The glory days of Dahab 1973 - 1983

I first went on holiday to Sinai in the 1970s.  My parents used to drive down regularly in their small tinny oil-cooled Renault 4, in which air conditioning meant opening the window. Sinai was under Israeli rule and peace with Egypt seemed like an unattainable fantasy.
Most Israelis went to Neviot, a Kibbutz erected near the Bedouin community of Nuweiba on the East coast, over an hour South of Eilat but my parents drove down to the Bedouin community of Dahab, about 100 kilometres further down the coast and a good 500 kilometres from our suburb of Tel-Aviv.

 

There was a Kibbutz next to Dahab as well, called Di-Zahav, and its name was said to hail from the golden glitter in the sand (zahav is gold in Hebrew).  There was speculation that the Israelites might have built the golden calf there.

Those in the know, which somehow included my parents, drove past Di-Zahav along unpaved roads, following the shore to Dahab. The Bedouin had a series of bamboo shacks there which they rented out, and they operated small, roofless kiosks. The Bedouin lived inland, in black tents nestling at the foot of the mountains, and at dawn one would see a young girl in the distance, dressed in black, leaving the tents and taking a small herd of goats into the mountains.  As she vanished into the ravines, another girl would emerge from the tents with another herd.  This went on for about an hour.
Twice a day, the tide went out, exposing a reef covered with fantastical creatures, see-through worms, sea-urchins, star-fish in incredible colours, crabs in myriads of sizes with and without shells and the odd oyster. If you sat on the reef's edge, you could see multi-coloured fish in all shapes and sizes swimming in the deep and watch the mountains of Saudi Arabia across the sea.
In the mornings, I would walk along the shore and explore the washed-up flotsam of one of the world's most beautiful coral reefs.  There were very few tourists, just a few annoying Germans who had somehow got to this rather desolate place with its incredible sea.
There was no need for tents. One simply slept on the sand with a little bamboo wall protecting against the wind. Rain is extremely rare in Sinai and impossible in summer. At night the sky was covered in stars and I once counted at least thirteen shooting stars as I went to sleep (I assume I witnessed the Perseids, an August meteorite shower).  In the wet season flash floods would carry chunks of road away.  As one drove down, one would see large chunks of last-year's road, sand held together by asphalt, sitting next to the road.  It looked as though a giant had stuck his hand in the ground, pulled up a piece of road and then deposited it on the ground.

Sinai returned to Egypt in 1979, after Sadat's impasse-breaking visit to Jerusalem.  It is not part of the promised land or the 1917 League of Nations "Jewish Homeland" and the only settlers were the Kibbutzniks, nature-loving leftists who, as soon as peace came, quietly packed up and went home. The peace treaty guaranteed Israelis visa-free entry to the coasts of Sinai but in the early years few took it up. 
In early 1981 my family returned to England. My parents had never taken out full Israeli citizenship and so I was not called up for military service. In 1983 I visited Israel with a girl-friend (Emily Brown, later lead singer of the Hangman's Beautiful Daughters http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-Vqh8oZWEQ).  We were 19.
My year at school in Israel were the Israeli generation most affected by Israel's invasion of Lebanon.  They spent most of their 3 year military service fighting in the Lebanon and were almost universally completely miserable. My parents had not taken out full Israeli citizenship and I saw no reason to join them (I returned to Israel in the Nineties' and then did military service). Me and Emily travelled to Israel and spent a few days in a flat adjacent to the Western Wall (lent by a friend) and then went down to Sinai.
We were the only tourists in Dahab.  Well almost.  The first couple of nights, there was an Australian woman who was there with her Egyptian boyfriend.  We slept on the beach and washed in the sea. The Egyptian police didn't like us and took our passports at night, much to the Egyptian boyfriend's embarrassment. It seemed politic to pretend not to be Jewish, so I listened politely as he made outrageous anti-Semitic statements.

We got down the coast in a taxi. The taxis were all ancient Peugeots whose water cooling system had been rigged by the drivers, they expanded it by attaching a mineral water bottle with a small pipe.

Peugeot must have been impressed, as they were shooting an advert for Peugeot in Sinai and we saw various sleek new Peugeots driving up and down.

I befriended a Bedouin guy who was operating a tiny kiosk and we played endless games of backgammon and chatted in Hebrew. The younger Bedouin had all been through the Israeli school system and spoke fluent Hebrew. I remember ordering a fish dinner and then watching as he went onto the reef with a stick and a bit of string and caught me a fish for dinner.  It was delicious. 
There was a small US army base (MFO: Multinational Force Observers, next to Dahab, where a few tens of American soldiers monitored the peace.  Most, as I recall, were black men not much older than me who came from Atlanta. They were very friendly and seemed to have little understanding of where they were. The Bedouin enjoyed the Americans occasional trips out of the base, when they spent freely.  I remember spending several minutes trying to catch the sentry's attention as he was too engrossed in his Walkman to pay any attention to me.  The Israeli in me was struck by this failure in his job as a sentry.
I no longer remember how long we spent there as one's sense of time would blur in Sinai, and one simply focused on being. The future and the past seemed irrelevant, while the present was entirely stress-free.

I returned to Israel in 1991 and a year later Rabin was elected prime-minister and peace almost broke out in the Middle-East.  The Palestinians got autonomy, Israel made peace with Jordan and the Sinai coast turned into "the new Riviera". I visited Sinai many times in that period and Dahab was unrecognizable.  The reef had mysteriously vanished and been replaced by a narrow strip of beach covered in restaurants serving every kind of international food.  they had no chairs, you were expected to lounge on carpets, leaning against chopped-down palm trees. Water was pumped from the ground but it was undrinkable because masses of sewage was pumped straight back in. Signs posted by the British Embassy warned of 40 year sentences to those caught with recreational drugs, which didn't seem to stop anyone from publicly smoking cannabis.

A narrow road ran between the restaurants and their lounge spaces which were directly on the sea-front.  You could buy everything and stay in all manner of hotels - including the Hilton. See http://www.dahab.net/english/Hotels/Dahab_Hotels.html for a vision of its present.
It was horrible. I used to periodically go through for a look and some shopping, but I tried not to stay there.

Palestein: The five state (federal) solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict

I read this week of a meeting near Hebron, between Israeli right-wingers and Palestinian traditionalists exploring the possibility of a single state for all.  what struck me was that they seemed to be leaving Gaza out of the equation, so it was a two state solution with Gaza as a separate state. So I thought: why not have multiple states?  They could be united in a federation.
We could have Gaza for Islamic separatists, Central Israel for left-wingers who want a predominately-Jewish state, Galillee (I can never spell that but you know what I mean) which would be a mixed Jewish-Arab state, the West-Bank would be a left-wing predominately-Palestinian state and finally around Jerusalem: this is the part I'm least sure of - perhaps a Halachic state.  I'm not sure about the Negev, perhaps it would be split between several states.
Each federal-state would be fiscally independent but required to make some kind of contribution to a central management body (eg the national-state), which would also manage the water resources and some other stuff.
There would be strict controls on militarization obviously.
The main problem I can envisage right now is what to call my five-state country: Palestine or Israel?
I considered combinations but then I had a brain wave, but considering that its my idea I think we should call it Palestein,

Putin's visit to Israel signals Assad's demise and a possible new alliance.

The dying Assad regime was the last vestige of Soviet hegemony in the Middle East. At its peak, some form of Soviet inspired socialism governed Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Algeria and the Yemen: the Arab world's most populated states.
Socialist dominance in the Arab world was neatly mirrored by its popularity in Israel, where a Labor party managed corporate state followed something akin to the Swedish model and the Kibbutz remains to this day, one of the most successful forms of socialist commune in the movement's history.
It has recently been claimed that the Soviets deliberately fostered conflict in the Middle East
(see The Cold War’s Arab Spring in the Tablet) as a means of maintaining their popularity, and it may well be that they overplayed their hand because the 1973 war between socialist Israel, Egypt and Syria directly led to its demise in both Israel and Egypt.
The Assad regime survived, bolstered by its control of Lebanon and a terrifying secret police, even after the Russians abandoned socialism. The Russians maintained loyalty to Syria , even as they changed. Syria was their single most important client state in the Middle East, and remained the sole provider of a Russian controlled Mediterranean port.
This week Putin came to Israel, to open a memorial to the Red Army dead in World War II.  Putin is the first Russian or Soviet President to visit Israel (Gorbachev came after retiring) and his visit is a powerful statement that Assad's time has finally come.
The late Bernard Lewis argued that religion is the Middle East's primary form of identity, and this now seems more relevant then ever.  Religio-nationalist regimes are springing up like mushrooms, with Israel once again providing a kind of mirror to both the Arabs and the Russians. Religious Judaism increasingly threatens to dominate Israel, while the Arab world is now adopting the Khomeini model of religio-nationalism and theocratic democracy.

When Avigdor Lieberman became Israeli foreign minister, his ambition was to bring Israel closer to Russia. About a quarter of Israelis are Russian speakers and the 15% or so who voted for Lieberman's party all admire Russian culture and prefer its limited democracy model to what they see as Western Anarchism.
I have no doubt that Putin's visit was inspired from Israel, but its timing is significant, and it can be argued that Russian Jews have never exercised as much influence as they do now. There are a handful - maybe more-  of "Oligarchs" with close ties to Israel and some of the most important Russian actors and writers live in Israel. This year a Russian-Israeli played for the World Chess Championship in Moscow.
Although Putin's Russia has often been hostile to the West, it has not come from an intrinsic clash of ideologies, but from a sense of historic threat and in that sense, the rapid decline of Western Europe and the USA may have served to free Russia from its fears.  Now, as the end of Assad is in plain sight, the Russians - who have no need for oil - can look around for new clients and although Russia is the Jewish people's historic enemy, the Nazis also made us historic friends. 


Those in the West who call for Israel to be boycotted, assume that Israel has no alternative but to kowtow to Western values, but the truth is that Israel has alternatives - and they may be far worse for the Palestinians.  Zionism was born at the Dreyfus trial, when a central European journalist realized that the values of the French revolution - the emancipator of Europe's Jews - could not prevent Jews from being a fishbone in  the throat of the European sense of identity and that secular Judaism was limited in its ability to bring emancipation.
Zionism has generally remained faithful to the ideals of the French (and American) Revolutions, but it has always been dominated by the East European Jews for whom it was created, and their value system remains at the heart of Israeli society. 
As capitalism falters in the West, so the appeal of partial democracy grows. That is the new Ruissia and this type of regime is spreading. It provides a way for unstable states to maintain a semblance of democracy without threatening the foundations of their society.  Its advantage as a model is that it can become more democratic. Its disadvantage is that it can metamorphose into Fascism.
For many Israelis who are threatened by the culture of human rights and sexual liberation it provides a more attractive model then Western Liberalism.  However before you write us off, remember that more than half the world's Jews live in the liberal democracies (mainly the USA but also France, the UK, Australia and  Canada) and that Israelis are increasingly, more a part of the Anglo-Saxon world than of the Russian and that, as long as Israel remains loyal to the USA, its usefulness to the Russians is limited. 

Gulag survivors in Israel: How my uncle survived the war.

My uncle, Fritz Stern, came from Vienna. He emigrated to Israel around 1948, met my aunt (my father's sister, who was from Nuremburg) and together they went to live in Nahariyya, a small seaside resort in the North of Israel which was famous mainly for being full of German-speaking Jews. Fritz had several friends who were also called Fritz Stern.
In 1990, a year or so after the collapse of the USSR, a middle-aged Russian man knocked on their door. when my uncle answered, the Russian gentleman informed him that "I am your son from Latvia".
It emerged that when the Austrians voted to unite with Germany in March 1938, Fritz had managed to get out and go to Latvia, which was then an independent state. It had been part of the Russian Empire until 1917 and managed to win independence during the Russian revolution.

Fritz met a woman in Latvia and married her, I don't know the details but I suppose it had the added benefit of allowing him to stay there at a time when anti-Jewish measures were being taken in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria and when Governments everywhere closed their doors to Jewish migration.
In September 1939 the Soviets and the Nazis signed the Molotov Pact and split Poland between them and in June 1940, Soviet troops entered Latvia (a Soviet area of influence under the Molotov pact) and annexed it.

The Soviets weren't terribly interested in Jews as such, but they were very suspicious of people who had lived outside the USSR and especially of Germans - even if they were Jewish, so they sent Fritz to the Gulag.
I don't know if Fritz knew that his wife was pregnant.  It is possible he didn't, either way those were desperate times and millions were sent to the Gulag.  One month after the Soviet invasion the Nazis invaded the USSR and by the end of the year close to 100% of the Jewish population had been murdered - many of them by Latvians.

The Soviets sentenced Fritz to five years hard labour and he was sent to a camp in Kazakhstan. He told my mother that it was so cold that he had to work to stay alive - that is to stay warm enough (the camps were basically slave camps, see http://gulaghistory.org/nps/onlineexhibit/stalin/work.php).  He told me that he had eaten rats and that he encountered a man who faked Parkinsons to get out of work and kept up the fakery for so long that he couldn't stop shaking when he was released.  He also told me of a Jew who told that camp commander that if he gave him all the camp's bread and 24 hours outside, he could get more bread out of it.  Apparently the man went off and did a series of trades (sounds like Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22) and indeed returned with vastly more food then he had taken.

Fritz said that the irony of the situation was that he was basically grateful to the Soviets for saving his life.  The alternatives in Latvia and Austria were far worse and most of his extensive Austrian family were murdered.

After the war he returned to Vienna - ignoring Latvia.  He once told me that the first time in his life he made a public fuss was on his return to Vienna.  He was on the bus and two Austrians behind him were saying how the best thing the Nazis did was exterminate the Jews and Fritz got up and started screaming. Apparently the bus driver shut the doors and drove to the Police station where the Soviet NKVD took the men away.

Fritz evidently concluded that Vienna was no longer for him and he took himself to Palestine, sometime in the Forties.  I don't know when or how he arrived but he had a photo of himself in Tel Aviv after it snowed and that has happened only once in recorded history: In February 1950.  You can see photos here: http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1877452 (the text is in Hebrew).

Fritz clearly never got a divorce.  The Holocaust in  Latvia was almost total and I suppose his wife must have escaped to another part of the USSR.   So the whole thing was forgotten - at least on his side of the family - until that day in the early nineties when  a middle aged man knocked on his door.

In those days Israel was awash with Holocaust survivors. People with numbers tatooed on their arms were all over the place and I suppose to them Fritz might as well have been at Butlins (a  notorious British holiday camp organization), so Fritz had to shelve his history and get on with life.  It took a few years but Israeli society acknowledged the suffering of its European brethren in the Holocaust with an annual day of memory, which is today firmly engrained in the national consciousness and taught (some would say too much) in the schools.

People like Fritz on the other hand are forgotten and there must be very many of them because at least one and a half million Soviet Jews have migrated to Israel.  Fritz was persecuted  as a German, not as a Jew. The Germans meticulously and apparently proudly, counted how many Jews they had killed, so we all know exactly what happened and how many were killed. The Soviets on the other hand, preferred to hide their crimes and kept no records of how many they had killed or how many of them were Jewish.  There is far less information available or known about the Gulag.

After the Six Day War, Jewish activists like Nathan Sharansky were sent to the Gulag and became known as Prisoners of Zion. I read somewhere that they were the last political prisoners sent to the Gulag. The suffering of these people was publicly acknowledged and they were given social benefits on account of their experiences, but people like Fritz are forgotten.  Yet it seems to me, that they too are part of our national history and it is a pity that no effort is made to document their experiences.

Incidentally, Fritz is not the only person in my family to have come through the Gulag.  My partner's father, Michael, was sent to a camp as a child and grew up in the Gulag.  His family came from a village just inside the half of Poland which the Nazis took over in September 1939 and after a couple of months the German troops marched them to the border and sent them over to the Soviet side. The whole family was subsequently sent to an extensive Gulag camp.

If you found this interesting, you might like to read about how my Grandmother escaped from Nazi Germany on the Trans-Siberian railway and how my father got into England using a fake Polish passport.

Ten percent of Israelis don't know their date of birth

 As part of the Israeli governments efforts to make our buildings resistant to earthquakes, it was made possible to sell the roof to contractors who would get an easy ride to adding an extra floor in return for strengthening the building as a whole and adding a couple of rooms.  To do that you need to persuade all the apartment owners  to sign a contract transferring ownership of the roof.  There are twelve apartments in my building. Four are owned by one person, six by two and one by three people. The twelfth is owned by the government.

Its a great deal and everyone signed on, but it has been beset with delays. One of the apartments is public housing (the government owned one) and it proved almost impossible to get an official signature on the deal.  There were also difficulties getting preliminary municipal approval for planning details. 

However, despite the problems, we have now reached the point where the contractor is ready to submit plans to the planning committee and it emerged that the Tel Aviv planning committee requires a photocopy of all the apartment owners identity cards handed over with the plans. 

So I found myself  running around collecting identity cards and scanning them. Altogether I had to collect 19 identity cards.

To my astonishment three of the 19 had no date of birth. Two had a year of birth but no day or month and one has a year and month but no day. Needless to say they are all Israelis who were born abroad: one was born in Iran in the Twenties, another in Poland in the Thirties and one in Morocco in the Forties.

The Pole has a month but no day and was not born during the Second World War; I once knew a man who was found in a paper bag outside the Warsaw ghetto.  The bag contained a spoon on which was etched the word "Olek", which became his name.  Olek used to say the spoon was his birth certificate.

I asked if they knew their birthday.  I was told that the Moroccan lady knows she was born in the Spring. The Iranian gentleman's son told me his father comes from Estafan in central Iran, he laughed at my question and told me that Estefan is larger then the whole state of Israel and that they only had a general idea of when the old man was born, and that his father never celebrated his birthday. He said no-one would fantasize about bombing Estefan's nuclear facility if they knew how big it was. I checked with Wikipedia and found it has a population of 1.5 million.

I recounted this story at work and discovered that I share an office with a woman whose father has no date of birth either.  He was born in Morocco "just before the ninth of Ab" (a fast date in the Jewish calendar). Needless to say it was a home birth (I asked).  He chooses to celebrate his birthday on the 8t of August. 

So I Googled Israelis with no date of birth.  I got surprisingly little response, except for one article in Yediot Achronot, written by an Ethiopian immigrant and published in May 2011, announcing that the 800,000  Israelis (slightly more then 10% of the population) who have no date of birth could now choose to register one if they wished! 

So that's my source. I e-mailed the national bureau of statistics to request an official figure and will update this blog if I get an answer, but it looks like 10% of the population don't have a date of birth. Its worth noting that Islamic countries would not have used the Gregorian calendar before the first world war and that the Moslem calendar is not solar, which is to say that you can't infer from the Moslem calendar how old someone is in solar cycles (months change every new moon and the year is shorter than a solar year). Russia also used a different calendar. 

As for registering births in a national registry, most of the world didn't even register land ownership until the twentieth century. So perhaps its not that surprising.      

To bomb or not to bomb and whether its just a bluff: Israel, Iran and nuclear bombs.

If Israel bombs Iran, there is no certainty that it will manage to halt the Iranian nuclear program while at the same time the price of oil will go through the roof (the Iranians will probably close the straits of Hormuz), and the main beneficiaries of high oil prices will not be Israel or its allies.

Even if the Iranians have trouble selling oil, if the price is very high, they don't need to sell as much.

Meanwhile, back in the West, the economies are very vulnerable and spiraling oil prices will only make problems worse. The main beneficiaries of declining Western economic power are likely to be China, India and Brazil: the rapidly emerging new world powers.

So there is a good chance that not only will Israel not stop the bomb, it'll also shoot its friends in the foot, while strengthening at least some of its enemies.

The Speaker of the Iranian Parliament said this week that "the Zionists were too cowardly to attack Iran" or words to that affect, and he may be right in the sense that if Israel meant to attack, then it would have done so.  Maybe I'm wrong and nowadays Israel stages endless public debates before attacking, but certainly in the past, Israeli planes suddenly appeared out of nowhere to smash its enemies (think Six Day war, Entebbe, the Iraqi reactor).

Only a few years ago the Israelis suddenly bombed a Syrian nuclear project. So I suspect that if Israel keeps fussing about it, then it won't. On the other hand, maybe the fuss is a tool to get the West to take action. Because that's the thing: Israel can use the threat of bombing Iran to leverage sanctions on Iran and that is now happening. The new sanctions are clearly being designed by clever minds. Iran was recently cut off from the Swift international banking transfer system, and I assume some other clever financial blows will be emerging soon. So the real question is, will the sanctions on Iran work? Will Iran end up like Egypt and Syria in internal chaos? Which is presumably the main idea behind the sanctions.

And who will benefit from the sanctions? The West won't, that's for sure, as all that Iranian oil money gets pumped eastwards to China and India (presumably at a discount thanks to the sanctions), but the main beneficiary would seem to be Turkey, since Iran is increasingly relying on Turkey to handle its oil and finances. Ha'Aretz recently estimated that 13 billion dollars a year of Iranian business is now being handled by Turkey.  So the moderate Islamism of Turkey gains from Western sanctions on Iran, although it remains to be seen if moderate Islamism really exists. Perhaps it’s like moderate Nazism and Israel is just trading Himmler (Ahmadinajad) for Hess (Erdogan).  On the other hand it might be Stalin for Scandinavian Socialism. A dominant moderate Islamism could be a big improvement. Either way it seems that Turkey is re-emerging as a second or third-level global power alongside Iran, assuming Iran survives the sanctions.  

I think Iran will survive, because the West no longer calls the shots. The West may still be powerful, but the world economy is no longer under Western thumbs – an ironic by product of the defeat of Communism.

The nuclear bomb project is actually weakening Iran, because it is paying vast sums to develop a few bombs it can't (and hopefully won't) use. So while Israel won't manage to stop Iran, its made them pay such a hefty price for the damned bomb and it may never have been worth it in the first place.  On top of that, I wouldn't trust Iranian nuclear safety; They may well end up poisoning themselves.

If Iran succeeds and gets the bomb, there is a whole new game to play and its hard to foresee the consequences. The Iranians may choose to distribute bombs to their pals but quite often the threat of nuclear war has the effect of moderating national behavior as the stakes grow higher. The main problem with using the bomb against Israel is that it will not be good for the Palestinians either while Israel will no doubt be forced to respond by developing sophisticated new forms of nuclear counter-weaponry which won't do anyone any good but will keep the enemy at bay.

Remembering Neighbours and Here We Are

There is a photo of my father in my kitchen, it shows him in the early fifties of the last century (or sometime round then), sitting amidst a set of rubbish bins (garbage cans if you're American) reading a script.  The bins say "Unity". A friend admired the picture and asked where I had bought it.  She said she wanted a picture like that for her house, so I told her that it wasn't bought, it was a picture of my father, Heinz Bernard, who was then the manager of a communist party affiliated theatre in London, called Unity Theatre.
Needless to say she hadn't heard of Unity but when I told her that he had appeared in two legendary Israeli Educational TV series, Neighbours and Here We Are, she immediately knew who he was.
In the late 'Seventies and 'Eighties there was only one TV channel in Israel and each of the two series was shown twice a week. They were so popular that they were shown for seventeen years.  Long after Israeli TV broadcast in colour, the two black and white series were still being shown.  That was a age before "celebrities" - many of them people who are famous for being famous - but Heinz, (my father), could not walk down the street without being recognized, and sometimes being mobbed by children.  Very few knew his name, but the entire country knew who he was.  In Neighbours (which was written by my mother), he was "Mr Cohen" and in Here We Are, he was "Dr Sharoni".

Heinz wasn't the only former leftist or top-flight  actor in the two series. Peter Frye, who played "Mr Kashdan" in Here We Are, had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Sarah Amman, who played the doll "Susie Surprise", had been a dancer on Broadway, and the director, Maxine Ellis, came from Beverly Hills, and was the widow of a Hollywood director who had been blacklisted by McCarthy. Thelma Ruby, who played Bella and was coincidentally married to Peter Frye, went on to have a successful career in the West End. The music, which remains popular, was a key component of the success and was written by a former employee of "Sesame Street".

To see the opening of Neighbours: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH58fJxiKqE
of Here We Are: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13E9ihrXt6I&feature=related

Educational TV's site allows some episodes to be viewed:
Here We Are: http://www.23tv.co.il/358-he/Tachi.aspx
Neighbours: http://www.23tv.co.il/318-he/Tachi.aspx

Self-fulfilling prophecies: The Bible, Zionism and the Palestinians

The Bible contains quite a few prophesies about the Jews returning to Israel.  Some of them related to the Babylonians and the first exile, which ended in the Sixth century BCE, but others came from later.
My favorite is Ezekiel 37 (Yehezkel in Hebrew), whose "Dry Bones" prophesy, in which a valley full of dry bones slide together to make an army of skeletons, sounds like the script for a Hollywood movie:


: ¹ The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. ² Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry. 
³ And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
So I answered, “O Lord God, You know.” 
⁴ Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! ⁵ Thus says the Lord God to these bones: “Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. ⁶ I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you; and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.”’” 
⁷ So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸ Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them. 
⁹ Also He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”’” ¹⁰ So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army. 
¹¹ Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They indeed say, ‘Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!’ ¹² Therefore prophesy and say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, O My people, I will open your graves and cause you to come up from your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. 

When these words were written, 2600 years ago, I don't suppose any more than a handful of people noticed them, but over the next three millenia the Bible became the most influential book ever created, and such powerful writing was no longer some obscure prophesy, but a statement with the power to move Empires - in this case the British Empire, the largest empire ever created, leading to the 1917 Balfour Declaration. 

Without the biblical prophesies, neither the Jews nor the Christians who facilitated their return, would have considered such a drastic action as a return to a country abandoned more than a thousand years earlier.

There are other examples of self-fulfilling prophesies, though perhaps none quite so impressive. Karl Marx prophesized class-warfare, claiming all human history was simply a tale of class-warfare. He made the point so effectively, that for next century  people motivated by his writings engaged in class-warfare. Although class conflict existed before Marx, the affect of his prophesies was to turn class conflict into one of the dominant forms of social conflict  for the next century (and possibly beyond).


There is another type of self-fulfilling prophesy and that's when you predict that someone will become your enemy, and in the process of pre-empting that eventuality, turn them against you. After the Balfour declaration The Palestinians started claiming that the Jews' objective was to drive them out.  In fact, although most Jews wanted a state with a Jewish majority, even the most radical, Jabotinsky wanted a democratic state and assumed the Arabs would remain.  Jabotinsky had no qualms about using force to achieve Jewish control of Palestine, but he assumed that Jewish migrants could easily outnumber the Arabs.
The Mufti in his efforts to prevent a Jewish majority met with Hitler, who favored expelling the Jews from Europe,  and helped persuade him to exterminate them instead. 
When the UN partitioned Palestine the Mufti insisted on an all or nothing policy ultimately resulting in the departure of a large chunk of Palestine's Arab population, thus fulfilling his own prophecy.  Had the Palestinians embraced the Jews and welcomed them in, it is likely both the Holocaust and the Nakba would have been averted.


The Israeli right, today,  claim to be concerned about the loyalty of Israeli Arabs.  So they are trying to pass legislation defining Israel as a Jewish state, giving preference to former soldiers in state employment tribunals (most Arabs don't serve in the Army) and preventing teaching of the Nakba in state schools. Needless to say Arab disloyalty is a self-fulfilling prophecy, if we cannot make allowances to the needs of our Arab citizens then we should not be surprised if they question their allegiances. Perhaps the right doesn't really care whether or not the Arab-Israelis are loyal, its just popular with the voters to put them on the spot.  

Collective responsibility: Gaza, Jesus and Gilad Shalit.

My mother recently met an old friend, they had a little chat, but then the next day she got an e-mail from her former friend saying she couldn't talk to her any more because of what Israel is doing in Gaza.
My mother is 90 and lives in London. She has absolutely no influence over Israeli policy and certainly bears no responsibility for it. You might as well blame her for the death of Jesus.  Yet there is this notion in certain circles that Jews are collectively responsible for the fate of the Palestinians. Fortunately, perhaps, the same people have no such claims about our responsibility for our own fate.  If my mother gets bombed, these same people will consider it entirely her own problem.

The idea of collective Jewish responsibility is not a purely antisemitic thing. A recent article in the New York Times  (A Yearning for Solidarity Tangles Public Life by Ethan Bronner) commented on the sense of mutual responsibility that exists in Israel and suggested it was a potential problem in Israeli politics.
Actually I rather like it, its what made our demonstrations in support of the welfare state both highly successful and completely non-violent: the biggest demonstration, with 350,000 (5% of Israelis) in attendance was held in the most expensive square in Tel Aviv, where all the top designer stores have branches, and not a single storefront was broken.   That could never have happened in England. It is also why the Israeli government released hundreds of dangerous men in return for one minor soldier.  Half the country now regards Gilad Shalit as their son. If Hamas didn't give him post-traumatic stress disorder, then the queues of people trying to get a look at him (after years of total isolation) probably will.

I think all this mutual responsibility is related to the Bible. The Jewish God wasn't into individual responsibility. The Jews were chosen to deliver a message and they had to do it as a collective. In the Biblical narrative, if some do wrong, we all get punished. For example, in Exodus 32 (9), the Israelites built and worshipped a golden calf while Moses was up Mount Sinai "I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them.”  Moses then argues with God and gets the punishment reduced, thus launching thousands of Jewish lawyers on the world, all well capable of arguing with God.
That's why Jews aren't required to believe in God: Rabbinical Judaism requires you to follow the commandments; we can be atheists so long as we keep the Sabbath, circumcise boys and fast on Yom Kippur. Otherwise we all get it.  Incidentally the converse also applies: maltreat the Jews and God punishes you collectively.

The Christians developed a different system, one based on individual responsibiity.  Christians, especially protestants, can improvise their prayers and are held to account on a personal basis. But all too many fail to apply an individual-based moral system to Jews.

Identities at the UN

In the recent TV footage of the UN Security Council deliberations on the Palestinian request for recognition as a state, I noticed that the Palestinians were sitting behind a sign saying "Palestine" which brought up some memories from my History MA.

Back in 1947 all UN security council deliberations on Palestine (as it was then known) were attended by representatives of the Palestinian-Arabs and the Palestinian-Jews. They also had little signs and the Arab's sign said "Arab High Committee" and the Jew's sign said "Jewish Agency for Palestine".
At some point in 1948 this changed, the Palestinians ceased to attend the meetings and were represented instead by the Egyptian UN representative.
In July 1948, the Ukrainian representative, Dmitry Manuilsky, was the chair of the Security Council. The security council chair is held for a month and some shenanigan by Stalin had enabled the USSR to wangle three seats in the General Assembly, one for the USSR, one for the Ukraine and one for Bayelorussia. in the late forties' the Ukraine also sat in the Security Council. The chair rotates among Security Council members and each country holds the chair one month in alphabetic order, in 1947-8 the Ukraine held the chair every July.
As chair of the Security Council the Ukrainian representative, who I recall seemed to have arrived early, changed the sign saying Jewish Agency, to read simply "Israel".

There were various protests and little speeches were made by the Canadians and British (who had yet to recognize Israel) to the effect that although they remained seated they did not necessarily accept the sign change. The Egyptian representative stormed off. The sign remained in use in all subsequent meetings. 

Israel was formally admitted into the UN in 1949 (following a Security Council debate) and became able to decide its own representation. 

From about 1943 - 1950 the British and the Zionist movement were in conflict, the British mainly concerned to protect their extensive oil holdings: Britain ruled Kuwait, UAE and Bahrain until 1971 and controlled all Iraqi oil until the late fifties. The Soviets briefly (until about 1951) thought Israel might become their ally, as Israel was the enemy of Britain and deeply (albeit democratically) socialist. The USA vacillated between  Jews, Arabs and Britons; its foreign service was strongly pro-Arab and Jews faced widespread discrimination in the USA; hence the Ukrainian support for Israel. In addition Soviet-block Czechoslovakia supplied Israel with arms and the Soviets allowed free Jewish migration to Israel. 

As it happens the Palestinian observer at the UN is actually the representative of the PLO: In 1974, the General Assembly granted observer status to the PLO, and it was only in 1988, following a declaration of  Palestinian Independence (made in Algeria...) that the General Assembly decided that the sign should say "Palestine", although the representative is still appointed by the PLO. Hamas, even though it won the only full free Palestinian elections ever held, cannot appoint the representative.
The chair of the UN security council in September (when the Palestinians submitted their request) was Lebanon.  Israel has never been a member of the UN Security Council and is the only long-term UN member which has never sat on it.

Incidentally, while it is true that Palestine and Israel have taken up a lot of Security Council time, if you check the records for the last year you can see that the Middle East in general occupies an awful lot of security council time.

The Palestinian bid for statehood and the end of summer

How the Jewish New Year, the first rain and the Palestinian bid for statehood are connected
The long hot Israeli summer is finally coming to an end. Rain is now mostly a memory. The last heavy rain was six months ago, and the last light rain about four months ago. The temperature has dropped slightly at night, so we now need to cover ourselves with a sheet, though we still sleep with the window wide open.

After months without water, the Lantana bushes that surround my apartment block in Tel Aviv, look dusty and barely alive, yet they always revive once the rains come. The Bougainvillea continues to flower and looks fine and the trees seem to be flourishing.
Predictably, there are far more words to describe rain in English then there are in Hebrew, but Hebrew has two terms that are absent from English: Malkosh, meaning the last rain of the year (in Spring) and Yoreh, meaning the first rain of the year, usually due around October. Both are very ancient words, literally thousands of years old, and can be found in the Pentatuach (Deuteronomy 11).
The end of summer is an important time in the Middle East, it is a time for new beginnings and optimism. So it is a very appropriate time to celebrate the Jewish New Year, to fast in penance at our sins over the previous year (Yom Kippur is ten days later) and restart the annual read of the Pentatuach.
The Knesset is ending its long summer break, the children returning to school, the government committees examining lack of competition in the economy and the need for more social welfare are due to report back. The timing is no coincidence: October and November were also the months that the Intifidas started, the Yom Kippur War began and Sadat visited Jerusalem. Nobody wants to throw rocks in summer or run around the desert covered in a uniform carrying heavy gear in the August heat.
The Yoreh was on Friday, the same day the Palestinians submitted their request for UN sanctioned statehood. The Jewish New Year is next week. In the Middle-East the first rain indicates a blessing, so it would seem the Palestinian bid for statehood, successful or not, has divine sanction. 

Time Lag and the Palestine-Israel conflict

I believe that time lags play a significant role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This works in several ways, firstly  each side has a delayed response to the other's intransigence or peace offers. So when Israel withdrew from Gaza, providing an opportunity for progress in peace, the Palestinians responded by electing the Hamas. When Israel withdrew from South-Lebanon, the result was a growth in Hezbullah poiwer and intransigence. The Israelis responded to the Palestinian election and Hezbullah successes by moving to the right, by which time the West-Bank Palestinians - though not Hamas - were in Peace and co-operation mode.  So each side is constantly out of sequence with the other. One hopes that at some point we will all be in peace mode at the same time, though the latest opinion poll in Ha'Aretz suggests we're stuck with a right wing government in Israel for at least another election and in the long run we're more likely to both be in war mode.

Another aspect of the time-lag is overseas perceptions of Israel. A generation of European NGO managers (and Israeli leftists) grew up in the Eighties when Israel was invading Lebanon and aggressively settling the West-Bank. Those perceptions persisted when Israel changed tack in the Nineties, contributing to the failure of the Peace process (though many other reasons can also be seen).

Now a new generation of Europeans is emerging that grew up post-al-Qaeda and Hamas, and while the anti-Israelis will no doubt remain vocal, I suspect the new generation will be less willing to criticize Israel.

Time-lag also affects the way criticism of Israel interacts with anti-Semitism: what starts out as event-driven criticism gradually shifts towards an expression of prejudice, due to ignorance and a lack of judgement which in turn leads to a backlash. Perceptions of European prejudice also affect Israeli and Palestinian politics.

Basically people don't change their thinking overnight, there is a time lag, and that has an impact on how things play out. Single incidents/major outbreaks play a role in molding opinions, but I think that over time there is an accumulation of events which leads to subtle shifts in attitudes, rather like ripples going through a pond. Changes may not be total single side-taking shifts, but rather more delicate changes in the willingness to vocalize or support activities.

The answer is 42: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Middle East Conflict.

In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, an alien species build a massive computer in order to find the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything only to be told that the answer is the rather mundane figure, "42". It then emerges that they never understood the question and a far bigger computer is required to understand it.

It struck me the other day that this was like the Israeli-Arab conflict: While everybody seems to think they know the answer - basically that Israel should withdraw - very few people actually understand the question, that is the nature and origins and whatever-else of the conflict.

Of course it is easier to understand something that hasn't yet happened: Withdrawal sounds easy, but as the withdrawal from Gaza showed, its a lot more complex once it actually happens and could lead to more rather than less conflict.

I always thought we should unilaterally pull-back from Gaza - and still do - but it was also clear to me that if we did and the Gazans attacked us, then the response had to be a massive, don't-fuck-with-me blow. Which is exactly what happened in both Gaza and South Lebanon.

Now I think we should pull back to the "separation barrier" (like most Israelis I just call it "The Wall" ) with the same provisor.

So here I am doing it too... telling you the answer without explaining the problem. So here's my short effort at defining the problem:

I think the conflict is mutli-faceted and combines elements of an array of different conflicts/prejudices/discriminations simulatenously interwoven: historic, survivalist, class, religion, ethnicity, external-meddling, national resource issues, nationalist conflict, majority-minority, immigrant-native, colonial-settler, antisemitism, racism... you name it, we have it and to confuse matters more, its bi-directional: Jews are a majority in Israel but a minority outside it. And it isn't just Israelis versus Palestinians, there are ever wider circles of conflict.

Soon we'll have aliens from out space taking sides and supporting... someone (probably the Israelis because because Jews are often called aliens).

As for how bad it is... how do you compare prejudices? or discriminations? Is the status of Arabs in Israel worse then say, Moslems in the UK? Is that a valid comparison in the first place?

The conflict is riddled with paradoxes: Europeans using anti-racism to justify antisemitism, Israelis using antisemitism to justify racism, Palestinians rejecting Israeli human-rights while claiming human-rights etc. Its so involved and intertwined that it is totally impossible that anyone who reads this (hopefully some one will), can possibly regard me as a "neutral observer" (no you're not one either).

Anyway that's enough. I want to keep this short. Thanks for reading this far.

Cheap electrical kettles and rabbis.

If you live in Tel-Aviv and like to hang out in electrical stores and take an interest in cheap electric kettles, then you have probably heard of "Kennedy" a firm whose cheap kettles are in all the major hardware stores and have a remarkable capacity for lasting only slightly longer then the guarantee. My habit of buying cheap kettles and toasters means I am always buying new ones when the last cheapo disintegrates. Kennedy rule the cheapo market and are even advertised on the rear ends of buses. My last one I bought in a petrol-station (gas-station if you're American) where for 100 shekels I got a kettle, a toaster and an waffle maker.

The kettle unexpectedly sprang a leak before its guarantee had expired and every effort to make a cup of tea was accompanied by a small puddle round the bottom, so I decided to take it to be repaired. The petrol station directed me to a shop in Haredi Bnei Brak which provides the maintenance for Kennedy, so I put the kettle in my bicycle saddle-bag and pedalled out to Bnei Brak.

I didn't expect to see a huge repair centre but I wasn't expecting what I got. It was a tiny little shop, in which there was a very elderly man with Parkinsons. The shop clearly hadn't been cleaned for years, and although it was an electrical repair shop, some of the light fixtures didn't work. I could tell it was the right place though, because it was packed with boxes bearing the label "Kennedy".

The old man looked at the kettle and told me the section which measured the water level was leaking, he said it wasn't covered by the guarantee but for 15 shekels (4 dollars / 3 Euros) he could fix it. He fixed it on the spot.

Opposite the shop was a Haredi book store and I had just read a history of the Jews in Byzantine Israel which used the Talmud and Gemara as its source and I wanted to have a look, so I wandered over. Outside the shop had a large set of wooden honeycombs outside each of which contained a photo of a Rabbi. The photos were being sold for five shekels a shot. They were almost identical, all dressed in black, all with black hats, only the length of their beards and cleanliness of their cloaks and beards varied. In quite a few you could tell they hadn't washed their coats for a while. Inside the shop, the books were mostly recent orthodox publications, usually very cheaply printed and there wasn't a very large selection. I couldn't find a copy of the Talmud or Gemrara which I could use and what there was looked like it was more intended for show then for study.

So I headed home with my fixed kettle. Which has worked fine ever since.

Shani's first birthday

Today is Shani's first birthday.
She now knows five words, all of them in Hebrew. Kova (hat) which she uses not just for hats but also for items of clothing (most of them will go on your head if you try) and bottle tops. Kadoor (ball)which she uses for anything round, including fruit and vegetables. Or (light) she uses for lights, light switches, ceiling fans, the sun and the moon. Hav Hav (Hebrew for woof woof) means dog and any animal. This morning she pointed at a pigeon and said "hav hav". She can also identify images of hav havs and kadoors and says kadoor when when seeing basketball or football on the TV.

Abba (father) she uses for me and (not sure how this happened) for mobile phones.

We spent the last ten days in Italy where she produced a new word, her first verb: Havi (bring / give). She doesn't conjugate it properly but there is no doubt about the meaning. She'll finish hr bottle and then point at it and say "Havi!" sending me scuttling to the kitchen, with her in one arm to make her a new bottle.

Being an Israeli child she also knows a few gesticulations: she can point at things and pat her head when saying "Kova!".




She may be confusing Abba with mobile phones because I recently bought a new one and have been playing with it. For a while I had David Bowies' song "Ground control to Maj

or Tom" as my ringtone but someone at work started joking about my being an astronaut so I changed it to the more combative "Joshua fit [fought] the battle of Jericho" sung by Mahalia Jackson.




During our visit to Italy we went to see the Jewish Museum in the Rome synagogue, which is one of the most magnificent synagogues I have seen. They have an excellent exhibition on the Jews of Rome, which is incidentally far better than that shown in the London Jewish museum, although using less fancy displays. Perhaps the London Jewish museum should be in the Bevis Marks synagogue.

It was hard being in the museum as Shani wanted to touch the displays and drum on the chairs, but I managed to contain her until we were taken on a guided tour of the synagogue. Here everyone was asked to wear a Yarmulke and Shani started shouting "Kova!" Kova!" much to my embarrassment. To further compound the situation as I held Shani, my cellphone went off and stated going "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho...".




At that point I gave up and walked out. I then realized Shani needed a nappy change so I went into the garden and started preparing to change her when a whole crowd of people came out. Realizing I might be causing offence I totally left the synagogue area and changed her on the street outside.