By Avraham H. Muthada / Café Gibraltar

Khaju Bridge in Isfahan, Iran (Photo: Hamed Saber/CC)

I often find myself yearning for Iran. Despite the fact that my feet have never stepped there, my mouth has never tasted its water, my lips have not sipped from its goblet. There, in the diaspora, where the dream of the promised land still burned and echoed. The longing that was part of us even before man met women, a longing for what does not exist – for a borderless purity amongst humans. The mullah (rabbi) stands at the gate of the city during every holiday with complete devotion, his face tilted toward the West – toward the sea – mourning a hill of stones and broken memories, quietly praising and calling for Zion. In his mind’s eye he sees the tribes of Israel and the Land of Judea and the Mediterranean – there he shall not pass.

My father shrinks into the blue, fur arm chair and sinks into a song of homesickness for a homeland left behind. “My Iran, my life and soul.” He glances upward, imagining the pathways of his childhood, weaving together notes and letters to form a pearl necklace of suffering. He is motionless. Like a national monument, he collects remnants of moments and gives them vitality. Soon his eyes will open and a sigh will leave his mouth.

“I am like a victim of your land / and helpless without you / every beat of my heart is the whispering of Iran,” the singer eulogizes the homeland, and my father continues, “Without you my home is full of sorrow / every moment is grief, the distance drives me mad / God knows that this world is a prison without you / life is dark and cold.” Indeed, Iran is the homeland of many expatriates, not all of them Muslims. Different religions, tribes and cultures are tied together to the forgotten homeland which has been painted black and white.

No other homeland

The task of wandering to a distant homeland was commanded of us, even before we became a nation, in one sentence that changed our fate: “Go from your homeland and the homeland of your father to a country that I shall reveal to you.” And here, thousands of years later, I wonder to myself, as Jews who returned to our homeland, aren’t we supposed to feel an even stronger connection to nature, to humans, to the living and the air around us? Our hearts have been filled with songs of the homeland and love for the Land of Israel, built by the fearless pioneers who sought to redeem the land of the swamps, ever since we were little. Are not the history and literature books full of songs of praise such as “Ein Li Eretz Aheret” (“I Have No Other Country”) and the famous “El Artzi” (“To My Land”), in which the Hebrew poet Rachel confesses that she did not do enough for her country.

Yoram Taharlev nicknamed it a “homeland with no shirt, a barefoot homeland.” Uzi Chitman called for “Eretz Ha’Tzabar,” (Land of the Tzabar) and even Aviv Geffen called it “Uri Ur.” But no, the promised land disappointed. Friends of mine who up until recently claimed “I love the country, not the state,” can now be found waiting in endless lines for a foreign passport, or at the very least a long-term visa. And like a beggar at the gates, divested of my memories and of the images of my forefather’s land, I am forced to bear a burden that is not my own. Creating a love for the homeland out of nothing, instead of creating new meaning for living in my country, Israel, through the eyes of my forefathers.

A letter of longing from Zion to Iran

Pain is the father of creation. It is woven into our being, into books, songs and prayers. Often I find myself incessantly switching stations on the radio, until I find an Arabic station and sink into the trills of the muezzin. Quarter tones, the deeply layered singing, carved out of a deep place of pain, remind me of the songs of my home.

“My heart wants to return to Isfahan…
I am still here, but my heart is there / all my prayers and desires are there.”

As a boy I loved the elegy for Isfahan, the birthplace of my parents, but I never wondered why. It is possible that I considered the city as holy as Jerusalem, where belief and holiness move us to a memory we have never experienced. I sit and stare into my father’s eyes. I am filled with jealousy as those eyes yearn for a homeland that was taken away, for the sounds that arise from the oblivion and fill the room. The glory of a faraway kingdom, stories of bravery about giants and ghosts who walk among humans. Stories about simple people and their simple lives. That same yearning for a homeland that prevails in my family excites me to the point that it seems as if it is inherited. Or perhaps they borrowed this trait from their Shi’ite neighbors, another persecuted minority who will one day reach salvation. Persian is a holy language to me – it empowers my mind and stimulates my creativity. Songs for Iran, which are sung by Iranian expats, those same songs I grew up on, penetrate my body and strum into my soul, despite not understanding most of the words.

MK Hanin Zoabi, with whom I do not see eye to eye, once claimed that Jews in Israel do not understand the love for a homeland. “Loving the homeland means loving and respecting its history and that of its indigenous people. One who loves his homeland does not cut down trees nor build ugly fences and does not ruin the natural view. This is not love, this is a project that says ‘we are the masters and we want to erase the other group that exists here’.” This is true. A homeland is not a piece of cultivated land, nor the object of a war for pride. Homeland is not nationalism. Love has no place where land is a tool for control. Homeland is an idea through which we mold our hopes and our most secret fears. It is an unconditional love.

My love for Zion and Jerusalem has nothing to do with blue and white and is not based in the history books of my childhood. Its origins lay in adopting the love for a homeland from my father. From Iran to Zion. From Isfahan to Jerusalem. There is an uncertainty about a father instilling forgotten love and continuity to his son. Like the poet Khalil Gibran wrote:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

This is the legacy I inherited from my father.

It is ironic that the land Abraham left for the Promised Land is the same land he misses while being in the Promised Land. Zion is my homeland, and I will love it forever. But every time that I direct my desire toward Jerusalem, the holiest of holies, I will slightly divert my eyes to Iran and tilt my head to hear the echoes of the mullah praying for the Land of Israel, that which he will never see.

Avraham H. Muthada is a writer and student of communications and journalism. This post first appeared in Hebrew on Café Gibraltar. 

By Mark R. Cohen

On one of my many trips to Israel, in January 2012, words spoken at the celebration of the founding of the PLO in Ramallah were disseminated far and wide via the Internet by Palestine Media Watch, shocking many in and outside of the country. Introducing the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, one of the officials referred to the “enemy” (Israel) as “apes and pigs,” quoting a famous verse from the Qur’an according to which God, through His prophet Muhammad, censures the “Sabbath breakers” for violating (Jewish) law and condemns them to be transformed into “apes and pigs.” In his own speech, the Mufti quoted an equally famous Islamic hadith: “’The Hour (of Divine Judgment and Resurrection) will not come until you fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind rocks or trees. Then the rocks or trees will call out: ‘Oh Muslim, Oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him; except for the Gharqad tree, which is the friend of the Jews.’ Therefore it is no wonder that you see Gharqad trees surrounding the Israeli settlements and colonies.” This hadith, with its anti-Semitic overtones, is famously quoted in the Hamas “Platform” as license to kill Jews.

Anti-Semitism in the contemporary Muslim world is real. It pervades the media in the very countries that are most inimical to Israel. It appears in political speeches, in cartoons, in the press and on Middle Eastern radio and television. It resonates all too familiarly with the anti-Semitism that fueled the Holocaust.

For a people who have suffered the consequences of anti-Semitism since the Christian Middle Ages, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, such expressions of anti-Jewish hatred in the Muslim world, side-by-side with Islam’s version of Holocaust denial, militates against hopes for rapprochement, political or otherwise, with Israel’s Arab neighbors and strengthens politicians’ resolve to resist statehood for the Palestinians.

Where does contemporary Muslim anti-Semitism come from? Does it stem from the Qur’an and other foundational Islamic texts? Is it endemic to Islam? Is it therefore ineradicable? Many, especially Jews, and especially Israeli Jews, believe this to be true.

Or is this anti-Semitism new, originating in Western (Christian) Jew-hatred that arrived in the Middle East on the heels of colonialism, and later became clothed in Islamic garb? And, if so, has this Muslim anti-Semitism somehow been enflamed by the rise of Zionism and the conflict with Israel?

The claim that Jews lived under Muslim rule in the past much as they had under Christendom — in a state of abject misery, relentlessly humiliated and even persecuted — does not stand up to scrutiny. In an essay for a volume edited by Israeli Middle East expert Moshe Ma’oz, entitled Muslim Attitudes to Jews and Israel: The Ambivalences of Rejection, Antagonism, Tolerance and Cooperation (Sussex University Press, 2010), I refute that approach. Building on the arguments in my book, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (also published in Hebrew with the title, Be-tzel ha-sahar veha-tzlav (Zmora/Bitan-Dvir, 2001), this essay “Modern Myths of Muslim Anti-Semitism,” from  the Ma’oz volume (linked here with the permission of the publisher, or in Hebrew), explains the relatively decent relations between Muslims and Jews under Islamic rule, and attributes modern Muslim anti-Semitism to just that: modernity, rather than inherent features of Islam.

Mark R. Cohen is the Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East at Princeton University.

A Palestinian photographer stands during a minute of silence commemorating the Nakba at a ceremony held by Palestinian and Israeli students at the entrance to Tel Aviv University. Right-wing activists protesting the ceremony and policemen are seen in the background. May 13, 2013 (photo: Yotam Ronen / Activestills)

Yedioth Hakibbutz is the weekly magazine of the United Kibbutz Movement. It is delivered every week to hundreds of Kibbutzim as part of the weekend edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, the best selling paper in Israel. Even at a time of diminishing political influence – there is not a single representative of the United Kibbutz Movement in the current Knesset – the Kibbutzim remain both a symbol and a stronghold of conservative Zionism, and the mainstream tone of Yedioth suits them well.

Three months ago, there was an unusual story on the cover of Yedioth Hakibbutz. The front page read: “We expelled, blew up and killed.” Inside the magazine was a three-page interview with Kibbutz Degania member Yerachmiel Kahanovich, a former fighter in the Palmach (the Jewish underground that preceded the IDF), in which Kahanovic confessed to his part in the expulsion and murder of Palestinians during the war of 1948.

Several months earlier, Kahanovich was interviewed as part of a project by Zochrot (“remembering”), a non-profit that deals with the Nakba from an Israeli perspective (an English translation of his testimony can be found here), and his testimony drew the attention of Yedioth reporters. Zochrot exists mostly in the margins of the Israeli discourse. Getting such a follow-up in the Kibbutz magazine was unique but not unheard of: in October 2012 the same paper ran a story on a Nakba tour book published by Zochrot.

Kahanovich’s testimony touched on one of the most awful events of 1948 – the intentional murder of Palestinian civilians who sought refuge from the fighting inside the Dahamsh Mosque in Lod. He also confessed that he had been ordered to shoot each Palestinian who tried to escape the procession of refugees marching out of the region. At time he sounded regretful – but he also felt that, “we had no choice.”

Q: Did you let the [Palestinians] residents get away?

YK: At first, yes. The intention was to expel them, these were the orders of the bosses, Yigal Alon and Yitzhak Sadeh. Sometimes we had to shot one or two, and then the rest got the message and left on their own. You need to understand: if you didn’t destroy the Arab’s home, he will always want to come back. When there is no home, no village, there is nowhere to return.

Q: Do you remember the battle for Lod and Ramleh?

YK: I don’t like to remember this so much… we shot shells into a mosque where many people were hiding. There was no choice.

Q: We shot?

YK: I shot with the PIAT [anti-tank weapon]. It has an enormous shock wave.

Q: And what were the results?

YK: Not pretty. They were all scattered on the walls.

Q: How many?

YK: I don’t know. Many. I didn’t count. I opened the door, saw what I saw, and closed [it].

Q: What did you feel?

YK: What can you feel after a thing like that? But if we didn’t do it, we might have been fighting to this very day. Then I stood with the Browning [machine gun] over the creek through which the remaining residents escaped. Anyone who strayed off track, got a shot.

Q: From you as well?

YK: From me too. I felt really bad but I was a good marksman, and there were times when they only asked me to fire a single bullet. At the village next to Ramleh, two shots were enough. In 45 minutes the village was empty. They got the message.

The Lod-Ramleh region was one of places where a massive, intentional expulsion of the Palestinian population took place. Controversies surround the departure of Palestinians from other areas; whether they were forced to leave or whether they escaped on their own. It’s not that important. The Israeli decision not to allow refugees to return to their homes – sometimes as early as two weeks after they fled or were forced to leave – is what made them refugees. Later came the confiscation of the entirety of “unclaimed” Palestinian property, which leaves no doubt about what happened in 1948. Intentional or not, this was ethnic cleansing.

***

Cover of Yedioth Hakibbutz featuring a story with a former Palmach fighter who confessed to his part in killing Palestinians during the 1948 war

Another Kibbutz story: a few years ago, some “internal refugees” (Palestinians who were displaced during the war but ended up within Israeli borders; they weren’t allowed to go back to their homes, but they did become Israeli citizens) planned a weekend trip to the hill where their village once stood. The news somehow reached members of a nearby Kibbutz – one of the pillars of the Kibbutzim movement and a Meretz stronghold – who were immediately alarmed. The Kibbutz email list came to life, with members suggesting that they form a counter-delegation and capture the hill before the Palestinians arrive. Others demonstrated a more hospitable approach. I don’t know how the story ended. I heard it from one of the Kibbutz’s members, a guy my age who has since left the country.

The tiniest symbolic action or gesture relating to the Nakba can unleash disproportionate panic among Jews, since the Nakba is not just the ghost of the Zionist project – it’s a very real and political problem. Both Israelis and Palestinians understand this. An Israeli-Palestinian leader once told me that he would not support building Nakba museums. “You put monuments when the story is over,” he said. “We are not there.”

In recent years, a trend of Nakba-denial has emerged in Jewish-Israeli political circles, a sort of conservative counter attack to the post-Zionism of the 1990s. Im Tirzu, a conservative group whose claim to fame was a campaign against the New Israel Fund, which included anti-semitic images, a couple of years ago published a propaganda booklet titled “Nakba-Bullshit” (it rhymes in Hebrew) which repeats many of the Israeli talking points on the refugee issue: from “there is no such thing as a Palestinian people” to “they fled of their own will” to “Jews from Arab countries also became refugees.” Activists from Im Tirzu urged students to avoid classes that mention the Nakba, distributed the booklet at university gates and staged counter-protests against memorial ceremonies on Nakba Day.

At the same time, the Israeli government initiated the Nakba law, authorizing the finance minister to withdraw funds from organizations commemorating the Nakba. One in every five Israelis is a Palestinian, and the law basically means that their public institutions are not allowed to deal with their own history. A petition against the law was rejected by the Supreme Court, demonstrating how threatened Israelis feel – that even the institution which is considered, and certainly considers itself the guardian of civil liberties, was ready to put such a limit on free speech. Since 2009 Palestinian schools have not been allowed to discuss or even use the term Nakba as part of their curriculum.

***

All these acts had a strange effect: while dealing with the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is still considered a “confrontational” and even “subversive” act, the term Nakba itself has become part of the mainstream discourse. The Arabic word “Nakba” (“disaster”) has been used to describe the Palestinian catastrophe as early as 1948, but I never heard the word until the nineties. Now I seem to hear it every other day.

Naturally, it’s not just in Israel. Google has a cute tool which allows you to see the number of times a term is used in the books in its databases. I searched the four common ways the word Nakba is spelled, “Nakba,” “Naqba,” “naqba” and “nakba” (the tool is case sensitive) and the same pattern emerged each time: a tiny surge in the mid-seventies and a skyrocketing rise at the end of the nineties.

Compare this, for example , to the word “Israel,” which is mentioned more frequently but its peak seems to have been in the eighties (the correlation of all those graphs with historical events is an interesting story in its own).

The Microsoft Word 2010 spellcheck software I use has yet to recognize the Nakba.

***

Last year, cops besieged activists who tried to distribute leaflets about the Nakba on Independence Day. This year’s events seem less tense. As I write this text, an outraged report on Israeli public radio opens the evening news broadcast with:

It happened today: at the entrance to Tel Aviv University some people marked the Nakba day and nobody did anything about it.

In fact, there was a small Im Tirzu vigil against the Nakba Day ceremony at Tel Aviv University, but except for some insults shouted into the air, the ceremony went on without interruption. Here is a video of the event:

The editor of Yedioth Hakibbutz told me that the interview with Yerachmiel Kahanovich went viral on Facebook but that at the same time, it hardly generated any hostile responses from kibbutz members. She sounded slightly disappointed.

A strange, bitter recognition of the Nakba seems to have settled in to the mainstream, incomplete yet undeniable. Israelis are beginning to acknowledge the past, although we are far from addressing its present consequences or its possible political implementation. However, one thing is clear: the war against history has failed. The Nakba will not be forgotten – not by Palestinians, nor by us.

Palestinian refugees in 1948 (photo: wikimedia, Israeli copyrights expired)

Related:
Why Jews need to talk about the Nakba: A personal journey
Pretending away the Nakba only perpetuates the conflict
PHOTOS: Palestinians commemorate Nakba Day with rallies and protests
Report: Forced displacement on both sides of the Green Line
Remembering the Nakba, understanding this is a shared land
The Palestinian Nakba: Are Israelis starting to get it?

Actress Mira Awad (Urga41/CC)

Palestinian Christian singer Mira Awad, a celebrity in Israel who has participated in the Eurovision, the Israeli version of “Dancing with the Stars” and is also known for her role in Sayed Kashua’s television sitcom “Arab Labor,” posted the following status on her Facebook page today:

So, I was checked at the airport, they asked the questions, put the stickers on, and I proceeded to the X-Ray machine. Suddenly, the young security man comes to me: “Mira? Mira Awad?”

Me: “Yes?”

Security man: “Can I see your passport? There’s a mistake with the sticker.”

I almost told him: “No, you’re not mistaken, I see you put the right one on — the sticker for Arabs”, but I didn’t say that (security people have their humor extracted during their preparatory course). I gave him my passport, he opens it, takes off the sticker in the passport and on the suitcase and puts on a new one, different, the same color but smaller.

Now the dilemma. On the one hand it’s obvious the young man has just made my life easier by putting on the sticker for Jews. On the other hand, it’s one of the things that it’s hard to say thanks for. I mean, thank you for not considering me a terrorist any more? Thanks that someone whispered to you, “it’s Mira Awad,” so the “Awad” isn’t scary anymore? Thanks for upgrading me to a Class A citizen? I turned into one of “ours,” or actually one of “yours.” A small sticker that carries with it such huge humiliation, and today even enfolds stupidity. Because since they cancelled the stickers with different colors, which we protested, they made new stickers with less recognizable differences to the inexperienced eye, and here they are embarrassing themselves with unaware patronizing like, “Let’s award you with the status of a privileged person!” — so you don’t say that we aren’t humane. By the way, it happend to me also last week, when a senior security man who wanted to “show off” (maybe you’ll say he wanted to joke around, but we’ve already concluded that he doesn’t know how to joke around, see earlier “extraction of humor”) and asked one of his employees to get me one of the “regular” stickers and then winked at me as he continued to speak him: “Can’t you see it’s Mira Awad?”

So, the conclusion is, if you’re Israeli and your name is Awad – you better be famous! If not, forget about the duty free! Yalla, I’m out of here. For now.

An Israeli soldier shoots tear gas into a crowd of Palestinian protesters in Hebron. March 31, 2013 (Ryan Rodrick Beiler/Activestills.org)

As reported this week, settlers in the West Bank are complaining that tear gas fired at Palestinians during weekly unarmed protests gets carried by the wind to their settlements and creates major discomfort for them on Fridays.

But +972 has found out that this is only the tip of the iceberg. According to anonymous sources, Palestinians are planning to demonstrate on the eve of every Jewish holiday, besides Erev Shabbat, to make the chag as unbearable as they can.

27-year-old “M”, from Nabi Saleh, told +972: “We are interested in making the settlers suffer as much as possible, so we have decided to meet the army head-on every, how you call it – Erev Chag? Inshallah the army will pound us with as much gas as possible. I hope I nearly suffocate.”

When asked what would happen if the gas would drift into his village and not the nearby settlement, M responded: “It’s a chance we’re willing to take. If this Shavuot we manage to make one cheese cake bring tears to a family’s eyes – our job is done.”

“A”, 34, from Bilin: “We will demonstrate this Shavuot, and Tisha B’av and Rosh Hashana! I will go straight up to the IDF jeeps and risk a rubber bullet if it means a settler may whiff some tear gas! I am willing to risk my life so that next Channukah the settlers will cry over every latke they fry.”

Settlers are already reacting to the news, asking the IDF to respond appropriately. “We demand the IDF cease shooting tear gas canisters at high arcs, since the gas floats much more easily that way in our direction,” said Yehuda Cohen from Halamish. “If the IDF truly cares about Jews and their holidays, they’ll shoot the canisters directly at their bodies, with no arc at all.”

Yocheved Bar-Yehuda, also of Halamish, said that “I swear to God, if my cheese strudel with raisins, from my grandmother’s recipe who survived Auschwitz, even smells of tear gas – I will personally erect a new outpost and call it ‘Givat Cheese,’ or ‘Maale Strudel’.”

The IDF responded, “our guidelines for tear gas fire have not changed: direct fire at Palestinians is allowed only after every B’Tselem camera has been broken. We’re not taking any chances, even if it means some holiday tears.”
—————-
(The above is satire)

By Amos Noy / Café Gibraltar (translated by Matan Kaminer)

Istanbul, Turkey. (photo: John Virgolino/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

To ‘Amar, with fond remembrance.

Between the demand for “authenticity,” which, while conscious of itself, is impossible (and has something petty and repressive about it), and the option of assimilation, or “self-effacing imitation” – one form of cultural oppression (which is, of course, a form of political oppression) – there is also third option: cultural sovereignty.

I imagine that many visitors to cities such as Istanbul and Cairo have experienced, like me, the wonder that grows into a sort of joy at encountering a confident, proud city of the Levant, cognizant of its traditions and working within them. For an Israeli (that is, for me) who has only known occupied, subdued, desperate Middle Eastern cities and impoverished ghost towns sadly longing to be transported to the American Midwest, there is something about this experience – about the naturalness, the self-respect, the self-evidence of a language, music and poetry which have been denigrated by the dominant culture under which we have grown up – something exciting about the rediscovery of a cultural world, as well as of a hidden personal level, obscured, denied, deep within. A sensation of sovereignty.

Umm Kulthum performs “Enta El-Hobb”:

Or: sitting in an Algerian (Kabyle) bar in Paris, in a diverse, cosmopolitan space which is not the product of a flattening globalization, but that of a multicolored counterculture of “others.” There is solidarity between immigrants, where the soundtrack features Idir, Billie Holiday, Salif Keita, Janis Joplin, Anouar Brahem, Ilham Al-Madfai, Misia, Paco Ibañez doing Brassens and Rachid Taha covering The Clash, until it ends in tears when Umm Kulthum’s “Enta El-Hobb” (“You are the Love”) comes on. Not because we are at a conference on multiculturalism at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque or watching some gluttonous “Taverna” TV show [1], and not as part of a world-embracing declaration or a polemical demonstration or a damning statement, but just so – for no reason. Because that’s what the owner ‘Amar likes to hear. ‘Amar doesn’t ask anybody what to like and what (and why) to play, and sometimes he happens to get what his clients – free of complicated theories – like, or at least are curious to hear. They unknowingly help him create a bubble of cultural sovereignty.

Rachid Taha’s cover of The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah”:

Generally, many more subscribers of the Cairo Philharmonic listen to Mozart besides Ismahan and Leila Mourad, without knowing or caring that some boorish and uncultured European bourgeois or Tommy Lapid [2] type (and perhaps some finicky authenticity-loving purists from the “other” direction) demand that they choose between them. Because they are acting out of “cultural sovereignty” just as ‘Amir Benayoun does Tchaikovsky, without agonizing too much over West and East. Without “Tulkarem has conquered us“[3] or “you’re becoming Ashkenazi, bro.” Because if music is war, then I surrender in advance to all the belligerent parties. Woodie Guthrie’s wrote “this machine kills fascists” on his guitar, and Bob Marley sang: “one good thing about music – when it hits you feel no pain.” Because sovereignty is good.

Amir Benayoun covers Tchaikovsky’s Op. 50:

Laila Mourad’s “Laih Khalettny Ahebek”:

____________________

And it makes me wonder…

Settlers throw stones at Palestinians as IDF soldiers stand by in the West Bank village of Asira al Qibliya. April 30, 2013 (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Ring, ring! Ring, ring!

Operator: Atrocities Unlimited, how can I help you?

Palestine: Hello, my name is Palestine.

Operator: Hello Mr. Palestine, what can I do for you?

Palestine: Yes, well, I understand you end atrocities and human rights violations.

Operator: That’s very true. Are you suffering from an atrocity or human rights violation, sir?

Palestine: Yes, I am. I have been under occupation for 46 years.

Operator: Occupation?

Palestine: Yes, occupation.

Operator: Sir, you do understand that we assist on a Worst Come, First Serve basis?

Palestine: Excuse me?

Operator: A Worst Come, First Serve basis.

Palestine: What does that mean?

Operator: It means we deal with the worst atrocity first. You are not the worst atrocity, sir.

Palestine: I didn’t say I was, but… but… I am suffering.

Operator: I’m sure you’re suffering but there are others out there who need our help before you, sir.

Palestine: But…

Operator: …and until then you just have to sit quiet and wait your turn. Will that be it, sir?

Palestine: But wait! OK, OK… so, tell me where I am in line… can you do that?

Operator: 31.

Palestine: 31?!?!? There are 31 peoples before me?

Operator: Yes, sir.

Palestine: But, what does that mean? How long do I have to wait?

Operator: That depends.

Palestine: On what?

Operator: Many things. For example, if there’s an international intervention in Syria, you might move up a space or two.

Palestine: A space or two?

Operator: Yes, sir.

Palestine: I don’t feel well. Who else is in front of me?

Operator: Well, according to my board here, there’s some rough stuff going down in Sudan, China, Mali, Myanmar and others, to name a few. But, it’s all pretty fluid.

Palestine: So… You can’t tackle more than one at a time? I have to wait?

Operator: I’m afraid so, sir.

Palestine: But I’ve been waiting so long.

Operator: Well, have you tried a change of tactics?

Palestine: I’ve tried everything.

Operator: Patience, sir. All I can say is: patience. And thank you for calling Atrocities Unlimited!

By Edan Ring / Café Gibraltar

A Ukrainian klezmer wedding band, ca. 1925 (Menakhem Kipnis/Yivo Encyclopedia)

Family Day was no different from any other holiday. On this day, too, we received an assignment from our daughter’s kindergarten teacher. Only this time, we were slightly embarrassed. As part of the Family Day (formerly known as the Israeli version of Mother’s Day) celebrations, the kindergarten hosted a big meal, in which every parent was asked to bring an “ethnic dish” that is traditionally made in each home. At first thought, no “ethnic dish” came to either my nor my partner’s mind. After some more thought, we came to the conclusion that neither of us has any culinary tradition that was passed down to us from our grandparents’ homes. Of course, when I was young I ate gefilte fish, matzo breit and kugel on holidays. After my grandmother’s death, however, very little was left of this tradition, which, in any case, took place only once or twice a year. Tradition cannot be summarized only in terms of food, but also in other areas: most descendants of Eastern European Jews will have a hard time finding ways of reconnecting to their past.

I see young Mizrahim around me celebrating and reviving their ancestral cultures. Shortly after the events of Family Day at the kindergarten, I took part in the launch of the new Cafe Gibraltar website. The young Adi Keissar moved me with her words:

“My grandmother loved me with her heavy accent, with her Yemenite talk which I could never understand. As a girl I remember how I feared being alone with her, concerned that I would not understand what she was saying.”

I always understood my grandmother, but mostly because she did not talk much. She was a simple woman, the mother of my father, who, as everyone always said, “could not speak three languages.” As a young Pole, she fled Europe before the Holocaust and arrived in Montevideo, Uruguay, where she was married and had three boys. She wasn’t really able to properly learn Spanish, since she was a housewife. She cooked marvelously, but her children and grandchildren were not smart enough to document her tremendous culinary knowledge and pass it on.

This is how I found myself with sweet potatoes in the oven during my daughter’s Family Day meal. My grandmother moved to Israel with a mix of Yiddish and Spanish and was never able to properly learn Hebrew (she mixed up the gender pronouns until her very last day). Since she spent most of her life on the move, she didn’t have a clear cultural identity. I have no idea what songs were sung to her in her childhood or which stories she told my father. When she moved to Israel with my Zionist grandfather, they were once again considered “immigrants,” and passed the remainder of their lives in a struggle of livelihood, language, identity – and all against the neighboring Mizrahi immigrants.

And what was left for me? If I wanted to go back in time and search for the traces of my Jewish identity and culture, what would I find? Like many other Israelis whose ancestors lived outside of Europe for a generations or two before arriving in Israel, my family also warmly adopted the culture and identity of their intermediate station – in our case Uruguay. Ironically, our need for finding whatever cultural roots we could, turned us into quasi-Uruguayan patriots despite the fact that our Zionist parents traversed half the globe in order to raise us here. When you have no idea how and where your grandparents grew up, you are resigned to being satisfied with the achievements of Uruguay’s soccer team in the World Cup.

Since the founding of the State of Israel, the Ashkenazi elite has suppressed the Mizrahi culture Jews from Arab countries brought with them. But almost without us noticing, those Ashkenazim who led the Zionist project also erased whatever Eastern European Ashkenazi traditions that were left after the Holocaust. In an interview to Haaretz, Attorney Yifat Bitton said that for Asheknazi Jews in Israel,”classical music is also an issue of identity – thus doubly gain: they enjoy the music and they feel at home.” Tell that to my grandmother, who like many other Poles, Romanians and Russians, never heard of Beethoven or Brahms.

The Ashkenazim were on the winning side of the cultural struggle in Israel, and perhaps it is because of this that they did not feel the need to struggle to maintain their cultural identity. But on the losing side remained Ashkenazi culture, which is for the most part, very different from the white, European culture that came to define the new Zionist. These are the last moments in which we can save an Ashkenazi tradition that has nearly disappeared, although it is unclear if there is anyone who will do it.

Edan Ring is a Herzliya-based media consultant for political and social organizations. This piece was first published in Hebrew in Café Gibraltar.

God bless Israel – for the big America.

Now, of course I’m not saying that America exists thanks to Israel. But there’s something about the reversal of roles that rings true in an era where the Israeli prime minister feels he can intervene in an American election, or easily push aside new diplomacy efforts by an incoming secretary of state.

Ramallah (photo: Adi Koll)

Warning! This post will be long, controversial and without color photos, even though I have plenty of photos. I made sure to take pictures throughout the day with the intention posting them to Facebook so I can show what we would all rather forget. But now it feels pointless. No picture can describe what I’ve been through, and even if it could, it wouldn’t achieve anything but to ease the conscience of the viewers. There, we saw it, now we know what they go through. We don’t really need to do anything with that.

Well, you have no clue!

Even if I post a picture of the dirty, frozen compound at Qalandia Checkpoint that I passed yesterday on my way back from Ramallah, you wouldn’t be able to see and surely you wouldn’t be able to feel the humiliation and insults, like the permit-holding Palestinians who have to pass through it day after day. You won’t be able to hear the soldier who was barking at us (“Knesset member? Which Knesset exactly?”) through the sealed glass, demanding that we go back and forth, again and again for no reason at all. And there is no picture and no film that could explain the absurdity, according to which Qalandia, which is part of the Jerusalem Municipality (and its residents pay municipal taxes) does not receive basic services from Israel because it lies beyond the checkpoint, nor from the Palestinian Authority, because it’s outside their jurisdiction. A whole neighborhood which is now a no-man’s land.

More importantly, a picture can be misleading. If it’s an image of the bright and renovated Muqatah, which without much success tries to portray stability of governance, or [a picture] of the city of Rawabi – an artificial architectural catastrophe which aims to sell the Western bourgeois dream to the Palestinians – a four-bedroom apartment with windows on three sides – and thus silence their cries.

No picture. Not one picture would be able to tell the story of my dear friend Amjad. A businessman, who was born in Nablus and lives in Ramallah, married for a second time and father of three children (classic middle class), who lives under countless restrictions but insists that he lacks nothing except the safety of his children. Last week, his two boys came home and told him that during a football game in the neighbourhood they heard “this thing that soldiers used” (radio). Along with some of their friends, they decided to follow the voices until they “discovered” the soldiers, and then all together, threw stones at them.

Amjad, who sent his children to a Christian private school so they will get proper education and not be brainwashed, angrily forbade his children to throw stones or have any contact with soldiers. When they told him that everybody does it, he decided to forbid them from playing outside. He hasn’t slept at night since. He knows that 12-year-old kids don’t really listen to their parents, and he knows the peer pressure they face in their neighborhood. He also knows that he won’t be able to watch over them forever, and how easily children’s games can turn into skirmishes between imbalanced powers, which will result in bloodshed. And he is afraid.

And I am afraid, afraid that we will continue to live this way, and afraid of the fear.

I could post more photos, but not photos of Amjad, because if anyone around him knows that he has a friend in the Knesset, this could be the end of his business and perhaps the end of his life.

I could have posted more photos but I don’t want to. Photos would create a sense of normalcy in the situation. There is nothing normal about life in Ramallah, and there is nothing normal about us letting this happen.

That’s MK Adi Kol. I don’t agree with some of the stuff she says – I don’t think Palestinians are more “brainwashed” than we are – but I advise readers to listen to the emotion. Obviously, her visit was uncoordinated with authorities, a fact which made all the difference. Once you get to see and experience the way Palestinians’ lives really are – even for a brief moment – some feelings are inevitable. MK Koll is not “pro-Palestinian” or biased. It’s reality that is biased.

Related:
No end in sight: Occupation marks 45th anniversary
Israeli occupation: You have to see it to believe it