“I know that a Jewish state can only be a dream,” Yoram Kaniuk once told me, “but I want to have my dream.” This literary giant and eternal dreamer passed away last night (Saturday) at the age of 83, and an important critical and humanist voice fell silent in this land.

The dream of Israel is one for which Tel Aviv-born Kaniuk nearly gave his life at the age of 17. He lied about his age in order to join the Palmach Brigades and was shot in the leg on the slopes of Jerusalem’s Mount Zion. Six decades later, having finally reached his renown as one of Hebrew literature’s most powerful voices, he told the tale of that war. His book, 1948, is not only a stray from the typical Zionist narrative, it is honest, irreverent and eye opening.

Kaniuk was a quintessential Israeli “sabra.” He was certainly a Zionist, in that he felt the Jewish nation would have no future without a home. Still, he was concerned for the wellbeing of every soul on this soil and frowned at the Israeli Right’s abduction of Zionism. His understanding of the term was miles apart from that which is common in contemporary Israel. “Our Zionism was on the coast,” he told me in another conversation. “When we dreamed of a state here, Jerusalem was not meant to be a part of it, never mind the West Bank and Gaza.”

The Kaniukian middle way may seem contrived to some, but in today’s Israel it is revolutionary. Kaniuk rejected the world view of Messianic religious Zionism, which combines Zionism as an existential solution — a life-saving project — with biblical context and extreme nationalism, a mix that permits inequality and atrocities. He was active in the struggle to secure the right of return for the refugees of Iqrit and Bir’im and cooperated with Palestinian intellectuals long before it was considered “acceptable” behavior. His disdain for mixing synagogue and state played out most powerfully in 2012, when he successfully appealed to remove “Jewish” from the “religion” clause in his Israeli ID card. To this day, he is the only Israeli to have achieved that feat.

He who molds reality with his own hands knows it can be formed into anything. Kaniuk’s reading of Jewish history — and particularly of the Holocaust — convinced him that the Jewish people have a role as a light unto the nations when it comes to human rights and social responsibility. He also knew Israel was not an ideal setting for fulfilling that role. In his iconic novel, Adam Resurrected, published as early as 1963, Kaniuk painted an eerie metaphor for Israel: an ultra-modern lunatic asylum, set in the middle of the desert and in which the patients are all Holocaust survivors.

The asylum was founded by Rebecca Siezling, an affluent American Jew. Siezling arrives in Israel in the early sixties with a sense of spiritual loss. Via a chance encounter with a local spiritualist, she learns that what she misses is God, that God speaks to lunatics and that he does so in the desert. The country, Mrs. Siezling learns, has no shortage of lunatics. Forearms tattooed with blue numbers are plenty and everyone around suffers from some form of PTSD. It has no lack of desert, either. In the heart of that desert, near the town of Arad, Mrs. Siezling’s Institute for Rehabilitation and therapy is thus created.

Like every Kaniuk novel, Adam Resurrected is a human story. Adam Stein, its protagonist, is so deeply scarred by his Holocaust experience that his ability to channel God is greatly impaired; instead, he channels man, ultimately healing himself by helping another heal. His character is the very quintessence of complex, believable humanity. This is Israel as Kaniuk envisioned it.

But Israel itself keeps chasing God and turning its back on man. In love with the nation for which he fought, Kaniuk kept hoping to reconcile the difference between reality and potential. In his later years he abandoned the Left, with which he was plenty active over the years; he hoped that a centrist approach might prove pragmatic. Then he turned back left — stubbornly. Going back to read his own contributions for +972 and my previous mentions of him on this site, I found the following attack he voiced against moderate elements within the #J14 movement.

“They weaken the revolution,” Kaniuk said in September 2011. “This leadership should have openly called for Netanyahu to quit. I want them to say ‘elections now.’ Say it! That would startle Netanyahu. Why not startle him? Netanyahu keeps leading us to Masada. He fights with the Turks, fights with the Americans, fights with everybody. What they express is too mellow. What do they mean when they chant: ‘The people demand social justice?’ What the people demand is a regime change!”

A true revolutionary speaks of revolution also at the age of 81. Kaniuk revolutionized this land in many ways — through war, literature, op-eds and activism. He knew that this country deserves at least one more revolution but was too old to bring it about. We will pick up his books, his train of thought, his faith in the young and keep trying.

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It’s 2 a.m. when we arrive back to Istanbul from Bursa. Istiklal Avenue is busier than at noon. Street musicians are everywhere, many playing “Bella Ciao,” the struggle’s adopted anthem. On our first day here, hearing it played in the square was a thrill. It took three days for it to become a chewed-up hit.

Even here, with all these people about, the spirit of the struggle seems less than invincible. Young folk have their photo taken by a graffiti potrait of Erdoğan, as though this were Disneyland and he Mickey Mouse. We are standing across from the now-repaired Pizza Hut restaurant’s windows, at the very spot where carnage caught us off guard the morning we arrived. Now it’s a different sort of damage that shakes us.

Just as cynicism takes over, there comes the burning sensation and Disneyland is forgotten. The barricades in Beşiktaş were again so badly gas-bombed that the entire Taksim district is in agony. Once more, things seem “real.” In more than one way, it is the police that keep the movement’s momentum alive.

Once the pollution recedes, we descend toward Beşiktaş, to the barricade where we were pepper-gassed the night before. Instead of a battle, we find an argument. Some of the activists favor descending down the dark street — the no-man’s land where I got burned by the gas canister — and “provoking” the police again. Others prefer to maintain a peaceful hold of the high ground. A girl interrupts excitedly, saying something about a camera and photos. It takes us a while to figure the camera in question is ours. She wants the keepers of the barricade to stand together for a group photo.

This may be the most wonderful, and at the same time most discouraging photo of the entire journey. They are here, so many of them. They control of the very heart of the city of 18 million souls. They are young and proud, and they are posing. They weren’t posing the day before.

The following day is to be our last on Turkish soil. May has her studies at the Bezalel Arts Academy, and I must present my weekly radio program, which will be dedicated this week to Istanbul.

After days of tears and dance, this is my one chance to touch down in the rest of the city ahead of the program, to again experience its bipolar disorder, to walk the stunning corridors of Kanyon shopping mall where Yuppies enjoy a salad of endives at “Le Pain Quotidian,” a Belgian café chain.

And the even more stunning alleyway of Fatih, in which Syrian refugee children play.

Looking at the two, I realize that what is happening here these days is nothing new. This is the city that connects Asia and Europe, the very point where eastern and western attitudes have always clashed: from the siege of Constantinople in 717 AD, to the establishment of modern Turkey via a rejection of the Fez and Arabic script.

Turkey does not suffer from an identity crisis, Turkey is an identity crisis. This is the curse and blessing of its bridge-like existence. The demonstrators may not be clear about the raison d’etre of their struggle or precisely of how to conduct it, but they are clear on one thing: the aspiration that their country take on one specific identity over another. While respecting the traditions and aesthetics of their country, they are fighting for a progressive, European Turkey. This is reflected by their attire, by “Bella Ciao,” by everything they told us. “Tayyip,” on the other hand, represents religion and conservatism — the politics of the Middle East.

In my understanding, this is what it all boils down to, from the religious issue to the environmental issue to economic ones. As much as I despise this term, what we are seeing appears to be another episode in the War of Civilizations. That war did not begin in 2001, and it is not only fought between “Christian” and “Muslim” societies (the Taksim protesters are not predominantly Christian). It is a deep rooted conflict that predates modern colonialism, that does not easily yield to contrived categories, and in Turkey, this is the sub-context of struggle.

This is what sets the Taksim story apart from other popular movements currently or recently active. In Spain and Greece the issue was the handling of an economic crisis. Here such crisis is absent. In Tunisia and Egypt, and at least at the onset in Lybia and Syria, the battle was against tyranny. Erdoğan is not a tyrant. If anything, his coming into power represents a democratic break from the army-supported Kemalist regimes of the past. What he is, instead, is a side of the Turkish story, which is the epitome of the entire eastern Mediterranean’s drama. Whether the action in Istanbul and the rest of Turkey dies down in coming days, magnifies or combusts, this will go on. It will go on for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. All we did was witness and describe four days out of history in all its endlessness.

A text message arrives from Anshel: Antakya is peaceful in the afternoon, but the issues voiced by protesters there are different and interesting. He is heading to Şanliurfa, another place where police purportedly used live ammunition and where the Kurdish issue may be part of the package. We are heading to Taksim Square, to bid it farewell, and we find that Gezi Park has been “Rothschildized” with tents.

Just as we wander into the square, thousands of members of various labor unions march into it in a stunning, very loud parade. Each union is joined by a van blaring festive music. Members of the public servants’ association are accompanied by what is unmistakably a Hassidic melody.

No need for the clarinet to highlight similarities. We are returning tonight to our own identity crisis pretending to be a country, where struggles will come and go, always being mere pieces of a grander picture and where the sense of harmony is always elusive. Our bags are full of cevizli sucuk sweets and Kashkaval cheese, our hearts full of love for this place and our heads full of questions as huge as the world.

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ISTANBUL/BURSA, Turkey — On the day we arrived, the metro station at Taksim Square was closed. The following day was a Monday. We took the train into town expecting to alight at least one station north of the square. To our surprise, the train went all the way to Taksim. The station was open and we emerged from it with our first sense of normality.

It wasn’t the normal kind of normality. For one, there was a car burning right outside the station, in broad daylight.

But the street-food stalls returned to the square following their weekend break and an overall sense of routine could be felt. Order had been established: The protest movement was in Taksim. The police were in Beşiktaş, and the rest of the city went about its normal business. Daytime is about dancing, nighttime about crying; stuffed clams are yummy, and so is köfte.

Down on Istiklal, we did witness something unique: a march of Istanbul’s lawyers protesting the use of gas.

This was indeed moving. But by now, on the dawn of our third day, the situation began to seem a bit stagnant. Meanwhile, we are told that other cities are not nearly as relaxed. Last night Ebu Zer showed us a clip filmed in Ankara. In it, a woman is heard begging the police not to gas her residential neighborhood where children are sleeping and older residents suffer from lung ailments. Her plea is not respected. Izmir is said to be the scene of much turmoil, and in Antakya one demonstrator was shot dead.

It’s time to leave Istanbul and we choose the city of Bursa as our destination. It has been the setting of several demonstrations in previous days and is located only three hours away, which would allow us to return swiftly should the police enter Taksim. In the hot afternoon, we board a ferry and head out across the mavi (blue) Marmara Sea.

On board is Turkey’s typical mix of the religious, the secular, the ethnically Turkish and the ethnically otherwise. It’s the very picture of harmony.

Soon, harmony is interrupted by news. All television screens on board erupt into a collage of gas clouds, seen from the police’s point of view, and of necktied parliament members addressing the house. It appears that Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arinç issued an apology to the demonstrators for the use of excessive force.

Passengers gather around to watch. Arinç is replaced at the podium by Devlet Bahçeli, of the far-right Nationalist Movement Party. A passenger yells, “Fascist!” No one contests. Harmony has returned.

We dock on a beautiful shore and take the bus to central Bursa.

Downtown is a huge square, flanked by a shopping mall. It is the perfect location for a quaint little riot, yet none is taking place here at the moment, unless you consider a bunch of bored teenagers schmoozing by a mall a “sit-in.” Some vendors stand nearby, tossing luminescent blue orbs into the air, catching them as they descend, selling dumb toys in the most boring place on earth.

We ask a group of youngsters about the protests. They direct us to a district called Heykel, and in typical local courtesy, walk us to the dolmus (service taxis) headed there. Heykel turns out to be Bursa’s “uptown,” a leafy business district studded with pretty mosques. Not a whiff of tear gas is felt here. No one is marching nor is anyone dancing. We ask about protests and are told that they take place at a place called Kent Maydani. In typical local courtesy, two locals walk us halfway there.

As we approach Kent Maydani, something does appear to be happening: colorful sparks fly into the air ahead of us. Once we turn the final corner, they reveal themselves to be the silly boomerang toys. We have returned to point zero. Kent Maydani is the shopping mall from before.

We turn to two women in their twenties. They are our last hope. One confirms that a demonstration took place here yesterday. About 400 people took to the streets. Today there is nothing. “It’s over,” she says.

Over, like our own cherished tent protests, like so many other struggles that mattered but were intelligently extinguished by the powers that be. Could one apology have had such an effect? Is it the same sense of stagnation that caused even us to change plans? We leave Bursa discouraged and head back to Istanbul, this time by bus along the Marmara coast. It’s late and the boats no longer run.

Thank God for small surprises. The bus, too, goes on a boat: a basic car ferry allows it to forego skirting the slender bay of Izmit.

We step out and enjoy the sea breeze in the warm June night, the lights on the opposing coasts and a can of Cappy juice. The small surprise is followed by a big one.

She’s an English speaker, a tour guide by trade. Her name is Sonyul and she opposes the protests.

“The Justice and Development Party won most of the votes in the elections,” she says. “It finally managed to bend the army’s arm, that has been interfering in this country’s politics for so long. The Left may think it can offset the democratic order, but that’s not likely to happen. And meanwhile, teenagers are on the street at night, in dangerous situations. This isn’t right.”

Though bareheaded, Sonyul identifies as religious. “We are a Muslim nation,” she says, “not like Israel or countries in Europe. I grew up learning nothing about the Quran, about the Arabic language, but that is contrived. In truth, a five-minute walk from Taksim, most women wear hijabs. This is who we are and this is how we vote.”

Sonyul expresses hope that police will treat the protestors more gently, but her speech remains a clear break from the routine, so much so, that at first she hesitates before letting May take her photo. Her friends are liberal, and may fail to understand. Finally, she performs her own little act of protest and smiles at the lens.

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ISTANBUL — On Sunday night, newly reunited after the lost kidney scare, May and I went to dine with two compatriots. One was Or Heller, Channel 10′s man, whom we tried to reach earlier, and Anshel Pfeffer, who reports here for Haaretz. I bit into the delicious Adana köfte and thought of Ruthie, who loves Istanbul so much, and would have come here if not for her work. What should I bring her when I return? Adana doesn’t travel well, and anyway she’s a vegetarian except for when she travels.

Thank Goodness for Anshel, who came up with an idea that may provide a nice solid memento: a tear gas canister. “I don’t know about you,” he said, “but I’m headed for Beşiktaş. Here everything is so sweet, there – the police are present. There are clashes.”

I did know about me. I wasn’t coming. Ebu Zer and Soner are hosting us and I promised them we would arrive before 10:30, but May’s eyes were agleam. She wanted those shots. How to argue with a creative spirit? I conceded, but warned that we would only stay for half an hour.

The street outside the restaurant was full of relaxed tourists and the buzz of restaurant hosts trying to lure them in. Nothing at all betrayed that two blocks away was a graveyard of overturned police vehicles. We emerged out of the hotel district, skirted the overturned cars and continued downhill, towards the Bosphorus shores and the Dolmabahçe Palace, a grand piece of Ottoman waterfront property, in which Erdoğan has an office.

On the hillside rising above the palace is the famous football stadium of Beşiktaş. As we approached, eyes already teary, we saw that stadium being taken apart before our eyes. Demonstrators were tearing off fences and other elements of its exterior.

A cloud of teargas loomed past them at the foot of the hill. We descended as far as we could amongst the hordes of young, masked rebels but were chased back again and again by the torturous sensation.

All of the comparisons I made in the previous post became void. The easygoing daytime scene was comparable to Israel’s tent protests, but what was going on before my teary eyes recalled another, very different struggle taking place in the same land — the Palestinian one. Beşiktaş has turned into an enormous Nabi Saleh.

Well, Nabi Saleh with a certain Parisian je ne sais quoi. Directly below us, demonstrators were taking the sidewalk apart to build a barricade. A barricade made of paving stones? 1968!

Fulfilling an old dream, I joined the workforce and kicked a few bricks down toward the rising wall. The feeling was intoxicating. I am Danny the Red! I am Mordechai Anielewicz! I am Spartacus! I am a pretentious tourist performing an act of no substance whatsoever.

Or could it be significant. This is my region. This is my world. What happens in Turkey matters. We are all affected, somehow, by the existence of this barricade and will all be affected by its removal. I kicked another brick, then ventured downhill again, then climbed back up, unable to see, my face burning, seeking out the kind people who spray you with a mix of milk, lemon and antioxidants. Then realized we had lost Anshel.

The hell with it. He’ll get by. Who wouldn’t in such a friendly scene? Even the most obvious outsider is taken for a friend here, so long as he is not in uniform and shows a hint of solidarity. A luxury car passed by and was stopped by the mob. The driver calmly opened his trunk and allowed for a six pack of water bottles to be snatched out. He was sent off to the accompaniment of cheers.

Boom! Clang! Great noises and grand billows rose from the road to north of the stadium. An elaborate system of defense was set up there, comprised of two enormous barricades made mostly of broken billboard frames. Everyone was moving past them now, yelling some Turkish word we couldn’t understand. We rushed along, then realizing that the forward barricade was rushing with us. That is, it was being moved further ahead, a hundred meters, to broaden the bounds of the rebel held free state of Taksim. It is rebuild directly at the foot of the police encampment, at the very gates of the palace.

The process was astounding. Two by two they came, girls and guys, carrying the billboard frames and chunks of stadium into the cloud while onlookers cheered from behind their masks. At last, the barricade stood tall. Some brave souls climbed over it, in the thick of the cloud, waving their arms in a scene out of Les Misérables, only with no guns. Later we learned that Ebu Zer was among them, and rated this the finest experience of his life.

That was last night. Tonight is different.

We can feel it from the first moment. We decided to head directly to Beşiktaş tonight, after dinner, and were expecting a similar scene. But there’s nobody here, nobody except for the cops. The air is an atrocity.

We hasten to buy a new pair of masks from a street vendor and head to the palace’s gates to ask the policemen what happened.

A straight answer is nowhere to be found, but we do get something of a policeman’s perspective. Officer Furkan, who speaks to us, is exhausted. He hasn’t seen his home in four days. “All policemen understand the protesters,” he says, “but they don’t demonstrate the right way. They are acting like terrorists.”

“The police too, uh, have been blamed for excessive violence,” I comment gently.

“We always try to communicate. We speak to them through loudspeakers, but they never listen. They never back up.”

Soon we learn that Furkan and his friends have just issued the harshest gas attack of the entire week. Last night the demonstrators won. Tonight the police kicked off with a blast. They pushed the mob up the hill, all the way past the stadium and to the very cusp of Taksim.

When we climb up in that direction, bystanders warn us that the road is “dangerous.” It is certainly dark. The street lights have gone out. We pass the barricade I helped construct; it is ruined, broken apart right through the middle. Beyond it, some large, empty mineral water containers and a few gas canisters litter the asphalt. Here is the gift for Ruthie! I pick one up and read the label. It was produced by Nonlethal Technologies in Homer City, PA. There’s another one lying nearby. As I lift it, trying to decide which of the two is less damaged and would make a finer gift, I realize it is not empty. A drop of thick liquid pours out of it onto the ground, and I fall apart.

My face! My face is screaming! I can’t breathe, can’t swallow, can’t think. I must get out of here to someplace where I can wash myself.

May climbs up the dark street with me. There are people ahead. It’s the demonstrators’ front line. They are standing in the dark, but a helicopter shines its beam of light on them. On us. What are those plastic things on the ground everywhere? The band of the most devout apparently looted a truck full of five-gallon mineral water containers and are rolling them onto the road. They are pouring oil to stall police vehicles should they approach. They are lighting firecrackers and throwing them. They are having a wild time, and I’m not even human.

Further up the hill is the InterContinental Hotel, so full of light. We enter it and find that the last attack has caused all barriers to fall. Surgical masks are now not only present in the tourist environment, scores of them are to be found under the very chandeliers of the InterContinental’s lobby. The place looks like the Winter Palace moments after the capture of the Tsar. That’s nice. I begin to calm down.

Anshel is here too. We haven’t seen him in 24 hours. He brings us to his own hotel room across the square, where I may recover. We are welcome to linger but May is electrified. She wants to go back out. There are shots she didn’t get. Once I regain myself, a compromise is reached: we’ll skirt the zone, stay away from the front lines and won’t linger for too long.

So that is what we do. We reach the first barricade at the edge of Taksim, which is now aflame, and stay there.

We stay there even when hundreds of terrified people are climbing up in our direction, escaping something invisible. May is in video mode. She is filming them escaping. She is overcoming her own need to escape. “Let’s scram!” I yell.

It is too late. We have been attacked by pepper spray. It makes tear gas feel like frankincense. We literally fall to the sidewalk, coughing, choking. I sit there, shocked, a long trail of snot dangling down my nose. Activists stop by to offer us various magic cures, but nothing works. This is the real thing, the one that stays with you.

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ISTANBUL — We are at “The Kebap” restaurant, near Taksim square, right where we left off and with a great view of the Bosphorus. Now noises rise from the street outside. Young people are climbing from the ferry port of Kabatas: suburban kids from the Asian side. While at noon the ravaged square played home to a thin gathering of oddballs and hardcore types, the afternoon promises to be different.

When we return to the square, it is already buzzing with festive spirit. Two good friends come to meet us here. Soner and Ebu Zer hosted my girlfriend Ruthie and me on Couchsurfing two years ago. Ebu Zer is a student of mineral processing and Soner just concluded his studies in the field of shipbuilding. They take us down a staircase inscribed with graffiti accusing the ruling party of Zionism, into the garden of Eden – Gezi Park in the afternoon. It is full of handsome young men like themselves and beautiful girls, all of them relaxed, happy, inspired by hope.

One of these girls takes Ebu Zer’s left pinky finger. Another takes my right pinky. Ebu Zer explains that this is how villagers hold hands to dance in the Black Sea region. A circle forms around a man who plays some very strange version of the bag pipe, the Turkish tulum, and another, who films everything on a cellphone. A third man, standing in the circle, sings out cautions and backhanded compliments aimed at Erdoğan. The dancers repeat them cheerfully.

Here, Erdoğan isn’t called Erdoğan. He’s called by his middle name, Tayyip, a choice that reflects lack of respect. I can’t help but thinking of our prime minister, known by his nickname, Bibi. Tayyip and Bibi, foes though they may be, do share a lot, and so do their opposers. When we first stepped back into the square, the sense of déjà vu for Tel Aviv of 2011 was so strong that I told May we should “really try and get a shot of Daphni.”

There are about as many hijabs in Taksim as there were yarmulkes on Rothschild Boulevard — that is to say, not many at all. Nor do many middle-aged moustaches make an appearance. This one, too, appears to be a protest movement of the young, liberal middle class.

When the young, liberal middle class gets gassed, things get going. “This is all about police brutality,” says Soner, who is ethnically Kurdish, “and in the south-east of Turkey the police have always acted this way. I can’t believe members of the TGB [a Kemalist organization, YB] who march with us. They are hypocrites. They don’t mind police brutality when it’s happening to Kurds and they have expressed support for Bashar al-Assad.”

Here no analogy with Israel’s J14 movement can be drawn. Despite a few incidents of excessive use of force on Tel Aviv’s streets and several needless arrests, Israelis never felt the techniques the state uses to conquer dissent among Palestinians. No Israeli family was woken up before dawn by invading soldiers, to have its children photographed. By allowing the police to act relentlessly before the weekend, Tayyip made a grave mistake.

Now people are dancing for his demise, and they are so beautiful. Protesters claim that the carnage that greeted us in the morning was itself the work of the police, intended to defame them. Whether or not this is true, the movement is in need of better press now. I’m texting my friend Or, a journalist with Israel’s Channel 10, trying to alert him to the dancing going on in the park, and then rejoin the dancing and forget all about him.

When I look at my phone again, Or has called three times. I arrange to meet him by the monument at the heart of the square, let go of the friendly pinky fingers and head there. Ebu Zer is walking beside me and I keep musing about possible comparisons in his ears. “One thing you guys do right is that you go after the government from the onset. The leaders of our movement kept asking the government politely to change things. You don’t ask. You blame them and want them out.”

“We don’t have leaders,” Ebu Zer points out a further difference, perhaps the most significant one. In Israel, the media was quick to identify the struggle with specific personas, which, as time has shown, added to its vulnerability.

We arrive at the square

But Or is not there. Looking back, I realize we have lost both Soner and May. Soner soon emerges, but May does not and her phone does not have any reception here. We wait for her at the monument, then return to an emergency meeting spot on which we have decided previously. Then to the spot where Soner and Ebu Zer joined us. She is nowhere to be found.

I beg the two to go off to dinner without me. They assure me that May is probably lost in the thrill of photography, but I am worried. By now 90 minutes have passed since we saw her last. Every urban legend of people vanishing in Istanbul, then waking up with their kidneys gone, passes through my mind. I start combing the park and the square, yelling, “May! May!” In Hebrew the name is pronounced “my,” and in Turkish that doesn’t sound like a name at all. People around me are trying to figure out what I am doing, and whether this is some new call to arms.

One huge building bordering the square is the incomplete Ataturk Performance Center. Its roof had been taken over by the activists. I climb up stairs of bare concrete, in enormous vacant halls, to join them, hoping this was an angle May sought for a shot. There is another, huge difference between what I know and what is around me. There are no police here. The police were chased out of central Istanbul. There are no authorities to turn to in case of a missing person. Good thing I find her in the end, with both cameras intact and a smile that says: this has been one special afternoon.

Click here for the full series. 

ISTANBUL – Nothing seems strange at first, Istanbul does seem atypically sleepy and empty on arrival, but then, it is a Sunday morning. The sense of normality persists on the way up the hill that cradles the historical district of Beyoglu. Even at the top, a few blocks away from Taksim square, it is only disturbed by a chemical stench, not unlike that of acetone.

I don’t think much of that smell at first, nor of the ruckus of service vehicles, traveling up elegant Istiklal avenue. I simply think of them as a nuisance. Go on, morning cleaners, come and part and leave the street to pedestrians and cute historical trams.

But hold on. This really is acetone, or turpentine, or some other paint diluter. Tankers full of it are driving up Istiklal to clean off graffiti.

There is plenty of graffiti here, some of it proposing police posts be used as public restrooms, others comparing Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to one of various fascist leaders or to a mangy dog. I have never seen anything remotely similar on Tel Aviv’s streets, not even on the hottest days of that summer in 2011. Should we have vandalized? Would we have gone further? Will the Turks?

The rage grows more and more colorful, more and more bold, as we advance up the street. Last night the police finally withdrew from Taksim Square, leaving it to the protesters. And the protesters took it. The further we walk, the more diverse are the signs of anarchy. Trash is strewn everywhere, mixed with the sorry remains of shop windows. At one corner is a black bank. It was burned down to the ground. At another, a Pizza Hut restaurant was destroyed. Corn and cabbage cover the floor, mixed into a fresh salad along with hundreds of advertising leaflets and the tiny splinters of what once was a table. At the gallery level, the floor is covered with human feces.

Stepping in with us, similarly curious, is Songur, a student of engineering. He admits being party to last night’s wreckage, but explains that he was on the other side of Taksim Square, and only now came down the avenue to explore the southern side of the damage. There was no shortage of damage where he spent the night, barricades were built of overturned vans and food stalls there, most of them eventually burned.

With his kind blue eyes, intellectual beard and lazy-Sunday-on-the-couch attire, Songur hardly looks the vandal.

“How do you feel when you look at all this?” I wave at the bit of hell where pizza was once served.

“I feel good,” he says, “I feel… better. I saw the burnt bank and that really moved me. It gives you a sense that money doesn’t mean anything any more.”

At this point in Istanbul’s turbulent week, many words pour over the conflicting raisons d’etre of the aspiring protest movement. Some of the demonstrators are said to be there against Erdoğan. Others, so we are told, are still there for the park whose planned uprooting sparked the riots. At times the struggle is described as a dispute over urban landscaping that was hijacked by activists for a secular Turkey, who were in turn joined by economic protesters, Communists of various creeds. Is Songur an “Occupier” rather than a tree hugger, or an Erdogan-hater?

“The park was the last straw,” he says, “But there were other straws: the introduction of modest dress codes in schools, the stationing of police on university campuses, human rights, big money and the city… everything is connected.”

Sometime, when things break, they come together. On the stairs leading to the now world-known Gezi Park, an activist points to the trees and explains: “Before WWI, barracks used to stand here. This high ground was used by Islamist militants to crack down on the more liberal population that lived in the neighborhood. Now they are trying to claim it back.”

Et voila: the fate of the trees and threat of Islamism get tied together in a perfect bunch. Such comments would have sounded so much stranger if not for the dozen or so overturned vehicles lying within 30 feet of our history teacher, the bonfires burning all around and the peculiar mix of activists drilling into the boots of cars in search of loot, tourists taking photos with their iPads, journalists interviewing one another and eccentrics (at least one eccentric) playing the harmonica with a funny hat on.

For one Felliniesque moment at noon on Taksim, it appears that the Turkish summer’s reason can only be found in madness.The movement, pushed too forcefully by astonishingly violent police, seems to have combusted into peculiarity, even idiocy.

But then something happens that alters that feeling. The rioters return, wearing rubber gloves and carrying trash bags and shovels.

They are indeed last night’s rascals. The city’s cleaners are here too, wearing green and snapping photos of the unthinkable mess with their smartphones. But it is the non-uniformed cleaners that draw our attention. I speak to one, a doctoral student, who commits entirely to the struggle. “I’ll stay here till the end,” he says, while scooping some of Taksim’s debris into the bag, “and I’ll come back to clean every time.”

At “The Kebap,” a restaurant around the corner, the waiter points to the television set, where a Taksim solidarity protest taking place in New York is broadcast. The protests finally made it to local media, as well as the worldwide support for them. The waiter feels no need to hide his own excitement at the unfolding events. A new wind is blowing through Istanbul, and so what if it reeks a bit of nail polish remover?

Peter Brueghel The Elder’s “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” (Wikimedia Commons)

It was a gorgeous day to be on the water, and the water itself was gorgeous. The Sea of Galilee, stroked by springtime winds, overlooked by mountains with names as beautiful as the slopes themselves: Arbel, Golan, Jabel Ash-Sheikh, Mt. Canaan.

Our group was made up mostly of American tourists. There were two Israelis, myself being one, and one Palestinian. This tour of the Holy Land is given by Mejdi, which offers dual narrative tours of the entire country. I accompany the group in the role of the Israeli, which means I must let go of much of my critical bias and reflect diverse viewpoints, including that of both the Israeli mainstream and of the Right. It’s an acquired skill, but it’s doable (especially in this kind weather), in a landscape I identify with peaceful kibbutzim and delicate Hebrew poetry. With so many things that are beautiful about the Israeli identity.

So we stepped off the dock of Kibbutz Ginosar and on board the King David, a boat that carries tourists and pilgrims on pleasure trips over the fabled Sea of Galilee. We have had a fine morning, wandering through the ancient remains at Tel-Dan and Banias, exploring Capernaum and enjoying St. Peter’s fish at a waterfront restaurant. We spoke of Syria and Lebanon, of the wars of recent decades, of the bomb shelters in Qiryat Shmona, of Tel-Chai and the tale of early Zionism in the region. Now was time to catch the breeze and enjoy a place of great beauty and spirit.

The wind’s caress turned rougher. The lake was choppier than I have ever seen it. The King David, designed to resemble the boats of first century fishermen, was big and steady, but other vessels suffered. Soon we saw two heads bobbing over the water, about half a cable to starboard. Closer to us, the lake’s ripples cradled a vacant jet ski. Clearly the two, who appeared to be wearing life vests, fell off their jet ski, were swept away, and needed our help, but we didn’t halt. Not at first.

“Stoooooop!!!” yelled a crew member at the stern. The captain, at the tiller, remains motionless. The crew member (one of three), yelled again, and again, and the others joined in, until finally the boat’s motor was killed. We all prepared to approach the men and rescue them, but the captain reversed only a few yards and stopped. When I stepped over to inquire, he pointed to nearby windsurfers who swept by us and said. “They’ll pick them up.”

“Why don’t we pick them up?” I asked, “don’t worry, no one in our group minds the delay.”

“We may hit them if we come too close.”

“Okay, so let’s not get too close and throw them a rescue wheel. Have we any on board?”

“No,” replied the captain.

“Really? Well, they are far from the shore and far from the jet ski. We are a million times more equipped to carry them to safety than the windsurfers, and the wind is blowing Westward, so we don’t risk being taken too far in their direction. Maybe we could…”

“Don’t tell me about winds and directions,” the captain started the motor again, “I’ve been on the water for many years and I know what I’m doing. Here, look, the windsurfers are picking them up.”

They did.

I explained to the group what the captain had said. All the while I could hear behind be the crew members conversing bitterly with the captain. “People die this way,” one of them said.

It took no longer than five minutes for the captain to feel assured enough to boast about abandoning the castaways. “I know those Arabs,” he told me. “They come to Tiberias, have beers, rent jet skis and there they go.”

Stepping over to one of the crew members, I asked him whether the ship carried rescue wheels. He said it does. He did not look me in the eyes. He clearly felt very uncomfortable.

My own sense of discomfort only developed later, while strolling through Tiberias in the evening. The captain assumed that the men overboard were Palestinian citizens of Israel. That was enough for him to wash his hands of their fate. The crew members were uniformly unhappy about the decision, but could no nothing in the face of hierarchy. What did the men in the water see, as they waved to us for help? They saw us moving away, all of us.

This was a lot to stomach. Was I in fact party to their abandonment? Were the tourists? Were the crew members? Comparisons to the “larger boat” (the State of Israel itself), and its own captain’s decisions, inevitably formed in my mind. Then came the big question: how do I go back to being the group’s Israeli chaperon the following day? Do I keep this story a secret? Do I calmly discuss the ideology that might lead to such behavior? Do I make comparisons with attitudes prevalent in other lands, in different times, towards my own people?

When morning came and we boarded the bus to Nazareth, I ended up divulging the story in full, openly discussing my discomfort. I explained that I do not regard the captain’s decision as congruent with Jewish values (I did not mention a rabbinical decree, issued by Maimonides, stating that a drowning Gentile may not be saved on the Sabbath, the day on which we sailed aboard the King David), but added with a sigh that it is becoming more and more normative in today’s Israel.

A wise member of the group remarked that such behavior is not exclusive to Israel. She said she could picture a Californian boatman giving a similer treatment to people he might perceive to be Latinos. For what it’s worth, I believe her, but what is it worth? Around us, Nazareth’s suburbs came into view: modest Palestinian neighborhoods, mosques and churches. Above them, on a high hilltop, loomed the residential towers of Nazareth Illit: the Zionist addition to Nazareth’s metropolis. Nazareth Illit’s mayor recently launched an outspoken campaign against Palestinian-Israelis who move into the town. He’s a captain indeed, one who was voted in by his city’s passengers. Traveling below Nazareth Illit’s high ground, I felt a bit as though I am drowning, without much of a life vest, and with the weight of the darkest moments in my own people’s history chained to my ankle like a rock.

Jewish culture had always centered around education, and the Zionist founders of Tel Aviv believed that so would the new Jewish society they were helping to establish. Fast forward 50 years, and the high school was torn down. The State of Israel, a decade old at the time, was priding itself on progress, and progress manifested as a skyscraper: 120 meters and 34 stories tall, the tallest tower in the Middle East, with the street was directly beneath it, forming a futuristic automotive underpass. The broader lower floors featured a wax museum, a public library and a department store. The roof over them bore an entire amusement park, while the tower’s top floor offered a popular observatory.

The Shalom Meir Tower was named after the father of its two developers, brothers Morderchai and Moshe Meir. Soon it is became commonly known simply as the Shalom Tower. I pass by it almost every day without thinking much about it. The sixties are over. Loftier towers rise over central Tel Aviv. The wax museum closed down years ago. No longer may visitors to the first Hebrew city witness its strangest exhibit: a wax reenactment of Charles Manson and the Family murdering Sharon Tate and her dinner company. “Meirland” was disassembled, ferris wheels and all.

Penn, Rovina and Shlonsky on display

Last night, for some reason, I mentioned that ferris wheel. I was passing underneath the tower with my girlfriend, Ruthie, and found myself looking up to where it once stood, all colorful and hopeful. “You got to see the Shalom Tower at its days of glory,” she said, “I was too young. Even the department store was gone when I first came to Tel Aviv from the South.”

She’s right, I thought, I was witness to history. We speak of the demolished high school as history. Its silhouette is today the symbol of Israel’s society for preservation of historic places, but by now the the 70s and 80s are also a past worth exploring. Ruthie considers the Shalom Tower a gem, and was sorry when nondescript new developments on our street blocked it from our balcony view. I decided to pay it a visit and see what is left of its past glory.

Upon approaching, I pause and take photos, feeling fairly stupid. During the 60s, the Shalom Tower starred in Tel Aviv’s postcards. today it is thought of by all (except Ruthie) to be another example of Tel Aviv’s dubious post-bauhaus architecture. It is perhaps symbolic that I visit it on the same day that architect Ram Carmi, who designed the city’s monstrous central bus terminal, passed away. The bus terminal is the world’s biggest and contains over 1,000 shops. It was dismissed as a white elephant within less than a decade of its 1993 dedication. Did the Shalom Tower simply take a bit longer to prove a similar failure?

Not quite, so it seems. The lobby is pleasant, still decorated with a large scale mosaic by artist and author Nahum Guttman. A sign over an elevator door reads: “to the library.” I take the elevator and find to my surprise that the old library is not only active, but is thriving. At least 20 young urbanites are here, working on laptops in a peaceful atmosphere. There’s some renovating going on. This library has a future ahead of it. In a city with very few libraries, this is a fond surprise.

Another surprise awaits me on the mezanine floor, which has been turned into a museum of sorts for the city’s history. Past a scale model of central Tel Aviv, and and exhibition of old newspaper ads, six familier faces greet me with frozen stares. The wax is still here! Someone rescued the great Hebrew poets Alterman, Bialik, Penn, Goldberg and Shlonsky, as well as actress Hanna Rovina from the basements, and sat them around an imagined Dizingoff cafe table of the early fifties.

Everything has changed in the Shalom Tower, but nothing fully vanished. The museum is now a single exhibit. The department store has split into many stores. The observatory closed, but the elevators are free for all. I travel to the 29th floor and catch a marvelous view over downtown through a hallway window. The new towers rising over Rothschild are particularly striking. They may put the Shalom Tower to shame, but they can’t beat its perseverance.

The new skyline of Rothschild Blvd.

On the way down, I think of Tel Aviv’s uneasy relationship with the very concept of history. It is a city established on the denial of history. In 2009 Tel Aviv celebrated its centennial, entirely ignoring Jaffa’s 3,800 years of existence. Imagine if Barcelona rejected the Gothic quarter as a separate town, and claimed to be 110 years old today, all because l’Eixample, its first modern quarter, was established in 1903.

Tel Aviv seldom recognizes history before traces of this history are gone or badly damaged. The old high school was torn down. The precious Bauhaus buildings fell into disrepair before being recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. Tel Avivians were surprised to learn that their boxy abodes were modernist masterpieces. Journalist Doron Rosenbloom likened us to “a sack-clad beggar, who learns one morning that for years he has been wearing a Coco Chanel gown.” We look at our city, see how modest it appears to be, how lacking it is in grand boulevards, in ornate facades, in lasting culinary establishments, and dismiss it as a drifting dune.

Current Mayor Ron Huldai is known for his love of flashy projects. The newly renovated national theater (designed by none other than the late Mr. Carmi) has drawn severe criticism from lovers of the city’s fabric. Our unique symphony hall, and even a few of the city’s beaches, are now subject to development. Meanwhile, police this month attempted to close down “The Block,” Tel Aviv’s state of the art dance club, citing drug trade. Judge Guy Haiman rejected the order, and reminded the police that “This is a vibrant city, whose reputation as a center for around-the-clock activity has gone far and wide.”

Had our society remained centered on education, the value of the city’s aesthetic and vitality would have demanded less explanation. Tel Aviv’s special brand of memories is unique and delightful. Our historical perception as Israelis is so full of dissonance that we overlook much of what is good in real time, just as we ignore so much of what is bad. Appreciation of the present and of the recent past is the first step in preservation. It’s up to us to keep our eyes open for all that is worthwhile, even if it is goofy, or boxy, or poor, even if it is graced by neither Boaz nor Yachi, even if its glory days are over.

A view of Jerusalem from a village trapped between an invisible border and a real separation barrier. (photo: Yuval Ben-Ami)

I just finished an ordeal at the Knesset. The next thing on the agenda was a long phone call, one that would last for at least an hour. Instead of walking about West Jerusalem for an hour, I decided to begin heading west on foot.

The brisk winter day was gorgeous. Beneath me, past the last row of city blocks, lay the gulley separating West Jerusalem from a ridge of lofty hills to the west. The slopes were made green by the season’s blessed rains. If I climbed down, then up again, I would arrive at the suburb of Mevaseret Zion, where busses stop on their way to Tel Aviv.

I found a street that turns into a trail and headed down, soon arriving at the abandoned Palestinian village of Lifta. Unlike many other villages that were emptied in 1948 and later destroyed, this one remains nearly intact. Lately, it narrowly escaped being replaced with a posh residential complex for Jewish Israelis. Walking among the crumbling stone buildings is a sad experience, but I could at least comfort myself in that Lifta remains as a monument.

While speaking leisurely on the phone, I crossed to the other ridge and began climbing a slope that I thought would lead me to Mevaseret Zion and to the bus. It did not.

The houses atop the hill were not lined along neatly planned streets, as they would be in Mevaseret. Instead, homes were freely scattered along badly paved roads, some of them were new, others – as old as those of Lifta. This was a Palestinian village, and various signs told me that it was not Palestinian-Israeli, such as nearby Abu Ghosh. The roads really were in a very poor shape, and the roofs bore black water tanks, rather than the white ones typical in Israel.

How could this be? I have been walking west from West Jerusalem. I am supposed to be in Israel proper, in the “Jerusalem corridor” – sandwiched between the north and south West Bank. This village is located only a half a mile from the Jerusalem – Tel Aviv freeway, which trails the adjacent slope, it is visible from its lanes and from many building in the city, looking like a mosque –topped suburb of Mevaseret Zion or of nearby suburb of Ramot, which, it now occured to me, is built partially over the Green Line. Israeli urbanization in this area is designed to blur this line’s existence,

Walking a bit further in, I began to see cars. Their license plates were white and green – Palestinian. Such cars are not allowed on Israeli roads. The mystery thickened. I haven’t crossed a fence nor a wall, and yet I entered the West Bank on foot. Less than an hour ago I was inside Israel’s parliament. Now here I was, at what must be a southwestern offshoot of the territory of another sovereign state, recognized by the UN and occupied by my own.

I knew that the separation barrier was not complete, but was amazed to find it nonexistent at such proximity to West Jerusalem. The barrier is meant to impact our brains, and it does. What made the situation so strange in my eyes was indeed how normal it was. The very fact that I could wander into this village as a peaceful visitor seemed bizarre. This isn’t real life! In real life there are walls separating people and military vehicles threatening the life of anyone who tries to sneak over. I have gotten used to this. I didn’t know how to deal with something so different.

Then I turned back, looked over at Jerusalem and felt a great sadness take over me. The people who live in the house shown in the above photo are not allowed to walk down the trail I took. It is unlikely that they possess a rare “Jerusalem pass” issued by the Israeli authorities. Most likely, they risk arrest and interrogation if they dare to visit the city. It is a city that appears every morning through their windows, a city that is sacred to them, a city that is the birthplace of their culture. A city that is off bounds.

Off bounds – just like Mevaseret, into which I now walked without hassle, climbing over the Green Line at some point I could not even identify. I took the bus and headed for the coast – the coast reserved for me. On the way I looked for the village on my Google Maps iphone application. Like most Palestinian villages and towns, it did not exist there. I can only assume that Google uses Israeli sources for its maps.

With the help of activist friends I learned that the village is named Beit Iksa. Israel plans to complete the fence separating it from Jerusalem next year. Meanwhile, a temporary fence stretches northeast of the village, and its residents must go through a checkpoint in order to visit the rest of the West Bank. While the village is trapped between a real barrier and an invisible one, Israel is confiscating its lands for the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem high speed rail. I’ll stop here. That’s enough absurdity for one post. Next time I’ll make sure to take the bus directly from Jerusalem, like most Israelis do, in order to avoid reality’s burden.

P.S. I feel compelled to add that Beit Iksa is by no means unique. Israel built the separation barrier unilaterally, often several kilometers inside the West Bank, confiscating nearly 9% of its territory. In most cases, the barrier was not placed temporarily, trapping Palestinians inside land-locked islands for good. Or at least until something changes.

A survey conducted in Gaza this September showed that a majority of its residents would prefer Fatah to Hamas if elections were held. Early this month President Mahmoud Abbas spoke again of a two state solution and even hinted at compromising on the right of return.

What could Israel do in light of this but start a war? Israel can’t deal with peace. It has become a war machine, and I’m not referring only to its over-militant decision makers and those who take their orders. Decades of media bias and dogmatic education managed to turn its citizens into a blinded mob that always support violence: today’s Haaretz poll shows 84 percent back the current offensive. A foreign television crew with which I work interviewed passersby today on the situation in Gaza. “We know they die by the score there,” one Tel Aviv resident told the camera, “It’s not that we don’t know. We just don’t care.”

Of course Palestinians can be extremely militant and violent. You would be too, after decades of enslavement, and if you believe you could overcome such wrath, well then, you’d be like the majority of Palestinians. As for Hamas, I am not fond of them one bit — notice this piece begins with my faith in a survey that showed it weakening. The thing is, it is (or was, until recent events) weakening.

Meanwhile, the Israeli Right is only becoming more powerful. True, it lies, diverts attention, misinforms and uses fear-mongering to gain power and support. The media effectively dehumanizes Palestinians and fosters our sense of victimhood, and the media is run by powerful people with links to Jerusalem high brass, but the simple people have heads on their shoulders and hearts in their chests. They too share responsibility. We have all been failed by the Israelis in recent days, again, all of us – the world, the Israeli Left, and especially the Palestinians.

The Israeli Left does still exist, and bravely struggles in the face of mounting de-legitimization, but it may finally be declared too small to count. Now that Labor leader Shelly Yachimovitch expressed full support for Netanyahu and Barak’s actions, only the tiny Meretz party (with three seats in the 120 seat Knesset) and the mixed Hadash party (only a minority of whose voters are Jewish) remain to offer an alternative. Both have openly opposed the military offensive.

In Jewish tradition, a dairy dish into which a piece of meat fell remains kosher, so long as that piece of meat is less than sixty times the size of the full dish. It is “batel b’shishim” – “cancelled out by sixty.” The community of Israelis who seek justice, life and human rights isn’t yet the sixtieth part of this country’s population, but alas, we don’t count for much. I would advise those who are unsure of how to feel about the current events not to decide their opinion based on our existence and our actions. Israel does not deserve to have us as a fig leaf.

We Israelis deserve the eternal war we live in. We deserve our murderous government, which is now sailing to the safe port of reelection on a river of Gazan (and some Israeli) blood. We deserve all that for saying yes to death again and again, but the Palestinians, who suffer of the same Bibi’s whims, don’t. They actually reach out for peace, both on the popular level and in formal speeches. Well, maybe not anymore. Not at the moment, not even if the ceasefire does come tonight. Yet another opportunity massacred.

Can we change? Should we never say die? Should I ask all of you, my readers around the world, to put pressure on us, to deny us business and culture so that we are forced to evolve? I don’t know anymore. Do so but without great expectations. It’s up to world leaders to make the difference here, and they need to treat us with enormous toughness, which they hardly seem inclined to show. So it remains: there is no way out, there was, but there isn’t now. A good night to everybody from Tel Aviv, and may the memory of the victims be blessed.

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