March 25, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-03-24

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...

---

We don't have ten men for a minyan today for the afternoon prayers. Purim isn't an official work holiday, but lots of people, including the bosses, have taken the day off. The bosses did send the company WhatsApp selfies of themselves in goofy costumes.

Even without the usual Adloyada parade, the city has a lot of smaller things happening. The local news site has listed them.¹ The Art Museum is holding a sculpture workshop. The Cinematheque is presenting Kung-Fu Panda Day.

Seeing the article, I forward it to a relative who is a chess expert. It says that the newly opened educational Meteor Center is hosting a children's chess competition.² Kids who show up in chess costumes can get special prizes.

In the morning, a relative at the House of a Hundred Grandmothers brings mishloach manot, Purim gifts, to several neighbors down the hall. She has made little wagons out of disposable kitchen containers, tissue boxes, wooden skewers, and toilet paper tubes. Each contains packages of raisins, Bamba³, wafers, and chewy food bars.

She brings a larger container down to the staff and residents of the continuous care ward. She tells me that "the universal response of delight (mixed, for new residents, with surprise) made it worthwhile."

---

The usual Saturday night protests go on despite the holiday. This time, speakers use Purim metaphors.⁴ Some events incorporate readings of the Book of Esther. The usual people block the usual highways, light the usual fires, and, as usual, get arrested.

In our town, one speaker brandishes the window through which his grandmother had been shot in the initial massacre, as well as bullets that had been found on her floor.⁵

Another blasts the wife of the prime minister, who is even more aggressively clueless than her husband. She had reportedly complained that none of the released hostages had contacted them to thank them. The speaker's retort:

"Thank you for the 134 abductees still in Hamas captivity. Thanks for hundreds of thousands of evacuees. Thank you for a disgraceful looting budget and international isolation. Thank you to the government, which has been running away from responsibility since day one."

Looking at the Google Translation of this article, I do a double-take. It refers to the "Brothers Who Kiss" movement. While there might well be such a group in our egalitarian city, the group is actually "Brothers in Arms."

According to this article⁶, the words for "kiss" and "weapon" are connected, because fighters got intimately close to one another in hand-to-hand combat. The article also goes deep on how a lot of other Hebrew words may be connected.

---

The Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle discusses "How do we celebrate Purim in a time of mourning?"⁷ (In addition to the bajillion cities I've lived in, my family has a Pittsburgh connection.) It describes Purim among people who had just been rescued from concentration camps in World War II, as well as how Simchat Torah might be celebrated and commemorated in the writer's town here. Five soldiers from the town have been killed in the war that began on that day last year.

---

Two articles on the front page of the news site that I follow the most bring together our losses, in what is probably an unplanned juxtaposition. One tells of a soldier who died in combat yesterday.⁸ The other interviews an evacuee who has been unable to return to her home in a city on our northern border:⁹

His name: Lior Raviv. Her name: Liat Raviv.

From what I can tell, they aren't directly related. But it brings out the way that much of the country feels like one big family.

---

Over Shabbat, relatives told me of their coherent idea for how to end the war and deal with the multiple humanitarian crises related to it.

One key idea: We're not dealing with a bunch of disorganized terrorist organizations. They're organized, and working effectively as a unified army. We had them outgunned, outmanned, and outnumbered, but we were outplanned.

This article by an expert lays out how some of this is, and has been, working.¹⁰

Thus, we need to recognize that we aren't merely dealing with disobedient territories. Defined borders separate us from what would be called, in any other area, enemy countries. We need to think of them that way. Even if there were to be immediate elections in those areas, polls consistently show that they would elect or re-elect the same hostile forces, or others that are even more so.

On our side, we've been letting things go on, especially in terms of the expanding settlements, that should have been shut down long ago.

This is how I understand their idea:

(One note first: in these posts, I have been regularly referring to "our country," "other people," "the land across the border," and the like. I tried writing this up like that, but it got needlessly jumbled. So I'm using actual names here, this time.)

1. We need to get the surviving hostages back. If this all happens, that stage wouldn't be too difficult, since they wouldn't be useful as bargaining chips.

2. Once that happens, we leave Gaza. Totally. They might say that our withdrawal is their victory. Let them.

3. We shut down our border with Gaza. No one gets across in any way. We also stop providing humanitarian aid and other resources. Other countries and organizations are clamoring for aid to happen. Let them provide it, by sea, through Egypt, or by rebuilding.

4. We remove settlements on the West Bank that are isolated or deep in Palestinian population. We keep the blocks of settlements near the Green Line. Our border would then move, annexing the areas of the nearby settlements. (Neither the left nor the right will like that.)

5. We block off most of the West Bank. Let them declare an independent state, if they want. Again, we lock down the border. No one gets in, no one gets out, except through Jordan. Again, let other countries and organizations who are eager for them to get humanitarian aid provide it to them.

6. As part of sealing the border, no one from the other side can work here. At all. We already have laws against that.

7. Open full citizenship (which, on paper, they already have) and equal rights for Arabs and other groups remaining within Israel, even if it means that, due to the poverty in many of their communities, the national government subsidizes local services to bring them up to standard.

8. We retain Jerusalem, except for some suburbs. We operate the Temple Mount fairly, as we have since we regained it (except for the recent problems raised by nutjobs currently in our government).

It's pretty clear that our current government, and especially our current prime minister, won't go for this. They're too caught in leveraging various factions. Our prime minister is desperately tap-dancing to avoid elections. He would inevitably lose, and would probably go to prison for issues for which he's currently on trial. So that's one of several things that could get in the way of any conclusive plans.

---

On the way home from work, I see an impossibly bright red star above a construction site. I stop and stare at it as it appears to peek out from a crack in the clouds. I don't think stars appear that color. Mars doesn't look like that either.

The clouds eventually shift. I see that it's actually in front of them. Ok. The changing colors of the sky reveal that it's at the end of an amazingly tall crane. The crane's body, in shadow, matches the pale gray clouds.

I head home. Technology is calling me. I'm setting up a new media server. Data is creeping from drive to drive. I have a Zoom call in the evening. I'm looking forward to it. Then I have to finish this post by morning. Editing it will take a lot of work.

---

Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

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.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.