I’ve kept the link to Imshin’s blog Not a Fish, Provincially Speaking on my sidebar just about since the beginning of this blog. Even for a good while when Imshin wasn’t posting anything new there I kept the link up, because I like the fresh way she writes about her life as a “sassy Israeli working mother.” And though I frequently disagree with her, there’s a lot of things she has written that I agree with and that make me admire her values and her views
She even put that “Provincially Speaking” subtitle onto her blog after I’d accused her of having a fairly provincial worldview.
Well, another word for provincial could be “grounded”. All well and good.
So I wonder how representative of broader Israeli thinking her view of the recent Israeli assault on Lebanon has been? If it is broadly representative, then that could explain some things that have been going on in Israeli politics that need a lot of further consideration.
Here’s what she was writing August 10th:
- I started this blog in 2002 because I was so upset about the lies being told about Israel all the time. Lies being told and being believed.
I don’t care any more. It doesn’t matter.
My mother-in-law often tells about life in Tel Aviv during the 1948 war…
That war was a fight to survive. A terrible terrible war, killing one percent of the Jewish population and many newcomers, Holocaust survivors fresh off the boats. It was touch and go. Us or them.
Never since has Israel’s home front been so targetted. Not even when we sat in air shelters here in Tel Aviv during the Gulf War of 1991. Not even near.
Never, until now.
This is still a fight to survive. And anyone who thinks differently is deluded.
Still we’re the bad guys.
Brave kids are fighting for us in Lebanon, getting wounded, getting killed. Whole families have been sitting underground for weeks, many others are refugees. People are being killed and wounded in their homes, thousands of homes have been destroyed. By an organization described by some foreign media as a ‘resistance movement’. Resistance against what exactly?
Against Israel’s existence. They are quite clear about that.
The situation is that Lebanon has to burn right now if Israel is to survive. I’m sorry for the people on the other side, but that is the way it is. Us or them. In that respect we are not doing nearly enough for the enemy to get the picture. No, for the enemy to cease to be.
You know, at some theoretical level, I know that when people say or do hateful things, they do so out of their own fear… and the best way to respond is to be compassionate toward the place in them where they experience that fear.
I think I can clearly see that Imshin was writing these really hateful things because she was deeply fearful, and I can understand where that fear comes from. (I’ve spent plenty of nights huddling in corridors and basements under the assault of incoming rockets and artillery… Actually, many more than she has, since she lives in Tel Aviv, not further north.) And maybe when you’re living right in such a coccoon of fear it is hard for you to think logically about all the consequences of your own words and actions?
But “Lebanon has to burn right now if Israel is to survive”? Where does that come from, Imshin? You are far too smart and sophisticated to think that that is any kind of a recipe for Israel’s longterm wellbeing.
… So now, I hope that with ceasefire along your country’s northern border you can finally climb out of your mental bunker and see things a little more clearly.
Imshin, if you are really concerned about Israel’s longterm wellbeing, as I certainly believe you are, then how come you can’t see that this depends on your country being able to build decent and fair relationships with all of your neighbors? You can’t just hope to “burn” them all while you yourselves remain living in self-righteousness and peace… Can you?
“You know, at some theoretical level, I know that when people say or do hateful things, they do so out of their own fear… and the best way to respond is to be compassionate toward the place in them where they experience that fear.”
Personally, I always thought all the hateful things you said were more a result of your “Great White Mother” syndrome. But maybe not. What is it that you fear, Helena?
What hateful things are these, Joshua? If you don’t cite some, then aren’t you just engaging in some childish name-calling?
Helena, Joshua is just having a bad war day. Hopefully the ceasefire has come quickly enough for everyone, (even the band of crusty demons who comment here) to look for new hope in the ME. Hope that can’t come from more murder of anyone’s citizenry, but only through a committiment to finishing the essential diplomacy.
Wasn’t it Edmund Burke who said:
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear!
Joshua-
With a comment like “Great White Mother,” you simply admit to holding the racial and sectarian bigotry that we all know you have imbedded in your heart. I am sure you regularly pat yourself on the back for what you alone think is cleverness.
You play this game of convolution and obfuscation at JWN to its sinister end (accusing Helena of projecting her fears on this website), but today the only one communicating through a projection megaphone is yourself, projecting your own sad fears onto the world. Why is that Joshua?
It is amazing to me that Helena continues to endure your contribution-less presence in this comments section. What Helena had to say about Imshin’s “Not a Fish” commentary was directly on target, and you know it. Perhaps this is one of the things you fear, and one of the things that drives your bigoted assaults on other people.
Both Imshin and yourself, as well as other Israelis and supporters of Israel, desparately need to look carefully at the function of fear in your own hearts. After the Holocaust in World War II the vast majority of world opinion looked with sincere empathy and sympathy at the genuine fear of persecution and annihilation in the hearts of Israelis and Jewish supporters of Israel.
For nearly fourty years after the Holocaust, the vast majority of world opinion stood with Israel. However, beginning with Israel’s first occupation of Lebanon and its brutal repression of the Palestinian intifada in the 1980s, the vast majority of world opinion began to shift.
Gradually more people in the world came to realize that it truly is the state of Israel which acts like a dangerous tyrannical force in the Middle East. And the reality is that it is very hard to have empathy or sympathy for the fear which still exists in the hearts of Israelis when this fear has become so twisted, so corrupted. It is twisted and corrupted by a blinding sense of self-righteousness that can’t imagine why the world would not continue standing with Israel while it engages in some of the worst violations of international humanitarian law.
Israel continuously stalls and plays games when it comes to negotiating a viable comprehensive peace settlement with all its Arab neighbors who have clearly and openly stated on numerous occasions their willingness to recognize the state of Israel within its pre-June 1967 boundaries. And the reason Israel stalls and plays games is obvious. Israel has repeatedly shown that it has no intention of withdrawing behind those 1967 borders, but instead has built permanent settlements on that illegally occupied land while formally annexinng large chunks of territory.
So the real problem is that Israel has reached a point where it genuinely has few legs to stand on, unless it can continue to keep the American superpower on its side in a dangerous game of “let’s define our own political reality that the entire world knows is false.”
If you have not yet come to terms with these facts, then I can certainly understand how that awful fear continues to burn away in your lower gut. And if you continue to let that fear burn away then it will cause you in the future to act out in more bigoted and biligerent ways. The only cure is to come to your senses, awaken to reality, and begin working for true peace with justice by reconciling Israel with all its Arab neighbors.
May you soon find good health!
For those who didn’t bother to go and look at the original, here is Imshin’s concluding paragraph:
So I’m supposed to be bothered about the usual lies being told about us by our enemies, those who wish us to cease to be? Excuse me if I don’t give a $%^&!
I have Jewish friends like Imshin in Toronto, sweet intelligent ladies who say that Arabs are animals who should be destroyed. It’s breaking my heart. Really.
The problem is that a Jewish state in Palestine does not have a right to exist. Westerners right and left yearn for a peaceful two state solution, but it will never happen. Westerners in the throes of colonial thinking made a foolish mistake to condone a few terrorists carving a Jewish state out of Palestine.
The 5 million racial Jews now in Palestine, and other westerners around the world, will see no peace from billions of other real people until Palestine is governed to treat all its people with liberty, equality, and fraternity.
So what can be done? It is simple: emigration of Jewish youth from Israel.
Canada alone would benefit enormously by welcoming every Israeli Jew. So would the U.S.
In my 72 years in North America I have never known any smallest disadvantage for Jews, though I have known constant tribal paranoia.
I don’t think an unterrified and knowledgeable Israeli youth would very much like what its government requires of it, or like being despised for it by billions.
The Israeli government must eventually, without its military and political population base become kind and generous to its Arab brothers, become secular and non-racist without the tribal paranoia.
The U.S. government, and the absurd U.S. religious fanatics, will not like not being able to sucker Jews in the Mid East, but U.S. hegemony is already lost. What the U.S. needs is their talent here.
I have Jewish friends like Imshin in Toronto, sweet intelligent ladies who say that Arabs are animals who should be destroyed. It’s breaking my heart. Really.
The problem is that a Jewish state in Palestine does not have a right to exist. Westerners right and left yearn for a peaceful two-state solution, but it will never happen. Westerners in the throes of colonial thinking made a foolish mistake to condone a few terrorists carving a Jewish state out of Palestine. The 5 million racial Jews now in Palestine, and other westerners around the world, will see no peace from billions of other real people until Palestine is governed to treat all its people with liberty, equality, and fraternity.
So what can be done? It is simple: emigration of Jewish youth from Israel.
Canada alone would benefit enormously by welcoming every Israeli Jew. So would the U.S. In my 72 years in North America I have never known of any disadvantage for Jews, though I have known constant tribal paranoia.
I don’t think an unterrified and knowledgeable Israeli youth would very much like what its government requires of it, or like being despised for it by billions.
The Israeli government must eventually, without its military and political population base, become kind and generous to its Arab brothers, become secular and non-racist without the tribal paranoia.
The U.S. government, and the absurd U.S. religious fanatics, will not like not being able to sucker Jews in the Mid East, but U.S. hegemony is already lost. What the U.S. needs is their talent here.
Well Tamroi, that’s kinda wacky. But it does present an opportunity to address that “right to exist” question so dear to our Israeli friends. I think it’s just the wrong question to ask, and perhaps deliberately so.
There will never be general agreement that Israel has a “right” to exist, in place of whatever went before (without getting into a debate about what that was). However, I believe it is quite possible to reach general agreement that the existence of Israel, within boundaries to be determined, should no longer be contested. Isn’t that the important point?
The argument that Israel is a “settler colony” leads nowhere. It is, of course, but so what? The US is a settler colony too. If you go back far enough, everyplace is probably a settler colony. I think our friend Jonathan Edelstein has done some scholarly work in this area. If a settler colony is successful enough, then at some point it is simply no longer worth contesting.
The problem with Israel, as everybody knows, is that the boundaries keep moving, so the issue can never be settled. I’m afraid the Israelis will take exactly the wrong lesson from this latest embarrassment, and conclude that any concessions on boundary issues are self-defeating.
Anyway, how do you Canadians feel about political refugees from the US? If our next election goes the wrong way, I may be heading up there.
Dear John,
Thanks for your thoughtful answer. I think we’d be glad to have you. I’m a refugee after Hebrew school and technical work in Washington for the first 35 years.
I see that my viewpoint seems non-existent even among lefties, but I don’t see what’s wacky about it. In fact I think sooner or later Jewish refugees from Palestine is what’s going to happen. It seems to me that sooner is the solution.
The right for a racially Jewish state to exist in Palestine is the point you’re addressing. “Right to exist” too conveniently loses it’s meaning. The right obviously does not exist anymore than apartheid South Africa or the Indian Raj had a right to exist. Israel is the last conspicuous holdout of formal Western imperialism (otherwise currently replaced by US style imperialism).
The US as a settler colony happens to have been one of the early instances of Western imperialism. However the successful genocide of native north americans is not repeatible in the Mid East by us Yids.
Anyway what matters is demography rather than what’s right. The number of Jews is tiny, even smaller in Palestine than in North America. Are the hegemonies replacing the US going to be interested in suckering Jews to be clients in the Mid East.
I’d really appreciate as much serious analysis and criticism as possible of my wackiness. Because I’m hoping to everyone’s G-d it will get refined, deseminated (sp?), and help. Tamroi.
“Rabbi Yosef, the former Sephardi Chief Rabbi, who recedntly said that Arabs were snakes and should be annihilated, told his followers that he had a dream on Friday.”
http://www.ety.com/HRP/jewishstudies/witofyosef.htm
“”It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable,” he was quoted as saying in a sermon delivered on Monday to mark the Jewish festival of Passover.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1270038.stm
Yap, just Like Khumayni and Bin-Laden
So Friday sermons in the west bank routinely refer to Jews as monkeys and pigs. This kind of “they are worse than we are, look at what they say” will never go anywhere nor will it ever bring peace. It’s the oldest prescription in the world for war: we’re always right, and they are always wrong. Get over it. Both sides can play the victim endlessly, and it will never go anywhere.