People Speaking – Do

— “No! It can’t be true! What a disgrace. Did you hear who received the Nobel Peace Prize?”

— “No. Who? Abu-Mazen?”

— “No, but the letters are almost the same.”

— “Eh… I don’t know.”

— “Obama.”

— “But what did he do?”

— “Exactly.”

Zero-State

The blogger known as Nobody asks: Are you afraid of a one-state world?

I am afraid of one-state world, especially the United Nations kind of it. I prefer zero-state world.

Hadar went to Northern Italy and told me: “They all speak German there. Why do they belong to Italy and not to Germany?”

And why doesn’t Austria belong to Germany? And why doesn’t Alsace belong to Germany? And why doesn’t Transylvania belong to Hungary? And why doesn’t Karmiel belong to Russia?

There shouldn’t be states – there should be only municipalities. Municipalities that share language or culture should organize themselves into non-exclusive cultural associations. And that’s all that’s really needed.

Made Me Cry – Neda

Whatever it means, Neda made me cry, too.

The meaningless and the weak

“If it is just to prohibit a Jew from living in Samaria, is it also just to prohibit a black from living in Washington DC?” – Moshe Feiglin

I strongly, very strongly disagree with Moshe Feiglin on many points of his political platform. He’s a manipulator: he presents himself as “loyal to the principles of Likud”, but his own platform actually contradicts that of Likud. It doesn’t mean that i, heaven forfend, support Likud; it just means that Feiglin is a bit of a trickster. Not a liar, just a trickster: Many of his platform’s points are very religious and fundamentalist, but he only publishes them on his own website and not in the articles that he writes for Maariv.

But i strongly, very strongly agree with the point above.

“Stopping natural growth” of the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria is, beyond being nonsensical, violent and racist.

But you know what? Barack Obama is himself a trickster. Worse, yet – he’s a puppet and the people behind him are tricksters. Obama is too good at pleasing crowds. He pleased the crowd in Prague saying that he wants to end nuclear weapons. I support that, but i don’t really believe that he means that. Obama tells a crowd of Jews that Jerusalem will stay undivided, but then a campaign adviser had to clarify, that is muddle it.

A campaign adviser.

At least Moshe Feiglin doesn’t seem to have campaign advisers.

Death Sentence in the Palestinian Authority

… And the BBC have also done that yet again: Palestinian handed death sentence.

The article is more or less OK. It says that the sentence is not actually expected to be carried, which is good. (Although similar cases have already ended in executions in the past.) But why does a half of the article discuss the “occupation”? And why does it have a photo of an Israeli soldier with the caption “Israel has settled hundreds of thousands of its citizens on occupied land” instead of a photo of a man who was sentenced to death for selling land to Jews? Many countries have border conflicts – Armenia, Serbia, Russia, China, India, the UK, etc. But what other country has a law that says that anyone who sells land to Jews, must be killed? (Oh, and the PA is not exactly a country.)

That’s exactly why i think that Israel, despite its demographic problems, should not have laws that prohibit selling of land to non-Jews. Such laws are discussed in the Knesset, but implementing them would be badly racist. The right thing to do is not to be like the PA.

Crime

I am familiar with only one Israeli media personality who openly professes right-wing opinions on a publicly funded station: Dudu Elharar.

Well, Dudu Elharar’s program is being closed. He blames Galey Tzahal for shutting him down for his views and says that this is the second biggest crime after the Disengagement. They don’t like the Disengagement comparison, but mildly admit that his views were not exactly their cup of tea.

No more right-wing politics in public Israeli media, then.

Secrets

This is so ridiculous: If is forbidden for newspapers in Israel to publish this: Israel Scandal’s LI Link.

The article says: “In a highly unusual move, Israeli authorities have barred the country’s media from publishing Talansky’s name – revealed now in The Post – saying it could hamper their investigation.” The move is really unusual, because the Israeli press is one of the freest in the world. But for the Israeli government, it is stupid in a very usual way.

This is called “Israbluff”. We can’t even censor things properly. In the really rare occasion when a news story, a song or a movie is censored in Israel, it causes it to be immediately published everywhere. The bad thing about it is not the silly censorship itself. When a state uses law to try and make people not do something, which they will do anyway, it will make people disrespect the law even when it does good things.

Goats

Two years ago there were Knesset elections in Israel.

5,014,622 had the right to vote.

3,137,064 cast a vote.

690,901 voted for the Kadima party, more than for any other party. As usual, Kadima was designated as the ruling party by the president, because that was the people’s choice.

No, it wasn’t.

1,877,558 didn’t vote for anyone. That’s more than twice as much as what Kadima got.

Kadima got 22% of the actual voters and 13.78% of eligible voters.

Apparently, 13.78% is a majority.

Bananas and Reality

I just watched Woody Allen’s Bananas, his second best after Crimes and Misdemeanors.

There’s that great scene, where the victorious rebel leader declares himself the new president and proclaims that the country’s new official language will be Swedish. His rebel collaborators immediately decide that he lost his mind.

And then i read this:

Malaysian row over word for ‘God’

A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word “Allah” can only be used by Muslims. (BBC)

Return

The politics mostly make me sick and i don’t really like to write about it. But sometimes things happen, which are so unbelievably stupid, that i’ve gotta tell something about them.

There are new billboards popping up all over Israel: “Olmert, let us return to Israel! Eighty thousand settlers are living in danger on the other side of the fence.” And in the corner a small sign says – “One Home movement” (Bayit Echad, בית אחד).

For some reason i can’t find their website, but Bayit Echad is a movement of Israelis that claims to be social and non-political and its stated goal is to help the settlers that want to leave their homes in the settlements in Samaria to get a fair compensation. This is a lie, of course: I know that Avshalom Vilan from Meretz is one this movement’s leaders.

Now – of course they are entitled to their opinions. It’s their right to claim that destroying flourishing villages is their idea of “peace”. But this billboard is simply stupid. The first stupid thing is that no-one is making it so hard for those people to move to another home. Of course it might be expensive and complicated, possible more complicated than moving from Jerusalem to Haifa, but it’s not illegal; There is no Soviet-style “propiska” here and Olmert doesn’t have to “let” them do it.

Another problem is the danger. Yes – they are living in danger and if they run away from it, will the danger go away? Taking care of that danger is called “occupation” by the people who put up those billboards.

Another weird thing is saying “return to Israel”. They already are in Israel. This is the reality – the UN may claim otherwise, but in practice the settlements are a part of Israel: They are de-facto in the jurisdiction of Israeli courts, Israeli police has stations there and their mayors report to the Israeli Ministry of Interior. Again, the Bayit Echad are entitled to their opinion, but if they think that this kind of propaganda is a way of convincing the general public that the settlements are not a part of Israel, they are simply wrong. It is similar to Lubavitch Hassidim saying “may he live to see good days” instead of “peace be upon him” about their late Rebbe – it’s a natural part of ideology for them and a sad joke for almost everyone else.

And of course, there’s the matter of the fib: It’s not a settlers’ organization that is putting up those billboards, so they can’t say “we”. There is one guy from Karnei Shomron (nonstandard; see also Wikipedia) that is interviewed every now and then as part of this ridiculous PR campaign, but common sense says that he doesn’t represent any significant group of settlers.

Anyway, i hope that it will turn out to be a “you cannot fool all the people all the time” thing, but unfortunately these people have collaborators in the media, so more ugly and stupid surprises may lie ahead.

People Speaking – Me-e-e-e-e

— “I wonder – now, with all the fuss about Winograd committee and all that, what can Olmert want? Cause one day, sooner or later, he won’t be a prime minister. Is there still anything that he actually wants?”

— “Mmm … To go to Ame-e-e-e-erica …”

Grapes of Wrath 2007

Winograd committee (standard!) which investigated the Second Lebanon War published its first official report today.

It is generating a lot media attention, but i wanted to point out two little things.

First – Retired Justice Eliyahu Winograd is the head of the committee. Winograd means grape in Russian. Thought you’d like to know.

Second – i like epigraphs and opening phrases. Great opening phrases, such as “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (which is probably an incorrect translation, but who cares), “On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature”, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, “Perl is a language for getting your job done”.

The Winograd report doesn’t have a great opening line.

But it does have an epigraph: “Weep sore for him that goeth away: for he shall return no more, nor see his native country” (Jeremiah 22:10). And the explanation: “This report is dedicated to the memory of beautiful flowers, the soldiers of IDF, that were cut down before their time in the second Lebanon war. They left after them a crying mother, a worrying father, a sad brother and a baby”.

The epigraph is taken out of context. The verse is incomplete. The full verse is “Weep ye not for the dead, neither bemoan him: but weep sore for him that goeth away: for he shall return no more, nor see his native country.”

As far as i understand the passage in the Bible refers to captive people. It is related to the war, because it started after soldiers were captured; but the explanation to the epigraph refers to soldiers who died in the war itself.

Israeli judges usually seem to write very good Hebrew in their reports and verdicts. I think that they slipped a little this time.

Slower than a motivated cheetah

In July of 2005, one citizen of the fine city of Sderot spoke to Maariv after a Kassam rocket landed near his house. This is what he said: “Carrying out the disengagement will nullify the motivation to fire Kassam rockets.”

His name is Amir Peretz and today he is the minister of defense. Israel is supposed to be a democracy, and therefore i am supposed to be his boss. I would like to fire him, but i can’t. That’s why i think that Israel is not really a democracy.

One man come

What do i have to write about the pride parade in Jerusalem?

Nothing much.

I think that those parades are kinda pointless, especially in Israel, because in practice gay rights in Israel are in a pretty good shape compared to the rest of the world. And so is the general public tolerance. It’s legal to have sex with anyone you want and same-sex civil unions are not defined in law, but they are defined well enough in court precedents, and that’s what counts. On the Hebrew Wikipedia they pretty much rule. Those who think that they don’t yet rule in Jerusalem are quite wrong.

But i don’t mind. Let them march if they think that it’s fun. I pity those who violently oppose it – they should find something better to do.

Plus, it was on the previous pride parade in Jerusalem that Hadar finally decided to go veg after i talked about it with her for years, so something good came out of it for me.