Not irritating, not provincial

So I guess the word got out to Imshin of Not a Fish! that I had been describing her on the Main Page of JWN as a “sassy (if sometimes irritatingly provincial-Israeli) working mother”. She recently changed the title of her blog to Not a Fish (provincially speaking), indicating that she has a robust sense of humor.
Then, around the same time (this was last Sunday), she wrote a great and lengthy post that seemed quite clearly to deal with the charge that she was “irritatingly provincial.” I thought it was so articulate and expressed so much of what many of my Israeli friends seem to feel in one way or another that I urge you to go read it.
She wrote another one, a couple of days later, with her recollections of the inter-communal confrontations inside Israel in October 2000 that left 13 Israelis of Palestinian ethnicity (whom she calls “Israeli Arabs”) and at least one Jewish Israeli person dead. Again, written from the heart and expressing an important take on those events. Read that one, too.
Then yesterday, she had a great little post with a link to an amazing web-based resource called “Grow a Brain” that has onward links on many topics Israeli and Middle Eastern.
So darn it, now I have to go into my Main Index Template yet again and take out that “irritatingly provincial” bit about her.
Finally, on a lighter note, this from my son Tarek in Boston, which he sent hoping it would bring “a smile for your day.”
I was just on the phone with him. I told him it reminded me of the time about 12 years ago that I took him and the other two kids to Normandy. I took some great pix of them clambering around on top of some of the old tanks that are there as part of the memorial of the D-Day landings. One of these pics I sent to my Dad in England, with a caption of something like “the triumph of youth over militarism.”
Now, my Dad had actually been on the Normandy beaches– he went over on about D-plus-4, I think. He told me a little sternly, “My dear,” he said (rocking back and forth on his heels– or am I only imagining that? JM, I miss you!) “–My dear, if it hadn’t been for people fighting in tanks like that you probably wouldn’t even have been here.”
Food for thought, yes. My personal take is that it may have been the US Civil War that was the hardest one for Quakers to take a pacifist position on….

14 thoughts on “Not irritating, not provincial”

  1. Ok, mom, I’ll take the bait… why is WWII less acceptable to you as a Quaker than the War Between the States?
    Consider: The US (and several of the other Allies) only entered WWII after they had been a) attacked and b) subjected to declarations of war
    The Confederation was formed for the purpose of economic self determination. (of which slavery was an integral part)
    Lincoln, at his inauguration (after hostilities had already begun) declared that it was not his intention to ban slavery where it was already in place.
    Personally, I think that the price that was paid for the Civil War was too high, and that the results were too meager.
    disclaimer: i am being deliberately provocative here, so jump on in if you disagree…

  2. “she wrote a great and lengthy post that seemed quite clearly to deal with the charge that she was “irritatingly provincial.”
    Great… now all we need is a post from you to deal with the charge that you are glib and frustratingly irrational.

  3. Is “Israelis of Palestinian ethnicity” a more wholesome, coherent or robust classification than “Israeli Arab?” For most of the world, ‘Palestinian’ still describes a political and not an ethnic identity.

  4. First, for Tarek: Good job we got you out of Texas before those cowboys totally addled your brain there… “War between the States” indeed!
    (Actually there are whole additional classes of war that are “hard cases” too, like national-liberation struggles against colonialism, etc etc… Still, Gandhi showed par excellence that there is a better way to do even that!)
    For Alex: The dominant discourse inside Israel likes to downplay any possibility that the Palestinian Arabs who live inside Israel and are citizens of it have anything to do with the “Palestinians” who either are refugees or live i the occupied territories. Of course, that’s crazy. It was a matter of happenstance in 1948, which families or which members of the same family left their villages inside what became Israel and which stayed. They are all the same ethnie (a helpful French term, that.)
    Of course, the best thing to call people is nearly always what they want you to call them. And the Israelis of Palestinian ethnicity nearly all strongly prefer to have the word “Palestinian” in their idenitification than not to. So it’s a matter of respect. Like not calling (Jewish) Israelis “Zionist usurpers”, or using the N-word in US parlance for African-Americans.

  5. If I asked to be called a “white American,” you might comply just to be nice, but you’d also be correct to look askance at my request. As Palestinian refers apparently to both a prospective nationality (encompassing, one imagines, the current inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza) and an ethicity (encompassing the above as well as those living within Israel as its citizens) it seems a deliberately ambiguous neologism as well as ethnographically imprecise, as ‘ethnicity’ (and “ethnie” for that matter) has traditionally encompassed religious and cultural heritage, not mere geographical heritage. Of course, your discourse is dominant hereabouts, so I won’t be offended if you remain unconvinced.

  9. “In terms of the CO2 issue … We will not do anything that harms our economy,
    because, first things first, are the people who live in America.”
    George W. Bush
    circa February 2001
    lipitor

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