My parents left to a vacation in Karlovy Vary. It was planned before the war, so they are not “refugees”. But before he left, my father said:
— “If they bomb our home in Nesher, call us. We’ll fly to Moscow.”
It was a joke, of course.
Still, i can’t escape the thought that that’s just what our enemy wants us to do – to go back to Moscow.
I was born in Moscow and lived there for eleven years. I love that city. I love the Russian language and the Russian culture. I have family and friends there. I can find a job there. But i just can’t think of going to Moscow in terms of “going back”, certainly not in the sense of “going back home”. My home is here.
I had an email discussion about this war with Mira, my pen-pal from United Arab Emirates. She’s a devout Muslim; she’s also very intelligent, and quite modern and liberal and feminist too. She says that Arabs – including herself – support Nasrallah, because everything that he says becomes a fact, while the Israeli government lies all the time. While i can’t accuse my government of excessive honesty, i find it rather disappointing that there are people who openly support someone just because he’s sincere about being a murderer of innocent civilians. The discussions with her put me back in proportion, though – i’m not talking about the numbers, the fact that we killed much more Lebanese than Hizballah killed Israelis, but the fact that something doesn’t make sense in all this.
I mean, seriously – can’t we end it in a few minutes? Don’t we know where those Katyusha’s are shot from? Can’t we just destroy the launchers? Why do we bomb civilians so hardly? Did they really all have launchers in their backyards?
Trouble is, no-one will ever take responsibility. Even if a government commission will list every single failure and human rights violation in this war, the generals and the politicians will keep getting their fat salaries and they will have bodyguards that look like Armani models until the rest of their life. An international court won’t help either – how can anyone trust them when they chase Serb criminals religiously, but don’t dare to touch Saddam, the Assad family or Kim Jong Il?
Someone must be laughing at our naïveté here.
Aharoni in Unicode 