November 19, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-18

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

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It's still light when I head out to the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. We changed the clocks a few weeks ago. Tonight, Shabbat ends early. If I came over at my usual time, I would miss the Havdalah ceremony. .

I leave my apartment about an hour earlier than I had, a few minutes later than I'd planned. My tutor has asked me to send her WhatsApp voice messages through the week. This gives me more experience speaking Hebrew. I record and send one, telling her about yesterday's sirens and of speaking with my landlord in the shelter. (Is there an English word for "landlord and landlady"? Maybe "landfolks"? "ballaboosters"?)

In describing the fallen shrapnel that he had seen, I realize that I don't know the word for "forearm." I dig through my memory and come up with a Biblical term, z'roa. Checking online later, I see that there's a more modern word, amah. But people would understand the word from the Bible.

I only see a couple of people on the way. A man my age and a young boy get out of a car on the hill down to the House. None of the usual people are sitting outside.

When I go into the House, a man with a walker waves at me with his stump of an arm. He lost the hand when he was in the Army, I believe, a half-century or more ago. (I may mention this to my tutor, since I now know the modern word for "forearm.") I nod and wish him a good Sabbath. There are still a few minutes left.

My family fills me in on what's been happening with them. They did indeed hear the same sirens that I heard yesterday. As usual, they went into their secure hallway. They heard a lot more booms than I did.

The relative who had been on the northern front has been discharged due to his health. He's not happy about it.

Another relative's car completely broke down. She needs it for work. She was able to get a good, sensible used car for less than we feared that it might cost. The market for cars has tanked since the war started. Consumer confidence is low.

I get the usual weekly critique of my posts. They're pleased with what I've been writing for the most part, and that they've been able to help. Almost all the sources from Hebrew language media, other than the ones from the city's local news site, come from them. So do a lot of the English-language sources.

I have made a few mistakes. The Yiddish word for "switch" that I mentioned yesterday is actually Schalter, as it is in German. I was close, but not quite right. I think I had already caught and corrected some other glitches.

They ask me about some of the things that they hear from foreign media. The pressure for a ceasefire is baffling. A ceasefire is only possible if each side trusts the other to keep it. Neither does.

There's also the fantasy of a "two-state solution." That sounds nice, unless you've actually looked at a map. There's no way to divide the area into two states without leaving one of them split into fragments. Even the squiggly gerrymandering of the Abraham Accords made for a map that no one could imagine would be sustainable.

One problem is that the area across the border doesn't make sense as an independent, self-sufficient land, and never did. ¹ The border is the line to which we pushed back another country's army in a conflict decades ago. It doesn't have anything to do with the area within it. It was a hub for trading, and once that line was drawn, most of the goods to trade couldn't get there.

At the same time, refugees from the rest of the area landed there. It wasn't their home. They saw it as temporary. Their descendants still do, generations later. Many live in what are still called "refugee camps," which weren't built to last.

A video posted a few days ago by our TV news network brings out a key point (at about 4:55 in).². When you ask a child across the border where they're from, they don't mention the country or region in general. They name the town or village, even if only their great-grandparents came from there. They don't just dream of returning to the land in general, but to the specific place. And in a lot of cases, that place has been destroyed and something else built where it was.

I had heard of people wearing makeshift necklaces with the keys to the homes that they fled, so they would still be able to open their doors when they would return. Most of those houses no longer exist. And to return would mean forcing out the people who now have lived there for generations. (My aunt, who recently passed away at 90, had lived in her town for some 70 years.) If such a forced movement of people wasn't right then, it wouldn't be right now.

Part of the problem is the whole structure of nation-states. (I know, this is far from an original thought. I was reminded of it by a podcast interview with Naomi Klein.³)

For millennia, this part of the world wasn't made up of relatively small countries. The whole region was a part of changing empires, with towns and other areas with their own identities scattered within them.

Here and elsewhere around the world, a whole lot of how things worked got messed up by governments (often colonialists or conquerors) drawing arbitrary lines and declaring various areas to be countries, regardless of who lived where.

Drawing even more lines to declare "states" isn't going to work. For a variety of reasons, the way that communities have grown here, around and between one another, doesn't allow for such facile map making.

The only thing that may work is joining the areas together as one land with the several communities living within it. The part that might be close to impossible now, as it would be with a mere ceasefire, would be to get everyone to trust one another enough to work together. And we would have to work together to rebuild what has been destroyed in this war and before.

The odds that it will happen are extremely low. But nothing else will work, either.

And that's about as close to talking international politics as I get.

During the day, I get a few messages about what I posted yesterday. A dear friend in San Francisco reminds me that the flyovers that I vaguely remembered were the Fleet Week flights of the Blue Angels.⁴

She quotes Lawrence Ferlinghetti: "They dive upon our city every year, in a frightening militarist and nationalist display of pure male testosterone. I’ve seen old Vietnam ladies in Washington Square diving under the benches! Do we really need to be reminded yearly how our planes have bombed Third World countries back to the Stone Age?"⁵

My family explains one cryptic bit in the description I quoted of the noises in the sky. boom al koli doesn't mean "a boom on my voice" but "a voice-like boom." While the letter yud at the end of a word can indicate a possessive, as Google Translate and I thought, it can also convert a noun into an adjective, as it did here.

It's dark when I head home from the House. The sky is clear. It's just past the start of the Hebrew month, so there's only a thin sliver of a moon.

At the corner, in a window near the entrance to the park, someone is practicing bebop saxophone lines. Across the street, I hear children playing in a well-lit yard behind high fences.

No one is in the park at all. At the other end of it, a woman drags a suitcase up the steps to my street. Its plastic wheels clack against the cement.

Closer to home, cats gather around another woman. She's about my age. I expect that she is laying out food for them. Perhaps they do, too.

As I get closer, I see that she is going through a public trashcan, picking out glass bottles. She can redeem them for about a dime apiece. I don't say hello. I have learned that people who are doing that prefer not to be seen.

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Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

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L'hitraot.