Semiotic Confusion

I had just sat down in the cafeteria with my lunch about an hour ago when the air-raid siren went off. At first, no one really took it very seriously, but after a while people started to remember that there actually is a war going on, so they stopped eating and asked each other what they should do.

One would think that this is an easy one: when the air-raid siren goes off, one looks for shelter.

One would be wrong.

It seems that Jerusalemites have been conditioned to treat the air-raid siren as an indicator of a public event — no doubt a consequence of years and years of wailing sirens on Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day for Israel’s Fallen.  Consequently, they all got up to go out on the terrace to get a better view.

One can’t help but wonder what would have happened if it hadn’t been a false alarm.

And those of you who might think that this is a behavior isolated to employees of Yad Vashem, can read this report on Ynet with an eye-witness in the Katamon area who reacted in the exact same way. He’s quoted as saying:

“I went out on the balcony to see if there was anything going on, but there was nothing. The neighbors asked what had happened, but it didn’t seem to be serious.”

According to the report, this guy wasn’t the only one who reacted to the siren by going out to have a look and not to seek shelter.

It would seem that the City of Jerusalem has an important educational task ahead of them.

Decision Time

So there it was. Yesterday when I returned home from work, I found my voter’s card waiting for me in the mailbox. On February 10 the citizens of Israel will go to the ballots for the eighteenth time to elect representatives to the Knesset.

For me it’ll be the first time around.

Obviously, I’m all for democracy, the ability to influence and all that, but still I await Election Day with mixed emotions. I wasn’t in favor of holding early elections, and I would have been perfectly happy if the current government would have been able to see its four years through. In fact, I was probably the last supporter of the Olmert government in the country. It’s not that I think that he’s such a great Prime Minister or that I think that his government has done such a fabulous job, but because I just don’t know for whom to vote instead.

As long as I lived in Sweden, it was very easy to have an opinion about for whom I’d vote in the Israeli elections. Even though this might sound strange, it shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s familiar with the public discourse in Sweden and the unbearable lightness of having opinions about the Mid East from the safe distance of a few thousand kilometers from the Levantine reality.

Now, however, it’s a completely different ballgame. None of the parties running makes me really enthusiastic – most of them just annoy me, and a few of them are actually quite scary.

Nonetheless, I’ll have to make a decision, and I have to make it pretty soon.