CATEGORY: Politics
17.04.2012
An officer, not a gentleman
Lieutenant Colonel Shalom Eisner is a soldier’s soldier. The guy is a deputy commander of the Jordan Valley brigade in the Israeli army, an armored brigade trained to fight other armies, head to head, face to face. His whole life he’s been preparing to take on Syrian and Iraqi armored formations, not Danish peace activists.
The blow that Eisner delivered to the ISM activist is a Krav Maga blow that recruits are taught in their first week of basic training. It’s what you’re supposed to do if you’re face to face with your enemy; it’s what you’re trained to do if you find yourself in hand to hand combat, when the bullets are out, or you’re too close to your enemy to shoot, if the enemy and you are at each other’s throats, on death ground, and there is nothing left to do but fight for your life. It’s a last-ditch move you perform on Syrian troops, Hezbollah guerrillas, Hamas gunmen. It’s not a move you pull against unarmed activists, no matter how provocative they are. Eisner’s life was not in danger. At most, his fingers were fractured. He was pissed off and he lost his cool. But he shouldn’t have even been there in the first place. READ MORE
12.04.2012
Don’t step on Grass
I think it was a stupid decision to ban Gunter Grass from entering Israel, but I’m not surprised at Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s decision to do it. Our interior minister is a man who sees things in black and white only.
This week, Yishai issued an order making the German writer Persona non Grata in Israel, effectively barring him from the country, for Grass’ poem in a German newspaper, in which the Nobel laureate said Israel’s nuclear program was a danger to world peace.
Grass wrote that he feared a nuclear-armed Israel “could wipe out the Iranian people” with a “first strike.” It’s ridiculous. It’s despicable, uninformed, reflexively anti-Israeli, and most likely anti-Semitic. He doesn’t even pretend to see things from our perspective, to walk in our shoes. It’s a load of bull.
But still, banning him from entering the country reminds me very much of Iran’s death fatwa on Salman Rushdie for his Satanic Verses.
Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about being banned for his writings, tweeted this on Monday:
OK to dislike, even be disgusted by #GünterGrass poem, but to ban him is infantile pique. The answer to words must always be other words.
If you were a teenager and a nazi came to conscript you, and refusal meant death, would you choose to die?
To be a conscript in the Waffen-SS is not to be a Nazi. To be the author of The Tin Drum is to merit great honor.
Let’s not forget that #GünterGrass is the author of the greatest literary responses to Nazism, The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, Dog Years.
09.04.2012
Swastika Revisited
On the 4th of April 2012, the very day when Günter Grass’s anti-Israeli poem ‘What Must Be Said’ was published, my friend rabbi in Vienna found a Swastika badge in his vacuum cleaner after Pesach cleaning. It happened, of course, by a coincidence; just like by a coincidence is Grass notorious for his SS past; and again, by a coincidence did the owners of the rabbi’s flat left the badge in there. Any attempts of drawing connections here is a sure sight of persecution complex and an unnecessary digging up the past. The problem is that such coincidences take place.
Almost 70 years have passed. Today, when public apologies for Nazi crimes are being tendered on any suitable occassion by people born after the war and klezmer melodies are filling the streets of Berlin and Nuremberg, bringing up any Nazi topic seems to be a moveton, a mockery, a pointless agression. It is forgotten, since all of us wanted to forget it. Yet it’s still there. It is there because the SS soldier considers himself to be impartial enough to voice his opinion on the actions of the Jewish land. It is there also because many Israelis, provoked by Grass’ poem, are immediately starting to recall the past of 84-years old Nobel prize owner and his nation. Finally, it is there because of some people in Vienna, who neither decided to save the Swastika badge as a family relict, nor to get rid of it. It has been lying on the floor of their appartment, waiting till a rabbi find it during a Pesach cleaning. English translation of the poem: here
05.04.2012
An Günter Grass: WARUM HAT ER NICHT GESCHWIEGEN
Bedenkt er nicht, dass Geschichte sich wiederholt,
wie Hegel und Marx schon wussten, einmal als Tragödie und einmal als Farce, die er jetzt ist?
Sieht er denn nicht, was nur allzu offensichtlich ist,
dass er am Ende als ‘Denker’ tatsächlich dazu wird:
die Fußnote?
In welchen Mantel der Selbstgefälligkeit und Taubheit
schlüpft er und ruft so die selbsterfüllende Prophezeiung:
‘Antisemitismus’?
Ist er so wenig Herr seiner Sinne, dass seine ‘letzte Tinte’
so schwarzbraun ist wie die Uniform, die er trug als
SS-Mann?
Ist seine Gebildetheit, vorgetragen wie eine Monstranz,
tatsächlich nur aus fadenscheinigem Pappmache und von
Unvernunft verschleiert?
Ist ihm wirklich nicht klar, dass nur ‘das Potential’
bis jetzt verhindert hat den nahöstlichen Flächenbrand,
auch den nuklearen?
Lernt er nicht aus der Geschichte, derer er sich so
gut zu bedienen weiß, dass 60 Millionen Tote zu verhindern
gewesen wären, hätte Chamberlain der Rotzbremse nicht
die Stiefel geleckt und ihm stattdessen das gezeigt:
Entschlossenheit?
In seinem Nachdenken hätte nachdenken ihn dorthin führen müssen:
gäbe es nicht seit ‘Jom Kippur’ die Kontrolle, die auch das Blut
tausender Söhne, Männer, Brüder sehr einfach und schnell
hätte nicht vergießen lassen können, wäre die ‘Existenz’ schon längst
keine mehr.
Er selbst macht sich zum Meister einer ‘flinken Lippe’,
die er so wortgewaltig zu bekämpfen sucht und gerät dabei
‘außer Kontrolle’.
Sein Wort, Gedicht genannt, wiegt schwer der Preise wegen,
der Bücher wegen, des Renomees wegen, auch der Geschichte wegen,
und ist nun leichter als das Papier, auf das es geschrieben ist,
mit Dummheit.
Wer im Wald der Klischees zu Hause ist, darf sich nicht wundern
über die Holzfäller, deren scharfe Klingen beginnen,
sein Baumhaus zu fällen, nicht stumm bleibend,
laut.
Er hätte seine Bedenken, wenn er sie so nennen will,
für sich behalten können auf dem Grund seiner bisherigen
Bedenkenlosigkeit.
CATEGORIES: Politics
29.03.2012
Kadima to nowhere
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, what is it? What is it? That’s right; it’s a lame duck political party.
This is the sorry state of Kadima now: On paper, it is the largest political party in the Knesset, but in reality has lost much of its electoral support to a resurgent Labor Party and newcomer Yair Lapid. It is also on the verge of a cataclysmic split which threatens to send the party from its current 28 mandates to single digits, somewhere just above the electoral threshold.
If its leader for the past three years, Tzippi Livni, loses to her perennial challenger Shaul Mofaz, she is likely to bolt the party bequeathed to her by former PM Ehud Olmert [who quit the party over corruption allegations]. Even though she hasn’t officially said so, Livni’s central message to party members and her supporters is that “there is no Kadima without Livni.”
This is quite a megalomaniac statement by Livni, but is also a shrewd political strategy on her part. With this scorched-earth strategy, Livni has told Kadima’s members that if they don’t vote for her continued leadership, Kadima will disappear. It’s either her or nothing; a message Mofaz has been hard at work countering.
So if she loses to Mofaz, she won’t see Kadima as her home anymore, and will either leave the party for private life, or take some of her supporters and start a new party. Some pundits have posited a Livni-Lapid unity, but Lapid has all but ruled that out by promising he will not staff any current members of Knesset in his new political party [such is the man's disdain for the current crop of politicos].
The scenario of Livni starting her own party [the 'real Kadima'] is quite unlikely, as Mofaz has reached out to all of Livni’s supporters, telling them that if he wins, he’ll take them into the next government, either with him as Prime Minister [yeah right] or as a senior coalition partner. Livni’s supporters have had quite enough of being out in the barren opposition benches, and most of them can be expected to grab the life buoy thrown out by Mofaz. How much this will help them stay in the Knesset after the next general elections is anyone’s guess, seeing as Kadima has taken a massive hit in the polls.
According to the latest polls, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud gains strength to 35 Knesset seats [up from its current 27], which allows the PM to cherry pick from amongst the smaller parties across the political spectrum. Since there is virtually no difference between Mofaz and Netanyahu on any substantive issue, the latter should have no problems taking whatever is left of Kadima, with Mofaz at its helm, into his coalition now, or after the next elections.
To Kadima’s left lies a resurgent Labor, with popular Shelly Yechimovich leading a socioeconomic agenda. Occupying the same electoral space as Kadima, Yair Lapid growing political movement [it is not an official party yet] has taken the mantle of ‘clean politics’ away from Livni, the latter being tarnished by months of reports of financial wrongdoing and alleged fraud by her party’s apparatchiks. Both Yechimovich and Lapid have capitalized on the past summer’s socioeconomic protest movement, something which Livni failed to do, to her eternal shame and detriment.
So has Kadima turned the corner? Perhaps, but waiting for it around the corner are two serious rivals that Kadima will have a hard time competing with for new voters. On the other hand, a Mofaz-led Kadima with eight to ten Knesset seats could be a comfortable coalition partner for the Likud.
Either way, Kadima has ceased to be a serious alternative for government, and is no longer a centrist rallying point for the Israeli middle class.
27.03.2012
spread the word: Martin Luther King Jr. – 1967
CATEGORIES: Documentation English Film Jews-News Politics Press Skills Social Culture
24.03.2012
No matter how tight things get – there are always good people out there!
CATEGORIES: English Politics Social Culture Video
