The Road to the 19th Knesset

Fellow Jerusalmite Esser Agorot has posted Haveil Havalim #382 - The Dual Elections Edition  in honor of the interest generated by the US elections and the Israel elections to be held Tuesday, January 22, 2013.
In Israel voters go behind a partition and choose a piece of paper with the letters of the party they wish to vote for and put that in an official envelope which they were given.  When all the votes are counted the seats in the Knesset are divided among the parties proportionally.  If your party received 10% of the votes then you would get 12 Knesset seats.
But how do you know which 12 party members get the seats?  Each party submits a list of 120 names of would-be Knesset members.  Then in the order they are on that list, they take seats in the Knesset so in our example names 1-12 on the list become Knesset members.  If one of these 12 should happen to resign (or falls as in \bottles of beer on the wall') then the 13th name takes her place.  So the order on the lists submitted to the election board really matters.

The Likud party has primaries and anyone who becomes a member of the party can vote (after 16 months membership).  My favorite candidate on the Likud's list is Tzipi Hotovely.  At age 33 she is finishing up her first term in the Knesset with an impressive record as the Chairwoman of the Knesset Committee on the Status of Women as well as  some other important committee membership.  She is firmly planted in the nationalist wing of the party of the current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.  She is an eloquent proponent of many important family issues as well an advocate for strengthening Jewish  settlements all over the country.
This week I answered a call to help out in her office as the primaries in the Likud are November 22.  I got there and joined a group of young people in stuffing envelopes (!) with flyers extolling her achievements in the 18th Knesset to be sent out to Likud members who will be voting in the primaries.
That brought back memories of the last time I stuffed envelopes in an election campaign.  It was 1966 and Bobby Kennedy was running for Senator from New York.  I went to a midtown New York City office with some friends and we were put to work stuffing envelopes with campaign material.
It was in that same election that I spent a Friday afternoon with some high school friends accompanying the candidate from one department store parking lot to another supermarket parking lot where he took to the platform and made a short speech to the cheering crowd and shook hands with anyone willing to step up.  Our 'job' was to go on the bus and arrive at each venue before Kennedy and hand out campaign material and lead the cheering when he showed up.  We were a very enthusiastic group of teenagers and did our job with gusto.
I was having a good time and thinking how nifty democracy is.  Then someone from the campaign came on the bus and said that since we had done such a great job we were all invited to have a fish dinner with Kennedy his staff at a nearby restaurant.  Remember it was 1966 and Kennedy was a Catholic and it was Friday.  It would be very exciting and really something to remember.  But it was Friday and I had to get home to light Shabbat candles with my mother.   It was a sunny breezy fall afternoon and I remember as if it were this morning the thought that went through my head a I got off the bus and headed in the opposite direction to my family and home.  No matter how integrated I might feel, in the end I would always be an outsider.

It's all about perspective

These last few weeks have gone by in a haze of almost normalcy here in Israel.
The New York Times even ran an article showing Israel in a downright positive light proclaiming: Where Families Are Prized, Help Is Free

 Jewish and Arab, straight and gay, secular and religious, the patients who come to Assuta Hospital in Tel Aviv every day are united by a single hope: that medical science will bring them a baby...

...Demographics here are also political. Israel has historically focused on promoting Jewish birthrates to retain a Jewish majority and more recently as a counterweight to higher fertility rates of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Arab citizens of Israel, however, have the same rights to state-paid fertility treatments as their Jewish counterparts.

While Libya, Egypt and Syria are dealing with the 'Facebook revolutions' involving violence, overthrowing governments and gunning down opponents, we have had our 'Facebook uprising' involving the price of cottage cheese and this week it's the price of rentals for students in downtown Tel Aviv.
There is comfort in the middle-class-ness of it all. You could close your eyes and almost  imagine we are a regular bourgeois country.
But the conflict hasn't gone away. However if Facebook and Youtube have become the venues for change take a look at this latest entry in the war of our legitimacy in the region. Think about it and pass it on. 

Song Worth 1,000 words!

I've got to admit that US President Obama and his Secretary of State Clinton's  reaction to the 'student unrest' in Egypt came across to us ex-pats here in Rehovot (representative sample of 2, me & David) as being only randomly tangential with reality. It was a flower children view of 'protest' conjuring up Pete Seeger-esque scenes. Sandy Cash, who is maybe a tad young to remember the sixties has captured the spirit of our response in this lovely ditty she posted on Youtube.
Apropos Sandy here's a personal favorite of mine.(non-political) Enjoy!

Israeli actors and playwrights want to boycott audiences in Ariel

Savion Liebrecht whose play The Banality of Love I saw and found so profound and really special has joined over 50 other people connected with Israels theater industry in signing  a letter declaring they will not perform (or in her case have her play performed) in the new cultural center in Ariel. See the articles here or here. I saw Liebrecht's play as part of a series  organized by the Rehovot community center. We get to see seven plays which are chosen by the center and then usually one or two shows (not always plays) which we get to choose from wider range of events also sponsored by the community centers. We see the plays at the Wix Auditorium in the Weizmann Institute, which is the largest auditorium in Rehovot. I love the subscription because it gives me an opportunity to see many plays during the year and exposes us to work we might not choose ourselves.I am a native New Yorker (home of Broadway) and I love seeing real live human beings perform! Movies and TV don't even come near the thrill of seeing and hearing real people on stage! Many of the plays we see are original plays written in Hebrew and these I find very interesting because although they are not all great plays they do reflect a lot of the culture around us and it is interesting to see Israeli culture develop. 

Ariel is a municipality founded in 1978 and now has a population of close to 20,000 residents with another 10,000 students who study at the college there. The town jus finished building a new cultural center and contracted for a series of plays to be performed for the local residents. Ariel, as you can see from the map here is right in the center of the country but it is 11 miles (17 km) over the 'green line'. And here the plot thickens!. Many of the people connected with the theaters are refusing to participate in the productions planned to be staged in Ariel. They don't want to be in the conquered territories. This is what they say: 

"We wish to express our disgust with the theater's board's plans to perform in the new auditorium in Ariel. The actors among us hereby declare that we will refuse to perform in Ariel, as well as in any other settlement. We urge the boards to hold their activity within the sovereign borders of the State of Israel within the Green Line."

Israelis consume a disproportionate amount of culture and one of the reasons is that the theater companies (as well as orchestras and other cultural organizations) are marketed to the public through subscriptions like mine as well as through labor unions and other groups that buy blocks and resell to their members. So although the Habima Theater (now undergoing renovation) is located in Tel Aviv, the troupe plays to audience around the country in setups like ours in Rehovot. Other theater companies that perform around the country are the Cameri Theater (also of Tel Aviv), the Be'er Sheva Theater and the Haifa Theater. There is also the excellent Gesher Theater, whose home theater is in Jaffa, which was started for and by Russian actors in 1991 at the height of the great aliya, to give them an opportunity to perform in Israel.  Needless to say, in a country as small as Israel supporting so many quality theater companies requires a good deal of government subsidy.
I'm sure that Habima's management means what they say on their website in the context of 'dialoge with different audiences' (emphasis mine):

 "Annual awards given to theater professionals for outstanding achievements in their work. HaBima has performances throughout the country, giving the Israeli public, from anywhere at any age, the opportunity to participate in theater - Jews and Arabs, secularand religious, young and old, from the central region to the periphery; Zabarim (sabras - born in Israel) and Olim Hadashim (new immigrants)."

Well, that may be what the management and the taxpayers want to think, but 'artists' have a right to decide where and to whom they will perform. They feel that by their presence they are lending credibility and legitimacy to the occupation. These 'artists' don't mind being in Jaffa, Haifa and Safed of course because that's Israel, right? Oh, excuse me, but Abu Mazem thinks he should be returning to the home he was born in in Safed. Who's going to tell him that the 'artists' don't count that as occupied territory. Oh, and Jaffa of course, also isn't occupied.  Maybe they should make sure that their audiences in the "central region" and in the "periphery" aren't comprised of people who are serving or have served in the occupation army or pay taxes that support the occupation government. 
These writers and actors have the right to say all this, they have the right to act on their convictions too. Culture should be a unifying factor for us. I can't help feeling that these people are more interested in partisanship than in unity. So if they want to be political they should run for office and face the practical day-to-day problems of running a country. In the meantime, till they take over they must accept that the audiences (and the government) don't have to finance their endeavors. 

IDF is for defending Jews not exiling them!

Thank you  toTzippi Hotovely and Aryeh Eldad  for proposing a law that would squarely put the responsibility for police actions on the police. Yes, they want to the army's job to be defense and leave throwing Jews out of their homes* to the police. 
*This should not be taken as an endorsement of throwing Jews out of their homes. 

Anti-Semitism is Alive and Growing

I'd like to call your attention to a post on the  blog "Coffee and Chemo" where we follow RivkA as she fights cancer which began in her breasts and lives the life of a Zionist in Jerusalem with her husband and 3 children. 
Her title: People Hate Jews Even More Than They Hate Cancer says it well. In a nut shell Israelis invited to the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Middle East Conference on Breast Cancer, held in Egypt last week,  were disinvited by order of Egyptian health minister. And we are supposed to be at peace with Egypt. Didn't some folks get the Nobel prize or something? 
Now NOrway's second largest university is will be considering a boycott  of Israel's academics. 


This video gives a few good points about boycotting Israel, her people and her products.  

And then theres also the nifty idea of participating in a Buycott which means buying as many Israeli products as possible and also letting the retailers know you're buying Israeli in support of Israel. 

Academics out there should sign this petition  signed by  Prof. Bjorn Alsberg of Trondheim's NTNU calling on the board of the university to reject the proposed boycott. 

The People's Army

Haveil Havalim is here 

Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Israel Defense Force
 צבא הגנה לישראל צה"ל 
was known as the great equalizer. Everyone, or almost everyone, was conscripted and the experience of living together, fighting together and possibly dying together made comrades out of an unlikely collection of immigrants and natives alike. Everyone knew who the enemy was and the purpose of the army was to fight the enemy and protect the country. Tzahal (IDF) was called 'the people's army' because aside for almost universal conscription, soldiers were also called up for reserve duty yearly (many times even more frequently) until they were well into middle age. 
The summer of 2005 brought a major change in the concept of the IDF. Instead of fighting a common enemy, Arik Sharon and his government used the IDF turn Jewish citizens out of their homes.in Gush Katif and the Shomron. A democratic country has the right to enforce laws but the body which is charged with enforcing those laws are the police. Members of the police force choose their career and can resign for personal or professional reasons. Not so, the conscripted soldier. Many soldiers serving during the disengagement were put in an intolerable position. There was talk of refusing to carry out orders and a few incidents where this happened. 
Apart from strongly opposing the disengagement itself I believe that this cynical and sinister use of the army is anti-democratic and harmful to our society. There has been a lot of talk lately of regrets and apologies and attempts to 'make it up' to the people displaced by the disengagement. Along with that we should do ourselves a favor and make sure that our soldiers never have to face the decision of whether to follow an order to turn a Jew out of his home. This should be a major issue brought before the Knesset and legally prohibited. 

Last Thursday night two soldiers registered their opposition to the IDF's continued use of soldiers in carrying out government policy against Jewish revenants (settlers who return to their homes) in Chomesh in the Shomron. I agree with their sentiments wholeheartedly but I believe that the army can not be used as a forum for political ideology. I do not want the security of our country to depend upon the willingness of individual soldiers to carry out orders. It just can't work that way. Those soldiers will have to face the consequences of their actions. 
The rest of us will have to sort this out and fast. Now is the time to demand of our democratic system to take this debate out of the military once and for all before it leads to further deterioration of the consensus. 

Let them eat cupcakes!

 For what's going on in the JBlogsphere see Batya's Haveil Havalim.

So everyone is in New York where Kadaffi and Ahmedinijad mock the unity that the 'united' in United Nations was supposed to be about. Nothing is what it was anymore. In other developments from New York, Barak Obama is implementing a new tough policy in which he tells us that it's time to DO something serious. Now. Or else.

But never fear the great New York Times 

has an angle to show you how progress in the piece peace process is a piece of cake. Or cupcake anyway.
It seems a fellow by the name of Fadi Jabar  who was "student at the multinational Aramco school in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia" and a "son of Palestinian refugees"  discovered chocolate chip cookies.One thing led to another and today he runs a successful cupcake emporium 'Sugar Daddy' in Aman, Jordan.

Well, guess what? There are  at least three (count 'em, 3) online cupcake companies in Tel Aviv!!! All this leads the venerable New York Times reporter Anna Louie Sussman to write this piece of wisdom: 

"Cupcakes have also bridged the most contentious divide of the Middle East."

Well then Bibi Netanyahu could have just stayed home and not bothered with his amazing speech today. He could have been out sampling New York cupcakes instead. 

______
Shabbat Shalom, have a meaningful fast.

כתיבה וחתימה טובה

Dummy Elections in Rehovot Today!

Arutz 2, Israel's second channel is holding mock elections in Rehovot. I was told that Rehovot was picked because our election results in the last elections came close to reflecting the results for the country as a whole. Pretty neat, huh?

I love elections (I think it's an American thing) and I have very strong opinions. I usually know who I'll be voting for way before the elections and I'm usually enthusiastically committed to my party of choice.

This time I'm whats known as a 'floating vote'.

But since even us undecideds will eventually make a decision (I do not hold not voting as an option) I went downtown to stand up and be counted. To make a long story short. I voted Likud.
Although I am not Netanyahu's biggest fan (putting it mildly) I am impressed with many of the names on the list. I am pleased that I will be represented by two religeous women, one of them even from Rehovot! I might still change my mind before election day, but for now I'm fed up with the 'unity' in what used to be the national religeous Zionist camp and see enough like-minded folks in the Likud, who might actually get something done this time around.

Some photos:
Labor (Avoda) presenting it's raison d'etre
Action at the Likud table and Tzippi Who?

Now, We MUST!!!

So, according to some of my fellow JBloggers Obama's victory should have me worried.

Very worried.

This is because George W. Bush has turned out to be such a great friend of Israel. I may be getting old and forgetful but it seems to me that in 2000, along with many others, I was apprehensive about Bush's attitude towards Israel. Most of us here would have been a lot happier with Al Gore. Besides Bush's other chasoren (negative traits - but in Yiddish it sounds much worse) he (and his old man) was close with 'the Arabs' having the family's money coming from oil deals.

Fast forward 8 very difficult years. To hear it today we never had a beter friend than W. So where did all the terror, the intifada, the sell-out of Gush Katif and abandonment of the displaced families come from. If things are so good, why are they so bad?

WHY?

Because no one else can do this for us! Sharon sold out Gush Katif. Not Bush. Olmert dragged us through war he didn't know how to win, Livni is, pardon the expression, waffling on Jerusalem and my fellow bloggers think Obama is our problem???

We need to learn from the US. We need to find our own great Jewish hope. We need our own change around here. It's our turn now.

Now, We MUST!!!

Listen to Gila too!