The view from my windows

We have met the enemy and they are us!

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 06:56:05 +0000

Some powerful insights from a man who sees reality in terms of generations and centuries. Rabbi Berl Wein, one of Judaism’s popular English language lecturers has an interesting assessment of whom the Internal enemies of Israeli society really are! There was once a fascinating commentary on life in the form of a comic strip called Pogo. One of its most telling captions to my memory was the paraphrasing of the famous line “We have met the enemy and they are ours” into “We have met the enemy and they are us!” The time, energy and effort spent on fighting imagined enemies and illusory dangers in the Jewish world, including the observant Jewish world is fairly mind-boggling. This is unfortunately in line with much of Jewish history where identifying the real problems, the true enemies of Jewish existence and comfort was somehow secondary to quarrels about fabricated enemies and minor issues of differing ritual and custom. In the middle of the nineteenth century the great hassidic rebbe, Rabbi David of Tolnoah, changed one word in the daily prayer service because of a holy dream that he claimed to have had. This touched off a war in Jewish Galicia that split families, caused [...]

The view from my windows : We have met the enemy and they are us!

The Sounds of 1984

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:10:19 +0000

Someone wrote a powerful book, describing a future world where the single authoritative voice of public opinion, public consciousness broadcast from the walls of every room human beings inhabited. A society where the very thought of Freedom of Thought (let alone speech) was heresy. When I first read the book, way back in the 1960′s, I thought it allegorical. It seemed to me that the author was describing a reality akin to Nazi Germany or Communist Soviet Union where only the censored content manipulated by the totalitarian rulers was broadcast or printed. Little did I realize that the day would come that I too would experience first hand the all encompassing voice of Big Brother. That no matter where I turned I would be forced to hear ‘his’ words echoing throughout the streets of my community. More to the point – that ‘his’ message would invariably be a message of hatred and of the total negation of everything and everyone who did embrace ‘his’ creed. In Israel, on any given Friday, if you live near an Arab village, not only do you hear the voice of the muezzin calling out the Adhan (call to prayer), you also hear in stereo the “sermon” of whichever visiting imam has the most fiery and rousing [...]

The view from my windows : The Sounds of 1984

Middle Eastern Languages

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 21:48:24 +0000

For the longest time I’ve listened to conversation of the deaf between the liberal Israeli Left and the Muslim world. It was so obvious to me that both sides were talking a different language, albiet using English words. I recently read an essay by Dror Eydar in Israel Hayom. Talk about an apology to Turkey comes under the category of a rational Western debate. In fact, in a liberal debate, an apology is perceived as a mature matter and a gesture of good will to open a new page and leave the older pages filled with disagreements behind. But we do not live in a Western region. The heartbeats in our region are thousands of years old, and they show up in our ancient regional myths. They blow up on us time after time in the form of naïve liberal voices who consider themselves utterly deep and sophisticated. I am talking about the subconscious style of language in the region, including political language. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or President Shimon Peres can meet Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, since the language they speak is supposedly universal, but only supposedly. Erdogan no longer represents the Kamalist values of the secular [...]

The view from my windows : Middle Eastern Languages

Sarah Palin’s Insights Into Israel’s Political Maladies

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:52:17 +0000

I’ll be honest. I really do not understand American politics. Still, I do read English (or at least the Canadian dialect) and do see things that I think I understand, and that occasionally impress me. The following excerpt caught my eye, specifically because I truly believe exactly the same accusation could be made against the Israeli Political Establishment. Excerpt from post on Anand Giridharada’s blog on the New York Times website: … She made three interlocking points. First, that the United States is now governed by a “permanent political class,” drawn from both parties, that is increasingly cut off from the concerns of regular people. Second, that these Republicans and Democrats have allied with big business to mutual advantage to create what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” Third, that the real political divide in the United States may no longer be between friends and foes of Big Government, but between friends and foes of vast, remote, unaccountable institutions (both public and private). … I found it especially insightful in light of the recent demonstrations against the inequity in the standard of living between Israelis “monied classes” and the rest of us who work for a living. What do YOU think?

The view from my windows : Sarah Palin’s Insights Into Israel’s Political Maladies

Israeli Exceptionalism

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 20:27:03 +0000

Much was made of President Obama’s dismissal of the idea of American exceptionalism, when he noted that the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism, etc. No doubt Achilles believed in the latter, as Hector believed in Trojan exceptionalism. But in many ways there truly is no more exceptional a nation than modern Israel. Exiled for nearly two thousand years by Roman imperialism, survivors of countless persecutions over the centuries — including those of an Islam far less tolerant that “Religion of Peace” partisans would have us believe — the Jews were awakened to the promise of return to the Holy Land by Napoleon. The man Winston Churchill called “the greatest man of action to take the world stage since Julius Caesar” invaded Egypt in 1798 and, more even than the atrocities of September 11, 2001, that invasion “changed everything.” Bonaparte promised the Jews that they could return to the Holy Land if they supported him. Napoleon spent his last days on St. Helena, in the south Atlantic, an inhospitable place. Given the condition that Jews coming to Zion found “the land of milk and honey” in, St. Helena was the Ritz by comparison. When the Arabs arrived in the seventh century they brought with [...]

The view from my windows : Israeli Exceptionalism

The Problem with the Middle East

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:17:46 +0000

Over the almost forty years that I live in Israel, I’ve always sensed a kind of pity for the plight of my Arab neighbors. As Israel developed over these decades, villages and farms grew and displayed the obvious signs of development - good roads, street lighting etc. Over the same period, the Arab villages in areas previously controlled by Jordan, remained in relative darkness and with poor infrastructures. It was not because the Jewish state discriminated against them. Rather, as a Christian Arab friend of mine who lived in a village in the Galil, explained to me, the leadership of each village see’s the funds entrusted in them as their “god given right”. So instead of sidewalks or youth clubs or street lights, the leaders of those communities have nice homes and nice cars and can afford to send their children abroad to be educated. A recent report by Freedom House published a comparison of all the countries in Israel’s “neighborhood”. Surprise, surprise! The only place in the Middle East where Arabs, Muslim, Christian or otherwise, have personal security and civil rights, is wherever Israel has total control. A small fact I’m certain will not be reported in the media.

The view from my windows : The Problem with the Middle East

Pain & Pleasure

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 09:33:46 +0000

When I was in high school, I has this deep-set belief that if people agreed with me, I must be doing something wrong. To make things really clear, it wasn’t so much because I considered myself a saint. I knew the difference between right and wrong and I can assure you that I knew that I was far from sainthood. No, the reason I believed this was simple. People, in my perception of humanity at that time, always sought the path of least resistance. I, on the other hand, was seeking something that required a great deal of both hard work and self-sacrifice on my part to try to find it. Many years later I learned for a short time at the feet of a Rabbi named Noah Weinberger (z”l). He had a way of summing up the powerful truths of Judaism in pithy “Americanisms”. One of the things I learned from him, a truth so self-evident it amuses me to admit it needs to be taught, that anything of value requires payment. In Rabbi Noah’s parlance, you must pay in “pain” for your “pleasure”. An Olympic athlete expects to pain in the “pain” of endless training to achieve the “pleasure” of [...]

The view from my windows : Pain & Pleasure

What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:10:39 +0000

Postwar Jewish refugees left everything they had in Europe—no ‘right of return’ requested. There are some articles that are so to-the-point that I feel I have no choice but to add them to my personal little collection of intellectual gems. Secretly I’ll admit that I’m envious. I wish I had written them. Warren Koxzak’s article, “If the Jews had followed the Palestinian Path” is definitely one of them. Originally published in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal, it says what those of us who live here and are historically aware know, but the media and the world in general appears to have forgotten. Agree with me? Pass it on to a friend! We need to educate the world to the truth, one person at a time! Yoel Ben-Avraham By Warren Kozak It is doubtful that there has ever been a more miserable human refuse than Jewish survivors after World War II. Starving, emaciated, stateless—they were not welcomed back by countries where they had lived for generations as assimilated and educated citizens. Germany was no place to return to and in Kielce, Poland, 40 Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed in a pogrom one year after the war ended. The European Jew, circa 1945, [...]

The view from my windows : What If Jews Had Followed the Palestinian Path?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 16:45:55 +0000

It was an unbearable movie, at least for me(1). I don’t even think that I sat through the entire performance. I’m pretty certain that I walked out in the middle. None-the-less that expression has played through my mind a great deal lately. I don’t know why! In a way I suppose it expresses a series of sensations that I’ve experienced over the past few months. Fleeting ephemeral sensations of watching myself from outside myself. At the same time, there was no panic. No sense of “whats happening to me”, only a wondrous sense of awe as I had the opportunity of viewing my surroundings and the people who populate it with an overwhelming feeling of appreciation. I can only express it in words by alluding to the famous scene in the Godfather when Don Vito Corleone, in the throes of a fatal heart attack, grabs a handful of earth from his tomato patch and whispers “la vita è così bella“(2) in his dying breath. It’s not as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. Its more that I’m blessed with a short momentary insight into what life is really all about, and let me share with you – life is overwhelmingly beautiful! Not just [...]

The view from my windows : The Unbearable Lightness of Being

The American Administration’s Adherence to the Arab Narrative

Yoel Ben-Avraham — Mon, 23 May 2011 17:21:19 +0000

Here are Moshe Aylon’s remarks as published by Haaretz: “There is no doubt that there is a political and diplomatic earthquake taking place in the Arab states and perhaps also Iran, and what is clear is that it is not tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama’s speech is negative in this context because it brings back the claim that there is a connection.” It is fascinating to see how fixated the American administration is on the “Arab Narrative” despite the fact that it flies in the face of almost all the facts! The Palestinians “are continuing to educate the young generation to deny the attachment between the Jewish people and this land, and that is being done by Abbas, the moderate….So it is quite clear to anyone with eyes in his head that we don’t have a partner to the vision of two states for two peoples.” “We don’t wish to rule over the Palestinians. In actual fact, we already do not control them – in Gaza they have Hamastan and we are prepared for negotiations without any prior conditions with Abbas in Ramallah.” (Ha’aretz) Now Aylon is not me. His world view as I understand it is [...]

The view from my windows : The American Administration’s Adherence to the Arab Narrative