Author Archive
September 21, 2009 at 9:21 am by Carmel · Filed under Israel, Palestinian Territories
Today, for international day of peace, I want to share a personal selfish thought with you. If you’re not Israeli you can either sympathize with me or hate me for it (and if it really touches you, it should be able to feel a little bit of both).
Pumpkin spiced latte
It’s a Starbuck’s original. I’m having it almost every day for the past two weeks. It became part of my routine here and drinking it feels so foreign, exotic. It’s nice to get used to something that you won’t be able to have when you’re back home. In a globalized world where you get the same things everywhere; in the Internet era when you can be on facebook, twitter and skype with your friends and family, and experience the events back home – I hold on to those little differences that weave the sense of actually being in another place.
I’m in Hawaii, carrying out a routine of paradise on earth, and yet I miss home so much. I get to be in a fantasy setting and I find myself longing to just hang out with my dog again in that ugly square near my house in Tel Aviv. The Americans I meet feel lucky to be Americans. They always assume all of us Middle Eastern would rather be Americans too and be away from all of this war crap. I don’t blame them, they got long immigration queues that give them that idea, but I find it hard to explain to them why I can’t really make myself at home anywhere but in my home. Why I love visiting their country and all other countries, but no matter how many years I’ll drink it, that tasty pumpkin spiced latte will never “taste like home” for me.
Home is where ______ is
What’s that got to do with peace day? I’m getting there. You see, I happen to live in a place of dispute. My ancestors claim it was their promised land and wave their bibles, while some of my neighbors and web friends claim their ancestors were on that land too and hold keys to the old houses they fled from during our independence war. How would an American feel if a Native American will knock on his door one day and claim his ancestors actually owned this land before there were U.S property laws and he should just evacuate himself to Canada or something? (At least until the Canadian Eskimos will realize they can pull the same trick…)
The Native American (or in my case, Palestinian) may have a point there, but would you leave the house you were born in, the only place that you will ever call home, because the guy has a point? Furthermore, will that guy really feel like home in your house? I’ve talked to this Palestinian guy online and he told me his family is originally from the Israeli city of Safed and he dreams of coming back home.
Since he was born in Gaza and never saw safed, I was compelled to ask him: Are you sure it’ll feel like home to you? Safed is a myth to you as the vague Promised Land was to my biblical ancestors. I’ve been to Safed a month ago, it’s a very poor city living of its peculiar mystical tourism. Honestly, after you’ve seen the city I bet you wouldn’t wanna live there. A home is not just a construction or merely a location, it’s what was cultivated on it and in it and with it, and it’s the culture and the community that emerged in that space and has already merged with it. “And that, my friend” I told him, “isn’t yours. It can’t be yours. It’s foreign to you, and you’ll feel it”.
Many people ask me how come I continue to live and love Israel, why won’t I use immigration as a form of resistance to my government’s actions. Heck, I even threatened to do so myself, many times. But obviously I can’t. I mean, of course I CAN, technically, I’m a friendly educated person with a global consciousness that can take root practically everywhere. You can remove me quite easily from Israeli territory but you can’t remove my roots – the Israeli culture and identity – it is with the same roots that I go to a foreign land and although it will rarely be noted on the surface, my roots may never really fit in perfectly in the new soil.
Even if I wander as far as the north pole, I’ll always be asked where I’m originally from, I’ll always be held responsible to something by someone, I’ll always feel guilty about something, I’ll always care about everything that happens back home. *sigh*, yea, home will always be “there” even if whatever I had there didn’t exist anymore.
The secret formula of home
It’s not politically correct but it’s true so I’ll just go ahead and say it: as much as I am peace seeking and sympathetic to Palestinian suffering, and aware of the injustice that keeps me safe in my home, I am still grateful my home is unchanged, that the circumstances that make it my home are maintained. Living in Israel you normally meet Palestinians who speak of an independent country in Gaza and the West Bank and that seems just fine and far away, but when abroad or online you meet many other Palestinians that speak of the entire land as Palestine, that want to return to Jaffa and Safed and hey, wasn’t Tel Aviv actually “Sheikh Munis” once?…
I fear that the concept of home, like love or identity, is a complex caotic fractal, a secret formula, that if I change one component I’ll lose it entirely. Tel Aviv just won’t be Tel Aviv under Palestinian rule, with a flock of new Palestinian residents or when its people and cafes and beaches are moved, as is, to Uganda. The geography and ecology create symbiosis with the community and the culture: it just doesn’t grow the same way in a different environment, in different circumstances.
There’s no clear right or wrong, both sides have rightful claims. Palestinian grandmothers should be allowed to return to the homes they fled from and at the same time Israeli children should be allowed to live in the homes they were born in. It doesn’t matter that it’s a small territory barely spotted on the world map while vast fertile lands wait to be inhabited someplace else. This is the fu**ing home for both of us and that’s that, i guess. Go figure. May we find a more peaceful and creative way to share it in a way that maintains those secret ingredients that make it a home for all of us.
The people of Israel live, homeless
As I was wrapping up this post a miraculous thing happened. I overheard the Israeli hymn, the tikva (that means “hope”), coming from downstairs across the street on waikiki beach, played by a homeless violinist. I left the computer and went down with a video camera. By the time I crossed the street he was already playing the popular “Jerusalem of gold” and I managed to capture him with the finale of the patriotic chant “am Israel chai” (which means “the people of Israel live” and is often sung by religious people in hard times, to cheer us up and remind us of the liveliness of our people and what we accomplished after all that we have been through).
The mixed nationalities tourist audience cheered without even realizing what they listened to. During the break he took after “hava nagila”, the homeless violinist told me he wasn’t even Jewish, he just knows many popular violin tunes from different cultures and he was playing there for hours before i heard him.
Tears came to my eyes as I realized this was just a message from the universe, from God to me, a manifestation of the ability of my culture to follow me everywhere, even in the most unexpected places like Waikiki beach, and always strike a chord (pun intended this time) weather I like it to matter for me or not.
The people of Israel indeed live and they live practically everywhere in the world, but only few lucky (?) ones can come to terms with calling another place home. I am continuously amazed to meet Israeli people living in the U.S and Europe for many years, seeing success and wealth there and yet giving it all up, settling for much less, only to return home again, to Israel.
Before you have any dialog with us, I think you should understand this about us. It doesn’t justify occupation, it doesn’t justify anything. I suppose even the most serious left wing activist feels this dissonance as he or she still live here and not just write an angry blog from their NYC residence… it’s just how thing are and that’s what I wanted to talk about today.
What is home to YOU? Is it a distant cultural memory or the actual smells of your mom’s cooking, the flower bushes outside your house, the angry salesman in the local grocery store….?
Happy peace day to everyone. I still blog for trust!
September 10, 2009 at 11:52 pm by Carmel · Filed under Israel, Mideast general
I’m in Hawaii right now, on the other side of the world lagging 12 hrs behind the Middle East. I wake up with the beautiful blue-green Pacific Ocean outside my window watching surfer-newbies take a shot at the waves as tropical birds stop by my porch checking out their food options.
On the street everyone smiles, many girls wear flowers on their necks or behind their ears, vendors open oysters and embed the pearls into jewelry in front of my eyes, and within 10 minutes walk towards the beautiful green mountains, one enters tropical jungle kingdom with fantastic waterfalls straight from the iconography of LOST.
If there’s heaven on earth it must be here: great weather all year, colorful tropical vibe and the best of American consumerism’s abundance. But instead of simply enjoying that, all I can think of is why can’t we have that too? Why are we condemned to fight for territory? why people in our area are so angry and obsessed? Why can’t we focus on joy and happiness as a top priority as well?
I used to blame our religious differences for it, but my Muslim friends say religion is used as political means in a much more basic struggle for money and power. So few people play this game and yet they manage to keep entire populations apart, breeding hate and stereotyping each other through misguided media.
Today, 11.9.09, a day that is remembered as an international trauma, we choose to start melting these stereotypes through the impartial medium of blogs and align with the light, the love and the hope. Thus, we start with the basis needed for all of that to breed, for the bridges to rebuild: we start with trust.
It’s no secret that our administrations don’t trust each other and as people we barely trust our administrations, so can we trust each other, as people? What needs to happen in order for YOU to restore your trust in the other side which you might perceive as an enemy but actually you don’t know too much about? What needs to happen in order for us to be willing to take a chance on that?
One thing I realized about Israelis lately is that we desperately need to be safe, always in the comfort zone. And so it’s really hard for us as to bare the risks of openness for peace: we feel we’ve done that before and all we got was hurt and terror, so we freaked out, closed up and built a wall on our land and in our hearts.
However, the same way we don’t close our hearts after a love gone sour and we’re willing to be hurt again in order to feel love again, we need to keep that gate open for peace even if it’ll be abused by some on the way. I know, I’m afraid too. But to think peace will sneak up on us peacefully on our terms only is a bit childish, isn’t it?
I mean, do we have any other choice but open our hearts in trust even when it’s hard and scary, especially when it’s hard and scary and pray love gets the upper hand?
What do YOU need in order to open up to trust? Bloggers from the EuroMed area will blog for trust today as part of the “restore trust, rebuild bridges” campaign. Please join us: add “I blog for trust” to your posts, spread the word or record a video response to our clip.
I would also like to recommend a new blog that attempts to build such a bridge to warm the cold waters of the Israeli-Egyptian peace. Meet Mr. Foul and Mrs. Falafel. I strongly recommend following them as it seems it’ll be both informative and funny.
I blog for trust,
Carmel, Honolulu.
August 9, 2009 at 4:26 am by Carmel · Filed under Israel
Many religious people await the mythic war between the light and darkness without being aware that the war is already being fought and they’re in fact aligning with darkness. It is the war between the people who love only the ones who are similar to them, and the people who love and embrace diversity. The war between people who think there’s only one truth and they’re holding its key and the people who see the complexity of many truths in different contexts and for different people. The war between those focused on exclusion and separatism and the ones focused on inclusion and connectivity.
Last week, an anonymous killer still running loose, started shooting at a community center for gay teen in Tel Aviv. Two teenagers were killed and 15 were wounded. The liberal city of Tel Aviv in the democratic country of Israel was shocked such a hate crime is possible, but some said that they always knew Tel Aviv to be a liberal bubble, inside a country that 46% of its people think being gay is a form of perversion and its formal religion explicitly bans gay relationship, comparing them to animal sex and condemning the parties to death.
These are not the words of God. There are enough God-wannabes spreading disarray through messages “channeled” to different people, only nowadays we take them less seriously than our BC ancestors. God, the spirit and consciousness of all living things, cannot be a fundamentalist, cannot afford to exclude some of its parts. It’s not so divine and barely even makes sense: if God wanted everyone to follow the same rule he/she/it wouldn’t have made everyone so damn different.
God doesn’t live between the pages of a book and doesn’t speak only to the ones who grow beards. god is in the world, it is in the details, in the small things, in everything. So God must love colorfulness, God must love diversity because unity is made of diversity and a ray of light breaks into the colors of the rainbow. This is the true face of God. Indeed, we’re all made of both light and darkness, like the Yin & Yang symbol suggests, but are we aligning ourselves with the light, containing our darkness, or aligning with the dark, swallowing and oppressing our light?
Some of my best friends are gay and I always thought sexual orientation was a private thing and either than that one could hold various opinions on different issues, but I understand now that being a gay activist and having a gay identity is necessarily taking a liberal stand, it must also mean being feminist and respecting minorities etc. We identify with complex identities in order to create bridges: while our national identity might be rivalry, our sexual identity might create something more important in common for us.
I stand with the gay community in Israel these days because it moves me to see them forge a strong political identity due to recent events, showing everyone their true size and true colors, and I’m so proud of them. God has made them a bit different so they could appreciate the beauty in our differences and help fight for the freedom of love, thus I count on this community as a partner for the vision of a new world.
This footage (with English subtitles) is from last night’s memory, pride and tolerance rally held in Rabin Square a week after the brutal shooting.
August 1, 2009 at 4:58 am by Carmel · Filed under Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, Palestinian Territories
On the second morning of the ALF bloggers intercultural training**, the Luxembourg abbey was turned into a casino: we were seated arbitrarily at 5 tables, and Xavi, our non formal education trainer, taught us to play “Barga” (which is Whist with a twist). After every round, the winner moves to the right table and the loser to the left, thus two people are replaced at each table. Oh, and we aren’t allowed to talk during the entire game. What we didn’t know is that every table got slightly different game rules that were taken from the table when the game officially started.
Identity politics, decaffeinated
I lost the first round, and as I walked towards my new table, I realized the game must be a metaphor for immigration to a new culture. Indeed, this new table culture was weird. When they claimed I won, I laughed and showed them they’re crazy in sign language but I was happy to go back to my original table. I was zigzagging between winning and losing so I visited only two tables besides my original and the vibe there was weird. I played calmly without even understanding the rules by which I was playing, letting others lead and assuming different interpretations in different tables. When I got back to my table I was received with hugs and laughs and I was so happy to come back “home” I was almost sorry I was winning again.
At the end of the game we broke the silence and broke down the metaphor. We perceive ourselves as liberal and global but “Barga” proved we all fall into our unaware cultural stereotypes when we encounter uncertainty. I was the classical Jew, turning her home-table into a happy sticky Jewish family, focused on the community rather than the laws, and although I seemed assimilated at other tables I was clueless, I wasn’t having fun and I couldn’t wait to be back home. Deep down I think I even believed my table had the real and right understanding of the rules (the chosen table? Mmmm).
Another blogger from my original table, Greek Orthodox from Cyprus, took upon himself the missionary/imperialist role and spread our rules to all other tables, confusing players even further. The “world” gave in to him until he met resistance from the Palestinian blogger, who was sick and tired of being confused. Later she confessed no table felt like home and she was angry and felt deceived by everyone. I felt great compassion to this “trust no one” refugee consciousness that we share in our cultural genes, although we employed different strategies to deal with it.
The Lebanese blogger confessed the game felt like Lebanon for her, when every group plays by different rules and the only way to survive is to form alliances. She indeed formed an alliance with the British blogger and they were showing drawings to newcomers socializing them to the rules they’ve established. Finally, kudos to the Egyptians that were adapting quickly everywhere, having fun and winning, bringing back new integrated methods from other tables.
Tolerance means stepping outta the comfort zone
We went back to our study room, confused and troubled, to get some theoretical explanation for what we felt. Xavi explained people do everything to get back to their comfort zone but real learning occurs in the stretch zone only. However, if you stretch too much you’re in the panic zone, where anger, hysteria and frustration kill learning again. When one is able to endure the stretch zone, growth happens and one’s comfort zone expands.
When we encounter Otherness most of us become ethnocentric. Even if it doesn’t normally get to the point we deny the Other’s humanity or defend ourselves from their danger, we all minimize. Minimizing the Other is a sublime daily ethnocentrism in which we come with good intentions (or just politically correctness) to respect others but we are pretty fixed on our views and think their interpretations are lesser than ours. Xavi asked us to entertain the idea we are rarely in real dialog. We rarely listen when we are truly open to accept and integrate.
This intensive training actually provided numerous opportunities for me to dive into the stretch zone. The farther I’ve stretched was probably the culture night, as I had to witness the Palestinian blogger present Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth which to me form part of Israel. When she joked even Jesus was Palestinian, I couldn’t find my sense of humor to remark that Mel Gibson must stand corrected and do another movie to get off our Jewish backs.
Honestly, I didn’t expect I’d be bothered but this training proved the Jewish gene comes uninvited; channeling through me that ancient fear of being homeless again, losing that little piece of land that comes without the peace of mind anyway, after my ancestors paid such a heavy price for it. My voice was still a bit shaky as immediately afterward I started my presentation, thanking God I went for stuff like Bamba snack, Ilan Ramon and the Israeli high tech creativity rather than retreating into the state city of Tel Aviv, my comfort zone.
Being strong means becoming comfortable with the stretch zone
That night I cried. I couldn’t’ sleep and I wasn’t even sure why. After two days of reflection I think I can offer some explanation, though. I cried because the stretch zone isn’t necessarily a fun place to be in and growth is a painful process. I cried because both our people are nomads nobody wanted around, and instead of embracing each other we duplicate and mirror the exclusion.
I cried because we fail to break the magic cycle of victim/aggressor, celebrating the panic zone or rushing back to the comfort zone at any cost. The Israeli public opinion is too edgy to be stretched these past few years; it looks away and pretends it didn’t notice the price paid for restoring comfort zone ASAP.
I cried because I am constantly attempting to ground myself within a vortex, when half of my community consists of dark souls, disgusting racist morons, and the other half consists of amazing, sensitive and creative people who bring so much light and knowledge to the universe, who can turn swamps into a heaven with a research institute beside it. And all and all, that’s all I got, that’s my home-table. I cried because the things I’m ashamed of and angry about in my country equal the things I’m in love with and proud of, and even if I resent my family I still love it and depend on it for my safety, like a tree can’t deny its roots.
On that culture night, the Palestinian blogger brought bracelets as give-aways with Palestine’s flag colors. I took one home because I feel uncomfortable to look at it, but every time I look at it I’m stretching out a bit, experiencing that little sting of real encounter with Otherness and the threat to the ego that comes with a competing frame for my reality.
And by looking at it I’m reminding myself that being strong isn’t about arrogance or defensive attack. It’s about taking deep breaths, feeling and containing the anger and anxiety and taking baby steps towards feeling more comfortable with that.
* I find this title ironic since Luxembourg is peaceful to the point it puts you to sleep.
** Yaser, from this blog, was supposed to participate as well and I’m sorry he couldn’t make it, i know i was dying to meet him. I’m hoping this would motivate him to join us for future activities….
May 15, 2009 at 3:45 pm by Carmel · Filed under Israel
Hi everyone. I wanted to share with you this short video introducing Daniel Karpinski, a very young (25) Canadian violinist visiting Israel, and was taken by the cantorial prayer music of the various religions we got here. He speaks no Hebrew or Arabic but the various ethnic accents he performs were impressing and surprising. I wish we could jam and juggle between religions as Daniels’ violin does. Our troubled area would be much more fun if we took our religions more lightly. This video was taken at an improvised jam session in my house last week. Enjoy:
Daniel Karpinski and the Cantorial Violin
April 22, 2009 at 5:18 am by Carmel · Filed under Israel
Yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day in Israel. I’m going to say a few short words about it that’ll be far from politically correct so brace your selves. The holocaust is a unique rare event marking an unusual psychotic and non humane state of mind. Therefore we are very upset when people try to compare other tragedies like apartheid, “simple” occupation or even “normal” African-style genocide to the holocaust. However, isolating the holocaust as a uniquely bizarre event disconnected from other forms of human brutality is extremely dangerous. Because the holocaust is just a unique peak of a very common human process which can be dealt with in much much earlier stages if you agree to see the connections and allow the comparison.
A friend told me that at the anti-racism museum in Washington there are two entrance gates – for racists and non racists – and everyone who enters through the non racists’ gate hears a recording calling him a liar. Each and every one of us has the seeds of a Hitler inside. I have these moments in which I am a control freak and I can’t stand it that things are not happening my way. The only difference between me and Hitler is that he couldn’t manage himself and decided to reorganize the world instead.
We all use stereotypes and it is often convenient to pile up a social group into a stereotype erasing their unique faces and stressing their otherness. It could be “the homeless” or “the Arabs”. Probably, none of us will take it as far as Hitler did, but do you honestly believe it’s a different issue and not just a sublime, primal, unripe version of the same essence? And finally, that frightening dangerous notion I encountered around me during the Gaza war that “the life of one Israeli soldier is worth more than the life of 1000 Palestinian children”. Army leaders acted under the assumption our people won’t be able to bare the death of soldiers but will understand the killing of thousands of Palestinian children as a necessary evil. So many young people around me weren’t’ ready to see or to feel the other side’s pain, an option that is open to us even if we’re politically right-wing and justify a war. Things could be more complex. Heck, they ARE more complex.
Now of course it is not in any way comparable with the holocaust, but the emotional imperviousness and the dullness of the senses are a “good” start even if it will never end the same way. In short, perceiving the holocaust as uniquely alien instead of an extreme manifestation of common forms gone psychotic and rotten, normalizes other tragedies and various expressions of inhuman brutality, disconnecting them from this continuum that starts with my personal emotional management.
Thus, for me, The holocaust remembrance day is about remembering to be human, to agree to see and feel the other even if he’s not on my side and to remember everyone has a place in the world, even the ones I don’t’ like. It’s about flexibility and love instead of stiffness and blocking off people (how many times have you heard the sentence “these are the rules, I’m only following orders” in bureaucracies?)
Yesterday I attended a lecture by Fleming Rose, the Danish editor of the famous newspaper who published the Islamic offensive cartoons almost 3 years ago. He defended the freedom of speech with a unique argument: he said equal societies are forged through freedom of speech and that includes hate speech and blasphemy. Europe has all kinds of blasphemy laws and you could be imprisoned for mocking the queen or the religion. He presented statistics demonstrating societies that allow free speech have less violence since things that you’re not allowed to criticize grow bigger and more dangerous. Instead of being politically correct and creating taboos, speak about what you believe and let the other speak otherwise.
He said that even anti-Semitism or holocaust denial shouldn’t be legally handled but morally. You could educate, condemn and spread the opposite information but if you start locking up people for liking Hitler you’ll end up with a new Hitler on the rise. Free words guarantee many things will not develop into deeds. He thought it’s because there’s a difference between words and deeds but I think it’s exactly because there isn’t. Word is a weak form of an act, a speech act. And if you let people take it out in words the energy behind that intention is wasted and focused in the verbal flaming, so there’s less likelihood it’ll evolve into deeds.
I agree with the main argument though: instead of being offended, laugh with us. Communicate. Believes which aren’t’ open to criticism and satire are very very very dangerous to hold on to.
January 7, 2009 at 4:15 am by Carmel · Filed under Uncategorized
One of the slogans that captured my attention in the anti war demonstrations of 2006 was “bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity”. This metaphor argues that the means to a vision must be consistent with the vision’s value system, since the medium is the message. However, Aristotle said “sometimes we go to war to live in peace”. As doctors know, the means for achieving health are often aggressive cures. Both proverbs have a point, in different contexts, I guess. And context changes rapidly. If only two days ago I would harden my heart and argue for Israel’s duty to destroy the Hamas for the future of the Palestinan people as well, the hard pictures of dead children change the context and the question of “in what cost?” appears.
Wars are not sterile, they never were. In fact all wars in human history were a war crime and bloodshed. Every war going on right now in the world is a walk in the park compared with those old wars. But something very important changed: we’ve got media now. Everyone can see this happening and human soul can’t ignore nor endure the war dynamics anymore. I always blame media for its many faults but on this one, bless its soul, it helps us grow and outgrow wars.
But what does it mean to outgrow wars? I look at the European Union latent and satiated countries, and almost can’t believe that until half a century ago they were engaged in historical rivalry and bloody wars over world territory. How did they outgrow that to a point we can’t even imagine them in war anymore? How can we follow that path? We may not like this, but maybe, a true and lasting peace consciousness cannot be achieved artificially, ahead of its time, with the help and the restrains of external forces.
Growth is a violent and dangerous process in nature and possibly in human nature as well. But growth can only be achieved from inside, from within it, otherwise it disrupts the species and not lasting. Maybe true peace grows only out of wars; maybe humans are able to transcend their consciousness only after they are saturated by blood, saturated in blood, holding bodies of dead children from both sides. Maybe we are bombing for peace, bombing till it blows our minds to outgrow it.
I have a vision of a Middle East Union, maybe even within a decade or two. My children or grandchildren will be learning about these wars in history and saying “can you believe it? can you even imagine these lazy saturated peaceful countries were once in such horrible wars? Hahahah….” I know it seems unbelievable now, but it is very possible, because it has happened to Europe and it may as well happen to us. I wish there was something we could do to bypass the bloody process but maybe we gotta accept the possibility that this is the way human nature develops and hold our breath and suffer pain for a little longer…
Maybe that is the recipe for making peace. the igridients are digusting but after stirring and baking we’ll have something to look forward to.
January 3, 2009 at 5:44 pm by Carmel · Filed under Israel, Palestinian Territories
Hi everyone. I haven’t been around much lately but it seems like the place to come to when i don’t have a TV and I can’t sleep, worrying about the ground faze of the war that started tonight. But let’s start earlier this evening. i didn’t go to the anti war big demonstration in Tel Aviv. Theoretically nobody’s pro war, but Hamas, Hezbollah, El Qaeda etc. don’t leave you any other choices besides kill or be killed. My friends in the Israeli left wing and my European friends are too busy being humanists and pluralists to understand that pluralism is irrelevant when your party believes it’s “my way or your dead body”.
On the other hand, you can’t kill an ideology by killing all the people who hold it. It seems that if we set the goal to destroy the Hamas completely, we’ll be in world war 3 in no time. And the fundamental Islam will survive it, of course. So there’s no choice but to go to war and no point to go to war anyway. And in-between that impossible reality, people will die.
I’m afraid to go to sleep as if i can keep things intact by following them with my own eyes. I’m afraid that once I’ll close my eyes I’ll wake up with a death toll. Tired of living here but can’t really call other places “home”. if only God himself could pull his head out of the clouds of smoke in Gaza and shout “you morons, I made you for the sole purpose of pleasure, growth and prosperity, but you had to take life so damn seriously. Fuck religions, the hell with weapons, go get a life. All of you”.
June 8, 2008 at 2:48 pm by Carmel · Filed under Israel, Lebanon
Last night I watched Ari Folman’s new amazing movie “Waltz with Bashir” premiered on May at Cannes festival, and I urge all of you: find a way to see it!
It has taken Israeli society its share of years to come up with Post-Zionist narratives to our permanent state of war and the escalation periods we actually call “wars”. Army service is a passage rite for manhood in Israeli society and I wrote once in my temporary war blog what I think it does to men. In this movie Ari Folman brings a broken narrative of manhood on the expense of a shattered humanity. The movie is a documentary but since it’s an animation movie, it provides a unique experience on the verge of real and surreal. Like a dark manga movie it could happen anywhere and anytime – to Croatians in Bosnia, to Americans in Iraq, to Japanese in China – the setting may be local but the story is personal, hence, universal.
Folman is over 40 years old and can’t remember much from the first Lebanese war he participated in as a confused 19 years old soldier. His images are so aesthetic, as if his memory turned things into a spectacle in order to protect the self. Movie aesthetics is inspired by “waking life” and is breath taking. It animates the innocence of the 80s on one hand, and the subjective narrative of war on the other hand, through animating true stories that happened to his army friends, some of them are inconceivable – all for the sake of trying to remember where he was in all of this.
Folman’s war critisizm connects with the second Lebanon war as well. The movie clearly shows that the higher your rank is the further you are from battle field: you give orders through the phone and send your pawns to die. frames also show how clumsy and scary everything is, how you aim at one bad guy and end up killing a family. and with all the cool music and animation, you dunno if to laugh or to cry. Animation plays between real and surreal and the last shots of the movie are not animated, to ground all that horror in the real.
The movie animates subjective narratives in which there is only the self and the fear in the face of the horror, being done by the self out of fear. no greater meaning can embody itself through that self, people shoot without even knowing why, war of zombies. Besides the genius cinematic masterpiece, this movie is a signifier for all those new post Zionist voices that look at war scenes and see only a bunch of different people trying to live. Not identifying with any big story that requires killing someone that has a different version of it. The world is just people – not religions, not nations, not doctorines – and when it boils down to “just people”, wars stop making sense.
Unfortunately those voices are not as common or legitimate in our neighboring countries, where stories such as ideologies and religions are still meta narratives to die for. The story protects you form going crazy because you believe it rationalizes horror. You slaughter families in Sabra & Shatila but you believe you’re doing stuff for a greater good. We don’t hear of ex militia or Hezbollah people having nightmares and going to a post trauma shrink after 20 years, do we? Now why is that, you think? You have to reach that level of development on the national level to be ready to critically detach from the big stories that made up your nation as an entity, and you have to do it without breaking that entity apart, which is quite a challenge. That’s evolution, folks.
However, once the story doesn’t protect you, you might go mad on account of what you did while your hands were in service of that story. Many cannot afford letting go of the story because they will have to face personal responsability for thier part in the horror. The middleway option to evolve would be to opress and forget, i guess.
I think one day not very far away there will be world peace. But not because everyone will suddenly get along, but because more and more people wake up to this understanding that the big stories are loosing their touch, slowly letting go of their grip, and what is left is people. A lot of people that have one planet to save and nurture and who cares which stories they tell themselves in their leisure time.
Don’t tell me terror and fundamentalism is on the rise since that is the exact symptom of the global decay of the big stories – those who still hold them tighten the grip and are afraid. We have this saying in Hebrew: the darkest hour is just before the break of dawn.
Watch the movie! please watch the trailer on the website and here’s a great scene that served as the pitch pilot for the movie, with english subtitles.
May 2, 2008 at 2:42 am by Carmel · Filed under Israel, Palestinian Territories
A well known Israeli right-wing joke tells of ex PM Sharon sitting with Arafat at the negotiation table and telling him “You know, when Moses arrived to the Gaza sea he took off his cloths and jumped in for a swim, and after a while when he was back to shore, all his cloths were gone. He was angry and asked his people what happened, so they told him “the Palestinians took it”. At this point Arafat gets up and shouts “that’s impossible, you can’t blame us for everything, Palestinians weren’t even living there at that time!” than Sharon smiles and answers calmly: “my point exactly”.
Basing our present arguments on history, which is sometimes as good as mythology, has already resulted in a dead end. some countries speak of this territory in terms of 1948 and choose not to recognize the realities that happened here since, but not liking or not agreeing with something doesn’t make it go away. a starting point for each change would be fully recognizing its present state (double meaning here…). what if all sides in the Middle East will sort things out from the present point?
This is just an opening thought for what I wanted to share with you today: yesterday was Holocaust day in Israel. surprisingly, the top story of Maariv’s new age channel yesterday, brought a historical document written by Mahatma Gandhi in 1938 about how Jews should deal with antisemism (pre holocaust) in a non violent way and should die proudly if there’s no choice, however, they should not be imposed over the Arabs in Palestine. you can read the document in English here.
I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday and I’m not sure that if Gandhi was alive today he’d still be supporting the Palestinians. you see, I think Gandhi works from the point of view of the present. in 1938 it did seem crazy and pointless to take someone’s country and turn it into another’s. and I could see the point he has about living our faith safely within any nationality, as it is today in Europe (more or less). but the problem with people is that we almost never work from present tense. stretching Gandhi’s argument from 1938 to today would be twisting his words and taking them out of their historical context. he might as well have said today that since Israel is already here big time, it is pointless to overturn that again, we should always work within the currents of reality and everybody should just stay where they are and work it out from there non violently. what do you think?
on a personal note, I’m sorry I haven’t been here for a long while and I shall probably not visit much till September – I’m writing my PhD now so you could say I’m in a self initiated full siege…
Next entries »
Bad Vilbel
Big Pharaoh
Carmel
Dalia
Matin
Shifaa
Yaser
Drima
