Ma'gan Michael, a new beginning

3 August, 2006
Kibbutz Ma'agen Michael (45km S of Haifa)

Hello All,

This entry marks my safe arrival & first morning/afternoon at Kibbutz Ma'agan Michael, and I have to say that aside from living quarters the place is absolutely gorgeous. This place has flowers & palm trees Galore, not to mention a famously beautiful perch on the sea (which I have not yet checked out). What's more, they have some sweet high-speed wireless that is fast enough to satisfy my American-sized attention span.

There are tons of new folks I have to meet, which I'm going to work on now. To my surprise, these Ulpanists are younger and have (much) weaker Hebrew, overall, than than the ones I met at UHaifa. I'm sure there will be more surprises before long. Hopefully I will have had a chance to check out the Kibbutz's famous private beach before my next writing...

Until then, I am finally posting an entry on developments up North, which I hope you find interesting despite its being a bit out of date...

31 July, 2006

Jerusalem

So I have to give Bush some credit for his stance on the Israel-Hizbullah conflict. I doubt that planting democracy throughout Middle East is a very good goal (see today’s NYTimes lead article… I just closed the window but can’t get back onto their website, or any non-Israeli website. Ahh, another day writing without being able to post), but you can guess from my last entry that I think that Bush’s latest support for Israel is right on track.

You can check out one Israeli Prof’s take on Hizbullah at http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3284057,00.html. Unfortunately I can’t get onto Al Jazeera, the BBC or any other site likely to offer alternate viewpoints right now. At least this Internet Café – the only one in hiking range – serves decent food.

In other news, a few of my Ulpanist friends and I got our asses handed to us on the soccer court a few hours ago. Just when we thought we were making some progress, a bunch of Israelis have to make an example of us. We were like the Might Ducks in the first half of those movies, in the parts before Emelio Estevez’s revelations launch him into super-coachdom. So it goes.

Two days to Kibbutz Life, and counting…

30 July, 2006

Jerusalem

56 Civilians Dead After IDF Strike, Mostly Women and Children

The thoughts of a mostly uninformed guy….

The question as to whether or not this was preventable seems beyond absurd – how could the army be so careless? Between last week’s strike on a UN observation post and today’s incomprehensible error, I am wondering with increasing anxiety what in the world is going on inside the IDF War Room. How can the IDF chalk up such low and embarrassing transgressions while battling a seemingly implacable enemy that is winning international sympathy despite their having spilt first blood?

I worry that, a little like the US in the year following 9/11, Israel is squandering some direly needed international understanding with carelessness and a lack of strategy.

The conflict with Hizbullah has broken the two week mark, easily, with no clear end in sight. As one Israeli reporter noted earlier this week, aside from hearing about scattered shoot-outs, bombings, etc., it would be nice to know more about the IDF’s actual progress. So far we know eerily little, excepting that Hizbullah has shown unanticipated resilience on its home turf. Unfortunately I cannot shed more light on the situation than your local reporter…

One thing that seems increasingly clear to me is that in addition to being a war among peoples, this is a war between cultures. I don’t know whether it is strategy or simply bad luck that each side’s stipulations for a ceasefire involve demands that the other side will never agree to meet. From what I can see (in the media), the militant Islamic culture seems to be winning a ton of international favor. After two short weeks, reporters have all but forgotten that Hizbullah’s killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers – the act that sparked this conflagration – is not an act of negation but terror, not the act of a sovereign state but of a group of bandits that cannot be held accountable for anything with any credibility. Is Western media is warming to the methods of militant extremism? Maybe. My sense from reading a few recent reports is that writers essentially have stopped caring about how the conflict began, focusing on today’s attacks while brushing away the context that precipitated them.

That context, those kidnapped IDF troops – and the thousand or so incarcerated supporters that Hizbullah is demanding from Israeli prisons – appears to lie at the crux of any solution here, barring a miraculous recovery of those two young men. If an extremist group tried to bargain with the US, can you possibly imagine our government (or a single politician) bowing? The truth is that Israel has negotiated under terms like these before (I don’t know much about these deals, except that some happened as recently as within the last few years), but this is clearly different. Israel and Hizbullah have dug into their mutually unpalatable positions, and despite Condoleezza’s smarts and good intentions I don’t see a quick way out of this barring some surprise military triumph in the North.

I have no idea how Israel should combat this stealthy and unremitting aggressor. I know even less about how Lebanon will rebuild after this (will Israel play a part, etc.). In my mind, it is a credit to the Israeli ethos that the lives of two of its soldiers have inspired the effort in the North. Granted that issues of security, etc. also play into the mix in major ways, but in the Israeli soul it is those two boys and the principle of their right to life that makes the going worth roughing. Israel has faced greater challenges before, and I remain confident that this country will learn from its mistakes and find an answer.

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A TEST: DO PICTURES WORK NOW?

... yahaa! They're back!

This is my friend Johan and me. Johan comes from Belgium... and is an Iron Man on the soccer turf.