Thursday, August 29, 2013

A Tekes and a Snapshot of Israel

My dear brother in law was sworn into his battalion today. He is part of Nahal, and as such, swears in at the Kotel Plaza. Since, as darling wife, his parents live in the US, we went along to be there for him on this momentous occasion in his life.

We arrived late, as we had to meet up with grandmother in law at the Tachana Merkazit and then sit on the 1 bus as it meandered through black and white Jerusalem on its way to the Kotel, where it ran smack into traffic and took 25 minutes to make it from the road around the Old City to Sha'ar Ha'ashpot. By the time we made it, the soldiers were in their "chet" formation (doorway shaped, for those non-Hebrew speakers), the music was playing, and the formation was surrounded (mobbed may be a more accurate term) by family and onlookers. We settled in a few feet behind the throng.

Many people spoke. I wish I knew who, but the emcee spoke too fast for me to make out the individual words. I assume most were commanders, generals, and the like.

Different speakers said different things, but one stood out, to me. He ended his speech to the soldiers with a blessing - he repeated Birkat Kohanim, and Hamalach. His voice was full of emotion; understanding that not all the assembled boys in green are necessarily going to make it home in one piece, and hearing the plaintive plea "yivarechicha HaShem viyishmirecha...ya'er haShem panav eilecha vichuneka...yisa haShem panav eilecha viyasem lecha shalom. Hamalach Hagoel oti mikol ra, yivarech et ha'ne'arim viyikarei bahem sh'mi, u'v'shem avotai Avraham v'Yitzchak...." my eyes teared a little. A secular army, yet so connected, in a visceral way, to the underpinnings of the Jewish enterprise of yore. It is one long story, one in which we all have our part...

Another speaker told the assembled soldiers that they are going to be given two weapons tonight. One was their rifle, and the other, their Tanach. The Tanach, he told them, is where they will learn the history of the Jews, their army, and the incredible prophecy of Yeshaya that has come true, where we have returned to our Land, proud and free. This is why we are here, why sometimes we must fight, and what we are fighting for.

The soldiers then were sworn in, their triplicate cries of "Ani Nishbah" echoing off the walls of the plaza. Then HaTikvah was played, and the crowd and soldiers sang along. I embarrassingly admit I do not know all the words, but when everyone sang "od lo avda tikvateinu..." again I teared; the proverbial man on the street, placing his children on the altar as Avraham did, only in green clothes and a chance he may not come down from that altar free, still sees this in the context of the 2000 years of Exile and the knowledge that we have now returned to our Land, to live as Jews, at last. And following this, as the soldiers received their Tanach and their rifle, they played "Shir Ha'maalot, esah einai..." in its entirety, twice. Each soldier, upon receiving his weapon, heard "Ezri me'im HaShem, oseh shamayim va'aretz". It was beautiful. It truly was.

And, I think, a snapshot of Israel as a whole. For it is far to easy to hide behind newspaper headlines, be they Ha'aretz or the Yated, and snipe at "them". It is easy to think you know how Am Yisrael is supposed to look, pray, act, or be. It is easy to denigrate, to put down, to find fault. But secular or religious, chiloni or dati, man, woman, child, all of Israel (both meanings intended) knows it is their Father in Heaven to Whom they direct their prayers, and in Whose image they walk, and Whose Mission they take part in. They stand as One as such, in knowing that the Nevi'im have spoken Truth, that we follow in their footsteps; that the One G-d is Our G-d, ezreinu me'im HaShem.

The Zohar has a funny sounding drashah it makes on the pasuk of "Mi K'amcha Yisrael goy Echad Ba'Aretz" - it simply sticks in a comma. Mi K'amcha Yisrael, (when? when they are) goy echad Ba'Aretz.

To see this, even if only in caricature form perhaps, is why I cried.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Shwarma, Gas Masks, and Normalcy

So darling wife lost her teudat zehut somewhere, and instead of going to open a bank account today, we went to get gas masks.

Let the incongruence of that sentence sink in slowly. (If there is nothing incongruent about that sentence, hello, fellow Israeli.)

It seems the government is handing out gas masks, so we walked to the mall 20 minutes away from our house and voila - we are the proud owners of 4 gas masks, complete with our names written on the box on the side.

Following this, we went to get some shwarma.

Once again, let the incongruence sink in.

While sitting at the table, watching my 2.5 year old daughter figure out if she likes shwarma or not ("I dont like this chicky! I like shwarma!"), it occurred to me that half the other families in the restaurant had the black or orange (adult or child) boxes too. And decided to go for shwarma. And this was normal.

Not normal in the sense of "sure, who's worried of being gassed to death with a massive chemical/biological warfare arsenal when there is food involved?", but normal in the sense of "there will always be those who want to harm the Jewish people, and we will take the necessary precautions, but there is still life to be lived, and that includes 18 shekel shwarma, and we are going to live it Pass the napkins."

And as insane as that may sound to some of you, I think it may be the only way to live. While the awareness of the possibilities of life is crushing, and in Western society we do our best to avoid them, there is something to be said for living life on the edge, in awareness of all that Is, and may not be for much longer. Call it stoic, call it crazy, call it Larry, it is on that razor edge of awareness that one can taste Life, sense it beating in the moment, with its eternity and its fleetingness, all at once. Its a nice place to live.




Elsewhere in the news, for those who are following our saga, we have more or less unpacked everything that we took on the plane, been shopping in the shuk and in our neighborhood stores, explored our environs (there are some GORGEOUS areas near our apartment, and some good shopping too!), and have been slowly stocking the fridge and freezer. The rest of this week should see us replacing darling wife's teudat zehut, opening a bank account, shopping for Rosh HasShana (yes, already), and attending my brother-in-law's swearing in ceremony (Tekes) for his army unit at the Kotel. It will be a packed week...


Sunday, August 25, 2013

Settling In

So we have had our first Shabbat (thank you last minute hosts!), we've unpacked most of the bags we brought on the plane, had a chance to shop a little bit (the Shuk is a wonderful place, Israeli supermarkets are pretty good too, though I have yet to find a Mehadrin butcher...), kinda adjust our body clocks, and our tans are coming in wonderfully.

We have also gotten adept at riding the buses (and that is with a stroller!), jury-rigging yummy meals out of nothing (here's to you, fresh bread everywhere, scrumptious veggies, cheese counters in supermarkets you can eat from!, Hummus, fruit, cereal, yogurt, and lox) walking all over the place (I have walked more in the last 5 days than I have in the last 4 years, I think), and using our rusty but trusty Hebrew.

The kiddies are jet lagged, stir crazy, defiant, overtired, and I think their body clocks have been set for Tokyo, or Mars.

But the cabinets and fridge is full, the drawers and closets too, and we do get to sleep sometime. For this I am grateful :)

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Landed...

So yesterday our plane landed in Ben Gurion. We are now officially Israelis, though it was quite anticlimactic to be unceremoniously handed my Teudat Zehut and be told "you're now an Israeli" as the guy walked away. 

But while sitting on the plane I had a thought I want to share. I'm not sure what I make of it myself.
I was going to start off this blog post with "We made aliyah", but since I was typing this on the plane, and I hadnt actually landed yet, I figured I should start by saying "I am making aliyah", in the present tense. 
And that is when I realized that aliyah is not just a past or future tense (I made aliyah, I will make aliyah, I will never make aliyah, etc) word. There is a present tense to aliyah. 

Aliyah is not an act of relocation. Nor is it a one time momentous occasion of "coming home", "arriving", or "returning". It's a lifetime process. And perhaps the interesting phenomenon that is the choice of nomenclature is pinpoint accurate - it is ascension, in all matters...

Anyway, we are here, been around a bit, and are adjusting nicely. There's a snafu with darling wife's Teudat Zehut, so we need to brave the Misrad HaPnim to get it fixed...which may be an exciting adventure. To put it mildly. Other than that, the jet lagged children having temper tantrums quarter hourly, the parents unable to sleep normally, a slew of new things to get used to, and dearly missing old friends and family, things are great! 

More later. 

Sunday, August 11, 2013

More Homeless Reflections While Waiting for the Plane - Hasbarah Musings, Revisited

I have noticed that the previous post has a very large amount of views, for my humble little blog. I am slightly bewildered that it is being read so much - feel free to drop a line, y'all!

There is an important subtext to the previous posting, one that begs to be explained. I owe the kernel of the matter to something I read, and much of the ideas expressed here come from different things I have read as well - but as usual, I forgot where I saw them...I will try to track it down and post it in an update or future blog post for those who wish to read the source/s themselves.

Israel has existed on three planes - independent power [think David/Shlomo and the Omride Kingdom, for example], as a secondary power [when reliant on patron states and shaky alliances], and in exile. All three have occurred numerous times, and today's state is no different in its 'Matzav'.

Israel today is an independent power in some respects, and a secondary power beheld to its patrons in others. Yes, TzaHaL is a fantastic army (despite itself, sometimes). Yes, our economy is world-defying. Yes, we are the second most educated people on earth. Yes, yes, yes. We also tread precariously on a tightrope, alone and adrift in world foreign affairs - much as we (sickening sweet and smarmily) proclaimed the "unbreakable alliance" between the USA and Israel, the truth is that the US forges its own Middle East policies, that are not always in line with our own. A look at the US' recent Egypt fiasco, in which they chose to back the Muslim Brotherhood despite 50 million people taking to the streets against them, and then doubled down when the army stepped in, is illustrative of this. The same can be said in Syria, where the US is (tepidly) arming an Al-Qaeda based movement (Jabaat Al Nusra) that is fighting Assad (and Hezbollah). Neither of these moves are in Israel's direct interests (the Muslim Brotherhood was a state sponsor for Hamas - wondered why Morsi was made the guarantor for the rocket firings stopping? Those are his underlings firing them. Same in Syria - it is Al Qaeda that would turn the Golan Heights "hot" again, not Assad). Yet we are reliant on US intervention in the Middle East more than many hotheads care to admit (here's looking at you, crazy rightists who want to dictate terms to the US) - and not for silly things like military aid and block development grants.

The Middle East is THE fracture line in world politics - the 1967 war was where the Russians tried to turn the Cold War hot, for example. There were tens of thousands of Russian "military advisers" armed and in uniform in the Sinai - Israeli SIGINT [signal intelligence] was picking up Russian on the radio waves! There were also Russian planes flying over Dimona before the war started. Russian military hardware is a staple in Arab armies (remember those S-300s that Israel is bombing in Syria right now? Or the MiG that landed in Israel in 1989?), and so is Russian fingerprints on the oil markets (something that Vladimir Putin manipulates in order to keep Russia from collapsing - it is no accident that he is the CEO of Gazprom, and that this was the first real step he took when he assumed power in Russia).

Russian propaganda is also responsible for a fair share of the anti-Semitic vitriol that we see pouring out of the mosques and halls of power (since the two are often quite linked) in Arab countries. The linkage of "Great Satan" to "Little Satan" is by design - what better way is there for the USSR to stir up anti-American sentiment in the Middle East?
(The remaining share, especially the Muslim Brotherhood's dissemination of anti-Semitic propaganda, comes from the Nazis - http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/the-roots-of-antisemitism-in-the-middle-east-new-debates).

The same is true today, only the Russians have been replaced by Iranian funded terror groups. Hizbollah is a naked Iranian proxy, which was made redundantly obvious by its continued involvement fighting for Assad [himself an Iranian client] in the Syrian Civil War, and other groups (Hamas' funding, for example) have extensive ties to Tehran as well. Israel cannot remove the Iranian threat on its own - Iran lies outside the reach of the IAF (well, there are 25 planes that can reach Natanz, but that is it - the mainstream F-16s and other fighter planes that Israel uses would need to refuel three [!!?!] times to reach Iranian targets; the odds of receiving refueling rights in Jordan and/or Iraq are close to zero). Even if they could, the resulting Shi'ite outrage would be devastating for Israel - think hundreds of suicide bombers (the Shia adore martyrdom; they take their inspiration from Hussein Ali, their founder, who fought a battle guaranteed to end his life at Karbala), throngs of crazed jihadis massing in Lebanon and Syria, and massive planned unrest/"intifadas" in Yehuda v'Shomron. The Jordanian Palestinians could potentially riot as well, spilling the war over another border - King Abdullah has perhaps a tenuous grip on his country right now, as evidenced by the reactions his parliament had when an Israeli newspaper leaked details of his agreements with Israel.

So Israel, besides being caught up in the usual intrigues of the Arab world, is caught between the almost one hundred year old battle between Iran and the US - and it needs the US to protect it. It does. In this arena, we are still a secondary power, and we are still dependent on American wants, desires, and policies.
[Why do you think that, pit'om, Bibi is back "negotiating" with Indyk (himself the architect of the failed "Dual Containment" policy of the Clinton administration regarding Iraq and Iran) and Kerry and Abbas?]

This is the precarious position Israel finds itself in today - stuck reliant on others for its security and safety, in a world where non state actors and rogue governments conspire to annihilate her, as a secondary power in an arena that is increasingly growing crowded. I leave the military and foreign policy machinations to those who know what they are doing - I am not sure it i my place to comment on them.


However, I can, and will, remark on the effects of the Hasbara campaigns on this situation.
It is here that Israel's naive and idealistic Hasbara tends to do her its biggest disservice. Engaging in a protracted battle with the shillers of anti-Israeli screed, on their own turf, where they control the terms and field, is clinically insane - and each successive failure, in which "human rights" and "genocide" are used to smear Israel and the counterargument fails to deflect it, only weakens the support that Israel retains in the places it needs it most in its current situation.
Instead of debating on college campuses, why not identify and invite (ala a birthright style, all expenses paid trip) students who are pro-Israel to come connect with our culture, our narrative, our history? They will be far better advocates than our own, and wherever they go in their lives, they'll take it with them. Instead of taking to the journalists who slant their coverage regardless of what actually happens (hello, BBC and Tom Friedman), why not emulate what Naftali Bennett and Michael Oren did on TV during Operation Defensive Shield? Instead of trying to answer smears, why not simply report on the facts, building a coherent narrative and message, and stay on track? As Karl Rove, and Nixon before him, and LBJ before him [remember the famous nuclear commercial with the little girl?] have shown, you cannot disprove a negative. <This idea, of Hasbara being scatterbrained and lacking coherency/consistency, has been made numerous times before by others, as well.> And lastly, instead of relying on AIPAC, Saban, Adelson et al to fly politicians in to Israel, why not do it ourselves? Create a "task force" that links MKs and policy wonks to Congressmen and women, and give them the royal treatment when they are here. Between the students and the politicians, we can get much, much better results than we do now.

Fight the battles you can win. Engage in a tactical, strategic plan. Execute. Put resources where they are used best. This is a recipe for success.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Reflections of a Homeless Man Waiting for the Plane

The lull in posting is due to not having a home, or a computer, to use to write. That, and the headless chicken race that was foisted upon us with the Foreign Ministry strike being resolved...

I have come to an interesting conclusion though, after much thought and mental exploration.

We, as Jews, have a need for public acceptance and world regard. It is destructive, it is harmful, and it is slowly eroding Israel's precarious position in the Middle East.

"Hasbarah" is an unnecessary tool, one that tries to fight a war it cannot possibly win, on a battlefield rigged against it, with the weapons of yesterday's public relations trying to change today's opinions.

Those who are anti-Israel are (generally) uneducated, leftist romantics seeking to remake the world in line with their fantasies, who ignore the large segments of reality that dont fit the narratives they've constructed; they do not care for logic, do not care for facts, and do not care for practicalities. They will not change their minds no matter how much you prove them wrong - look at Alice Walker (she of the great alien lizard colonization beliefs), or Sarah Shulman (a gay rights activist [and a professor, despite not having an advanced degree] who thinks Israel's forward treatment of gays is a calculated coverup for its abuses of Palestinians), to name two of many.

No amount of narrative-setting, or data provision, or editorials, or social media advertising is going to accomplish anything. In fact, it alienates those in our camp, while we spend all our energies talking to those who do not listen, and are actively trying to undermine our standing (if not outright trying to dismember our State).

It is far better to make friends, to spend money inviting young leaders to see the facts on the ground, to engage in Israeli society, than it is to attempt communication with those who do not wish to interact, but only to destroy.

If only there was a program, some money, to fly in politicians and policy wonks from around the world to see what tings are like, and allow them to educate themselves. Those who are open to reality will accept it.

And above all, my fellow Yisraelim, stop. Stop wasting your time and energy chasing approval from idiots, from delusional people lost in their own emotional stupidity, from those who want you dead. Develop relationships with those who are open to having them. Build on your strengths. (And to my leftist Yisraelim, its okay to have strengths, and okay to be strong!) Accept some people arent going to like you, protect yourself from their attacks, and work on positively building lasting and meaningful relationships and institutions.