November 20, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-11-19

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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The rain starts just after I wake up, That's good. Had it started earlier, I might have stayed in bed to listen to it.

When I get to my desk, the internet connection is down. That often happens when it rains. But I know to start following the path of the problem right at my Mac and work my way outward. Stopping and restarting the Wi-Fi on my Mac is enough.

I ask Alexa for the weather report. The temperatures are in the sweatshirt zone. Just where I like it. I have a great rain jacket. When I only need to keep the rain off, it isn't overly warm. But, with the appropriate other layers, I have worn it outside in the deepest Cleveland winters.

It's only drizzling when I head to work, but quickly starts raining harder. That's OK. I'm ready. As my father used to say, "It's a great day to be a duck."

A WhatsApp message in the morning tells us that a friend of the family is worried about her husband. He's fighting across the border. She hasn't heard from him in a month. I'm told that soldiers there aren't allowed to have phones, because they might reveal their location.

Later in the day, we hear that he's OK.

The local news site has images and video from the event on our beach last Friday, where surfboards represented the hostages.¹ The mayor and other officials speak. A singer performs what the news site says is the anthem of the war, "To Get Out of Depression." I hadn't heard it. I hunt down the video² and the lyrics³.

Our biggest pop star has released a video of her recent Eurovision hit, "Unicorn" unplugged, in support of the country during the war.⁴ She did a beautiful version of it to close out a telethon several weeks ago.

The new National Library has set out an empty chair for each of the hostages. Consulting with the families, each chair holds a book that they have selected specifically for that person.⁵

A report charges that warnings of the imminent attacks before October 7th were ignored because the surveillance soldiers were women.⁶ A report today in The Atlantic tells of a female team at the CIA being similarly ignored before 9/11.⁷

I send the October 7th report to one of my family at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. She replies,"Now that I read it, I am shocked but not surprised. Sexism is pervasive in Israeli society. It's been a frustration of mine for years that my daughters have to fight, not only the ones I did, but even more."

Our largest cab company has established a site where people can donate money to supply cab rides for soldiers on leave (presumably only those on our side of the border).⁸ Another top pop singer is fronting the effort.⁹ I don't know if the cab company is donating anything themselves, or just looking for others to pay for it. Capitalists gonna capitalize. (But, to his credit, one of our oligarchs has chipped in one million shekels.¹⁰

A tweet claims that sea pirates from the Houthis, a group in Yemen who have been tossing the occasional rocket our way, had captured a ship in the Red Sea with 22 crew members from here.¹¹ Not quite. The photo shows Hebrew words on the ship, but it looks like an ad: "Get the news before everyone on Telegram."

Our news reports that all the crew members were from elsewhere. ¹² And, while one of our tycoons has a stake in the shipping company, It's a British company that has leased out a ship flying a Bahamian flag to a company from Japan. International shipping is weird.

My family reminds me that today is my mother's yahrzeit, the anniversary on the Jewish calendar of her passing. I hadn't realized that hers and my father's were only three weeks apart. She passed away many years after he did.

I say Kaddish during the afternoon prayers. I do it quietly, more or less in sync with the leader. I don't think anyone else notices.

Through the day, on Facebook and in emailed responses to the newsletter, several people respond to yesterday's post. I had proposed that a single joined state was the closest thing to a possible solution to the situation here. Folks have questioned how it might work.

I should say again that I'm no expert, and not cut out to be a pundit. There are existing groups, such as A Land for All¹³ who have looked at this in a lot of detail, and have clearer ideas than I do.

Maybe the single state could have different organizations or ministries (or perhaps sub-ministries within one) covering religious issues. I think there's a Muslim entity, the Waqf¹⁴, currently managing Al-Aqsa.

One challenge is how many there might need to be: in addition to Judaism and Islam, there are, of course, significant presences of Christianity, Druze, and Baha'i.

It also gets into the messy question of what falls under the rubric of Religious Affairs. I'm not sure that any two religions agree as to what "religion" is. Does it foreground belief? Behavior? Tribal identity? That's a massive question.

There's the symbolic issue of flags. I would picture the single state using both the Israeli and Palestinian flags.

Corruption within the government and ministries would be so close to inevitable around here that there would have to be safeguards in advance.

And to implement it would involve sufficient trust between the parties. We might hope that time might bring this about. But here, at least, it seems that younger generations are more radicalized than the older, rather than moving toward coexistence.¹⁵

I've seen a worry that, demographically speaking, we might soon be outnumbered, and that the new majority could vote any earlier decision into oblivion. But I also worry about that worry. Anything with a tinge of "We can't let those people outnumber us" has echoes of dangerous groups in the US and from earlier in history.

What happens in the next few months will be critical. My guess is that the terrorists running the area across the border will be destroyed and driven out. Due to how I understand they're organized, though, they're not as dependent on leaders as other groups, and might find it easier to reorganize and re-emerge.

The current leadership to the west is quite old and losing control. Our own current government will probably be voted out (and the Prime Minister might go to prison, since he was already on trial before the war started). Other current non-governmental groups, like terrorist enemies to the north and south, and whatever sense of organization our own violent extremists to the west might have, present their own threats.

Quite a mess, with a whole lot of variables. I probably haven't even thought of other essential problems.

It's late at night as I finish writing this. I've been drawn into tangents by following the links to videos. I hear the rain starting up again. Good. I look forward to falling asleep to the sound.

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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.