By Ari Shavit, Haaretz Correspondent
"Let me tell you something. I am determined to make a real effort to reach a real agreement. I think that anyone who saw the tremendous thing called the State of Israel in the making possibly understands things better and knows better how to reach a solution. That is why I think that this task rests with my generation, which was privileged to live through one of the most dramatic periods in the history of the Jewish people. ..."Have you really accepted the idea of to states for two peoples? Do you really plan to divide western Israel? "I believe that this is what will happen. One has to view things realistically. Eventually there will be a Palestinian state. I view things first and foremost from our perspective. I do not think that we have to rule over another people and run their lives. I do not think that we have the strength for that. It is a very heavy burden on the public and it raises ethical problems and heavy economic problems."
Read the whole interview. See what you believe. Me it gave hope.
April 14, 2003
In today's GuardianThe photograph of Shoshana Johnson limping along to her rescue inspired me. Last night at a very joyous wedding I heard nothing of the war or the security situation in general until someone mentioned that Shoshana Johnson was among the freed prisoners of war. Then the conversation became animated - the victim who was just trying to live her own life, to find a way to exist, and got caught in the middle - was something everyone identified with. Much more than the fighter pilots.
Why do i say everyone? The Palestinians and many of the Israeli Arabs see a different news. They watch the Arab channels and are devastated. Last night I spoke to Jamal who feels caught in the middle. Most of his friends are Israelis he says, but his BROTHERS are Arab, and on Arab channels the wounded and dead are emphasized in a way that is deemphasized in the Israeli and U.S. channels. The loss. The shame. Survival, he reminds me, has less of a value than pride. Once I was in Nablus - in '74-5 - and we were talking with a local businessman. My ex-husband sold him industrial sewing machines. He had been buying more and more equipment and I mentioned that this is a sign that his business must have picked up a great deal since the '67 war. Yes, he said sorrowfully. We are raising our standard of living by a great deal... But we are not ruled by Arabs, by ourselves. It is shameful.
I am not sure I said this out loud, but i know i thought it: that i could only think about my pride after my stomach was full.
And that i would not hate the people who helped me fill my stomach.
That's a major difference in our culture i think. But maybe it's only me.
We sprayed Shusha for fleas - it makes her look and fee like a drowned rat. "You could have waited," says Ezi, "for Syria to get its act together and spray all of us."
April 15,2003
There was a very large bomb found in a knapsack at Beit Berl College yesterday. I didn't see it reported, but it had more that 3 kilo of explosives. Beit Berl has a large Arab population and a very leftist foundation. I used to teach there and found it a little paradise. So another bomb neutralized. Twenty people saved from death and twenty more from mutilation. Not worth reporting.
I cut my finger on the bones of the carp fish i bought for the seder. 3 kilo of gefilte fish. I was listening on the radio to a survivor from the Park Hotel Massacre talk about how she wasn't going to attend the seder there this year because she blamed the hotel for insufficient security and now it was becoming a shrine. My cut finger was probably a tiny symbolic identification. This is the season of symbols, anyway, isn't it?
I was wrong about the bomb not being reported in the media - it is mentioned in this morning's haaretz.
A few words Abu Mazen, who presented his proposed 22-member Cabinet (with a lot of guys liked around the world who could clean up the Palestinian Authority), was insulted by Arafat who threw the list on the floor in disgust because it didn't have his friends in it. I was hoping he could get it through - just so we could have a basis for discussion. But there's a reason why people find it hard to work with Arafat. (Hell, it must be impossible to live with him - where HAS Suha disappeared to for the past 2 years?)
I don't know about you guys but I check Salaam Pax's Site to see if by any chance electricity has returned to Baghdad and he's safe and sound and back to cruising. I don't know anyone else in Baghdad - I don't know him either - but worry about his safety as if he were a cousin.
April 16, 2003
We see today how much we have been changed by the past year. This is the speech Naomi Ragen gave at the memorial for the victims of the Park Hotel Massacre last year.
Memorial Speech For Families of the Twenty-Nine Victims Of The Passover Massacre
Yad Le’banim, Netanya, April 15, 2003
Naomi Ragen
I came here to tell you that I think about you, and I am so sorry for what happened to you – to us. To tell you that I will never forget what we went through, and that I care about what happens to you and mourn your losses, the pain you went through.
There is nothing I can say to comfort you. If God forbid, someone I loved had been killed or injured, I would be very angry at anyone who quoted Scriptures, or read Psalms said things like: time heals. Or “be strong” and other such lies people say to mourners.
Time does not heal. And when we tell a mourner to be strong, we are comforting ourselves, not the mourner. Strength has nothing to do with it.
It’s so easy to talk…
We were standing in the lobby of a hotel with our family, waiting for the Seder to begin. We were laughing with our children, chatting with our elderly mother in law, trying to comfort strangers whose children were late, telling them that they are probably just caught in traffic.
All we wanted, was to gather with our families around the Seder table. To say the words of the hagadah. To talk about the miracles our God performed for us in taking us out of Egypt. We wanted to sing the Hallel, and praise His holy name. To listen to the Four Questions, and try to come up with some answers for our children. We wanted to bless the wine, dip the parsley in salt water, eat the bitter herbs….To imagine that the wine symbolized blood, the salt water tears, and the bitter herbs , the bitterness of slavery and injustice that happened long ago. To remember, that once, thousands of years ago, we were not free, and we suffered and our lives were bitter.
Instead of wine, we got real blood. Instead of salt water, we got real tears. Instead of remembered bitterness and suffering, we got death, destruction and real bitterness we tasted in our souls, not on our tongues.
This Passover, I will have not have all the answers for my children. Instead, I will have so many, many questions. And I am the child, and there is no adult to answer them.
But one answer I do know. This Seder night will be different from all other Seder nights for every person who was at the Park Hotel last year and for every other Jew all over the world, and every other decent, peace-loving human being , who will remember this bestial crime against humanity that occurred in the little seaside town in Israel to innocent men, women and children.. For the rest of our lives, Seder night will never be as it was. We will carry every one of you with us every Seder night for as long as we live. We will see your faces, remember your pain and fear, your loss and your mourning.
And this year, as we sit around the table and speak of the horrors of past oppressors that have caused such terrible suffering-- the Pharaohs and Hitlers and Saddams and Arafats-- the telling itself will bring some comfort, because in the end we survived. But from now on, will not say the Hagadah, we will live it; not with memories from the distant past, but from yesterday. My dear brothers and sisters, may God watch over you and bless you and comfort you, and may you never feel it is too late for blessings and comfort and prayers.
HAG SAMEACH
One thing I know I will be doing at the seder, as we always did when I was a child, is to question everything - from all angles. I am all four sons at the seder, asking as a good child, an evil child, a simple child, and one who cannot formulate questions. Because everything important has to be approached like this. And often there are multiple answers - sometimes answers that can be coordinated and sometimes not. Private Lynch, for example. Today's Guardian has a story that Jessica Lynch had been treated very well by her physician at the hospital in Baghdad, that in fact, the Americans mistreated patients and doctors when they moved in like Rambos.
The initial story we got was the opposite. I don't think its a matter of interpretation and the 'truth' is somewhere in the middle. I think the perceptions of the truth are antithetical and the actual formulations of events are created by these initial perceptions. Our perceptions make the events occur. They make the truth. The soldiers approaching an indignant doctor perceive the indignance as antipathy and it becomes antipathy.
The amount of time we spent when I was a child on the phrase "A new Pharoah arose who did not know Joseph" is like that. Did not know? Did not know personally? Did not WANT to know? Did not understand? Did not want to remain with the old perception of history and the Jews? Couldn't conceive of the potential of the Jews? Or could conceive that if they were good at storing grain, they'd be good at building cities?
Or got turned down by a jewish broad and decided to pay them all back.
Or maybe it was the Jews fault - so secure in their status in Cairo they didn't make an effort to educate and enlighten the Pharoah.
Yes, I have written about Passover elsewhere - last year I think - and here on my web site.
From Uri Avneri:
çøåú
äð÷ðéú
áîçéø
äùéòáåã
ùì òí
àçø –
àéðä
çøåú
Freedom
bought
at the price
of the enslavement
of another people
is not
freedom
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