I don’t normally like Israeli songs that are written and performed in English. I’m a great fan of Tamar Eisenman’s artistry, and of Asaf Avidan’s surreality, but what can I tell you – I’m an old-school Zionist. I’m big on our developing and Israeli-Jewish culture in Hebrew. You don’t need to – even I call me old-fashioned. I kind of think that if we can’t even create our own renewal of Jewish culture here in the Holy Land, then really what are we doing here?

But just now a great song came out by an Israeli woman who writes and performs in English. This one made it past my usual barriers.  It’s one of those rare Israeli songs that while escaping the particularity of Hebrew, doesn’t feel the need to escape Israel and her issues.

The chorus is a powerful mix of rocked-up folk with a Cranberries-crack, and evokes the powerful image of the Carmel Forest up in smoke:

My country’s burning

Smoke is rising

You can see it rise from miles away

Driving by the flames I pray

For rain

I pray for sanctuary

The singer songwriter comes from my neck of the woods, and we could indeed see the smoke rising from miles away. It was an awful sight.

Along with the tears shed for the destruction and the deaths of so many brave people, there was a lingering frustration following the Carmel fire. An excruciating video went around, showing Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovitch in the Knesset warning that in pushing Israel’s firefighters towards privatization by drying up their public funding, the Finance Ministry was almost asking for a disaster to occur. It occurred.

It wasn’t until listening to the song by Ella Vs Mountain that I saw the connection between the Carmel Fire and the Israel’s summer protests for Social Justice. If ever we had required non-partisan confirmation that the State was not doing its job properly, the devastation of such a a beloved part of the country mostly due to poor preparation and chronic underfunding gave it to us. Maybe this was the fire that Ella recognizes burning under the protest movement.

But the video clip of the song does more than talk Israel. It cuts together images of popular protests throughout the world, so that the fire falls back into symbolism and the protests that gripped Israel become part of a global wave. Though the youtube cuts mostly show images from Israel (there are even a few rioting Haredim in there) they are also taken from the US, China, and throughout the Middle East. On the youtube page they even give links for all the clips they used.

The message of the video is clear: the local is global. Israelis in the streets were marching with the world, as part of the world, in order to address an issue for the world. It’s a bold – and mostly true – statement. It’s a no-brainer to suggest that the general aims (and some methods) of the Occupy movement share a great deal with the Social Justice tent encampments of Israel, although I reckon Occupy could learn something from the Israelis about inclusivity. One can also see how the call for a more representative application of state power shares much with the protests in the Arab world. Though in Israel the protests were met with far less violence (and far less success?).

The video led me to think about what is going on in Tunisia, pretty much the only place in the Arab world where protesters were not beaten or shot at. The New York Times now points to a more complex issue that the Tunisians are dealing with: The tensions between religion and democracy.

Ring a bell?

A TV director chose to air a film that upset religious Muslims, and he’s since been beaten up and taken to court for libeling religion and possibly harming “public order or good morals”.

“Certain Islamist factions want to turn identity into their Trojan horse,” Mr. Messaoudi said. “They use the pretext of protecting their identity as a way to crush what we have achieved as a Tunisian society. They want to crush the pillars of civil society.”

In describing a Tunisian issue, he uses almost exactly the kind of words one hears in Israel today with regards the fundamental religious encroachment on public life. The article refers to Turkey by way of comparison, but so much of what it describes could as easily be applied to Israel. Check this out:

secular elites long considered themselves a majority and were treated as such by the state. In both, those elites now recognize themselves as minorities and are often mobilized more by the threat than the reality of religious intolerance.

Hello?

Not only that, but it seems that in Tunisia at least, the founding democratic government is keen to avoid making any bold decisions. Compromises will be made, rulings will be postponed, just as they have been in Israel for decades. The spokesperson from the ruling party’s political bureau admitted that

the line between freedom of expression and religious sensitivity would not be drawn soon. “The struggle is philosophical,” he said, “and it will go on and on and on.”

And in a strange way I’m left hopeful. In a bizarrely Zionist way I’m proud that here in Israel we’re no longer dealing with the esoteric. The tensions between religion and state are now no longer just a Jewish meshuggas – they’re international (dare we say “universal”) issues that we’re trying to tackle. Likewise the social justice protests were nothing if not local – after all, no one bailed out failing banks in Israel. But we shared a shout, we called a call in common with the rest of the world.

In that way it made sense for Ella to sing her song of protest in English and not in Hebrew. Sometimes Israel isn’t a separate case – it’s part of the whole.

I’m sitting on the train. The carriage is quiet. Four kids get on and sit across the aisle from me. They’re about 15 or 16. Well-equipped with their various mobile devices, they all loudly and boisterously turn to their respective video games. None of them have earphones. One guy in particular is playing his beeping video game with the volume on full.

After putting in my noise-cancelling earphones and unsuccessfully trying to ignore him, I give in. I ask him, fairly nicely, to turn down the volume.

At first he doesn’t respond. Then after I repeat my request he tells me to wait until he finishes the game. He is a little irritated that I distracted him.

Blood rising to my cheeks I ask him again, less nicely.

His giggling mates guffaw as the kid tells me that I ought to be more patient.

I want to kill him.

Even more frustrating is the ticket inspector who is sitting only a few seats away. He does nothing. In the end – oh the shame! – I respond in kind. I unplug my earphones from my computer and turn my own volume up. Only then does the inspector get up and tell us both to turn the volume down.

I breathe again.

A few days later, and  I’m in even more of a state. I’ve just read that the Railway Authority has refused a request for announcements to be made in Arabic as well as Hebrew. Arabic is one of Israel’s official languages. It is spoken by a significant proportion of Israel’s citizens, and the train stops at several cities with a large Arab population – Lod, Ramle, Acco, Haifa.

But no announcements are made in Arabic. They are made in Hebrew and, quite often, in English.

Here’s the kicker. What is the reason Israel’s Rail Authority will not make announcements in Arabic?

Because it would make the announcements too long, and, wait for it – “it would make the train ride noisy.”

Noisy.

Were I only concerned with my decibellian comfort, I’d laugh bitter tears. But these days I’m reading a lot of Avishai Margalit. He is the wise man who suggested we let go of lofty aspirations to a Just Society, and aim for the more modest goal of creating a Decent Society. A decent society, according to Margalit’s famous encapsulation, is a society that refrains from humiliating its citizens.

This decision, this deliberate decision not to make announcements in Arabic is humiliating. It humiliates Arab citizens of Israel. It’s especially humiliating because it’s so trivial. It’s not about changing the words of Hatikvah, it’s not about the Nakba, and it’s certainly not about the Occupation. A compromise would have cost nothing. Instead, it’s another little humiliation for Arab Israelis.

What does one do with such feelings of humiliation?

I know that when that kid refused to mute his stupid game, my fury and fantasy of violence emerged from a feeling of helplessness and the inexplicable humiliation of having my humanity disrespected. I was humiliated. In particular by the way in which the ‘system’, ie the representative of Israel’s Rail Authority, was so loath to intervene.

It was almost as if he didn’t care about the noise.

“Point a finger at someone and you’re pointing three fingers at yourself.”

Yeah I know, it’s one of those annoying aphorisms that appear on Facebook with some cute photoshopped image. But as in many annoying Facebook aphorisms, it has something to it.

I’ve been thinking about this physiological morality tale over the past few weeks. Like an evil wind, uproar against one Israeli ‘tribe’ or another has been whipping from headline to headline, stirring up anger then moving on to the next issue, leaving pointing fingers in its wake.

I keep returning to the Prayer of the Secular. It’s a song by Kobi Oz that, to my mind, manages to point a finger at everyone, and yet finds a space for self-critique and harmony. (For a less polemic interpretation of the song, feel free to pop over here, where you’ll also find a full written translation and explanatory footnotes.)

The song begins with the prayer, but swiftly moves into a full-blooded yet empathetic critique of the secular life-style. We take pills if we feel bad, we blame our parents for all our faults, and our values are for sale in a mall. We take no cosmic responsibilities, and (my extension of course) we’re no great advocates for women’s rights ourselves…

Oz imagines himself standing praying his secular prayer in a Jewish minyan. Next to him is a sweaty, slavish, over-reproducing Haredi man. All the (well-sourced) stereotypes spill out in three lines of verse. Yet before we have time to take a breath, the National Religious get it in the neck. They are accused of being vainglorious, valuing land over people, stuck in the past and pulling all of us into war.

Then just as the progressive Jew begins to giggle, the song cuts Reform Jews to the quick, with a suggestion that their Judaism may not be an alteration but instead a totally different religion. My translation, “A reform Jew with a brand new cover or a different book”, is less inflammatory than the Hebrew (what can I do? Child of my time, I was thinking of that great line from ABC…). The Hebrew reworks a phrase asking if Reform Judaism is a make-over, or a different woman entirely?

In line with our current issues in Israel, Kobi’s minyan includes and excludes the women, “rustling and whispering” behind the mechitza, contributing the “sensuous sound, the feminine voice of the non-counted”

What this song succeeds in doing where most of us in Israel have failed, is in both sharing out the blame and praying for peace. The accusations in the song – against the secular, the haredi, the modern orthodox and reform – do not cancel each other out. The fact that one is fatally flawed does not mean that the other is not. They all stand, together, in the same minyan, praying for fertile rain.

After the whole furore over the Ministry of Absorption’s commercials, I became upset with the way that some American friends felt it was okay to stereotype Israelis. They were having lots of fun laughing at how rude, gauche, arrogant, and loud-mouthed Israelis are. It bugged me.

I used the ‘r’ word. I said their jokes were racist. Oops.

I got told off. I was asked to explain myself, since “Israeli” is not a race.

I was also told I was being over-sensitive “because, frankly, your job is to defend Israel”. (It was the “frankly” that did my head in. He was being careful not to offend me. You know, like someone might say, “because, frankly, you smell like crap…”)

I stopped myself responding straight away, and sat back to think.

1. WHAT’S RACISM?

Maybe I shouldn’t have called their jokes “racist”. I should have been more specific. I should have mentioned that they were perpetrating generalized, exaggerated and offensive stereotypes of people based solely on where they were born. I don’t know, if that’s not racist behaviour, it’s certainly holding hands with it.

I remember once being on an anti-racist seminar while working in the social services in the UK. We were given a standard equation. Racism = Prejudice + Power. The equation made me extremely uncomfortable even then. How can you judge who has power? It would seem that all a racist needs is to prove that s/he is less powerful than the person they are abusing, and hey presto, they’re all cool. In particular aware of past Jewish experience in Germany (who would have defined Jews as powerless in the early 30s?) I felt the definition was insidious.

I think expressions of prejudice are bad news, whether or not you call them racist.

I’m not saying that there aren’t some rude and boorish Israelis around. Of course there are. But there are fewer than there were. Israeli society is capable of developing.

Just as in right-on Britain the only racism allowed (okay – nasty national stereotyping) was against Americans, so in the Jewish world the acceptable face of racism is to ridicule Israelis’ sense of dress and decorum.

It still bugs me.

2. WHAT IS IT THAT I DEFEND?

Bearing in mind that I don’t even defend Man United when they’re playing crap, I was struck by this comment. Is it my job to defend Israel? Not sure. I imagine there are people in my organization who would say so, though I don’t tend to listen to them. Anyway the point is that what I feel free to write on my facebook or my blog is different from what my job expects of me.

But Dan’s comment led me to ask myself – what is it that I defend? In what do I so fully believe that I will defend it no matter what?

It’s not Israel, and it’s certainly not my job…

It’s complexity.

I believe that the world is destroyed by absolutes. I believe that violence and oppression emerge from absolutes. I believe that it is a moral imperative for us to break down absolute understandings, assumptions, and faiths. Absolute faith leads to war.

The constant search for the undermining argument, the unexpected ‘other hand’, the deflating witticism – these are the tools of peace.

Theodore Zeldin taught me:

“The fact that the world has become fuller than ever of complexity of every kind may suggest at first that it is harder to find a way out of our dilemmas, but in reality the more complexities, the more crevices there are through which we can crawl.”

I defend the need to constantly search out, and even chip out, crevices through which we can crawl.

That’s why the stereotyping jokes bug me. They smooth over crevices.

“Don’t tell him I sent you,” she called after me, “Tell him it’s for Muli.”

Muli is the carpenter with whom D often combines forces. He is a man, and D, being my wife and mother of my children, is not. Rabakh, the guy at the glass place, doesn’t like D. It’s not that he doesn’t like her more than he doesn’t approve of her. We know this because he always charges her double. In this, as in many other areas, the traditional Arab meets the (over-)traditional Jew. There are many ways for Middle Eastern men to demote women, many of them far more subtle than barring them from singing or kicking them to the back of the bus.

There was Rabakh, sitting at the front of the store, supping coffee with a friend of his. Knowing what was coming, I checked my watch: It was okay, I had some leeway. Sure enough the invitation came to sit and drink coffee. They say that you need to offer things to Brits three times before they finally accept. Apparently we assume you’re only being polite and don’t really mean it. It’s a reflex it’s taken me 15-odd years in Israel to overcome. I smiled, said thank you, and sat down with the small china cup placed in my hand. Rabakh does good coffee.

His mate asked Rabakh something about me in Arabic, and made some joke on hearing the response. I showed an interest in understanding what he’d said, and he explained simply, “You live on Kibbutz Tuval, built on the land of Dir El Assad.”

I don’t know what I managed to do right, but from what might have seemed an unpromising opening, we ended up getting on really well. We talked together about various bits of land up the top of the hill that had been taken over by various Jewish officials or businessmen. Some had been met with (partially successful) resistance, some with resignation. It was an odd, delicate conversation, as the two of us smiled and laughed about an intolerably tolerable situation.

At one point I, the Jew, living on land that he, the Arab, disputes, asked him “So what do we do?”

He smiled sweetly, and gestured to the coffee, and to our conversation. That’s what we do, seemed to be his answer. We chill over a cup of coffee.

I have to admit to having been somewhat agnostic about the “co-existence” line of political action. The whole “hang out with an Arab” (most of the older folks I end up meeting here in the Galilee don’t call themselves Palestinian) approach to righting the status of non-Jews in Israel has always struck me as too kumbaya for my liking.

I’m always reminded of the parable credited to Rabbi Akiva about the musical recital that the nightingale is giving for all the animals of the forest. All the animals are rapt, except the worm, who remains under a rock, paying no attention to the beautiful singing. Why aren’t you listening to the music? Ask the shocked animals. The worm replies, Because I know that the moment that bird stops singing, she’s going to come and try to eat me.

My thinking goes, why would an Arab wish to hang out with me, to enjoy my company or my culture, when he fears that any second one of my mates is going to appropriate his back-garden? Surely it’s best to fight to right the substantial and substantive wrongs?

But my quiet friend over coffee reminded me yet again that life here is more complicated than that, and I need to learn more modesty. After all, what did I intend to do about my house or my kibbutz’ dairy sitting on Dir El Assad’s land? I have no plans to move out. Nor did my friend really expect me to do so. What was required in this situation was for me to hear his gently stated grievance, and do him the honour of supping a coffee with him. It didn’t solve anything in the physical world, but maybe did some good in the realm of the spirit.

A similar thing is going on throughout Chanukah this year. All over the place people are gathering to light a chanukiah by the mosques that Jewish scum have vandalized or burned in the last year. “Tag Mechir” is the term these people use, putting a “price tag” on the cost of the government acting against settlements in the West Bank. “Tag Meir” is its opposite. “Meir” means “illuminating”. We’ll be going to light a chanuka candle at each place that has been defiled by these race vandals, in a prayer for peace. As the traditional Chanukah song has it, we’ll be working to drive out the darkness with light.

Kumbaya? Totally. But sometimes you just have to fight darkness with light.

Merry Holidays and Chag Sameach.

Look, let’s be straight. I think that living in Israel is a good thing. I also, continuing to taste its fruits to this day, think that making aliya is a good thing.

I think that the Absorption Ministry is completely within its rights to try to encourage people to come to live in Israel – particularly those people who were born in Israel – and if Jeffrey Goldberg thinks that’s being mean to American Jews, then so be it.

You can’t get all uppity about Israelis saying that it’s good for Israelis to live in Israel, even if that implies they should leave America. It’s not “archaic” to suggest that aliya is good for the future of the Jewish people: It’s what we call debatable. That’s not the same thing, and it borders on cowardice to suggest it is.

Having said that… the two commercials that have many of my friends in America fulminating and my friends in Israel cringing are indeed problematic even for a Zionist such as myself.

I’m going to do what I’m not convinced the ad-firm really deserves. I’m going to try to analyze these commercials seriously.

The Grandparents video has a lit chanukiah in the background of the Israeli elderly skypers, and when they ask their Hebrew-speaking grand-daughter what festival it is, she cries Christmas! The concerned-yet-sympathetic voice-over points out: “They will always remain Israeli. Their children will not…”

Of course there are a few category confusions here. The kid has a good strong Israeli accent: her Hebrew is fine. What would seem to be in question is her connection to Jewish religion and culture, which is not necessarily exactly the same thing as her Israeliness. She will, after all, despite her identification with the goyim, still be expected to serve in Israel’s army when she reaches the right age, and will be allowed to enter Israel only on her Israeli passport.

Were we into philosophizing a little, we might ask if this girl with her perfect Hebrew, familiarity with all the Israeli music her parents play in the house, and call-up card to the IDF, is not Israeli? I’m not for a minute suggesting that an Israeli culture lacking a basic awareness of Chanukah is a rich or healthy culture for Israel, but it certainly exists.

But much of the critique I’ve so far seen of the advert goes further. The advert is somehow seen as proof that “it is impossible for Jews to remain Jewish in America”. So of course anecdotally the commercial is thoroughly unfair, but statistically it is spot on. Of all Jews in America, Israeli ex-pats have the greatest trouble identifying with their local Jewish communities. Several Federations are making huge efforts to reach out to Israelis in their midst precisely because they have recognized there is a problem. In particular secular Israelis find it very hard to parlay their secular Israeli identity into the strictly Protestant-Jewish-religious terms of the American community (see the debate explored by James Hyman and Yonatan Ariel).

And now for the second video. A young Israeli is going through Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day) on her own. Her partner doesn’t understand what she’s going through. She is alone in her grief and far away from home. Jeffrey Goldberg is convinced her boyfriend is Jewish because he speaks through his nose and has a goatey beard. (Less said about what lies behind that set of assumptions the better…) The friendly pitying voice-over: “They will always remain Israeli. Their partners won’t always understand what that means.”

So let’s parse this one, too. First off, the scene lasts all of 20 seconds. It may well be (if their relationship is worth anything) that the next few hours in Dafna’s apartment is spent with Dafna talking to her partner about what Yom HaZikaron is and what it means to her. It may well be that by the end of the conversation he will understand far more what it means to be Israeli. (And if he doesn’t he’s welcome to check out our online activity on the subject called The Price…)

If he listens carefully, and if Dafna is able to express herself well enough, he will understand that of all the days in the calendar that fill Dafna with ambivalence about Israel, it is Yom HaZikaron. It is a day full of pain, loss, and unspoken anger – especially for many of those people who have chosen to leave Israel. While it is the day most likely to lead Dafna to miss the company of other Israelis, it is very unlikely that this is what she most misses about Israel.

She misses the friends, she misses the energy, she misses the openness, she misses what her American friends mistake for rudeness but she experiences as honoring honesty. She misses the tiyulim, the views, the weather, the dynamism and the fear and excitement that literally anything may happen at any time. Without necessarily admitting it, she also misses feeling connected to something important, even crucial. She misses the thickness of existence in Israel, where everything is symbolic of something else, where the new is old and the old is new, where her in-born connection to the Jewish People can be expressed far beyond the synagogue. She misses the language, the music, the culture. She misses home.

It’s not wrong to try to encourage these people to come back to Israel, nor is it wrong to suggest their lives might be richer were they to do so. What is sad is that we’re so rarely allowed to discuss this latter assertion in any intelligent way, and these two commercials certainly don’t make it any easier.

Her husband was away on a work trip, and she decided she was going to paint the outside of the house. It’s not a simple job to paint the outside of your house. You need to scrape off the original layer of paint, you need to fill in cracks and stuff, you need to gather all the right equipment, and most importantly for a woman in Israel – you have to convince the blokes at the hardware store to sell you what you need even though you’re a woman.

She worked like crazy. She probably looked fairly mad to onlookers. Middle aged woman up a ladder scraping and smoothing, painting and getting painted. But she did, as she told me, a “damned good job”.

Her husband came home, she took him outside, and he looked up at the whole painted house. He stood there in silence, nodding. Then he pointed up to the corner of the back of the house, where the wall meets the roof.

“You missed a bit,” he said.

As she later hastened to explain to me: He was right. She had missed a bit. But that didn’t help. It took weeks of groveling on his part for her to forgive him.

Where’s the analogy? Diaspora Jewry behaves this way towards Israel. Israel’s not perfect. Okay. We know that. But where does Diaspora Jewry get off, only concentrating on the bits we missed, and not offering some kind of praise for what we’ve achieved? Her husband’s thoughtless comment wasn’t untrue, but it was hugely damaging for their relationship.

Israel is an incredible achievement. It only takes a tiny act of imagination to picture the state of the world’s Jewry in the first half of the 20^th Century, and then to wander around Israel with your mouth agape. I moan about the traffic, I hate the buses, and the trains are less and less reliable, but Jesus, who thought we Jews would ever be laying roads and running national public transportation systems? And so much more.

In short, my friend’s story of the house painting stuck with me for some time. It gave me a different paradigm to assess things. Me, who’d been so big on encouraging, nay liberating Jews around the world to critique Israel,  I fell silent a while.

I found a little “but” beginning to nudge its way into my mind.

But.

To come back to the house analogy. What if the husband had noticed the unpainted corner and had said nothing? What if he’d just hugged her and praised her and talked her up to all his friends for weeks to come? And then, at some appropriate moment, he’d mentioned – nicely – that there was still a corner left to be done. And what if she’d responded quickly with, “Yeah, you’re right. I’ll get to it.”

What happens over 30 years later, and she didn’t get to it, and the corner is still lacking paint and sealing? The husband’s getting restless, the wife is just pissed off with him nagging, and in the meantime that corner is letting in water. When there’s a storm they have to lay out pans to catch the dripping inside the house. Experts are telling them that the damp is spreading and could endanger the entire outer wall. And her only response is that they don’t know what they’re talking about?

In 1967 the world’s Jewry did not respond to the victory of the 6 Day War as snooty nit-pickers. They celebrated along with everyone else. The critique was by no means immediate, nor was the praise grudging. But gradually the fly in the ointment, the population that came with the new territories, just got too difficult to ignore. As Levi Eshkol said at the time, “The wedding was a great success. We love the bride, we just don’t like the dowry…” In celebrating the reunification of the Jews with the bride of biblical lands, we just kept ignoring the dowry – the Palestinians.

Work in the realm of Israel engagement is sometimes like dropping your kids off at that couple’s house. The house is in a bad state, and the parents can’t stop bitching at each other…

I believe in pushing for as much freedom as possible for as many people as possible, while maintaining both solidarity and tradition.

I like to think of myself as a knowledgable Jew: I can refer to Torah and Talmud easily and happily, I lead prayers at Yom Kippur, but at the same time I’m an incorrigible agnostic, don’t wear a kippa, and have never kept Shabbat in any orthodox fashion.

I made aliya from England. Been living here since early 1996. My Hebrew’s good – I can read fiction in Hebrew and I teach and perform in Hebrew. While I didn’t serve in the army (too old), I would have done. In short, I’m a British Israeli – not a Brit living in Israel. My wife is Israeli-born as are our kids.

I’m deeply unhappy with the direction that politics and media are moving these days – less because they’re moving to the right (I believe more strongly in democracy than in enforcing my leftwing views) but more because they’re moving away from anything resembling intelligent complex thought. These days it feels like intelligence and complexity are the most essential tools for dealing with what’s going on around us.

I think the left in Israel is as full of fascist wankers as the right in Israel. The only difference between them is that the right-wing fascist wankers are more comfortable with using power and violence. I also think that just because someone is a fascist, or a wanker, or a bully doesn’t mean that s/he doesn’t have a good point.

As I once explained on a radio interview here, when they asked me what ‘side’ I was on: “I’m on the side of Manchester United. Only in football should we be proud of stubborn unquestioning bigoted loyalty. Everything else should be up for grabs.”