I'm tired.
I'm never taking a course that requires me to wake up at six AM.
Or alternately I could start going to sleep at reasonable hours...
But fuck that right?

But the fact that I'm tired won't stop me from reporting this shit, that went down in the beginning of last weekend and which may or may not be resolved.
It pissed me off royally.
Beyond the tragic and cruel nature of these invalidated conversions, it spotlights a grave and important matter about the relationship of religion and state in Israel.
That it is rotten.

I got into an argument about what is acceptable involvement of religious establishment in the state.
Personally, I think they can fuck off, since these establishments are chauvinistic, sexist and racist.

There is no civil marriage in Israel, the closest we have is common-law unions which were established so that "un-marriageable" couples could have legal standing.
Who are the "un-marriageable" you ask - they are members of the population that cannot get married through the Rabbanut. The system was initially built for couples who according to Halakha couldn't marry each other: Cohens and divorces mainly. But this also includes Mamzerim (bastards) who cannot marry through the Rabbanut, Jews cannot marry Muslims or Christians, nor can Muslims and Christians marry each other, there is no same-sex marriage either.
This, is of course easily solved by marrying elsewhere; Cyprus, Canada, the USA, Anywhere that allows foreign nationals to marry.

And after marriage (which brings great civil benefits) comes divorce (more and more these days and don't let anyone tell you otherwise).
It's a great invention, Jews are practical that way.
Of course it is the Husband that must grant the Wife the Get (divorce), she can "choose" whether to accept it or not. Not that the man would give a shit, all he needs in order to have a Halachikly legal family (while not divorced to his first wife) is something like a 100 signatures from 100 Rabbis and he can marry and have (halachicly)legal children - bigamy and polygamy are illegal in Israel - so he can ignore with impunity the pleas his Wife makes so that they can be rid of each other. There are sanctions, monetary usually, but go beg a Yeshivah Bochur to pay alimony when he can't sustain himself without a wife, or just a run of the mill asshole who doesn't want to pay alimony and that putting him in jail only postpones the writ of execution of whatever he owes his wife, his lawer and his children should he have any. The wife, due to all this, is now an Aguna - another side effect of the Rabbis revocation of the conversions - there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Agunot women in Israel.

My side of the argument was that we either take the anti-patriarchy hammer and bash the Rabbanut until nothing is left of that racist, sexist establishment, or have the state acknowledge the fact that there is more to Judaism than Orthodoxy so that that the pluralism we pretend to have in Israel have some basis in reality.

A mixture of reform and revolution - I'm more keen on rebuilding from the grassroots, but others kind of like the way things are... or at the very least don't mind the way things are; seeing as the privilege of being born Jewish has the added bonus that no one will be nosing around our private life and checking to see if we're actually being Jewish.

It makes me sick.

I've heard people say it takes time for these things to change, after all blacks in the USA only got civil rights in the 60's of the 20th century and the women only got the vote less than a hundred years ago.
Change is slow but it happens.

Yes, change is slow... when those in power have no incentive to change, when the atrocities that these establishments perpetrate don't touch their lives, then change can be slow.
When the status quo is just fine and dandy to The Man, then change can be slow.

Classical liberal* bullshit.

*No offense to any liberals who may be reading this.

What is the world coming to, I ask you?
Is nothing "sacred" any longer?
Have we lost all sense of proportion when it comes to historical perspective?
Or just plain common sense?

The 14-year-old girls, whose actions were supported by their parents, The Independent said were protesting antisemitism in Shakespeare's portrayal of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The exam questions they refused to answer were actually about The Tempest, a different work of Shakespeare's.
"Many Jewish people would not listen to Wagner on the same grounds," The Independent quoted school principal Rabbi Abraham Pinter as saying. "I do not see an exact comparison and I don't share their view, but their decision is something I respect," he said, adding "I think Shakespeare was reflecting the ethos of the time in his portrayal of Shylock. If he was alive today, he would probably be going on anti-war marches."

On the one hand, you have to admire the ingenuity of the girls' reason (though I suspect it was the parents who gave them the idea) to get Shakespeare out of their hair. On the other hand, what kind of education is these girls (and other kids in UK schools) are getting?!

This little article made me think how lucky it is that Cats is no longer showing on the West End anymore.

Via.

I didn't write about this yesterday because I was all about ME, which is sometimes what this LJ is for.

This is "old News" by now, but Sderot and Kibbutzim of the Western Negev were bombarded yesterday with over 50 Qassam Rockets.
50 Qassam Rockets.
At least one person died and several other have been critically injured, maimed and traumatized.
The retaliation and in these cases it always a retaliation, was the usual IDF and IAF maneuvers.

What I find most interesting is that in the International News sites, the retaliation was written about first, giving the obvious impression that that the Qassam rockets were launched in retaliation to the military action done by Israel.

Such. Utter. Bullshit.

I'm a big talker and I'm all for talking with Hamas, but when the complete and utter disregard they show towards their own people by launching rockets that are designed to hurt my people, because my people have the Big Guns and on TeVi, Big Guns look much worse than little rockets despite the damage wrought by both.

The ones who suffer the most are the civilians on both sides of the border. It doesn't matter if they're Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Bedouin or Christian.

Hamas' goal isn't to liberate Palestine, it never was, it is to recreate the Caliphate and bring the Umma together and then go out on a Holy War against the West.
And like most of these kinds of groups (al-Qaeda, the Taliban, etc.) they were created in order to fight the real enemies... the Communist or Marxist Identified groups - or in the case of the Taliban the Soviets themselves.

Old News? Ancient History?

Maybe, but it's certainly a way to see the interconnectedness of it all.
Until the USA decides that it no longer supports Nations that give money to Hamas and Hizbulla (and it's not just Iran, far from it) and that "spreading Democracy" is not the way to go, but co-operation and actual fucking communication; you can bet that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict will continue.

I have a button that says "blame my parents" and I do, but in the way that button supposedly means.

Tonight my parents and I ate supper together, it was very nice, it doesn't always work out that we eat at a normal hour (around half-past seven) all together, our lives don't always mesh until around nine PM.
Anyway discussions, as ever, turned to politics.
There were disagreement, mainly between Mummy and I, seeing as Daddy was happy to just sit there, eat and watch the drama.
It wasn't really big argument, just a big clash of ideologies; I mean the differences between the way Mummy (and probably Daddy, but he didn't want to add much to the conversation) and I see things about the Israel/Palestinian conflict aren't big, not really, mostly I see Israel as purposefully keeping Gaza and the West Bank in Occupation/Poverty/etc. and Mummy says the Palestinians do it to themselves.

I learned my Humanism from Mummy, the whole People are People whoever they are; I mean the woman came olive picking with me in the Territories! I suppose that's why we have such heated arguments, our views aren't so far from each other, we both think the Palestinians deserve to be liberated from the brutality of their lives and that a Palestinian state is important - but the differences between whose to blame and who isn't is a sticky point.

I can't and won't say that everything Israel does is bad and that all the Palestinians are good, I mean, this is quite obviously not the case.
I'll also put a whole lot of blame on the other Arab and Muslim states and nations who use the Palestinians plight as an excuse to hate Israel and spread their Antisemitism, when they do nothing to actually help the Palestinians proper, like fund for housing, hospitals and education that doesn't incite hate and prejudice and not just give money to Hamas to buy more weapons or to Fatah in order to line their pockets.
Israel does, however, control everything that goes on in the West Bank and not allowing the PA to actually create a proper authority in the Territories - not to mention the Settlements, but that's just a whole other post - and lest we forget the continued siege on Gaza because no one is willing to talk to Hamas, not Abu-Mazen and Fayyed and not Olmert and Barak.

I've been told that everything that Israel does in Gaza is in retaliation to the Qassam rockets, which have been fired onto Sderot and the Kibbutzim of the West Negev for the past seven years (ever since the early stages of the Al-Aqsa Intifadah), and yesterday two rockets fell on siblings in Sderot, the older 19 year old had medium to minor injuries, the 8 year old had to have his leg amputated this morning.
It's a tragedy.
Missiles were fired into Gaza by the IDF and two bystanders in Rafah today were hurt, though no information was given about their condition.
This is also a tragedy.
Is one more tragic than the other?

So Mummy and I argued and we huffed at each other for about half and hour, and on TeVi there was movie in which a mother died and I began to cry, thinking about how terrible it would be for Mummy to die after we fought - my mother, who says (and I agree) I get my sentimentality from my father, said that just because we disagree doesn't mean we fought.
Awesome Woman.
I cried a little more and asked jokingly "You love me even though I care about suffering Palestinian babies?"
She laughed and said "Yes, but you don't need to care about all the suffering babies in the world... you're too sensitive"

Ain't that the truth - I still blame my parents for that though.

Well, Hamas claims responsibility for this mornings suicide bombing in Dimona, even though the Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigade and the PFLP also claimed that they did it.

Three dead people (Israeli woman, the two Palestinian Bombers).
Thirty (at least) wounded.

It's not a fun place to be, let me tell you.
The terrible humanity of it all, I know it sounds trite, but it really is.
It's so easy not to care and to shut out the whole thing, saying "Those Arabs only understand violence", it would be a tempting view to hold, but it would be dismissing the motivation behind why the extremists do what they do. I don't think anybody could justify the methods the Palestinians use, but you can't ignore the place they are coming from. To just see them as pure killers is to ignore the injustice done by Israel and to ignore the situation which brought them to this despair.
No matter how much Israelis suffer because of the conflict, we are stronger and we have better weapons and we don't die as much as Palestinians do.
That's a fact.
Does that give them the right to put on a bomb belt, walk into a mall and intend to kill innocent civilians? No.
But when all Israelis mean to them is a big block of Occupation force... are we even human to that kind of mindset?
Just like the view of "Violent Arabs", in that mindset, are they human?

I just noticed I'm using the dichotomous separation of "we, they"... I find that so incredibly sad and... kinda weird.

This is a difficult view to hold, I think. It requires a hell of a lot of self examination and criticism and the knowledge that what you believe is different from the status quo.

Despite it all, I still feel hopeful that one day, hopefully during my life time, this place won't be this hell-hole that it is and that people can be people together, even if we aren't the same people.

How does what compare the suffering of one to another?

I could be hypothetical, but living here and reading the News I can't; I think Hamas are crappy leaders and don't want what is best for their people; I think their method of fighting a siege does more harm than good in the end and in the end the IDF will march back into Gaza and re-occupy the place the Settlers left over two and a half years ago.
I think the people of Sderot and the West Negev have been completely abandoned by our leaders and in the inaction of the past seven years have absolutely no faith (with good reason) in this Government.

Does anyone?
I think the Annapolis Summit was nothing more than Pandering to a lame-duck Prez by two gutless leaders who don't have enough power to bring about real change in either Israel or Palestine.

In the West Bank there are still settlements being built and the different villages and refugee camps are being separated from each other by roads and road blocks. Not surprisingly there a lot of support for Hamas in the West Bank, where the inept leadership of Abu-Mazen and Fatah is glaring.
Also unsurprising, most of the people in Gaza aren't too happy with the leadership of Hamas, seeing as they are provocateurs who do their best to make their people suffer as much as possible in order to blame Israel on the lion's share of their suffering.
Hamas are a gangster gang who got the popular vote and abused their voters' confidence and hope that they will bring change and the little civil war that happened in Gaza has brought more suffering than not.

Unilaterally leaving Gaza without any talking to the Palestinians was hubris on Israel's part that the Palestinians would automatically begin to build a state in Gaza. How could they when there is so much infighting within the population? When the so many of the Palestinians are raised and taught to hate Israel and that the only hope they're taught is the hope of Paradise and not that of Independence.
In the West Bank this isn't even actual, with so many settlements which are still growing day by day and the Settlers using the resources for themselves.

As with everything it's far more complicated than "Big Bad Israel" and the "Poor Palestinians", to see thing so simplistically is ignorant and insulting to the situation, this is unfortunately the way lots of people see it.

At the end of the day, the individual people, me and you, that one and this one and all of us could get along.

It's a pity policy and government get in the way.

A few days ago I was reading the blog of an entertaining graphic designer, she's a Palestinian Arab and mentions it probably as much I mention that I'm an Israeli Jew (meaning offhandedly and not always politically), which is cool. It's always good to remember that the blogosphere isn't different shades of White.
However, she wrote something that bothered me and I didn't comment, because my GDess the backlash it would have caused, and the grief it would have given both her and I wouldn't be worth it.
So I'm going to write my much longer, would be comment, here on my own little piece of the Internet.
( Cut so that all your f-lists are comfy )

Should I prepare for my own backlash?
*hides* ;)

Some of you know, some of you don't. But about a week or so ago there was an explosion in fandom regarding Antisemitism(1). Seeing as it was all very US-Centric I didn't feel I had much to contribute and to tell the truth I didn't think I could give any proper account for being a minority seeing as the country I live in, being Jewish is the privileged majority, specifically Ashkenazi Jews, like me.
Basically, in Israel, religiously, racially and ethnically, I'm the "WASP"(2). I am greatly privileged by this, even in countries outside Israel, unless I told someone no would know I was Jewish (I'm pale and fair and have no physical characteristics that would mark me as Jew), when I speak English I have a South African accent, thanks to being the child of immigrants, and my name isn't a Hebrew name, again, thanks to being the child of immigrants.
All this makes me extremely, extremely privileged.
At home I am "the majority" and don't need to pretend to be anything else and in other "White Majority" countries I can pass with little effort.
( so as not to eat your f-list )

Another thing that erupted from this whole kerfuffle, is a meme (that's what it is) that began at oyceter and it's called common and hidden knowledge and it comes to challenge what we know or what we thing we know about certain things in cultures no our own. Lots of people have already done their own, some of them have been about Judaism, so it seems redundant for me to do one about that.
So I've decided to test my readers knowledge about the basics of the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
I ask you not to answer the questions in the comments, as I'll be posting the answers sometime later on, you can tell me if you think you know the answers, but actual answers later.
( Common and Hidden Knowledge on the Israel-Palestinian Conflict )

Hope you guys do well!

Notes:
(1) A few more links: here, here, here and here. There will probably be more later today or tomorrow so just keep track of metafandom which is a great link gathering comm in any event.
(2) If I start on the personal politics, woman and queer thing I'll never get to my point, but having certain politics, being female and queer, does cause trouble.

ETA: coffeeandink made a link roundup of other "Hidden and Common Knowledge" posts, including others in the comments.

21/10/07 ETA: The answers to the Hidden and Common Knowledge questions are here.

In addition, the genocide in Darfur must be stopped.

The Guardian published an article calling to boycott the Israeli Medical Association.

One of our Doctors, who is a Emergency Pediatrician at Tel Ha'Shomer Hospital, put a minute and a half video on YouTube: Medicine not Politics.

A group of British physicians published a letter in the guardian — claiming that the Israeli medical association should be expelled from the international community for being inhumane
You have seen the facts. Don’t the British doctors know the facts? Don’t they understand the facts? Do they distort the truth for political reasons? I urge our British colleagues to withdraw heir letter. We are not politicians, we are physicians and we do everything in our power to help all people.

I'd also like to mention that a large portion of the medical population in Israel is Arab, in Senior Positions as well as first year interns. Many Arabs are nurses and other caregivers with in the medical population.

I ask you to spread this around, to leave a comment, to get this out there. What the British physicians are asking for will be even more detrimental to the all Palestinians (living within the Green line and across it) and all Israelis.

ETA:The original story can be found here - Hebrew link.

In addition, the genocide in Darfur must be stopped.