The meeting of Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi and Molla Shams al-Din in Konya (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Due to the influx of gay tourists who arrived in Tel Aviv for Pride Week, we can say with some certainty that more Belgians and Danes marched in the Gay Pride Parade than Palestinian citizens of Israel. That’s not just because of the understandable need for the gay Arab population to maintain a low profile. Gay Palestinian organizations boycott pride events because they consider them examples of “pinkwashing” – presenting Israel as enlightened due to its treatment of homosexuals, while denying the human rights of others.

Al Qaws (The Rainbow), familiar to the gay community in Israel mainly because of the queer Palestinian parties it holds in Tel Aviv, was among the organizations that did not encourage its members to march in the parade. But Al Qaws did not ignore Pride Week – it provided an alternative. On the Thursday prior to the parade, Al Qaws members met at Cafe Dina in Jaffa, with people from the Qadita website, for an event called “Reading Queer Texts in Arabic.”

Qadita is a site founded by Alaa Khlakhal and is dedicated to culture and criticism in Arabic. It offers its readers a rare and permanent column of often artistically ambitious queer writing, edited by Raji Bathish. “The Israeli LGBT culture is fully interwoven with Israeli militarist culture,” says Bathish. “It tries to emulate the Israeli mainstream, in the central Tel Avivian, hetero-normative sense, with its army and gyms. The queer movement needs to change the system and social structure from the base, rather than reaffirm them, and the LGBT movement here only deepens the system of oppression.”

The name of Bathish’s column, hosting diverse works of literature and commentary, was recently changed from “Gays and Texts” to “The Queer Text Corner,” in an attempt to separate it from the Arabic-language gay blog culture prevalent in the Middle East, to stress queerness as a principle, and to create a clear reference to literature. The event celebrating it, attended by about 40 men and women, was a break from the mainstream pride events not only in its use of the Arabic language, but also in its focus on challenging content.

Activist, cultural figure, and DJ Muhammad Jabali spoke about queer traditions in...

The author putting on last touches before heading out for the parade. Would you be rough with someone wearing a headband?

A note added on 6/10/12: I’ve been doing some thinking since this post was first composed, and I’m not sure that I am entirely comfortable with it. In fact, I am more receptive to criticism in the comments than ever before. The critics are right: I did act in a way that was disrespectful to hard working policemen, condemned to stand in the hot sun. They are also right in regarding the story as possibly trivial. It was a specific incident that does not shed light on issues such as pinkwashing. It could have likely happened everywhere, which would mean that my hypothesis on the sanctity of fences in Israel is not founded and that a table at the bar would make a better platform for this story than +972.

Thing is, we Israelis aren’t only Israeli, we’re human, and when human beings are treated with undue roughness, they feel a need to discuss it and ask questions. This post was written out of a state of slight shock. I really was treated rather brutally and certainly more physically by the police than I was ever before, and ended up distraught and depressed for the remainder of the day. The fact that I was in drag doubtlessly contributed to my experience. Drag makes a man vulnerable and it may not be too much to ask that the police treat a man in drag with extra care and gentleness rather than vice versa, especially on gay pride.

And now for the post in question:

Tel Aviv pride tends to be a bit of a nightmare, meteorology-wise.  Summer always chooses to arrive in full force on the day of the parade. The streets picked for its course are viciously shadeless, and hands waving rainbow flags get colored bit by bit with a single hue of the rainbow: sunburn red.

I still march, yearly. I pride myself for being the first Israeli to have come out of the closet as a heterosexual cross-dresser. Last year saw the publication of my book “The Tel Avivian comedy”, in which I explain this tendency and tell of the long road to accepting it. The media took a great interest in...

The preoccupation with Iran and migrants is calculated to deflect attention from the empty public purse, our shattered health system, the disintegrated education system and our pretend welfare system. The renewed protest movement will be different, but it is the only way to save democracy and save ourselves. The demonstrations on Saturday need to reignite the struggle for the future.

I first published this call to action yesterday on Hebrew Website “Mako.” It was translated into English by Sol Salbe.

"The decapitated man speaks - illusion and reality" (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Danielle, a social studies coordinator in a high school in the north, told her students that large scale demonstrations are expected to take place on Saturday evening in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv. The students responded enthusiastically: “Great! Let’s demonstrate against those Sudanese people, let’s boot them out of here!”

Danielle needed two sentences to explain to her students that the demonstration is not directed against asylum seekers – it is an attempt to reignite the struggle to correct Israel’s warped economy. After a 40-minute conversation, the students understood that the issue of African asylum seekers is more complicated than they previously thought. They also gathered that there’s no point marching blindly in the footsteps of those politicians who are good at inciting while not coming up with any feasible solution to anyone’s problems.

The manner in which the students ignored issues directly related to their own future, focusing instead on booting out Africans, is no coincidence. It is a testimony to the success of the distractive sleights of hand used by Netanyahu and his cohorts to divert attention from what we learned last summer. Like a great magician, Netanyahu has focused on creating illusions.

When, at long last, we last year ventured a look at our empty savings accounts, and at our dilapidated health, education and welfare systems; when we noticed those moneyed men and women getting rich at our expense, Netanyahu quickly deflected our gaze to Iran. Later on he was ably abetted by Interior Minister Eli Yishai and Knesset members from the right who directed our fire at refugees. Today, we can barely recall the reason why we all went out into the streets.

Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the growth of the refugee population are not trivial matters. These...

This week, Israel’s national theatre, Habima, will bring its production of “The Merchant of Venice” to London, as part of the Globe Theatre’s multi-linguial Shakespeare festival. The following is a review of the Palestinian contribution to the same festival: Ashtar Theatre’s Richard II. It originally appeared in Hebrew in the Tel Aviv culture magazine Achbar Ha’ir.

Richard II of England, a portrait from the 1380s (image: Wikimedia Commons)

Once upon a time, in a distant land, I had a good friend named Inge. She was Danish and lived in Denmark, but looked like a Native American princess and loved to rebel against Danish values. I had the honor of joining her for the wedding of her sister, in a small village in northern Jutland. Inge disliked formality and protocol. She let her son attend the church service wearing the t-shirt of some metal band and a baseball hat. She did not ask him to remove his hat when entering the church.

Following the service, we got into her car and waited for her son, who popped over to the restrooms. Inge looked impatiently at the pastel dresses and neckties entering other cars and said, “Something is rotten in the state of…” She then hesitated and asked, “In which state?”

This question surprised me. “Denmark,” I said.

“Really? Denmark?”

“Yeah.”

“Ah, I thought we only say ‘Denmark’ because we’re Danish, and that you guys, for example, would say ‘Something is rotten in the state of Israel.’”

I’m thinking back to this story in another European land – England chilled by a gray May. It says something about Shakespeare’s place in world culture. Almost every culture has adopted the Bard’s creations, making them its own, really its own. The line “To be or not to be,” taken from the same play in which Denmark produces a stench, is a key phrase in the literature of many languages, including Hebrew. Something really is rotten in the State of Israel, and this is exactly what Sheakspeare meant for us to see. He is a perfect poet, because his Hamlet deals with our reality, with that of contemporary Denmark, with that of medieval Denmark and with that of the author’s own homeland all at the same time.

This month in London, we could see how poignantly he treated Palestinian reality....

On the holiday of Shavout, the Book of Ruth is traditionally read in synagogues. I took an afternoon to ponder this tiny yet meaningful tome, and realized just how significant it is these days.

"Summer" by Leopold Karl Walter Graf Von Kalckreuth (image: Wikimedia commons)

Agriculture The Book of Ruth is a beautiful pastoral, set in fields of barley, in which the sheaths themselves play a part in the love story. While traveling for my recent project “The Round Trip,” I found myself again and again charmed by the Holy Land’s fields of grain: expanses of ripened wheat near Beit Shean, harvested fields near Ashkelon, and traditional patches of Barley, sown by Bedouin in the northern West Bank. Some things don’t change, even in our heavily industrialized reality. Other things do, however.

This year on Shavout, as we near the traditional holiday reading of the Book of Ruth, shattered glass still cover sidewalks in south Tel Aviv, where cynical politicians stirred violent rage against African asylum seekers. The contrast between the values of this Biblical tale of a love shared by a Jew and a foreigner, and those of contemporary Israeli politics, are harsher than ever.

Bethlehem Ruth’s homeland is Moab, a region located in today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The town to which she immigrates, Bethlehem, is in the West Bank. In the years following the 1967 war, a “Ruth” would have been shot on the spot by the IDF for attempting to move between these two territories. Following the Oslo accords, visits by Jordanian citizens to the West Bank have been made possible, and legal immigration became possible through family connections (known as “family unifications”). The number of requests granted changes with the political climate, and it is my understanding that as of 2009 family unifications are de facto no longer a reality. Many holders of tourist visas are said to have remained in the West Bank over the years, bereft of documentation that would allow them to travel from town to town through Israeli checkpoints. The Ruths are out there, but they are stuck in Bethlehem and can’t even visit the shopping mall in Hebron.

Cheese isn’t mentioned in the book at all. The correlation made by Israelis between Shavuot and dairy products is entirely contrived. It was likely dreamed...

A reflection on last night’s protests against racism, with photos by Sasha Y. Kimel

The demonstration following Wednesday night’s race riots was the mellowest I’ve seen here in years. Several hundred of concerned Israelis gathered in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and marched to symbols of the political system that produced the incitement: the Knesset in Jerusalem, the headquarters of the Likud party in Tel Aviv. No confrontations with police were reported.

This should not be taken as a sign that liberal Israelis view the events as trivial. Many of my friends and myself were so shocked and depressed at Wednesday’s news, that we found expressing our feelings difficult. I did not manage to write anything on the subject, neither in Hebrew nor in English, neither an op-ed nor a song.

The demonstration was to take place in the Tikva neighborhood itself, but was moved from there so as to prevent further violence. Activists also feared being taken for enemies of south Tel Aviv’s Jewish residents, neglected for decades, whose plight is now being used by cynical politicians, and preferred to clearly target those politicians themselves. Determined but exhausted, we took to the streets solemnly.

To many of us, the broken windows, looting and attacks on African passersby carried a clear memory of atrocities committed against Jews in Europe, and the internet was overflowing with references to pogroms and to Kristallnacht. It comes as no suprise then, that the resulting protest march felt somewhat more like a memorial event than a demo.

A night has passed since. As I write these words, violence tolerated by the government and incited by right-wing politicians is raging again, as it does daily. Right now, fields around the village of Madama, near Nablus, are burning, having been set on fire by Jewish settlers from nearby Yitzhar. The area is under Israeli control, but the Israelis do not supply villages with adequate fire control and the villagers must struggle to extinguish the fire themselves.

The Israeli right, which permits settler violence and which incites the residents of South Tel Aviv to violence, is now more powerful and more extreme than ever before. The few of us left untouched by its constant fear-mongering and unconvinced by its...

It was 2:00 AM when we arrived at St. Pancras station. 2:00 AM London time is 4:00 AM Tel Aviv time, and we were certainly still on Tel Aviv time. In a way, we were still in Tel Aviv altogether, or perhaps somewhere in between the two – in the cold sky over Bulgaria or Slovakia. The soul is said to be chasing the body when it is taken away by a jet plane. It only catches up with it several days later.

We stepped into a cab and were surprised by how roomy it was, as well as by the fact that it was driven by a lady, an uncommon sight around our own neighborhood. The air outside the cab was chilly and smelled of large trees and fried food, inside was a unique, inimitable, London cab smell. We were in an environment entirely foreign to us yet felt instantly very much at home. For an Ashkenazi Israeli, Europe will always be a home of sorts. The soul of our nation apparently hasn’t yet caught up with Zionism. It is still on its way from the grassy knolls of our grandparents’ homelands, baffled to behold us flying the other direction in Easy Jet planes.

Our longing for Europe’s mix of the familiar and the exotic grows, the more hopeless Israel’s situation becomes. The rise of fascism, the growing disregard for human rights, the gradual disappearance of our freedom of speech, all of these cause concerned young Israelis, whether Ashkenazi or otherwise, to reconsider their future on the soil of the Holy Land and look west.

Israel is losing its educated, concerned young generation to other countries, ironically: mostly to Germany. The new emigrants (let’s call them “newgoers”) are different from emigrants of decades past, termed “Descenders” in Zionist lingo, which views Israel as elevated above the rest of the world. While the descenders of the ’70s and ’80s were motivated for the most part by economic factors, the newgoers are often driven by a dread of Israeli politics and a sense that they no longer belong in Israel. It is a sense that our government gladly reinforces, mainly via supporting legislation that delegitimizes dissent.

By deliberately alienating this public, Netanyahu’s government is causing what I term a “heart-drain.” Israelis who hold a point of view that isn’t entirely tribal,...

From Ashdod to Tel-Aviv via Yavne, Rehovot and Jaffa, the final leg. 

The sun is setting over Ashdod, where Ruthie and I came to relax following the hospital experience. There is nothing wrong with Ashkelon, but Ashdod, a fifteen minute drive up the super-urbanized coast, somehow turned into our romantic getaway over the past few months. We even came here for our Valentine’s Day date.

If you wonder about this strange attraction to a modern mammoth of a port city, ask our taste buds. Ashdod is Israel’s answer to Palestinian Nablus: a culinary paradise of a town, and while Nablus is about local tradition, Ashdod is about foreign ones, brought here by Jewish immigrants from their native lands.

An exception is Israel’s best Chinese restaurant, Chon Lee. A Chinese Jewish diaspora does exist, with centers in Harbin and Shanghai, but the owner at Chon Lee happens to be from Taiwan. In any case, his children all served in the IDF, so he’s as good as Jewish by the local book.

The only way to improve on a dinner at Chon Lee is by grabbing a pint at “Nash Miesto” (“Our Bar”), the best Russian bar in Israel. It was here that I ended the full day I devoted to Ashdod on the September Journey, as well as the day I dedicated to the Russian community on the Christmas journey.

Ilya is in the house and so is his wife, whose name I never catch, and they are both surprised at the size of my beard. This is what a man looks like near the end of a long journey. I am truly near the end now. In fact, I am determined to conclude the journey tonight, despite the concussion and having lain on a hospital bed only this morning. It’s around 10:00 p.m. right now, and for the moment there’s still time to relax in Nash Miesto. Ilya brings out a guitar and I take my best shot at singing “Exhausted Sum.”

Before leaving Ashdod I take a photo of another culinary palace. The Mamounia building was...

From Nir Oz to Askelon via Agadir, the land of broken pots and the city of dirty bunkers

Ewan and I build a fire outside Kmehin, both to warm ourselves and to impress a very special newcomer. Ruthie is here. She took the train to Beer Sheva, then caught a bus to the border and made it on time to enjoy the fireworks.

After both fireworks and fire die down, the big sphere of flames rises again over the desert and allows us to take a good look at our whereabouts. We are in one rare corner of the Negev that is sandy, and Kmehin is prettily nestled in pink dunes.

West of here, across the border, the terrain is sandier still, so sandy that the man-made, straight line distinguishing Israel from Egypt can be seen from space, as seen here on the lower left-hand side (image: Wikimedia Commons/TheCuriousGnome).

Close to the coast, it is agricultural land in Israel and dense urbanity in the Gaza Strip that contrast with the sparsely populated Sinai, but further south, desert meets desert and the border should have been invisible. The effect is caused here by goats and tanks. In the Sinai, livestock eats most of the vegetation, while in Israel, where the land is used as firing ranges by the IDF, Bedouins are banned from grazing their herds in the expanses. Thus, the Israeli dunes remain dotted with low brush, which dyes them a darker brown.

The driver who takes the three of us through the sagebrush would love to see the dunes used differently. “They could have had a wonderful nature reserve here,” he says, “It could be a joy to all, if only we changed our perspective a little bit. This area is completely contaminated with military. You need to live here in order to really see that, we can’t move freely in any direction: here there’s a fence, there a firing range…”

His name is Yinon and he lives in Kibbutz Kissufim, where he also grew up. Kissufim is located very close to the fence with which Israel surrounded the Gaza Strip. Yinon is thus one of the Israelis...

From Eilat to Kmehin via Eritrea, the days of yore, and the middle of nowhere

Tonight at sundown, the Day of Remembrance for Fallen Soldiers and Victims of Terrorism will begin. I picked a fitting city in which to pass this evening. Eilat is the one Israeli town that never knew war. In 1948, Palmach units arrived at this stretch of coastline and found it vacant. The forces of the Arab legion withdrew of their own accord, and the minute hamlet of Umm Rashrash was abandoned. The combatants produced a flag using a bed sheet and a small ink jar and got young Israel an opening to the Red Sea. Terrorism did find its way here in later decades, and the occasional missile shot from within the Sinai falls here, but such incidents are rare. I am about to receive Memorial Day in a city of peace.

Before the radio begins to play nothing but sad Hebrew songs for 24 hours, I must go and seek out the community that is currently Eilat’s most talked-about. Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers, who made their way here overland from their troubled countries, are to be seen everywhere, but it takes a stroll uphill to Los Angeles Street to arrive in the midst of their small quarter, or “pletzl,” as the Yiddish term goes.

In the small internet cafe and DVD library pictured above, nobody is thrilled to share his or her story. “What good would it do?” is the question they keep asking, “How could it possibly help?” I try to explain that I’m not necessarily here in order to help, but that passing on voices from the community certainly would not hurt. For the most part, the asylum seekers are badly received in Israel, especially by our right-wing politicians. The Knesset recently passed a law that literally outlaws being a refugee. Asylum seekers are to be automatically imprisoned for a minimum of three years without trial. The biggest penitentiary on earth is soon to be built in the desert for this purpose.

The common propaganda line on the asylum seekers is that they are actually work migrants in disguise. Since I will be paying generously with my tax...

From Taba to Taba via trouble.

The government issued a severe travel warning, urging Israelis to stay out of the Sinai Peninsula. I’ve bumped into those occasionally in newspapers and on the radio over the past few days, yet am still planning to venture in briefly. It’s not that I doubt the sincerety of the warning: while much Israeli fear-mongering is unfounded propaganda, Sinai terror alerts are sometimes followed by a fair bit of blood. I simply owe my readers and myself a true taste of the Egyptian border.

This will be a difficult border to follow. The road running along it within Israel, Route 10, is commonly closed to civilian traffic. Since the disengagement from Gaza, no border crossing with Egypt serves Israeli civilians besides the one at Taba, just south of Eilat. For a glimpse of our largest and most fabled neighbor, I arrive in the morning at the first of two hotels that Aboud the boat owner had pointed out to me yesterday.

Directly across from it floats an Israeli Navy boat.

Then, a mere two-minute walk southward, a new land appears before the traveler: mighty Egypt, the singing heart of the Middle East, land of the Pharaohs, of Tahrir, and of kushari, that awful mix of lentils, rice and macaroni which may well be the most sorry excuse for food known to mankind.

Photos of Mubarak no longer grace the entry terminal, and have not yet been replaced by photos of anyone else. The jury is still out.

My passage is smooth, since the queues are short. Taba, on the other side, is a vacant boulevard running between three shiny white hotels and overlooked by the communication towers of police stations. It may very well be the eeriest place known to mankind, at least today. A group of Romanian pilgrims heading for St. Catherine’s monestary piles into a tour bus and vanishes. I now share this entire lunar Champs Elysee with four local taxi drivers.

They soon learn that I’m not going anywhere, and get annoyed. One of them, named Uda, gets annoyed in...

From Aqaba to Eilat via an intolerant electric appliances store, a metaphoric volleyball court, and a strange play of reflections.

The first thing I notice in Jordan is a picture. It is hanging over my hotel bed: a representation of Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem in its “before” state (for its “after” state, see the end of part 13).

The second thing I notice are tall curbs. Jordan has insane curbs and consequently so do many West Bank cities, which were once subject to Jordanian civil engineers. I figure that such curbs impede parking on sidewalks, but they must also force people in wheelchairs to phone-order every meal they eat.

At a small roasted-chicken eatery, I notice the pull tab on my soda can. You tell me that this place has a strong relationship with recent history (say, the 80s) and a less strong connection with environmentalism.

Having also noticed that the sockets here are of the square-toothed British breed, I step into a electric appliances store, asking for a converter. While looking for one, the owner asks me where I am from. This place may resemble Jenin and Ramallah in language and religious affiliation, it may even be inhabited mostly by Palestinians, but I am present here legally and need not pretend. “Israel,” I say.

“Then I don’t have a converter. I have nothing for you.” He leaves the drawers be, straightens up and looks my way impatiently, waiting for me to leave.

This is never a good feeling, but it’s worse now, since I really do need a converter or I’ll lag another day behind on my posting. By now it is past 10:00 p.m., this shop is open by sheer miracle, but will not serve me. What to do?

I recall how, after being arrested in Dura on the September journey, the officer interrogated me on my attitude towards his people’s national aspirations, then praised me for being “min jama’at as-salaam” – belonging to the brotherhood of peace.

I give it a shot: “I belong to the brotherhood of peace.”

“Ah,” he raises his brows. “So you’re not an Israeli?”

“Whatever, not Israeli.”

His demeanor changes sharply....

From Neot Hakikar to the Arava border crossing, via a land bereft of food, a plant for neutering flies and the home of a two-headed snake.

Zoe, Mairav and I are looking for something to eat. We head down to Neot Hakikar, a small moshav on the southernmost tip of the Dead Sea. Google claims that it is home to a restaurant named “Fata Morgana” (a mirage).

“I hope it doesn’t vanish when we reach it,” Mairav says.

The restaurant is real enough, but only feeds large groups and only with advanced reservation. The other culinary establishment in town, a tiny diner named “Pnina’s,”  fails to work our appetite. A sign posted to the window promises corn schnitzels, the Israeli vegetarian’s frozen delight.

Neot Hakikar is no Paris when it comes to food, but, as in the case of Ein Gedi, it is literally a flowering garden in the heart of the desert.

To the south the garden is flanked by stout rocky hills, while to the north and east plantations of date palms stretch to the Jordanian border.

All of this is stunning, but we need food. We head back to the main road and turn to the south. I recall a small roadside rest area near moshav Hatzeva, where busses stop over on their way from Eilat to Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv. Halfway there we pass a peculiar structure standing atop a small mesa overlooking the road. Hungry or not, this calls for a stop.

What is this place? In a land in love with signs and plaques, here is a rare exception. It reminds me of old Indian observatories. Mairav and Zoe mention Gaudi.

Gaudi = Barcelona = La boqueria, Cheese and sausages, tapas from the sea, manchego and jamon, xuixos stuffed with creme Catalan, wine and sangria. On, on to the rest stop!

Disappointingly, it only offers two fast-food franchises, both of them equally dull and uninspiring. One is a “Burger Ranch”, the other – an “Aroma” cafe and sandwich shop. For travelers, even starving travelers, food is a means to a cause. We would like to...