I bumped into a bunch of English guys last night in Mike's Place, three seconds after I'd bought a soldier on leave from Lebanon another beer.
For once they weren't a group of football fans, UN soldiers or journalists travelling together, so everyone had opinions of their own. One preached 'when in Rome...' (like I needed to learn it?) and another expressed similar sentiments in a more modern way, aka 'when in New York...' We were discussing the Gay Pride march, which was to have been held in Jerusalem and now is not. The Third Man, being non-Jewish and new to the area, felt strongly that the Gay Pride parade should've been allowed in Jerusalem. 'Why not Tel Aviv?' I asked - Tel Aviv is far more European than Jerusalem will ever be. 'That's no challenge, obviously,' the American Jewish visitor sitting behind me offered. Probably that's the entire reasoning behind this particular issue. The Third Man certainly thought so, but his response to that idea and mine were so far apart that we found each other offensive, even though we'd both played by the rules of social engagement.
I think having a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem at present would open the town up to overt violence all over again, as opposed to the bubbling undercurrent of potential violence we all know and love. The effort to prevent the parade united Jewish, Christian and Islamic religious leaders here. Now that is an achievement; in Israel we hear next to nothing about these moments of unity between religions, but briefly there was peace... peace in a stranglehold maybe, but still peace...
He thinks having a Gay Pride march in Jerusalem will normalize the city, make it part of the world. Hm. Yeah actually so do the rabbis, priests and imams. That's why none of them want it. How's a man to make a living?... nah, it really would be offensive to them, as it would to many sectors of the population living here. Including me, and please don't bother telling me I'm anti-gay, because I'm demonstrably not. I just think if I'm treading on someone else's toes it'd be polite to move away, is all.
Inevitably, Daniel said to me (much, much later) he was all for hosting the Gay Pride march in Jerusalem. 'If you need to say something you should say it loud'. 'But in Jerusalem?' - I'm shocked. Heck, I might be a goy but I don't even eat pork in Jerusalem, it would feel so wrong. Jerusalem is a beautiful princess in bondage gear, waiting hopefully for her Prince Charming to come back. And there you have it, in a nutshell.
The debate isn't about whether you are for or against gay activism; the debate is about whether you see Jerusalem as a symbol, or as a city much like any other. Seeing her as a symbol doesn't in any way preclude knowing Jerusalem as a city, but it's the one thing the various religious factions here share and understand about one another, without effort. Treating her as a secular city means ignoring that other reality; it effectively means sidelining the religious population, of all persuasions. While that may be a road to a secular peace, it doesn't take into account the history of the city, or its social make up, or its physical situation on the borderline between East and West. It assumes that everyone else is - or should be - prepared to leave God out of the equation. In Jerusalem, that's quite an assumption to make.
I'd join that march - in Tel Aviv.
Monday, August 21, 2006
Friday, August 18, 2006
Letter to Rowie
There's this organization here that delivers pizzas to combat units on duty, even during a war. I actually paid for dinner for 30 soldiers over the Internet the other day, having heard that the Army forgot to send food along with the troops they sent to fight in Lebanon. I also sent chocolate. It's even hotter on the Lebanese border than it is in Jerusalem, but you can send chocolate... I've no idea what sort of state that's in when it arrives. The pizzas looked tasty though.
http://www.pizzaidf.org/ if anyone's interested.
(and Rowie is my cute 13-year-old niece :)
http://www.pizzaidf.org/ if anyone's interested.
(and Rowie is my cute 13-year-old niece :)
Now it's all over
Nobody here really believes it's over at all, but the fact remains that the reservists are already home - as, of course, are the wounded. 18 year old boys with bullet wounds in their limbs whose eyes fill unexpectedly now and again, like when they're in a crowded bar and the crowd seems happy. It's called grief.
The older ones look after each wounded soldier as if he were their own kid brother; there's no roughness there, Israeli guys on the whole are very good when it comes to hugging at the right moment or knowing when it's a good time to walk someone away from an emotionally unbearable situation. And meanwhile the regular IDF (i.e. the non-wounded teenagers and the career soldiers that lead them) are still in Lebanon, waiting to be relieved by an increasingly recalcitrant Lebanese Army/UNIFIL coalition.
I'm told by friends who work in the Knesset that the atmosphere there is every bit as unpleasant as it looks in the press. Pretty much everyone is scheming against at least one other person, and (given that Israel has a highly efficient State Comptroller at present) there are also a bunch of accusations that would've arisen anyway against various members of the government. The Minister of Justice has already resigned; others may or may not find themselves forced to do the same. It depends on how much is spin and how much is for real. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz are coming in for spectacularly heavy (and - in my opinion - largely unfair) criticism. Unaccustomed as I am to living in a war zone, I only saw a handful of things that really went wrong:
1) the Israeli press had too much freedom, to the extent that they endangered soldiers' lives;
2) the weaker members of the 'home front' were forced to 'stand firm', or in some cases be wounded or even die, because nobody provided for them or evacuated them until the last minute - and even then it was a limited evacuation (from Kiryat Shmona, which bore the brunt of the direct missile hits);
3) the logistics were rubbish - the reservists complained of being under-trained, under-equipped and (in some cases) of not having enough food and water supplies to see them through the last-push ground attack;
4) the upper echelons underestimated Hezbollah's capabilities and worse, weren't prepared to listen to the soldiers on the ground who told them the full story.
Everyone that knows me will be wondering what on earth Israel has done to me that I don't care about the loss of civilian Lebanese lives all of a sudden. I do still care - but I believe Israel genuinely tried to minimize civilian deaths, and I've been very, very cynical about the way the Arab press report anything since the time of 'the Jenin massacre'. I've read a lot of conflicting reports coming out of Lebanon, and there's enough Israeliness in me that I find the sensationalist use of childrens' corpses - particularly during a war - almost as sickening as the fact that children died at all. They died here too; the difference is, Israel counted them all in a transparent way, and released each one's name rather than photographs of what was left of their bodies. (Direct hits from missiles don't leave whole corpses, sorry but.)
While all eyes were on Lebanon, the IDF were busy in Gaza. They took to phoning up homes known to be used for arms storage and giving the residents 15 minutes to get out before they flattened those buildings. I haven't even seen anyone comment on the success of this strategy, but the upshot has been that civilian deaths there have gone down dramatically; active terrorists have been targeted in a cleaner way, and something like 150 of them are idling with their virgins now as a result. Hamas and Fatah came very close to forming a unity government yesterday and _most_ of the militias have quit firing on Israel. It's been quite a success story to date; it could even lead to that peaceful Palestinian neighbour most of Israel wants. And this much was achieved already by the same team most Israelis seem to want to throw out of the Knesset. Go figure.
The older ones look after each wounded soldier as if he were their own kid brother; there's no roughness there, Israeli guys on the whole are very good when it comes to hugging at the right moment or knowing when it's a good time to walk someone away from an emotionally unbearable situation. And meanwhile the regular IDF (i.e. the non-wounded teenagers and the career soldiers that lead them) are still in Lebanon, waiting to be relieved by an increasingly recalcitrant Lebanese Army/UNIFIL coalition.
I'm told by friends who work in the Knesset that the atmosphere there is every bit as unpleasant as it looks in the press. Pretty much everyone is scheming against at least one other person, and (given that Israel has a highly efficient State Comptroller at present) there are also a bunch of accusations that would've arisen anyway against various members of the government. The Minister of Justice has already resigned; others may or may not find themselves forced to do the same. It depends on how much is spin and how much is for real. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz are coming in for spectacularly heavy (and - in my opinion - largely unfair) criticism. Unaccustomed as I am to living in a war zone, I only saw a handful of things that really went wrong:
1) the Israeli press had too much freedom, to the extent that they endangered soldiers' lives;
2) the weaker members of the 'home front' were forced to 'stand firm', or in some cases be wounded or even die, because nobody provided for them or evacuated them until the last minute - and even then it was a limited evacuation (from Kiryat Shmona, which bore the brunt of the direct missile hits);
3) the logistics were rubbish - the reservists complained of being under-trained, under-equipped and (in some cases) of not having enough food and water supplies to see them through the last-push ground attack;
4) the upper echelons underestimated Hezbollah's capabilities and worse, weren't prepared to listen to the soldiers on the ground who told them the full story.
Everyone that knows me will be wondering what on earth Israel has done to me that I don't care about the loss of civilian Lebanese lives all of a sudden. I do still care - but I believe Israel genuinely tried to minimize civilian deaths, and I've been very, very cynical about the way the Arab press report anything since the time of 'the Jenin massacre'. I've read a lot of conflicting reports coming out of Lebanon, and there's enough Israeliness in me that I find the sensationalist use of childrens' corpses - particularly during a war - almost as sickening as the fact that children died at all. They died here too; the difference is, Israel counted them all in a transparent way, and released each one's name rather than photographs of what was left of their bodies. (Direct hits from missiles don't leave whole corpses, sorry but.)
While all eyes were on Lebanon, the IDF were busy in Gaza. They took to phoning up homes known to be used for arms storage and giving the residents 15 minutes to get out before they flattened those buildings. I haven't even seen anyone comment on the success of this strategy, but the upshot has been that civilian deaths there have gone down dramatically; active terrorists have been targeted in a cleaner way, and something like 150 of them are idling with their virgins now as a result. Hamas and Fatah came very close to forming a unity government yesterday and _most_ of the militias have quit firing on Israel. It's been quite a success story to date; it could even lead to that peaceful Palestinian neighbour most of Israel wants. And this much was achieved already by the same team most Israelis seem to want to throw out of the Knesset. Go figure.
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