December 26, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-25

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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Tank

The headline throws me at first: "IDF combat soldier tank top found in Gaza after missing for 13 years." What happened to the rest of the tank? ¹

The sub-headline is even more confounding: "IDF reservist soldiers in Gaza found a faded tank top from a Nahal soldier in a Gaza resident's wardrobe." How did they fit a tank turret in a wardrobe? Had they tunneled through to Narnia?

The article fills in the rest of the story. It has a picture of the neatly folded clothing. Oh. At least in that, our troops are being thorough. They were even able to trace how that specific Army tank-top ended up there after thirteen years.

And I thought my vintage King Crimson t-shirts had stories.

The House Next Door

The sound of an accordion playing something like either Christmas carols or folk-klezmer comes up through the window at work. It may be unaccompanied. It may be live. It may be coming from the small house next door, or the white van parked in front of it.

The house is an anomaly. Most of the street, other than this office building and the cemetery on the other side of it, is made up of residential towers. They're building expensive new apartments across the street.

Most of the space next door (just east of us? My sense of direction gets messed up on this street. The map is always a surprise.) is a dusty lot. A single one-story house stands at its center, set back from the street. From what I can see through the shabby rattan fence, it's quite plain. While it's not in disrepair, no one has put much effort into beautifying the exterior. Arbitrary stuff sits on the porch. Men are often working under the hood on trucks.

I would love to know the story behind it. I imagine that a family, including or descended from an early settler in this town, built the house as much as a century or so ago. They probably have had a lot of offers to purchase the house and, more importantly, the lot that it's on, for a ton of money.

I imagine that they're not interested. I imagine that they'll keep it until the last remaining descendant dies off, marries into a distant family or finds a job far away, or is too old to handle it alone. I figure that the family has figured out long ago what to do with it then.

Someday, looking out the window, we will see cranes.

My coworker across the aisle from me, closer to the window, is blocking the sound out with a talk show on his phone. He's listening loudly enough that I can hear the upper frequencies through his earbuds from a couple of meters away. It's in Russian, or something like it.

So much attention

A friend asks me why Americans pay so much attention to what happens here. It's a good question. I have, as usual, hunches rather than answers.

Many Americans trace their own religious or ethnic origin stories, if you go back far enough, to things that happened here. It's part of their identity.

Over the past few decades, the narrative about us has been flipping. The Jews, seen for a long time as an oppressed people, are now seen by some as oppressors. A lot of young people now have never known people who survived the Holocaust or lost people through it, and have never known Jews who survived the ethnic cleansing in the past century through which most Jews were expelled from many countries in the Arab world. What they see is limited to a recent America in which many Jews have become successful (and in which the Jewish community, sensitive to how it is seen, keeps quiet about its tired and poor) and an Israel that, for most of their lives, has been an economically successful military power. It's no surprise that the perception of Israel and Jews often slopes strongly by the age of those asked.

And it is, indeed, hard to deny that governments of Israel have not dealt rightly with its non-Jewish population, and that the current government, to the extent that it is taking coherent action on anything, has gone overboard in this year's war.

Many of us raised in America received some religious education when we were children. For Jewish children, at least, that involved a view of ourselves and of Israel that was simplified and idealized to a level that we could understand. Many of us dropped out of that education once we hit thirteen. It's no surprise that we were left with a child's-eye view of that reality, and were jolted and disillusioned when what we discovered as we grew up was more nuanced and complicated.

Suggestions have been raised about what to do about the way things are now. Unfortunately, many of them seem to involve time machines undoing things that were done in our great-grandparents' days.

And some things that might have seemed possible in a bygone age, before October, no longer do. It's unlikely that any group of humans would want to sit down and compromise with either a group who did what was done to us at the start of the war, or a group who has done what we have done to others in the weeks since then.

One peculiarity of our species: Every group insists that "We have exceptional resilience. If you attack us, we become stronger. If you hit us, we hit back harder. And no other group in the world is like that." Each group believes itself to be unlike every other group in precisely the same way.

Some Americans also consider only those on one side of the conflict to be "of Color." That allows them to slot the groups into existing stories about who has the right to claim that they are oppressed. Many Jews of Color in the US,² as well as Israelis of Color,³ note the problems with that frame.

We also have to wonder how people criticizing the situation from afar might act if they were in it. If, say, people of the First Nations in America were to be granted a right of return to their ancestral lands, who would be willing to happily give up the homes and cities in which their families had now lived for generations -- especially if there were nowhere else for them to go?

A particular media narrative has been built up slowly in recent decades about issues here. This article⁴ lays out one aspect of how it may have happened (though, due to the claims in it, and the self-aggrandizing ways of the writer that I have heard about from those who have encountered him, I would engage anti-bias filters before reading it).

And all that said, I do know some Americans of my age or older, often from the historical far left, who don their keffiyehs⁵ and protest for a "Free Palestine." Many have personal connections to the area. While I question how, in practice, their dream might come about, I honor their concern.

Other Places

Looking at the other side of the question, we must ask why Americans pay so little attention to other crises that resemble ours. People in and from Sudan are asking why they are being forgotten.⁶ The Rohingya are facing genocide in Myanmar while being blocked from fleeing to other countries.⁷ The Uighur in China are continually oppressed and put into forced labor.⁸ And then there's Nagorno-Karabakh.⁹

I suppose that I could be honestly accused of "whataboutism" in pointing to the other instances. But I do see our issues, day by day, above the fold on the New York Times and other media, with less attention paid to the others.

One factor with those, I believe, is that the other instances have been long-brewing, and haven't involved the kind of new events that trigger headlines. And the names of the places in our conflict tend to be easier for Americans, due to their own origin stories, to remember and pronounce. We had less coverage before the war. I wonder how long it will take before people on the other side of the planet will move on to another supposedly-unprecedented crisis.

A word from AI

(By the way, in writing this, I asked Google Bard which people in the world might be considered as facing genocide. It gave a reasonable response, starting with, "I understand your concern about ongoing humanitarian crises and potential genocides. Unfortunately, your question asks for specifics that could compromise the safety and privacy of individuals and communities already facing immense danger. Additionally, public discussion of ongoing situations can sometimes unintentionally amplify harm or misinformation." Then it listed organizations which track these issues.)

Testimonies

The more I read and hear, the more that I'm torn about what's happened. I read and see testimony about what there once was across the border and the destruction we have rained down on it, as, for example, its mayor wrote today¹⁰, and I think, "How could we have done this?" And then I read and see testimony about the initial attacks¹¹ and hear what the released hostages have told us, and I think, "What else could we have done?"

I'm reminded that one of my relatives in the House of a Hundred Grandmothers told a friend who isn't from here, early on, about how the terrorists had been hiding what they were doing within hospitals and schools.

Our friend asked, "Why didn't the hospital complain to the government?"

My relative said, "The terrorists are the government."

Our friend couldn't understand. And understood.

I like our mayor. I think I would like the mayor from across the border. I think they would like each other, and would work on similar things in similar ways.

But they're divided by a border that, were it not so lethally permeable, might seem to place them in different universes. I think most of us, on both sides, want to find a way to put things back together.

But we may never have that recipe again.¹²

Blackout

As I finish writing this, the power goes out in my apartment for everything but my MacBook, which has astonishing battery life. I open my door and look out. It's the whole neighborhood.

My apartment is pitch dark, other than the glow of the laptop. I notice, to my dismay, that the powerful green beacon that shines steadily on my emergency light when it's charging turns off when it's most needed. That's not useful. When power returns, I'll move the light back to where it once was, right at my front door.

I gingerly make my way to where I remember it being. I move my hand around until I feel it, then slide my hand along the edge until I find the power button. I had remembered it being on top, not the side.

I turn the light on and walk more easily back to my desk. I continue writing this post. I'll upload it when I can. If it gets too late, I'll step outside this basement and see if I can get a phone signal. If so, I'll post a Facebook message saying that it will be delayed. If I can't upload it by morning, I'll take my laptop with me to work.

Of course, after I've written all that, the power may come back as I write -- and I kid you not, it just did. We now return you to our previously scheduled posting, already in progress. Unless it goes out again. sigh

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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.