Time Out Tel Aviv, 8.1-15.1.2009

Aus dieser Ausgabe möchte ich einen Auszug aus dem Artikel von Itai Waldman, Kolumnist aus Tel Aviv posten, in dem er seine Verzweiflung und Fassungslosigkeit über die Situation in der Region zum Ausdruck bringt.
Aus dem Hebräischen ins Englische übersetzt. Seite 28

You sit on the sofa watching TV and you see the parade of politicians, ministers and generals, and all sorts of people that they find in the attic whenever there’s a war, because they wore a rank on their epaulets so they must know something about something, and everyone analyzes the event, and then we go to our correspondent in Sderot who interviews people where a rocket just fell that very second, and you listen to it all, and you simply refuse to believe that it’s happening again. Because the most frustrating thing about wars is that they never ask you. You’re living your life, in the center of Tel Aviv as it happens, trying to be a good citizen and just go with the flow from age 0 to 80, and to have a nice life, without hurting anyone and without being hurt by anyone else, and every few years, one fine morning, they drop a war on you. And you feel like shouting, ‘Hello?! Could we do this some other day? Because it really doesn’t work for me today; I had other plans. Like living, for example.’

But you can shout until tomorrow, because no-one is listening, and no-one really cares. Not in the places where they make decisions, at least. And you think it could be otherwise, and it could even be that you have some good advice up your sleeve, but with the cacophony of words coming at you from every direction you’re pretty sure that no-one will listen to you, and besides, how much does it really matter?

And then the IDF goes into Gaza, and by the end of the day the generals summarize the first day of the ground operation and say that it was a fantastic day and that we achieved all our goals (’what goals?’ you wonder naively to yourself), and sometime during the news broadcast, quietly and without moving his lips too much, the anchor announces that one of our soldiers was killed. And the subtext is that one dead in nine days is really nothing and we can be happy and go to sleep with smiles on our faces because the operation is succeeding and everything is fine, but it’s 1 a.m. and you’re very cold and you can’t fall asleep so that probably means that nothing is fine.

And all you can think about is that poor boy who last week was hanging out with his friends at the mall, and after that he went to see a movie with his girlfriend, and then they went back to his place, and they made love the way you do when you’re 18, quietly, because you still live at home and your parents are sleeping in the next room. And in the morning they get up together, and he goes to the army and they make plans to meet when he gets his next furlough, in another two weeks, and until then they will speak on the phone, ‘I’ll SMS you when I’m back at the base, so you’ll know I’m okay.’ And then the war starts, and they tell him he is going into Gaza, and she is worried, and he tries to calm her down, and she won’t be calmed, and he has to hang up, and she’s alive, and he’s dead.”
…..

And I know it sounds childish, but we’re tired of looking with grown-up  eyes at this torture rack called Israel. God knows we’ve tried. We went to the army and did our duty and went where we were told to go, and shot where they told us to shoot, and drugged the army, and stopped doing drugs just in time to stay focused and find a serious job, and looked for the right partner to start a family with, and we started to go out to parties a little less often, and in the morning we now read the politics section in the papers, not just the culture and sports, and in the evening we watch the news from beginning to end. We wanted to be grown ups, we really did, but not for this, damn it, not for this.
….

And now you’re frustrated. And your frustration is so big that you can uproot mountains and make buildings collapse. Frustrated, you watch the news hosted by Raviv Druker and Ofer Shelach, whom you usually like a lot, as they talk with some general from the reserves, and they start with that fascist mumbo jumbo, and Shelach says that the best way to fight in a heavily built-up area is to blow up the whole neighbourhood first and then to fight in an open area, and they laugh, they really, really laugh, and you think ‘How can you laugh? How are you able to laugh?’, and you feel as though you’ll never want to laugh again.

Wars have a certain cumulative quality. When you’re a kid and they bomb you, and your dad takes you in his arms and runs to the shelter, the whole situation is infused with a sort of weird childhood magic. And when you’re in the army and you enter a battle with your unit, you’re so brainwashed that it doesn’t really touch you. And you can even survive your first war as an adult civilian. But one day the moment comes when you just collapse.

And that’s what you feel is happening right now. That you don’t understand what they want from you. That you don’t understand why now. That everything looks so capricious, illogical, unfair. And you’re sad for everyone – the people of Gaza, the people of southern Israel, who didn’t do anything bad to anyone either, but mostly for yourself. You’re sad for yourself because you don’t want to to spend the rest of your life like this – from bombing to bombing, from injustice to injustice, from death to death. You’re sad for yourself because life has taught you that you only have yourself. And the only people you thought maybe you’re not sad about are the politicians, but then you give that a bit more thought, and you’re sad for them too. They’re so contemptible, so impotent, that it would be disgusting on your part not to feel grief for them.

War is something huge. Enormous. And you can look at it from so many different angles. You can talk about the causal factors, and you can talk about the disengagement from Gaza; you can try to understand if this is calculated as an election strategy, and you can talk about the crisis within the political left; you can talk about the wartime induction of the media, and you can talk about pathetic celebrities, that go to perform in the bomb shelters in a cynical attempt to revive their careers. But talking about all that will just make the war continue. And that is why the only subject worthy of discussion in wartime is the people who are dying. The newspapers should be filled with lines upon lines with the names of the dead, and who they were, and what they did, and what they wanted to do tomorrow morning but will never do. People who planned to live here with us, today, and to breathe the air that I breathe now when I write this text, and the air that you breathe when you read this text, and the only thing that touches their cold nostrils right now, is ash.

Auszug aus dem folgenden Videoclip mit englischem Untertitel:
Jonathan Shapira, reserve pilot, Black Hawk Captain, refuseniks:

…
It isn’t possible to bomb and kill civillians in quantities
and expect that everything will go as usual and we will go on
talking to our friends and families be somewhat leftist and
somewhat rightist watch ‘Erets Nehederet’ (sketch tv show) and
put the girl to sleep. It won’t just go on forever.

Civilian, opposes protest:

courage to fight, yes,
courage to defend, yes,
but courage to refuse ?
That’s treason.
There is no such thing
“courage to refuse”.

…

With beliefes, not here.
Here we have to live, with a belief you won’t live.
If you didn’t have the army you won’t be able to walk around here.

Fast täglich gehen Menschen in Tel Aviv-Jaffa auf die Straße und demonstrieren gegen den Krieg.
Hier einige Bilder:

Protest against the war, Jaffa, Israel, 17/1/2009.
More than 3000 Arabs and Jews marched from Tel Aviv to Jaffa protesting against the Israeli attack on the Gaza strip.

Photo: Meni Berman
FREEDOM
Against prisons, against ghettos, against slaughterhouses, against the occupation

Photo: Meni Berman

Photo: Meni Berman

Photo: Meni Berman
Jaffa Gaza, 1 Nation, 1 Question

Zu guter Letzt poste ich ein Gedicht eines Freundes.
שלוש פגיעות סומנו
בבנק נותרו פחות
מחר אמציא לי עוד כמה
אבל היום אני מוסרי

רודפים אחרי בסירנות
צבעים אדומים של שקיעה
מחר אהרוג את כולם
אבל היום אני מוסרי

שנים שהבלגנו על קסאם ברגיעה
אך היום הגיע זמן פרעון
הריבית לא מוגדרת – היא לבטח גבוהה
החלו לספור הרוגים ופצועים
כי היום אני אף יותר מוסרי

מלאך מול שטן
מחויב להרוג
גם אם ליד השטן עוד שלושה מלאכים
או שבעה, עשרה
מי יודע?
מלאך מול שטן
זו חובה לחסל
כי אני המלאך הממית שטנים וגם עוד אנשים
שחושבים שאני השטן -
מוזר, כי היום אני כה מוסרי

שלושים? חמישים? תלוי את מי שואלים
אדוני השופט, זו אינה אשמתי
זו מלחמה בַּטרור, מלחמה בְּטרור
ואני באמת באמת מוסרי
גם היום, גם אתמול, גם מחר

מאה ושמונים אומות
שטופות בתעמולת בני ערב
ואני היחיד שרואה נכוחה
אני היחיד שקורא עיתונים
עם כתבים מוסריים ועורכים צדיקים
גם אם לפעמים מדברים יהודים
ששונאים את עצמם עוד יותר מכולם

ליד מחבלים
ילדים גם מתים
וזו גם אשמתם
כי היו חייבים לעצור המחבלים
בעזרת קצת קפה ומעט שכנועים
אבל אלה ערבים -
מכניסים הם אורחים
עם רובים ולפעמים עם קסאם

אנחנו שונים, מוסריים, טהורים
כשאנחנו הורגים זה ללא כוונה
שלושים, חמישים, עד מאה ועשרים
במיוחד אם גדלת על ברכי אמונה
גאולה, אלוקים, גאולה
אוהביך ולומדי תורתך
זוכרים הם היטב ציווי עמלק
אז אפשר גם לירות על זקנה (בטעות)

דמי הילדים כלל אינם זועקים
פעימה אחרונה בלב נערות
מהקוקפיט רואה רק מטרות
בבור בקריה שומע רק צפצופים
אנחנו לא חיות
אנחנו לא חיות!
רק עברים מסכנים תחת איום
או עוורים מרצון, מבחירה
אל תטיף לי מוסר
אם תטיף לא אוכל להגיב
על טילים שנופלים על אחי בדרום
בטילים אחרים שישימו להם סוף

אז הכנתי טבלה
מוסר ואשמה
מורל מלחמה
בני אור ובני חושך
אנחנו והם
ככה נוח, נעים
כך אפשר להמשיך
אל תפריע, אני מנמנם