Tel Aviv Diary - from March 28, 2003 Karen Alkalay-Gut

March 28, 2003

I was going to sleep (at last)thinking about the naivete of parts of my entry before, and suddenly the sweet little commercial popped into my mind: "I'd like to teach/ the world to sing/in perfect harmony/i'd like to buy/ the world a coke/and keep it company.

Oh, God, it's just like that poem they never reprint anymore from Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses":

Foreign Children

Little Indian, Sioux, or Crow,

Little frosty Eskimo,

Little Turk or Japanee,

Oh! don't you wish that you were me?

You have seen the scarlet trees

And the lions over seas;

You have eaten ostrich eggs,

And turned the turtle off their legs.

Such a life is very fine,

But it's not so nice as mine:

You must often as you trod,

Have wearied NOT to be abroad.

You have curious things to eat,

I am fed on proper meat;

You must dwell upon the foam,

But I am safe and live at home.

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,

Little frosty Eskimo,

Little Turk or Japanee,

Oh! don't you wish that you were me?

In both cases these are TRYING to be enlightened, but they still see their own civilization as superior.

And that makes me cringe.

However, who fought the Nazis and liberated my neighbors? Who saved my aunts from starvation? Who helped to rebuild Europe after the War? (And where were the French then, and the Belgians? and the Dutch?)

So there IS something culturally imperialist about the Brits and the Americans. But there's also something very evil about Saddam.

I mean It has to be worse to be gassing hundreds and thousands of his own people. It has to be worse to take pleasure in torture. it has to be worse to be paying money to suicide bomber's families. There are some situations in which this sense of superiority is justified. So despite the skews we put on it, and despite the crazy "God is on our side" look in Bush's eye, I still think the brits and the americans are right. But if i didn't keep reevaluating it every day, i would not have a right to this opinion.

Because people on all sides who think they are right, like me at this moment, can be the most dangerous.

I think that the entire war would have been prevented had the european nations stood together with britain and the u.s. Saddam would not have felt he had a chance to oppose a united front. Since then he's been playing one against the other. And more people are killed.

Do I think the lives of the civilians of Baghdad should be sacrificed because of Saddam? No.

"Who the hell is Kurt Gerron and why are you talking to him all the time?" asks a worried friend. Let me recap. We inherited an enormous beloved oil painting of a fat man with a cigar done by Shalom Sebba in 1928. It hung in the tiny dining room of my in-laws and dominated the room, reminding us all not to eat too much. As it moved to my dining room i began to explore his identity. It turned out this man, Kurt Gerron, was the first man to sing Mack the Knife with Lotte Lenya in the Three Penny Opera (you can hear him on http://www.Amazon.com., made 70 films including the Blue Angel and a forced film for the Nazis "Hitler Builds a City for the Jews" before he was sent to his death singing Mack the Knife for the amused soldiers in Auschwitz.

The reason i talk to him is because he provides me with a moral perspective on this situation - It is complex, compromising, and painful. It is part of my conscience now.

Any question about this war is measured with it. Can art save you? Can compromise help? At what point do you resist? How Can you resist? etc. etc. etc.

The painting is here.

This is a guy who was wounded twice fighting with the Germans in WWI, and believed in his country - certainly until he got fired with the rest of the Jews from the theatre in 1933, went to Paris and then Amsterdam to continue his career and in Holland got picked up and sent to Westerbrook, then Theresinstat, then Auschwitz. At what point did he stop believing in Germany? When he was organizing the Karousell in Theresianstat? When he was trying to continue his career in Paris? When he saw his friends disappearing? I'm still trying to find out.

I dreamt last night that Salaam disappeared because he got conscripted - that he was being forced to defend a situation about which he is totally ambivalent.. although perhaps he disappeared because the phones are out. or the internet... i dread the other possibilities.

Me - i'm celebrating my birthday tomorrow with friends (i've never gotten so many flowers in my life). Some of my friends say this may be the last birthday they ever celebrate - we seem all to be on the verge of an abyss.

Liz called me just now from Albequerque where she's visitng her father - and even in that quiet place she feels the impending cataclysm. Gog and Magog.

So let's have a nice glass of wine tonight...

The local manifestation of this is the fear of biological weapons - when saddam's back is against the wall, our reporters keep reporting - he will do what is being called "let my soul perish with the philistines" - suicide mission. I get very irritated that the comparison is to Sampson - because Sampson was a prisoner of the philistines who planned more damage to his people. his 'suicide'-when he knew he'd be murdered and the murder of the philistines was to save his people. if Saddam is thinking of throwing us some anthrax it isn't to save his people, but to make him look good in the afterlife. Saddam is no Sampson

March 29, 2003

Saddam is not the only one who has doubles - I seem to have more and more "doubles" - well people who are writing diaries from Israel. Here's another interesting one. All of the diaries I have been recommending in the past weeks prove the old saying that if you get two Jews together you get three opinions.

And I love all the opinions.

Even though you can't get anything done or even decided that way.

For my birthday some friends came over last night - it all seemed light and airy - but almost everyone of them came over and whispered the questions: "Where is your shelter? How large is it? Is it chemical?

Somehow we knew something was going to happen last night - but we didn't figure it would be a cruise missile to Kuwait. That shows you how creative people with their backs against the wall can be. And how worthwhile it was to meet with friends even though we knew something was up.

And since I believe in long drawn out birthdays we also went out to lunch today - one of those increasingly popular types of restaurants that WE could barely find, so we figured that for any terrorist it would be impossible to detect.

Or maybe we just wanted to get away from the crowds...

And now part iii, a film.

But before it begins, lets review some of the events in Iraq today: the suicide bombing, for example. I assume that the one in Iraq is not similar in motive to the ones in this neighborhood. It's a copycat kind of thing staged by Saddam's party. I'll bet anything they are forcing people into these acts.

I'll bet (and I rarely bet on anything but sure things - even with myself) that these guys were conscripted, would have loved to get out of it, but their mothers were being held at knifepoint.

The attempts to parallel the conflict of the Palestinian people are staged.

Back to Tel Aviv. My old old friend Sharon and I have not seen each other in ages - why - we figure it out when he calls to sing happy birthday - In order to see each other we have to make elaborate plans because we have complicated schedules that don't intersect automatically. And we are not making any plans in advance. That seems to be true for many of us - and in many areas of our lives.

Passover, for instance.

We had thought we would all meet in some Greek Island for a few days and relax - but that was before the war. Now we don't even think about where the seder will be, who will be there, who will run it.

We've become totally fatalistic.

I mean what if we go to a hotel for the seder and some terrorist blows up the whole family - like last year at the Park Hotel? What if we stay home and Saddam sends us smallpox as one of the plagues.

Which reminds me - just for the record - The U.S. Navy is not the first to use animal/amphibian/fish life in warfare. We are reminded every year at the Passover Seder that against the Egyptians we used Frogs...lice...

Midnight March 30, 2003, Part iii of my birthday was "The Hours" - which has a different meaning to me today - that it might have 3 years ago. A film about how some one has to die so that others can appreciate the significance and value of life - in the context of a world in which some people are dying so that others may die, and some people are being killed for no reason, and so on... it works differently, gives a different color to things.

I cannot forget the moment when i saw Sapi's face on the front page of Ha'aretz - after the last big suicide bombing. After i had been so relieved that none of my kids or family had been killed or injured. And there was my tiny dance partner - so full of life - and dead. Did she die for any reason? No. Do i appreciate life more because of her death - in a way yes.

One more point - I think one of Virginia Woolf's problems when she decided to put some stones into her pockets and walk into the water was the fact that a war was beginning again and she knew she wouldn't be able to handle it. War does add another dimension to all the emotional issues of life.

I discovered the other day that Radio Free USA was excerpting from these pages - it was a little like stepping out of the shower after belting out a song and hearing applause... the private and the personal fields intermix. But that's like what our entire lives have become - no one aspect of my private life is not intermixed with the daily news. And there are some benefits - I learned that Radio Free Usa has lots of information i haven't seen elsewhere.

TODAY IS LAND DAY. The Arab-Israelis usually use to day to visit villages that have been erased, to plant olive trees, to mourn the loss of their lands. Last year I remember no demonstrations and assume that this year there will be none. Except for some demonstrations in favor of ending the war in Iraq. But it is always a sad day for them.

We usually ignore it - mention it here and there on the radio and ignore the implications. But we know that if we look at old maps there were many villages that no longer exist. You can tell where they were by the sabras, the cactuses used as town lines.

Some of the former residents were deserted by fleeing residents in '48, encouraged by their leaders to go and return in triumph, some were 'encouraged' to leave by the Israelis, and some were actually chased away.

The proportions always change depending upon who is telling the story.

To return to the issue of the Palestinian support of the war in Iraq. I think the strands of this have to be separated carefully. First of all a distinction has to be made between Saddam (who is loathesome) and the Iraqi people (who are people - some of whom have become convinced that the Americans want to kill them (as one can understand seeing as how they are being bombed.) It is the Iraqi people who many antiwar demonstrators all over the world are supporting. Now here there is an additional factor. Many Palestinians see Saddam as their hero - Not only was he helping out a great deal by giving large sums of money to the families of suicide bombers, and other worthy causes, but he constantly refers to the Palestinian people. That is, he constantly makes an identification with them. No one else does that so frequently. So people think the cause is the same. But it isn't. it isn't. The Palestinian people needs self rule, they need a government, borders. They need to negotiate and make peace. And I think many of them want it. Saddam on the other hand wants control over others.

In any case, I think the distinction between support of the Iraqi people and support of Saddam should be clarified, and the distinction between support of Saddam and support of the Palestinians as well.

We had our own suicide bomber today - 30 people injured in Netanya - a few very severely - the most seriously injured is the man who heroically tried to stop the bomber - but we breathe easy - say it is not so bad - wait for it to be worse.

March 31, 2003

I don't mean I don't think we can't do anything, and we have to wait around for the end or to be saved by some higher force. I mean we fight PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) all the time - trying to follow the dictum of Shimon Peres who isn't interested in history but in imagination. But our situation is complicated -we are not POST trauma - but totally involved in daily trauma. The night my cousin's daughter got called up to go on duty with the patriot missiles was in itself a trauma for my cousin. My friends who are dealing daily with unemployment and imminent poverty (who were yesterday exactly in my place) are living an existence in which there IS no POST. For the tens of thousands of people who have been wounded, disfigured or merely traumatized in recent terrorist attacks there is only trauma. My physiotherapist today treated me in a sealed room - the window has three seperate tapings and the plastic curtain above th door is ready for sealing, with the gas masks handy. The waiting room has a chemical tent. This is certainly the proper responsible behavior on her part, but it can distract from healing.

Can't I try to imagine a rosier future? Richard MacNaughton-Abrams - who knows me from high school - warns me not to lose my old ability to imagine the future. He says: "The current situation is something new in Jewish history. It has to be mentally organized and discussed in an effort to assess its newness . I am not denying the extreme danger nor am I saying that people should not express their concerns, but expressing concerns in such a way that recall the horror of the nightmare beyond all conceivable nightmares is not the best way to handle this new situation. "

Now I wasn't aware i was suggesting the connection - but i am aware of MORAL parallel issues that i want to learn from.

i don't want to lose my morality in the struggle to survive.

And that's often the first thing that gets lost.

March 31, 2003

Hey - I barely watched the news today. Reading the newspaper doesnt count, nor the updates on the internet. It's the television that brings the war - as the U.S. wants it to be perceived - into our living rooms. (There was even a discussion on the local channel 2 about the impossibility of televising objectively DURING any war. You can't stand in the middle of the battlefield and point your camera first at one and then the other and then from that decide who's right or who's winning.) But the fact that I myself didn't sit down for an hour or so of war means something - it means i'm too scared of the outcome.

I know i know i said this war had to be fought - but then i thought it was going to be fought surgically, like Tony promised. (Remember in Catch 22 when the girl proclaims "God wouldn't let this happen" and the guy says "I thought you didn't believe in God." And she replies: "I don't. But the God I don't believe in is a kind God, a just God, a good God." I was born into Catch 22).

I had to visit the local hospital this afternoon - the showers outside for washing down victims of chemical attacks are still up and waiting for something to happen. They are still practicing there for emergencies. A doctor told me that on the first night of the war the emergency ward was filled with people pretending to be sick so they could be close to a shelter and anti-biological warfare equipment.

And now - that an attack is much more feasible than before - no one is carrying around a gas mask.

Enough of this fear or fatalism or bravado. I've got to watch the news!

April 1, 2003

AMERICAN troops killed seven Iraqi women and children yesterday when they opened fire on a van which refused to stop at a checkpoint.

That's the first line of an article in the Guardian today.

Get used to it.

It's the best weapon Iraq has. Mixing up the good Iraqis with the bad Iraqis. The soldiers must be very suspicious after the suicide bombings began. It makes them less friendly and understanding. And then they kill civilians, and make enemies out of people they have nothing against. We do it all the time - for exactly those reasons.

The first rule is that you have to fight your opponent using his rules. You make up rules of honor and you get smashed. But when you fight according to his rules, you also become like him.

Get used to it.

The only difference is that we feel terrible about it. The opponent rejoices.

And for those of you who are counting, here's where the body counts of Iraqis killed are:Iraq Body Count you are visitor number

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