Mikael Tossavainen
This blog is run by Mikael Tossavainen. He’s a thirty-something historian with a Ph.D. from Lund University, Sweden. Mikael drinks too much coffee, enjoys clearly substandard music, and envies those who get something out of reading poetry.
So what’s this business about two cities?
Mikael lives in Tel Aviv and works in Jerusalem. Thus, these two opposites are the cultural, political and not least topographical poles of his day-to-day life. That, and anything else that might catch his fancy, is what this blog is all about.
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1.
Lennart Frimodig | October 16, 2009 at 17:00
Interesting perspective. A good comment about Linderborg. She is like immune. A young leftist woman. Gives you the right to be as stupid as you like. You are not judged by common standards. And, like any believer, she knows better.
But the idiocy of official Israel, needs to be presented. The Liberman guy. He is a living shame for any democratic society. It gives a very bad picture of isreali people to choose people like him as their representative. I would guess he is worse than Chavez or Raul Castro, both bad people in themselves.
But jews in Sweden are in an underdog position. It is no honour to present yourself as a jew. I have headed refugee camps, 90 % muslims.
I went to Auschwitz with my future wife in 1968, when the communists ruled. We slept in the SS-buliding, made by concrete, so it survived the burning. Whe spend two days walking around. Scary as hell. Birkenau don´t exist.
Lennart Frimodig
2.
Gal Kimhi | October 17, 2009 at 19:32
Dear Mr. Frimodig,
What exactly do you mean by “Birkenau doesn’t exist”????
3.
Lennart Frimodig | October 20, 2009 at 21:11
I exactly mean, that when I and my fiencee went to Auschwitz in 1968, there was no Birkenau to visit. Birkenau was said to have been built by wood, and was all burned down as the nazis left the place.
That is exactly what I mean.
Your question-marks obviously tells another story. You know something different, tell.
4.
Gal Kimhi | October 21, 2009 at 05:42
no no, i thought you meant that there was never in the past a place called Birkenau….
5.
Lennart Frimodig | October 23, 2009 at 16:51
Ok.
Have you been to Auschwitz? When I was young I was slightly obsessed with the concentration camps and all that. I saw every documentary, I read a lot of books. Today there are much better books about the experience. I felt guilty. A kind of western civilization shit. And I very much wanted to identify the bad people to pay back, in my small way. I belong to the revengeful kind of people.
My son has a polish fiancee, extremely beautiful.
Her maternal grandmother is a normal anti-jewish person. We had a long discussion about this, a whole night. The grandmothers experience was being mentally minshandled by jewish shop-keepers in her small town in southern Poland. When she grew up.
What do you think about Liberman?
Lennart Frimodig
6.
Gal Kimhi | October 23, 2009 at 17:06
hi again
yes, i have been there. i am originally from Israel, and it is very common to go with your school to the concentration and death camps in Poland.
My grandmother was there as a prisoner for two years until she got rescued by the allied forces in 44 or 45 i don’t remember the exact year.
you said you feel guilty. Why?
and what do i think about Liberman? well that is a very complicated question. i can understand how you might think of him in the same context with Hugo chavez. But He is far from it. it’s not that i admire him, but i do think that a Firm approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must be taken in order for Israel’s security to be maintained. and he is Firm, ofcourse. i think that he gets very bad public relations. it’s very hard to understand the reality in Israel from what you see on the news
7.
Lennart Frimodig | October 23, 2009 at 18:15
Ok, I will really try to be polite. By myself I am pretty mean. I am not emphatic at all. But, I work with helping people who are objectively in need. Unemployed, long-time sick, functionally handicapped etc. I am very nice to these people.
I am not nice to people who I see as equals. I demand the same thing from them that I demand from myself. I know it is completely wrong.
What was your impression of Auschwitz? When were you there?
I belong to the western civilization. The greek science, the jewish god-shit and the roman empire. (I am a relaxed atheist, I essentially view every believer, in any kind of an religion, as an idiot, sorry). Stone dumb. A two or three year old child. That is the true picture of any believer.
Our kind produced the nazis. There is no excuse for that. It is important to describe the common german killers. The family men. The ordinary people.
Yes, it is very hard to understand Israeli reality from where I live. I read Haaretz, now and then.
But, the settlers in Gaza and on the west bank, there is no excuse for them.
They are like naturally evil people. They are jews, and they take part of defining of what it means to be a jew.
Natural occupiers. People who were born to occypy. Like the dutch in south africa.
For me there are like four stories about jews.
One. the inventive kind. Philip Roth. Kafka. All the scientists.
Two, the victims. The nazi killings. The communist oppression. The discrimination.
Three. The settlers. The really evil people.
Four. People who tries to live their lives.
It is ok, you can´t handle Liberman.
Is your first name male or female?
Lennart Frimodig
8.
Lennart Frimodig | October 23, 2009 at 21:33
I should add one thing.
The wish to define yourself as being different, and the price you pay for that.
In Sweden there are two kinds of people who accomplishes to be different, generation after generation. Gypsies and jews. They manage to keep their other-ness.
Is that a good thing? What is the point?
Personally, I am an individual, I am sceptical of groups. I don´t like this belonging-thing. It is sick.
Lennart Frimodig
9.
Gal Kimhi | October 26, 2009 at 11:06
hi again.
my first name is both for men and women, but i am a man…
I was in Auschwitz 10 years ago, in high-school.
You are very straight-forward, and you don’t really care about the consequences of your words, as i see in your reply. I have to say that i admire that quality in some people, although i could never be like that.
i didn’t understand what you meant by :
“I am not nice to people who I see as equals. I demand the same thing from them that I demand from myself”
as far as my faith goes, i am jewish, but i don’t believe in God. any god, for that matter.
however, I DO believe in tradition, which is something that kept all the major civilizations throughout history. tradition is what really keep societies intact and it gives people a sense of belonging, and although you mentioned that you don’t like the belonging thing, i am sure that you do associate yourself with any kind of group. we all do. it is in our human nature.
it’s not so nice of you to say that the nature of jewish people is to occupy, although i understand where it comes from: media and propaganda. for about 2000 years or so the Jewish people were running for their lives, being hated and oppressed, and now, for 60 years, when they have their own country, finally, and another kind of people claim it for themselves (palestinians), we are the evil occupiers and “it has always been in our nature”. i dont agree with that. Don’t get me wrong, i don’t think that Israel is innocent at all, but we do what we do because we don’t have a choice, AND UNTIL YOU HAVEN’T LIVED IN ISRAEL FOR A LONG TIME, YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RIGHT TO CRITICIZE ISRAEL’S ACTIONS OR ITS PEOPLE.
im not looking for a verbal fight with you, i just had to state my opinion. we could argue about the Israeli-palestinian conflict for 10 years, but that is kind of pointless.
on the contrary, you seem like an intelligent man, and i enjoy corresponding with you.
about the jews in sweden that try to be different – like i said, i believe that it is very important to 99% of the people to belong to something. and that’s why probably they keep their tradition.
Gal kimhi
10.
Lennart Frimodig | October 26, 2009 at 22:15
I wrote a reply, but it got lost in space. Very irritating.
I make three points. I get back to the rest.
1. I am 65 years old. I have nothing to prove.
2. I forgot what it is called when you write with big letters.
Anyway, that is wrong. I can criticize anything, independent of where I live. And this goes for anyone.
How do I do that? I use independent criteria to judge things. Like a lackmus test.
Of course anyone living outside Israel can, with good morals, criticize Israel for it´s actions. You use criteria to judge. It is the same for every country everywhere. You use the human rights shit. Very easy.
3. You don´t understand. Everyone, except jews and romas, turned into ordinary swedes. Finns, duch, germans, norwegians, russians, latvians, estonians, poles, austrians, italians, spaniards, peruvians, chileans, north-americans, mexicans, south-africans, egyptians, iraqians, iranians, indians, chinese, vietnamese, thais, etc.
Everyone became swedes, exept romas and jews. (Well, more exactly, a great proportion of romas and jews.)
Why do you think?
11.
Gal Kimhi | October 27, 2009 at 06:21
again, i dont understand what do you mean by “became swede”. the jews in Sweden are not swedes? why not? because they keep their tradition? i have some friends which are jewish and swedish.
and if you look closely on the list that you provided you will see that most of that list is composed of christians. yes you also wrote other religions, and im sure that those people keep their religious traditions even in sweden (im sure that you have mosques in areas where there is a big concentration of muslims)
about the criticism – i dont agree with you. ofcourse that you CAN critisize whatever you want….. but unless you know how it is to live in a place you cant really understand the way of its thinking. this is what i meant.
12.
Mikael Tossavainen | October 27, 2009 at 08:18
Of course everyone is free to criticize anyone or anything, but — if I may — I’d like to rephrase Gal’s objection slightly:
Anyone whose knowledge of a country and culture is so superficial that he doesn’t know if a name stemming from it is male, female or unisex might want to consider the possibility that he doesn’t really understand all the aspects of what’s going on in that country and thus practice a certain measure of caution when judging it.
13.
Lennart Frimodig | October 27, 2009 at 17:39
Wow, that is stone dumb.
As I said, you criticize by using standards. The Freedom House sort of thing. You need no knowledge about burmese name-patterns to criticize the rule in Burma. Occupation is a bad thing. It can be relatively unharmful, as in Japan and western germany after ww2. But that is not Gaza or the West Bank.
How do you see Freedom House?
14.
Lennart Frimodig | October 27, 2009 at 18:07
To Gal.
Very good question. Interesting.
My answer is something like this.
If you can identify an individual after living three or four generation in a country, as coming from a definite other country, then she is either a roma or a jew. Romas and jews keep their life-patterns, generation after generation, in a way nobody else does. (A great number of them, not all.)
I don´t know why this happens. Swedes in US disappears after two generations.
I agree that I don´t understand how you think because you live there. I like Israel very much because it is a democracy in a hell-hole. Surrounded by bad states.
Could you describe the traditions that you honour, and who are kept out by these traditions?
I did not say that the nature of jews was to occupy. That is the settlers, the evil people. Why don´t you condemn them? They are like objectively bad. Especially if you don´t believe in this religious shit.
15.
Gal Kimhi | October 29, 2009 at 16:44
hi again Lennart
Jewish people all around the world have always 2 different identities:
1- the national one – French/German/Israelis/Mexican/Australians/Polish etc…
2- the religious one – Judaism
once again, i think that the answer to your question is that the jewish people, in contrast to others try to keep both traditions wherever they are, especially the second one.
i think that it’s the same with Muslims, by the way.
i dont really know aho are the “romas”that you speak about.
ofcourse this makes their life-pattern more obviously different, because other people from other Christian countries, would more or less have the same traditions (Christmas, easter, etc…) as the swedes.
there aren’t really any specific traditions that i keep. sometimes i do this and sometimes i do that. what i meant to say that i believe in keeping the traditions or at least some of them in order to have a sense of self, a sense of belonging perhaps.
about the settlers – almost every war that happenned in the world is because of Land and religion. it basically comes down to someone believing that this piece of land is theirs, and the other side believe it is his. this is also the problem in Gaza and the West bank, ofcourse. i DO NOT agree with a lot of the settlers. and if i knew that giving away all of the occupied territories would get us peace i would give them away in one second.
i find two problems with that, however:
1- as a non-believer, and as a man that Grew up in Tel-aviv, which was never a part of the conflict (in terms of land), i don’t really think that i have the right to tell 200,000 people to leave the land that they believe is theirs (im referring to the settlers) and in which they lived all their lives.
2- the much much bigger problem is that i dont believe that if Israel would give away all of the occupied territories the conflict will end. i think that there would just be a new land that the palestinians would claim, and the conflict would be the same.
a good example for that is in 2005 – when israel evacuated all of the settlements next to Gaza , and didn’t achieve anything by that. on the contrary – by loosing it’s hold on the settlements south of gaza, the new common border of Gaza with egypt led to much much more weapon smuggling from egypt to Gaza.
waiting for your reply
gal
16.
Lennart Frimodig | October 29, 2009 at 18:47
Ok, I like you too.
1. Why jews and romas don´t feel like being swedes?
Romas are also called gypsies. There are great numbers of them in Rumania, and they are extremely oppressed. Part of it is their own fault. They were killed like jews in ww2.
I think the reason for this otherness-behaviour is that romas and jews thought they had no native country. They had nowhere to go back to, so they upheld their traditions in a very serious way. If you become a swede you are like a traitor.
Can you understand this?
2. That is a depressing thought, you have a religious identity. But, I think you are wrong. Being a jew is a biological and cultural thing. The culture is strongly influenced by your h-m religion. But, it is much more than your h-m religion. It is your historical experience. The ww2 mass killing is basic. (I don´t like the expression holocoust, I don´t like that definition, it is a victim definition. I like Yad Vashem, or what it is called.)
3. You can´t tell the settlers to leave the occupied territories, then you are part of the problem. Watch their behaviour. Whatch the behaviour of natural occupiers. When they meet people of a lower kind.
They are like the basic definition of occupiers, and they are jews. They tell who you are, deep down. (Mainly to muslims all over the world.) And to me. And you don´t understand. They paint a black picture of jews. Settlers tells the world you are evil people. I think you have to accept that. Because you are a jew you are evil. The settlers prove it. You are swine. The settlers explain that you are swine.
You don´t understand what settlers mean outside of Israel.
4. Peace is a negotiating process. You need to be in a strong position. On the positive side is your basic democray, the settlers and Liberman are on the negative side. Settlers are natural occupiers in religious names, Liberman is Soviet Union in Israel. And you don´t understand.
5. There need to be a non-religious israeli state.
Jews and palestinian arabs lived on your territory historically. They both belong. They should both feel at home.
6. Pulling back from Gaza was very good in the eyes of us, the democratic surrounding. It made Israel a very much better country in many people´s eyes in our part of the world.
7. What do you work with? Do you have a family?
I have two female grandchildren, 5 and 2,5. The older one has diabetes and a very strong imagination. I give her Miyazaki movies. The younger one is a natural rugby player, but she don´t talk. My exwife concentrates on the older one. I go for the younger.
Lennart
17.
Lennart Frimodig | October 29, 2009 at 20:14
I don´t manage to explain what the settlers means.
I am very sorry. They are like the original evil guys. Say Pol Pot and his friends. People who know.
They go by their destiny, they know better. They have this religious book to prove them right.
They mean all the well in the world. They have a destiny to fulfill.
I mean, fuck, they got it from God. They got their mission from God.
They are jews, they are you. You belong to them.
They are evil. No excuse.
Lennart
18.
Gal Kimhi | November 5, 2009 at 08:25
hey Lennart
i just had to say that dont worry, i will reply to you soon, im just too busy right now..
probably i will write in the weekend.
Gal
19.
Lennart Frimodig | November 5, 2009 at 16:35
That was a nice gesture.
Mikael still hasn´t answered my mild criticism of his ideas about what you need to know (name-patterns) to be allowed to express an opinion on a country´s policies. And, by the way, the name pattern thing gets very complicated when it comes to criticizing communist china. Their words are pictures. Are you supposed to understand about that before you can criticize the great leap and the cultural revolution? The political starving to death thing, and the degrading and killing thing.
Answer when you feel like it.
20.
Mikael Tossavainen | November 10, 2009 at 17:57
My point, which I obviously didn’t put clearly enough, is that I get the impression that your knowledge of the settler communities is limited (What is a settlement? Are they all the same? Why are there settlements? Who lives there? When and why did they move there?).
I would venture to say that your knowledge on the issue is so limited that any claims that the settlers are, or represent, the absolute evil, say more about you than about them.
21.
Lennart Frimodig | November 10, 2009 at 19:05
Ok, thank´s for the answer.
You have retreated, now you don´t have to know name-patterns in a specific country, to be allowed to criticize the country in question. A step forward.
Assume you are a honest person. Assume you want palestinians and jews to live in peace.
How do you defend the settlements? And the behaviour of the settlers? And their ideology? And the support of the israeli governement for the settlements?
I am reading Goran Rosenberg´s book, The lost country (in swedish), third edition. How do you view his picture of Israel?
My idea is that if you are a settler on occupied territory, and you can count on governement support, then you turn into something evil. The logic of the situation makes you evil.
22.
Gal Kimhi | November 10, 2009 at 20:51
ok…
i will try to answer some of the questions that you asked me… (Lennart)
1 – i dont really believe that jews don’t want to be swedes. what is it exactly “to be Swede”? can you define it? because Sweden, as far as i understand, is a country that accepted so many different people from different backgrounds in the last 50-60 years that maybe “to be Swede” has become something which is rather obscure. again i must emphasize that jews have a different religion, which makes them separate.
2 – i didn’t really understand that point… what’s an H-M religion??? and what do you mean that being a jew is a biological thing?
3 &4 – i agree just a little bit with you about this point. the settlers obviously show Israel in a very negative light to the world. and that’s very funny, because they are less than 3% of Israel’s population. the other “regular” areas and “regular” people in Israel are never shown on the media. about what you said to tell them to leave – we can’t just leave these territories without getting some kind of an agreement, and until we can be sure that giving those territories would get us peace – we can’t leave them…
5- israel is not a religious state. period. we are not ruled by religious leaders. some of them have a lot of influence, ofcourse, but this is just because religious people in israel represent a big portion (but NOT the majority) of the population, and we are a democracy afterall, so a lot of times, some religious issues get in the way of things.
6- like i said before, although it seems like a good thing that we did, pulling back from Gaza, in my mind was a tactical mistake. we just got less control on weapons coming in from egypt, eventually those weapons were fired on Israeli towns, and in response we had to get ourselves into gaza again last year. what did we achieve? good view from other countries, and then when we went into gaza again, everyone hates us (again).
before i tell you about myself – i have to ask you: why do u hate the settlers so much? what did they do to you? what did they do to the palestinians? i dont know if you know – but actually the settlers are not really violent. i thought that you would express your anger about the Israeli army, and the Israeli government, but for some reason you are angry about the settlers. there have been very few cases of settlers going and actually killing palestinians or going into palestinian villages. they just went into those territories and lived there. nothing else. if they have to , they will protect themselves, but its rare to see an act of aggression from them towards the palestinians. it’s exactly the opposite with the palestinians.
a bit about me – i’m 27. i was born and raised in Tel-Aviv. after i was released from the army i came to Hungary to study medicine, and now i’m in the middle of the 5th year of medical school.