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, coexistence, General, History and Culture, Holidays, Religion
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.
Whistling in the dark
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life
It’s been a year and a half since my daughter began her two-year obligatory army service, and was placed in the Israel Police. Sure has gone by quickly for me.
For her, I’m not so sure. While she’s accepted her responsibilities with poise and a remarkable sense of maturity, it’s clear that she’s mentally tearing the calendar page away a day at a time as her long countdown begins to her release.
We’ve been lucky, because her patrol route and home base are relatively close to home, enabling her to sleep in her own bed, instead of staying in a police barracks.
It’s become routine in the house – Adina returning home at 5:30 am after a 12-hour all-night shift, and sleeping all day. If we’re home, we try to keep things quiet, but in the summer, with the younger kids on the TV and computer constantly, it’s not always possible (not to mention the remodeling taking place by our downstairs neighbor).
And when she’s on a day shift, she gets home in the early evening, takes a nap, showers, and heads out to see her boyfriend or her high school friends. We’re happy to be her welcome berth, providing her with food, shelter… and privacy.
Occasionally she’ll tell us about something that happened on her shift – which involves usual police stuff like burglaries, roadblocks to check for drunk drivers, and sometimes, heading into Arab villages to back up army troops on a mission. But usually, she just says everything’s fine, and doesn’t go into detail.
That leaves us with a false sense of security that she’s leaving to go to work like any of us, to sit at a desk or computer – not that she’s leaving home and entering a danger zone where her life or well being could possibly be put in jeopardy at any time.
Once in a while, on the rare occasions we’re both at home and not preoccupied with human doing stuff, I tell her I’m proud of her, and appreciate the sacrifice she’s making for her country, when she’s at an age when many kids – at least in the US – are more focused on where the next keg party is going to be. On Shabbat, during the prayer for the soldiers defending Israel, I put in a good word for her, and ask that she return home safely from all her tasks which put her in harm’s way.
Then the new week starts, and those thoughts return to back part of my mind once again. Still, when I hear her roll in at 5:30 am, I roll over in my bed, and in hazy between sleep and awake state, I pretend to smile to myself.
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