Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘lisa goldman’

From an MSN conversation last night between a local friend and her friend in Haifa (paraphrased):

“How are you?”
“I’m great!”
“Great? How can you be great?”
“Seeing a new guy and he’s amazing!”
“But how are you with what’s going on in Haifa right now?”
“A bit nervous… let me tell you about him though. I really think he’s ‘the one’.”

In the meantime, more rockets have hit Haifa and this time, there were injuries and fatalities. Not to mention the constant barrage of rockets that keeps raining down on the north. People have got to be scared.

Here are some reactions from Israeli bloggers on how they’re coping:

Allison wonders how to go on with daily life:

The government tells people from Tel Aviv northward to “be alert.”

OK, so I’m alert. Now what?

I’d love some specific instructions. Let the kids go play at their friends’ house or not? Go grocery shopping or not? Dentist appointment?

I guess I’m supposed to keep doing it as normal, but ALERTLY. Fat lot of good alert will do me if I’m in the dentist’s waiting room and hear a siren for a one-minute warning till a missile hits.

Meanwhile, Harry can’t tear himself away from the news:

Today was a bad day. I got ZERO work done today. Eight dead in Haifa. Fifty wounded. The bodies of the three missing sailors were found. And more and more missiles landing. Over 800 missiles and mortar attacks thus far.

Spent pretty much every second of the day reading news sites and blogs and watching television. I know I’m not the only one. A friend of mine who works at a fairly large corperation here IM’ed me earlier that everyone at his company must be surfing and not working because the network keeps crashing. Another friend’s company’s entire customer support system sits in Carmiel and the company is backlogged with hundreds of customer requests.

I went out briefly for some shwarma. Lots of people were out and about. Everyone of course was talking about the situation but the sense of detachment still exists. It’s just too surreal for people around here. I’m sure that will change as the missiles land even more south.

Lisa, who is angry about the whole thing, blogs about the absurdities of this war:

We watch each other’s television broadcasts, we talk to one another, and then…we bomb each other.

This morning a friend of mine called from Gaza. He’s not a journalist, not a politician – just an ordinary Palestinian guy in his twenties. He lives down the street from the offices of Hamas’s Ministry of the Interior in Gaza, which was bombed a few days ago by an Israeli fighter plane. He has about two hours of electricity a day in his house and about as much running water. But he called me to ask if I was okay, after he saw on Al Jazeera television that Nasrallah was threatening to bomb Tel Aviv. “I’m worried about you,” he said.

And late, late last night I chatted via Instant Message with this Lebanese blogger, while he sat on the roof of his apartment building and watched Israeli fighter planes bomb Beirut.

Speaking of which, here’s a post from the Lebanese blog that Lisa linked to:

A week ago, I might have told you that my heart broke because my favorite World Cup team lost – I almost cried. Now I would do anything to watch my team lose – and bring down my sense of disappointment to that level again.

What I feel now, as a citizen, and what everyone feels is disappointment, anger, anxiety, frustration. We’re scared and locked up at home. War came in a day. War in one day.

Of course, there are thousands of personal accounts from Israeli and Lebanese bloggers “from the ground”. I was only highlighting a few from some of my regular reads. But things are getting worse, and all I can do is watch in fear and hope that people stay safe, somehow.

Lisa recently moved to her new blog home. She’s got photos of her daily life after Ariel Sharon’s stroke. Sometimes pictures really do say a thousand words.

Meryl has numbers proving conclusively that the so-called “truce” was a myth all along. She’s been saying that since it started. Nobody’s been listening. I’m betting not too many people will now. Read her post anyway.

Closer to home, there’s no shortage of election coverage and commentary. But here’s something you don’t see every day: David Janes apparently wants to be Prime Minister. And he’s laying out his platform, piece by piece. I can’t say I agree with everything he says, but at least he’s refreshingly honest. Bloggers for PM!

Pauline cast her ballot in advance polling, for the eminently logical reason that Montreal weather is unpredictable at this time of year. If I find myself unable to vote on Monday because of an ice storm, Pauline, I give you permission to say “I told you so”.

If you aren’t reading Imshin, Damian or Lisa regularly, you’re missing out. Do yourselves a favour and surf on over there now. There’s not much to see here anyway; I’m still in too-busy-to-blog mode.

I haven’t done one of these in a while. And some bloggers have been writing very, very good posts. So it’s high time, I guess.

Here’s Lynn on so-called “messianic Judaism”:

We Jews have been fighting this battle for nigh on two thousand years. Christians have been trying to explain to us where and how we went wrong since the dawn of Christianity. Whether it’s the threat of eternal damnation or death by the sword, the noose, the bullet or the gas chamber, whether it’s physical violence or gentle persuasion, we’ve been there and done that. We have all the tee shirts. Those of us with any historical education at all are way too familiar with these ploys to fall for them. Unfortunately, we live in an age when too many of us lack that education. Jews today are generally smarter about everything else and (except, perhaps, in Israel) stupider about Judaism than they’ve ever been. So we’re ripe for the picking. And, with a little help from their friends, the missionaries are eagerly anticipating the harvest.

Lisa eloquently sums up – as only she knows how – the overwhelming sentiment in Israel these days about disengagement:

The situation is heating up here; it’s not pleasant; it’s very complex; as usual, the people with the least power are paying the highest price; and I really wish this painful enterprise had been planned and executed in a more organized, sensitive fashion.

And closer to home, Debbye has some of the most reasonable commentary on the gay marriage issue I’ve seen so far from the right:

To reiterate: the one prospect I find insupportable is that of allowing gays to marry yet a future Conservative Party government suddenly declaring those marriages null and void. Try to put yourselves in the position of marrying, making plans for a future together and even making joint financial investments and then imagine being told your marriage is no longer legitimate.

Forget the circusy atmosphere we see on television and some of the wilder “activists” showcased by a sensationalist media and focus on the human face of this issue. Gay couples love one another – in probably the same variables of intensity and committment as straight couples – and I believe their love is entitled to respect.

The damage to the institution of marriage was done long before gays emerged from the closet. We can blame easier divorces, the pill, Roe vs. Wade, or the sexual revolution and even the “disposable society” but we simply cannot with any honesty blame gays much less instituting gay marriage.

Hmmmm, all women today. Well, I guess that’s fair, seeing as how the guys usually get all the linky love. Once I’m highlighting women bloggers, I should direct everyone to Meryl, Imshin and Allison while I’m at it, not for any particular post but more for all of them in general.

The sun’s come out and dried up all the rain. It’s gonna be a nice day.

Autonomous Source has a story that’s getting little press coverage but could have widespread implications.

Debbye warns us that Carolyn Parrish may be staging a comeback, now that Paul Martin’s so desperate to inflate his ranks with just about anyone. Why can’t she just disappear?

Imshin and Lisa both share travel tales.

And over at Peaktalk, a strongly-worded post criticizing the Liberals of playing politics with human lives in Darfur. On principle I agree, though I have to sadly admit that there’s precious little that Canada could do even if we were honestly committed to trying.

Lisa has some insight into why so much of the foreign media coverage of Israel is so shoddy:

While standing in a tiny area reserved for the press, I struck up a conversation with a European photographer who had arrived in Israel three weeks previously. He had not yet been out of Jerusalem, and asked me about Tel Aviv. I told him that it’s very different from Jerusalem, gave him my card and told him to give me a call if he ever wanted a tour of my city. Don’t make the mistake that so many foreign journalists make, I told him, of getting stuck on the Jerusalem-Ramallah route. Israel is a lot more interesting and complicated than that.

Yes, he said, I heard that there’s a really big Jewish neighbourhood in Tel Aviv.

I laughed, then stopped when I saw that he wasn’t joking.

Um, listen, I said. That’s like saying you heard there’s a big black neighbourhood in Addis Ababa.

So maybe the journalists aren’t all pre-biased after all. Maybe they’re just too idiotic to know any better than to report the soundbytes that are fed to them on a silver platter. That would actually explain an awful lot.

Allison is tired of the same old story:

We’ve seen this movie before — the Palestinian Authority does nothing, Sharon and the government have no choice politically or militarily but to root out the terror itself, going into Gaza and the West Bank, resuming targeted assassinations, etc. And while they still say they are going ahead with disengagement, the political road to getting out of Gaza will get even rockier and they may have to slow down the pace.

Then the world gets all pissed off at us, and the sparks of potential for a real agreement and progress towards peace quickly get snuffed out.

I would love it if someone would change the script.

Lisa worries about the effects of becoming numb:

I told her that I’d let my guard down. I had lost the ability to shrug off the bombings, and I didn’t think I had the energy to deal with the rollercoaster of emotions again – the adrenalin rush and the grief and the fear.

But most of all, I am afraid of the numbness. Because when unspeakable events occur on a regular basis, survival mode kicks in: you can’t deal with those constant questions about meaning, so you don’t. You become numb. And that means that you lose a bit of your humanity. Because if you cry over every person who is killed, then you go cuckoo. But if you don’t cry, then you’ve lost something important. Empathy. Humanity.

And Imshin went to the site itself and took some horrifying photos.

Too busy to blog at the moment, but never fear: there is so much worthwhile reading out there that you can keep plenty busy.

Allison and Imshin pointed me towards Lisa’s story of how she came to Israel. I’m completely hooked. You will be too. So far, she’s got parts one, two, three and four.

While you’re over at Imshin’s, read this post about Hannah Senesh.

Damian has this disturbing story about how Russian nationalist lawmakers want to “investigate” and ban Jewish organizations. Meryl has more.

And in case you’re still looking for more to read, check out the Jewish and Israeli blog award nominees. While you’re there, vote for your favourites and check out some of the ones you may never have heard of.

Back to regularly-scheduled programming as soon as possible.