The Small Differences

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This milestone on the road to democracy in Europe has been thoroughly celebrated, not least in Berlin.

Some Palestinians thought that they’d take advantage of the event in order to protest against the wall that Israel has erected to keep “martyrs” and other “freedom fighters” from blowing themselves and — more importantly — Israeli civilians to smithereens in cafés and on buses in Israel. They did this by reenacting the famous footage from Berlin when the first segment of the Wall fell, and joyous East Berliners streamed over to the western side.

I saw the event on the eight o’clock news this evening, and it was very well thought through. Before the lenses of scores of cameras from international media outlets, a segment of the concrete wall was torn town, and masked Palestinians with flags in their hands rushed through to the Israeli side. It looked very much like Berlin two decades ago, and the whole stunt must be described as a media success, conjuring up uncanny parallels.

The only thing is that I just can’t remember any East Berliners that night in November 1989 rushing through the breach shouting “a thousand shaheeds marching on Jerusalem!”

Nutritious Nostalgia

A few years ago, when I was a visiting PhD-student from Sweden living in Jerusalem, I shared an apartment with a guy with American roots. At the time he worked for a company that imported food from the States, so we’d always have lots of typical American food in the house. He even had a cupboard in the kitchen filled with goodies, and whenever we had other Americans over for meals, he’d open the cupboard to give them a glimpse of heaven in the shape of root beer, pumpkin pie crusts, jell-o and other forms of eatables that would cause our guests to swoon and wax nostalgic about their childhoods in the goldene medine.

I used to witness these scenes with a certain detached cool and (not always sufficiently well-masked) European contempt for the American way of displaying emotions and getting all worked up about something as trivial as food.

Little did I know that less than ten years later, I’d sit here in the wake of a visit from the Old Country, blissfully gorging myself on salty liquorish and tar pastilles.

Kingpin Comes Home

For some time now, Tel Aviv has been trying to challenge Barcelona as the number one destination for gay tourism in the Mediterranean basin. And why not? Rothschild Boulevard may not be las Ramblas, but the White City certainly has the same insufferable humidity that plagues the Catalonian capital, and — much like Barcelona — also Tel Aviv does what she can to ignore the fact that she’s situated on some glorious beach property.

Michael Lucas, one of the hottest names in gay porn these days, and — according to The New Republic – “gay porn’s neocon kingpin”, does what he can to help boost pink tourism to the Holy Land. Driven by a well-developed business sense paired with Zionist idealism, this Russian-born New Yorker already produced one of his films (“Men of Israel“) in the Jewish homeland. Now he’s here again. Lucas is currently producing a film called “Inside Israel”, which will take horny homos all over the world for a tour of the country, from the Golan in the north to the nudist Gaash beach in the Tel Aviv area.

Anyone interested in a sneak-peak from the filming, can have a look at this report from Yediot.

Corruption Lies in the Eyes of the Beholder

Unfortunately, corruption isn’t something that’s alien to the Israeli body politic. In resent days, the extravagant bill for the defense minister’s visit to the last Aviation Salon in Paris hit the headline when the State Comptroller published a critical report.

But that’s not all. It’s been a bad press week for Ehud Barak, since he — together with three other MKs — recently were criticized by the Knesset for skipping too many plenary sessions. This latest form of misconduct is not, however, limited to our own little Levantine banana republic.

It happens in Sweden as well.

Former minister of justice, Thomas Bodström, the president of the judicial committee at the Swedish Parliament and the opposition spokesperson on legal issues, hasn’t been present much in the Riksdag in the last year. TV4 studied where he’d been when he’s chair in the chamber has been left vacant, and it turns out that he at least hasn’t been at home sleeping in.

Mr. Boström has been working — as a lawyer. Simultaneously with receiving his salary from Parliament, he’s also been representing clients in court — and made tens of thousands of crowns in the process.

Whereas Barak and the other three Israeli parliamentarians have been fined for skipping Knesset sessions, Bodström faces no consequences. In fact, Mona Sahlin, the leader of the Social-Democratic party only thinks that it’s a positive thing that her party members have experience from outside of the parliamentary work.

My Piece of the Pie

It’s hard to find a journalist, expert or know-it-all who hasn’t yet cashed in on what the good people at Timbro Media Institute call “Boström Gate”, that is Donald Boström’s by now infamous article implying that the IDF kills Palestinians and sell their organs abroad.

Now, when you honestly didn’t think that there was a single opinion that hadn’t been expressed or a single angle left to give to this story, it’s finally my turn to publish something on the whole affair.

My whipping of this dead horse can be enjoyed here.

The Passing of a Noble Man

Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, passed away this weekend.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising took place during the spring of 1943, and it was the first major organized act of resistance by any civilian population under Nazi rule. Even though its military significance was basically nil, the symbolic importance of the last stand of the remaining Jews of Warsaw before the ghetto was liquidated cannot be exaggerated.

The uprising became the focal point of Israeli Holocaust commemoration, and several of those who participated in it became notable public figures when they moved to Israel after the War. The leader of the uprising, Mordechai Anielewicz, fell in battle during the uprising, but countless streets in Israel carry his name, as does Kibbutz Yad Mordechai.

Marek Edelman was far less celebrated in Israel, because unlike so many of the other survivors of the Holocaust, he remained in Poland after the War. Despite the pogrom in Kielce in 1946, the communist take-over and the anti-Semitic purges of 1968, Edelman stayed in Poland, a country which had a Jewish population of about 3.3 million souls when he was born in 1922, and merely a few thousand at the day of his death on October 2, 2009.

יהיה זכרו ברוך

Quintessentially Quentin

Last night I finally got around to see Quentin Tarantino’s latest film Inglourious Basterds. Anyone who’s seen a Tarantino movie before will undoubtedly recognize his style with fascinating characters, parallel plots and lots of graphic violence.

In my humble opinion it was the cinematic experience of the year — and I’m not referring to 5770.

I enjoyed every second of it, and there were quite a few of those. It is a long movie, more than two hours, but I’ve suffered through commercials that felt longer — I can honestly say that I didn’t look at the time even once, and when the end came I was surprised to see that it was already after midnight.

The theme of the movie – Jewish vengeance for the Holocaust — obviously hits a raw nerve in Israel, and I think that it would be interesting to watch the film in some other countries as well. Does the movie-going crowd in, say, Germany, greet the death of Nazis with the same enthusiasm as the audience at Lev Tel Aviv did last night?

This brings me to my only real reservation to the film.

I left the movie theater with a slightly uneasy feeling about the message that can be extracted from between the lines of this virtuous script. Of course I agree that violence is never good, and that brutality should not be allowed — not to mention cheered – by anyone. However, it makes me a little uncomfortable when this message is presented through the gruesome and extremely painful death of dozens of high-level Nazis, their mistresses and other Germans at the hands of a Jewish woman whose whole family has been murdered by the SS.

But maybe I’m just overly sensitive. In any case, I strongly recommend this excellent film.

A Good Sign

Israelis and Swedes don’t have all that much in common, but one thing they do share is the obsession with the end of summer. However, their respective takes on this event are quite different.

Swedes fear the fall as the plague, and go into heavy denial mode toward the end of August, stubbornly going to the beach, muttering about arboreal decease when the leaves on the trees start turning yellow and falling off, and insisting on having dinner outdoors, even though they can already see their own breath.

Israelis, on the other hand, can’t wait for summer to move on and sometimes declare the arrival of the fall as prematurely as September. They rally a whole range of signs to prove their point: the end of the summer vacation on September 1, the arrival of the first migrating birds on their way to Africa from Europe and the changing back to winter-time a few days before Yom Kippur, just to mention a few.

All of these are, of course, nothing but wishful thinking and in the best of cases only vaguely connected to the meteorological reality.

However, yesterday I actually observed a genuine sign of the changing of the seasons: I got home from work without breaking into a sweat for the first time since April.

Sending off Sins in Sweden

So Rosh Hashanah is over, and there’s a little breather until the rest of the holidays kick in next week. As usual, the holiday was enjoyable — a lot of good food, excellent company and pleasant davening.

Yesterday afternoon as I went to tashlikh on the beach in Tel Aviv, I was reminded of the Old Country and performing this ceremony there. After the afternoon prayers, the whole congregation would go down to the canal surrounding the old city of Malmö. There we’d all say the short prayer and cast the sins of the previous year, symbolized by a piece of bread, into the water.

This is pretty much what went on in Tel Aviv yesterday as well.

But unlike in Malmö, on the Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv there’s no local non-Jewish population that stops in their tracks to gawk at some fifty Jews, who huddle along the canal in the gathering darkness, mumbling some stuff from a book and frantically bombard the handful of ducks and seagulls that happen to be present with loafs and loafs of stale bread.

I bet that’s the kind of stuff that gets over-imaginative minds racing.

Heroic Defense of Double Standards

Jan Guillou, one of the best-known Swedish journalists of our time, is known and admired for his uncompromising quest for the truth (for which he even served time), and his distaste for speculative journalism — especially culture journalism. To many, Mr. Guillou is a hero of the free word.

That’s why quite a few people thought it peculiar that he defended Donald Boström’s speculative conspiracy theories about the IDF killing Palestinians to sell their organs. But on the other hand, maybe we shouldn’t have been surprised, considering the fact that Mr. Guillou writes in Aftonbladet on a regular basis — and given his activism and attitudes in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Listen to Mr. Guillou trying to defend his double standards to a reporter from Swedish public radio here.