$24 Billion for Wexler Freedman and more Bethlehem

Hi sorry, i got sick so I took a few days off.
First thing, I want to let everyone know that Ariela and I will be going before a special joint session of Congress to request a $24 billion dollar bailout package. I want to reassure you that we have heard the messages of the American taxpayer loud and clear and if we are indeed granted this small amount we will immediately impose salary caps of $10.3 million dollars per year on our top executives (me, Ariel, Lev and Benjy). No more fatcatting around for us. Also we promise that there will be no layoffs for at least 6 months -- although we cannot promise that restructuring will not occur (Lev will no longer be getting thirds of yogurt).
Some of you may be asking yourselves why the taxpayer should spend $24 billion dollars on a family of four and the answer is America cannot afford not to bail us out. Think of all the secondary and tertiary industries associated with Wexler/Freedman Holdings. With this one-time -- at least for now -- infusion of cash, it will be possible to ensure that we can continue to buy stuff, like pizza, for example which otherwise we could not, (or it would be harder without that $24 billion, anyway). Think of all the pizza shops that will go out of business if we don't have the money. We are also committing ourselves to greater and more rigorous financial oversight; Lev -- who prioneered our leveraged use of assest-backed corporate paper, which turned out not to be such a hot idea -- has been moved out of his post to other responsibilities, chiefly in daycare. Benjy, who has six years of experience, will now be responsible for long term strategic planning. Benjy brings to the job a firm understanding of addition and subtraction in numbers under ten and vague notions of how to multiply. Tell your congresmman and senator, America cannot afford NOT to give the wexler-freedmans $24 billion dollars.

Now on to other business. I promised to finish telling you all about Bethlehem. I will tell you briefly that there were a few other things I thought were worth noting. One of the activities we did was one in which participants step into the circle if a sentence applies to them. One of the sentences was "I am sometimes scared when I hear Hebrew." To see people step in for that one, was pretty hard for me. I guess I knew that Palestinians might very well be afraid of Hebrew but knowing and seeing are two different things. In the small group where we talked afterwards I mentioned how sad it was for me to think of Hebrew -- the revival of which I think is perhaps the great miracles of Zionism -- being frightening for people, nice, decent, good people, made me cry. Another related thing was to see the degree to which Palestinians of good will did not seem to 'get' Israeli and Jewish concerns for physical safety (with the notable exception of Sami Awad, who I mentioned previously). Saman Khoury, who was an author of the Geneva Inititaive, a sort of blue-print for a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict said that (and I hope I am not misrepresenting his views) that the Oslo process, started by Rabin/Peres and Yassir Arafat collapsed because Shimon Peres failed to win the election after Prime Minister Rabin was killed. Saman Khoury's account of why Peres wasn't elected, and why Oslo ultimately fell apart, left out one thing that to me was very important -- the Hamas suicide bombings in Israel. While Shimon Peres may be the perenial loser of Israel, he had some help with that one. I am not blaming Saman Khoury who I think is smart and courageous for pursuing a two state solution, but I did think that he did not see how fragile Israelis (and Jews generally) feel our safety to be -- rightly or wrongly -- which seems to me a major factor in moving forward. Finally, and on a hopeful note, we visited a place called Wadi Fukin which is just the other side of the green line from Tsur Hadassah in Jerusalem. It is a small farming village. It has an intersting history since the inhabitants were evacuated by the Jordanians in 1948 to a Bethlehem refugee camp since the village sat basically on the border. They would come in the day time and farm their fields and go back to the refugee camp at night. In 1967 when Israel took over the west bank the residents petitioned to return and eventually were allowed to. An organization called friends of the earth middle east, a joint palestinian, israeli, jordanian venture is working on water use issues with the residents of Wadi Fukin and Tsur Hadassah trying to encourage good neighbourliness. The village is beautiful though squeezed between Tsur Haddasah on the one hand and Betar Illit (a settlement next door) on the other. Teh village is working with friends of the earth ME to market and seel their produce in israel labeled as palestinian produce in the hopes that Israelis will understand that palestinian prosperity can benefit both communities.
Have a great Shabbat/Weekened. J

Bird Notes and Bethlehem

Ariela says my previous blog entry about the birds I was seeing out my window was too complicated. Just to add to any confusion, the bird that I thought was a shrakrak/bee-eater is in fact a Palestine Sunbird/Tsufit. What is today called a shrakrak, the bee-eater (merops in Latin for those who want another language thrown in to the mix) is slightly larger than the sunbird though my point about the weirdness of these small birds (about 26 centimeters according to my guide) being called shrakrak -- the translation into aramaic of the word for vulture -- seems to still apply. I also saw what I think was a nachalieli (pied wagtail) the other day. Nice because I have a nephew with a close name (when I say 'close' I mean my nephew's name is Nachliel, not, for example, Pied Wagtile) .

On subjects non-ornithological, I spent two days in Bethlehem in the West Bank last week. I went on a trip organized by "Encounter" which has as its mission bringing Jews of various flavors from outside of Israeli to the West Bank so they can meet with and hear from Palestinians. (I actually think they say that their mission is to bring Jewish leaders to the West Bank. Of course in the Jewish community just about everybody considers themselves a Jewish leader. I looked for the trip for Jewish whatever-the-opposite-of-leaders is but couldn't find it, so I settled for this).

Bethlehem is about half an hour from Jerusalem, which was my first shock, ie just how close everything is. I could walk and certainly bike from my home to the main Bethlehem checkpoint. It is remarkable to stand in Beit Jala, a neighbourhood in Bethlehem, where you can see the 'back' of Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem (built outside the Green Line, the cease fire line which was Israel's border until 1967 when it captured the West Bank, the Gaza strip and the Golan Heights). We visited a private school called Hope Flowers which is run basically by a single family which is committed to educating Palestinian children about non-violence and trying to foster some sense of mutual respect between Israelis and Palestinians.

Met a guy named Sami Awad. He is the nephew of Mubarak Awad who was deported from Israel for his non-violent leadership of opposition to the Israeli occupation in the first Intifada. It was interesting because Sami Awad said that seeing his uncle deported actually solidified his own commitment to non-violence rather than driving him away from it because he saw how intimidating nonviolence was to the occupation. Sami Awad showed us around a little, including the security barrier. Two other things he said that stood out to me were that he thought the Oslo peace accords were doomed to fail because they had been so top down, negotiated by politicians without really reading the feeling of people who were living with the reality. He also said that he had spent a week meditating at Auschwitz-Birkenhau. He said that contemplating the intensity of the evil there had lead him feel that the Palestinians -- instead of trying to understand Israel's security "addiction" -- had spent too much energy on placing themselves in the position of the "victims of the victims." I thought that was really insightful. Throughout the visit this was the only time I heard a Palestinian articulate an understanding of Israelis' and/or Jews' concerns for individual and communal physical, existential safety. As I remarked to one of the participants as we were walking through the lobby of the Bethlehem hotel, one of the big differences between that and, say, the Dan Panorama in Jerusalem or any other hotel in Israel, is that there is no guard at the entrance to the Bethlehem hotel.

We got to see the security barrier which cuts through Bethlehem. (See the map from b'tselem at the right: Green Line is pre-67 border. Red line = existing separation barrier. Red dotted =projected seperation barrier. The Blue ares are Jewish settlements and the brown are Palestinian areas) If I ever had any doubt that the thing was being done stupidly that visit eliminated it. Interestingly, a number of the Palestinian's we talked to said that they didn't have a problem with a security barrier... along the green line. In Bethlehem, you can see how dramatically the barrier encroaches on daily life and how far beyond the pre-67 border it reaches.

One of the weirdest things right near Rachel's tomb which is completely surrounded by the barrier was a spot where one lone house stands surrounded by the security barrier on three sides. Sami Awad said that the family was Catholic and had been able to get the church involved so the Israelis didn't want to the black eye of expropriating the house, so instead they just built the barrier around it on three sides. He said that the shutters on the top floor must remain closed at all times and the family has to get permission from the military commander in order to go out on their roof, lest they should fire on the wall, or the guard towers.

The barrier is also just a disaster from a purely political standpoint as it gives everybody a 9 meter high billboard on which to scrawl their discontent. Spray-painting on the wall has actually become a sort of pro-Palestine tourist attraction and most of the graffiti we saw near Rachel's tomb was in European languages, not Arabic. Surprisingly, while it was pretty strongly anti-occupation, none of what I saw was really anti-Israel. There was one spot where there was a giant "Ich bin ein berliner" and in smaller letters nearby somebody had written, "tear down this wall." Which in that context could only be an allusion to.... Ronald Reagan: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down..." I thought that was pretty funny, given that most of the people who were writing on the wall, if they were old enough to remember Reagan, were about as far from him politically as could possibly be.

Several prominent artists have done work on the wall. I got to be about as close to a Bansky as I am likely to get this year.

I stayed with a very nice middle class Palestinian Christian family who both desperately wanted to move out of the country (it reminded me of a host family I had on Kibbutz once upon a time -- "What's Canada like? Is it hard to get a visa?") and at the same time badly wanted to stay. They have a small apartment-building that was built together by four brothers, not far from Shepherd's field. It is funny how things can be so so old fashioned and so up-to-the-minute in Arab communities. Bethlehem is a pretty big city but you still see people riding donkeys, hear roosters crowing in people's houses. The whole living with your family thing too seems -- if not old fashioned -- at least very different from the way we do things in Canada or in Israel for that matter. The other guy who was staying with them asked, "How do you get along with your brothers?" I expected an answer like, "Sometimes its hard" or "Mostly okay but we fight about things from time to time," but our host just said "We get along well." It makes you realize how much of what you get out of something is determined by what you expect going in.
I'll write more tomorrow about the rest of the visit including Wadi Fukin but now I have to go to bed.

quick bird notes.

It is a beautiful evening and I am looking out the window as the boys toil on their art. What first drew my attention was what first I took to be a pair of alpine swifts (snunit har) . It turned out that they were these big parakeets or small parrots whose English name I forget but which are called drara. These birds are bright green but from below and at evening the colour is hard to see, but you can tell them apart from the swifts by their long trailing tails. You would think that being so conspicuous you would want to keep your voice down but the drara has a loud high short cry and I think that they were the birds that I heard gatherered in their hundreds on Yom Kippur evening. ...Not to be confused with the simpilarly named dror or sparrow. The word dror literaly means free and the dror got its name because of a discussion in the talumd about discussions over free birds, that is to say birds that are not domesticated. The most common I suppose and easily pointed to, was the dror bayit or house sparrow, which are everywhere here. What I once thought were magpies are crows. They aren't black crows but gray crows (orev afor) which I have never seen in Canada, and they are out in abundance. They fly in pairs and are actually very graceful and are sort of like a poor man's hawk. They like to play chasing games in their twos, games which seem kind and friendly and not nearly as agressive as the flirtation of say pigeons (if indeed it is flirtation). They seem to really like this time of day as do a lot of birds. I also saw a shrakrek (bee eater), the previously mentioned Middle eastern non-humming hummingbird. I learned an interesting shrakrek related fact. The word shrakrek is one of the few Talmudic names which modern hebrew has used for birds. What is strange about the usage is that Shrakrek is the word used by the talmud to translate and explain the biblical hebrew racham which is generally thought to be the egyptian vulture (nothing nearly so dramatic out this evening). Shrakrek means 'whistle' in Aramaic and part of the reason the talmud likes to call racham shrakrek is because there was a prophecy about the vulture perching on the ground and whistling as a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But this makes for an interesting juxtaposition of the egyptian vulture which certainly must be one of the largest old-world birds with the bee-eater which is one of the smallest. The bee eater does indeed make a high pitched sort of whistling sound, as I can now attest. It is almost dark out so bird watching and blogging are done for the night and now it is time to go make dinner for the boys. Over and out. J

The Cleavage of Jerusalem, Praying for Jasham

Sorry it has been a while. Many of you have been asking for more chomping at the bit.
First of all I hope you all saw the fantastic piece in the Globe and Mail about how, since the election, a lot of American conservatives are considering seeking asylum in Canada. Soldiers who want to serve another tour of duty in Iraq, economists who still believe that de-regulating the financial sector is the best way to ensure long-term economic growth and executives from health insurance companies are snapping up property in Toronto and Calgary. Someone has even set up an apartment swap business so FSCL (formerly smug Canadian liberals) can go live in Chicago and unrepentant ex-Bear Sterns employees can move to Toronto.
Now for Jerusalem political coverage. There is a sign that has gone up around Jerusalem. It shows the Western Wall broken down the middle and urges people not to vote for front-runner Nir Barkat because he will divide Jerusalem. This is a funny claim since Barkat has probably the most right-wing bona fides of anyone in the race, while people who are putting up these signs, presumably the ultra orthodox, don't usually serve in the army. Certainly his chief rival on the right, Meir Porush, wasn't in the paratroopers. But what really struck me about this ad is that Tsipi Livni, the former prime minister designate (how's that for a provisional sounding title) who is with Barkat on the poster, presumably for extra scariness, has had her exposed clavicle photoshopped. Up close you can see that the FPMD -- who the Syrian press lauded for her good looks and style -- has had a tee-shirt airbrushed in under her open neck blouse. Unpacked: the holy people who made this poster accusing Livni of planning to destroy Judaism's most treasured religious and historic site, are carefully safeguarding her modesty (and not to expose the people of Jerusalem to the provocative top three inches of her chest). Hashem yishmor (God protect us) when the general elections roll around.
We went to the Kinneret last weekend. We drove derech yericho, ie. up the Jordan valley, ie. through the west bank, ie occupied Palestine ie. Judea ie whatever. I wasn't thrilled about this when we were planning it not because I was worried about safety so much since there are very few big Palestinian towns there and the road is well travelled. I just don't like the idea of gong somewhere where most of the people who live there don't want you there. The drive was unbelievably beautiful though first down through the Judean desert side of Jerusalem. The wadis have small bedouin (my friend David says they are displaced bedouin and I defer to his knowledge) encampments. You drive past the sea level mark down to the dead sea, the lowest point above-ground on earth and switch off highway 1 to highway 90. There Lev puked for the first time, right at the interchange, at the lowest point on earth (or close to it anyway) all over the back seat of the rental car. It turned out he had a stomach bug and he threw up a number of times on the trip -- often in some very picturesque spots -- but otherwise seemed perfectly content (as you can see). We cleaned up and drove on. The whole Jordan valley was very beautiful. The extent of the settlement there is pretty amazing and you wonder how on earth they are going to get all those people out of there when they finally do give that land to Palestinians. There are graffitis in Hebrew on old buildings saying "bring the sinners of Oslo to justice." I read somewhere once that the landscape of Israel was what inspired people to think of God and you can sort of understand that when you drive on those two roads. Giant, forbidding mountains soaring clouds, oases, powerful stuff. Then out the checkpoint through Bet Shaan and off to the kinneret. We stayed at the kibbutz haon guest village in a little shack right on what was once the beach though now because of low rainfall and poor water management you have to walk out several hundred feet to get to the water. I was molested by a startled fish who flapped between my legs, saw turtles and a "parpur" kingfisher (the black and white one, not a "shaldag," interesting that in English there are three native birds all called kingfisher but in latin and Hebrew the names are different) diving for his lunch and what I think was a baz adom (one of the runners up for Israel's national bird) a lesser kestrel. Also storks and herons (hasida). The boys swam and played with Noa. Friday night, a Russian family gave me a l'chaim of high octane slivovitz so I went to prayer services (in the bomb shelter) half in the bag. I got to hear a Yemenite style torah reading of the story of Noah. It was really interesting. Where we would say 'geshem' for rain, the yemenites read 'jasham'. Aside from the first week of Heshvan, the month of floods, when we nearly got swept away, Jerusalem has been dry. Its hard to pray for rain when the weather is nice but after seeing the kinneret, Israel's main fresh water source, so low, I will re-dedicate myself as well as using the "little flush".