Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "jews"
Tel Aviv at 100
Israel’s hippest, most tolerant city celebrates its centenary
By Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post
TEL AVIV—Purple fireworks sprayed off the roof of Tel Aviv’s City Hall last week to open festivities marking a century since Zionist pioneers began construction of the “first Hebrew city.” Watching among the crowd in Rabin Square, Marko Martin wept.
A German journalist, Martin travels the world to write cultural articles for Die Welt, filing from Myanmar to El Salvador. But he returns again and again to this Mediterranean metropolis, where his Israeli friends call him “Mister Tel Aviv.”
“No other place on earth makes me feel so much at home as this hot and shabby town, built by immigrants from all over the world,” says Martin, whose book “Tel Aviv—A Lifestyle” will be published in Germany this summer. “I was born in Communist East Germany, so I know how to appreciate an island of tolerance in an ocean of bloody fanaticism.”
At its centenary, Tel Avivians have many complaints about their city, from lack of parking to smog to the plain ugliness of most of its architecture. But they all agree with Martin that they’ve built a city that seems almost out of place in the Middle East. Where the rest of the region (including Israel’s capital, Jerusalem) is bigoted and hardline, Tel Aviv mirrors edgy European centers of social liberality like Martin’s native Berlin, even down to a flamboyant Gay Parade and a throbbing nightclub scene that brought you some of the most annoying “trance” music ever recorded.
In 1909, the area that’s now Tel Aviv was “a wilderness of sands,” according to the Zionist mythology. It had been a Canaanite settlement in the third century BC. When Napoleon besieged nearby Jaffa over two hundred years ago, he camped here. The early Zionists who decided to move the short way up the coast from Jaffa wanted to found a “Hebrew city,” unburdened by the biblical past.
They clashed with the Zionist establishment, which favored socialist collective farms and agricultural labor. Tel Aviv was home to tradesmen and shopkeepers. They called their new city “Spring Hill,” which sounds exactly like the bourgeois suburb it originally was. When the British army came through during World War I, it had a population of 2,000, compared to 50,000 in Jaffa.
But the Zionist dream was built around construction as much as agriculture. One of Israel’s national poets, Natan Alterman, immigrated from Warsaw to Tel Aviv in 1925. In his “Song to the Homeland,” he wrote: “We will clothe you in a robe of concrete and cement.”
Alterman might have specified that the robe would be a muumuu, because for a relatively young city Tel Aviv has the girth of a sumo champ.
These days Jaffa, where the Biblical Jonah took ship on his date with the whale, is the minor partner of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality, an Arab slum with a smattering of gentrifying yuppies. Tel Aviv is a town of 390,000, and its greater metropolitan district has swelled to a population of 1.3 million. Not huge, but pretty good going for a city that was an outpost in a British colony until 60 years ago.
Tel Aviv has its detractors. Jerusalem has a more religious, conservative population and is inclined to see the city 40 miles away on the coast as a modern Sodom. (The ancient city which gave us the word “Sodom” is, of course, south of Jerusalem near the Dead Sea.) Certainly the gay community is very much accepted in Tel Aviv and also provides a refuge for Palestinian gays who flee their own intolerant towns. By contrast, Jerusalem grudgingly allows a Gay Parade. But over the last few years Jerusalem’s religious zealots have attacked marchers, including one gay man who was stabbed.
Tel Aviv isn’t the loveliest place to look at, either. “It is shabby, like a neglected old woman,” wrote Yossi Klein in an Israeli magazine earlier this month. (An aside: the same magazine included an interesting article on Israeli sexism.)
Personally, having grown up in a mountainous country, I’m constantly lost in the featureless landscape of Tel Aviv. I’ve been there every couple of weeks for 13 years, but it’s always as though I’m visiting for the first time, clinging to a couple of identically sycamore-lined, grubby streets which I believe will get me to the highway and back up the hill to Jerusalem in the end.
The city has been through a number of attempts to pin a name on its unique character. In the 1990s, the municipality came up with “The City that Never Stops,” which gets a cheer when visiting rock stars parrot it at concerts, but is mainly used tongue in cheek by locals. (They know it’s a third-rate reworking of “The City that Never Sleeps.”)
More recently the central district--built by Bauhaus architects fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s--has been somewhat spruced up and Tel Aviv dubbed itself “The White City”. In 2003, UNESCO made it a world heritage site.
It’s undoubtedly among the ugliest of the 878 world heritage sites (If you don’t believe me, check out the list). But one would be churlish to say that this cosmopolitan oasis in a desert of hate didn’t deserve some recognition.
By Matt Beynon Rees on Global Post
TEL AVIV—Purple fireworks sprayed off the roof of Tel Aviv’s City Hall last week to open festivities marking a century since Zionist pioneers began construction of the “first Hebrew city.” Watching among the crowd in Rabin Square, Marko Martin wept.
A German journalist, Martin travels the world to write cultural articles for Die Welt, filing from Myanmar to El Salvador. But he returns again and again to this Mediterranean metropolis, where his Israeli friends call him “Mister Tel Aviv.”
“No other place on earth makes me feel so much at home as this hot and shabby town, built by immigrants from all over the world,” says Martin, whose book “Tel Aviv—A Lifestyle” will be published in Germany this summer. “I was born in Communist East Germany, so I know how to appreciate an island of tolerance in an ocean of bloody fanaticism.”
At its centenary, Tel Avivians have many complaints about their city, from lack of parking to smog to the plain ugliness of most of its architecture. But they all agree with Martin that they’ve built a city that seems almost out of place in the Middle East. Where the rest of the region (including Israel’s capital, Jerusalem) is bigoted and hardline, Tel Aviv mirrors edgy European centers of social liberality like Martin’s native Berlin, even down to a flamboyant Gay Parade and a throbbing nightclub scene that brought you some of the most annoying “trance” music ever recorded.
In 1909, the area that’s now Tel Aviv was “a wilderness of sands,” according to the Zionist mythology. It had been a Canaanite settlement in the third century BC. When Napoleon besieged nearby Jaffa over two hundred years ago, he camped here. The early Zionists who decided to move the short way up the coast from Jaffa wanted to found a “Hebrew city,” unburdened by the biblical past.
They clashed with the Zionist establishment, which favored socialist collective farms and agricultural labor. Tel Aviv was home to tradesmen and shopkeepers. They called their new city “Spring Hill,” which sounds exactly like the bourgeois suburb it originally was. When the British army came through during World War I, it had a population of 2,000, compared to 50,000 in Jaffa.
But the Zionist dream was built around construction as much as agriculture. One of Israel’s national poets, Natan Alterman, immigrated from Warsaw to Tel Aviv in 1925. In his “Song to the Homeland,” he wrote: “We will clothe you in a robe of concrete and cement.”
Alterman might have specified that the robe would be a muumuu, because for a relatively young city Tel Aviv has the girth of a sumo champ.
These days Jaffa, where the Biblical Jonah took ship on his date with the whale, is the minor partner of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality, an Arab slum with a smattering of gentrifying yuppies. Tel Aviv is a town of 390,000, and its greater metropolitan district has swelled to a population of 1.3 million. Not huge, but pretty good going for a city that was an outpost in a British colony until 60 years ago.
Tel Aviv has its detractors. Jerusalem has a more religious, conservative population and is inclined to see the city 40 miles away on the coast as a modern Sodom. (The ancient city which gave us the word “Sodom” is, of course, south of Jerusalem near the Dead Sea.) Certainly the gay community is very much accepted in Tel Aviv and also provides a refuge for Palestinian gays who flee their own intolerant towns. By contrast, Jerusalem grudgingly allows a Gay Parade. But over the last few years Jerusalem’s religious zealots have attacked marchers, including one gay man who was stabbed.
Tel Aviv isn’t the loveliest place to look at, either. “It is shabby, like a neglected old woman,” wrote Yossi Klein in an Israeli magazine earlier this month. (An aside: the same magazine included an interesting article on Israeli sexism.)
Personally, having grown up in a mountainous country, I’m constantly lost in the featureless landscape of Tel Aviv. I’ve been there every couple of weeks for 13 years, but it’s always as though I’m visiting for the first time, clinging to a couple of identically sycamore-lined, grubby streets which I believe will get me to the highway and back up the hill to Jerusalem in the end.
The city has been through a number of attempts to pin a name on its unique character. In the 1990s, the municipality came up with “The City that Never Stops,” which gets a cheer when visiting rock stars parrot it at concerts, but is mainly used tongue in cheek by locals. (They know it’s a third-rate reworking of “The City that Never Sleeps.”)
More recently the central district--built by Bauhaus architects fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s--has been somewhat spruced up and Tel Aviv dubbed itself “The White City”. In 2003, UNESCO made it a world heritage site.
It’s undoubtedly among the ugliest of the 878 world heritage sites (If you don’t believe me, check out the list). But one would be churlish to say that this cosmopolitan oasis in a desert of hate didn’t deserve some recognition.
Global Post: Bibi in a corner
Obama presses Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop building in West Bank settlements. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost May 26, 2009
JERUSALEM — One morning late last week, Israeli Border Police showed up at Maoz Esther, an outpost of Israeli settlers in the West Bank near Ramallah. They waited for a Bible study class to finish, tore down the settlers’ five little shacks and ran the residents off.
A few hours later, the settlers returned, nailing together the battered pieces of drywall shunted aside by the government. Maoz Esther rose again.
This kind of half-hearted approach to clearing out illegal outposts is the way Israel has always handled the settlers. Read more...
JERUSALEM — One morning late last week, Israeli Border Police showed up at Maoz Esther, an outpost of Israeli settlers in the West Bank near Ramallah. They waited for a Bible study class to finish, tore down the settlers’ five little shacks and ran the residents off.
A few hours later, the settlers returned, nailing together the battered pieces of drywall shunted aside by the government. Maoz Esther rose again.
This kind of half-hearted approach to clearing out illegal outposts is the way Israel has always handled the settlers. Read more...
Look out, God--Here's Shalom Auslander's Writing Life interview
“Fuck,” said God. …That’s a line from one of the short-stories in Shalom Auslander’s “Beware of God.” I live in the Middle East, so I feel like I hear God saying “Fuck!” almost every day. (If He doesn’t, then He’s not reading the newspapers.) “Beware of God” nails faith and the faithful as only a genius of satire can do. A very angry genius of satire, I ought to point out. As you’ll discover with Auslander’s second book “The Foreskin’s Lament.” It’s a memoir of Auslander’s Orthodox Jewish upbringing in a family as scarred as a lamenting eight-day-old foreskin. Here’s my interview with America’s scourge of religion.
How long did it take you to get published?
Not as long as it took me to write. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a writer; it wasn’t until I was in my early 20’s that I realized how badly I wanted to burn the world to the ground, and writing was the most immediate way I could do that. Once I started writing, getting published came soon after.
Would you recommend any books on writing?
No, and I read them all. And what I realized is that no matter what advice might be found inside, there’s an admission in just looking for help that “I can’t do this.” Writing needs to come from a ludicrous sense of self-assurance (combined with a terrifying degree of insecurity).
What’s a typical writing day?
Wake. Ride to my office. Delay. Delay. Delay. Get angry at myself. Write.
Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
“Foreskin’s Lament” is a memoir of growing up in an emotionally dysfunctional and religiously stifling home. It may or not be great, but it’s honest, and full of rage, which is nice.
What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.” Beckett, first sentence of ‘Murphy.’ Taking the most joyful part of the day and bending it, by perception, into something utterly bleak. Mazel tov.
How much research is involved in each of your books?
I research my books a lot, because research is easy and feels constructive while it really just kills time. “Wow,” I can say at the end of the day when I’ve written nothing, “That was a productive day!”
Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
A pain? You mean one? No.
What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
Have courage. Write a book that will shake up the world. Writing isn’t war, but at it’s best, it’s a bit like terrorism – take a small, 200-page bomb, plant it in the holiest place you can find, and kaboom. Candide was a bomb. Huck Finn was a bomb. Catch-22 was a bomb.
What’s your experience with being translated?
Mostly good. Translators who think of books as literature upset me, because they won’t translate “cocksucker” as “cocksucker.” They’ll try to soften it, try to “elevate” the book into something weak and mealy. “Cocksucker” is not the same as “homosexual.” Someone who is a motherfucker is a motherfucker, not a “jerk” or a “cad.”
Do you live entirely off your writing?
No. I work part-time for Satan in a Manhattan marketing firm.
How many books did you write before you were published?
One.
What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
Angry Orthodox Jews accosted me, told me I was a heretic and a heathen and was finishing what Hitler started. “Did you read the book?” I asked. “No,” said God’s inexplicably chosen ones. “And we don’t want to.” Sigh.
What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
I have this idea for a book that claims to be the Word of God and that tells the story of how the Earth came to be. But who the fuck is going to believe that?
Review: The thriller that reminds us why Euro politics matter
The Budapest Protocol, by Adam Lebor
(Reportage Press)
Sometimes a journalist comes across something so powerful that it seems bigger than the project he’s researching. Usually it’s put aside to serve as the basis for a future project, a magazine article or another nonfiction book.
Sometimes it takes such a grip on the writer’s imagination that there’s only one way to go. The novel. I know, because it’s how I turned from Middle East correspondent to the author of Palestinian crime fiction. Journalism seemed so limited by comparison, so unlikely to grab people and tell them “Pay attention, this really matters” the way a novel can.
That’s what happened to Adam Lebor in 1996 when he was researching his acclaimed “Hitler’s Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide.” He stumbled upon a World War II intelligence dossier addressed to the US Secretary of State. It detailed a French agent’s report on German contingency plans for the economic takeover of Europe, should the Third Reich fail.
Lebor asked himself the question: what if the industrialists who intended to found this Fourth “economic” Reich had tried to do so, after the war? What if they had succeeded? (“What if,” as Stephen King notes in his “On Writing,” is the best place from which to start a thriller.)
From his vantage point as a correspondent based in Budapest, Lebor was able to see the massive inroads amounting more or less to takeover of post-Soviet economies by German and Austrian conglomerates. Add to that the growing centralization of the European Union and the introduction of its single currency forcing the economies of most of Europe to toe a single line, and you start to see why the Red House Report gripped him so.
The result is the chillingly real thriller “The Budapest Protocol,” published in the UK this month.
Alex Farkas, a local journalist, uncovers the economic conspiracy, which – as the novel unfolds – is focused on the election campaign of one of the conspirators as President of Europe (a post that many Brussels types would gladly see become reality). Farkas discovers plans for a new Holocaust against the Gypsies, which with the rise in these poor economic days of a neo-Nazi right-wing in Hungary is another of the novel’s moments of eerie realism.
What really drives Farkas, though, is the sinister murder of his grandfather, a survivor of the Budapest ghetto and a former dissident. That gives the novel the personal underpinning that elevates it above pure conspiracy theory. In fact, it makes it a first-rate thriller comparable to Robert Harris’s “Fatherland.” The novel reminds us that the politics of Europe remains more charged than the dull image the Brussels technocrats have lulled us into.
I’ll bet you’re sorry now you didn’t vote three weeks ago in the Euro elections. You will be after you read this novel.
Photos of the Jerusalem you don't read about in the newspaper
My friend Ilan Mizrahi has published a wonderful book of his photos about Jerusalem -- not the conventional Jerusalem of suicide bombs and the Dome of the Rock and praying Hassids (though he covers that, too). Ilan, who was born just down the road from where I now live and is as "Jerusalem" as they come, aims to capture a side of the city populated by the poor, the drug abusers, the beggars: the scavengers who make it a real place, one that's more interesting than anything you'd ever imagine from the cliched nuthouse of the tv news. My favorite is of a man playing violin on the street for small change, while another man urinates furtively against the wall behind him. Look at some of Ilan's photos here. Ilan also asked me to write an introduction to the book. Here it is:
Jerusalem is a rumor, fed by the whispers of centuries, until its echo returns distorted from its tittle-tattle travels, unrecognizable to those who live in it. Like all rumors, it is unreliable and somehow more broadly accepted than the reality.
I arrived in 1996, drawn by my relationship with a woman, rather than any particular fascination with Jerusalem. Of course, I had heard the rumors like everyone else; they crept out from the Bible and the histories of Rome and of Islam, on through my two great-uncles, who rode into town with Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. But I came with few preconceptions, and that’s how I stayed. Though my business at first was the news, I was under no illusions about the uselessness of newspaper and magazine formulas for unveiling the truth of a place. I tried to travel the neighborhoods of Jerusalem with an anthropologist’s eye. It turned out I was attempting, as a writer, to do just what Ilan Mizrahi has been able to do as a photographer.
When I arrived, journalists were busy writing about the dull mechanics of the Oslo peace process. Lots of stories about the first Palestinian beer, the first Palestinian Olympic team, Palestine’s acceptance into FIFA, and the first joint patrols between Israeli and Palestinian soldiers. None of these developments amounted to much in the end, except perhaps the beer, but foreigners were so preoccupied with these pointless milestones that they were slow to see the danger signs. When I joined Time as Jerusalem bureau chief in 2000, the magazine’s editors had been considering hiring a business writer, because they believed that peace was on the way and that Israel’s high-tech industry would become the center of the story. Then came the intifada. Which only goes to show how little editors know.
I wasn’t as surprised as many by the violence which engulfed the second half of the period covered by Ilan Mizrahi’s book. One morning in 1998, I awoke in my Abu Tor apartment to discover 300 East Jerusalem Palestinians protesting on my street, where one of their compatriots had been stabbed early that morning. It wasn’t the fact that they turned out to chant and throw their fists in the air that shocked me, but that ready and waiting they had a massive Palestinian flag, five meters by three, which they had draped over a wall. This was supposed to be a neighborhood where the Arab residents weren’t militant and yet this flag materialized. But I heard something else in their cry, choking them less with politics than with the dryness of the old desert traditions of blood feud. So it was no surprise to me four years later when a Jewish woman was stabbed in the woods abutting the same street.
Since then, the Jerusalem of the newspapers has been the realm of endless suicide bombs and clichés about an “intractable conflict.” But the intifada revealed so much more, if you only looked. In 2002, 45 percent of small businesses in Jerusalem went bankrupt. That, in a city already stricken by some of the worst poverty in Israel. A city with a Palestinian refugee camp within its municipal boundaries, and another “camp,” Mahaneh Yehuda, where junkies shoot up at night.
When I came to write my nonfiction account of life here, Cain’s Field, I went to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods around Mea She’arim to write about the conflict between the burgeoning religious population and the old inhabitants, mostly from Morocco, being shoved out because they weren’t religious enough. As I walked through these streets, I noticed that schoolchildren stopped to stare suspiciously at me. I felt more foreign than I’ve ever done wandering a Gaza refugee camp. To me it was an important lesson about Jerusalem: its alienness comes to you when you least expect it. The sights and sounds to which you’ve been attuned all your life -- the Bible, the news, poetry and art -- can inspire, so long as you let them. With repetition, they dwindle into inflated half-truths for which you feel contempt or anger or boredom. But in the places where you’d expect Jerusalem to be drab and rotting, the places which aren’t the subject of scripture or famous songs, there you find the timeless moments of enlightenment. There, the city is no longer a whispered rumor. Instead, it speaks to you, loudly, berates you, until you’re forced to acknowledge that it isn’t what you thought it was. It never will be.
Jerusalem is a rumor, fed by the whispers of centuries, until its echo returns distorted from its tittle-tattle travels, unrecognizable to those who live in it. Like all rumors, it is unreliable and somehow more broadly accepted than the reality.
I arrived in 1996, drawn by my relationship with a woman, rather than any particular fascination with Jerusalem. Of course, I had heard the rumors like everyone else; they crept out from the Bible and the histories of Rome and of Islam, on through my two great-uncles, who rode into town with Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. But I came with few preconceptions, and that’s how I stayed. Though my business at first was the news, I was under no illusions about the uselessness of newspaper and magazine formulas for unveiling the truth of a place. I tried to travel the neighborhoods of Jerusalem with an anthropologist’s eye. It turned out I was attempting, as a writer, to do just what Ilan Mizrahi has been able to do as a photographer.
When I arrived, journalists were busy writing about the dull mechanics of the Oslo peace process. Lots of stories about the first Palestinian beer, the first Palestinian Olympic team, Palestine’s acceptance into FIFA, and the first joint patrols between Israeli and Palestinian soldiers. None of these developments amounted to much in the end, except perhaps the beer, but foreigners were so preoccupied with these pointless milestones that they were slow to see the danger signs. When I joined Time as Jerusalem bureau chief in 2000, the magazine’s editors had been considering hiring a business writer, because they believed that peace was on the way and that Israel’s high-tech industry would become the center of the story. Then came the intifada. Which only goes to show how little editors know.
I wasn’t as surprised as many by the violence which engulfed the second half of the period covered by Ilan Mizrahi’s book. One morning in 1998, I awoke in my Abu Tor apartment to discover 300 East Jerusalem Palestinians protesting on my street, where one of their compatriots had been stabbed early that morning. It wasn’t the fact that they turned out to chant and throw their fists in the air that shocked me, but that ready and waiting they had a massive Palestinian flag, five meters by three, which they had draped over a wall. This was supposed to be a neighborhood where the Arab residents weren’t militant and yet this flag materialized. But I heard something else in their cry, choking them less with politics than with the dryness of the old desert traditions of blood feud. So it was no surprise to me four years later when a Jewish woman was stabbed in the woods abutting the same street.
Since then, the Jerusalem of the newspapers has been the realm of endless suicide bombs and clichés about an “intractable conflict.” But the intifada revealed so much more, if you only looked. In 2002, 45 percent of small businesses in Jerusalem went bankrupt. That, in a city already stricken by some of the worst poverty in Israel. A city with a Palestinian refugee camp within its municipal boundaries, and another “camp,” Mahaneh Yehuda, where junkies shoot up at night.
When I came to write my nonfiction account of life here, Cain’s Field, I went to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods around Mea She’arim to write about the conflict between the burgeoning religious population and the old inhabitants, mostly from Morocco, being shoved out because they weren’t religious enough. As I walked through these streets, I noticed that schoolchildren stopped to stare suspiciously at me. I felt more foreign than I’ve ever done wandering a Gaza refugee camp. To me it was an important lesson about Jerusalem: its alienness comes to you when you least expect it. The sights and sounds to which you’ve been attuned all your life -- the Bible, the news, poetry and art -- can inspire, so long as you let them. With repetition, they dwindle into inflated half-truths for which you feel contempt or anger or boredom. But in the places where you’d expect Jerusalem to be drab and rotting, the places which aren’t the subject of scripture or famous songs, there you find the timeless moments of enlightenment. There, the city is no longer a whispered rumor. Instead, it speaks to you, loudly, berates you, until you’re forced to acknowledge that it isn’t what you thought it was. It never will be.
Israelis riot, thanks be to God
Orthodox Jews face off against secularists in the Holy Land — a sign that all is well. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — Ultra-orthodox Jews have been rioting the last few weeks against a parking lot the municipality wants to leave open during the Jewish Sabbath, leading to dozens of arrests and quite a few moderate to serious injuries. Secular activists have held protests in favor of free garaging for those who defy God by driving on Saturday.
All of which is a sign of good times in Israel.
Here’s why: It shows that Israelis think there’s nothing worse to worry about.
When I first came to Jerusalem in 1996, the ultra-Orthodox, or "Haredim" as they’re known here (it means “those who quake,” as in quaking before the wrathful God of the Jewish Bible) used to riot over a major thoroughfare that ran through one of their neighborhoods. They wanted Bar-Ilan Street closed between sundown Friday and the onset of Saturday night.
The Sabbath, they argued, ought to be sacred to every Jew, but at the very least no one ought to drive along Bar-Ilan, reminding them that its sanctity was being violated (by people who in turning their keys in the ignition were violating the rabbinic commandment not to kindle a flame on the Sabbath. It’s one of 39 tasks “set aside” on the Sabbath, because they were used in building the Ark of Covenant and therefore shouldn’t be carried out on the day of rest. No ritual slaughtering, tanning — of leather, that is — or separating of threads is allowed either, for example).
In my neighborhood, there was one old white-bearded rabbi who used to sit on a stool at the side of the road reading and wagging his finger at me as I drove by. But in more religious neighborhoods there was real violence. In Mea Shearim, the heart of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, gangs of black-hatted rioters used to light trash cans on fire, throw stones, kick and spit on journalists, and aim rather feeble punches at policemen. (Feeble because almost all the rioters are full-time yeshiva students who are, to say the least, short on regular physical activity.)
Secular activists used to counter-protest in Jerusalem. They’d turn up, too, at shopping malls near largely secular Tel Aviv to barrack the so-called “Sabbath inspectors,” non-Jews employed by the government to hand out fines to businesses that opened on the holy day.
This was among the most important issues of those days.
Then came the intifada. The Sabbath wasn’t so contentious anymore with suicide bombers working every day of the week. Maybe it’s also that Israeli Jews decided it was time to unite against their attackers.But a month ago, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat (who replaced his ultra-Orthodox predecessor this spring) decided to leave a parking lot beside city hall open through the Sabbath. There are plenty of restaurants and bars open Friday night on a nearby street and Barkat’s aim was to prevent that street from filling with poorly parked cars.
Trouble was the lot wasn’t far from the edge of Beit Israel, one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods stretching through central Jerusalem. Rabbis ordered out their spindly troops and rioting ensued.
Barkat switched the parking lot to one underneath the Old City walls beside the Jaffa Gate. If he’d started out there, things might’ve been different. But the rabbis had a good head of steam up and had returned to the rhetoric of my early days in Jerusalem — namely that secular Israelis were the worst anti-Semites, because they were self-hating and felt inadequate in the face of the dedication to religion of their ultra-Orthodox compatriots whose observance they wished to destroy.
So this past weekend the rioting reached a new stage of ugliness. Police arrested 57 ultra-Orthodox protesters, many of whom had bussed in for the Sabbath. One man fell off a wall and was in serious condition in hospital. The riots continued throughout Sunday, as the ultra-Orthodox protested for the release of those who had been arrested the previous day. The riots centered around Sabbath Square in the middle of Mea Shearim.
There are plenty of problems for Israel these days, not least the tortuous attempt by the current right-wing government to persist with settlement building in the face of (for the first time in years) genuine American insistence on a construction freeze. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, too, that Europe might get tough on Israel unless peace talks with the Palestinians show some fruit.
But in comparison to the intifada, these are easy times for Israel. Long may the Sabbath be a time for rioting.
JERUSALEM — Ultra-orthodox Jews have been rioting the last few weeks against a parking lot the municipality wants to leave open during the Jewish Sabbath, leading to dozens of arrests and quite a few moderate to serious injuries. Secular activists have held protests in favor of free garaging for those who defy God by driving on Saturday.
All of which is a sign of good times in Israel.
Here’s why: It shows that Israelis think there’s nothing worse to worry about.
When I first came to Jerusalem in 1996, the ultra-Orthodox, or "Haredim" as they’re known here (it means “those who quake,” as in quaking before the wrathful God of the Jewish Bible) used to riot over a major thoroughfare that ran through one of their neighborhoods. They wanted Bar-Ilan Street closed between sundown Friday and the onset of Saturday night.
The Sabbath, they argued, ought to be sacred to every Jew, but at the very least no one ought to drive along Bar-Ilan, reminding them that its sanctity was being violated (by people who in turning their keys in the ignition were violating the rabbinic commandment not to kindle a flame on the Sabbath. It’s one of 39 tasks “set aside” on the Sabbath, because they were used in building the Ark of Covenant and therefore shouldn’t be carried out on the day of rest. No ritual slaughtering, tanning — of leather, that is — or separating of threads is allowed either, for example).
In my neighborhood, there was one old white-bearded rabbi who used to sit on a stool at the side of the road reading and wagging his finger at me as I drove by. But in more religious neighborhoods there was real violence. In Mea Shearim, the heart of ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem, gangs of black-hatted rioters used to light trash cans on fire, throw stones, kick and spit on journalists, and aim rather feeble punches at policemen. (Feeble because almost all the rioters are full-time yeshiva students who are, to say the least, short on regular physical activity.)
Secular activists used to counter-protest in Jerusalem. They’d turn up, too, at shopping malls near largely secular Tel Aviv to barrack the so-called “Sabbath inspectors,” non-Jews employed by the government to hand out fines to businesses that opened on the holy day.
This was among the most important issues of those days.
Then came the intifada. The Sabbath wasn’t so contentious anymore with suicide bombers working every day of the week. Maybe it’s also that Israeli Jews decided it was time to unite against their attackers.But a month ago, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat (who replaced his ultra-Orthodox predecessor this spring) decided to leave a parking lot beside city hall open through the Sabbath. There are plenty of restaurants and bars open Friday night on a nearby street and Barkat’s aim was to prevent that street from filling with poorly parked cars.
Trouble was the lot wasn’t far from the edge of Beit Israel, one of the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods stretching through central Jerusalem. Rabbis ordered out their spindly troops and rioting ensued.
Barkat switched the parking lot to one underneath the Old City walls beside the Jaffa Gate. If he’d started out there, things might’ve been different. But the rabbis had a good head of steam up and had returned to the rhetoric of my early days in Jerusalem — namely that secular Israelis were the worst anti-Semites, because they were self-hating and felt inadequate in the face of the dedication to religion of their ultra-Orthodox compatriots whose observance they wished to destroy.
So this past weekend the rioting reached a new stage of ugliness. Police arrested 57 ultra-Orthodox protesters, many of whom had bussed in for the Sabbath. One man fell off a wall and was in serious condition in hospital. The riots continued throughout Sunday, as the ultra-Orthodox protested for the release of those who had been arrested the previous day. The riots centered around Sabbath Square in the middle of Mea Shearim.
There are plenty of problems for Israel these days, not least the tortuous attempt by the current right-wing government to persist with settlement building in the face of (for the first time in years) genuine American insistence on a construction freeze. It isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility, too, that Europe might get tough on Israel unless peace talks with the Palestinians show some fruit.
But in comparison to the intifada, these are easy times for Israel. Long may the Sabbath be a time for rioting.
Rabbis: No pie for Jesus!
Her methods may be kosher, but in Israel baker Pnina Konforti faces a bigger commercial obstacle: She's a Messianic Jew.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
GAN YAVNEH, Israel — I always thought that by following kosher laws religious Jews only missed out on certain flavors and debatable delicacies. Turns out that by turning their back on “treyf” they also steer clear of Jesus.
At least that’s the verdict of rabbinates in two Israeli towns who’ve been denying a kosher certificate to a local cafe owner for three years — not because she doesn’t conform to the laws of “kashrut,” but because she’s a “Messianic Jew.”
Pnina Konforti, owner of the two branches of Pnina Pie in Gan Yavneh and Ashdod, this month won a decision in Israel’s Supreme Court forcing the rabbinates of the towns to give her a kosher certificate. Just because she believes in Jesus, the judges said, doesn’t mean she can’t keep kosher. Without the kosher certificate, many religious and traditional Jews refused to frequent the cafes and Konforti’s business was failing.
The case looks set to provoke a battle between the more secular organs of the government and the state rabbinate. It’s also a new point of conflict in the long battle between Israel — particularly its ultra-Orthodox community — and the Christian faith.
The rabbis insist they’re the ones who ought to decide about matters of kashrut and they refuse to allow a Messianic Jew (or a “Jew for Jesus” as they tend to be known in the U.S.) to receive a certificate. Though that sounds extreme, the rabbis aren’t entirely wrong (at least in the archaic terms of kosher law). After all, in Israeli wineries, non-Jews are forbidden from touching certain apparatus for fear of making the wine non-kosher — a prohibition going back to the days when a non-Jew might have used wine for idol worship.
Konforti’s point — which the Supreme Court accepted — is that she isn’t a non-Jew. She just happens to have decided during a stay in Ohio that the world’s most famous Jew, Jesus — or as she, an Israeli, calls him, “Yeshu” — is her savior.
The fear of Christian proselytizers or, even worse, Jews for Jesus is a common one among Israelis in general, and it has a long history that reaches back to a Europe where Jews were often persecuted or forced to convert to Christianity.
In that sense the court decision marks a rare gesture of conciliation by the organs of the Israeli state toward those who profess to be Christians.
It hasn’t always been that way.
In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court denied citizenship to a Polish priest who had been born a Jew and converted to Christianity while hiding in a monastery to escape the Holocaust. Oswald Rufeisen, known as Brother Daniel, qualified for immigration under Israel’s “Law of Return” because he was born a Jew, but the court refused to accept a man who no longer called himself a Jew. (Eventually Rufeisen gained residence and died in a Haifa monastery a decade ago.)
Neither is pettiness a bar to paranoia. In my largely secular neighborhood of Jerusalem a few years ago, a tiny kiosk serving coffee in a small park was driven out of business because locals whispered that the owner was a Messianic Jew.
The lesson of such cases is that two thousand years of persecution at the hands of the church isn’t quickly forgotten, even by those who’ve never faced so much as a single anti-Semitic slur.
It’s a lesson only some in the Roman Catholic Church seem to have learned. Pope John Paul II won over many Israelis during his papacy with his visit to an Italian synagogue and talk of reconciliation during a 2000 visit to the Holy Land.
But the current pope, Benedict XVI, appeared cold and, to most Israelis, pro-Palestinian when he visited this spring. Many newspaper commentators complained that a former member of the Hitler Youth representing a faith with a history of persecuting Jews ought to have been less academic in his public addresses and more contrite toward Israel.
To understand the depth of fear among the ultra-Orthodox, consider the leaflets posted in Gan Yavneh warning residents against Konforti’s cafe: “Beware! Missionaries! What is hiding behind the Cafe-Bakery?” (In a community where television and radio are often not allowed, having been deemed negative modern influences, leaflets posted on walls are the favored way to pass information around among ultra-Orthodox Israelis.)
The answer, according to the leaflets: “Jews who sold their soul, betrayed their nation, and converted to Christianity.”
The leaflets advised citizens not to enter the cafe or “she will try to ensnare you in her Christian religion.”
Must be pretty good pie, you’re thinking.
I came across Pnina Pie in January when I visited Gan Yavneh during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Missiles from Gaza landed several times on this small town, which is home to an air force base and several thousand Tel Aviv commuters.
I concluded an interview with the town’s mayor by asking him where I could get a decent lunch. He directed me to Pnina Pie, where a young Russian immigrant served me excellent bourekas, flaky pastry triangles filled with potato and cheese.
Unaware of the lack of a kosher certificate at the establishment, I bought a strawberry pie and served it to some guests that night. It happens all four of these friends were observant Jews.
At least they were observant Jews. Maybe by now they believe in Jesus.
After all, it really was very good pie.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
GAN YAVNEH, Israel — I always thought that by following kosher laws religious Jews only missed out on certain flavors and debatable delicacies. Turns out that by turning their back on “treyf” they also steer clear of Jesus.
At least that’s the verdict of rabbinates in two Israeli towns who’ve been denying a kosher certificate to a local cafe owner for three years — not because she doesn’t conform to the laws of “kashrut,” but because she’s a “Messianic Jew.”
Pnina Konforti, owner of the two branches of Pnina Pie in Gan Yavneh and Ashdod, this month won a decision in Israel’s Supreme Court forcing the rabbinates of the towns to give her a kosher certificate. Just because she believes in Jesus, the judges said, doesn’t mean she can’t keep kosher. Without the kosher certificate, many religious and traditional Jews refused to frequent the cafes and Konforti’s business was failing.
The case looks set to provoke a battle between the more secular organs of the government and the state rabbinate. It’s also a new point of conflict in the long battle between Israel — particularly its ultra-Orthodox community — and the Christian faith.
The rabbis insist they’re the ones who ought to decide about matters of kashrut and they refuse to allow a Messianic Jew (or a “Jew for Jesus” as they tend to be known in the U.S.) to receive a certificate. Though that sounds extreme, the rabbis aren’t entirely wrong (at least in the archaic terms of kosher law). After all, in Israeli wineries, non-Jews are forbidden from touching certain apparatus for fear of making the wine non-kosher — a prohibition going back to the days when a non-Jew might have used wine for idol worship.
Konforti’s point — which the Supreme Court accepted — is that she isn’t a non-Jew. She just happens to have decided during a stay in Ohio that the world’s most famous Jew, Jesus — or as she, an Israeli, calls him, “Yeshu” — is her savior.
The fear of Christian proselytizers or, even worse, Jews for Jesus is a common one among Israelis in general, and it has a long history that reaches back to a Europe where Jews were often persecuted or forced to convert to Christianity.
In that sense the court decision marks a rare gesture of conciliation by the organs of the Israeli state toward those who profess to be Christians.
It hasn’t always been that way.
In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court denied citizenship to a Polish priest who had been born a Jew and converted to Christianity while hiding in a monastery to escape the Holocaust. Oswald Rufeisen, known as Brother Daniel, qualified for immigration under Israel’s “Law of Return” because he was born a Jew, but the court refused to accept a man who no longer called himself a Jew. (Eventually Rufeisen gained residence and died in a Haifa monastery a decade ago.)
Neither is pettiness a bar to paranoia. In my largely secular neighborhood of Jerusalem a few years ago, a tiny kiosk serving coffee in a small park was driven out of business because locals whispered that the owner was a Messianic Jew.
The lesson of such cases is that two thousand years of persecution at the hands of the church isn’t quickly forgotten, even by those who’ve never faced so much as a single anti-Semitic slur.
It’s a lesson only some in the Roman Catholic Church seem to have learned. Pope John Paul II won over many Israelis during his papacy with his visit to an Italian synagogue and talk of reconciliation during a 2000 visit to the Holy Land.
But the current pope, Benedict XVI, appeared cold and, to most Israelis, pro-Palestinian when he visited this spring. Many newspaper commentators complained that a former member of the Hitler Youth representing a faith with a history of persecuting Jews ought to have been less academic in his public addresses and more contrite toward Israel.
To understand the depth of fear among the ultra-Orthodox, consider the leaflets posted in Gan Yavneh warning residents against Konforti’s cafe: “Beware! Missionaries! What is hiding behind the Cafe-Bakery?” (In a community where television and radio are often not allowed, having been deemed negative modern influences, leaflets posted on walls are the favored way to pass information around among ultra-Orthodox Israelis.)
The answer, according to the leaflets: “Jews who sold their soul, betrayed their nation, and converted to Christianity.”
The leaflets advised citizens not to enter the cafe or “she will try to ensnare you in her Christian religion.”
Must be pretty good pie, you’re thinking.
I came across Pnina Pie in January when I visited Gan Yavneh during the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Missiles from Gaza landed several times on this small town, which is home to an air force base and several thousand Tel Aviv commuters.
I concluded an interview with the town’s mayor by asking him where I could get a decent lunch. He directed me to Pnina Pie, where a young Russian immigrant served me excellent bourekas, flaky pastry triangles filled with potato and cheese.
Unaware of the lack of a kosher certificate at the establishment, I bought a strawberry pie and served it to some guests that night. It happens all four of these friends were observant Jews.
At least they were observant Jews. Maybe by now they believe in Jesus.
After all, it really was very good pie.
Israel grapples with a new kind of violence
Good, old-fashioned murder catches off-guard a country always prepared for war
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
TEL BARUCH, Israel — It may surprise you to learn that many Israelis are only now realizing they live in a violent place. And they’re freaking out.
Not the terrorist violence for which Israel is something of a byword. The murderous gang beating type of violence. The dismembered women kind of violence. The homophobic hate crime sort of violence.
Earlier this month, an as-yet unknown masked gunman shot down two men at a Tel Aviv gay hangout. Two women’s bodies were last week uncovered chopped into pieces — one in a dumpster near Tel Aviv and the other in a river further north. This week, a landlady showing a potential tenant around a Jerusalem apartment was stabbed to death by the man she intended to evict.
But the biggest headlines were for the beating death of Aryeh Karp on the Tel Baruch beach, just north of Tel Aviv.
Last weekend, Karp’s daughter was harassed by a young Arab man from a town near Tel Aviv. Karp warned him off, but the youth called some drunken friends over. A group of eight Arab men and two Russian women chased Karp along the boardwalk and kicked him repeatedly in the head. He was found dead on the beach soon after.
The shock among Israelis was as much for the location of Karp’s death as it was for its violent nature. The beach, particularly to Tel Avivians, is a refuge from the bustle and general craziness of Israeli society.
Just how crazy the country has become is at the heart of the chest-beating opened up by a few weeks of violence. Israelis have long bragged to foreigners that — apart from the terrorism — Israel is a very peaceful place where typically children can wander towns without parents worrying and anyone can go anywhere at night without feeling threatened.
Israel’s police chiefs maintain that this image is correct. The crime rate, according to a police official, is at its lowest since 1996. Break-ins and car theft are both down more than 20 percent, though that could be explained in large part due to the security barrier around the West Bank. (Burglary and car theft inside Israel were popular with Palestinian criminals, who can no longer cross the network of walls and fences separating them from Israelis.)
One politician from the largest parliamentary party reckons the police are cooking the books to make themselves look more effective. Yohanan Plesner of the Kadima Party accuses the police of categorizing violent crimes under less scary names. Thus, someone robbed by a menacing mugger is entered into the police’s crime statistics as nothing more than a stolen wallet.
Certainly it’s rare to see Israeli police patrolling as cops do in U.S. cities. They always seem to be going somewhere. As for pounding the beat, the only time you’ll see an Israeli cop outside his car is when he’s checking the identity documents of an Arab.
The one time I’ve had to report a crime against me here was some years ago when a man leaned out of his car late at night on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and started smashing the side of my car with a police night-stick. I called the equivalent of 911 from the car and was asked, “Was he an Arab?”
When I responded in the negative, I was told to come to the police station and file a report. I waited two hours at the station in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound to do so. Some weeks later, I received a form letter informing me that further investigation was “not in the public interest.”
Most commentators trying to make sense of the increase in violence point to the growing complexity of Israeli society. In the case of Karp’s murder, it seems disaffected children of Russian immigrants mixed with disaffected young Arabs. Add drugs and alcohol, and you have a murder, the explanation goes.
But there’s also an unrestrained non-physical violence that’s prevalent in daily exchanges with Israelis. It’s a society in which the aggressor generally wins.
Alongside the articles and radio spots about violent crime, the media has featured frequent comments from people who were forced by threats to sign over property rights to thuggish neighbors or who were told by the police that minor crimes weren’t worth pursuing. Moving from aggression to actual violence may not be such a big step.
It isn’t only in violent crimes that Israelis feel their society’s morality slipping away. The country’s most sacrosanct institution, the army, was tainted this week, when a soldier at the main Tel Aviv military base stole the credit card number of the chief of staff and sold it to an Arab, who racked up $500 in charges. The soldier also sold the Arab a couple of assault rifles. Under interrogation, he said he wasn’t the only soldier on the base who possessed the army chief's card number
At the Tel Baruch beach this Wednesday, there was no sign of a police officer. Bathers at the beach appear to be experts at ignoring things around them. They ignore the lifeguard, who barks into his loudspeaker constantly about the risks of shifting sands and rip tides, warning swimmers that they’re too far from the designated bathing areas. They ignore the noisy planes landing at Sde Dov Airport, which has its main landing strip just across the beach’s small parking lot.
And now they are struggling to ignore a murder.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
TEL BARUCH, Israel — It may surprise you to learn that many Israelis are only now realizing they live in a violent place. And they’re freaking out.
Not the terrorist violence for which Israel is something of a byword. The murderous gang beating type of violence. The dismembered women kind of violence. The homophobic hate crime sort of violence.
Earlier this month, an as-yet unknown masked gunman shot down two men at a Tel Aviv gay hangout. Two women’s bodies were last week uncovered chopped into pieces — one in a dumpster near Tel Aviv and the other in a river further north. This week, a landlady showing a potential tenant around a Jerusalem apartment was stabbed to death by the man she intended to evict.
But the biggest headlines were for the beating death of Aryeh Karp on the Tel Baruch beach, just north of Tel Aviv.
Last weekend, Karp’s daughter was harassed by a young Arab man from a town near Tel Aviv. Karp warned him off, but the youth called some drunken friends over. A group of eight Arab men and two Russian women chased Karp along the boardwalk and kicked him repeatedly in the head. He was found dead on the beach soon after.
The shock among Israelis was as much for the location of Karp’s death as it was for its violent nature. The beach, particularly to Tel Avivians, is a refuge from the bustle and general craziness of Israeli society.
Just how crazy the country has become is at the heart of the chest-beating opened up by a few weeks of violence. Israelis have long bragged to foreigners that — apart from the terrorism — Israel is a very peaceful place where typically children can wander towns without parents worrying and anyone can go anywhere at night without feeling threatened.
Israel’s police chiefs maintain that this image is correct. The crime rate, according to a police official, is at its lowest since 1996. Break-ins and car theft are both down more than 20 percent, though that could be explained in large part due to the security barrier around the West Bank. (Burglary and car theft inside Israel were popular with Palestinian criminals, who can no longer cross the network of walls and fences separating them from Israelis.)
One politician from the largest parliamentary party reckons the police are cooking the books to make themselves look more effective. Yohanan Plesner of the Kadima Party accuses the police of categorizing violent crimes under less scary names. Thus, someone robbed by a menacing mugger is entered into the police’s crime statistics as nothing more than a stolen wallet.
Certainly it’s rare to see Israeli police patrolling as cops do in U.S. cities. They always seem to be going somewhere. As for pounding the beat, the only time you’ll see an Israeli cop outside his car is when he’s checking the identity documents of an Arab.
The one time I’ve had to report a crime against me here was some years ago when a man leaned out of his car late at night on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway and started smashing the side of my car with a police night-stick. I called the equivalent of 911 from the car and was asked, “Was he an Arab?”
When I responded in the negative, I was told to come to the police station and file a report. I waited two hours at the station in Jerusalem’s Russian Compound to do so. Some weeks later, I received a form letter informing me that further investigation was “not in the public interest.”
Most commentators trying to make sense of the increase in violence point to the growing complexity of Israeli society. In the case of Karp’s murder, it seems disaffected children of Russian immigrants mixed with disaffected young Arabs. Add drugs and alcohol, and you have a murder, the explanation goes.
But there’s also an unrestrained non-physical violence that’s prevalent in daily exchanges with Israelis. It’s a society in which the aggressor generally wins.
Alongside the articles and radio spots about violent crime, the media has featured frequent comments from people who were forced by threats to sign over property rights to thuggish neighbors or who were told by the police that minor crimes weren’t worth pursuing. Moving from aggression to actual violence may not be such a big step.
It isn’t only in violent crimes that Israelis feel their society’s morality slipping away. The country’s most sacrosanct institution, the army, was tainted this week, when a soldier at the main Tel Aviv military base stole the credit card number of the chief of staff and sold it to an Arab, who racked up $500 in charges. The soldier also sold the Arab a couple of assault rifles. Under interrogation, he said he wasn’t the only soldier on the base who possessed the army chief's card number
At the Tel Baruch beach this Wednesday, there was no sign of a police officer. Bathers at the beach appear to be experts at ignoring things around them. They ignore the lifeguard, who barks into his loudspeaker constantly about the risks of shifting sands and rip tides, warning swimmers that they’re too far from the designated bathing areas. They ignore the noisy planes landing at Sde Dov Airport, which has its main landing strip just across the beach’s small parking lot.
And now they are struggling to ignore a murder.
Suffering 101
Palestinians and Israelis take an eternal debate into the classroom, leaving the UN stuck in the middle. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”
The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.
On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”
The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.
Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.
In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”
Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.
U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."
A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.
Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.
Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.
In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”
For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.
“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.
“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”
All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.
Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.
JERUSALEM — In the Book of Lamentations, the people of Jerusalem cry out against the destruction of the city: “Is any suffering like my suffering?”
The answer, of course, is: No. Ever since, Jeremiah’s phrase has pretty much been the catchphrase of the entire Middle East.
On a recent Sunday, the Israeli Education Minister Gideon Saar told the cabinet that the word Arabs use to describe the foundation of Israel — “Nakba,” or catastrophe — would be removed from Arabic-language textbooks in the schools of Israel’s Arab minority. His contention: it wasn’t a catastrophe for him or the government that pays the schools’ bills, so out with “Nakba.”
The same day, Hamas lashed out at the U.N. agency that educates Palestinian refugees. The agency, Hamas alleged, was planning to change its textbooks to teach Palestinian children about the Holocaust. Hamas’s contention: the Holocaust didn’t happen, and teaching about it would legitimize the State of Israel which, in the opinion of most Palestinians, was foisted on them as payback for the Holocaust by guilt-ridden Europeans.
Recognizing the sufferings of the other side is generally the first step in conflict resolution. It makes the enemy seem human. It’s something Israelis and Palestinians find particularly hard to do.
In a letter to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the Hamas-affiliated Popular Committees for Palestinian Refugees called the Holocaust “a big lie that was fabricated by the Jews and a big campaign of propaganda.” The U.N., the letter says, should “erase the subject of the Jewish Holocaust from the curriculum, and stop future attempts to insert strange concepts which contradict Palestinian values and principles.”
Hamas claimed to have uncovered plans to teach about the Holocaust in a human-rights course. There are 200,000 Gazan children in U.N. schools.
U.N. officials tried to set the record straight. Karen Abu Zayd, the UNRWA commissioner-general, said Tuesday that she could "refute allegations that the U.N. school curriculum includes anything about the Holocaust."
A relief, perhaps, to anyone worried about offending Palestinians. Maybe not such a relief to those hoping the U.N. provides refugee children with a fully rounded awareness of history — the history of the people who live right next door.
Holocaust denial is common among Palestinians. That’s because they believe the enormity of the Holocaust diminishes — in the eyes of the world — the significance of their own suffering. The figure of 6 million murdered was made up, they contend, so that it would dwarf the 750,000 Palestinians who lost their homes and became refugees in 1948 when Israel was founded.
Hamas has backers in this regard. Since its international isolation in 2006, the Islamic group has increased its political and financial ties to the Holocaust-denying regime in Tehran.
In contrast, Saar, the education minister, didn’t entirely deny the grievance of Israel’s Arab population at the cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “It can be said with certainty that Arab Israelis experienced a tragedy in the war [of 1948:],” he said. “But there will be no use of the word ‘Nakba,’ whose meaning is similar to Holocaust in this context.”
For Saar it seems to be more a matter of capitalization. That is, 1948 was a catastrophe for the Palestinians, but not a Catastrophe.
“Nakba” didn’t have a very long run in Israel’s schools. The left-wing education minister, Yuli Tamir, introduced it two years ago to third-grade Arabic-language textbooks. Saar took office this spring as part of a more rightist government.
“The creation of the State of Israel cannot be referred to as a tragedy,” he said, “and the education system in the Arab sector will revise its studies in elementary schools.”
All this is just in time for the return of students to school for the start of a new academic year.
Now that’s a kind of suffering everyone can relate to.
“ME” doesn’t stand for Middle East
One of the advantages of being an author in an “exotic” locale is that people visit and want to hear from you as someone who knows the place well. It’s also one of the disadvantages.
Last Friday night, I drove out to Ein Kerem to meet one such group of visitors from Reboot, a U.S. organization that brings together mostly liberal – and certainly not conventional-thinking – Jews to discuss issues related to Judaism and Israel. It turned out to be one of those occasions where I take a certain amount of pleasure in the people I meet, but am also reminded why I chose to spend my days alone with imaginary characters.
Ein Kerem is an old village on the edge of Jerusalem that’s less regimented in its architecture and layout than the neighborhoods of the city built in the last 60 years. John the Baptist was born there. So was my son, because there’s now a hospital overlooking the valley with its collection of churches, convents and restaurants. When I arrived, I stood by my car for a few minutes watching a desert fox prowl the street, its brush silhouetted against the lights of the hospital.
The Reboot people had spent the day being spat upon by ultra-Orthodox Jews who objected to their visit to a religious neighborhood of Jerusalem. The previous day a friend of mine who works with asylum seekers had shown them around a Tel Aviv slum where illegal immigrants from Africa and the Far East congregate.
In the private house where Reboot had arranged for the dinner, I went out to the garden with the 15 members of the group. The owner of the house started telling them about the village. She began with the fact that it had been home to Palestinian Arabs. She didn’t mention that in 1948 a massacre in a nearby village lead them to flee. One of the “Rebooters” called her on it: “What happened to the Arabs?”
Nothing wrong with that, except that it wasn’t really a question – he could’ve guessed the answer. There was a tone of self-righteous confrontation to which I’m deeply attuned after 13 years here.
Well, not as deeply attuned as I thought. Because then I made my mistake.
I’d been asked to speak about “Jerusalem and what it means to the Jews.” God knows why. But I never turn down an audience when there’s a chance of plugging my books. My mistake was to say that I’d be prepared to talk about broader political issues than Jerusalem.
I can do that perfectly well. For several hours in fact I discussed the changes – for the worse – in the chances for peace over the years. The growth of Israeli settlements, in the face of agreements to which Israel is a signatory. The sense among senior Palestinian politicians that they can let peace talks languish because time is somehow on their side. Everyone behaving as though the problems they’re prolonging will disappear.
But people don’t know the energy it costs me to discuss this shit. And after 13 years here that’s what it is. Shit.
As the evening drew on, I found myself subject to a familiar feeling. Sapped of energy, tightness at the back of my jaw, wanting to fall off my chair. I’d connected with a few members of the group. But still others wanted answers to questions which have no answer (unless you think, for example, that the world just hates Jews and wants Israel gone, or that Muslims are born crazy.) I suppose I ought to have said that politicians disgust me and let’s quit talking politics… Let’s talk about how you build a sentence. What it’s like to bury yourself in a novel for months at a time. How different a culture looks when you put aside politics and try to imagine the taste of hummus on a tongue that recalls a time when your mother fed it to you as a baby.
It’s not for nothing that the people closest to me at the table were the ones with which I connected and the ones at the farthest end asked questions on an impersonal political level. At the far end of the table I probably seemed like a lecturer, rather than the actual human being visible to those sitting close to me.
I wrote my novels to escape this sort of dialogue. I wanted to show the human concerns of the Palestinians I’d come to know, rather than the stereotypes of their political portrayal.
Why? Because politics in the Middle East goes around in circles. Circles of victimization, everyone competing to show that they’re misunderstood and that they suffer more than the other side of the conflict. Refusing to see the other side as human.
The longer I’m here the less interested I am in exploring that. Palestinians are people to me – not symbols of victimization and oppression. Israelis, too. To a novelist, people can be characters. To a politician, they’re only ever symbols and numbers to be shunted about or used.
When I talked to the Rebooters, I was able to explain this, but only when the conversation turned to my books. It’s fair enough that most of them hadn’t yet read my books and that they returned to political issues and media coverage of the conflict.
As I drove home through the empty streets of a quiet Jerusalem already six hours into the Jewish Sabbath, I realized that I turned to novels because I’d come to know myself well. I didn’t want to turn my attention outward as a journalist, to record the emotional responses of others. I wanted to take readers into my characters’ heads – and, of course, into mine. Into the extreme experiences and emotions I’d gone through covering the intifada, learning about the real Palestinian culture. I decided that I would no longer speak about political issues, except where they touched upon the content of my Palestinian crime novels.
From now on, the Middle East is me.
(I posted this on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog.)
Last Friday night, I drove out to Ein Kerem to meet one such group of visitors from Reboot, a U.S. organization that brings together mostly liberal – and certainly not conventional-thinking – Jews to discuss issues related to Judaism and Israel. It turned out to be one of those occasions where I take a certain amount of pleasure in the people I meet, but am also reminded why I chose to spend my days alone with imaginary characters.
Ein Kerem is an old village on the edge of Jerusalem that’s less regimented in its architecture and layout than the neighborhoods of the city built in the last 60 years. John the Baptist was born there. So was my son, because there’s now a hospital overlooking the valley with its collection of churches, convents and restaurants. When I arrived, I stood by my car for a few minutes watching a desert fox prowl the street, its brush silhouetted against the lights of the hospital.
The Reboot people had spent the day being spat upon by ultra-Orthodox Jews who objected to their visit to a religious neighborhood of Jerusalem. The previous day a friend of mine who works with asylum seekers had shown them around a Tel Aviv slum where illegal immigrants from Africa and the Far East congregate.
In the private house where Reboot had arranged for the dinner, I went out to the garden with the 15 members of the group. The owner of the house started telling them about the village. She began with the fact that it had been home to Palestinian Arabs. She didn’t mention that in 1948 a massacre in a nearby village lead them to flee. One of the “Rebooters” called her on it: “What happened to the Arabs?”
Nothing wrong with that, except that it wasn’t really a question – he could’ve guessed the answer. There was a tone of self-righteous confrontation to which I’m deeply attuned after 13 years here.
Well, not as deeply attuned as I thought. Because then I made my mistake.
I’d been asked to speak about “Jerusalem and what it means to the Jews.” God knows why. But I never turn down an audience when there’s a chance of plugging my books. My mistake was to say that I’d be prepared to talk about broader political issues than Jerusalem.
I can do that perfectly well. For several hours in fact I discussed the changes – for the worse – in the chances for peace over the years. The growth of Israeli settlements, in the face of agreements to which Israel is a signatory. The sense among senior Palestinian politicians that they can let peace talks languish because time is somehow on their side. Everyone behaving as though the problems they’re prolonging will disappear.
But people don’t know the energy it costs me to discuss this shit. And after 13 years here that’s what it is. Shit.
As the evening drew on, I found myself subject to a familiar feeling. Sapped of energy, tightness at the back of my jaw, wanting to fall off my chair. I’d connected with a few members of the group. But still others wanted answers to questions which have no answer (unless you think, for example, that the world just hates Jews and wants Israel gone, or that Muslims are born crazy.) I suppose I ought to have said that politicians disgust me and let’s quit talking politics… Let’s talk about how you build a sentence. What it’s like to bury yourself in a novel for months at a time. How different a culture looks when you put aside politics and try to imagine the taste of hummus on a tongue that recalls a time when your mother fed it to you as a baby.
It’s not for nothing that the people closest to me at the table were the ones with which I connected and the ones at the farthest end asked questions on an impersonal political level. At the far end of the table I probably seemed like a lecturer, rather than the actual human being visible to those sitting close to me.
I wrote my novels to escape this sort of dialogue. I wanted to show the human concerns of the Palestinians I’d come to know, rather than the stereotypes of their political portrayal.
Why? Because politics in the Middle East goes around in circles. Circles of victimization, everyone competing to show that they’re misunderstood and that they suffer more than the other side of the conflict. Refusing to see the other side as human.
The longer I’m here the less interested I am in exploring that. Palestinians are people to me – not symbols of victimization and oppression. Israelis, too. To a novelist, people can be characters. To a politician, they’re only ever symbols and numbers to be shunted about or used.
When I talked to the Rebooters, I was able to explain this, but only when the conversation turned to my books. It’s fair enough that most of them hadn’t yet read my books and that they returned to political issues and media coverage of the conflict.
As I drove home through the empty streets of a quiet Jerusalem already six hours into the Jewish Sabbath, I realized that I turned to novels because I’d come to know myself well. I didn’t want to turn my attention outward as a journalist, to record the emotional responses of others. I wanted to take readers into my characters’ heads – and, of course, into mine. Into the extreme experiences and emotions I’d gone through covering the intifada, learning about the real Palestinian culture. I decided that I would no longer speak about political issues, except where they touched upon the content of my Palestinian crime novels.
From now on, the Middle East is me.
(I posted this on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog.)
