Like a tiny slip of a donkey, thin and mangy from maltreatment and continuous beatings, Gaza is being flogged again. While its population of 1.5 million people, famed for their stregth of spirit and warmth, must be searching for the deepest of inner reserves to survive this next onslaught, the rest of us can only look on with grave concern.
Well over a hundred people, including many children, have died and this morning's news showed the wreckage of a centre for disabled people, two of whom were killed. J and I have our iphones clamped in our hands most of the time - searching for news, and receiving automatic updates. Heroic stories trickle through, such as a group of foreign activists who yesterday formed a human chain around a hospital in an attempt to stop an Israeli strike on it. We marvelled at their courage.
I don't enjoy being on the sidelines - it's like watching people work. I'd much rather be in amongst it. But as Mum sagely suggested last night on the telephone, 'Being with your boys and keeping them safe is the right place for you at the moment, darling.'
St Grace has been in Jordan visiting her husband so the dwarves and I have had four days together. We visited our local pizza restaurant as a treat. It's a Palestinian establishment who received a grant from the EU to learn how to make a real pizza and build their own ovens. The other draw is the albino rabbit who the Lozenge and Rashimi have named 'Nibbles'. So we set off down the road in the scorching sun armed with a couple of cucumbers from the fridge so it could live up to its name.
After a Marguerita (pizza not cocktail, I promise) between them, the boys were busy tucking into an ice cream doused with chocolate sauce. The world cup highlights were blaring in the background, with Brazillian beats mixed with Arabic dialogue, then all of a sudden a loud: 'Doooommmf' then four more of the same. The dwarves were so busy covering their chins with extra choccy topping, they didn't notice, but I looked up and caught the eye of a Palestinian man sitting with his family. He nodded. They were definitely rockets and then the air raid siren sounded. Everyone sat still, and the waiters walked by, chatting in Arabic to the other Arab families there. I've interviewed enough Syrians now to know the word for shelling and rockets, and I heard the waiter say he thought the noise was from the Israeli 'iron dome' intercepting them. I looked at the structure of the building and saw we were sitting as far from the glass windows as we could have been - plus no one else was moving and I reckoned they'd been through this before, so we sat tight and then walked home as quickly as I could make the tight-bellied dwarves scamper down the uneven pavements.
As often in life, the thing you fear is not the thing that ends up hurting you. I should have looked no further than the bowl of ice cream, which caused the Lozenge a more violent bout of food poisoning than any I've witnessed. From 1am onwards he was sick every half an hour and we ended up spooning in his single bed with Rashimi jabbering away in the background: 'Ith it morning Mummeeeee! Is it morning? Is it, is it?' We limped through the beginning of the day. By 10 am we'd watched James and the Giant Peach, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Shrek.
Being a fairly robust kinda guy, L seemed to be on the mend that afternoon and was not going to miss a friend's birthday swimming party for the sake of a bout of food poisoning. I was changing my clothes to something more modest to leave the house in, and put on a tshirt with spots on it. The Lozenge said: 'You look beautiful Mummy. Jutht like a dotty printhess.' Evidently he was recovered enough to head out.
The swimming was a huge hit - for them. You might have thought that Israel were playing in the World Cup that day for all the blue and white flags, but no, in Israel, this is just a normal day. The place was seething with children in the baby pool which had rather suspect lumps of unrecognisable solid matter floating in it. There was so much chlorine it was like getting the water from the Dead Sea in your eyes. Then the dwarves discovered the water slide, for over 10s only. But the guy waved us on and we hurtled down, over and over again. After the dwarves welfare, my main concern was to keep my bikini on before we were spat out at the bottom into a deep pool.
We made it home, and I raced about trying to make dinner for the dwarves, get changed to go out, and welcome a Sri Lankan babysitter who St Grace had arranged to come over in her absence. She sat shyly on a bench in the hall, and didn't seem to undertand much English. Just as I was trying to plunge the dwarves into a bubble bath, the air raid siren sounded and L did a huge projectile vomit all over the carpet. As I watched the sweet but rather hopeless Sri Lankan lady dabbing at it with a bit of tissue paper, also suggesting we vacuum it up, I realised this wasn't the person to leave our children with during a potential rocket attack.
We canned the evening out, which is one of a number of evenings which have not happened recently and had a night in together which is often as exciting as a night out these days. The night was punctuated with the air raid siren, sounds of rockets being intercepted, and then hilariously the 'Iftar' cannon which sounds every night at 8pm to signal the hour when all Muslims can break their fast. It also sounds at 4am - and it still catches me out, along with randomly timed fireworks displays. You'd think that at troubled times like these they could have a bell in the mosque to ring instead of having to fire an enormous cannon and cause us to leap for cover.
There are an awful lot of people on the planet whose hearts are with Gaza - but how can this be happening again? Normally there would be an external mediator involved by now - but Egypt, who often fulfilled this role, are not interested now that they've kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood (the main basis of Hamas), so they're no longer interested. Other Arab countries are busy with their own mess, and Internationals are hopping about the sidelines, or not even that, these days.
We internationals, and most Israelis could leave the country if it gets really bad. But the Gazans are stuck there with no escape and no one to turn to but each other and their inner souls.
Though people are wary of suggesting a third intifada as yet, you wonder how much more this tortured nation can take before they retaliate with something other than rockets. There have been 80 so far, and almost all have been intercepted, which must only accentuate the feeling of powerlessness. I have a vision of those martial arts displays where a big guy deftly blocks a punch from a smaller guy, not feeling a thing from the furious fist and infuriating the weaker one until he has to resort to dirtier tricks.
Well over a hundred people, including many children, have died and this morning's news showed the wreckage of a centre for disabled people, two of whom were killed. J and I have our iphones clamped in our hands most of the time - searching for news, and receiving automatic updates. Heroic stories trickle through, such as a group of foreign activists who yesterday formed a human chain around a hospital in an attempt to stop an Israeli strike on it. We marvelled at their courage.
I don't enjoy being on the sidelines - it's like watching people work. I'd much rather be in amongst it. But as Mum sagely suggested last night on the telephone, 'Being with your boys and keeping them safe is the right place for you at the moment, darling.'
St Grace has been in Jordan visiting her husband so the dwarves and I have had four days together. We visited our local pizza restaurant as a treat. It's a Palestinian establishment who received a grant from the EU to learn how to make a real pizza and build their own ovens. The other draw is the albino rabbit who the Lozenge and Rashimi have named 'Nibbles'. So we set off down the road in the scorching sun armed with a couple of cucumbers from the fridge so it could live up to its name.
After a Marguerita (pizza not cocktail, I promise) between them, the boys were busy tucking into an ice cream doused with chocolate sauce. The world cup highlights were blaring in the background, with Brazillian beats mixed with Arabic dialogue, then all of a sudden a loud: 'Doooommmf' then four more of the same. The dwarves were so busy covering their chins with extra choccy topping, they didn't notice, but I looked up and caught the eye of a Palestinian man sitting with his family. He nodded. They were definitely rockets and then the air raid siren sounded. Everyone sat still, and the waiters walked by, chatting in Arabic to the other Arab families there. I've interviewed enough Syrians now to know the word for shelling and rockets, and I heard the waiter say he thought the noise was from the Israeli 'iron dome' intercepting them. I looked at the structure of the building and saw we were sitting as far from the glass windows as we could have been - plus no one else was moving and I reckoned they'd been through this before, so we sat tight and then walked home as quickly as I could make the tight-bellied dwarves scamper down the uneven pavements.
As often in life, the thing you fear is not the thing that ends up hurting you. I should have looked no further than the bowl of ice cream, which caused the Lozenge a more violent bout of food poisoning than any I've witnessed. From 1am onwards he was sick every half an hour and we ended up spooning in his single bed with Rashimi jabbering away in the background: 'Ith it morning Mummeeeee! Is it morning? Is it, is it?' We limped through the beginning of the day. By 10 am we'd watched James and the Giant Peach, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Shrek.
Being a fairly robust kinda guy, L seemed to be on the mend that afternoon and was not going to miss a friend's birthday swimming party for the sake of a bout of food poisoning. I was changing my clothes to something more modest to leave the house in, and put on a tshirt with spots on it. The Lozenge said: 'You look beautiful Mummy. Jutht like a dotty printhess.' Evidently he was recovered enough to head out.
The swimming was a huge hit - for them. You might have thought that Israel were playing in the World Cup that day for all the blue and white flags, but no, in Israel, this is just a normal day. The place was seething with children in the baby pool which had rather suspect lumps of unrecognisable solid matter floating in it. There was so much chlorine it was like getting the water from the Dead Sea in your eyes. Then the dwarves discovered the water slide, for over 10s only. But the guy waved us on and we hurtled down, over and over again. After the dwarves welfare, my main concern was to keep my bikini on before we were spat out at the bottom into a deep pool.
We made it home, and I raced about trying to make dinner for the dwarves, get changed to go out, and welcome a Sri Lankan babysitter who St Grace had arranged to come over in her absence. She sat shyly on a bench in the hall, and didn't seem to undertand much English. Just as I was trying to plunge the dwarves into a bubble bath, the air raid siren sounded and L did a huge projectile vomit all over the carpet. As I watched the sweet but rather hopeless Sri Lankan lady dabbing at it with a bit of tissue paper, also suggesting we vacuum it up, I realised this wasn't the person to leave our children with during a potential rocket attack.
We canned the evening out, which is one of a number of evenings which have not happened recently and had a night in together which is often as exciting as a night out these days. The night was punctuated with the air raid siren, sounds of rockets being intercepted, and then hilariously the 'Iftar' cannon which sounds every night at 8pm to signal the hour when all Muslims can break their fast. It also sounds at 4am - and it still catches me out, along with randomly timed fireworks displays. You'd think that at troubled times like these they could have a bell in the mosque to ring instead of having to fire an enormous cannon and cause us to leap for cover.
There are an awful lot of people on the planet whose hearts are with Gaza - but how can this be happening again? Normally there would be an external mediator involved by now - but Egypt, who often fulfilled this role, are not interested now that they've kicked out the Muslim Brotherhood (the main basis of Hamas), so they're no longer interested. Other Arab countries are busy with their own mess, and Internationals are hopping about the sidelines, or not even that, these days.
We internationals, and most Israelis could leave the country if it gets really bad. But the Gazans are stuck there with no escape and no one to turn to but each other and their inner souls.
Though people are wary of suggesting a third intifada as yet, you wonder how much more this tortured nation can take before they retaliate with something other than rockets. There have been 80 so far, and almost all have been intercepted, which must only accentuate the feeling of powerlessness. I have a vision of those martial arts displays where a big guy deftly blocks a punch from a smaller guy, not feeling a thing from the furious fist and infuriating the weaker one until he has to resort to dirtier tricks.
The only one who maltreats and bit donkeys around here are the Arabs - both in Jerusalem and in Gaza (haven't you seen Arab boys around Gay Ben Hinom (the park under the cinematheque, riding donkeys and brutally kicking and beating them?) . And Hamas is terrorizing and beating the Arabs in Gaza no less than it terrorizes Israelis.
ReplyDeleteThe Arab mother in east Jerusalem really touched my heart but her article is ridiculous. What happened to the Arab boy is terrible but you can count on one hand such barbaric crimes of Jews against Arabs and you will need thousands of hands to count such barbaric crimes of Arabs against Jews (only a few days before the Arab boy was murdered THREE Jewish boys were shot in their head in a car by Arabs who burst into joyous singing after murdering them. but hell they are ONLY Jews, who cares if THEY are murdered).
And the whole Israeli public and media condemned and were horrified by the murder while in the west bank people gave sweets and celebrated the murder of the Jewish boyslike they usually do whenever their terrorists kill an Israeli child, mother, old people etc.
The mother in east Jerusalem is afraid of for her son? from what I see Arabs fload west Jerusalem in their thousands everyday but not one Israeli Jew (beside orthodox and national religious) will dare visit in Beir Hanina, Shoafat or any other part of Arab east Jerusalem for fear of barbaric lynching which happened or almost happened too many times to count.
Don't even try to make Israel the winner of the barbarism contest here. There's not a doubt as to which is the much much more barbaric and violent society among the two, and it's not Israel.
Haaretz left wingers can write whatever they want but they are Israelis and Zionists and no matter how harsh their criticism against Israeli policy is they also have no doubt which society is more humane. They critize Israel because they care about Israel. None of them, not even Gideon Levy sides with vast majority of the Palestinians who want Israel destroyed - sorry to disappoint you on that.
David Grossman is a wonderful Israeli writer but he is a ZIONIST, don't ever doubt that. He may critize Israel but he is deeply committed to this country. He just wants Israel to get out of te west bank, unlike you and your Arab friends who want Israel to get out of this area altogether. His son by the way was killed during his military service.