But one man in the northern coastal mixed Jewish-Arab city of Acre didn’t abide by the unwritten societal rule – and as a result, all hell broke loose.
According to The Jerusalem Post’s report,
Tawfik Jamal – a resident of Acre’s Old City – made his way to the predominantly Jewish Ben-Gurion neighborhood in the eastern part of the city, blasting loud music from his vehicle., Jamal denied he had intended to provoke local residents, saying he had driven with his 18-year-old son and the son’s 20-year-old friend carefully and quietly from the Old City to the Ben-Gurion neighborhood, three kilometers away, to pick up his daughter from her fiancée’s home.
But police dismissed Jamal’s claims.
“This was a provocation. An Arab driver arrived in a Jewish neighborhood on Yom Kippur with blaring music, and refused to leave when asked to by local residents. We believe he was intoxicated. This was a deliberate act,” Galilee Police spokesman Ch.-Supt. Eran Shaked said.The verbal confrontation between Jamal and the local residents quickly deteriorated into violence, as rocks and bottles were thrown at Jamal’s vehicle.
According to Jamal, he and his two passengers fled the car. The three were taken to hospital where they were treated for light wounds and discharged.
And then, to show you how rumors can spread faster than reason, false reports that Arabs were seriously harmed or killed by Jews reached the Old City, and then things began escalating.
Responding to the rumors, hundreds of Arabs set out from the Old City toward the Ben-Gurion neighborhood, walking down a main road, smashing store windows and cars along the way. Reports said the mob shouted “Kill the Jews,” “Allahu Akbar,” and “If you come out of your homes, you will die.”
At the same time, a few hundred Jews had congregated in the streets of the Ben-Gurion neighborhood. Fearing a deadly clash, police acted quickly, mobilizing “a very large force” to prevent the two groups from confronting one another, police said.
So, was it a deliberate provocation from an Acre Arab? An overreaction from the Acre Jews? And was the escalation simply the culmination of animosity that’s been built up between the two sides over years of living near each other?
Let’s not forget that in the scores of other areas in the country – in Haifa and the Galilee and in Jerusalem – there weren’t any similar reports. Let’s hope this was an aberration, and not a sign of a deterioration in relations between Israel’s Jews and Arabs.
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