The Contradictions Post

Yesterday Israeli film producer Ari Folman won a Golden Globe for the movie Waltz With Bashir, about his service in the IDF during the First Lebanon War when Israel did not intervene as Christian Lebanese massacred Palestinian refugees. Folman reportedly said nothing about the current activity in Gaza in his acceptance speech. However, it must have been a poignant moment to collect the trophy for his anti-war film even as his home country is at battle again. From this end of the world, it was ironic to see the national press enthusiastic about both Folman's win and about the operation in Gaza. See this collection of headlines from Haaretz today:

• Israel's 'Waltz with Bashir,' on 1982 Lebanon War, wins Golden Globe for best foreign film
• IDF finds Hamas arms stockpile in raid on Gaza mosque
• Olmert: Gaza war won't end until rocket and smuggling stop
• ANALYSIS / Israel's victories in Gaza make up for its failures in Lebanon
• UN Human Rights Council condemns Israel over Gaza op
• Legal expert: Rising Gaza death toll doesn't mean IDF acts are disproportionate
• Amira Hass / Gazans doing their best to avoid becoming death statistics
• ANALYSIS / Why Israel should let foreign journalists into Gaza

I was reminded by Lisa Goldman's epic blog post on Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh's Bedouin Israeli sisters that this conflict is full of internal contradictions. Here are a few more:

On Saturday I went to downtown Beer Sheva for a bourgeouis afternoon spent sipping the best coffee in the country. Founded by two friends who fell in love with gourmet coffee on a trip to Australia, the Gecko roasts and grinds all its beans. The result is coffee with a personality. One blend tastes of chocolate. Another delivers a sharp, bitter hit to the palate. Coffee sacks are everywhere - empty hanging on the walls and half full on the floor.


Owners Shahar and Haggai said they have been keeping the place open every day even while rockets fall, both to keep a sense of normalcy in the city and because it's what they know how to do. To keep costs down, they have told their waiters and cooks to stay home and they run the outfit by themselves from 8 am to 11 pm on weekdays, and from 9 to 11 on Saturdays. They said that while at first patrons were wary to go out, or may have left town, they are now gradually trickling back. This is the Gecko front patio, on Smilansky Street in Beer Sheva's charming Old City.


During the week, Haggai has reserve duty in the IDF, and Shahar runs the coffee shop alone. He checks the news online, even visiting Hizbollah's news channel in Hebrew to read what's going on and what the Arab world has to say about his home. Here he is with the coffee grinder.


***

The day before, on Friday, a Tel Avivian friend of mine came down to Beer Sheva to volunteer with kids who have been out of school since Hannuka, in late December. The rocket siren went off as her bus pulled into central Beer Sheva and she was understandably shaken, but nothing was hit nearby. I joined her at one of BGU's dormitory buildings which has a computer lab and more importantly, a bomb shelter. There were around 20 kids and maybe a dozen student volunteers, and at first we really tried to help the kids do some schoolwork. I was giving Anwar, 9, tips on how to fill out a multiplication table. He speaks Arabic at home but goes to Jewish public school, and I could see how the different ways of saying numbers in Hebrew and Arabic was making it tough to fill in the chart.

Soon enough, the kids noticed they were sitting next to computers and the room was filled with awful pop music and the sounds of asinine Internet games being played. We managed to drag three of the kids outside for a game of football played with a plastic water bottle. Anwar and his twin brother Ali took every chance they could to pummel each other. The other volunteers and I were just happy to see kids being kids instead of racing imaginary bulls online.

***

Today I sat around with my roommate and his friend, talking about how living in Israel can be so depressing that they both want to leave as soon as possible. "The country has been at war since before I was born and I see no end in sight," one said. "Why would I put my kids through that?"

We listened to "Children of Winter 1973," a song written in the wake of the 1973 war about how Israel's children grow up with broken promises of peace.

You promised a dove
An olive leaf
Peace at home
You promised springtime and flowers
You promised to keep promises
You promised a dove.

We are the children of winter of the year seventy-three
We grew up, now we're in the army with our weapon, the helmet on the head.
We also know how to make love, we laugh and know to cry
We are also men, we are also women, we also dream of babies
And so we won't push, we won't demand, and so we won't threaten
When we were little you said: you have to keep promises
If you need force, we'll give it, we won't hold back, we just wanted to whisper
We are the children of the winter of the year seventy-three.

This was released 35 years ago. A gloomy cloud descended over the three of us as we contemplated the lyrics. Then, a second later, we were watching the "Foxy Lady" clip from Wayne's World on YouTube.

Breather

The following is cross-posted at GreenProphet.com.

I woke up this morning thinking I was on the streets of Chicago with the wind loudly blowing between the blocks of skyscrapers. It took a few minutes to realize this howling wind was actually the rocket siren, an especially long one. The siren is a wail that crescendos and decrescendos; usually the rockets fall 60 seconds after it starts. Since this one was so long, I heard a boom in the middle of it. The house shuddered; the rocket must have fallen nearby (I returned to Beer Sheva last week). The siren stopped and I dozed off again.

The reason I was tired enough to go back to sleep was that last night some friends and I took a break from the action and went on a full-moon hike in the desert, in a dry riverbed called Nachal Havarim near the Sde Boker field school. It’s out of rocket range.

As we drove the 50 minutes south of Beer Sheva, we listened to Bohemian Rhapsody on the radio and reminisced about the effects of Wayne’s World on our youth. Eventually we got out and hit the trail. The moon was so bright that it cast shadows from the large boulders onto the rocky, sandy ground. We were six students, and as we walked we got warm enough to forget that it was the middle of winter, except for a refreshing chill on our cheeks. At one point we passed a large flint stone and threw rocks against it, throwing sparks into the weak darkness.

There was a flat area on one edge of the riverbed, high up, where we drank wine and coffee and ate oatmeal cookies. The moon lit up the rolling hills and canyons all around us. In the distance we heard cars intermittently on the highway.

Towards the end of the hike we took another break and stared at the sky. Although for the last two hours it had been clear, suddenly a thin lace of clouds stretched over half of it. The bright round moon slipped between the clear and the clouds, shining and then casting a light halo on the white around it.

We talked as we walked, about how the war had put some of us in a bad mood or in a slump. Twice the conversation went into the politics of Israel’s actions in Gaza and reached an uneasy stalemate between those who supported and opposed the war. Then the chatter moved into discussions of trips abroad, of when school would start again, what we had been doing with all our newfound free time.

Around midnight we got back in the car and listened to the Israeli singers Ehud Banai and Nurit Galron, and then Leonard Cohen as we drove back home. The trip had taken us out of empty Beer Sheva, which is dreary because so many students went home, and into the desert whose very charm and magic comes from emptiness. Away from the sirens and the newscasts, it was lovely to just take a breath.

The Israeli University System

It was thirty minutes into a seminar on Critical Theory on Planning when I realized with relief that I was not the only one drowning in the Hebrew discussion on relative and absolute space. Another student raised her hand and flat out told the professor, "Excuse me, please slow down. I have no idea what you're saying."

But there was no such sense of sympathy in the school supply store.

The Academon is in the basement of the student union and is filled with the usual paraphernalia for studying - stationery, pens, pencil cases...and then loads of computer goods, an entire corner devoted to backpacks, and racks of toiletries. Really, Ben Gurion U. students? You can't find shampoo at your corner grocery?

What confounded me was how I would organize my papers in the land of no Five-Star notebooks with multiple subject areas and convenient built-in pockets. How to deal with A4 paper, which is narrower and longer than my old mainstay, A3? What to do with a standard filing system of two holes to a sheet, instead of one? Or with the national love for "nylons" - transparent plastic pockets with two holes designed to be placed in binders to hold onto the non-punched sheets.

I stared at the wall of binders and nylons, bewildered at the prospect of re-thinking the way I take notes. After ten agonizing minutes, I bought pre-holepunched loose leaf paper (which comes bound on one end, so it can be easily used in a clipboard) and two binders. I also picked up colorful pens to get excited about writing reams of Hebrew which may be indecipherable to me when I look at them later. I think I'll wind up taking notes on a clipboard, ripping the sheets off at home and filing them away in the two binders, which I'll divide into subjects using nylons.

This information may not be Earth-shattering, but it is just one more way in which I am realizing that studying in another country has many consequences beyond just the language. Foreign students everywhere, I salute you.

First Impressions of Beer Sheva

The good news: university strikes aren't happening this year, and classes began on schedule on Sunday. The bad news: Beer Sheva's urban design. Let me explain.

Last year, I heard a great line: "Tel Aviv would be such a great city, if only it weren't in Israel."

That thought kept popping into my head last Thursday night, as a friend drove me and the last of my possessions from Tel Aviv down to Beer Sheva, where I am getting a Master's in Geography at Ben Gurion University. As the physical and cultural center of the country, Tel Aviv is a vibrant city full of beautiful people and well-planned parks and boulevards. Elegant skyscrapers, cozy coffee shops and trendy bars light up the streets at night.

By contrast, as you leave the center for the desert this organization deteriorates into wide expanses of empty land broken up by isolated towns and small cities, each carrying its own gas station and monstrosity of a shopping mall done up in neon light that breaks up the serenity you would expect from open space.

After crawling out of Tel Aviv's heavy traffic, we drove past Ashkelon, a coastal city in the Western Negev desert in the part of the country known as "Otef Aza" (Wraps around Gaza) but which some people have dubbed "Khotef Aza" (Catches [Kassam rockets from] Gaza). An acrid smokey pall hung over the road, and infused the car as we traveled to nearby Netivot. This city's entrance is marked by tall modular apartment buildings and jarringly bringt signs tacked onto shopping centers. One meaning of Netivot is traffic lanes; I commented that the only Netivot I would want to see in the town of Netivot are the ones going out.

At this point we turned on the radio to find out that as we drove, Kassams had fallen near both Ashkelon and Netivot. Perhaps this was the source of the smell. We rode on, happy to be moving away from the source of the rockets.

As we reached the outskirts of Beer Sheva, the highway turned into one of the main avenues of the city, Rager Street. And yet, little seemed different. Yes, the road was lined with apartment blocks, but they were wide three-story impersonal and identical buildings that look like traincars on either side. These eyesores are part of the legacy of towns like Beer Sheva, which were developed hastily in the 1950s to absorb massive numbers of immigrants from the Arab world. Although the imperative to quickly house a large crowd has disappeared, the bland buildings live on. Few bars, restaurants or cafes occupy the lower stories, lending the street a bleak and empty character bereft of any urban fabric. And woe to the bikers who ride on Rager. They choose between riding on the edges of a road where cars are traveling at highway speed, or steering their bikes on unpaved "sidewalks" which are really three-feet-wide strips of packed-down sand and gravel.

One of the few places where this sprawling nothingness lets up in Beer Sheva is the old city, which I rode my bicycle to today. Built by the Ottomans, the old city is a series of narrow streets planned on a grid where business are open on the ground floor with apartments going up a few stories above them. Besides the university campus, the old city is one of the few places in Beer Sheva where walking around doesn't involve crossing four- and six-lane highways. And yet...few brand name national chains have stores downtown, preferring to open in the giant sterile shopping mall a few blocks away. The shops that do open in the old city reminded me of business districts I have seen in Amman, Jordan. They advertise heavily with graphics, as in a hair salon will have a picture of a finely coiffed woman on its illuminated sign. Most of the clothes, belts, suitcases and other goods sold in the shops are cheap looking. The few decent restaurants are far outnumbered by felafel joints and hummus restaurants.

Beer Sheva's rent is so cheap that I pay only half of what I would in Tel Aviv. But you get what you pay for. More than a million people live in the metropolitan area of Israel's glossy, European Tel Aviv. Beer Sheva is how so many of the other 5 million people in this country live - in poorly planned cities filled with soulless apartment buildings, ugly clothes and too many cars.

Obama in Israel

Although I have moved to Beer Sheva, I went up to Tel Aviv to watch election results with two American friends, and it was one of the first times since moving to Israel that I felt proud to be an American and aware that there are certain events that you must share with people who come from the same country as you.

The first polls closed at 2 AM Israeli time, and the only American news station we could get was FOX News. We anxiously watched as McCain at first seemed to be in the lead, with eight electoral college votes to Obama's three, and as Florida, Ohio, Missouri and others remained undecided. The three of us dozed off, waking up periodically, as Obama took Pennsylvania, Colorado...and broke through 300 electoral college votes. At 6 we drowsily woke up to Obama's acceptance speech.

It was so exciting to watch this happen at home, in Grant Park where I went while studying at Northwestern, and to see the crowd flowing between Chicago's skyscrapers as though it were an anti-Communist rally in Eastern Europe. Sky News showed Kenyans dancing in the streets, the Fox broadcasters seemed sad, and the three of us kept saying how proud we were of our country, and how excited we were about the Obama family dog.

In the morning I wore a grey Obama t-shirt around Tel Aviv. It felt like the day after you finally get together with someone you have been hoping to be with for months and you want the whole world to know. Every few minutes I would remind myself that Obama was the president-elect, and smile, and stand up on my bike so the t-shirt would be more easily visible.

It's strange, but I really cannot remember feeling this proud of neither America nor Israel, ever. Is this how it was to be an American in the 1940s, when we helped sink Germany and Japan, or in Israel when the Six-Day War was won? So unusual and pleasant to feel that my country makes me feel good about myself, privileged to be a part of it and excited to see what happens next.

...

Today, as I walked around Beer Sheva with a friend, we wandered into the tourist office (which was empty) for the city (which is nearly empty) and chatted with the two middle-aged women who worked there. They said they like Obama, especially because he has a doctoral degree and is an intellectual. Then they added that maybe because Obama is only 47, it will make people in Beer Sheva feel ok about voting for the youngest mayoral candidate for the city, which goes to the polls this Wednesday. Then they accidentally called Obama Mubarak.

Back to Life...Back to University?

When I signed the lease on an apartment in the Negev desert city of Beer Sheva for the coming year, I had assumed I would be renting as a Geography Master's student at Ben Gurion University. Besides a solid academic reputation, BGU is also known as the Israeli institution that most closely resembles American college life, because most of the students live near campus and have a robust social life. Classes are supposed to start November 16.

However, BGU has joined the other six public Israeli universities that have threatened to strike unless the Ministry of Finance shells out $125 to shore up a wide budget gap - apparently in the last eight years the university budgets shrank 20 percent even as enrollment increased 10 percent.

If you think it is impossible for universities to strike, look at last year, when the faculty refused to teach for two months, or the year before that, when students went on strike against higher tuition. This has turned into an annual public dance between the universities, which demand more money, and the government, which refuses to give it. The article I linked to above presents a clear, if depressing, analysis of how that process works. It seems to be the fault of the government.

The outcome of this awkward negotiation is that public higher education, a widely accessible rite at $2,400 a year in Israel, is earning a reputation for being unreliable. This leaves a vacuum filled by private colleges, where 61 percent of this year's undergraduates are enrolled. Private colleges charge higher tuition and depend less on government funding. Healthy colleges, which open on time and are not subject to the whims of the Finance Ministry, can attract professors with higher salaries and students with a promise of dependability - which will eventually strip the public schools of their best talent and their strongest students.

Hopefully, this year's strike will not be two months long. But just in case, I am going to start pitching articles the minute I move to my new apartment so that I have a way to fill my days if classes are canceled. Who knows - I may look back on my university years in Israel as the tail end of the era when public universities actually functioned.