The Bubble

Before the rain

Before the rain.

Elections

The Israeli elections’ results are worrying. Avigdor Lieberman’s party Yisrael Beiteinu won 12 mandates. Lieberman wishes to “clean” Israel of its Arab population.
In Shaister words:
“Although definitely rightwing politically, he is more of a brutalist than an ideologue. The issue of greater Israel is important to him (he is one of the few Knesset members who actually lives in a West Bank settlement), but less important than issues of demography.

Yisrael Beiteinu's popularity comes more from Lieberman's ideas about Israel's Arab minority. Over the years, rightwing fringe parties have proposed a policy of "transferring" Israel's Arab citizens to neighbouring Arab countries.

The idea - patently illegal and morally reprehensible - is to protect Israel's Jewish character.

In the current campaign, two parties are proposing ways to "solve" the Arab problem. One proposes to do this by force, the other by encouraging Arab emigration using bribes and incentives.

Lieberman, by contrast, has a novel but no less legally dubious solution. He proposes to redraw Israel's boundaries to transfer control of large Arab border towns such as Umm el-Fahem to the Palestinians. No one has to move physically, and Israel solves its demographic problem. Easy peasy.

I need to emphasise that Lieberman's ideas in no way represent mainstream Israeli political thinking. In his most optimistic scenarios, he may get 10% of the vote.

However, a depressingly large number of people seem to agree with him on a gut level, even if they don't actively support his policies.”

To read the complete article that appeared at the Guardian Unlimited click here.

Racism is an inherent characteristic of the Israeli society and it is felt everywhere. An article at this week’s Haaretz magazine called "The boundaries of love" tells an unbelievable love story of a Jewish woman and an Arab man who are kept apart because the Israeli state doesn’t allow them to live together. Both animal lovers, they met and fell in love at the Humane Society in Jerusalem where they worked. The information about their marriage led to their firing. This event is mentioned in the article, which focuses on their inability to live together, as a minor detail, one that is taken for granted.
If you live in Israel you do not have to read such articles in order to feel the racism – it is everywhere. People share with you their notions of “not loving Arabs” without feeling the list embarrassed about it, as if it was a law of nature. The discourse became more extreme and the racism much more apparent in the past year though, with the disengagement opponents’ vile discourse penetrating the mainstream media like a virus. Although I was aware of this shift, I find Lieberman’s success overwhelming.

As to my personal take of things; I have to remind myself all the time not to be influenced from what I read in the papers. Of my lovely Bubble, many of its residents so tired of Israeli politics and its corruption, they chose not to vote (these elections had the lowest percentage of voters in Israel’s history). I remind myself of the people I love, who try to lead a peaceful moral life among the chaos.

An afterthought: doing some errands after writing this piece I recalled how I accidentally bumped into  an Israeli guy I know from the neighborhood yesterday while sitting in Baskin Robbins for Daniel’s daily fix of Ice cream, and the gravity in his voice as he immediately shared with me an up to date report of the election’s results. It was as if he just stepped out from the elections’ booth, rather than standing in a busy Torontonian street. I then remembered how I was totally not aware of the Canadian elections, conducted about 2 months ago, until a day after the elections took place. It struck me - the oddity; how an event that it physically happening so far away can affect one in such a way. I looked at the Newspapers’ headlines and they were discussing a Canadian soldier who was killed in Iraq, rather than the Israeli elections, as I somewhat naively expected. It seems that you can get out of your motherland but you can’t get your motherland out of you.

spring

For those of us who spend most of our time indoors, there is nothing like the first day of spring.
For those of us who spend most of our outdoors time covered with layers of clothes - a wool hat on our heads, mittens covering our hands - there’s nothing as liberating as a cool breeze felt on hair and skin.
For those of us whose children spend most of their time indoors, there’s nothing like the first day at the park after long months of absence, surprised to find that the whole neighborhood is there. Seeing the kids running and playing and digging in the sand; their cheeks red, their smiles wide.
For those of us who spent their last months planning the future, dreaming of warmth, obsessing, speculating, longing, imagining – what a relief it is to be submerged in the now. To enjoy being in the present. 

For those of us who live in Toronto, there’s nothing as glorious as the first day of spring.

Look at this lovely place I found, created by the web artist J.R. Carpenter. Reminded me a bit of my Species of Spaces project, I wonder if she read Perec too.

Newborn

Untitled

Nature through a fogy window.

Me myslef I

She said that she really loves reading blogs because they give her access to places that were once considered closed. To the lives of people who are very distant from her, like this woman from Gaza, for example, who raises a 3 years old child. She found it fascinating, she said, to discover that although her life’s circumstances seemed so different, it basically isn’t, because raising a child is a universal thing, and the problems the woman in Gaza faces are very similar to hers (although she doesn’t have to worry about airplane bombings.) By now she knew many people who blogged, but she had to admit she often finds it hard to tolerate the bloggers’ self-absorbance. “Hadas is a photographer”, she clarified to her friend, “and I like her photographs”.

Ever since that day I find it hard to stop being absorbed with my self-absorbance.

The barbershop

A barbershop, Tel Aviv 1991.

I used to photograph old barbershops in Tel Aviv. Most of the barbers I met were kind- hearted Yiddish speaking old gentlemen. This barber shop operated at the corner of Mazeh street and Yehuda Halevi, next to my Tel Aviv home. Two or three years after I took this photo it disappeared. I remember how delighted the barber was when I gave him the photos. I think that none of the barbershops I documented exist today.

I have to share with you this amazingly, hmmm, erotic photograph, taken by Andrea the Superhero.

Ponies

The immigrant’s weekend is often tinted with sadness.

Technology

Photo Friday's challenge this week is Technology.

Pebbles

They collected these pebbles to please me. How lucky I am.