I don’t know how many of you are following the insane letter signed by a few city rabbis in Israel, telling their followers that it is forbidden to rent or sell apartments to Arabs in their respective cities.

Since I have never learned how to handle people with mental disturbances, I am not going to elaborate about these rabbis, but I do want to write about a group of rabbis who decided to oppose the letter.

One of them is Rabbi Haim Druckman who came up with this brilliant solution. The owner of the apartments should distinguish between “good Arabs” and “bad Arabs” when they want to rent or sell apartments to Arabs.

First, I would like to command Druckman, an active member of the right wing in Israel, for his acknowledgement of such thing as “good Arabs”.

But I must say that I am little bit confused. How do… weiter lesen

There are some certain circles in Germany, including in this paper, with a Pavlovian reaction for anything that smells of the Israeli-Palestinian situation. It must be something about the German past and the glorification of the 68′ movement, that makes the Germans identify completely with the Palestinian struggle. One of the things that I really can’t stand is being dogmatic. By that I mean the tendency to fall into one’s default, no matter what are the circumstances.

Before I will get to the wall, I would like to write a line or two about the German past and the people I am writing about. This group of people are really ashamed of the past, and are fully regret what happened to Jews in this country, yet somehow this group fails to materialize on drawing a direct line between this past and the current situation in Israel.

By that I mean:… weiter lesen

I went with my wife to the public viewing of the Germany-Turkey game in Kreuzberg. Naturally, we were following every move and the reaction to every move of Mesot Ozil, the German middle fielder of Turkish descent.

Some how and without ever wanting it, Ozil became the face (if not the hero) of something much bigger. Maybe it was just a football game, but it was played with the air still not clear from Thilo Zarrazin poisonous remarks, and with the newspapers reporting that his book is still high on the best sellers list. I will write about Sarrazin later this week, but I will say this: his crazy ideas and his many followers occupied a vacuum. If the German society had the courage to make an in-depth, national debate about immigration and integration, it might avoid this vacuum.

(The taxi driver on the way back… weiter lesen

It was a classical American terminology: the State Department don’t tell American citizens to stay away from Europe, it just ask them to be careful and try not to identify themselves as Americans.

I could have joined the little smirk appearing on many Israeli faces in the last few days: “Let’s see how liberal are these Europeans when they will have to think twice before getting into public transportation”‘, or “what do you think about a Palestinian state when you have to interrupt every sip of your coffee to look for suspects”.

But I will not. This all drama is played to me more like: “Dear adventurers, America really needs your money. Stay at home”.

What does it mean to be an Israeli? I don’t really know. There are about ten million options, but none of them is telling the whole story, not even one half of it. An Israeli is someone who knows that when another Israeli says “trust me” or “believe me” he should never believe or trust the guy who said it.

An Israeli eats watermelon, and he can go to the end of the world and still look for his cottage cheese.

An Israeli will ask you to let him in first on the line in the super because he had only two items, but then his wife join him with a cart full of products.

An Israeli knows you, or someone who knows you, or someone that was in bed with you. There are only three degrees of separation in Israel.

An Israeli don’t smoke on a shabbat, but he… weiter lesen

It’s fucking nice in here. The temperature flirt with the high 20′s, and we rent 2 chairs and a shade, throw a blanket and let the sun take care of us. Then we go and fight the waves, or collect shells with Maya.

35 kilometers away people are congratulating each other with bombs.

North Israel is paradise. The trees are falling because they can’t carry the weight of the bananas or mangos, avocados or apples. There are excellent wines coming from the region. And it is so quite, you need to check every ten minutes that you didn’t become deaf. Even Maya slept until eight.

And everyone can see what is going on behind the border and realize that another war is just a matter of time.

People are telling you how, exactly, you are supposed to raise your kid, and that you must hurry with… weiter lesen

Despite the fact that we were sitting on the Airbus’ first row, no one had the patient to let us go out first, then everyone was walking on top of us to get inside the overcrowded bus driving to the terminal (it wasn’t like there was not another bus waiting behind), then the escalator wasn’t working so we used the elevator to go up, but another eight people insisted on getting in, and then everyone was skipping us on the line for the passport check. 

But hey, it was 28 degrees outside and you could taste the humidity. 

When people ask me what do I miss the most about Israel I say Hummus, the beach, and the warmth–the climate and of the people. What I never tell them is that after a couple of days, this warmth is burning me. 

It’s pretty sad to be in Israel these days. I will elaborate… weiter lesen

All who read this probably read the accounts of the horrible Israeli violence in the sea. In the last ten years there is a slogan in Israel by the right wing camp, asking “let the army win”. Well, unlike the previous Israeli operations in Gaza and Lebanon, this operation was led by a Minister of Defence who is considered to be the number one soldier in Israel history.

We let the army win. It just can’t. Not when it is not based on moral grounds.

I am waiting for more details before I will write on about it, but for now I know three things for certain:

1. If the accounts are true (many in Israel claim that there was a lynch attempt in one of the soldiers), then I am really ashamed of who I am nationally.

2. I am preaching for this for years: the results are horrible,… weiter lesen

One of the main themes of our visit in Israel is the constant arguements between my mother and me. We argue over everything: what and how much I eat, my tanning, the war between religious and secular people, settlers and Arabs (this is where it gets nasty, but my wife claims that these are the most fascinating arguements for her as a German).

Mainly, I think we are fighting about the identity and definition of Judaism.

One fight evolved over the fact that she always have the TV running, even when she is not watching. This is not unique for her–Israelis are constantly staring at the screen. We used to have great poets, writers and thinkers as role models. Today, in Israel, the biggest celebrities, the people kids want to immitate are the stars of the two commercial channels.

But a recent tour in Israel helped me understand this. Terrorist are breeding cells in… weiter lesen

(In the next few days I will write some posts about our vacation in Israel. About why I can’t live here, about how much i love this place, about the situation and about how this place is so much like and different from Germany)

We needed Pampers and as always in these kind of stores, we ended up buying everything but what we actually came to buy there in the first place. There was a young guy behind the register who looked at us and with a mindful of innocent ignorance ridiculed us about looking so tired at seven in the evening, like he didn’t notice that he was scanning pacifiers, wet towels and a bath sponge shaped like a frog. 

After finishing the scanning he announced that the bill is 170 shekels. On the register in front of me it said. 169.90. It was out of curiosity, not principal, that I… weiter lesen