Back from Israel

I thought I would post a few photos with comments.

This is the street on which we lived. It was named after the grandfather of the architect friend who had written an article that I referred to in an earlier Bog.

Ben Yehudah Street - a main street In Tel Aviv and just a few minutes away from where we were staying. Here I could buy my copy of the Jerusalem Post, catch a bus or have a cup of coffee and a boreka (a tasty zero calorie parcel of Bulgarian cheese and olives in crispy filo pastry)

On the right is a snapshot in the bakery; light rye, 50% rye, carroway seed bread, russian breads, Health bread, poppy seed chollah, nut bread, sesame seed bread, sweet round chollah; etc etc.

Israeli gospel

Sweet music stolen on the steps
at the crypt of Abu Gosh
By a palm tree leans a woman reading
Inside gospel deep river Jordan flows
Honeyed stone walls enclose a wailing saxophone
Fig leaves and palm fronds absorb the drifting sounds
A call to prayer from the neighbouring mosque
punctuates the closing day
and we climb to look at stars
and the scintillating lights that bejewel Judean hills
and lead the eye upwards to the jazz that is Jerusalem.

Deeply fatigued in Israel

"Deeply fatigued" was the phrase used by the presenter of the BBC radio programme "Unveiled -
The impact of Jack Straw's views on women wearing the veil" which I listened to a couple of days a go.

Fareena Alam, editor of the Muslim magazine Q News, was referring to her feeling on hearing about the article by Jack Straw towards the end of what she must have felt was a week with a surfeit of negative Islam oriented stories.

Now, in the second week of my visit to Israel I too am feeling deeply fatigued.

The experiences are piling up and the impressions are layering.
My step-grandson's induction into the army.
Hearing of my uncle's recent deposition before the The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Yad Vashem . Something my wife's ex-husband has also recently done.
(An aside: The title of "Holocaust Martyrs" awkwardly resonates with other more recent video claims to martyrdom in a way that to my English sensibilities risks tarnishing the term. The former however were actually unwilling and often unwitting victims unaware of the apellation that followed their annihilation. Suicide bombers seek a peculiar sort of oxymoronic self-inflicted self-professed martyrdom, for they do not offer their lives to be taken by their enemy in the service of their cause or have them taken without their knowledge but give them willingly, and so one would have thought martyrdom would elude them whilst conferring the unfortuate quality on their, so called, enemy victims. )
Reading an article in the Jerusalem Post (English edition) giving a perspective on the immigration of French Jews to Israel under the heading "Ingathering of the Exiles - Fleeing escalating French anti-semitism and Muslim violence France's Jews are turning their former holiday spot into a permanent residence. The article is strangely bland. It is, I feel, capable of reinforcing everyone's original prejucides with little risk in the way of enlightenment.


What to say? I ask myself.
It already seems too much.

Why do I want to write anything?
Well firstly for myself: to clarify my thoughts.
Secondly to record the thoughts and to allow for revisions and additions.
Thirdly to share the thoughts with others.
With respect to the first and second reasons: in as much as I am writing for myself, I know the background, the context, to my thoughts.
It is with the third reason that I am having problems.

What veil am I wearing?
You know my name: Josh Kutchinsky
(Now I am dancing. )
Some have seen my face and therefore think they know what I am, and what I am not.
There are more layers.
You know my language.
You may know my country of residence and of birth and you know which country it is that I am presently visiting.
I could tell you more...but will you listen?
You cannot stop me...but will you allow me to define myself?
Will you reject or accept my definitions?
Should you do either uncritically?
I don't think so. You should demand adequate evidence. You should expect persuasive argument. You do not have to agree but should you not allow me the courtesy of not stripping me of my beliefs about myself even if for you they are not convincing?
But, then again, why should you bother?
I don't know.
I am also trying to work out whether it is worth offering to remove more veils or whether inevitably I will just end up humilliated and naked.

Israeli vision and conversation

Empedocles thought the world was perceived by the eye sending out rays to touch and feel the world out there. Clearly he must have known the limit that touching could achieve. The gaps would have to be filled by blind imaginings.

One Israeli friend is a rare and shockingly liberal/socialist left-leaning radical but he admitted over a fish lunch that his most recent article angered his friends no less than his rightist adversaries.


He was rewriting the strategy for tackling the recent Hezbollah/Lebanon crisis.
The problem: abduction of three soldiers from Israeli territory and a hail of cross border missiles which were not so much guided as lobbed with the intention of at least disrupting if not actually taking many lives in the north of Israel. He told me that when missiles are launched from Gaza it is different. The Palestinians don't have a state. We should ensure they have one and it should not be demilitarised. It should be just like any other. Just like Lebanon.
If missiles are sent from one country to another it is de facto a declaration of war. An ultimatum should have been issued: stop the missiles, return the soldiers within a certain time, 24 hours or whatever. If not we will destroy villages starting in the south and working northwards until you comply. Villages will be razed to the ground one by one until the terms for cease-fire are met. Uncompromising or what? We had no time for desserts and coffee.

Another old friend, a retired gentle and perceptive physics teacher, is imbued with the pessimism of a man in possession of only a standard ruler in a non-linear world. He has now reached a hyperbole of gloom.
We sat sipping water in their flat close to the Tel Aviv University. I had presented him with a book "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins. He had brought out Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe" and also a photocopy of a wartime paper by Erwin Schrodinger, he of the famous equation and cat, entitled: What is life? : the physical aspect of the living cell.
My friend said:
There is no way to communicate with them. They think differently. They don't have any respect for the sanctity of life. They believe this life is just a corridor through which they pass on the way to paradise to be greeted by a host of virgins. They are prepared to sacrifice themselves and their children. They want to Islamicise the whole world. Your Britain is too tolerant. It has been for years. Of course you and I admire this tolerance but it has gone too far. They must be stopped, refused entry, removed, returned. They are different. They think differently. They do not accept our values. They reject them. They kill each other. Look at Iraq. How can they? Why does no leader, no ayatollah, no imam speak out? They don't because they agree. If you don't acept Islam you should be killed. That's what they think. You know if you are a woman and they find you have had an affair you are stoned to death. OK. OK. I know, you will say, bad things happen in other countries too. In the United States; lynchings, shootings but it is not the same, not the same at all.
His lovely wife adds: They want to destroy us all. In Germany they stopped Idomeneo. I mean. Europe is weak. You wait and see. I hate to say it, but Europe will be finished. It will be swept away in an Islamic tidal wave.
There was little I could think to say other than to ask them whether they didn't agree that we are all subject to forces of propaganda and might they just consider for a moment that their perspective might be slightly influenced by the bias of the sources on which they relied for information.
I am not sure I made my point very clearly and then it was time for salads, cheesecake and coffee.

Random observations in Israel #4

This is the mindset that most people outside Israel don't realise. I quote from an opinion piece in today's Jerusalem Post (English edition) - "The arab's object is to annhilate the Jewish State, replace it by an arab one, and get rid of the Jews."
The Jewish objective is, of course, peace! But, as almost everyone here would say: "with whom?" "With people into 'annihilating' and 'ridding'?"
The writer has been at the heart of political affairs. He has chatted with Anwar Sadat. Are all Muslims, for the purposes of "ridding, annhilating, etc.", arabs? Are Egyptians, arabs? I know that many here, if pushed, would say "ridding" and "annhilating" are simply non-Jewish qualities concentrated for the time being in those whom they call arabs.

Random observations in Israel #3

Disconcerting for touristic ambles is the fact that pavements are really for cycles & mopeds, scooters and motorbikes. So to be safe we sit in a pavement cafe. There is an ineffable sadness or maybe even tragedy in the tall American - lean and fit senior citizen - who has just breakfasted meticuluously. Delicate manicured hands peel notes from a billfold as if downtown in a once elegant and prosperous southern state. His gestures are sharp until he rises to go. His body in motion tells the story.
Once he and his wife had places to go after breakfast. They didn't speak. There had never been much to say but there was always the next place to be. Now alone he moves without purpose. I think we might see him somewhere for lunch.

Random observations in Israel #2

Here it's the holiday season.
"Tabernacles!", I hear someone shout and you are of course correct.
Many people are off work pursuing leisure activities but not quite as hyperactively as usual. It's more than just holiday time. I sense a collective sigh of relief in the air after the recent Lebanon hiatus.

Random observations in Israel #1

Met up with some old artist friends and breakfasted, with a sense of symmetry, at the cafe "London" on the Tel Aviv seafront. Only a week or so ago I had breakfasted Israeli-style with my blogmate in Golders Green, London.

Here, as over there, the waiters are young, sharp-featured, lean and fit-looking. The customers in Golders Green range in ages but in Tel Aviv, the slack-jawed pensioners, with time on their hands, gaze at the blue Mediterranean past bronzed limbs jogging energetically on golden sands.

Looking out to sea we heard about an old jazz friend who had recently died. He had stopped eating. As in the UK this was an old man's sadly prolonged voluntary euthanasia. This is virtually all that's available in societies, like the UK and Israel, still dominated by religious values. Most of our Israeli friends and family, like most Israelis, are secular Jews.
Our friends buried their friend with a non-religious ceremony. Such send-offs are offered by a number of secular kibbutzim (plural of kibbutz). Kibbutzim originally were collectivist agricultural settlements which have now diversified into a variety of capitalist enterprises from hi-tech manufactury to funeral services in a Garden of Eden setting.
(Have since done a little googling and found quite a controversy about Israeli burials - people who are regarded as "questionable Jews" etc - For anyone interested an article Graves on the black market is quite informative.

The veiled threat

Instead of a straw-man, it should have been a lion-woman. Instead of a lying straw-man, it should have been an honest lion-woman.
Jack should have been Jill and not a flibberty-jibberty, rackety-politico but instead a liberty-loving, wear-what-you-will, human rights defending woman.
It is the men that should, though, be requested to bow their heads in contrition and be made to admit the centuries of macho dictorship which hangs about our necks like unlit tyres.
Abdullah state it clearly. Josh and Jack be plain. Ahmed and Aaron, Pandit and Sanjiv cry it out loud: people (and I am thinking here particularly of women) should be free to do as they please subject to the law of the land and the law between the lands, made and remade, moved and improved by, yes I have to admit it, mainly men. But more and more, slowly but surely, also by women: women, of course of all hues of political colour, which is as it should be.
The insult is invasion, rape and pillage.
The insult is violence, immodest and rapacious.
I did not hear Jack Straw's words.
I have been told that they were quiet-spoken and imploring.
However isn't a burka worn at the demand of one man just as demeaning as one removed at the behest of another? Who are we to know the grounds for which some wear a hat, a veil, a crucifix, a skull cap, a shawl, a skirt, a sarong, a piercing, a tattoo, dark glasses, spiked hair, a hoodee, a wimple or a mitre. A cautious more reasonable Jack might not have stoked the fires of prejudice. It may seem evident that some (maybe most) are forced against their wishes to conform. Maybe this is so, but speak to the oppressors and not the oppressed and speak not as if ones' hands were clean and not stained with blood.