israel

Security, and Lack Thereof

As some of you may know, I’m flying to the United States in a week. I’m extremely eager for this trip, which, of course, makes the time move all the slower. I’ve been obsessing, planning and re-planning, mentally packing and making lists for days now – and with all that came the comparisons between here and NOT here. In musing about the differences between a country fraught with chaos, namely Israel, and a country fraught with a different sort of chaos, namely the US, I stumbled upon a very small but fundamental difference between the places. It’s something I almost never remember until I’m actually in the US.

When most of you walk into a grocery store, a theater, a mall, a cafe or any other public place – you just walk in. You open the door, and walk in. Here, it is not so. Here, there will be a guard. There is always a guard. There will forever be a guard. No matter what public place you enter here, you will have to surrender your bag, purse or back-pack to a guard’s cursory glance, their hands feeling inside it or weighing it to see how heavy it is. In places like the Jerusalem Central Bus Station, you’ll have to go so far as to pass your things through a metal detector. At the entrance to most malls, you yourself have to go through a metal-detector.

After being used to handing over your belongings everywhere you go, I’m always struck by how odd it feels in the US, or anywhere else for that matter, where you don’t have to do that. You can just… walk in. Incredible.

Travel Plans

Whenever I hear an airplane buzz above my house these days, I turn my face to the sky and smile. Whenever I’m at work and have to answer customers’ questions about their purchases abroad, I smile as I read them the data. Whenever I look at the calendar and realize it’s the middle of March already, I skip over to April and smile some more. In two weeks to a month I will be on an airplane and I will be bored half to death on the long, long, long flight, but ultimately, the flight will end. I’ll get off the airplane and breath the (slightly) better airport air. I’ll walk to passport control, have my passport stamped, and then I’ll hear those words that they say every time my mom and I reach the US. They’ll say “Welcome home.”

I do love my home here. I do love my friends, and my tiny city, and Tel Aviv just a few minutes away with its beaches and cafes. I do love taking the ride up to cold Jerusalem, and I do love my time there with Sir B. F. I might sound as if I’m wild to begone from this mad country – that’s not entirely true. I just need a vacation. I wish I could take everyone I love with me, though.

I apologize for the very “bloggy” quality of this post – my mother and I are starting to plan dates, and so my mind is abuzz with the thoughts of open days in colleges and hotel prices and the fact that I’ll get to see New York for the first time ever. Plus, and almost more importantly than the college-scoping, I’ll get to go to BARNES AND NOBLES.

Oh yes. Book shopping and baggage-overweight -fees, here I come.

When the Chamsin Breaks

Israel is a strange country when it comes to weather. A tropical country, some might say – all I know is that it’s mad-as-a-hatter weather over here. Near the ocean, where I live, it could be hotter than hell, but up in the hills of Jerusalem it’ll be cool at night, the desert not far from those hills will be even cooler, the mountain in the North will be covered in snow and the border in the South will be even warmer than the ocean but dry.

Yesterday and today we had what is called a “chamsin” here on the coast. A chamsin is a few days when the weather is perceptibly hotter than normal, usually quite dry, with sandy winds that blow dust into the houses. Everyone leaves their windows open in the hope of coaxing a non-existent breeze in, and the wardrobe changes appropriately to tank tops, shorts and sandals. In Los Angeles, this weather would be called “earthquake weather” because there is an unsettling quality to it – all day, it feels as if something is about to snap, as if the air cannot stand any more of the still and silent electricity that seems to crackle in it.

Then evening comes along. The first evening of a chamsin might be just as hot and horrid as the day was. The second night might be the same, making people toss and turn in their sweat-soaked sheets as they try to rest. But eventually, the chamsin breaks, as it did tonight. When it does, it’s as if the world breathes a sigh of relief – there, feel that breeze? It’s over, at least for a few more hours. There’s air that doesn’t sting anymore, the windows are open for a reason now, and you can finally get some sleep.

Casual Warfare

If there is one thing that people who live in stable countries don’t understand, it’s how casually a country can slip in and out of war. Perhaps I’m being unfair though – perhaps it is only this odd country, a so-called “Holy Land,” that acts this way. This place, Israel, Palestine, The Land Where Jesus Walked – whatever you want to call it, it has been, and apparently forever will be, a battleground.

It is an extremely odd feeling to realize how casually and nonchalantly we accept the state of warfare and the murderous activities that suddenly flare up around us here. The most people seem to be doing is starting different Facebook groups, so now my inbox there is filled with invitations like: “Join the ‘Boycott all Israeli Arabs!’ group,” “Join the ‘I agree with Israel invading Gazza’ group,” and “Join the ‘Everyone change their profile pictures to the Israeli flag!’ group.”

It’s horrid. It’s horrible. It’s, most of all, weird. It’s not normal to sit at work and hear people getting phone calls about rockets landing in their cities of residence and not to have that bother you particularly. It’s not normal to see people joking on the inter-office emails about how they hope they won’t get blown up on their rides home. It’s not normal to need to wish your coworker to feel better when she leaves work early because of a cold and to tell her in the same breath to be careful and not to leave the house too much.

Every time this country slips casually into war, almost without my noticing, I feel that humankind must be insane.

Yeah, Ok, And I’m Queen Elizabeth

Liars, unreasonable liars, make me cringe. Everyone tells the occasional white lie, either out of politeness [“Oh, that hat is so cool!”] or out of laziness [“Yeah, I promise I’ll clean my room today.”] But people who lie to impress give me shivers of such intense annoyance, I can’t even explain it. I know my response is exaggerated – let them lie, right? Let them tell me whatever they want to impress me, I can just smile and nod and know it’s not true.

What gets to me, though, is that I want to shake them until they tell me WHY they’re lying. I had a friend in junior high who used to tell me and my friends that her uncle knew the whole cast of this Argentinian soap-opera that was big here. She went on and on about how they’d come to Israel just to meet her in a hotel in Eilat [it’s the supposed “resort city” of Israel.]

I’ve known other people who do this since then as well. But WHY must they do it? I don’t CARE if your uncle knows someone famous, it’s not going to make me like YOU any better! The world is a cruel, cruel place if people feel they need to lie and brag about their family connections just to give themselves worth.

But then we all know that already, I guess.

Bomb Country

Sirens pierce the air with their harsh sounds, sounding their half-melodic noise in the distance. First siren. Second, third. Mostly we ignore sirens, we just hear them and think, maybe for a split second, that something happened somewhere. Then we forget about it and get on with our lives. So it is most places, I believe. Sirens are so much a part of the background that we really don’t notice them much.

In Israel, it is often different. Sure, we ignore the first sound of those wailing tones. But when another and another join the first’s voice, we start to wonder. What has happened? Was there a bomb? Was there an attack somewhere? How many are dead this time? What political tangles will imerge now and how will the papers make it racist this time?

The Intifada has been over for quite a few years now, but still, we cannot forget the times when we would look at the front cover of the newspaper and count how many died last night and how many were wounded. All those deaths, for a squabble over some silly land. Israel, Holy Land indeed.

Political Drinking

There is clearly something wrong when at a dinner table three out of the seven adults are drunk and the four youngsters are sober. I don’t want to sound pretentious but sometimes it truly seems as if young people could be better at governing, if only because we’d all be willing to compermise much faster so we could go play GTA4.

Dinner last night at Sir B. F.’s family was interesting obviously. A loud political argument took up most of the time, in which it was said that being in the Israeli army is like being a rapist; a grown women started crying out of frustration; much happiness was had over a line of paper towel bits and three bottles of wine were left standing empty on the table by the end.

Seriously, the only normal thing about dinner was the yummy coffee-flavored dessert. Other than that, the evening was completely bananas. And bats. And generally crazy.

“Women, Media and Conflict: A Gendered View of the Media Coverage of the Lebanon War”

This was the title of the lecture and panel I attended tonight with Sir. B. F. who volunteers with Keshev, the orginization hosting this event. I shall proceed with a review of the lecture. Perhaps not a relevant one, but a review nontheless.

First of all, it was hosted in a very small room, which was fitting for the small amount of people who attended. What was less fitting and more amusing was holding this sort of discussion in a room that held very large photographs of Bette Davis, Judy Garland and Ingrid Burgman. Because what did these three beauties of Hollywood do for femenism?

The man sitting in front of me was the husband of the woman who published the paper on the topic above. He was very intent on telling people off who weren’t listening or being quiet enough for his taste, but then he answered his cellphone twice and whispered fiercely into it, answered SMS messages on said cellphone, kept looking at his watch and at the door at the back of the room to see who was coming in and fidgeted unnecessarily and loudly. I can see you give quite a lot of respect to your opinionated wife, Mr. Fidget.

Lastly, a lot of what was said was interesting and relevant, but then a lot of it also wasn’t. The panel sadly turned into a bitchy cat-fight of women talking over each other and disagreeing loudly with each other over issues of how women were and are portrayed in the media. One of the women, the speaker I related to most, actually left the room after a woman from the audience criticized her for needing to leave early to take care of her children. I do not know how the fact that she failed to hire a babysitter for that night was relevant to the feminist discussion in any way, and yet in our lovely Israeli society, it seems things always go off track and get personal.

Thus concludes my mostly irrelevent report of the evening.