The Arab-Israeli conflict as seen by Chuck Jones, Birds and What I'm Reading

My mother called me up the other day and said “What happened to your blog?” I was amazed that anyone noticed that I hadn't updated it. Then she told me that “all her friends” were reading it, too and were very worried about me. For a writer there is no better prod to writing than having a reader or (ptu, ptu, ptu, ken ein haorah) several, so with my vanity stoked I am back.

I will tell you – Mother and mother's friends, and anyone else who happens along – that the reason I wasn't writing is because I just couldn't write about politics because of the ahhhhhh!!! $%@^#*!!!! -factor and I couldn't not write about politics.

I was sitting with the boys watching Road Runner the other day. As the coyote prepared to drop an Acme mail-order anvil on the roadrunner's head which everyone in the world except him knows is going to squash him not the roadrunner, I found myself asking “Are the Palestinians the roadrunner or the coyote? Who are the Israelis?”

This explains why or maybe how it is that people here end up ignoring politics when it is so important; If you think about it at all you have to think about it all the time and if you do that you are on the slippery slope to becoming a politician. Before the ink is dry on your nomination papers you are taking greasy shopping bags full of cash from a shadowy Miami billionaire... and Klong!!!! That anvil you dropped before just whacked you on the head.

Bird update: I have recently seen a Syrian woodpecker, a noisy family of jays and my first hoopoe. The hoopoe was over in Mamilla, where there are these weird old houses just west of Gan Haatzmaut. They are really run-down and it is funny to come upon what looks like the left-overs of a little Arab village across the street from the Sochnut building, the Jerusalem Sheraton and the Great Synagogue. Anyway, I heard him before I saw him and followed the sound to a dead tree where he was sitting sounding very much like an owl in the day time... whoo whoo, whoo whoo. He is called a duchifat in Hebrew which is a biblical name from the list of birds considered unclean for eating in Leviticus 11. He is the national bird as recently chosen by popular vote. Like all politicians he looks just the same in person as he does in pictures. A friend pointed out to me that all the candidate birds are non-migratory, so sojourners like us are out of the running. She works at the Arab-Jewish school in Pat and she said that when the contest was running all her Palestinian students were voting for the Palestine Sunbird because it had Palestine in its name – (in English and Arabic, not in Hebrew where it is called – I think -- the tsufit).

I am now very close to having seen all the birds on the list of candidates. I still have to see an Egyptian vulture who I mentioned in previous posts, I think. There are no roadrunners in Israel at least outside of cartoons and politics so they did not make the list.

PS. A shout out to Sam Fraser in Nova Scotia if he is reading... I took a break from Israeli writers and read “The Tombs of Atuan” and some of “The Wizard of Earthsea” in Hebrew. You see that I am susceptible to commanding booksellers.

I am now making my way – slowly -- through a book of essays by Amos Oz, the Hebrew title of which is “Here and there in the land of Israel in fall of 1982” but which I think is the same as “Amos Oz In the Land of Israel” in English. On the Hebrew difficulty scale, I would give it a 7. The reportorial style makes it easier than a novel. I also read Canadian Edeet Revel's “The Ten Thousand Lovers” which was pretty good and is set largely in Jerusalem which made it extra fun, though it is certainly not a book to give your brain a rest from the idiocy-loop of Israel/Palestine.