Israeli presence in Egypt (civilian and academic, that is..)

I first wondered about that when I heard of the “First International Conference of Jews from Egypt”, to be organised by the Tel-Aviv based “Association Pour l’Amitié Israel Egypte” (God knows why they have a French name...)
To be held, guess where? Cairo, Egypt. At the Marriot Hotel, from May 25^th to May 29^th 2008.

In the programme: archeological and religious visits, prayers, as well as a day at the “Israeli Academic Center in Cairo” (there’s an Israeli academic center in Cairo? Really?)

The most amusing thing is that the flyer mentions the participation of the Israeli ambassador, “and Egyptian personalities”. I love their secrecy... I mean, people, it’s in the fucking Marriott!
Which, by the way, will be making lots of money since residency there is compulsory for all participants to the conference. I wonder whether there was a financial-political balance to strike within the hotel to host this conference...

Anyways.
0.14 seconds after typing in "Israeli academic center in Cairo" in my Google toolbar, I read that it's an organisation, located in the Dokki neighbourhood, "which assists Israeli scholars with research into Egypt and Egyptian culture, and facilitates cooperation with Egyptian academics."

A long and interesting article on the center is here, published in the NYC-based Jewish daily "Forward". A rather dumb article posted on a random website calls it a 'spy center in Cairo', as expected.

Not quite sure what I think about it. You make up your own mind - and let me know what you think about it.

Kibbutz tourism

I decided to give myself a break from over-thinking - which is hard when you’re in Palestine. But I was going to see a good friend and I was quite set on enjoying my weekend.

Hence, the weekend rule: I’m a regular bloke who knows nothing about reality, hasn’t read any politics since, hmm, the 19^th century. I am tourist Lambda; I will have fun and snap photos like a Japanese tourist with a brand new camera and an unlimited memory card.

The weekend was spent in a kibbutz in Israel, which was quite something! My dear Tally was home for a few days and invited me to experience the quintessential building block of the establishment of the state of Israel. (See? I even kept myself from writing ‘the occupation of Palestine :-).

Now a kibbutz is the socialist experiment par excellence. Shared property, communal work, self-sustainability, “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” kind-of-thing. By definition, a kibbutz is a secular place - it served primarily for very earthly needs (you know, survival and stuff?) and it’s generally a-religious.

(Ein Harod kibbutz. Pretty, huh?)

Today’s kibbutniks (kibbutz inhabitants) are often new immigrants, older people who have always been living there, young people who have either been too lazy, too incompetent, or too zany to leave.

“Anyone who does something worth anything gets out of there”, said Tally. Surrendering your salary in exchange for 400 euros of credit a month isn’t too exciting I guess.

Aaaaanyways. We went to two kibbutzim - Gan Shmuel and and Ein Harod.

Gan Shmuel was probably as tacky as expected: some of the people actually lived in trailers (think FEMA trailers), the place smelled of cow shit and the trees were unkempt. Nothing to write home about (despite the fact that I just did. Right, Kristen?)

Ein Harod, however, was pretty as a touristic village by the beach: great sun, fantastic views, pretty cottages with a red roof, the whole shebang. It was hard to think of a communist mode of living when walking around between the families taking a picnic - unless it was the houses of the party leaders...

Tally’s kibbutz father is a tour guide - and the man reads hieroglyphs like I read Arabic. It’s impressive. And did you know that one of the judges who convicted innocent peasants to death in 1906 in the infamous Denshwai incident was Boutros Boutros Ghali’s grandfather? Yep, yep...

A relaxed weekend in a great setting, nice walks in the countryside, great conversations, a bit of biblical history (this battle happened over there, King something took a dump by this hill, etc.).

My favourite story was about how King Saul wanted to select his knights; he brought the men by a river, and told them to drink. Those who knelt and put their faces in the water, drinking like horses, were sent home; those who brought the water up to their mouth were recruited.

A giant sign in the grass, celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary (next May) somewhat snapped me back into reality. I looked away quickly.

Army + Bread + Crisis = Nasty shit, generally

You normally can't put the words 'Army', 'Bread', and 'Crisis' in the same sentence and hope for anything good to come of it.

And while shit will surely hit the fan soon, with an army intervention taming a bread uprising, well, luckily it's not today.

The production of bread in so disconnected from the demand that they had to start selling the army bread production to the public. I already mentioned people dying in queues to get subsidised bread (according to the BBC News, it's 10 to 12 times cheaper than the market price (10 to 12 times!!!!!) and if the government is backtracking on its plan to end subsidies, then it must be going REALLY bad on the ground.


Two - or three things I come up with from this story:

- That is only a temporary and unsustainable fix, that will only delay the inevitable. Kaboum.

- If that was an option - why was it not done before? Oh, wait, don't answer that. My bad.

- This example actually highlights a different issues - for some other day, perhaps: the advantages given to the army and police corps.
Of course the government must feed the soldiers, but what I'm talking about is the extra capacity - what will be sold to the public will surely not be taken from the mouths of the army...
Why does the army have enough capacity to feed itself AND the people? This is only a small example.

Overall, the army and the police have mad advantages in our country, from exclusive access to fancy clubs to pensions more than ten multiples the average wage in the country, to State cars, to placements everywhere with ridiculous salaries after they leave the military (despite their incongruous lack of skills in anything useful in the world..)

I know. It's a basic trait of a dictatorship to feed its hyenas. But I still abhor that.

How to break a child's spirits - Gaza

I always wince whenever the Israeli government justifies its 'Palestinian Holocaust' and other campaigns against civilians by "the trauma caused to the children of Sderot by the constant fear of bombs falling on their heads".

I wince because the real trauma is precisely what the Israelis are causing. How does it feel to be a child who has lost everything, from their toys to their mothers?

Watch this 1 minute excerpt. The little girl from Gaza is candidly talking about the "bomb that entered from the ceiling.. everything was destroyed. We had to throw away everything. Even my clothes, we had to throw them away. They smelled so bad! Tell them to come smell our clothes!"
It's cute, isn't it.
And it's heartbreaking. Talk about robbing childhood, traumatising children? Welcome to Gaza.


From the multiple award laureate documentary "Occupation 101".

The pen and the status quo

I smashed this poor pen against the wall - and the result is what you see.
I know. Poor, poor pen.

There is a reason, though - unconvincing as it may be.

Let me try to explain. There was a line in "The Good Shepherd" film (2006, with Matt Damon) where one of the characters said something along the lines of "You are afraid to go through life following the plan that was put for you". (I did say something along the lines of, didn't I?:)

I've always shared this fear. The number of things that we "should" do -- go to these schools, hang out with these people, work in these jobs, marry someone fitting this description, live in these places.
It's somewhat heartbreaking (and a little depressing) to see my once free-spirited friends walk this path, resigned to their fate, one after the other. Working jobs they hate, having children they're not ready for. Effectively, following the plan drawn up for them by society, customs, family, religion, and every other societal control mechanism.

No. No. Shit, no. I don't want to do that.

And for a split second, this quiescent, boring, resigned pen seemed to personify all this: it has, since its creation, been just a pen. It has failed to rebel against the 'plan' that was put for him, and was set on the course drawn up for him. The pen was us.

So I smashed it against the wall. My small, insignificant mini-revolution.

Don't get me wrong - it isn't a question of maturity or lack thereof. It's about the molds we're supposed to grow into. It's a society Matrix. It's the choices that are already made for us, the decisions we'll never get to take.

But is destruction - or self-destruction - the only way out of the status-quo? I hope not.

I think I'll take my chance anyway.

Man dresses as a woman to cut through the bakery queues

From Al-Arabiyya.
A man dressed as a neqabi (with full face veil) in order to be able to stand in the women's queue in front of a government-subsidised bakery, the men's line being constantly considerably longer.

His fellow queue-dwellers noticed the trick and he got a serious beating, and when the police came they decided to let him go - the beating he got was enough.

Both very funny, very stupid, and seriously sad. But it's true that some people cannot afford anything but this subsidised bread - and they simply have to feed their kids.

A number of people have already died from fights erupting at government bakery queues.

Great new blog // What would your last lecture be about?

Here's a new blog that i will probably be stealing links from: "Mali's stream of consciousness" by a good friend (you guessed it - Mali!). Tune in to her blog -- she's smart, articulate, and has a great sense of humour.


Actually, here's the first: a lecture by Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon U, who gave the traditional "Last Lecture" at Carnegie , where a professor is supposed to talk about what he would if that was his indeed his last lecture.
Only, here's the kick: he actually is dying, from an advanced pancreatic cancer.
So it isn't one of these silly email forwards: it's actually interesting and coming from a pretty brilliant guy. And it's pretty inspiring.

Enjoy.
(note - the above link is a 10 min quick lecture that he did -- if you have the patience, you can see (or read) the full lecture here).

Palestine, back to business?

Ramallah appears to be back to normal today. People are back on the street, flags are back up, shops are open. After 3 days of mourning for the victims of the Gaza Holocaust (see previous post for the name), I guess we had to get back to our lives...
Supermarkets are open, those large yellow vans that operate as shared taxis are back to roaming the streets like mad, people are eating ice-cream at Rukab's. As they always have.
I don't know how they can do it - but I guess it's the kind of resilience that I hope I will never have to develop.

And, it may seem back to normal on the surface or at least in parts of the country, but it's unlikely to be 'back to usual' for the, what, mere 120 people murdered, the 300 injured, their families who will no longer have their mother, their father, their child?

Here's the kick though -- it's not over. Whatever supposed withdrawal is announced, operations, incursions, and air strikes continue in the Gaza Strip. At work I receive a daily Security Briefing about all security-related events that occurred the day before, and there isn't one day where there are no extra dead people.

And I hate the fact that the Israelis are going to get away with it.
Again.

"Copycat"! Or why we order differently in a restaurant

On a lighter note...
You know, one of the advantages of having a job is that you get to spend time reading blogs and other interesting things that remind you that, well, other people are doing stuff that's overall more interesting than what you're doing.

Tim Harford, who writes the Financial Times' "Dear Economist" column, maintains a great blog and an entry last month was about how people in a restaurant tend to systematically order differently from others -- even if the other person orders what would've been their own first choice.

How true is that? Don't we always do that, and 'cover it up' by throwing sentences like "Oh, we can order 2 different things and share!" (which, face it, we never do).

Dan Ariely and Jonathan Levav did a pretty cool experiment and penned a nice paper from it - they posed as waiters and bartenders, observed how people order and what and in what sequence, then asked them whether they were happy about their choices.

And lo and behold, people seem to order differently from those who ordered before - and are generally unhappy about it.
Surprising? Hmm, not really. Ariely and Levav put forth explanations of "variety-seeking", "information-gathering", "product-familiarity", and other fancy hyphened italicized terms.

I think it's much simpler though: we still obey the childish desire not to be looked at with a smile that says "Copycat, Copycat!!"

Is it a murder? Is it a massacre? No... It's a genocide!

I spent the weekend in Jerusalem, and I spent the day composing, in mind, a lovely blog entry about spirituality and brotherhood and how we all believe in the same God...

Well, not anymore.
59 dead people in Gaza TODAY, at least 20 of them children.
FIFTY NINE. And counting. Surely more by the time I finish this entry.

Mass-murder? Massacre? How can you put a label on that?

Well, thankfully, I won’t have to: the Israeli deputy minister of Defense, Matan Vilnai, has threatened of a “Palestinian Holocaust”. Thank you, deputy minister. So, genocide is what you have in mind? Thanks for speaking it up.

Being in Palestine - albeit on the other side of the country, in the West Bank - gives a whole new perspective to this. I am, like the rest of the Palestinian people, under the mercy of the madmen in West Jerusalem, who seem to be set on celebrating 60 years of Nakba with, well, another Nakba.

Think of it. Deir Yassin and the like, 1947/1948: Jewish terrorist organisations (Haganah, Irgun, Stern, etc...) would circle Palestinian villages and mass-murder everyone inside.

Gaza looks scarily like that. It’s circled, its people are trapped inside, and the Israeli army, which is little more than a highly trained and well organised terrorist organisation, is mass-murdering them.

One ‘good’ thing that might come out of this, though: rebuild the ties between Gaza and the West Bank, reminding those in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem of how bad those in Gaza have it.

I hope the Palestinian politics will follow.