I used to enjoy cruising through Walnut Creek Christmas morning. Streetlights change from red to green to red, directing traffic that isn't there. In the normally bustling Broadway Plaza, empty nylon bags and unswept leaves swirl in front of the dark, deserted shops. I can stroll up to the movie ticket counter five minutes before showtime and still grab the best seat. The world feels like some post-apocalyptic dreamscape.
American immigrants love the 25th in Israel for the opposite reason. No more jolly red-suited fat men, fake snow spray painted on the drugstore windows, Styrofoam reindeer, interminable loop-tracks of jingle bells over the loudspeakers, or flashing lights. Free at last! Free at last! Thank gawd Almighty, I'm free at last! Occasionally, though, someone just has to bring it up. "Hey everybody, it's December 25th! Ha ha, look at me, I'm so unselfconscious I didn't even notice that it's the 25th."
For a telecommuter like me, it's a double-freebie. I get the day off from work, but here in Israel, home turf, it's business as usual. So I decided to spend my free day riding the Israeli bureaucratic merry-go-round. First stop: Interior ministry. My Michtav Ma'avar, the document certifying that I am permitted to leave the country for three months after landing, has expired, as has my legal right to renounce Israeli citizenship. The next step is to get my Teudat Ma'avar, a temporary passport. I take a number, wait an hour, and get to see the clerk. The paperwork is perfect, but of course there's a hitch; the passport photos I had taken at the mall are the wrong size. So it's downstairs and out the door and around the corner to the photo store to take new passport photos. Then it's back in the line at the door for a pat-down and metal detector sweep, something most Israelis just accept as a part of living but never ceases to tick me off. Damn bombers, forcing me to put checkpoints in front of every building, wasting precious minutes of my day. Then it's back up three flights of stairs, cut ahead of everyone and hand my photos to the clerk who staples them to my paperwork, back downstairs, and I'm out on the street with ten minutes to spare to get to my Tanach class at the yeshiva. Which is a thirty minute walk. Darn. So I hail a cab after cab, but they're all full, until a cabbie driving the opposite direction makes a screeching U-turn across traffic and swoops along the road to scoop me up.
"Where to?" Arabic accent. I know some Jews who simply won't ride with Arab cabbies.
"Kiryat Mosheh. Rechov Hame'iri" American accent. I hop in.
"Do you mind if I speak English?" he asks in English.
"No, go ahead." Most Arabs I've met prefer to speak English over Hebrew. It's a dignity thing. Not to assimilate. I can respect it, since I have no illusions about the ability of a free western society to absorb the eastern mentality.
"I don't know Rechov Hame'iri is. Do you?""Yes, It's off Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Street. I'll direct you."
"You mind if I smoke?""Go ahead," I tell him, taking a stand for reason over superstition, having just read an article concluding that, despite hyperbole to the contrary, there is no repeatable scientific study indicating that second hand smoke causes cancer. Who knows if it's true, but it feels good to be different. Taking a moment to grasp my surroundings, I notice that the car in front of us has green and white license plates entirely in Arabic, unlike Israeli yellow and black plates with Hebrew and Arabic.
"Where is that car from?" I ask the cabbie.
"It could be Egypt, could be Jordan, could be the gulf. Who knows?"
Egypt and Jordan are possible, since Israel has treaties with them, but, "The gulf? What would they be doing here?"
"Believe me, everybody wants to live here. I live in [majority Arab] East Jerusalem. There are Arabs from Dubai, Qatar, all over, living there."
"How do they get here? It's not like there's a peace treaty with them or anything. We're still at war."
"Money. If you have money, you can buy anything. But some day there will be peace. Soon, I pray! There's no reason for war."
This is about the only dialogue an Arab and a Jew can have here. He sees the yarmulke on my head and can probably guess my conservative politics. And I know enough about all the terror cells and training camps broken up in east Jerusalem. But we're stuck together for the cab ride, and he's trying to be polite.
He's just made a right turn. Off Bezalel, which leads straight to Kiryat Moshe. Now we're on Ben Zvi, at least a five minute detour in this traffic, and the meter is ticking. It's a part of Arab culture that I have encountered time and time again and have come to hate; the immediate use and betrayal of the tiniest trust for advantage. He knows it's a detour. I know it's a detour. He suspects that I know it's a detour, but he knows that I'm American, and because he was polite to me, I will be too courteous to call his bluff. I should have paid attention when we switched to the right turn lane. I shouldn't have trusted. The meter ticks another 30 agurot out of my pocket and into his bank account. Well, if I don't get a free ride, neither does he.
"There isn't going to be peace. Not soon, not in a hundred years, and not in a thousand."
He's taken aback by my bluntness. It's not like his people to answer directly.
"Look, what do I need in life? Really? A house, a car, a good school for my children. All we need is peace.""I was here in 2000," I tell him, "and it felt so close. There were treaties, meetings. Everyone thought it was going to be the end of war. Then, boom, the intifada. Bombings and killings. Whenever we think we're close, that's when the war gets the worst."
Usually at this point I'm confronted with the tsunami of Arab grievances; that the Jews stole my house/poisoned my well/made the rain stop/made me bald, so who wouldn't blow themselves up? But I'm not the neutral tourist this time, and he knows I'm not going to buy it.
"It's the leaders. The people want peace, but the leaders don't."Ah yes. I've heard this one before too, that the middle east has leader's disease. That if only whoever was in charge would expire, then all the problems would go away. Except it's not the leaders who are strapping on bombs.
"Sorry," I say as we pull up to the yeshiva and I hand him 22 shekels, "but I don't buy it. I want peace, but I don't see it ever happening."
"Well, I still believe. Salamalakum, have a good day."I don't move to get up. The Israeli flags hanging from the facade of the Yeshiva flap in the breeze. The cabbie makes like he's filling out paperwork, waiting for me to get out. I look at the meter. 21.30 shekels.
"You owe me seventy agurot."
"Oh, really? Why? How much did you give me?"
"Twenty two." It would have been fifteen without the detour."Oh, yes, okay, no problem. Here you are."
Torah study, afternoon prayers, and lunch successfully accomplished, I'm back on the street on my half-hour walk towards Ben Yehuda and King George street when I hear a bus revving behind me. I glance back and see the fourteen. A familiar number, but I didn't know it comes all the way out to Kiryat Moshe. Let's see, where does the fourteen go? Yes! It's going downtown, and right to my intersection! I sprint up to the stop and force myself onto the bus, compressing the crowd further in just enough to fit inside the hydraulic doors. Ten minutes later, I'm at my intersection and talking to the clerk at MEMES, the Israeli Triple-A, trying to get my American driver's license switched over to Israeli.
"No, we don't do that here any more. You have to go to the Peninat Yerushalayim Hotel. It's by the Jaffa Gate."
Another half hour of urban hiking later, I'm at the hotel door. Bag search, metal detector sweep, damn bombers. "Drivers license? Bottom floor, to the right."I walk into the driver's school, which consists of one clerk at a desk.
"I want to transfer my license over from California to Israel.""Okay, you need to go next door, have an eye exam, and then get the green approval form. Then, you need to come back here and I will give you further paperwork. Then, you need to go to your doctor and have him sign off that you're in good health. Then, you need to go to the motor vehicles department in Talpiot and have your form stamped. Then, you need to come back here and I will give you two driving lessons. Have you ever driven before?" "Yes."
"In Israel?"
"No."
"Then I should probably give you three lessons. Then I will give you the test, and you will have your license. But you want to make sure that you pass the test because if you fail you will have to pay hundreds and hundreds of shekels like all the other Israelis." I wander next door to the eye doctor.
"I'm looking for the green paper."
Groomed, suited, and deliberate in his body language, the eye doctor responds in impeccable Hebrew with a hint of an Arabic accent, "Yes, sir, that would be the Tokef. My name is Achmed. Please have a seat." He lifts his camera, and I notice a blue background behind me when -FLASH- before I realize that I'm being photographed.
"Please come this way, sir, and look through the viewglass at this screen. Now, if you would please read the numbers from left to right."
It's part of Arab culture that I love, the thoughtful politeness you don't hear in Jewish Israel. It's a relief.
"One five seven nine three. Is that photograph you just took going to be the one on my license?"
"Yes, it will. And will you please now read with your right eye.""Nine four three seven. How did it come out?""Very handsome. You look just like my younger brother. How many colors do you see?"
"Three."
"Now, I'm going to flash some lights, tell me if you see them in the right or left eye."
"Right..."
"You know," he interjects, "my brother lives in Lebanon."
So I could pass for Lebanese? Perhaps my unspoken-
"Left..."
-fantasy of infiltrating Hizbullah isn't so outlandish after all. Wait a minute, so how did Dr. Achmed get-
"Right.."
-here? It's not as if there's an open border between Israel and-
"Right..."
-Lebanon. After all, we just had war with them. There are only three-
"Left..."
-possibilities. Either both brothers were both born here and his brother met a girl and-
"Left..."
-left Israel for Lebanon, or they were born in Lebanon and he-
"Left..."
-married an Israeli Arab and moved here under the family reunification-
"Right..."
-law. Or it could be he was born in Lebanon as a Christian and-
"Right..."
-fought with the South Lebanese Army, Israel's Christian ally against Hizbullah in the 1990's, until Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 1999 and gave-
"Left..."
-sanctuary to the South Lebanese. But then he wouldn't be working on Christmas, would he?
"Your vision is excellent," he tells me, pulling the green Tokef form from the laser printer. My photograph is in the top left corner, eyes glazed and confused, hair unkempt. If I look like his brother, his brother must be a heroin addict.
Should I ask his story? Would I believe whatever he told me? And if I didn't, would I have to disbelieve his courtesy, gentility, sweet words as another farce? I let it go. There might be quiet here some day, but there will never be trust.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Aliyah 2006 / Hitnatkut IV (the final post.)
Before I finish my Hitnatkut post, I'd like to welcome all of the new olim (immigrants) who arrived from the United States today, including Nefesh B'Nefesh's 10,000th oleh. Every year sees an even higher number of western olim, and this year was no exception. Way to go, Nefesh b'Nefesh. And, at least from the photos, it would seem this group has a preponderance of pretty young women. Again, way to go Nefesh B'Nefesh!
Credit for these pictures goes Jacob Richman, who posted them on his website.
Below is part 4 of my Hitnatkut post. For previous parts, click below:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
To the west stands Tel Tzion, several rows of massive, brand-new, urban-sized apartment blocks, groomed trees, and tight streets, amidst rocky outcroppings and ramshackle goat pens. It’s as if a chunk of Rechavia went wandering off into the desert and sat down here.
“It’s the Haredi [ultra-orthodox] neighborhood,” he explains. “It’s built on a hill of Kochav Yaakov. It’s still technically a neighborhood of ours, but they are eventually going to break off and form their own municipality.”
Past Tel Tzion, the spires of Arab northern Jerusalem and Ramallah point skyward. The Arab buildings closest to the settlement, about three quarters of a mile to the west, stand empty.
“They build the same as we do, using Saudi oil money, help from their friends. Nobody lives in those houses, they were built to stake a claim. We used to have good relations with Ramallah; I could drive in there, go grocery shopping, and leave my car door unlocked, but since the peace process it’s become too dangerous. [Late prime minister] Rabin built the bypass road,” he says, pointing to the black strip of asphalt wriggling through the desert east of the settlement, “in order to give away Ramallah, which the main road from Jerusalem passes through to get here. It was a part of the Oslo process, but it was also there to make us feel doomed, like we were next on his list so we had better clear out. But it’s had the opposite effect; the road shortened the commute time because it avoids the city, so now instead of taking forty minutes to get to Jerusalem it takes fifteen. Settlements that had been struggling for years with just a few trailers started growing with families who could now commute to their jobs in Jerusalem. So, we see, a thing of evil can be turned to serve the good.”
Piecing the map together, the strategy in building here becomes clear. In a row, north of us are Beit El and Psagot. To the south is Adom, and my own Jerusalem suburb of Pisgat Ze’ev. To the west of this living wall is Arab Ramallah and North Jerusalem. To the east, save for a couple of small Arab villages, large Jewish hilltop towns and smaller outposts, lies mostly empty desert clear through to Jordan. This axis of settlements was built to hold the line against the eastward expansion of Ramallah.
It’s a tactical move in a larger slow motion struggle not of tanks and troops, but bulldozers, cement mixers, and maternity wards. The timescale is measured not in days or months, but decades. After long experience with broken promises, betrayed international resolutions, and hollow military victories, Israel found that the only way to hold any piece of land was to build there permanently. So the legions of buildings face off against one another, row upon row of identical Jewish apartment blocks lined up as the soldiers of a proper western army standing at attention; the chaotic, organic mass of Arab Ramallah looking eerily like the ununiformed irregulars who attacked Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt in 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006.
Walking along the hilltop, Rabbi Feld tugs my arm to keep me from falling into an ancient, recently excavated olive press. The hill is alive with the evidence of early Jewish habitation. Cisterns, wells, mikvehs, the outlines of ancient homes, terraces, and burial caves carved out of the rock in every direction. Another gust of wind slaps me so hard I have to use my hand to pin my kippah on my head.
“You know,” I think out loud, “you could generate quite a bit of electricity if you were to put a wind turbine up here.””I must admit, I’ve thought about it myself. Would it pay to do?””You would have to do some research on average wind velocities over the course of a year,” now my brain is churning, “and you would have to anchor it, although this limestone is probably sufficient. You would need an inverter and some batteries to hold you over if there were no wind for a while. Think about it, if you had enough of them, you could generate enough power for the whole town.”Of course my mind is already envisoning vast fields of wind turbines across the open stretches of Samarian desert. “How do you get land here?”
“Look,” he explains, “there’s no way to own land here. Like anywhere in Israel, the government owns everything, so you can only lease it for like 199 years at a time. But we’re happy to let anyone use the land who wants to. See that house out there?” he asks, pointing to a small house and olive orchard off by itself, way, way beyond the fence, under the shadow of the Ramallah suburb of Jaba, “He’s a gardener with ten kids. The olive trees aren’t mature yet, but he’s hoping to retire on them eventually. We had another woman who wanted to build an amusement park on the hillside down there. She had approval and everything, but when the Oslo War…” that’s how settlers refer to the second Initifadah, linking it to the failed Oslo peace negotiations, “…started, she knew that nobody would be coming out there so she had to give it up. But there’s nothing stopping you.”
“How did this whole settlement get started?”
“In the eighties, the army built an antenna on this hilltop. Then, they sent a squad of soldiers to camp out and guard the antenna. At first the soldiers thought it was just a fun camping trip for a few weeks in the field, but then the army sent more soldiers. Later, they replaced the tents with trailers. Afterwards, the first of us civilians moved out here and replaced the soldiers. When I first moved here…” he starts off. I’ve heard this one from the old timers in every town, whether it’s on a Samarian hilltop or a sprawling Tel Aviv suburb. Stories of how there was no running water, no trees, no birds, no grass. It always starts off with nothing, “…there was nothing here. Today, thousands.”
It’s a very different story from isolated Elon Moreh, which was built by settlers and destroyed by the army seven times before the army finally relented. But this settlement is strategic, built not on the basis of faith but the strategy of stopping Ramallah from gobbling up the Judean desert. It’s the sort of project a hard-nosed irreligious general could get behind. But the people moved here didn’t come for strategic reasons, they arrived on faith. Strategic Israel is today in serious retreat, while the Israel of faith continues to advance. Kochav Ya’akov is now beyond the security fence, “out there,” outside the constantly contracting borders of strategic Israel, and therefore not worth the effort. The Hitnatkut was the first direct confrontation of strategic Israel against the Israel of faith, and it ended, at least in the short term, with a defeat for the Israel of faith. This defeat places a serious question mark over the future of Kochav Ya’akov. But it’s a question they’ve had to deal with from day one, and one to which they have an answer: build.
Credit for these pictures goes Jacob Richman, who posted them on his website.
Below is part 4 of my Hitnatkut post. For previous parts, click below:Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
To the west stands Tel Tzion, several rows of massive, brand-new, urban-sized apartment blocks, groomed trees, and tight streets, amidst rocky outcroppings and ramshackle goat pens. It’s as if a chunk of Rechavia went wandering off into the desert and sat down here.
“It’s the Haredi [ultra-orthodox] neighborhood,” he explains. “It’s built on a hill of Kochav Yaakov. It’s still technically a neighborhood of ours, but they are eventually going to break off and form their own municipality.”
Past Tel Tzion, the spires of Arab northern Jerusalem and Ramallah point skyward. The Arab buildings closest to the settlement, about three quarters of a mile to the west, stand empty.
“They build the same as we do, using Saudi oil money, help from their friends. Nobody lives in those houses, they were built to stake a claim. We used to have good relations with Ramallah; I could drive in there, go grocery shopping, and leave my car door unlocked, but since the peace process it’s become too dangerous. [Late prime minister] Rabin built the bypass road,” he says, pointing to the black strip of asphalt wriggling through the desert east of the settlement, “in order to give away Ramallah, which the main road from Jerusalem passes through to get here. It was a part of the Oslo process, but it was also there to make us feel doomed, like we were next on his list so we had better clear out. But it’s had the opposite effect; the road shortened the commute time because it avoids the city, so now instead of taking forty minutes to get to Jerusalem it takes fifteen. Settlements that had been struggling for years with just a few trailers started growing with families who could now commute to their jobs in Jerusalem. So, we see, a thing of evil can be turned to serve the good.”
Piecing the map together, the strategy in building here becomes clear. In a row, north of us are Beit El and Psagot. To the south is Adom, and my own Jerusalem suburb of Pisgat Ze’ev. To the west of this living wall is Arab Ramallah and North Jerusalem. To the east, save for a couple of small Arab villages, large Jewish hilltop towns and smaller outposts, lies mostly empty desert clear through to Jordan. This axis of settlements was built to hold the line against the eastward expansion of Ramallah.
It’s a tactical move in a larger slow motion struggle not of tanks and troops, but bulldozers, cement mixers, and maternity wards. The timescale is measured not in days or months, but decades. After long experience with broken promises, betrayed international resolutions, and hollow military victories, Israel found that the only way to hold any piece of land was to build there permanently. So the legions of buildings face off against one another, row upon row of identical Jewish apartment blocks lined up as the soldiers of a proper western army standing at attention; the chaotic, organic mass of Arab Ramallah looking eerily like the ununiformed irregulars who attacked Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt in 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006.
Walking along the hilltop, Rabbi Feld tugs my arm to keep me from falling into an ancient, recently excavated olive press. The hill is alive with the evidence of early Jewish habitation. Cisterns, wells, mikvehs, the outlines of ancient homes, terraces, and burial caves carved out of the rock in every direction. Another gust of wind slaps me so hard I have to use my hand to pin my kippah on my head.
“You know,” I think out loud, “you could generate quite a bit of electricity if you were to put a wind turbine up here.””I must admit, I’ve thought about it myself. Would it pay to do?””You would have to do some research on average wind velocities over the course of a year,” now my brain is churning, “and you would have to anchor it, although this limestone is probably sufficient. You would need an inverter and some batteries to hold you over if there were no wind for a while. Think about it, if you had enough of them, you could generate enough power for the whole town.”Of course my mind is already envisoning vast fields of wind turbines across the open stretches of Samarian desert. “How do you get land here?”
“Look,” he explains, “there’s no way to own land here. Like anywhere in Israel, the government owns everything, so you can only lease it for like 199 years at a time. But we’re happy to let anyone use the land who wants to. See that house out there?” he asks, pointing to a small house and olive orchard off by itself, way, way beyond the fence, under the shadow of the Ramallah suburb of Jaba, “He’s a gardener with ten kids. The olive trees aren’t mature yet, but he’s hoping to retire on them eventually. We had another woman who wanted to build an amusement park on the hillside down there. She had approval and everything, but when the Oslo War…” that’s how settlers refer to the second Initifadah, linking it to the failed Oslo peace negotiations, “…started, she knew that nobody would be coming out there so she had to give it up. But there’s nothing stopping you.”
“How did this whole settlement get started?”
“In the eighties, the army built an antenna on this hilltop. Then, they sent a squad of soldiers to camp out and guard the antenna. At first the soldiers thought it was just a fun camping trip for a few weeks in the field, but then the army sent more soldiers. Later, they replaced the tents with trailers. Afterwards, the first of us civilians moved out here and replaced the soldiers. When I first moved here…” he starts off. I’ve heard this one from the old timers in every town, whether it’s on a Samarian hilltop or a sprawling Tel Aviv suburb. Stories of how there was no running water, no trees, no birds, no grass. It always starts off with nothing, “…there was nothing here. Today, thousands.”
It’s a very different story from isolated Elon Moreh, which was built by settlers and destroyed by the army seven times before the army finally relented. But this settlement is strategic, built not on the basis of faith but the strategy of stopping Ramallah from gobbling up the Judean desert. It’s the sort of project a hard-nosed irreligious general could get behind. But the people moved here didn’t come for strategic reasons, they arrived on faith. Strategic Israel is today in serious retreat, while the Israel of faith continues to advance. Kochav Ya’akov is now beyond the security fence, “out there,” outside the constantly contracting borders of strategic Israel, and therefore not worth the effort. The Hitnatkut was the first direct confrontation of strategic Israel against the Israel of faith, and it ended, at least in the short term, with a defeat for the Israel of faith. This defeat places a serious question mark over the future of Kochav Ya’akov. But it’s a question they’ve had to deal with from day one, and one to which they have an answer: build.
Hitnatkut
I've posted my last four posts on the Hitnatkut in their entirety below:
Pointing over the Shabbat table at the wall mural, Naftali stretches the limits of his Hebrew vocabulary, "Pretty.... picture."
"That's okay," Rabbi Feld, our Shabbat host tells him, "we're American. You can speak English." An American immigrant himself, and one of the founders of the settlement of Kochav Ya'akov, he obviously experienced the same language difficulties himself years ago.
Naftali laughs uncomfortably and stares at the floor. Time to intervene.
"Naftali doesn't like to speak English on Shabbat, only Hebrew," I tell our host. "It's a holy day so he only wants to speak the holy language."
"Oh," Rabbi Feld responds, and continues in Hebrew, "I'm glad you like the picture."
Naftali shuffles his feet.
"You should also know," I tell him, "that he's only been in Israel for three months. He can't speak Hebrew either. He's on such a high spiritual level that he can't keep up with himself."
"Well," Rabbi Feld continues, "it's a portrait of the Beit Hamikdash." The holy temple, as described in the Torah. You can find images of the holy temple in every religious home in Israel. Except...
"Is that the Park Hotel in the background?" I ask.
"Yeah, we asked the artist to plant it in modern Jerusalem. And there," he says, pointing to the next wall mural, "are the settlements of Gush Katif rebuilt."
Pointing over the Shabbat table at the wall mural, Naftali stretches the limits of his Hebrew vocabulary, "Pretty.... picture."
"That's okay," Rabbi Feld, our Shabbat host tells him, "we're American. You can speak English." An American immigrant himself, and one of the founders of the settlement of Kochav Ya'akov, he obviously experienced the same language difficulties himself years ago.
Naftali laughs uncomfortably and stares at the floor. Time to intervene.
"Naftali doesn't like to speak English on Shabbat, only Hebrew," I tell our host. "It's a holy day so he only wants to speak the holy language."
"Oh," Rabbi Feld responds, and continues in Hebrew, "I'm glad you like the picture."
Naftali shuffles his feet.
"You should also know," I tell him, "that he's only been in Israel for three months. He can't speak Hebrew either. He's on such a high spiritual level that he can't keep up with himself."
"Well," Rabbi Feld continues, "it's a portrait of the Beit Hamikdash." The holy temple, as described in the Torah. You can find images of the holy temple in every religious home in Israel. Except...
"Is that the Park Hotel in the background?" I ask.
"Yeah, we asked the artist to plant it in modern Jerusalem. And there," he says, pointing to the next wall mural, "are the settlements of Gush Katif rebuilt."
Children play in Kochav Ya'akov
Over a year has passed since the when the Israeli government destroyed the Jewish settlements of Gush Katif, the Jewish community of Gaza, but the trauma seared on the national consciousness is so raw that it still hurts to the touch. The process had a fancy name, "Hitnatkut," meaning disconnection, or disengagement. It's related to the Hebrew word "Lenatek," to hang up (the phone.) After a decade of interminable negotiations with Muhammed abu-This and Muhammed abu-That for worthless treaties which everyone knew they would violate anyway, it seemed so much simpler to just hang up the phone on them all. No more "windows of opportunity" or "carrots and sticks." They could take their carrot and choke on it.
But when it came time to do the deed, the slick "Hitnatkut" political spin crashed headlong into the messy reality of nuts-and-bolts ethnic cleansing. Minds throughout the country are still indelibly etched with the memory of Jewish policemen and soldiers dragging screaming children and weeping mothers from their homes, army bulldozers reducing modest villas and manicured gardens to rubble, and convoys of now homeless Jewish refugees dumped in the desert. These were scenes associated with Jewish life in previous centuries throughout Europe and Araby, not modern Israel.
Despite the tendency of Israel to constantly tear itself apart with stubborn and conflicting ideologies, the country also has a subconscious sense of just how far it can go before coming apart at the seams, and a desire to avoid charging over that cliff. Today, even among the left, there is a desire to slow the process of Hitnatkut which began with Gush Katif. The rhetoric of the need for further settlement destruction and outrage at Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice line is still heard, but since the Lebanon war, it has remained in the realm of words, not serious political pressure. The economy is strong, the north is recovering from the war with Lebanon, and, if you don't live within rocket range of Gaza, life is relatively quiet, so the attitude is, "Let's just recover from Gush Katif before we open up that can of worms again."
Within the Dati Leumi, or national religious movement, of which I am a part, the fabric of society is still seriously tattered. Unlike other Jewish religious groups who rejected secular Zionism due to the sneering anti-religious attitudes of its early leaders, the Dati Leumi community embraced certain truly Jewish concepts within the Zionist movement, including the mitzvot (Torah commandments) for social harmony and the settling of the land, while leaving the secularism, which they regarded as nonsense, in the garbage. Dati Leumi Jews, who comprise by some estimates around 7% of Israel’s population serve in the army, fill the ranks of the best combat units, and comprise over half of the officer corps. But since the Hitnatkut, attitudes towards the state are changing, as Sasha and Yitzchak tried to explain on my recent visit to Harsina.
"Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu," Sasha says, referring to the former Chief Rabbi of Israel and present spiritual leader of the Dati Leumi community, "instructed religious soldiers that if they followed these orders they would be committing a serious aveirah (violating a commandment.) The army told us that if we disobeyed orders we would be sent to prison. You must understand how conflicted we felt. It's a mitzvah to serve in the army and protect the nation. But the army was now being used to destroy the settlements."
"Well, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner," Yitzchak counters, referring to the respected Head of the Ateret Cohanim Yeshivah in the old city of Jerusalem, "said that we must obey orders, even if we are crying while we do it. It's similar to observing Shabbat (sabbath.) Ideally, the entire Jewish people would keep Shabbat, but we would never force them to. Once the nation made the decision to commit this aveirah, we couldn't force them not to, we could only do everything in our power to convince them of their mistake."
"If I see a Jew who isn't keeping Shabbat," Sasha answers, "I try to convince him of his mistake, but I don't force him. But if the government tells me to violate Shabbat, then I must refuse, no matter what. They were forcing us to violate the commandment to settle the land."
"But," Yitzhak counters, "if we tell them that we refuse to follow orders because we don't agree with them, then suppose a leftist soldier who is opposed to the settlements refuses to protect them? Can soldiers choose their missions? The army would fall apart."
In the end, only a few soldiers disobeyed orders. It's still a source of bitterness between the rabbis who advocated for and against refusal, as well as between the soldiers and their religious leaders.
The most deeply felt sense of betrayal, however, is directed towards greater Israeli society. Sure, the thinking went, there were a few sniveling surrender-monkey elites who got all the media attention, but most of the nation should have been on board. Conservative and religious newspapers predicted massive protests, refusals, strikes, and virtual civil war to prevent the Hitnatkut. When the time came to take to the streets, there certainly were the protests, roadblocks, and piles of burning tires across the country, but they were carried out by the same activists who show up to all the other demonstrations. The strongest stance most Israelis took was to curse at the images on their television screens. The massive cities in the center with idealistic names like “Rishon Letzion” (first in Zion), and “Petach Tikvah” (Opening of Hope,) founded a century ago by small bands of idealistic pioneers just like those in Gaza, had long since extinguished their Zionist flame. The values inculcated in the settlements; raising large families, building the land, and forging a connection to history, values once held by most Israelis, were now outdated. The settlers who thought themselves the locomotive pulling the rest of the Zionist train up the mountain realized that they had disengaged from the train, which was sliding back down the hill.
Many had to rethink the relationship a religious Jew should have to the state. As my neighbor Tzvi put it, "My son trained for years in high school to go into an elite unit as soon as he graduated. Now that he's graduated, he decided to delay enlistment for a year and learn in yeshivah. After all, what's the point of trying to be the best when you're just going to be dragging people out of their homes?"
But in the settlements, there’s still an optimistic sense of forward momentum.
“Do you worry that what happened to Gush Katif will happen to Kochav Ya’akov?” I ask Rabbi Feld.
“I’ve been here through five governments. Each one of them wanted to destroy this place at some point. They’re gone, we’re here.”
It’s a similar sentiment I heard expressed five years ago. Headlines tell us that all of these communities could be uprooted at any time, but the willingness to take the risk of building here required that such logic be set aside. It forces the settlers to focus their eyes on the future only. But then he adds something I haven’t heard before.
“It could happen. But all you can do is pray and build.”
Child dancing on dumpster, the neighboring settlement of Psagot in the background.
The aura of unstoppable destiny is gone, but the goals and the means are still intact. He passes around the table a photograph of a lonely one-room house in sea of dead, rocky fields.
"This is was taken in 1929. It's Rechavia."
I take a second look at what stood, and more noticeably what was absent, in what is now one of Jerusalem's wealthiest established neighborhoods packed with high rise apartment complexes and swanky housing. Eighty years ago, where the Prime Minister's house stands today, was just a tuft of weeds.
"Today, if a thousand Jews move to or from Rechaviah, it won't make a difference. It's permanently Jewish land. But if a thousand Jews moved out here, the land becomes ours. God willing we will bring so many Jews out here that there can never be another Hitnatkut. Imagine if there had been one hundred thousand Jews in Gaza instead of seven thousand. There wouldn't have been any way they could get us out of there."
So the building continues. Standing at the peak of Kochav Yaakov the next morning, the driving wind kicks up a dusty haze in the valleys, but it’s still possible to see the fifteen miles or so to Jordan. The hilltop is sprinkled with trailers, makeshift goat pens, and corrugated tin shacks.
“This is a good place for a couple to make a start,” Rabbi Feld says, “rent for a trailer is only a couple hundred shekels a month. You’d pay at least six or seven hundred dollars for the same sized apartment in Jerusalem. They come out here and live for a few years to save money. Once they’re ready to get started, some move into the city, but some decide to stay in the community and build their homes here. But if you really want to live for nothing, you can go out there,” he says, pointing to the next hilltop about a mile and a half east, to the uniform white trailers gripping the wind worn limestone summit.
Remembering the terminology of Elon Moreh, I ask, “Is that Kochav Yaakov B?”
“It was. Now it’s called Migron. We built it a few years ago. It’s outside of our fence, but inside the settlement’s municipal boundary. Last year, Sharon got it in his head to destroy the place.” Sharon. The bulldozer. Israel’s now incapacitated but then powerful Prime Minister. “It was ridiculous. We had gotten all the proper permits, everything was above board. It was so legitimate that even the banks were loaning out money to start construction. But it was politics.”
“So why is it still there?”
“We called in people from all the surrounding settlements. Thousands and thousands sat on that hilltop and waited. Only a couple hundred police showed up, so there was nothing they could do. They went home to come back another day. Pretty soon everybody forgot about it and moved on.”
To the west stands Tel Tzion, several rows of massive, brand-new, urban-sized apartment blocks, groomed trees, and tight streets, amidst rocky outcroppings and ramshackle goat pens. It’s as if a chunk of Rechavia went wandering off into the desert and sat down here.
“It’s the Haredi [ultra-orthodox] neighborhood,” he explains. “It’s built on a hill of Kochav Yaakov. It’s still technically a neighborhood of ours, but they are eventually going to break off and form their own municipality.”
Foreground: Kochav Ya'akov; Background: Migron
Past Tel Tzion, the spires of Arab northern Jerusalem and Ramallah point skyward. The Arab buildings closest to the settlement, about three quarters of a mile to the west, stand empty.
“They build the same as we do, using Saudi oil money, help from their friends. Nobody lives in those houses, they were built to stake a claim. We used to have good relations with Ramallah; I could drive in there, go grocery shopping, and leave my car door unlocked, but since the peace process it’s become too dangerous. [Late prime minister] Rabin built the bypass road,” he says, pointing to the black strip of asphalt wriggling through the desert east of the settlement, “in order to give away Ramallah, which the main road from Jerusalem passes through to get here. It was a part of the Oslo process, but it was also there to make us feel doomed, like we were next on his list so we had better clear out. But it’s had the opposite effect; the road shortened the commute time because it avoids the city, so now instead of taking forty minutes to get to Jerusalem it takes fifteen. Settlements that had been struggling for years with just a few trailers started growing with families who could now commute to their jobs in Jerusalem. So, we see, a thing of evil can be turned to serve the good.”
Standing on the summit of Kochav Ya'akov, midground: Jaba; Background: Ma'aleh Adumim
Piecing the map together, the strategy in building here becomes clear. In a row, north of us are Beit El and Psagot. To the south is Adom, and my own Jerusalem suburb of Pisgat Ze’ev. To the west of this living wall is Arab Ramallah and North Jerusalem. To the east, save for a couple of small Arab villages, large Jewish hilltop towns and smaller outposts, lies mostly empty desert clear through to Jordan. This axis of settlements was built to hold the line against the eastward expansion of Ramallah.
It’s a tactical move in a larger slow motion struggle not of tanks and troops, but bulldozers, cement mixers, and maternity wards. The timescale is measured not in days or months, but decades. After long experience with broken promises, betrayed international resolutions, and hollow military victories, Israel found that the only way to hold any piece of land was to build there permanently. So the legions of buildings face off against one another, row upon row of identical Jewish apartment blocks lined up as the soldiers of a proper western army standing at attention; the chaotic, organic mass of Arab Ramallah looking eerily like the ununiformed irregulars who attacked Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt in 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, and 2006.
Walking along the hilltop, Rabbi Feld tugs my arm to keep me from falling into an ancient, recently excavated olive press. The hill is alive with the evidence of early Jewish habitation. Cisterns, wells, mikvehs, the outlines of ancient homes, terraces, and burial caves carved out of the rock in every direction. Another gust of wind slaps me so hard I have to use my hand to pin my kippah on my head.
“You know,” I think out loud, “you could generate quite a bit of electricity if you were to put a wind turbine up here.”
”I must admit, I’ve thought about it myself. Would it pay to do?”
”You would have to do some research on average wind velocities over the course of a year,” now my brain is churning, “and you would have to anchor it, although this limestone is probably sufficient. You would need an inverter and some batteries to hold you over if there were no wind for a while. Think about it, if you had enough of them, you could generate enough power for the whole town.”Of course my mind is already envisoning vast fields of wind turbines across the open stretches of Samarian desert. “How do you get land here?”
“Look,” he explains, “there’s no way to own land here. Like anywhere in Israel, the government owns everything, so you can only lease it for like 199 years at a time. But we’re happy to let anyone use the land who wants to. See that house out there?” he asks, pointing to a small house and olive orchard off by itself, way, way beyond the fence, under the shadow of the Ramallah suburb of Jaba, “He’s a gardener with ten kids. The olive trees aren’t mature yet, but he’s hoping to retire on them eventually. We had another woman who wanted to build an amusement park on the hillside down there. She had approval and everything, but when the Oslo War…” that’s how settlers refer to the second Initifadah, linking it to the failed Oslo peace negotiations, “…started, she knew that nobody would be coming out there so she had to give it up. But there’s nothing stopping you.”
“How did this whole settlement get started?”
“In the eighties, the army built an antenna on this hilltop. Then, they sent a squad of soldiers to camp out and guard the antenna. At first the soldiers thought it was just a fun camping trip for a few weeks in the field, but then the army sent more soldiers. Later, they replaced the tents with trailers. Afterwards, the first of us civilians moved out here and replaced the soldiers. When I first moved here…” he starts off. I’ve heard this one from the old timers in every town, whether it’s on a Samarian hilltop or a sprawling Tel Aviv suburb. Stories of how there was no running water, no trees, no birds, no grass. It always starts off with nothing, “…there was nothing here. Today, thousands.”
Trailers for absorption center and young couples.
It’s a very different story from isolated Elon Moreh, which was built by settlers and destroyed by the army seven times before the army finally relented. But this settlement is strategic, built not on the basis of faith but the strategy of stopping Ramallah from gobbling up the Judean desert. It’s the sort of project a hard-nosed irreligious general could get behind. But the people moved here didn’t come for strategic reasons, they arrived on faith. Strategic Israel is today in serious retreat, while the Israel of faith continues to advance. Kochav Ya’akov is now beyond the security fence, “out there,” outside the constantly contracting borders of strategic Israel, and therefore considered by many not to be worth the effort. The Hitnatkut was the first direct confrontation of strategic Israel against the Israel of faith, and it ended, at least in the short term, with a defeat for the Israel of faith. This defeat places a serious question mark over the future of Kochav Ya’akov. But it’s a question they’ve had to deal with from day one, and one to which they have an answer: build.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Snow in Jerusalem
Due to inclement weather, the continuing (seemingly interminable) post on the effects of the Hitnatkut has been interrupted for.. SNOW!
This morning, I left my apartment in the whipping, stinging cold rain. I typically bring my camera, you know, just in case something interesting happens.
On my way home, I knoticed the rain seemed to be falling a bit more slowly. It started out as just a messy slurry, but pretty soon, we had a full-blown snow on our hands.
I hopped off the bus in Pisgat Ze'ev. It doesn't typically rain much this far east (we're in a rain shadow), but the snow was still pouring down.
Looking eastward on the Meir Promenade.
This morning, I left my apartment in the whipping, stinging cold rain. I typically bring my camera, you know, just in case something interesting happens.
On my way home, I knoticed the rain seemed to be falling a bit more slowly. It started out as just a messy slurry, but pretty soon, we had a full-blown snow on our hands.
On the number 8, near ammunition hill.
I hopped off the bus in Pisgat Ze'ev. It doesn't typically rain much this far east (we're in a rain shadow), but the snow was still pouring down.
I set the camera on"portrait" so it would focus on 5 feet in front of me, rather than the space in the background, and caught this interesting snow in action.
A self portrait of yours truly.
Moshe Dayan Street.
Looking eastward on the Meir Promenade.
The next picture wasn't taken on snow day. It's a mechanical dancing Hassid in front of the Judaic supply store on Meir Gersom street. Does anybody notice anything, eh, suspicious about him?
Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Hitnatkut III / Kochav Yaakov
Continued from Part II (below)
But in the settlements, there’s still an optimistic sense of forward momentum.
“Do you worry that what happened to Gush Katif will happen to Kochav Ya’akov?” I ask Rabbi Feld.
“I’ve been here through five governments. Each one of them wanted to destroy this place at some point. They’re gone, we’re here.”
It’s a similar sentiment I heard expressed five years ago. Headlines tell us that all of these communities could be uprooted at any time, but the willingness to take the risk of building here required that such logic be set aside. It forces the settlers to focus their eyes on the future only. But then he adds something I haven’t heard before.
“It could happen. But all you can do is pray and build.”
The aura of unstoppable destiny is gone, but the goals and the means are still intact. He passes around the table a photograph of a lonely one-room house in sea of dead, rocky fields.
"This is was taken in 1929. It's Rechavia."
I take a second look at what stood, and more noticeably what was absent, in what is now one of Jerusalem's wealthiest established neighborhoods packed with high rise apartment complexes and swanky housing. Eighty years ago, where the Prime Minister's house stands today, was just a tuft of weeds.
"Today, if a thousand Jews move to or from Rechaviah today, it won't make a difference. It's permanently Jewish land. But if a thousand Jews moved out here, the land becomes ours. God willing we will bring so many Jews out here that there can never be another Hitnatkut. Imagine if there had been one hundred thousand Jews in Gaza instead of seven thousand. There wouldn't have been any way they could get us out of there."
So the building continues. Standing at the peak of Kochav Yaakov the next morning, the driving wind kicks up a dusty haze in the valleys, but it’s still possible to see the fifteen miles or so to Jordan. The hilltop is sprinkled with trailers, makeshift goat pens, and corrugated tin shacks.
“This is a good place for a couple to make a start,” Rabbi Feld says, “rent is only a couple hundred shekels a month. You’d pay at least six or seven hundred dollars for the same apartment in Jerusalem. They come out here and live for a few years to save money. Once they’re ready to get started, some move into the city, but some decide to stay in the community and build their homes here. But if you really want to live for nothing, you can go out there,” he says, pointing about a mile and a half east, to the uniform white trailers gripping the wind worn limestone summit.
Remembering the terminology of Elon Moreh, I ask, “Is that Kochav Yaakov B?”
“It was. Now it’s called Migron. We built it a few years ago. It’s outside of our fence, but inside the settlement’s municipal boundary. Last year, Sharon got it in his head to destroy the place.” Sharon. The bulldozer. Israel’s now incapacitated but then powerful Prime Minister. “It was ridiculous. We had gotten all the proper permits, everything was above board. It was so legitimate that even the banks were loaning out money to start construction. But it was politics.”
“So why is it still there?”
“We called in people from all the surrounding settlements. Thousands and thousands sat on that hilltop and waited. Only a couple hundred police showed up, so there was nothing they could do. They went home to come back another day. Pretty soon everybody forgot about it and moved on.”
To be continued...
But in the settlements, there’s still an optimistic sense of forward momentum.
“Do you worry that what happened to Gush Katif will happen to Kochav Ya’akov?” I ask Rabbi Feld.
“I’ve been here through five governments. Each one of them wanted to destroy this place at some point. They’re gone, we’re here.”
It’s a similar sentiment I heard expressed five years ago. Headlines tell us that all of these communities could be uprooted at any time, but the willingness to take the risk of building here required that such logic be set aside. It forces the settlers to focus their eyes on the future only. But then he adds something I haven’t heard before.
“It could happen. But all you can do is pray and build.”
The aura of unstoppable destiny is gone, but the goals and the means are still intact. He passes around the table a photograph of a lonely one-room house in sea of dead, rocky fields.
"This is was taken in 1929. It's Rechavia."
I take a second look at what stood, and more noticeably what was absent, in what is now one of Jerusalem's wealthiest established neighborhoods packed with high rise apartment complexes and swanky housing. Eighty years ago, where the Prime Minister's house stands today, was just a tuft of weeds.
"Today, if a thousand Jews move to or from Rechaviah today, it won't make a difference. It's permanently Jewish land. But if a thousand Jews moved out here, the land becomes ours. God willing we will bring so many Jews out here that there can never be another Hitnatkut. Imagine if there had been one hundred thousand Jews in Gaza instead of seven thousand. There wouldn't have been any way they could get us out of there."
So the building continues. Standing at the peak of Kochav Yaakov the next morning, the driving wind kicks up a dusty haze in the valleys, but it’s still possible to see the fifteen miles or so to Jordan. The hilltop is sprinkled with trailers, makeshift goat pens, and corrugated tin shacks.
“This is a good place for a couple to make a start,” Rabbi Feld says, “rent is only a couple hundred shekels a month. You’d pay at least six or seven hundred dollars for the same apartment in Jerusalem. They come out here and live for a few years to save money. Once they’re ready to get started, some move into the city, but some decide to stay in the community and build their homes here. But if you really want to live for nothing, you can go out there,” he says, pointing about a mile and a half east, to the uniform white trailers gripping the wind worn limestone summit.
Remembering the terminology of Elon Moreh, I ask, “Is that Kochav Yaakov B?”
“It was. Now it’s called Migron. We built it a few years ago. It’s outside of our fence, but inside the settlement’s municipal boundary. Last year, Sharon got it in his head to destroy the place.” Sharon. The bulldozer. Israel’s now incapacitated but then powerful Prime Minister. “It was ridiculous. We had gotten all the proper permits, everything was above board. It was so legitimate that even the banks were loaning out money to start construction. But it was politics.”
“So why is it still there?”
“We called in people from all the surrounding settlements. Thousands and thousands sat on that hilltop and waited. Only a couple hundred police showed up, so there was nothing they could do. They went home to come back another day. Pretty soon everybody forgot about it and moved on.”
To be continued...
Saturday, December 23, 2006
Hitnatkut II
Continued from Part I
Within the Dati Leumi, or national religious movement, of which I am a part, the fabric of society is still seriously tattered. Unlike other Jewish religious groups who rejected secular Zionism due to the sneering anti-religious attitudes of its early leaders, the Dati Leumi community embraced certain truly Jewish concepts within the Zionist movement, including the mitzvot (Torah commandments) for social harmony and the settling of the land, while leaving the secularism, which they regarded as nonsense, in the garbage. Dati Leumi Jews, who comprise by some estimates around 7% of Israel’s population serve in the army and fill the ranks of the best combat units comprise over half of the officer corps. But since the Hitnatkut, attitudes towards the state are changing, as Sasha and Yitzchak tried to explain on my recent visit to Harsina.
"Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu," Sasha says, referring to the former Chief Rabbi of Israel and present spiritual leader of the Dati Leumi community, "instructed religious soldiers that if they followed these orders they would be committing a serious aveirah (violating a commandment.) The army told us that if we disobeyed orders we would be sent to prison. You must understand how conflicted we felt. It's a mitzvah to serve in the army and protect the nation. But the army was now being used to destroy the settlements."
"Well, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner," Yitzchak counters, referring to the respected Head of the Ateret Cohanim Yeshivah in the old city of Jerusalem, "said that we must obey orders, even if we are crying while we do it. It's similar to observing Shabbat (sabbath.) Ideally, the entire Jewish people would keep Shabbat, but we would never force them to. Once the nation made the decision to commit this aveirah, we couldn't force them not to, we could only do everything in our power to convince them of their mistake."
"If I see a Jew who isn't keeping Shabbat," Sasha answers, "I try to convince him of his mistake, but I don't force him. But if the government tells me to violate Shabbat, then I must refuse, no matter what. They were forcing us to violate the commandment to settle the land."
"But," Yitzhak counters, "if we tell them that we refuse to follow orders because we don't agree with them, then suppose a leftist soldier who is opposed to the settlements refuses to protect them? Can soldiers choose their missions? The army would fall apart."
In the end, only a few soldiers disobeyed orders. It's still a source of bitterness between the rabbis who advocated for and against refusal, as well as between the soldiers and their religious leaders.
The most deeply felt sense of betrayal, however, is directed towards greater Israeli society. Sure, there were the sniveling few sniveling surrender-monkey elites who got all the media attention, but most of the nation should have been on board. Conservative and religious newspapers predicted massive protests, refusals, strikes, and virtual civil war to prevent the Hitnatkut. When the time came to take to the streets, there certainly were the protests, roadblocks, and piles of burning tires across the country, but they were carried out by the same activists who show up to all the other demonstrations. The strongest stance most Israelis took was to curse at the images on their television screens. The massive cities in the center with idealistic names like “Rishon Letzion” (first in Zion), and “Petach Tikvah” (Opening of Hope,) founded a century ago by small bands of idealistic pioneers just like those in Gaza, had long since extinguished their Zionist flame. The values inculcated in the settlements; raising large families, building the land, and forging a connection to history, values once held by most Israelis, were now outdated. The settlers who thought themselves the locomotive pulling the rest of the Zionist train up the mountain realized that they had disengaged from the train, which was sliding back down the hill.
Many had to rethink the relationship a religious Jew should have to the state. As my neighbor Tzvi put it, "My son trained for years in high school to go into an elite unit as soon as he graduated. Now that he's graduated, he decided to delay enlistment for a year and learn in yeshivah. After all, what's the point of trying to be the best when you're just going to be dragging people out of their homes?"
To Be Continued...
Within the Dati Leumi, or national religious movement, of which I am a part, the fabric of society is still seriously tattered. Unlike other Jewish religious groups who rejected secular Zionism due to the sneering anti-religious attitudes of its early leaders, the Dati Leumi community embraced certain truly Jewish concepts within the Zionist movement, including the mitzvot (Torah commandments) for social harmony and the settling of the land, while leaving the secularism, which they regarded as nonsense, in the garbage. Dati Leumi Jews, who comprise by some estimates around 7% of Israel’s population serve in the army and fill the ranks of the best combat units comprise over half of the officer corps. But since the Hitnatkut, attitudes towards the state are changing, as Sasha and Yitzchak tried to explain on my recent visit to Harsina.
"Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu," Sasha says, referring to the former Chief Rabbi of Israel and present spiritual leader of the Dati Leumi community, "instructed religious soldiers that if they followed these orders they would be committing a serious aveirah (violating a commandment.) The army told us that if we disobeyed orders we would be sent to prison. You must understand how conflicted we felt. It's a mitzvah to serve in the army and protect the nation. But the army was now being used to destroy the settlements."
"Well, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner," Yitzchak counters, referring to the respected Head of the Ateret Cohanim Yeshivah in the old city of Jerusalem, "said that we must obey orders, even if we are crying while we do it. It's similar to observing Shabbat (sabbath.) Ideally, the entire Jewish people would keep Shabbat, but we would never force them to. Once the nation made the decision to commit this aveirah, we couldn't force them not to, we could only do everything in our power to convince them of their mistake."
"If I see a Jew who isn't keeping Shabbat," Sasha answers, "I try to convince him of his mistake, but I don't force him. But if the government tells me to violate Shabbat, then I must refuse, no matter what. They were forcing us to violate the commandment to settle the land."
"But," Yitzhak counters, "if we tell them that we refuse to follow orders because we don't agree with them, then suppose a leftist soldier who is opposed to the settlements refuses to protect them? Can soldiers choose their missions? The army would fall apart."
In the end, only a few soldiers disobeyed orders. It's still a source of bitterness between the rabbis who advocated for and against refusal, as well as between the soldiers and their religious leaders.
The most deeply felt sense of betrayal, however, is directed towards greater Israeli society. Sure, there were the sniveling few sniveling surrender-monkey elites who got all the media attention, but most of the nation should have been on board. Conservative and religious newspapers predicted massive protests, refusals, strikes, and virtual civil war to prevent the Hitnatkut. When the time came to take to the streets, there certainly were the protests, roadblocks, and piles of burning tires across the country, but they were carried out by the same activists who show up to all the other demonstrations. The strongest stance most Israelis took was to curse at the images on their television screens. The massive cities in the center with idealistic names like “Rishon Letzion” (first in Zion), and “Petach Tikvah” (Opening of Hope,) founded a century ago by small bands of idealistic pioneers just like those in Gaza, had long since extinguished their Zionist flame. The values inculcated in the settlements; raising large families, building the land, and forging a connection to history, values once held by most Israelis, were now outdated. The settlers who thought themselves the locomotive pulling the rest of the Zionist train up the mountain realized that they had disengaged from the train, which was sliding back down the hill.
Many had to rethink the relationship a religious Jew should have to the state. As my neighbor Tzvi put it, "My son trained for years in high school to go into an elite unit as soon as he graduated. Now that he's graduated, he decided to delay enlistment for a year and learn in yeshivah. After all, what's the point of trying to be the best when you're just going to be dragging people out of their homes?"
To Be Continued...
Friday, December 22, 2006
Hitnatkut Part I
I'm back from the Negev. And pretty beat up. Sunburned and chapped lips. About 70% of the yeshivah had some bug, so I've got it too. Sore throat, runny nose, the works. Oh, and I've also got the stomach flu so I haven't eaten in like 24 hours. But I had a great time! I'll post some pictures hopefully next week, but meanwhile I want to get started on a post I've been working on about the effects of the Hitnatkut, the disengagement from Gaza, last year.
Pointing over the Shabbat table at the wall mural, Naftali stretches the limits of his Hebrew vocabulary, "Pretty.... picture."
"That's okay," Rabbi Feld, our Shabbat host tells him, "we're American. You can speak English."
Naftali laughs uncomfortably and stares at the floor. Time to intervene.
"Naftali doesn't like to speak English on Shabbat, only Hebrew," I tell our host. "It's a holy day so he only wants to speak the holy language."
"Oh," Rabbi Feld responds, and continues in Hebrew, "I'm glad you like the picture."
Naftali shuffles his feet.
"You should also know," I tell him, "that he's only been in Israel for three months. He can't speak Hebrew either. He's on such a high spiritual level that he can't keep up with himself."
"Well," Rabbi Feld continues, "it's a portrait of the Beit Hamikdash." The holy temple, as described in the Torah. You can find images of the holy temple in every religious home in Israel. Except...
"Is that the Park Hotel in the background?" I ask.
"Yeah, we asked the artist to plant it in modern Jerusalem. And there," he says, pointing to the next wall mural, "is the settlements of Gush Katif rebuilt."
Over a year has passed since the when the Israeli government destroyed the Jewish settlements of Gush Katif, the Jewish community of Gaza, but the trauma seared on the national consciousness is so raw that it still hurts to the touch. The process had a fancy name, "Hitnatkut," meaning disconnection, or disengagement. It's related to the Hebrew word "Lenatek," to hang up (the phone.) After a decade of interminable negotiations with Muhammed abu-This and Muhammed abu-That for worthless treaties which everyone knew they would violate anyway, it seemed so much simpler to just hang up the phone on them all. No more "windows of opportunity" or "carrots and sticks." They could take their carrot and choke on it.
But when it came time to do the deed, the slick "Hitnatkut" political spin crashed headlong into the messy reality of nuts-and-bolts ethnic cleansing. Minds throughout the country are still indelibly etched with the memory of Jewish policemen and soldiers dragging screaming children and weeping mothers from their homes, army bulldozers reducing modest villas and manicured gardens to rubble, and convoys of now homeless Jewish refugees dumped in the desert. These were scenes associated with Jewish life in previous centuries throughout Europe and Araby, not modern Israel.
Despite the tendency of Israel to constantly tear itself apart with stubborn and conflicting ideologies, the country also has a subconscious sense of just how far it can go before coming apart at the seams, and a desire to avoid charging over that cliff. Today, even among the left, there is a desire to slow the process of Hitnatkut which began with Gush Katif. The rhetoric of the need for further settlement destruction and outrage at Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice line is still heard, but since the Lebanon war, it has remained in the realm of words, not serious political pressure. The economy is strong, the north is recovering from the war with Lebanon, and, if you don't live within rocket range of Gaza, life is relatively quiet, so the attitude is, "Let's just recover from Gush Katif before we open up that can of worms again."
Continued in Part II
Pointing over the Shabbat table at the wall mural, Naftali stretches the limits of his Hebrew vocabulary, "Pretty.... picture."
"That's okay," Rabbi Feld, our Shabbat host tells him, "we're American. You can speak English."
Naftali laughs uncomfortably and stares at the floor. Time to intervene.
"Naftali doesn't like to speak English on Shabbat, only Hebrew," I tell our host. "It's a holy day so he only wants to speak the holy language."
"Oh," Rabbi Feld responds, and continues in Hebrew, "I'm glad you like the picture."
Naftali shuffles his feet.
"You should also know," I tell him, "that he's only been in Israel for three months. He can't speak Hebrew either. He's on such a high spiritual level that he can't keep up with himself."
"Well," Rabbi Feld continues, "it's a portrait of the Beit Hamikdash." The holy temple, as described in the Torah. You can find images of the holy temple in every religious home in Israel. Except...
"Is that the Park Hotel in the background?" I ask.
"Yeah, we asked the artist to plant it in modern Jerusalem. And there," he says, pointing to the next wall mural, "is the settlements of Gush Katif rebuilt."
Over a year has passed since the when the Israeli government destroyed the Jewish settlements of Gush Katif, the Jewish community of Gaza, but the trauma seared on the national consciousness is so raw that it still hurts to the touch. The process had a fancy name, "Hitnatkut," meaning disconnection, or disengagement. It's related to the Hebrew word "Lenatek," to hang up (the phone.) After a decade of interminable negotiations with Muhammed abu-This and Muhammed abu-That for worthless treaties which everyone knew they would violate anyway, it seemed so much simpler to just hang up the phone on them all. No more "windows of opportunity" or "carrots and sticks." They could take their carrot and choke on it.
But when it came time to do the deed, the slick "Hitnatkut" political spin crashed headlong into the messy reality of nuts-and-bolts ethnic cleansing. Minds throughout the country are still indelibly etched with the memory of Jewish policemen and soldiers dragging screaming children and weeping mothers from their homes, army bulldozers reducing modest villas and manicured gardens to rubble, and convoys of now homeless Jewish refugees dumped in the desert. These were scenes associated with Jewish life in previous centuries throughout Europe and Araby, not modern Israel.
Despite the tendency of Israel to constantly tear itself apart with stubborn and conflicting ideologies, the country also has a subconscious sense of just how far it can go before coming apart at the seams, and a desire to avoid charging over that cliff. Today, even among the left, there is a desire to slow the process of Hitnatkut which began with Gush Katif. The rhetoric of the need for further settlement destruction and outrage at Jews living beyond the 1949 armistice line is still heard, but since the Lebanon war, it has remained in the realm of words, not serious political pressure. The economy is strong, the north is recovering from the war with Lebanon, and, if you don't live within rocket range of Gaza, life is relatively quiet, so the attitude is, "Let's just recover from Gush Katif before we open up that can of worms again."
Continued in Part II
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Going south for the winter
My first oil menorah. (It's elevated on two cans of corn to make it visible from the street, fulfilling the mitzvah of publicizing the miracle.) Chag Sameach! Happy Chanukkah.
Chanukkah is one of the few holidays that even the Goyim (non-Jews) know about. As a less religious Jew slowly becoming more religious, I came to understand that there are many other, more "important" holidays throughout the year which have been forgotten by most Jews. I gradually came to think of Chanukkah as a sort of second-rate Jewish holiday, which only became more famous due to its proximity to X-Mas. I looked down my Jewish nose at the old, less-knoledgeable me, who elevated Chanukkah to the status of a major holiday just because I needed an excuse to fit in with my Goyish neighbors.
But as I learned more, I realized, first, that no holiday is considered more "important" than any other holiday. Indeed, there was the Jewish legal case of a Polish Jew bound to a Polish noble in servitude for some perceived crime. The nobleman gave him only one free day per year, to be taken at a time of his choosing. Naturally, he asked the legal decisors, the rabbis, which holiday he should take off. Yom Kippur? (The day of atonement, perceived by many as the most holy day of the year?), or perhaps Pesach? (Passover.)
Nope. Each holiday holds its own sanctity and is not greater than the other. Just as we do not assign a rank to various mitzvot, and perform even the smallest details with the same focus and dedication as the greatest, so too we do not elevate any holiday above any other. The rabbis answered that he should take the next holiday or Shabbat (sabbath) available off, regardless of which one it was.
So too, I now look down my nose at the old me looking down his nose at the original me. If there's one holiday that everybody should know about, it's Chanukkah, because it's the only holiday with the attached mitzvah of publicizing it to the world, Jew and Goy alike, to tell all of humanity that God rescued his people from the Greek exile, drove idol worship out of the holy temple, and saved his people from certain spiritual death. Don't mess with the mitzvot.
Because the miracle of Chanukkah occured over the oil for the menorah, it is customary to light an oil menorah. Most Ashkenazim (Jews of Eastern European descent) in the United States light candles, as I have always done, because olive oil was very difficult to come by in Eastern Europe, and so the rabbis ruled that candles were an acceptable substitute. But now that I'm back in Jew central, the holy land, where olive oil is abundant, I decided to switch back to oil.
And now, I'm racing out the door to get downtown. The yeshivah is taking a tour of the Negev desert, down south, starting at 4AM Monday (I'll be sleeping over at the yeshivah tonight) and returning 4PM Tuesday. I won't blog for a day but stay tuned for future posts with photos!
Friday, December 15, 2006
Tel Tzion
Hi all,
Chanukah and Shabbat start in like 10 minutes, so I've got to type fast.
I've been incredibly busy with work this week. Couldn't go to yeshivah. Couldn't do any serious blogging. Couldn't go to the shabbaton in Haifa that I wanted to go to this weekend. Which is really too bad, because I was very much looking forward to it. And even more frustrating, I have all of these experiences rattling around in my head that I really must blog.
So anyway, instead of a serious blog, here are some pictures from Tel Tzion, the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) settlement next to Kochav Ya'akov. Hopefully, I'll have some time after shabbat to do some serious writing.
Shabbat Shalom!
Happy Chanukah!
Israeli Army base at the top of the hill
Foreground: Local school. Fore-mid ground: Tel Tzion Back-Mid Ground: Arab north Jeruslalem. Background: The distant two towers of Givat Tzarfatit (Jewish Jerusalem.)
Man getting ready for shabbat in Tel Tzion. Background: Kochav Ya'akov.
Foreground: Tel Tzion. Midground: Kochav Ya'akov. Background: The more distant settlement of Ma'aleh Michmas
Chanukah and Shabbat start in like 10 minutes, so I've got to type fast.
I've been incredibly busy with work this week. Couldn't go to yeshivah. Couldn't do any serious blogging. Couldn't go to the shabbaton in Haifa that I wanted to go to this weekend. Which is really too bad, because I was very much looking forward to it. And even more frustrating, I have all of these experiences rattling around in my head that I really must blog.
So anyway, instead of a serious blog, here are some pictures from Tel Tzion, the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) settlement next to Kochav Ya'akov. Hopefully, I'll have some time after shabbat to do some serious writing.
Shabbat Shalom!
Happy Chanukah!
Israeli Army base at the top of the hill
Foreground: Local school. Fore-mid ground: Tel Tzion Back-Mid Ground: Arab north Jeruslalem. Background: The distant two towers of Givat Tzarfatit (Jewish Jerusalem.)
Man getting ready for shabbat in Tel Tzion. Background: Kochav Ya'akov.
Foreground: Tel Tzion. Midground: Kochav Ya'akov. Background: The more distant settlement of Ma'aleh MichmasWednesday, December 13, 2006
Kochav Ya'akov
Went on a trip to the settlement of Kochav Ya'akov (Jacob's Star) for a shabbaton (Shabbat gathering) with my friends from the Yeshivah. It's pretty close to Pisgat Ze'ev. You take the Ramallah Bypass road, pass through the Hizma checkpoint and into Injun Country, head north, and ten minutes later you're there.
Of course, in my case, I don't have a car, so I had to take a bus from Pisgat Ze'ev to the central bus station, where I met some of the guys from the Yeshivah. We were then handed itineraries and names of the families who would be taking us in.
Yosef
We all hopped on the bus, back up through the same Jerusalem traffic I had to deal with coming in, but soon we surrounded by the rocky hilltops of the Binyamin (the land north east of Jerusalem, the inheritance of the tribe of Benjamin.)
Kochav Ya'akov, and it's sister settlement Tel Tzion, are perched on a rocky hilltop.
Tel Tzion (left) and Kochav Ya'akov (Right)
Winding our way up the access road, it took as long to get up there as it did to get from the checkpoint to here.
The traffic circle. The little building with the red roof is Chabad of Kochav Ya'akov. The buildigns in the background are Tel Tzion.
But, at long last, we arrived at the main traffic circle.
Local kids were sitting by the bus stop waiting to help us find the families who would be taking us in.
The locals waiting to greet us with paperwork and rosters
Giving directions
I took a few minutes to walk around and photograph the town before Shabbat.
The yeshivah.
New Housing
Trailers on a hilltop. This is the absorption center for new immigrants (mostly families.)
David, Binyamin, and yours truly.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
More Separation Barrier Photos
I've got way way too much work to do today to write a proper post, so I'll pull this one from my archives, which I never posted. It's a posting of photos taken on the way to this wedding.
These photographs were taken about two months ago on the drive to a wedding in Moshav Modiin. They were taken along the new Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway which takes a short cut through the Shomron (northern "west bank".) The highway, built before the second Intifadah in 2000, passes through and between several Arab villages. Since the government embarked on the construction of the separation barrier, it has been surrounded on both sides by fences and walls, giving the feeling of driving down the main trench on the Death Star. The map below shows the fence in green, along with the route I took to get from Pisgat Ze'ev to Modiin along the highway.
Temporary fencing. Large areas have been levelled for a more permanent wall.
These photographs were taken about two months ago on the drive to a wedding in Moshav Modiin. They were taken along the new Jerusalem-Tel Aviv Highway which takes a short cut through the Shomron (northern "west bank".) The highway, built before the second Intifadah in 2000, passes through and between several Arab villages. Since the government embarked on the construction of the separation barrier, it has been surrounded on both sides by fences and walls, giving the feeling of driving down the main trench on the Death Star. The map below shows the fence in green, along with the route I took to get from Pisgat Ze'ev to Modiin along the highway.
Route 443
For some stretches the wall has been painted.
Looking out the bus window at the wall.
Temporary fencing. Large areas have been levelled for a more permanent wall.
Looking across a temporary fence towards the outskirts of Ramallah.
Sunset over the hills of the Shomron. Note the swath cut through the hillside in preparation for building the wall.
Sunday, December 10, 2006
The Draft
I remember exactly when they stopped pushing me around in high school. Returning from summer vacation Junior year, the same old bully from Sophomore year saw me in the hallway and approached on attack vector. Subconsciously calculating the angles and measuring force he would need to apply to my left shoulder to propel me smashing into the lockers, his pace sped from casual walk to a brisk trot as I stopped in my tracks, eyes darting, looking for an escape. But not this time. As he approached, the bully's eyes widened, then he quickly glanced away and scooted past. I wish I had a great story to tell, about how I finally couldn't take it any more, and, backed into a corner, let go with my kung fu I had been practicing all summer and taught him a lesson he wouldn't soon forget. But it was nothing so glamorous, I had simply grown a foot. And gained forty pounds.
Of course I had no idea what was happening, and still thought of myself as the little guy, in a forest of seniors, trying to keep from being battered against the lockers. But when the spanglophonic gangsta wanna-be's, instead of tossing me around, gave me high fives to shouts of "Wassup Ese?" I knew something had changed. By the time I hit six foot two, instead of being asked, "Dude, are you gay?" it was, "Dude, what position do you play?"
I still don't know how to play football.
"Have you ever been in the military?"
It's one of those questions that comes up from time to time on dates. Or from friends. Mabye it's my jarhead haircut (note to future immigrants: saying "short" to an Israeli barber is like saying "bald" to an American barber.) Perhaps it's just my size. If you look like you could jump off an airplane with a sixty pound backpack and a bayonet, most people assume you've done it at some point.
Actually, they're not too far off, because by the time I was a Junior, I was already in the Sea Scouts, a nautical paramilitary youth group, in preparation for enlistment after high school. I wanted nothing more than to be a naval officer, or a Marine, standing at the prow of my ship, charting a course through hostile waters. I was even accepted to the California Maritime academy. With a naval officer training program in Berkeley, across the bay, an offer of tuition payment, and gung-ho enthusiasm, I was ready to go. What about a sensitive guy like me killing bad guys? No problem, just mentally paste the bully's face on their bodies.
But by some miracle, I was also accepted into the University of California, Santa Barbara, a far better school, in spite of the fact that my high school grades were, by their standards, too low. UCSB had no officer training program, so I decided to put the military on hold for four years and invest the time in a better education. By the time I graduated, I was already keeping shabbat and eating all kosher food, which is a bit hard when you're jumping off landing craft and eating combat rations.
Of course, there happens to be one army in the world where the combat rations are kosher.
Rafi's brows furrow when I tell him my story, his own experience as a drill instructor in the Israeli Defence Forces coming back to him.
"You? Nah, you're not a fighter."
"Well, I happen to think I'd make a fine soldier. I run seven kilometers every day already, I can put up with a lot of abuse, and I get the job done."
He strokes his beard, pondering the idea for a minute.
"Nope."
National conscription is something every Israeli has to deal with. Out of high school and into the army. Hope you had a nice summer vacation, because it's three years for boys, two for girls, and reserve duty several weeks a year until you're forty. And it's not just something to get done. These guys love the army. Ever read the comic that comes folded around the Bazooka Joe bubble gum sticks? At the bottom, there's a little advice column. In America, it has a pithy saying, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," or what not. The Israeli Bazooka Joe says, "Don't go to the disco because the loud music will lower your hearing profile." I.e., you will have a lower hearing score on the physical exams given to recruits entering the army, and you will not be able to get into an elite combat unit.
Army service is a great divider between those who never quite manage to leave their country of origin and those who become true Israelis. As an old friend Donny put it, "You go into the army, and you see how this country really works. It's all thrown together, nothing is planned, but somehow everything gets done in the end. If you don't go, you'll never leave America."
I may not have a choice in the issue. If I were to make aliyah at eighteen, I would have an automatic three years to serve. At twenty, it's reduced to two years. By the time you're over twenty five like me, you're "on hold." As in, "If there's a war, and nobody is left, and Hizbullah is driving tanks down Jaffa Street, then mabye we'll call you."
So is that the end of it? Did my dream of being an undercover Mossad agent, leaping out of Hassan Nasrallah's oversized novelty birthday cake with an uzi in my hand, mowing down the Hizbullah leadership, just go up in a poof of smoke?
Well, actually, there is a way around. If you show up at the draft board every morning, persistently pleading to be let in, then they may relent. I know people who've done it, even when over 30 and married.
"I've been thinking about it," I tell Sasha.
"Why waste your time? You won't be doing anything useful."
"Well, I'm a mechanical engineer, I would think they would need people like me for the corps of engineers."
My naivete elicits a laugh, "Well, in that case, they would make you a janitor."
"What if I were a janitor in real life?"
"Then they would put you in charge of the corps of engineers."
Steven is a bit more circumspect.
"They wouldn't give you anything interesting. At your age, they could only keep you for eighteen months anyway. It would probably take them six months to train you to drive a tank, more to get you combat ready. Think of how much money they would spend just on fuel. And then they would be able to use you for maybe six months, and they would only have you in the reserve for ten years. If you were eighteen, they would have you for two more years of active duty, and almost twenty of reserve. So they're not going to waste any money training you. You'd be a jobnik."
A jobnik. The lower class of the army. The pencil-pushers, sitting behind a desk running out the clock on their mandatory service. The fact of the matter is that the army itself doesn't want the draft any more. The population has increased tenfold over the last fifty years, and the army wants a smaller force of highly specialized combat soldiers, not the legions of unspecialized foot soldiers and jobniks seen in previous decades. From time to time, the generals grumble that they don't know what to do with all the conscripts they're getting, but the Israeli public still wants the draft. As Yossi Alpher, a former officer in military intelligence said in an interview in The Guardian:
"The army absorbs immigrants, it teaches some people to read and write, it prepares for citizenship, it even converts to Judaism. Even if we were to find ourselves at peace with our neighbors there would be very strong pressure to continue conscription because there's a very strong sense this is an important part of Israeli society."
And as Reuven Gal, former chief psychologist of the Israel Defence Forces put it, "What it gives Israelis most is maturity, a sense of responsibility, a sense of affiliation, a sense of becoming part of the nation."
As such, for many the army's role is to fill the void left when many Israelis abandoned Judaism, which traditionally instilled all of these values. While I feel that a life of Torah observance can provide all of the self-discipline and national affiliation I will ever need, one thing I will miss is the bittul, the self-nullification, of the soldier, to subordinate himself completely towards a noble goal. But it's something I will have to find elsewhere. It's important not to take on a a life mission, that isn't appropriate, no matter how appealing or glamorous it may seem. As for becoming an Israeli, well, I didn't come here to be an Israeli, I came to be a better Jew. If I don't talk or think the same as the people around me, I can live with it. But watching the helicopters thump by overhead, off to their missions to protect the rest of us, there will always be a part of me that wants to be up there with them.
Of course I had no idea what was happening, and still thought of myself as the little guy, in a forest of seniors, trying to keep from being battered against the lockers. But when the spanglophonic gangsta wanna-be's, instead of tossing me around, gave me high fives to shouts of "Wassup Ese?" I knew something had changed. By the time I hit six foot two, instead of being asked, "Dude, are you gay?" it was, "Dude, what position do you play?"
I still don't know how to play football.
"Have you ever been in the military?"
It's one of those questions that comes up from time to time on dates. Or from friends. Mabye it's my jarhead haircut (note to future immigrants: saying "short" to an Israeli barber is like saying "bald" to an American barber.) Perhaps it's just my size. If you look like you could jump off an airplane with a sixty pound backpack and a bayonet, most people assume you've done it at some point.
Actually, they're not too far off, because by the time I was a Junior, I was already in the Sea Scouts, a nautical paramilitary youth group, in preparation for enlistment after high school. I wanted nothing more than to be a naval officer, or a Marine, standing at the prow of my ship, charting a course through hostile waters. I was even accepted to the California Maritime academy. With a naval officer training program in Berkeley, across the bay, an offer of tuition payment, and gung-ho enthusiasm, I was ready to go. What about a sensitive guy like me killing bad guys? No problem, just mentally paste the bully's face on their bodies.
But by some miracle, I was also accepted into the University of California, Santa Barbara, a far better school, in spite of the fact that my high school grades were, by their standards, too low. UCSB had no officer training program, so I decided to put the military on hold for four years and invest the time in a better education. By the time I graduated, I was already keeping shabbat and eating all kosher food, which is a bit hard when you're jumping off landing craft and eating combat rations.
Of course, there happens to be one army in the world where the combat rations are kosher.
Rafi's brows furrow when I tell him my story, his own experience as a drill instructor in the Israeli Defence Forces coming back to him.
"You? Nah, you're not a fighter."
"Well, I happen to think I'd make a fine soldier. I run seven kilometers every day already, I can put up with a lot of abuse, and I get the job done."
He strokes his beard, pondering the idea for a minute.
"Nope."
National conscription is something every Israeli has to deal with. Out of high school and into the army. Hope you had a nice summer vacation, because it's three years for boys, two for girls, and reserve duty several weeks a year until you're forty. And it's not just something to get done. These guys love the army. Ever read the comic that comes folded around the Bazooka Joe bubble gum sticks? At the bottom, there's a little advice column. In America, it has a pithy saying, "An apple a day keeps the doctor away," or what not. The Israeli Bazooka Joe says, "Don't go to the disco because the loud music will lower your hearing profile." I.e., you will have a lower hearing score on the physical exams given to recruits entering the army, and you will not be able to get into an elite combat unit.
Army service is a great divider between those who never quite manage to leave their country of origin and those who become true Israelis. As an old friend Donny put it, "You go into the army, and you see how this country really works. It's all thrown together, nothing is planned, but somehow everything gets done in the end. If you don't go, you'll never leave America."
I may not have a choice in the issue. If I were to make aliyah at eighteen, I would have an automatic three years to serve. At twenty, it's reduced to two years. By the time you're over twenty five like me, you're "on hold." As in, "If there's a war, and nobody is left, and Hizbullah is driving tanks down Jaffa Street, then mabye we'll call you."
So is that the end of it? Did my dream of being an undercover Mossad agent, leaping out of Hassan Nasrallah's oversized novelty birthday cake with an uzi in my hand, mowing down the Hizbullah leadership, just go up in a poof of smoke?
Well, actually, there is a way around. If you show up at the draft board every morning, persistently pleading to be let in, then they may relent. I know people who've done it, even when over 30 and married.
"I've been thinking about it," I tell Sasha.
"Why waste your time? You won't be doing anything useful."
"Well, I'm a mechanical engineer, I would think they would need people like me for the corps of engineers."
My naivete elicits a laugh, "Well, in that case, they would make you a janitor."
"What if I were a janitor in real life?"
"Then they would put you in charge of the corps of engineers."
Steven is a bit more circumspect.
"They wouldn't give you anything interesting. At your age, they could only keep you for eighteen months anyway. It would probably take them six months to train you to drive a tank, more to get you combat ready. Think of how much money they would spend just on fuel. And then they would be able to use you for maybe six months, and they would only have you in the reserve for ten years. If you were eighteen, they would have you for two more years of active duty, and almost twenty of reserve. So they're not going to waste any money training you. You'd be a jobnik."
A jobnik. The lower class of the army. The pencil-pushers, sitting behind a desk running out the clock on their mandatory service. The fact of the matter is that the army itself doesn't want the draft any more. The population has increased tenfold over the last fifty years, and the army wants a smaller force of highly specialized combat soldiers, not the legions of unspecialized foot soldiers and jobniks seen in previous decades. From time to time, the generals grumble that they don't know what to do with all the conscripts they're getting, but the Israeli public still wants the draft. As Yossi Alpher, a former officer in military intelligence said in an interview in The Guardian:
"The army absorbs immigrants, it teaches some people to read and write, it prepares for citizenship, it even converts to Judaism. Even if we were to find ourselves at peace with our neighbors there would be very strong pressure to continue conscription because there's a very strong sense this is an important part of Israeli society."
And as Reuven Gal, former chief psychologist of the Israel Defence Forces put it, "What it gives Israelis most is maturity, a sense of responsibility, a sense of affiliation, a sense of becoming part of the nation."
As such, for many the army's role is to fill the void left when many Israelis abandoned Judaism, which traditionally instilled all of these values. While I feel that a life of Torah observance can provide all of the self-discipline and national affiliation I will ever need, one thing I will miss is the bittul, the self-nullification, of the soldier, to subordinate himself completely towards a noble goal. But it's something I will have to find elsewhere. It's important not to take on a a life mission, that isn't appropriate, no matter how appealing or glamorous it may seem. As for becoming an Israeli, well, I didn't come here to be an Israeli, I came to be a better Jew. If I don't talk or think the same as the people around me, I can live with it. But watching the helicopters thump by overhead, off to their missions to protect the rest of us, there will always be a part of me that wants to be up there with them.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
The Battle of Giv'on
There's a saying, "Ayn Torah K'Torat Eretz Yisrael," "There's no Torah like the Torah of the Land of Israel." It expresses the concept that Eretz Yisrael has a special energy to it which helps the mind to absorb the conepts one learns here more easily and thouroghly than in the best yeshivas of London or New York. But there's another facet to the expression. When you learn Torah in Eretz Yisrael, where the whole thing happened, you're no longer dealing with just a conceptual story, or an allegory, but with the real history of the people. There's no need to imagine what the places and cities looked like. You can take the bus.
The grave of Samuel the Prophet is marked with a green X. The town of Giv'on is directly to the north. My town of Pisgat Ze'ev is directly east.
In our Tanach Shiur (Bible lesson,) we have been reading from the book of Joshua, which begins where the Torah (five books of Moses) ends, with the Jews standing opposite the river Jordan, preparing to cross into Eretz Yisrael under the leadership of Joshua the Prophet. After defeating and destroying the Canaanite cities of Jericho and Ai, word spread far and wide across the land that a new force had moved into the neighborhood, and was wiping out idolatry.
Looking East, in the direction of Jericho and Ai (my town of Pisgat Ze'ev is on the other side of the ridge line.)
The people of the Canaanite town of Giv'on (Gibeon) were petrified. They had already been given the option of rejecting idolatry or leaving the land, and had decided to stand and fight instead. But the slaughter at Jericho and Ai gave them second thoughts. Thinking it too late to change their minds, the Giv'onim (Gibeonites) decided on a ruse.
The Giv'onim wore out their sandals, collected all the stale old bread they could find, and set out to approach the Jewish forces encamped in Jericho from a direction other than Giv'on. When they finally arrived, they explained that they had come from far, far away to help the Jews in the war, displaying their worn sandals and stale bread as evidence. The Jews immediately accepted and made a covenant with them, without consulting the high priest who could have warned them, thus unwittingly violating the direct Torah prohibition against making a covenant with the Canaanites.
Yours truly in front of El-Jib, the Arab town built on the ruins of Giv'on. Later, when the Jewish camp realized they had been tricked, there was a move to kill the Givonim, but the Givonim explained that they had feared for their lives and didn't realize that they would still have been granted exception from the war had they abandoned idolatry. Joshua conferred with the elders and decided that the treaty stood. It was feared that even though the treaty had been made under false pretenses, to violate it now that they were known as the nation which serves God, could be midinterpreted by the idolatrous nations as a Chillul Hashem, a desecration of God's name. Like today when the United Nations routinely condemns Israel for it's acts of defense while ignoring Arab suicide bombings and invasions, so too the nations of the ancient world would only see that Israel had violated its treaty and ignore the dubious conditions under which it was signed. Joshua permitted the Givonim to return to their city in peace, to remain in the land, and even to serve as honored workers in the Holy Temple, provided they abandoned idolatry and recognized Jewish sovereignty.
The Jewish town of Givon, built west of the ruins of ancient Givon.
But the other Canaanite kings were furious at the Givonim for breaking ranks. The kings of Jerusalem, Hebron, Jarmiuk, and Lachish (where my ex-landlord now lives) gathered their foces and marched north, encamping outside Givon, preparing to exterminate the residents the next day. The terrified Givonim sent a messenger to Joshua, who was with the Jewish camp in Jericho, to tell him that they were in peril.
Looking west towards Jerusalem. The Canaanite kings likely encamped where we were standing.
In spite of the dubious conditions under which the covenant with the Givonim had been forged, they were now under Jewish protection. Without a moment's hesitation, Joshua roused his soldiers and headed east, marching kilometer after kilometer, over hills and ridge lines, arriving with miraculous speed, overnight. Catching the Canaanites by surprise, he immediately attacked, throwing them into a panic and sending them fleeing in the direction of Beit Horon. In a sign of divine approval of Joshua's decision to honor the covenant, huge stones fell from the sky, crusing the fleeing Canaanites. The battle was proceeding swimmingly but the day was running out. Fearing he would lose the initiative if he had to stop for the night, Joshua commanded the sun to stop, and the moon to remain still over the valley of Ayalon. The four kings, now subdued, were put to death. The conclusion of the war would take many more years, but Joshua had established a firm foothold on the land, and idolatry was banished from southern Israel.
Looking towards Beit Horon, the direction of the Canaanite retreat. In the far distance is Modi'in, in the Valley of Ayalon.
The group, on the roof of Samuel the Prophet, looking towards Jerusalem.
Our shadows on an archaeological ruin.
The Machon Meir beginning students of the English department (yours truly top right.) Department Director and tour guide Rav Listman with the baseball cap. Rick, who had me over for thanksgiving, with the gray jacket.
Excavations of a settlement next to the grave of Samuel the Prophet.
More excavations. Wish I could tell you more about them.
Foreground: Excavations Background: Mount Scopus, Jerusalem
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