The right to spring

With the spring in full swing, Labor Party chairman-wannabe Ophir Pines is giving us his take on the season of rejuvenation and rebirth. Today the media reported that the former science, culture and sports minister is seeking to convene the party's central committee. Should it convene, the committee would vote on Pines' proposal to quit from the Olmert coalition; should the proposal be approved, it would take effect immediately, leaving the premier without his foremost coalition partner.

Let's assume for one minute that this plan succeeds, and Labor leaves the government in a matter of weeks. Let's assume also, in the best-of-worlds hypothetical scenario, that following this move Pines is hailed as Labor's new hope and gets voted in as the new Labor Party chairman.

If we were to focus on Labor for a minute, suspending the question about Olmert's options, we'll soon learn that Israel's most battered party is not expecting a bright future ahead.

Pines never shone as one of Labor's heavy guns. Never did he grab someone else's microphone in mid-speech (like Ehud Barak); nor did he establish himself as the party's strongman who cannot be elected himself, but nevertheless no one else can be elected without his blessing (like Benjamin (Fouad) Ben-Eliezer).

True, his record of parliamentary work is impressive, with membership and chairmanship of various Knesset committees, including the important finance committee and the foreign affairs and defense committee. True, also, that he is the youngest candidate running in the coming Labor primary elections.

Yet his ministerial appointments put together did not exceed 18 months. His extra-parliamentary and extra-governmental work spanned mainly what Israelis call "field-level," i.e. handling contingencies rather than policies.

Any person with a burning desire to make a change starts on his or her own, with nothing but a dream. Any leading politician would need the first break to be leader, so that later he or she can be leadership savvy. We must also remember that the dividing line distinguishing true visionaries from Kumbaya-singing dreamers is many times very fine.

Ophir Pines-Paz's record doesn't carry the mark of a true leader or that of a true man of actions who can "get things moving." He is well spoken; his good intentions seem genuine enough; but in more than a decade of national-level politics he has not demonstrated cut-mustard abilities. Until this magical, majestic moment happens, he is looking at a future of being torn to shreds either by his Laborite comrades, by his political rivals or by both.

Hence, supposing that Labor does end up quitting the coalition, Olmert still stands a better chance to survive than what one might hope they'd be. After all, he is turning out to be the least-weak boy in the 'hood of wusses.

Where are the Palestinians?

It could be the festive season that is upon us, it could be the train of high-ranking American officials that passed through our humble country in recent week; but it seems that the Palestinians have lost much of the media exposure they are used to.

Once recurred infighting dissipated the short-lived mirage of a unity government; as soon as planned terror attacks were forced back to underground holes and dirty dungeons, the cameras were turned elsewhere; Dictaphones were shoved back to the bags of foreign journalists. Silence on the media.

The Pavlovian instinct of winning global attention through atrocities – be they self-inflicted, targeting Israelis or brought about by Israel – is proving to be narcotic. The momentary gratification can only be sustained by returning time and again to the toxic, destructive substances that generate the instant and short-lived pleasure. Iraq-based terrorists do it better – more savage, more televised, more destructive – and yet they face the same fate. Once world audiences become used to the images and the sounds, they ultimately turn their attention elsewhere.

Palestinian plight and the cause of the meek and the humble are not earning many brownie points either. Genocide in Darfur is sexier; war in Somalia is more riveting; local social injustices are more worrying.

If terror ain't workin' no more, if misery, starvation and poverty don't do it for the world, what remains in the Palestinian bag o' tricks?

Dare I say it – peace?

The residents of the Middle East, Western politicians, even the world at-large, seem tired of empty statements and stale diplomatic moves. The current state of affairs strikes me as the most real and present dead-end we have faced in our region.

If the Palestinians are to stop international media from yawning, they must muster whatever solidarity they have left in them and march towards peace.

The case of Gilad Shalit is a perfect model for my contention: Palestinian militants are holding him captive, staunchly opposed to any compromise that will bring to his release, yet they continue to yearn for the return of thousands of prisoners. Any other aspect of their lives will demonstrate the same ratio in favor of Israel.

Media coverage is obviously not an end in itself, but a means, and a very powerful means at that. The Palestinians have known this all along, but lost their direction somewhere along the way. In the maze of indulgent whims, justified and unjustified rage and genuine plight, they will inevitably meet the Minotaur. It is only too unfortunate that the Master of the Maze will be speaking fluent Arabic with a thick Gazan accent.

A happy Passover

As I was driving to Seder night on Monday evening, the radio eased into Passover spirit with tunes of good ol' Israeliana. This has become a standard ritual, not only on high holidays, but also on Shabbat – playing them same songs with that same old pathos of purity, bravery and innocence of days long gone.

A slightly less common ritual, but a ritual nonetheless, was the announcement of a complete curfew over the territories, and the high alert of all security forces. The radio announcer pronounced the words with perfect diction, sending me back to the old movie The Troupe (Halahaka). In one of the scenes the performers are getting ready for Independence Day celebrations as an anonymous radio announcer is describing countrywide preparations with the same perfect diction and the same self-persuasive pathos.

In a different, earlier scene, the troupe is traveling through the Sinai to perform before soldiers on duty in remote outposts, as the radio is dictating the latest figures of casualties in the War of Attrition.

We're now in 2007, and yet so little has changed. Our dependence on military might, the urge to hail our protectors, the need to report every small success, to give credence to arms bearers' prowess. For the same reason, I believe, little or nothing has changed in the presentation style of news by state radio, Israel Radio. Correct, passé diction is insisted upon as though the Hebrew Language Academy had just been established; the vocabulary chosen for describing military operations is exact and uncompromising; so are the descriptions of enemy activity in days of war or days of false peace.

As these thoughts crossed my minds we finally made it to the Seder. At table, one of my relatives, who fought as a reserves soldier in the Second Lebanon War, felt at ease and for the first time shared with us a few horrifying stories.

At the conclusion of the meal and reading of the Haggadah, we didn't go our separate ways. The entire family gathered around musical instruments and sang together the same pathos-filled songs I derided earlier that evening. This was a wholehearted moment for all of us, I'm sure.

And here's the paradox: We are a nation that still relies on the sword for its survival, and some of the existential axioms of Zionism are still difficult to argue with. We are, however, much less devoted to our "nation" and to the call of the National Conscience, as pronounced and expressed by official media channels and state representatives of all walks of public service.

We put our trust in a Winograd Committee, media reports on the blunders of army chiefs, we know to air our despairs and bring a Chief of Staff to resign from office. This country has witnessed the Agranat Committee, the rage of reserves soldiers during the First Lebanon War, the crisis of the first and second Intifada. Parents know who will take their official complaint and which journalist they should turn to if they believe their sons and daughters have been maltreated or abused during their military service.

A former general and defense minister was convicted of indecent behavior.

All the same, we allow this shameless indoctrination to continue uninterrupted, this cheap propaganda, idealization and idolization of a state of affairs that cannot last forever and therefore must change. And in my eyes, these seemingly superficial mannerisms are the easiest and most important element to change. Easy because it's only the media. Important, because it will help change our automated responses to a reality that need not remain too familiar and too painful.

These beautiful songs of yore should be allowed to keep warm our nostalgic sentiments for an innocence that may or may not have been there in the past. But we should make a concerted effort to extract it from the rhetoric and thought patterns that gel no longer. We owe this to nobody else but ourselves.

This is where we should begin. The rest shall follow.

Musings on a porcelain rabbit

A porcelain rabbit has been stolen from someone at work. I only know this because he sent a call for its prompt return on the internal messaging framework.

I haven’t seen this rabbit, nor do I wish to see it (though I do support its return to its rightful owner). But the notion of a rabbit porcelain, here at work, a place like so many others that is anything but what porcelain stands for, got me thinking.

What is the root of the desire for porcelain items, be they tea or coffee cup sets, an assortment of domestic, domesticated or wild animals, or pastoral scenes of long gone days? Why do I care not in the slightest for this white, brittle raw material that adorns the guest rooms of many worldwide?

Pristine whiteness, the ideal of beauty and perfection, cannot be achieved in reality. Any move you make, every vow you take (to misquote Sting), is bound to taint your intent, to add in an unexpected element. Whatever it is you set out to do, or anything that is imposed on you from without your narrow strip of life, will not be pristine, nor will it keep the ideal of whiteness unblemished.

Is it not what I, and so many more capable commentators than myself, write about day in day out? What would we do without the unexpected turns, the filth that resurfaces time and again, the crises and the catastrophes that disqualify the possibility of securing a porcelain moment, or mini-reality?

And now the porcelain has been taken away from the life of this poor colleague of mine, this morsel of fake perfection to brighten up his days under the glaring neon lights. If we are not to relent from this tongue in cheek metaphor-making, we could say that it stands for our inability to have a lucid, unblemished porcelain moment even on the eve of one of our three high holidays. The festival of freedom is marked by abduction; the festival of spring and renewal is stamped with the mark of death and atrocity; this Passover is anything but porcelain.

And so much for my wish to write up something cheerful and merry.

Chag Sameach.

The somber wave at the curb

November 4, 1995. Yitzhak Rabin is officially dead. So dead that U.S. President Bill Clinton steps out to the lawn before the White House and gives his famous, succinct statement. He then turns around, and walks into the violet darkness behind the open doors.

We, Israelis, are left to our own devices. The president could not have empathized with us more than he did; could not have given a better shot at comforting the bedazzled who are not yet morose. But when that moment ends, he goes back to the sanctuary that is America. With its insurmountable moat that is the Atlantic Ocean, brandishing waves that wash away any grain of Middle Eastern reality back to where it belongs. Here.

Ever since that moment, I have become acutely sensitive to senior diplomats' moment of departure. That minute or so that seems to last an eternity, when the official or world leader is standing at the curb and makes one last gesture before mounting the stairs. And then the leader is gone, ingested by the warm darkness of a house or an airplane.

And today this moment will repeat itself. Certainly not as dramatically as Clinton's but nevertheless it will possess some of its benumbing quality. Condoleezza Rice was here again. Condoleezza Rice will board the plane. We will be left with our reality, she'll go back to face her own.

I guess the emptiness I describe originates in a very primordial yearning for peace. Not just political and diplomatic, but personal more than anything else. That sense of envy that pricks the heart of every Israeli at the thought of the nations that enjoy economic prosperity that is not accompanied by a Despite, that is not achieved in the shadow of a military conflict with no end in sight. And in a sense, the goodwill efforts of those nations, the United States in particular, to help us get to the same position as they, are both disheartening and inefficient.

For the same reasons that America failed to accept Vietnamese mentality and lost the war; for the same reasons Iraq is now falling apart and so are its residents (literally). America just doesn't get the Middle East.

Maybe if we were left to our own devices in making peace the efforts would yield something other than empty slogans. Maybe we should be told once and for all that we need to go it alone.

One thing is certain: We won't suffer the emptiness after the somber wave at the curb.

The human zoo and why Israelis need it

Tel Aviv was taken over by a 3,000-strong mob of English supporters of their national team for a match with Israel on Saturday. TV channels and newspapers didn't miss out on an opportunity to flash an image of a beer-merry geezer (the SAME geezer on all channels, papers, wire-services and Websites) to convince us this visit is nothing short of an Anglo-Saxon invasion to the first Hebraic city.

Succumbing to the media hype I ventured to see for myself what was the actual extent of the Brits' invasion. And I was in for a real surprise.

It began with finding any and every outlet selling beer on tap boasting at their front a Union Jack, an English flag or both. This move was probably made on the presumption that the true beer-heads from Albion would be more attracted to a pub demonstrating solidarity than to the nearest place that sells the booze.

Well, the presumption turned out to be very wrong.

The city streets were empty as on any other Saturday, but as my partner and I drew nearer the both famous and infamous Mike's Place, we understood just HOW wrong pub owners were.

The 50 meter by 15 meter perimeter of the city's usual foreigner / backpacker hangout was swarming with proud pink nosed beer gut owners who did no dishonor to their title. The hour was 11.30 A.M. and beer was piled in jugs on the wooden tables; inflatable beer advertisements bounced against the wind with their hot air; and more official-team-shirts-wearing patrons strode along the promenade, slowly making their way to the beer fountains.

But I am not writing here the lament of business owners that know no better. Alas, the surprise I wish to describe did not lie amongst emptying pints and beer-breathed London homies. It lay on the other side of the street.

Israelis from all walks of life had gathered on the promenade and watched the beer guzzling process, making it a point not to hide the observational nature of their activity.

I won't be radicalizing the scene too much if I'll say that it just fell short of serving as a human zoo. The occupants were offered a constant flow of mead, were surrounded by a fence and were dull-faced and mostly oblivious of the observational activity around them. The visitors were standing at a safe distance, protected by the moat that is Tel Aviv's Sunset-Boulevard-wannabe driveway, at times pointing at the objects of observation and bending down to their children for elaborate, studious explanations.

A proper disclosure is in order. I too left my house to bear witness to the miracle of English geezers ridiculing themselves ahead of the match. I too stood there for a few minutes to ingest the unusual sight. But, admittedly, I felt very uneasy about the whole thing.

Why is it that we, Israelis, feel so inclined to turn any deviation from the familiar into a spectacle, an attraction that makes cover page pictures and Friday night feature stories on TV? How can we be this comfortable with establishing an instantaneous relationship of zoo occupants and observers?

We crave an otherness that is not threatening. We crave momentary visitors we do not need to suspect, such that we can welcome and embrace, allow adding color to our everyday lives (which are, after all, gray worldwide), and then part amicably.

We had just that for a brief moment in the summer of 1967. We can have it again, with the same visitors / neighbors of yore. We can but we won't.

The Hoax

I don't know if we were fooled by others or if we fooled ourselves, but the appointment of our first-ever Muslim Arab minister had to turn sour sooner rather than later.

True, he is a Knesset member for Labor. True, of the Arab MKs he has been silent on many a volatile issue over which his fellow Arab parliamentarians roared ferociously from the small, auburn dais in Jerusalem. Yet he's an Arab after all. Can we expect anything but trouble? After all, the dagger must be hidden somewhere underneath his cloak.

Our political pallet didn't have to wait long for the anticipated sourness. Just this morning I heard a most embarrassing discussion on Raleb Majadele's refusal to sing The Hope (Hatikva), the throbbing heart of whatever it is we still like to refer to as Zionism.

"A minister in the State of Israel turns his back on one of its foremost symbols?" The radio news anchor wondered aloud in Majedele's ears? "Will you or will you not sing the anthem" she added in a tone that would make any cadet Shin Bet interrogator proud.

The answer was a plain "No." No.

The recalcitrant minister, a Muslim Arab, would not utter the lyrics depicting the yearning soul of every Jew for the Land of Israel.

Our anthem is unlike other national unity songs, because it does not call for the unity and togetherness of all inhabitants of the land. It appeals only to Jews worldwide to partake of the yearning for freedom in our country, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. It does not echo the call of the Declaration of Independence for Israel to be a country of all of its citizens. Nowhere does it even relate to the existence of any nationality but the Jews on Israeli soil.

The counter-arguments raised by the anchor, and later by right-wing parliamentarian Zvi Hendel, don't even merit their mention here. The patronizing air of their all too amicable conversation reeked of a Jewish conspiracy against the poor Arab boy who, for a minute, was led to believe he got accepted into the Club.

I apologize for the radical leftist subversive air of my commentary today. But I didn't touch this comment by MK Hendel: "If an Arab chooses to join a Zionist party we must encourage him."

We are not doing any Arab a favor by making him or her Knesset member, a public servant, or our car mechanic. The scepter of infinite wisdom is not held in our hand, for wise we are not nor are we superior in any way to the non-Jew or the generally Other.

Let us not disgrace The Hope by allowing it to expose our ugliness. Let us not turn it into The Hoax.