tel aviv

i've been spending more time in tel aviv lately visiting with friends and family. yesterday i spent the afternoon with my father's aunt, my great aunt, who is nearly 80 and volunteers with machsom watch, the group of women who monitor the checkpoints. she calls the women in her organization "fighterits" adding the hebrew feminine suffix "it" to the english word fighter. i told her about the right winger and she said she'd have much less patience for someone like him. she told me stories about trying to learn arabic and how touched she was to realize that hebrew and arabic are so similar. she proudly told me she drives her own car into the territories, unafraid and determined. she read me stories by a women named edna from the organization, stopping at the end with tears in her eyes. she told me about organizing a family passover ceder in an arab village and how proud she was that her granddaughter's rightish wing boyfriend came despite his apprehension.

funny enough, some young man from port said in egypt called her randomly on skype several months ago probably thinking she was a young woman. she innocently answered and has since been talking with him several times a week, mostly about day to day things. he called while i was there and was interested to talk to me about my peacemaking ambitions. he talked to me about the situation of gazans stranded in egypt and the nature of his work as some kind of textile importer. we made outlandish, tentative plans to all take a trip to dahab in the sinai. in the meantime, she said she'd take me to a meeting with several important organizations next week. even though i'm only related to her by a long fizzled out marriage, i felt happy and proud to have such a compassionate, lefty woman consider me family and friend.

i've also been spending more time with my clone, gila, who is also american, also looking for peace work, went to school at nyu and knows my cousin benny. last night we went to a very difficult play called "hebron" about the terrible situation there, the antithesis of muslim-jewish coexistence. well, to be fair, i pretty much dragged her there. afterwards ali and other people gave a talk, moderated by an exceedingly annoying woman. it was my first time seeing him since i've been here and of course, once he was on the stage and speaking so honestly and eloquently about the need for co-existence and mutual understanding i forgot all about the million reasons i have to hold on to my own anger towards him. he makes it so hard to hold grudges!

the biggest cross in the world

a few weeks ago, the right winger and i went to eat hummus in nazareth. he showed me around a bit and gleefully told me that the christians of nazareth are hoping to construct the world's largest cross at the tip top of the city, upsetting nazareth's majority muslim community. a few days later the story appeared in the press and i found the image accompanying the articles to be absurd and sort of hilarious. though i've never been one to knock extravagant religious imagery, the fighting and tensions that ensue over things like this are much less appealing. i thought i'd share.

right and left behind....

I finally got my first real chewing out since being here. As some of you may know, I'd been seeing someone in Haifa who, to put it lightly, didn't share my views on a whole host of things - from peacemaking to hiking and everything in between. It was nothing short of miraculous one day when we discovered we both liked the same song on the radio. I should have started running the day he told me he didn't like cheese and I should have run even faster when he told me I have no reason to be here and that my views are a threat in and of themselves to the country. But no, being the optimist-bordering-on-gatekeeper-of-la-la-land that I am, I thought I might be able to pull this one over to the other side. He was a bit of a project, and a hard one at that, who also happened to enjoy taking me out and translating for me and teaching me about relevant spots around town. In the beginning we talked about politics, always heatedly, and sometimes even had make-up make-out sessions that were like mini-peace agreements in themselves. I was making concessions but also felt like I was making progress.

Yesterday, all that work came down on my head in several of the ugliest phrases I've personally heard uttered anywhere in my direction. Following a semi-controversial interview I went on last week at a leftist organization, homeboy decided I was beyond hope, beyond the illuminating reach of his right-wing claws and thus worthy of being chewed out and verbally spit on. He said it was a shame I wasn't born earlier because I could have made a nice career as a Nazi collaborator and that people like me, i.e. enemies of the state, deserve to be hanged in the public square. He quickly retracted the latter part once I pointed out how fundamentalist he sounded but the damage had already been done. Anyway, I will spare you further details, but suffice to say after almost an hour of his abuse and my earnest attempts to diplomatically sock it back to him, I finally gave up. We both promised to think about what the other had to say and then hung up.

For about five minutes I felt like the world was crashing down around me and that I should probably just fly back to New York, where I can at least defend myself to the best of my ability in all the glory of my native tongue. But then it dawned on me, the real difference between him and I. While he is a certified misanthrope, believing that most people are animals and worthy of his scorn, I, maybe because I'm an optimist, maybe because I'm nice, like to think that most people in the world want the same things I do. It seems to me that most of us enjoy the view of the sea, we want to sit for long periods of time enjoying the company of our friends and family, we want good food to eat, better lives for our children, and above all to feel safe and secure where ever we go. And for that reason, I refuse to give up. I refuse to accept his black and white version of things, his us and them and good versus bad. Let him live in his cheeseless world, full of hatred and anger. I would have liked to pull him out and I would have liked to understand his perspective but a girl can only take so much abuse.

yesterday's hopes

i've been going running on the beach in the evenings, in my never-ending quest for a bikini bod. yesterday there were all these jellyfish washed up on the shore that i had to dodge. the sun dropped down behind the clouds and this salty, humid breeze started blowing off the water and i felt like the luckiest person, joblessness and all aside. it has been great to spend time with my family, even my grandmothers who are slowly driving me crazy with their insistence on my finding a man and getting married already. every day they say to me, so-and-so has a nice grandson, it couldn't hurt to give it a try, let me give him your number. and i say, no, no grandma, it's ok.
and though i'm not involved at all in what is going on here politically, i like to think my presence alone is inspiring some sense in high places. finally there is some talk of renewing efforts to make peace. my grandmother likes to say, "tout change et rien ne change," everything changes and nothing changes, but my stubbornly optimistic self holds out hope something simply has to change.

my new hebrew teacher

the good news is that my 13 year old cousin is finally ushering me out of illiteracy. i can now read his first-grade notebook and he gives me words to write down. we were talking about the government the other day, so now i know how to say, read, and write "corruption" and "bribery." i can also say, "my vocabulary is small" without having to substitute the word vocabulary in english. it's not really at all humiliating to learn to read from someone who is less than half my age because he's such a good and patient teacher.
i'm also helping him with his english and finally breaking the secret of how israelis speak english freakishly well. they learn grammar better than we do! objectively speaking, he's also a bit of genius.
in other news, though i haven't found a job, i've discovered that i'll make a very good retiree. i've mastered the art of sitting around doing a lot of nothing with my grandmothers and enjoying myself immensely. i also get tired early and am suddenly sort of bad at parallel parking. it's the one-way streets!
i'm making contacts with organizations and despite my flirtation with being an old lady, am looking forward to making use of my degree in the service of peace. i also stumbled upon this ad by an israeli-american girl who is looking for work in the peace business. it's crazy how many things we have in common - she also did an m.a. in new york and my cousin was her professor in undergrad. so we're going to get together next week to brainstorm and try to help each other.
she may come to haifa to see co-existence at work. perhaps it's a tenuous co-existence, but nonetheless, i went for a run on the beach a few days ago and was so pleased to find all kinds of people enjoying themselves there with their families and friends. granted, everyone seemed to be keeping to themselves, but my optimistic self likes to think it's a start.