June 28: rehearsal

 

Just before pressing "Publish" recently, I paused to check into someone I had quoted, then scrapped the +Time blogpost draft when I discovered he was not at all someone with whom I would wish to be associated in anyone's mind, especially my own. In that case, it was a religious kook.

Have you ever noticed that you need to check out the biography and qualifications of authors whom you are inclined to cite? I find it especially so in Bible scholarship and religious writings, because sometimes even reasonable views are taken by real cuckoos.

It's the case also in the social and political arenas. So, I try to be careful about who I quote. 

Whom I quote. 

It applies today in the below (scroll down) essay by an Israeli writer. But I've checked him out and decided to go ahead.  

Before going there, what do I long for in American politics? Something that makes sense - - the Eisenhower Stevenson days - - the Kennedy Nixon years - - even the Dewey Truman times. An era in America during my earlier adult life that made sense. That's all I'm saying.  

++++++

You may or may not like Haaretz, but I do, one reason being that I appreciate opposition. But this essay is especially good, poignant, ironic, in reminding me of how it is at church, a place where - - like Boaz Izraeli in the essay below chatting with neighbors about dogs - - you're there for religious reasons but you need to steer clear of politics. Comes to mind the stories coming out of Vietnam in The Day, when soldiers getting their hair cut were always aware that the barber shaving their neck was not unlikely to be in the Vietcong group attacking their barracks to murder them that night.

Boaz Izraeli is the author of several books, including books of Hebrew short stories. I was hoping to get one or two, maybe "Crocodile Pool" or "The Dangerous Neighbor" but I couldn't find any of his writings online.

Born in 1960, he's my son's age. 

Anyway, see if you can translate and relate this essay to what's going on throughout America today. And it's not just "all around us," it's us personally. Life was not so scary in a Time when America seemed to make more sense, and did not seem to be growing more and more dangerous. 

And yet, whatever we were and did then was the foundation that evolved into what we are and, worse, worst, what we are becoming.  

RSF&PTL

T88&c

+++++++

+Time is my blog. It's whatever I say, and there doesn't need to be a clear and evident relationship between my blogpost titles, and the pictures I post, and whatever I write as text in the day's blogpost. It's enough that there may be a relationship or memory in my own mind. T   

Opinion  

My Tel Aviv neighbor has been nothing but nice to me. Turns out, he's the enemy

By Boaz Izraeli Jun 28, 2024 05:04 AM

One effect of the protracted war is the removal of all the masks of people who thought they could live together. The gap is growing and seems terminal

A neighbor of mine thinks we should settle the Gaza Strip. And that the Jews in administrative detention (imprisonment without charges) should be released. It's not that he has told me this. It's what the stickers he's affixed to his car and to the railing of his balcony say. He's not next door - he lives three or four buildings down the street from me. I first encountered him when I passed by his home with my two dogs and he happened to be coming out of the building.

What appeared before my eyes was a guy in his 30s, with pleasant features and wearing a knitted kippa. He smiled at me and in a sociable tone of voice asked about the dogs and complimented the beauty of one of them. So he does make a nice impression, but there's no getting around it: He belongs to the enemy camp. Of that there's no doubt. His way of looking at things is different from and opposite to mine and of most of the people I know.

And that difference is substantive. Conceptually and practically. It's not that he likes tahini and I prefer hummus. Not that he thinks Tarantino is a brilliant director and I think he's not all that good. The gap between us is acute, and probably terminal.

I don't necessarily think that this affable fellow is jubilant inside over the pogrom perpetrated against the leftists in the kibbutzim and the nihilists who were celebrating in a lewd party last October. I'm also not sure that he automatically identifies with Minister Orit Strock's lunatic, smiling, defiant "First of all, happy holiday" on that calamitous day. But even so, what is now bothering this neighbor of mine, as declared on his car, is the administrative detention of three "hilltop youths" who attacked Palestinians in the territories.

Possibly for him it's a wrong that is really and truly equal to the wrong that was done to the hostages in Gaza. Both groups are being held against their will, being denied freedom. It's not that he's against the hostages, he's simply in favor of freedom for all. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow photographs of Rohingya prisoners will appear on his car.

Perhaps it's odd, or possibly it's actually natural, but his car, which is a regular platform for hyper-religious-rightism and is parked in a secular neighborhood in the center of the country - from which no few residents stream resolutely every Saturday evening to the protests at the Kaplan-Begin intersection - has never been attacked. Not one passerby has smashed the car with an iron rod, or scratched or torched it. Nothing.

What does happen is partial, hesitant acts of detaching. Occasionally, when I pass by the car, I see that someone has torn off a bit of one of the stickers. Just a bit - they've removed a corner or ripped off a narrow strip. No one has removed them in full.

This measured response to the car may well be representative of the Israeli left. Expressing its distress, demonstrating, protesting, but within the bounds of reason - not violent, not even toward the property of the Other, not "going haywire," but rather restrained, like its leaders. Inhibited in the face of flagrant provocations like the one that's embodied in this car.

Most people prefer their contact with the external world to be pleasant. Or at least not hostile and tense. It's lovely to behave politely and amiably in the public space and in general. There's nothing like a hearty exchange of hellos with a neighbor (or a stranger) in the street, interactions bearing a private and personal character, disconnected from political-public influence: That's what civilized life looks like.

Now it looks as though this civility is drifting away. Some people are talking about the possibility of a "civil war." And so, will I need to do battle against this smiling neighbor at some point? And how will it be? In the street? Using an iron rod? And which squads will be more dangerous - religiously pious youth who will come from the hilltops, or skinhead Bibi-ists? How will we receive them if they pass by here in the street: Will that neighbor join the violence or only cheer them on from the balcony?

It's really not pleasant to think about a situation like that. A civil war means, among other things, that the boundary has been removed between the private sphere and the public-political sphere, with the former completely overwhelmed by the latter. That creeping process is well described in Sebastian Haffner's memoir "Defying Hitler," in which the author describes his apprehensive monitoring of the evolving political tension in 1920s and '30s Berlin not only in the media but at the level of the street, the neighborhood and the city, and wonders gloomily which of the neighborhood children has already joined a Nazi youth movement.

But, as we've seen, he's smiling and affable, that neighbor. And at the emotional level, at least, there's something of a contradictory experience here, something of an unresolved conflict between the narrow personal and the extensive public. So too with the dog park in my old neighborhood. One of the regulars there was a true dog lover, hugging his dog and kissing it on the head, over and over. He took an interest in other people's dogs too. He laughed and was easygoing with their owners, connecting easily, sometimes even bringing various snacks that he prepared.

One day it turned out that he was a Bibi-ist. A stable and "sober-eyed" supporter of what Netanyahu says, and someone who completely deplored Lapid/Gantz/Bennett/Eisenkot, et al. So it's not simple. I like the dog lover part of him; but not the Bibi-ist element. And ostensibly, I am tasked with choosing which of his two loves - dogs and Netanyahu - I am supposed to relate to. Should I allow "politics," namely current events, to shape my attitude toward this person?

I experienced a similar dilemma in an encounter with someone else, an acquaintance of an acquaintance. The person I met gave the impression of being quite intelligent, he also had a sense of humor, even a sense of irony, including self-irony (an increasingly rare attribute). Yet in the public context, he is a member of a fanatical minority - in his case, the ultra-Orthodox - whose outlook, way of life and voting pattern are working against Israeli society. Politically (and if we allow ourselves to exaggerate a little, in survivalist terms too), he is my enemy, but it's not clear whether that is supposed to overshadow unequivocally the positive personal impression he made on me.

The emotional passion vis-a-vis the hostages in Gaza also reflects the tension between the private and the public. From the point of view of the right, at least its messianic wing, the hostage issue has created a situation in which the private is interfering with the public-conceptual, standing in its way. For them, the captives are apparently an acceptable private victim on the way to realization of the great collective vision - victory in the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkness, the "hastening of redemption," a "vast tikkun" and so forth.

The problem is that the captives' families and their advocates refuse to understand this and are making unnecessary noise and weakening us all. Being egoists and being blind to the overarching goal, they think their personal problem is more important than anything else.

There's another type, similar yet different, of the same dissonance and disturbing blurring of the boundary between the personal and the public. When I lived in Karkur, during the height of the attempted judicial coup, I immediately joined the protests that were held there. The demonstrators blocked Highway 65. Of course we saw those who were blocked ensconced in their cars, and we would make eye contact with the occupants of the closest vehicles. How odd: You try to disrupt public life in Israel, but that "public life" looks at you from the distance of a meter. It's a very particular and definitely private person who has been disrupted and blocked by you, and it's possible he also lives in your community, maybe he's a neighbor. Maybe his name is Amir. In any event, he has a name. And it's clear that he is specific individual. He is not "the public," not "the government," not "the right wing."

This might be one of the rotten fruits of this bellicose period: the loss of the possibility of private life, in the personal and interpersonal sense. And very regrettably, it's hard to believe that that privilege will return here in the foreseeable future.

Writer and editor Boaz Izraeli has published five books of Hebrew short stories, and the novel "Parasite," which came out earlier this year from Locus Books.