Razia's show - Dinner & Politics

June 14

Diana Shoeff from the Center for Contemporary Art invited us to attend a rehearsal for a play written and performed by Razia Yzreeli, an old friend of Sammy’s from when he lived here 30 years ago! She is an accomplished actress and she has been performing a piece she wrote called THE DENTIST which is going to be presented at the Endinburgh Fesitval in August. After performing it in Hebrew for the past 3 years, she is now in the process of learning to do it in english which is not easy for her as she is the sole performer (75 minutes). The play tells the story of the psychological and emotional wounds of a family that suffered for years because of a horrifying secret….the father in the story was part of a special unit at Auschwitz that was given the task of extracting the gold fillings from the mouths of corpses after the jews were gassed and before they were burned. 16 months of this service, millions of corpses, tons of gold extracted. All this was done so he might actually survive The Holocaust. He did in fact survive physically, but he was so scarred and traumatized by the experience (of course) that he could never lead a normal life. It is a morally scandalous story here in Israel among so many survivors and it was wrenching to hear it told with such emotion by Razia, a gifted and passionate story-teller.

After the performance, we went to have an delicious dinner at a charming, very bohemian restaurant in Jaffa with Diana and Razia and some of their friends – including a couple who turned out to be neighbors of ours in Brooklyn! - and as is often the case in Israel, there was much heated debate about the political situation here. Diana has been involved with the far-left movement here since the late 60’s. She has many informed opinions about the Zionist mythology and the brainwashing that she resents deeply. It has been fascinating to have dinner one night with Sammy’s Right-leaning family (father, nephews) who all believe profoundly in the mission of Zionism and then the next night to sit with Diana and her friends from the art/activist community here who are passionate in their opposition to the established rhetoric. Last night she said that she believes that it is the secret dream of the Zionist establishment that the Palestinians will one day become exhausted from the on-going conflict and surrender and disappear, and it is the same not-so-secret dream that the Palestinian authorities have about the jews, that they will just go away one day. It is an awful game of willpower, to see who blinks first, with many innocent lives lost along the way.

Gay Pride

June 12

 

The Gay Pride Parade/Festival in Tel Aviv is, like in many cities outside the US and Western Europe, still an important political event. Tel Aviv is an island of liberalism and tolerance but it is significant for the gay community to come out in full force to assert their visibility and civil rights. It was a festive affair, not as bawdy as those in Boston, SF, and NYC, etc., and was clearly designed as a gesture to remind Israeli society of its own diversity. With so many other pressing social and political issues pertaining to the rights of Palestinians the many problems caused by the extreme Religious Right, the gay community is free to live in peace. Even the all-night dance parties are uninhibited and un-policed. Nobody really cares what you do here in Tel Aviv as long as you are not carrying a pipe bomb with the intent to blow up a club, café or bus. Tel Aviv is a big party town in spite of  and because of the fact that it is in the middle of an endless war with itself and its neighbors.

Slaughter of the Lamb

June 11

After spending the night at the Colony Hotel in Haifa (highly recommended as it is a restored 19^th century building built by German pilgrims), we met up with Manal Mahamid, an Palestinian-Israeli installation artist who kindly offered to help us with one of our most challenging video shoots—the slaughtering of a lamb—which is an image we have been wanting to capture on video as it has symbolic resonance with many of the themes we are here to explore. Despite the raw violence of the killing, Sammy was unflinching as he kept a steady hand during the shooting of the video from start to finish. Meanwhile Anthony had to back off in horror after taking a few key stills with his camera.

Neither one of us had ever witnessed a death so up close like this before.

After the shoot, Hiel, the man who slaughtered the lamb for us, brought us to his family home in Yarka, a Druze village overlooking a beautiful valley filled with olive groves. It felt like a real honor to be invited into his parents’ home to experience their amazing hospitality as we were treated to a delicious lunch made from all the things that the family grows  on their land including organic goat yogurt and sheep cheese.

Spending the day with Manal, we got a much clearer picture  of the difficulties of what it means to be an Isreali-arab. According to her, they are looked down upon by both the Jewish Israeli establishment and by their fellow Palestinians in the West Bank because in 1948 they chose to stay in their homes and villages to live under Israeli rule.

Manal is a fearless, tough woman who was determined to stop at nothing so that we could get the  shot that we imagined and we are forever grateful for her perseverance.

Bethsaida Excavation Site in Galilee

June 9^th

Wake up at 4:30 a.m. to join the

 excavation party and visit the site. The digging is done from 6 a.m. to noon, as it is way too hot to work any longer under the sun. It is dusty, back-breaking labor, tedious, repetitive, and to us, completely fascinating. We videotape and take many photographs, and get to meet some colorful characters among the volunteers and Biblical scholars working on the dig. One of them is Nick from Montana, a real cowboy who learned about the excavation in a Bible study group and got so excited about it that sold his horse and his shepherding dog to pay for his trip “to do the Lord’s work.”

The realities of time and history become apparent in this place not only for the obvious unearthing of an ancient city but because the process itself happens over such a long time-span: they have been digging for 17 years, and there are barely the contours of a few buildings visible amidst piles and piles of rock and dust. Reversing time takes time too!

June 8^th

We leave early in the morning and start driving north. We stop in Cesarea to see themagnificent ruins by the sea of what was once the capital of Roman Judea. Despite a few Disneyfied  cafes and trinket shops, the ruins are very  beautiful, their location unsurpassable, and among some  historical trivia, we learn that the city was used as a settlement camp for Bosnian Muslims during Ottoman rule.

One of our goals for this trip to the Galil is to visit the excavations at Beith Saida, a city on the northern shores of Lake Kinneret which dates to 3000 BC.  We arrive by mid afternoon to kibbutz Ginossar, where the excavation team is lodged, just in time to hear the “pottery shard reading” session, where the archaeologists analyze ,classify, and catalogue the findings from the excavation. 

The director of the dig is Prof. Rami Arav , and enormously erudite and affable

man, who welcomes us very warmly. Going through tray after tray of pottery, broken fragments of glass, and animal bones, he gives a most entertaining and informative reading of the significance of each piece.  The excavation is done mostly by volunteer students from the US, in this case from the University of Omaha, Nebraska, who put in three weeks of really hard labor under the intense heat and sun for the greater good of unearthing the past and connecting to the birthplace of 3 of the Apostles of Jesus.

 

While visiting the site, we are staying in Tiberias, another ancient city, but a very ugly and creepy one. Our hotel sits smack on the lake, but between two semi-abandoned resort hotels that if we didn’t know better, we’d think they were bombed during a recent war.

Our hotel is filled with a motley crew of Orthodox Jews and Christian pilgrims following in the footsteps of Jesus, among them a loud group of Finnish teenagers.

One afternoon we find a peacock which escaped from an adjacent menagerie wandering lost and squawking among the decrepit abandoned buildings. Very strange and unexpected.

June 7^th

Sammy’s parents invited us to the theater but we never quite expected to be treated to such an extraordinary experience. We went to see a performance by “Na Lagaat” (Please Touch) a troupe of deaf, blind, and deaf-blind actors. It was an example of supreme goodness embodied in awful art. We were moved to tears in spite of the show’s sentimentality and clumsy execution as we were witnesses to an enormous triumph of the human spirit.

We were completely uncomfortable throughout the performance, which was truly pathetic in the truest sense of the word. In it, though, the smallest human yearnings attained a gigantic dimension when seen from the “darkness and silence” of the actors’ lives. There was an uplifting dignity in giving these people a voice, even if their show was, to quote Joan Acocella, “beyond criticism.”

That evening we were also joined by Sammy’s nephew Shmulik, and having coffee before the show we heard some hair-raising stories about his service in the army in a first response team helping citizens during the bombings in the north during the 2006 war.

In Israel the authorities take great care of the psychological well being of the citizens: if your house is bombed, for example, a team comes immediately to assess the damage and order the necessary materials and labor for repairs, another team takes you to stay in a hotel for a few nights, where you get counseling and all your needs met. In two days your house is fixed and you are sent home as if nothing had happened!

First Days in Israel

Arrived in Tel Aviv the 3^rd of June and greeted at the gate enthusiastically by Sammy’s  sister and nephew who were waiting with open arms to welcome us. Always a nice way to arrive anywhere, especially here, in this place that is so full of contradictions on every level.

Spent the day unpacking and getting situated and fighting off stomach flu and jet lag.

 

June 4.

Our first full day and we were taken by car to Jerusalem to witness the induction ceremony of new soldiers in the Israeli Army. Sammy’s nephew, Nadav, is one of these patriotic young men who is 18 years old, just finished high school, and recently completed 3 months of basic boot camp , where he got his unit’s highest marks for marksmanship.All those years devoted video-games  must have had an effect after all, and as usual with may things here, we were not sure whether to feel pride or despair

Yesterday, in front of the Wailing Wall and in front of family and friends, these young cadets swore their allegiance to the state of Israel and received each a gun and a bible.

It was a chaotic, very informal gathering that was punctuated by religious jews who aggressively continued their rocking and praying facing the holy wall , oblivious to the ceremony taking place all around them and the military marches and sappy patriotic hymns blaring from the speakers . There are many mysterious and irrational aspects to Israeli society, none more bizarre than the fact that religious far-right jews are given citizenship but do not have to serve in the army, and even more bizarre, some ultra-orthodox jews here do not even acknowledge that there is a state of Israel and the army is not necessary because in their view only the Messiah can return the jewish homeland and therefore, this one is invalid. These would be the ultra orthodox anti-Zionists as opposed to the ultra-orthodox ulta-zionists such as the most stubborn jews living in the settlements.

 

After the ceremony we all went  to have dinner in Abu Ghosh, an Arab village that chose to remain part of Israel back in 1948. We had the best Hummus & grilled lamb at a restaurant called “The Lebanese”. One more irony to check on the list.

 

To top the day off, we arrived back in Tel Aviv to hear accolades –from Sammy’s father no less, who is an avowed nationalist – about Obama’s speech in Cairo. The right wing here are panicked about the US severing their special status relationship with Israel, but apparently the speech was masterful in giving both Arabs and Jews  due acknowledgement for their respective suffering. Once again, we want to see this as a sign of real hope for better understanding between the two sides and not mere rhetoric . It is interesting for us to be here at this moment that seems to mark a kind of turning point in American policy towards the Middle East.

Meanwhile, life in Tel Aviv goes on around and through all this in the most normal way, with families playing on the beach and surfers riding the waves in the most carefree way.

There is such a strange and palpable tension between all these different sects and points of view that have been brought together in this one small area. This intersection is what we are interested in experiencing as we continue down this particular road.

 

 

June 5^th

After another frustrating day dealing with connectivity issues with the internet and email system, as well as Anthony’s ongoing bout of stomach flu, we spent the evening at the Cucher’s Friday night Shabat dinner with Sammy’s sisters, mother, father, nephews and nieces and brother in law. It was a rather momentous occasion since it was really the first time in 18 years of being partners that we shared such an intimate family gathering together. And Pepe rose to the occasion and made a  warm welcoming toast with everyone around the table to say how happy he and Lily were that we were all together as a family and that he made a special point to welcome me in particular, all said in perfect English. He was making a very  emphaatic gesture to Sammy and me and it did not go unnoticed. He is a very sweet, sincere man with a big heart.

 

We also talked a lot about politics, of course; it was very interesting to hear Sammy’s nephew Shmulik (23) provide us with a very clear, propagandistic view of how righteous Israel is in so many ways and how he is learning PR techniques as an official delegate who provides foreigners with an ‘accurate” picture of the real Israel. He is teaching the technique to other young Israelis (the party line) and he told us that he would demonstrate it for us before we leave. Shmulik is a smart, clever young man just out of the army and he is a product of a strong Zionist upbringing, the same one that Sammy grew up with but later became so skeptical of so many years ago.

 

June 6^th

Another almost perfect sunny Saturday in Tel Aviv in June, apart from Anthony’s ongoing stomach woes—we started the day at the gay beach surrounded by more pretty young things and packs of playful dogs and far too many children everywhere (the religious right encourages childrearing beyond all else).

 

We were then invited to have lunch at the home of Avi and Racheli Pnini, parents of Tom Pnini, a student at Parsons. It was a feast! But Anthony could not really eat more than the rice and potatoes. We have been promised another lunch in two weeks after we return from our upcoming trip to the north.

 

Tom’s father, Avi, is a very accomplished theatre actor and is quite famous here in Israel. They are both jolly, easy going, warm people, full of love and light. They were so happy to have us there and to meet their family and friends. One friend, Dani, is a professor of film studies and the curator of the Israelis section of the Jerusalem Film Festival and his mother in law, we were told, is the First Lady of Archeology in Israel, having made some crucial finds in various digs years ago. It was a day full of conversation about art, poetry, culture, travel, memories, and more. Not once did we discuss politics, as these folks clearly have a lot of other interests beyond the most obvious ones that preoccupy so many Israeli gatherings.

 

And finally, Diana Shoef took us to a protest march marking the 45^th anniversary of the Israeli Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. The march went from the City Hall Plaza, past the Army/Air Force Command Center, and finished at the entrance to the Tel Aviv Museum. It was a gathering of the Far Left in Tel Aviv, groups gathering together around the common goal of providing a voice for those repressed in the Palestinian territories. There were perhaps 1000 people there, some arab Israelis, and many vocal opponents to the established party line. These protests have absolutely no effect on public policy,  but they are vital in order to show the world that not all Israelis support the occupation blindly. The OCCUPATION MAGAZINE at www.kibush.co.il contains daily articles, reports and eyewitness accounts from inside the territories.

 

During the Gaza invasion in January , we were told, it was extremely difficult for the protestors to march without facing the wrath of many people on the street who were horrified that a group of Israeli citizens would criticize the invasion while innocent Israeli lives were lost in the south and soldiers were putting their lives at risk on the front lines. They were greeted as cowards and their voices were not heard in the Israeli press. They were harassed, and even worse, ignored by the media.