Photo By Ezra Gut
Sometimes I go down to Sodom
to talk to Lot’s Wife
where she looks out at the Dead Sea
Karen Alkalay-Gut
The Lost Generation
C’est un peu, dans chacun de ces hommes, Mozart assassiné.
I enter the hotel where Ricky has been staying since a few days after October 18 when she was forced to leave her house in Metula. In that home next to the northern border of Israel she had been dealing with her Parkinsons’ with walks in the garden in the morning and the afternoon, grab bars in strategic places, meals provided by a local organization, and visits and deliveries from shops she has known for 50-odd years. Now she is in a small room far from the elevator and can’t make it to the dining room because there are some stairs she cannot manage.
Tel Aviv Tell
I am not a professional poet
I’m not a reporter of today’s news
I see what I see,
and before I finish the telling
something else happens to me.
Julia Sebutinde
As soon as I heard the verdict of the International Court of Justice last week and heard the vote of 15-2 against Israel, I knew it had to be a woman. Who else could stand up to 15 men and vote with the old Israeli man?
Mass Rape (& Obliviousness)
It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here. And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth. So I began to look for information, for specific facts. As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focused subject than the general slaughter. Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves. Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped.
Skies Over Israel
Maybe if they stopped bombing us, we’d stop bombing them…If they have a million displaced persons, we have 150,000 families looking for places to stay because of the rockets.
In Country
There are three new buildings being raised right around our co-op, primarily by workers who come in every day from the West Bank or Gaza. A few days ago I spoke to one of them in the little grocery store. Tall, shy, a teenager, he could speak only Arabic and comes over the border every day. From Gaza, he comes through the Erez crossing.
But I won’t be seeing him for a while. The crossing was destroyed yesterday when hundreds of nearby residents were slaughtered in their shelters.
The demonstrations were cancelled last night – most of the pilots, the soldiers, the navy, the doctors – were in the sites of the catastrophe, trying to clean up the remains of the slaughter, to treat survivors, to find some of the terrorists who may still be around.
A Sack of Ideals (Conscience and Protest in Israel)
Feeling very impotent in the face of the gradual transformation of the country I joined precisely because of its struggle for democracy and socialism, I returned to my childhood companion, Thoreau. He’s the one who knows about civil disobedience…
Democracy in the Streets (Saturday Night in Tel Aviv)
Tonight there were much more than 150 thousand demonstrating in Tel Aviv alone. If Tel Aviv has a population of about half a million, and over 150 thousand people were holding flags in the center of the city and shouting in union “democracy,” what does this mean? This is not just about certain rules being crammed down our necks every day, or about politicians who should be in jail. This is about the concept of democracy, and to my mind it should not be only an Israeli issue or even just an issue for Jews around the world. It is about the danger to democracy all over the world. My Hungarian friends, my Polish friends, my Italian friends, and my American friends all know the terrible threats to democracy being faced and the delicate freedom to protest that can disappear in a moment. Tell the world to pay attention to the freedom we have and guard it carefully!