Aliyah! Step-by-Step: Making a Life in Israel

The Kadima primary is fast approaching. It is beginning to feel relatively certain that Livni is going to beat out Shaul Mofaz for the leadership. The question will then remain as to whether or not an alternate government can be formed. If a coalition cannot be formed then Olmert will remain as the Prime Minister for another 6 months until new general elections are held. Obviously, no one wants that to happen except for Bibi –because of course he is hoping for a general election and that Likud would come into the premiership with him at its helm.

But, at least at this point (and things change so quickly here who can say if it will be the same in 6 months) if Bibi and Livni were going head-to-head in a general election today, Livni would win it but secure about exactly the same number of seats for Kadima as exists today. The “left” (I don’t think you can really call Labour left any longer –center-left is about right) parties such as Labour and Meretz would lose in a big way in general elections, as would the Pensioners’s Party. Basically, the Likud and Labour would exchange positions almost perfectly, with Labour dropping down to about 12 seats and Likud gaining up to somewhere between 18-24 seats. Putting together a coalition under those conditions would be much more difficult.

Yeah, remember back when I was like Livni, Livni! but thought she wouldn’t have a chance if there were general elections because even the people I knew from Meretz were going pro-Bibi? Well, there has been a shift. Bibi-mania has reduced now that it is clear that Olmert is out. It is not so much that people were pro-Bibi as anti-Olmert and thus willing to vote for ANYONE who had a shot at getting Olmert outta there.

Livni is also gaining a much broader level of support because she knows how to keep her mouth shut. Now a lot of people complain, and it is a valid complaint, that they don’t know where she stands on many issues because she keeps her mouth shut. But the deal is, the other guys (Barak, Bibi, Mofaz and so forth) regularly open their mouths… and insert both feet. Furthermore, just because they open their mouths does not necessarily mean you know where they stand –lots of the feet inserting happens because they spout off one thing and then go and do the opposite.

Livni plays it close to the hip and that is a much smarter strategy.

It is also not a bad strategy for use in dealing with the Palestinians. They have no idea what she would do and being in a position of uncertainty makes them uncertain of how they should react. Several Palestinian friends have said that the Palestinians are much more worried about Livni getting the leadership than Bibi because they were able to successfully counter Bibi when he was in office before and know what to expect from him whereas with Livni you have the hardline approach that Bibi adopts with them but without the ability to rouse the bluster in response to the bluster that you had with Bibi. They consider Livni to be more dangerous to them.

The thing that really sucks is that it looks like Shas, regardless of whether Livni can cobble a coalition now or in six months, or if it is Bibi in six months who is putting together a coalition, will remain a “linchpin” to forming a coalition and thus be able to continue their extortion and negative disproportionate influence on Israeli society.

Earlier today I was sitting in a cafe attempting to get some work done when I saw something that made me go ehhhhhhhhhhh. A pretty young woman with nicely coiffed hair and several shopping bags came along the sidewalk, entered the outdoor seating area, and took a table not too far distant from mine. She was wearing a pretty sundress. It was one of those kinds that have a side zipper that zips from just above the hip but not entirely to the top of the dress because there is a connected band of the cloth across (most) of the bosom region. I have several of those little numbers myself and they are very comfortable.

Her dress was exceptional, however, because it, ehhhh, was not zipped. She was walking about giving a side view of the inner workings. I pondered what to do and then went over to her and said quietly, “maybe you don’t know this, but perhaps you should check your zipper.” She looked at me for a moment rather taken aback and in some confusion. “On the side of the dress,” I added. Still looking confused she checked the wrong side first and then the other and then gave a little shriek. Turning several shades of crimson she rapidly closed the view crying, “Oy! Oy! I didn’t know this dress had a zipper! I’ve been walking around like this the whole day…OY.”

So much for Israeli forthrightness! The poor girl.

[For those who don't know, XYZPDQ is the shorthand way American children tell someone to "Examine your zipper pretty damn quick"]

The Haredim (ultra-orthodox) do not serve in the military on the basis that they need to, at the tax-payer’s expense, study full-time in Yeshiva for life (meaning they also do not work and thus their families are supported at tax-payer expense). But obviously they have no problem with serving in a different kind of military-like structure –one whose purpose it is to “break the bones” of defenseless women. The members of the so-called chastity squad have been, for years, operating under the police radar (or being ignored by the police and allowed to beat people up with impunity) and that of the public. Their weapons are baseball bats and iron bars and these ‘pious’ souls see no problem with attacking children, young women, and men, and hospitalizing them. As one former member of the squad, said, “”I bought a club, so that I would have an easier time breaking bones. Some used irons. The job only get carried out after hard evidence was gathered. We would collect the evidence, and there was a hotline as well.” Oh and they get paid for it too from the money raised for charity — $1600 for a woman’s two broken bones and $3,300 if it is a guy and he is big. Your charity dollars at work. The community in Geula seems to have no problem with this, but they will riot in the streets and throw stones at the police when members of their ‘military’ are arrested.

I see no difference between the Chastity Squad and their supports and the crazy people in Gaza who have been training Palestinian children to kill Jewish children with pistols and rifles in recent weeks.
“I am learning how to fight the Jews and kill Jewish children,” 11-year-old Muhammad told Ynet.

Unconscionable, unconscionable acts. Talk about reaching into the depths of depravity and immorality.

The tensions between nations and factions here in the Middle East have nuthin’ on the tensions between the household cats. Here are the warring factions in the Middle Apartment:

Arie, Gingi, Matan and occasionally Mischa plague the life out of, ambush, chase, and attack poor, timid Tzeekadah –often working together to trap and plague her.

Gingi, Tinoket, Batya, Shachori and Mitzi have blood in their eyes when they see baby Muffin. Tinoket especially has a vendetta against her and, if thwarted (by me) from making an assassination attempt will then turn her angst on even her friends (including her Ema).

Matan and Mischa occasionally get into it with one another.

Mischa occasionally attempts to eat little Tzofia, although this is only very occasionally.

Arie (quite unusually) today attempted to drive Mitzi out of the Middle Apartment.

Here are the allies:

Tzofia and Gingi –Tzofia is convinced Gingi is her mother and he is willing to go along with this, not only allowing but even encouraging her to “nurse” on him while he bathes her.

Arie and Gingi –a fast sibling bond.

Muffin gets along splendidly with Tzeekadah, Tzofia, and Matan and attempts to engage them in play if they are the only other cats in evidence. They tolerantly allow her to be in their midst but don’t seem wild about the acquaintance. She has signed a non-aggression pact with Arie quite recently.

The Arie-Gingi-Tinoket trio. They curl up together, play together nicely, and enjoy one another’s company.

The Arie-Gingi-Shachori trio. You will often find either Gingi or Arie or both simultaneously trying to bathe Shachori and she often attempts to get them to bathe her.

The non-aggression pacts:

Mitzi generally leaves everyone alone (except for Muffin) and they all ignore her existence in turn.

Matan too generally ignores the other “children” except for those listed above.

Shachori gets along or ignores everyone but Muffin.

Tzeekadah attempts to be the Switzerland of the Middle Apartment but alas her aggressive neighbours simply won’t leave her borders alone.

Now I’ve just got to find a way to divide up the peaceful blocks and keep them separated from the catnations that they engage in border skirmishes or full-out invasive attacks with. Sigh.

I couldn’t decide on the title for this one, with some of the runner-ups being “They really don’t pay us enough for this dangerous job!” and “Uhhhh can we have the boycott instead?!”

I’m talking, of course, about the terrorist cell they arrested, that had two Israelis in it and that was planning to assassinate Israeli “pilots, scientists, and university lecturers.” Umm hmmm, makes that idea of being internationally condemned and boycotted seem like a really nice alternative to being assassinated . Boy, they really don’t pay us enough!

All joking aside, that is like, veeeeerrry disconcerting. I think the most disconcerting part is the father of one of these guys told the judge that he doesn’t think there is too much wrong with what his son was planning, that he sees a difference between acts of terror against innocent people, which he objects to, and what he views as legitimate resistance like the plan to target pilots.

Uhh but Hellooooo both you and your son are Israeli citizens and that legitimate resistance you are talking about is attacking and killing your fellow citizens. If you would like to think this, and by all means feel free, please leave your citizenship permanently at the door and step on out of this country. Thanks.

Mid-life crises can take many different forms but generally they all have one thing in common: reaching a period in the middle of one’s life and realizing that many of one’s life goals have not been reached, or “the big goal” was not reached or it was reached but wasn’t what you thought it would be; that one has lost sight, through going through a mindless daily grind, of the things that were important to them — a sense that life is rapidly passing one by and one has not made the most of it. Some people at this stage suddenly drop their current career and embark on “what they always really wanted to do” as far as a career. Some leave their spouses and try to hook up with a younger model who makes them feel “young again” and like they’ve now got some sort of second, “do over” chance. Some continue slogging on, feeling that there is nothing they can do about it now and life is just a bitch anyway. There are lots and lots of things that people do if they get hit by a mid-life crisis, some of them good and some of them bad, as they try to get a second lease on life.

I’ve actually been going through a rather different kind of mid-life crisis. Far from feeling that life has passed me by and I’ve missed out on the opportunities to do the things I “always wanted,” or that haven’t managed to achieve important goals, I’ve hit mid-life and realized that…I’ve done it all.

I’ve achieved every single really important personal goal that I’ve had in life. You know how you make those checklists of “things you really really want to do before you die” –my checklist has been checked off and it was not a short list. It had everything on there from little things like “learn to jump out of a plane” to “make a name for yourself” which I did by becoming known as one of the founders of a field of study. I didn’t dream of making the Olympics (being a bit of a realist, lol) but I did dream of training with Bela and Marta Karolyi –and my Ema should know that the loans she took out and the extra job she worked to allow that to happen gave me absolutely the best, happiest, peak experience of my whole life. Nothing else has ever come close. –competing internationally and taking a first on bars in a significant competition and I did that. But that is not to say that other life experiences haven’t hit pretty darn high on the experience-o-meter and even knocked the ringer off the top of it. I wanted to experience living in another country and immersing myself fully in that culture –and I’ve done it with not just one but three. I’ve visited every country (and there were a lot of them) that was on my “I’d like to see it before I go” list and even seen some that I never particularly wanted to see but enjoyed the visit nonetheless. I wanted to become “native”-fluent” in another language and I was in German when I was there regularly, getting good enough to give professional talks and to write a scholarly article but best of all, being taken for a German by other Germans. It’ll never happen with hebrew because becoming ‘native’ in languages, like gymnastics, can only be done when young. I’ll always sound like a foreigner with my hebrew. I was, and I guess still am lol, the first girl in my family to earn a doctoral degree. I jumped a fence on a horse, I didn’t become the next Katherine Hepburn but I did act in plays and commercials until I felt my acting goal had been fulfilled enough and I decided that I really didn’t care about being the next “Kate,” I dreamed of publishing and I’ve published, and many other goals, large and small. Making Aliyah was the last “my life would not have been fully complete if I got unexpectedly hit by a taxi” personal goal on that list and exactly 3 years and 8 days ago, I fulfilled it.

If I got hit by a taxi (knock wood) tomorrow, no one could say that my life was cut short or there were things left undone, that she “always wanted to () and now will never have the opportunity.” I feel like I’ve crammed in 3 or 4 people’s lives into my own. Everything from here is gravy. But I feel a little lost without those life-long things that sat about on the checklist waiting to be fulfilled. Goals now don’t really feel like “goals” but rather just adding to what has already been done, nice, great if achieved but not like, like….yeah.

So my kitchen sink again got itself unusable last week (it may be the coffee grinds doing it as I have a “rinse-out” filter and when you shake it over the trash can you still get a good bit stuck to the sides of the filter that needs to be washed or you’ll have bitter, gross coffee). I spent 30 sheks on poisonous drain-out again and still nothing was wanting to drain –literally taking half an hour to drain out the smallest amount of water. In desperation I went online to see if there was something, anything I could do and found a simple recipe using just the household products of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and vinegar. What the hell, I thought, let’s give it a try as I have nothing to lose.

So in went nearly half a cup of baking soda with (the recipe called for an equal amount of vinegar but I ended up using nearly double for it to be effective) vinegar poured into the drain on top of it. Fizz, fizz, fizz. Yeah, the reaction made lots of fizziness but was it going to work…I waited for an hour and then flushed it down with a kettle-full of boiling water. The first kettle-full seemed to open up a small hole in the blockage but the water still backed up. I heated another kum-kum full and SQWUAP down it all went draining merrily. I followed up with two more boiling kettle fulls just to make sure but wow, for like 4 sheks and no poison I now have a functioning sink.

I was somewhat domestic yesterday as my apartment had gotten into a pre-Ema-visiting-and-cleaning state. I did the Ema-thing and got down on my hands and knees and cleaned the living-room floor with a sponge. Then I went over it again with two clothes that still turned brown! (And yes, I mop with the floor cloths every day so it is not like I am a complete sloth or something).

I also went to the beach for a half-hour swim yesterday in the very late afternoon. I’d tried all day to work on a paper but got less than nothing done on it. I simply could not concentrate at all. But now I have a clean living-room floor and a working sink again

It seems to me that when a citizen of a country publicly refers to their own country as “the enemy” and publicly calls on other countries to attack their country, that that should be grounds for the removal of that person’s citizenship and their removal from the “enemy” country that they so revile. Such calls go beyond free speech issues.

People have every right to criticize their government and call for changes within their government and work for changes within their government –that is free speech. But calling for outside countries to attack one’s own country –that is treason.

So why does this guy still have citizenship? He regularly calls for the destruction of the country in which he has citizenship and benefits.

It is important to point out that absolutely not all Arab-Israelis share this man’s views or support him, whatsoever. Indeed, the majority do not. I’ll tell a little story about my recent tour (I need to find and upload those pictures) along about 60 miles of the border fence in the West Bank. There is one town that we visited with a very interesting history. Back before the war of Independence there had been two little villages located a little more than half a mile apart. As a result of the war, one village ended up under Jordanian control and one on the Israeli side. During the next 20 years each village expanded and grew until each was right up against the barbed-wire barricade between “Jordan” and Israel. After the ‘67 war, they were not so much “reunited” (as they had developed as separate village from the outset, but rather “united” into one town. The Israeli side had developed as a modern, progressive place but the side that had been under Jordanian control was still using the same agricultural practices and so forth as had been used in the 1800s. They were like two different worlds. Nonetheless, in the “no-man’s land” that had separated them they built a communal market and began trying to live as one town (given that they could hit each other’s houses with stones..). They intermarried and so forth.

Fast-forward to 2003 when the fence was being built. The fence in that section went right through on the Armistice Line (the fabled Green Line). This meant that the common market situated in the previous no-man’s Armistice land was removed and the fence routed through there. Both sides of the village vehemently protested the fence. But in it went. And after in it went something occurred to change the minds of the Israeli side –the crime rate in their village dropped dramatically. The original fence put through was all chain-link like 95% of the rest of the fence. However, right there where the market had been the terrain made it easy for the chain fence to be breached and so the villagers on the Israeli side requested that the fence be fortified to keep the villagers from the other side from climbing over and burgling their homes. This was done and a short section of cement wall was placed in that spot. When the villagers discovered that criminals were still scaling the wall with ropes,they requested more fortification and a section of chain-link, electrified fence was put atop the cement wall. We got this story from some of the villagers themselves, including a bright young doctoral student studying at Tel Aviv University. She said, “Our crime rate dropped almost 100% and although we argued against the fence initially, if they were to try to remove it now they should be ready for some real protests.”

Many of the villagers from both sides still go through the crossing right there (as we watched from afar, the crossing went smoothly with pedestrians and cars going in either direction having to wait no more than a couple of minutes as the trunks were checked and IDs shown –about the amount of time one would sit at a traffic light or to go through the check of your car to park it in a parking garage at a mall in Tel Aviv–and no, the soldiers did not know we were there watching). We asked the young woman if she ever went over to the other side and she said no, she had no interest in going there. But you have family members living there, yes? She did but, she explained, they consider the Israeli-Arab villagers to be inferior because they are “collaborating with the enemy.” She shook her head disdainfully in return, “no, I’m simply living and working and contributing in my country.”

And that is what citizenship is about.

I’m going to be putting up a picture of one of the cutest kittens in history (really quite literally, she looks like those cartoon pictures of cats with the super big eyes and little round faces) later in the hopes someone might know someone who would provide a good, safe, indoor-ONLY “she’s the only cat” home for little Muffin. My mother and I rescued her from the middle of traffic on Ben Yehuda street way back in July. Usually it takes only a maximum of 2 weeks for a kitten, particularly one as small as she is, to integrate into a multi-cat household. I’ve not had a problem integrating even much older cats with my crew.

But Muffin is different. Muffin is completely, beyond terrified of other cats. When one comes anywhere near her she begins a terrified growling. Sensing her vulnerability and terror, my normally sweet, loving, accepting crew goes into attack frenzy. Quite literally. It is beyond not a pretty sight –one will begin it and another 4 or 5 will join in, all trying basically, to harm her. Now I know what Buffy was like as a tiny kitten and what she went through.

The whole cat household is in a constant uproar. They are aggressing toward one another now as well as toward Muffin. Tinoket has had a complete personality change and swings wildly between hiding in fear herself and attacking the kitten and now Tzeekadah and even biting and growling at me. Gingi has also become far more aggressive but mostly it is the female cats that are out for little Muffin’s blood.

I can’t leave her out about about when I leave the house but have to lock her in a cat carrier for her own protection. Last night things had been going more smoothly so I tried leaving her loose while I slept, especially since she has been in the cat carrier during my long Beer Sheva day for more than 14 hours. Holy crap. I didn’t get to sleep until nearly 6 a.m., despite falling into the bed in an exhausted state at 11:30. Rather I was repeatedly awoken every few minutes as I tried one solution after another. The first solution was to bring her into my bedroom along with Tzeekadah. Sadly, I was unaware that Tinoket and Shakhori were hiding under the bed. *&&&%^$#@ POW. It took me nearly a half hour to get them out of the room. Then Arie began opening the closed door from the outside and more cats poured in. *&&^%%$#%$ SLAM. BAM. SCREAM. Another good while to get the ones that went under the bed out of the room.

So I got up and put him in the room (he is the only one, along with Mischa who totally ignores her existence thus far, who doesn’t scare her silly). This was fine for about another half hour until he decided that he wanted to let himself out of the room. SCRATCH, SCRATCH, SCRATCH, WHEEEZ. So then I had to get up and lock him into a cat carrier for the rest of the night (or else he’d be opening that door from one side or the other again). Then Tzofia sat and screamed at the closed door but when I brought her inside she, who is terrified of Muffin, started screaming hysterically to get back outside. And so it went.

Nu, maybe I should actually go and read the darn thing one of these days. The archaeological dig that’s been going on in Jerusalem seems to be turning up quite some interesting things. They’ve now found a seal with the name of some dude, Gedaliah ben Pashur, who was a high muckety-muck clerk or something to the last king before the destruction of the First Temple, and who was mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah. Not too far away from where that seal deal was found, they had already found another seal deal with the name of another high muckety-muck minister also mentioned in Jeremiah.

The other interesting reading material this morning was an interview with a professor from Boston University who specializes in Russian history, and in particular on terrorist movements within the revolutionary period of Russia. She makes a convincing argument and draws some really interesting parallels between the activities of Hamas and other terrorist groups of today and the evolution of terrorism within the period of the revolution in Russia. Good reading and much food for thought.