Opinions
'We are peace-seekers' - Ehud Barak
It is 21 years since the first Intifada in Gaza. Two weeks ago the truce between Hamas and Israel ended and Hamas resumed mortar fire on Israel. Hanukkah over, Israel responded with dedication and air power striking targets in Gaza - government offices, mosque, residences, roads, bridges, communications positions - and soon over 400 Palestinians were killed including over 60 civilians and children and a senior Hamas official. Israeli officials lament the loss of Israeli life from Hamas rockets and report a total of 31 deaths for the entire 2008! The dead Hamas official had advocated increased use of suicide bombers to improve their killing record.
The majority of Jews and Palestinians are hard-working folk who contribute to society’s variety, complexity and progress. Both include politicians and militants (radicals) who exploit the majority’s pacifism to achieve personal, often anti-social agendas. Israeli leaders and Hamas seem to belong to the second. They have sworn to fight each other: a mouse shaking fists at a cat, which is supported by an elephant. The struggle, as congealed in Gaza, has therefore been unequal and persists because of Arafat’s blunders, the fatalist position of Hamas and Israel’s intransigence, undeniably a reflection of its regrettable domination by Ashkenazim known for being rigid and intolerant. Yet regardless of how difficult Palestinians have been, Jews had a duty of tolerance - they were after all injected into Palestinian lands without any consultation, and surely would not have tolerated the reverse position - and were expected to negotiate a modus vivendi before flexing their American muscle with crippling results to Palestinians, thus ensuring a lasting enmity, compounded by blatantly stealing of Arab land under protection of tanks and artillery. They have thus continuously breached a condition in the Balfour Declaration which made their settlement possible; it stated: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, …"
It’s astonishing that in this day of wondrous inventions and easy communications that large groups exist that live by and promote this type of barbarism. I am particularly disappointed with the Jews, a learned people with a long history of living with other cultures, surviving slavery, indenture and other privations, through discipline, diligence and single-mindedness to achieve the highest positions in the modern west - a dominant presence in business, the professions, government, finance, with authority over people who are mostly not of their faith. Witness their high representation in the US federal and various state governments, their presence in New York which makes that city the second most populous Jewish city after Tel Aviv, and in Toronto. We trust them to be fair and just, but their attitude and behaviour towards Palestine belie this.
I am bothered that North American Jews are 80% Ashkenazim and thus intolerant and self-promoting, and in many ways as problematic as the Wahhabis of Islam or fundamentalists of other religions. They number less than 20 million worldwide (6 million in North America) and should be held accountable to the wider world - now some 6.6 billions - to display a standard of social and moral behaviour far superior to what Israel shows today.
The persistence of war in the ME is sad commentary on the intransigence of humans who demand rights and considerations, yet withhold them from others, on the basis of religion. Religion is indeed the opiate of the people, and has spurred its leading exponents into cruel and inhuman behaviour comparable to similar events recorded in the Tanakh and Quran. It was simpler when people fought mainly for greed. Rabbi Elyse, of Brattleboro, Mass., USA, said, in 2006, “Judaism is most assuredly not a pacifistic tradition.”
Parallel fireplaces in a world of similarities
The neighbour next door looks forward to the lighting of our wood burning fireplace. In the months of snow when footfalls on decks are muffled with ice, she comes out into her backyard and sniffs the smoke that hovers among the trees. When she does this her eyes point backwards in time as she runs through familiar landscapes of her childhood growing up on a farm in Saskatchewan.
We are close friends – in the last few years we noticed similarities despite different worlds and grew closer. Now we are family. She envies us having a wood burning fireplace in our family room – she makes do with a gas one that simulates a wavering flame.
We are close friends – in the last few years we noticed similarities despite different worlds and grew closer. Now we are family. She envies us having a wood burning fireplace in our family room – she makes do with a gas one that simulates a wavering flame.
We admit that such technology isn’t the real thing – while wood smoke is an insidious agent that coats the drapes and the underside of the white ceilings, at the same time it causes delicious episodes of hacking and irritated eyes, which can only be delivered by a chestnut-roasting flame and heat radiating from dying embers long after we are in our beds.
But she does have a fire pit, which is lit most weekends during the summer when the authorities allow it in the few non-hazard sessions that tinder dry spells allow. Sometimes this annoys me, because her family gatherings around the fire pit can be cantankerous and continue non-stop into the early hours of these sleepless nights when it starts becoming painfully daylight again at 3 a.m. But summers, as we know it, are not for restless sleep in sweat-soaked T-shirts and ungraciously longing for cold weather again. It is a time for families to reconnect over cold drinks around a blazing fire, happily watching squadrons of kamikaze mosquitoes fall into the flames, looking up into a cloudless black sky to see fixed dots of lights and a predictable satellite hurtling past every 20 minutes, and for me in a bedroom next to my neighbour’s back fence, vexed and vapid with humidity, listening to her recall childhood jaunts with cackling siblings in what are descriptions of rural Canada similar to Alice Munro country, but this recounting first-hand and eye-witness, and more-detailed in its richness and rawness.
Since we became “family” we have chatted enough times at the post-dinner table for me to see a clear picture of the difficult days she knew growing up a “farm-girl”, and how much a fireplace still means to her, not only for its survival warmth in brutal winters, but for the nuances, associations and similarities that have brought us together as different people - as neighbours, then friends, and now family - in a place far away from where we were born.
A fireplace was also survival for me. My first recollection is Ma’s - U-shaped and rugged, moulded from dirt and baked ceramic dry with countless cooking. On this she would perch dented pots with soot-blackened bottoms in which she relentlessly boiled tea leaves into an inexorable chai mixture of tannin, sugar, and a final infusion of gooey condensed milk; in these pots, the foot-soldiers of what would never blossom into gourmand vessels, she deposited rice that had been tediously garnered for insects, dead or alive, chaff that had been blown away through repetitive tossing in a tin tray called a “soup”, and small white stones, virtually indiscernible from grains of cooked rice, and which could create a jarring riot in a mouth full of newly appeared teeth.
The children around me made miniature versions of these fireplaces with mud. We spent many happy hours playing “dolly-house” with this in imitation of the adult world – we traveled afar throughout the backyards collecting small pieces of wood which we tied in bundles and carried on our heads, drooping with fatigue the way the adults did. We pretended to be riding carts pulled by oxen or stubborn mules – we shouted, “Hie! Hie!” the way the cartmen did at the animals labouring with the bigger loads of firewood. We used cans for pots and pans and borrowed handfuls of uncooked rice from sooty kitchens. We sneezed, rubbed our rheumy, smoke-filled eyes, and fanned ourselves while complaining about the heat and smoke the way our mothers and grandmothers did. We wiped our eyes with the hems of shirts and skirts and blew running noses voluminously into the dirt.
In a dining room thousands of miles away and decades later, I heard from my neighbour that her early childhood years saw an open brick fireplace before introduction of the wood stove with its chimney stack exiting through the roof. Pots and pans, blackened with age, permanently hung over a slow fire. As a young lady, she missed schooldays when she and her siblings helped out with the harvest. In late summer she traveled far to collect wood for cooking and heating. Horses drew the firewood out of the forests before tractors came along. They yelled, “Yihah! Yihah!” at the horses as they goaded them to pull the birch logs out of the forest floors soaked with autumnal rain.
I marvel at the similarities – no wonder our households have become one family!
But she does have a fire pit, which is lit most weekends during the summer when the authorities allow it in the few non-hazard sessions that tinder dry spells allow. Sometimes this annoys me, because her family gatherings around the fire pit can be cantankerous and continue non-stop into the early hours of these sleepless nights when it starts becoming painfully daylight again at 3 a.m. But summers, as we know it, are not for restless sleep in sweat-soaked T-shirts and ungraciously longing for cold weather again. It is a time for families to reconnect over cold drinks around a blazing fire, happily watching squadrons of kamikaze mosquitoes fall into the flames, looking up into a cloudless black sky to see fixed dots of lights and a predictable satellite hurtling past every 20 minutes, and for me in a bedroom next to my neighbour’s back fence, vexed and vapid with humidity, listening to her recall childhood jaunts with cackling siblings in what are descriptions of rural Canada similar to Alice Munro country, but this recounting first-hand and eye-witness, and more-detailed in its richness and rawness.
Since we became “family” we have chatted enough times at the post-dinner table for me to see a clear picture of the difficult days she knew growing up a “farm-girl”, and how much a fireplace still means to her, not only for its survival warmth in brutal winters, but for the nuances, associations and similarities that have brought us together as different people - as neighbours, then friends, and now family - in a place far away from where we were born.
A fireplace was also survival for me. My first recollection is Ma’s - U-shaped and rugged, moulded from dirt and baked ceramic dry with countless cooking. On this she would perch dented pots with soot-blackened bottoms in which she relentlessly boiled tea leaves into an inexorable chai mixture of tannin, sugar, and a final infusion of gooey condensed milk; in these pots, the foot-soldiers of what would never blossom into gourmand vessels, she deposited rice that had been tediously garnered for insects, dead or alive, chaff that had been blown away through repetitive tossing in a tin tray called a “soup”, and small white stones, virtually indiscernible from grains of cooked rice, and which could create a jarring riot in a mouth full of newly appeared teeth.
The children around me made miniature versions of these fireplaces with mud. We spent many happy hours playing “dolly-house” with this in imitation of the adult world – we traveled afar throughout the backyards collecting small pieces of wood which we tied in bundles and carried on our heads, drooping with fatigue the way the adults did. We pretended to be riding carts pulled by oxen or stubborn mules – we shouted, “Hie! Hie!” the way the cartmen did at the animals labouring with the bigger loads of firewood. We used cans for pots and pans and borrowed handfuls of uncooked rice from sooty kitchens. We sneezed, rubbed our rheumy, smoke-filled eyes, and fanned ourselves while complaining about the heat and smoke the way our mothers and grandmothers did. We wiped our eyes with the hems of shirts and skirts and blew running noses voluminously into the dirt.
In a dining room thousands of miles away and decades later, I heard from my neighbour that her early childhood years saw an open brick fireplace before introduction of the wood stove with its chimney stack exiting through the roof. Pots and pans, blackened with age, permanently hung over a slow fire. As a young lady, she missed schooldays when she and her siblings helped out with the harvest. In late summer she traveled far to collect wood for cooking and heating. Horses drew the firewood out of the forests before tractors came along. They yelled, “Yihah! Yihah!” at the horses as they goaded them to pull the birch logs out of the forest floors soaked with autumnal rain.
I marvel at the similarities – no wonder our households have become one family!