2008

There were 34 posts published in 2008 (this is page 3 of 4).

ID Blues (new documentary series by Chaim Yavin)

Last night, in the framework of the Jerusalem Int’l Film Festival, was the first public screening of the first two episodes of Chaim Yavin’s ID Blues (Teudah Kehula in Hebrew).

The series very effectively explores relations between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel (i.e., those who carry the blue Israel ID card).

As with his previous series Land of the Settlers, Yavin puts to good use his credentials and qualities. Name recognition, face recognition, and his iconic status in Israeli news media, play no small part in this. His sometimes belligerent interviewing style, acquired through years of grilling politicians, manages to draw people out, and his understanding of what makes good television keeps viewers engaged.

The five-part series was two years in the making – and not all of the work was finished in time for the film festival. Taken together, the series should provide an uncommonly penetrating view of Arabs in Israel, and their relations with the Jewish State.

In 2008, a series like this can’t afford to fail, can’t afford not to spread before Israelis the soiled and ragged fabric of Jewish – Arab coexistence. It’s almost too late. “Don’t talk to me any more of coexistence,” says Adel Manaa in the first episode, to a well-meaning sympathizer. “I’m sick of hearing about it. Talk to me of equal rights… If you aren’t doing something to change the situation, you bear responsibility for the consequences.”

After the screening, Yavin answered a few questions from the audience. One viewer asked him whether he felt optimistic or pessimistic for the future. Yavin said that he was by nature an optimist, and in this case drew his optimism from the simple fact that Jews and Arabs are in a relationship that eventually has to improve. “Neither they nor we are going anywhere.” Yavin emphasizes throughout the series his Zionism, but said afterwards that Zionism has to make some adjustments.

When the adjustments grow large enough to allow both Jewish Israelis and Palestinians to feel equally at home in the state that governs their mutual homeland, perhaps we will all be Zionists.

Thanks to Anat Tsom (co-screenwriter and editor) – whose sharp editing makes every moment of the series count – for inviting us to the screening.

Jews from the Amazon

M., originally from Barcelona and now in Jerusalem, had been a volunteer in Wahat al-Salam during the 2nd Gulf War. All the other volunteers had fled, before the airlines cut their flights Since that time I hadn’t seen her. I only knew that she had initially gone to live in Efrat (the West Bank settlement), where she had converted to Judaism. I assumed that she was still there and happily married to a religious Jew.

On Saturday afternoon, she suddenly showed up on our doorstep, together with a friend originally from Milano, and we spent an hour or two chatting.

M’s conversion to Judaism and settlement in Israel had resulted from an inner conviction that her true identity was Jewish. She was convinced, without much factual evidence, that she was descended from Spanish Jews. It wasn’t so much a spiritual identity: “I am not at all a religious person.” When we asked her how the conversion process had been for her, she said at first that it had been all right, then confessed, with a chuckle, that it had been terrible. The conversion, learning a language, and all the other hassles of adapting to a new country had been, she said, “a parenthesis in life”. During the process she had learned facts about Israel that would have daunted someone with a weaker personality or lesser sense of purpose.

Among the stories she told was her meeting during Hebrew studies with the “Jews of the Amazon”. Dorit and I had not heard that there were a group of people from Iquitos, Peru, who underwent conversion to Judaism, were brought to Israel, and then settled in Kiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement in Hebron. Dorit was incredulous at this story, and I resolved to check it. But apparently it’s true. I found a web page with an account by a progressive rabbi of his journey to meet them in Iquitos, in order to establish their connection with Judaism. They, like our friend M, believe that they are descended from Jews. The rabbi describes his encounter with them:

“Standard questions received very strange answers. “I think a Chassid is one that is glued”, said one, awkwardly correct. (Dvekut, the state of total attachment to God, is central in Chassidism). Some confused Purim with Chanukah and a Mezuzah with a Menorah, and yet with a little help, strange old stories came out: “My mother lit the seventeen candles every first of December”… “… Since the leprosaria is open every day 9 to 6, I arrive always a little late for washing the hands and go to Friday Shabbat services here in Iquitos…

“Tapir[13] is not kosher, but I don’t really know what is Kosher,” said a lady from Santa María de Nieva, six days away by boat into the deepest Amazon. And so the line between ignorance and different codes was, despite all our efforts, an uncertain line, adding up to our puzzle…”

He also mentions the Kiryat Arba connection:

“To make it even harder, reports of an orthodox nationalist Jewish preacher urging these people to settle in Kiryat Arba, Hebron, made us aware of a possibility for them that made our role as progressive Jews even more compelling, urgent. Our abstention could lead to a sin of omission, to a vacuum to be filled by a nationalistic, arrogant and humiliating Judaism, which may corrupt all we stand for as liberal Jews. We made it very clear that we were not signing the certificates for them to end up in a trailer on a Judean hilltop, thus blocking a peaceful, secure and democratic Israel, hopefully alongside a future peaceful Palestinian state. Danger loomed there as well.”

Well they ended up in Kiryat Arba after all, mate. The wonderful thing about Zionism is that its long arm can reach to the Amazonian jungles, the deserts of Africa, or the borders of Burma, discover people with the most marginal connection to Judaism, then spirit them away to Israel. All in order to win demographic points against Palestinians, many of whom are themselves descended from Jews.

The Nine O Clock News

I found myself turning the evening news off fairly quickly again tonight. The programme opened with an item about a government decision to investigate police wiretapping used as evidence in the investigation of a sexual harassment scandal involving a politician, several years ago. The TV news brings us stuff like that every evening, and I’m tired of it. The real news goes unreported, while this crap is placed in the spotlight. As if it weren’t bad enough that the politicians are doing a poor job of running the country, they also distract everyone else from crucial and pressing issues by their follies and crimes.

When people rely on TV news, they surrender to the editorial decisions of the TV news staffs. This is not true of newspapers, since readers simply choose the stories that appeal to them. And it is even less true of web media, where it is easier still to hone in on the topics that interest us.

Web media is still developing. Right now the situation is one of utter chaos. Traditional newspapers are going under since web advertizing revenues are not as lucrative as from print media. People look elsewhere, to sites like Craig’s List, for personal advertising and this robs the newspapers of one of their main sources of income.

Readers of web media are also widely different in their sophistication and preferences. Some are regular readers of news feeds, whereas others have never heard of them. Some prefer to read stories, others listen to podcasts, and others watch video clips. Some get their news emailed to them, some use services like Digg, Twine, or Google News. And the technology is changing all the time.

I’m personally an avid reader of news feeds, but have to admit that it isn’t easy to give myself a “balanced diet”. In my case, I find it easier to read the tech feeds like ReadWriteWeb and Slashdot, than to follow stories that are more important and relevant to my world. The reason is partly technical: the tech sites generally include whole stories in their news feeds, whereas newspaper sites are more stingy. They usually provide only a headline and a teaser, and hope that will be enough to get you to click through to their site for the rest.

Probably, as the technology develops, my habits will change accordingly. I bet I will find myself watching more video, and using various aggregators to pull in the items that most interest me.

But I have to admit that till today there is nothing as easy as watching half an hour of TV news. It’s so easy that after about ten minutes I’m gone – one way or another. Either way, I miss the weather.

’Day of Mindfulness’

Every six weeks the Israeli Thich Nhat Hanh sangha holds a day of mindfulness in the Pluralistic Spiritual Ctr and I join partly to manage the screening of a recorded dharma talk.

The last couple of times, besides the work with the projector, there have been lots of early morning preparations; this time carrying and assembling tables, so that I have wondered whether the day was more relaxing or stressful.

It’s a pleasant group of people to be with and the practice is meaningful for me, though sometimes I find it better to tune out and replace the long-winded visualizations and instructions with my personal practice.

As in workshops and seminars everywhere, one of the first items is the round of names, or whatever this is called in workshopese. This time the suggestion was to mention, besides one’s name and sangha connection, also a person or persons with whom we feel we would like to improve communication or come to understand better.

Some people named family members, such as sons or brothers. Others said they felt like they needed to understand themselves better or everyone better.

I suddenly remembered our visit to the prehistoric sites in Dordogne, near Plum Village (Thich Nhat Hanh’s retreat centre in France), and my fascination with the mysterious culture that had created paintings and drawings on cave walls. I had felt such a powerful desire to understand these people, because it seemed to me that if we could understand the motivations of these, our ancestors, we could better understand ourselves.

Dorit spoke to the sangha about the visit that she and Samiyeh made to the retreat and conference held by Thich Nhat Hanh in Hanoi.

The subject of Thich Nhat Hanh’s talk, in the recorded session we heard today, was a proposed letter to one of the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks. The directions he took in the talk were interesting. I would need to hear it at least one more time to grasp it well. But he said that one of the purposes of such a letter would be to come to understand our wrong perceptions, and perhaps to help the attacker to understand his wrong perceptions too. Thich Nhat Hanh said that peace making itself was about coming to understand wrong perceptions which lead to war and conflict.

Of all the people who spoke in the hours and days after the September 11 attacks, I remember that those of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama were the most significant to me at the time. All the world’s religions are receptacles of wisdom, and religious teachers can often offer spiritual insights into current events. However it seems to me that Buddhist teachers in particular have a quick grasp of the changes that our world is going through. Thus Thich Nhat Hanh dedicates great attention to the environment, whereas for so many other teachers it is still a non-issue. It is not surprising that a tradition that is based on mindfulness, flexibility of thinking, a rejection of dogma, and other positive traits, can be counted upon to give fresh insights into the challenges we face.

The end of school

I attended / sat through seven end-of-the-year school events this year. Six of them were at the WAS-NS primary school and I was there to take pictures. I do the same every year. The children perform various plays, skits, dances. The teachers show slide shows and talk about the past year. Parents read out long speeches, words of thanks, sometimes in rhyming couplets, which enter one of my ears and go out the other. I usually can’t follow more than the most obvious themes of the plays – partly because of the Hebrew / Arabic mix, partly because I’m busy taking pictures, partly because children naturally mumble their lines, and partly because I’m just pretty thick when it comes to dramatic content.

But I do absorb general impressions, squinting upward at the sunlight filtering through my murky waters. You can tell when a teacher is full of light, speaks from the heart, is loving, and has given all she can give to her class. We have a few such teachers at the primary school. No amount of murky water could hide this, and I was touched.

The seventh end-of-the year happening was my youngest son’s graduation from Tsafit high school. Five other kids from Wahat al-Salam graduated with him. Four of these are Arabs. At the school, they were a tiny minority. And the graduation event probably left them feeling even more alienated.

The artistic part of the evening was given to a series of plays, skits and dances on the theme of life changes from babyhood to adulthood. The backdrop was a canvas with drawing of each of these transitions. The final drawing showed a helmeted soldier, making a wooden salute.

Yotam says the school hired at no small expense an external professional manager, who wrote the script and managed the entire production. The young people invested much time and effort and this paid off in a very professional production.

The main weakness was the blandness of the theme. Parents could enjoy the cuteness of youth, sigh nostalgically and listen to the medley of old songs. The captive audience heard nothing that would challenge their ideology, belief system, or acceptance of the status quo. There were no progressive themes, and nothing to upset the Israeli ideal of school followed by military service to the nation, The Zionist and militaristic themes were particularly obvious to the Arab parents (as the only outsiders). One of whom said that if this had been a TV program, she would have been able to switch channels.

Krishnamurti, speaking before his time, used to say that schools should teach children to question authority and all the received notions about their role in society. I’m sure among educators such ideas are no longer revolutionary. But they haven’t properly been absorbed here.

Tsafit, which probably has more potential than an average state high school to provide the kids with a good education and critical thinking skills, makes many compromises. The result is a crop of graduates whose unquestioning next step is either 3 years of military service, or a year of civil service, to be followed by military service afterwards.

There may even be a regression. At the graduation evening of my eldest son, Yonatan, the school kids put on a production of the 70s musical “Hair”, with its antiwar theme. When I described it to Yotam, he said there’s no way the present group at his school would have done something like that.

That these graduates accept the pattern and the role imposed on them by the establishment and so few offer any resistance shows that, on the one hand, the school has not sufficiently encouraged the development of critical thinking and, on the other hand, it has actively led these young people to believe they have no moral alternative to military service. They have absorbed this message, made it their own, and will pass it on to their own children.

After the graduation, we came home.

Children from Tulkarm, and a birthday party

This morning went to take pictures of the art workshop for the kids from Tulkarm – most of them are from the refugee camp. They arrived yesterday, and their main activity was to create some paintings, together with children from the WAS-NS school.

Roos, A woman from the Dutch Embassy, which sponsored the project, came along. As we watched the children painting, I asked Roos if she thought these could be Dutch children. She said “sure!” I remarked that the children in our region are known to be cheeky and undisciplined, but she said this was true also of Holland. Anyway, as we talked the children were fairly quiet and focussed on their work.

Children are children everywhere. It was hard sometimes to see which were the refugee kids and which were ordinary pupils at our school. But we know that the Tulkarm children come from very difficult conditions – the overcrowding and poverty of the refugee camp. Tulkarm is virtually a prison, blocked off by the separation barrier and army checkpoints. Although the children live close to the sea, they have never visited it, and for most of them this was their first trip beyond the narrow confines of military occupation. Some of their paintings showed explosions and people being shot and killed by the army. The military vehicles they drew were not the stereotyped tanks such as any child might draw, but armored personnel carriers, which they had obviously seen themselves.

In the afternoon, they visited the swimming pool. None of them can swim, but they had lots of fun in the water. One girl said she wanted to stay and go to our school. And that leads to the inevitable question about whether it is kindness or cruelty to take these children out for a day.

In the evening we went to Ruti’s birthday party. I sat next to Rabiah, an Arab woman who works at the hotel. She has a similar diet to me: vegetarian, with a dislike for garlic and eggs – basically a yoga diet, though she came to it naturally.

Having left her husband, Rabiah raises her three children alone. The youngest in high school, though Rabiah herself is quite young, having married early. During the meal the conversation turned to Hezzie’s surprise at meeting one of his former pupils, who is already married and pregnant, at the age of 15. Rabiah explained that in the village in which this girl lives it is the custom to marry young, illegal though it might be. They get the qadi to marry them, then wait for a few years to register the marriage with the civil authorities. In the adjoining village, where Rabiah lives, the attitude is different – with men and women often waiting until their late 20s before getting married.

Another subject of conversation was an Israeli-Palestinian encounter workshop that Norit had suffered through. She had found herself in a situation where her views diverged widely from those of the other Jewish participants. These were mostly moderate leftists, who weighted every statement in favour of peace and justice with strong “buts”, as Norit put it. She mentioned a former soldier who had talked about patrolling the streets of Hebron. He said that despite his armour and weaponry, he had felt more scared and confused than the Palestinians around him.

Norit said that she had an easier time with determined right-wingers than with these leftists. By agreeing with many of the statements of the Palestinians about Israel and the occupation, she managed both to alienate the Jewish participants and to irritate the Palestinians, who wanted someone they could argue with.

Norit said that the most memorable statements for her had been those of a Palestinian participant who, like her, was regarded as a traitor by his own group. He had praised a mukhtar of an Arab village who, in the 1948 war, had chosen to surrender to the Jewish side. As a result, the village had been spared, and is still there today, whereas otherwise it would have been wiped out and its citizens killed or forced into exile. “Sometimes the bravest decision is to surrender,” she said.

Hello wordpress!

Today I started a new version of the hieronymouse blog under WordPress.  My purpose in changing the blog over from the SPIP CMS was to enable some additional features I’d been missing, like writing through third-party software.

There is no auto-magical way of importing the old material from SPIP so, in the meantime, that will coexist at http://blog.hieronymouse.com.  I’ve also been blogging at myopera.com and other places, to add to the chaos.

Actually, I think that non-networked blogs are becoming a little passé in the world of social networks.  I will be importing posts from hieronymouse.com into Facebook Notes, and possibly other places.  However, I don’t feel totally comfortable about surrendering control of personal data to such services.  A better solution may be to store original material on a self-hosted site, and just link to that through RSS or other techniques.

As before, this blog is hosted at Ouvaton.coop, the French web cooperative that is possibly the only noncommercial hosting service on the internet.  If you find another, let me know.

Writing, and Writers’ programs on Linux

Daughter Ella left for Barcelona this afternoon, to meet up with the Rainbow gathering, currently near the town of Leon.  Doesn’t seem like long since she came home from India. Europe will be different for her. During her year in Sicily, she didn’t travel very much – now it’s another phase in her life.

One of her deliberations was whether to take a camera. Eventually she decided on her old Rebel – a film camera. When I first traveled to India, I didn’t take a camera. I wasn’t sure about preserving memories, or maybe it was about preserving them by mechanical means – hard to remember one’s ideologies of thirty years ago.

Lately I’ve been thinking that not taking travel pictures might encourage me to do more writing. I found a couple of writing programs that work under Linux. There’s yWriter 4, by Spacejock. That’s a free program that runs under Wine / Crossover (Windows emulators for Linux). At least it’s supposed to run. I didn’t managed to get it to work properly. You type and nothing appears on the page. Like a mechanically induced writers’ block, or the machine version of those nightmares where you scream but are unable to produce sound. Perhaps now, after reinstalling under Crossover 8 / Wine 1.0 it will work better.

However, the other program I discovered looks good too. This is a multi-platform suite called Writers’ Cafe. It isn’t, unfortunately, a free open source program (though the Mac version is free).

The most convenient computer for writing, of course, is my ageless Psion. Its AA batteries last a month and the thing clips neatly onto my belt.  Not so inspiring to type on the small keyboard and grey screen but when the spirit moves me these details are forgotten.  Perhaps now, with the emergence of a line of computers like the Ee PC, we are moving back again towards convenient handhelds.

Touring nearby villages

One of the things I like about my job is that I never know exactly what I’m going to be doing on a particular day. But today I did, since Ahmad had asked me the evening before to escort a guest, who is here in order to represent a family foundation, to various places from which children come to our school. That’s over twenty towns and villages in the area, though fortunately we didn’t have to go to all of them. She wanted to concentrate on a few from which she had interviewed children, whose daily travel expenses the foundation will help to support.

So we started with various moshavs (semi-collective villages) in the area. Since she spends much of her time in India, she was surprised to learn that some of these nearby moshavs are populated by Jews from Kochin, in Kerala. One of these, Messilat Tsion, even has streets named after the old country. I told her about efforts to preserve the cultural heritage of these Kochini Jews that had been made by the Hebrew University (collection of old songbooks, formation of a choir, production of a disk). We also visited larger towns, like Beit Shemesh, Modi’in and Abu Ghosh, and a couple of kibbutzes. During this long journey we had the opportunity to discuss many things, from contemporary politics to spiritual influences. She had once been a professional dancer, and a student of classical Indian dance. Today she maintains a connection with her spiritual teacher, Satya Sai Baba, and is involved in working with orphans in Orissa. She was interested in what I could tell her about the founder of our village, Father Bruno Hussar.

Tomorrow our guest flies back to India and, in the afternoon, I made the first stage of preparations for my own trip there, planned for later this summer: a visit to the Travelers’ clinic in Lod. That involved a battery of vaccinations – two in each arm, and prescriptions for more drugs against dysentery and malaria. The doctor said one of the side effects of the malaria drug can be nightmares. Ella’s friend didn’t recommend – she says it “plays with your head” too much.

Meanwhile I’ve been reading Shantaram, a 900 page novel based on the adventures of an Australian ex-convict in Bombay / Mumbai. Quite a story.