Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Walls

Well, I just heard I got my Israeli press pass.  This is excellent
news.  One of the main reasons I need it is that being the bearer of a
press pass is the only
way foreigners and Israelis get to cross into Gaza at all these
days.  Of course, once I’ve got it no doubt there are all sorts of
other fascinating things I can do with it.

I’m still in Tel Aviv.  I’ve been hanging around waiting for an
interview that now (nearly 6 p.m.) looks as though it ain’t going to
come through for me.  All Israeli political figures are incredibly
busy these days, organizing their campaigns for the March 28
elections.  I even had a hard time getting an “appointment” with
Naomi Chazan, the former deputy Knesset Speaker from the leftist Meretz
Party, whom I think of as a dear friend.  Oh well, I understand…

Actually, one thing quite a few Israelis have remarked on since I came
here has been how indifferent much of the public seems to be to the
whole campaign.  Usually, politics in Israel is a 24/7
obsession.  But as much as I can figure out from listening to
radios in taxi-cabs, that portion of the media seems much more
interested in Hamas (or as Israelis say it, “Khamas”) and Abu Mazen
than they are in their own politicians. Go figure.

Also, I haven’t seen one single recognizably electoral billboard or
informally posted flyer on the hoardings in the streets yet. 
There are plenty of billboards bearing the ayatollah-like image of the
Shas Party’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Youssef– not just
billboards, but massive displays on the sides of buses, etc etc. 
But people say even that even there, the “message” is not political at
all, but one that features some kind of religious exhortation.

In fact, Youssef’s bearded and turbaned visage on these billboards and
displays is quite reminiscent of the parades of beared and turbaned
ayatollahs who (along with their own religious homilies) grace many of
the billboards of Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon or come to think of
it of the posters for Hamas I saw in the West Bank, which have an
impishly grinning photo of a (bearded, headscarveded) Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin.

.. Well, anyway, late this morning, cellphone clutched in hand, I
decided to walk down the seaside promenade to the old city of Jaffa
that’s perched on a hilly promontory that juts out into the
Mediterranean just over a mile south of Tel Aviv’s city center. 
The seaside promenade is beautiful: much nearer to sea-level than the
Corniche in Beirut, and much cleaner and better appointed.  As I
walked briskly along I passed a few groups of older guys sitting
together on folding chairs playing shesh-besh (backgammon) almost
exactly as they would be doing at the very same time on the Beirut
Corniche…

As in Beirut, there’s lots of traffic whizzing along on the non-sea
side of you, and there are palm-trees and the occasional
snack-vendor.  But another difference is the wide expans of beach
here in Tel Aviv, that runs between the promenade and the gently
lapping sea.  In Beirut, the Corniche is perched above a rocky
coastline.  A few people swim from it.  But mainly there it’s
fishermen between the Corniche and the sea– and the waves often come
crashing up against the rocks and against the Corniche itself.

So anyway, I’m walking along and I see a rather interesting-looking
structure beside the promenade.  (The road by now has veered away
from us.  There’s quite an expans of tough-looking grass right
here.) So this structure looks like an old Arab stone house (arches,
etc) that has fallen into some desuetude and then had an entire
sqaur-ish glass-and-steel structure put on top of it.  I’m
intrigued and go closer.  A sign announces it’s a little museum
called the “Etzel Museum”.  Okay, I still don’t know what Etzel
is– maybe it’s the name of the building?  Maybe the name of a
famous painter whose works are featured here? Who knows?  I fork
over my 10 shekels for the entry fee and then it suddenly dawns on
me:  Etzel is the Hebrew acronym for the Irgun Zvai Leumi– the
infamous militant (“terrorist”) Zionist group that incubated Menachem
Begin and the whole of the Likud Party.  And this is their
museum!  (Actually, as I learned later, just one branch of a
larger museum they have elsewhere in town.)

So this is really interesting.  Quite apart from the fact that
I’ve been making quite a bit of a study of how it is that, as and after
conflicts wind down, the affected societies choose to memorialize them,
particularly through built memorials and museums.  But the Irgun,
for goodness sake!  And to come upon this place quite by chance at
a time when many in Israel have been calling on Abu Mazen to organize
his own “Altalena”.  Altalena was a boat full of weapons (from
France) that the Irgun had been bringing in to Palestine at the time of
the fighting in 1948.  David Ben-Gurion, the head of the biggest
Zionist organization (the forerunners of the Labour Party) demanded
that the Irgun hand over thte weapons to the unified Haganah fighting
forces.  The Irgun refused, and Ben Gurion seized control of the
boat by force.  (This was just a little bit north of here, I
think.)  There were a number of fatalities in that fighting,
even…. So that was their big moment of bringing all the fighting
forces under the command of the central state.  It’s certainly
worth noting that Ben Gurion didn’t take that step until one month after the British had
withdrawn and the Zionist had celebrated the foundation of their
independent state.  But now, people have been wanting Abu Mazen
(and before him, Yasser Arafat) to “take on” the militants in
Palestinian society long before the Palestinians have even the tiniest
little piece of actual sovereign independence– or even, any guarantee
at all that sovereign independence is on its way…

So, the Etzel Museum.  Established, I believe, with the help of
the Ministry of Defence Museum Unit.  My (American) tax dollars
at work!  At work, moreover, glorifying and memorializing the
actions of a group of people who took lethal violent actions against
both Palestinian civilians (in Deir Yassin, and elsewhere– as
fulsomely celebrated in this museum) and against British troops. 
Indeed, there in one corner of the museum is mockingly displayed the
“Wanted” poster issued by the British for the entire leadership of the
Irgun after they kdinaped and hanged two British Army sergeants.

It’s quite well done as a museum.  This place memorializes only
ther actions the Irgun took in 1947 and 1948– though those were pretty
crucial years for it, all in all.  There a section on Deir Yassin– a
small Arab village just west of Jerusalem whose houses still stand
empty today as a silent memorial to the killings (and complete ethnic
cleansing) that the Irgun committed there in April 1948. 
Wikipedia has a very full entry on
the events there, and quotes a Bir Zeit University study that found
that,

Anyway, the museum has a little section on that, one on the fighting in
the Wadi Nisnas area of Haifa, one about fightinbg they took part in
right here, in the Manshiyeh area just north of Jaffa, and a few others
about battlles and other military actions the Irgun took part in those
years.  Also, a large display about the Altalena incident. 
One room was given over as a sort of memorial room to the Irgun
fighters who died in action, and another was organized as a lecture
room with seating for maybe 80-100 people, a lectern, and a movie
screen.

There was only one other visitor there this morning.  There were
two staff people– a guy in a kippa who gave all my bags a very
thorough searching and a youing woman who did speak some English, took
my entrance money, and  also sold me a rather handsome book about
the Irgun in English, written (she told me) by the person who organized
the museum, Joseph Kister, and published in 2000 by the Ministry of
Defence Publishing House and Museum Unit.  The young woman offered
to play the 20-minute Englisjh-language movie they have there, for
me.  But I really didn’t have time for that and demurred.  I
took a bunch of pics both inside and outside the museum.  Maybe
I’ll get them up onto the blog sometime.

So I walked the short remaining distance to the outskirts of Old Jaffa,
took a few pics of the Hassan Bek Mosque, bought a sandwich from one of
the Palestinian-owned stores nearby, and hopped into a cab to go to my
next interview which was down in Cholon, south of Tel Aviv.

As we went there, at one point the cab whizzed by a structure that was
almost certainly a prison– high concrete walls topped withmany layers
of razor wire, and punctuated by watch-towers.  But it was in the
middle of just a regular, fairly high-density urban neighborhood… So
here’s what someone had done to try to soften its impact on the
neighbors:  They had painted gaudy murals on at least two of the
outer walls of the structure– mainly a blue background with
frolicking, bad-Chagall-like figures floating around in it… But then
on one of the walls, they had added some 3-D images including one that
looked as though it was a man pushing out of the wall… It looked like
a rather sick mockery of the fate of those imprisoned (I assume) inside
there… But the cab was going too fast for me to see any more.

Of course, painting large oppressive concrete walls to try to
“normalize” them for those Israelis
who are sometimes forces to look at them is something the
Israeli authorities do a lot more frequently elsewhere– primarily,
with regard to those sections of the infamous West Bank Wall that curve
around anywhere near where Israelis live or travel.  For example,
I’ve seen at least two different “artistic” treastments given to the
Israeli side of the wall at different points.  On the (US-funded!)
“bypass” road that curves around urban Jerusalem to the northwest and
ends up near the Qalandiya checkpoint, there’s a long (though not very
high) portion of the Wall that runs along the western side of the road…
Here, Israeli painters have put in repeating images of a flat-topped
stone arch with a green field, horzon, and blue sky visible under each
arch… So the visual effect as you drive quickly by is that you’re
driving along parallel to something like an aqueduct over to your left
there.  (Wall?  What Wall?)

The graffiti on the Palestinian side of the Wall is, needless to say,
far less mendacious and palliative in intent.  Over on the
Palestinian side of the Ramallah-enclosing Wall at Qalandieh there’s a
rather nice work by the London graffiti artist Banksy.  (I think
it’s this
one.)  There’s also a really lovely, large stencilled image of
Gandhi — and a whole bunch of very political graffiti.  And
there’s this
image, too which I hadn’t realized is another Banksy creation.

… One last question is it better to “beautify” urban prisons, or
not?  I am always shocked when I walk along Helene Hamalacha
Street in Jerusalem (which I do quite often– partly because it’s nice
to walk along Queen Helena Street and partly because it goes where I
need it to go)… because it goes along the side of the Israelis’
“Moscobiyya” prison where political prisoners are kept in isolation
cells.  The Moscobiyya’s structure is an old pilgrim hostel from
the 19th century that wass established by the Tsarina Elizaveta or some
other Russian princess of that era.  I think it’s only one story
high, and most of the sides have a series of largish rectangular
windows– one each, perhaps, for each of the original pilgrims’ room
within.  But on the side that goes along Helene Hamalacha Street
each of these windows has been boxed in with a really ugly metal box
with a sloping ‘roof’ that only has a few small holes punched in it for
light and ventilation.  I have talked to a number of Palestinian
political leaders who’ve spent time in this prison, including Faisal
Husseini and Ghassan al-Khateeb.  Their descriptions of the
treatment they received there– vomit-stinking bags over their heads,
stress positions, lots of disorientation techniques, etc etc– makes
my stomach lurch every time I walk along the street and think that
people inside there might be receiving that kind of treatment right
now.  (Neither Faisal nor Ghassan was, as far as I recall, ever
charged with anything.  They were just among the thousands of
Palestinian political organizers arrested and held without trial for
months, sometimes years at a time.)

So there we are.  I wonder what the theme of today’s slightly
meandering little travelogue could be said to be…  Maybe
“walls”.  Tomorrow– Jerusalem!  And then on Friday, I hope–
Gaza!