Category: Israel / Judaism

This is interesting:

Jewish settler Avi Farhan, determined not to give up his home overlooking the sea when Israel quits the occupied Gaza Strip, is looking into becoming a Palestinian.

“I have met with Palestinians. I am willing to be a test case for peace and take up Palestinian citizenship,” Farhan told Reuters. “It will hurt me to give up my Israeli citizenship, but I want to remain here.”

[snip]

Farhan, a Libyan-born Jew who left Tripoli for Israel at the age of three in the wake of the 1948 war at Israel’s creation, said seven families were willing to stay in the mostly secular Gaza settlement of Elei Sinai after Israeli troops leave.

Farhan, 59, helped establish Elei Sinai after being forced to leave the Sinai settlement of Yamit in 1982. Like the West Bank and Gaza, Israel captured Sinai in the 1967 war, but returned it to Egypt under a peace deal.

“I fled from Tripoli, endured the displacement camps in Israel, and then I was kicked out of Yamit. Today I won’t be a refugee again. I have no strength,” said Farhan, a restaurant owner. “The Israeli government says it is concerned for my security if I stay here. I will worry about my own safety.”

Maybe there’s more going on than meets the eye in this story, but at least someone’s thinking outside the box here. Kudos to him.

No More Mister Nice Guy decided it was more fun to slag off on Ann Coulter for being a dumb lying shill than to call attention to that fact that there’s a disconcering trend behind Coulter’s lies.

She’s a liar. That’s not news. Shouldn’t it ring some alarm bells that over the past three years, two different Arab TV networks have broadcast a dramatized version of an antisemitic book that is widely recognized as a forgery?

I’d go into a long list of reasons why this article is completely full of sh*t, but I have a paper to write today. However, I can’t resist this one appalling tidbit:

Were Jews true to their mission, they would stand alongside Christians who work to bring the Torah’s values to the world

In other words, not helping the people who think you’re doomed to hell because you don’t believe in the divinity of Jesus is somehow against the mission of Judaism.

I call it self-preservation, thank you very much.

Althought I have strong feeling on the subject of Israel, I rarely blog about it. This is in part because I think it’s easy for me to have an opinion while sitting safely here in America, but the people who are actually living through it probably don’t appreciate the armchair quarterbacking. Also, because my position is hard to explain and tends to satisfy nobody. Some don’t like it that I have little good to say about the Palestinian leadership and the practices of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Fatah, et al. Others believe whatever Israel does is right without qualification.

So all in all, I tend to let the subject be. There’s plenty of other things to blog about. However, today I ran across an entry in the Bull Moose Blog that I liked. It’s short and worth a read.

This article in the NY Times is an interesting slice of Israeli life.

“When I had my list of stickers, I realized it’s like a capsule of Israeliness, all the brutality and aggression and the need to get out of this situation,” said [song author David] Grossman, who is best known for magical-realistic novels like ”See Under: Love” and volumes of left-of-center political essays, including last year’s ”Death as a Way of Life.”

”The more the dead end of the situation grows, the more frustrated people become with their inability to influence it,” he continued, in a telephone interview. “Few people on the left or the right are satisfied. And the more they are frustrated, the more they are extremists, the more bumper stickers they have on the car. Sometimes you stop behind a car that looks like a shouting demonstration.”

Gadi Taub, one of Israel’s leading cultural critics and public intellectuals, put Mr. Grossman’s experience into a larger context. ”Israel is such a small place that taking a political position is like declaring the very core of your identity,” he said. ”For many years it was unthinkable for Israelis that if you’re a Likud voter you could marry someone from Labor. It would be a battle over every dinner and every breakfast. So your car, too, will declare your identity. You don’t think you can even make friends across bumper stickers.”

iTunes doesn’t have the song, unfortunately, but I found it in less than 5 minutes on an MP3 file trading network. Hat Tip: Amygdalagf for the link.