December 3, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-02

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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This all happens without a sound, other than the birds, distant traffic, and what leaks from the earbuds of people passing by:

Two women lean over the bush that lines one block of the pedestrian street. As I approach, I can't see what they're doing.

One of them stands. With her left hand, she balances herself against the other woman until she is upright. Her right hand holds several short branches. She's wearing headphones and talking to someone in something like Russian.

She turns. Our eyes meet. I tilt my head, Scooby Doo-like, wondering what the branches are.

She walks forward. When she's closer, she reaches toward me with the branches and waves them under my nose.

I sniff them cautiously. They smell wonderful, like basil. I inhale more deeply and hold onto the scent for as long as I can.

I smile at her. She nods. She turns back to the other woman, then to the bush. She reaches over it and resumes her harvest.

Later, at home, as I write this, I search online for images of basil. What I see of the bushes doesn't look like the ones that line the street. I'll have to take a closer look at them when I pass by them tomorrow. And I'll take another sniff.

In the afternoon, I visit my family at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers. When I enter their apartment, I can sense the difference in the air immediately. Now that the air purifier has been running for a couple of days, it's like entering a different climate. No one is coughing from the pollution outdoors.

Things have gotten shuffled at the House since yesterday, when the war resumed. Last night, we had supper in the dining hall. Tonight, they're back to eating supper in their apartments.

A staff member brings my family's meals to them and apologizes for the changing plans. A couple of other workers came over to them at lunch, also apologizing that the usual wine and pastries weren't at the doors of the synagogue at the end of the morning's service.

I don't think they bring personal apologies to every resident. They know my family well. One is on the House council. They are also resident experts on issues of air quality, as well as religious affairs.

Like everyone else, the House is improvising, based on the degree to which we're at war on any given day.

Today, for the most part, the terrorists are throwing rockets at us, and we're bombing them.

(Of course, I'm saying "we" as I sit in a comfortable basement, a few meters from a shelter, in a city that rockets rarely reach. On the other hand, my house just shook from a series of unidentified booms. I hope it's something my landlord is doing upstairs. Checking later, I see that there have been "massive rocket alerts" just south of us.¹ In the town where I used to rehearse, one person was "lightly hurt" with a head injury from falling shrapnel.²)

The news sites have had some interesting information about how we're doing our targeting. The Guardian has a large article on an AI system we're using.³ They call it "The Gospel," but the Hebrew word, b'sorah, could just mean "news." They link to a page on the Army website from about a month ago discussing it, so we're not keeping it a secret.⁴

It isn't very clear as to how AI figures into it. That's enough of a buzzword nowadays that it could mean just about anything. The result, though, is that we can identify targets more readily than before.

The information is still checked against humans in the loop. Google Translate claims that the Army page says, "With the help of artificial intelligence, and through the rapid and automatic extraction of updated intelligence - it produces a recommendation for the researcher, with the goal being that there will be a complete match between the machine's recommendation and the identification performed by a person."

The Army has published an interactive map⁵ dividing the area we're targeting into small numbered blocks. They say that they will announce which areas are about to be targeted, so people can get out of them.⁶ They're announcing them through the internet (though not everyone has access, or even electricity there) and through flyers, which also have a QR code to use with phones.

While over a hundred hostages were released during the truce, even more remain. The gaming industry, working with a group of reservists who first organized for protests before the war, has released a well-made video, "Or is AFK," about two young gamers who are currently hostages.⁷

A large demonstration is happening tonight in the city south of us, demanding the release of the rest of the hostages. For the first time at these rallies, freed hostages are speaking of what they have endured.⁸

At the same time, the Prime Minister is giving a press conference, restating what he's been saying at previous ones. He is asked about claims that he colluded with other people in government to downplay the possibility of the terrorist attack that later happened. He calls them "conspiracy theories."⁹ He may be right at that, under the principle that we shouldn't attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

There is, however, some pretty good evidence that balls were dropped at a variety of levels, leading to the intelligence failures before the massacre. It looks like things got clogged up enough that the information never got to the top levels. Some of it, as mentioned before, appears to have been due to low level officials ignoring warnings because they came from women.¹⁰ The New York Times went deep on newer revelations a few days ago.¹¹

The Justice Minister has announced that courts are going back to normal operations. That appears to mean that the Prime Minister's graft trial might resume.¹² That might give him a measure of relief: he might be able to avoid losing his job due to venality and incompetence if he has already been thrown out due to mere corruption.

Of course, that was announced when the war was on hold. It's back. We might need a spreadsheet to understand which version of "normal" things are returning to at any given moment.

I had thought I wouldn't get around to mentioning much news tonight. That's what I get for skipping news entirely yesterday.

Typing that, I realize that my eyes are tired. I need to pause before I edit and post this. Time to tilt back, close my eyes for a moment and breathe. Doing it, I'm pleased to discover that, breathing deeply enough, I can recall the scent of the branches with which I was blessed this afternoon.

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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.