January 18, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-18

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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I stare at the news when I wake up. After a day away, I'm lost. I don't understand it. veryone is lobbing missiles at everybody else, in "response" to each other's "crimes."

I ask my family. They tell me that I'm pretty much right. They send me a good round-up from the Washington Post.¹

I notice that the map in it doesn't name one nearby country. Moments later, a headline pops up. They're tossing bombs across their border, too, though not at whom I'd expect.²

That's not directly related to what's happening here right now. It's about the smuggling of a drug called Captagon³. Many of the terrorists were reportedly hopped up on it when they attacked here.⁴ Reuters says that it's also "fueling the Gulf party scene."⁵

It feels like we're living at the intersection of David Baldacci and William Gibson.

I get lunch at the place where I got the burger on Monday, a couple of doors down from the clothing shops. This time, I get the Me'orav Yerushalmi, the Jerusalem mixed grill. It's a combination of every cut of meat that you would probably not want to identify by name (but that is strictly kosher), grilled up with onions and stuffed in an oversized Moroccan pita. It's good.

One disorienting thing: the sign recommending the dish is right below a poster demanding the return of a hostage who also happens to be named Yerushalmi.⁶ Undoubtedly a coincidence. I doubt anyone else has even noticed this, but my eye is drawn to text that comes together in odd ways.

When I enter the clothing shop, a woman whom I don't know says, "You're the uncle. You look just like her. How are her parents?"

She asks after each by name. She then asks where I'm living, how long I've been there, how many rooms it has, how much my rent is, where I work, what I do for a living, and how much I'm paid.

I have come in to get a bathrobe. They have one. It looks good. It fits. I buy it.

The person I bought from before appears. It's clear that they're a couple. He welcomes me, then says, "You need shirts." He's right. I do. I tell him what I'm looking for. He and his wife dig around on the shelves and emerge with a plastic bag labeled, "T K Maxx." At first, I think that that's some sort of ridiculous knock-off of an American brand. Googling around later, I see that that's what the chain is called in England.⁷

The shirts in it are my size, fit well, and are what I'm looking for. They're a little more expensive than I want to pay, and he fast-talks me into getting four rather than three. I balk at buying any red shirts. It's dangerous to beam down to new planets wearing them, and they make me look like Santa Claus.

I wonder if I should be bargaining with them, or if I'm just racking up Frequent Freier points.⁸ They also try to sell me trousers, sweatpants, and, somehow, sandwiches.

I had planned to go grocery shopping, too, but my hands are too full. I stop at a bakery across the street and get a coffee, then head home.

The local news appears good for non-humans, at least. A young whale has been spotted swimming off our coast.⁹ And a section of the beach has opened up, specifically for dogs.¹⁰

Our recent Eurovision contestant and possibly Israel's biggest popstar (yes, the one who sued TikTok last week) has released a gung-ho video, "The Commando Is Rising," backed by the Army choir.¹¹

She shares her first name, Noa, with a lot of other people. (It's not the same as the male name, Noah, which is pronounced the same way in English, but as Noakh in Hebrew. That confused me when I first got here.)

She, along with a lot of other famous women named Noa, has released an Instagram video in support of a current hostage, Noa Argaman.¹² Their appeal: if your name is Noa, change your avatar to hers. If it isn't, and you live here, you probably have at least five friends named Noa, so nudge them to change theirs. (I don't, but the people I know skew older, and I'm not on Instagram.)

While the largest and loudest group agitating for the hostages' release (the ones who organized the huge demonstration I went to on Sunday) want their release at any price, another group, made up of other families of hostages, aren't so sure.¹³

They point out that previous releases, in which hostages were exchanged for large numbers of terrorists that had been in our prisons, had some terrible results. Several of the top leaders who are now in charge across the border and spearheaded the massacres were released then.

And an incomplete campaign would quickly put us right back where we were before. Those who cry out for a ceasefire appear to have forgotten or never learned that we've had them before, and each one of them was eventually broken. So another supposed ceasefire would just kick the can down the road, giving a period of fake peace while everyone could regroup, rebuild, reload and eventually launch another attack. People thousands of miles away can bask in comfortable naïveté. We can't afford it.

Pete Townshend may be right. We won't get fooled again.¹⁴

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.