Last Week of Classes

We're coming up on the end of the NYU-Tel Aviv program. Classes end on Dec 15th, and then we have our finals period, and then on the 22nd it is back to New Mexico for me. I'm going to miss Israel, but I'm also excited to be home again.


Since this is the last week of school, it's pretty much crunch time. All the assignments that we didn't have over the semester are happening all of a sudden. Papers? Tests? Work?? Arabic homework has been pretty consistent, but my other classes tended towards reading homework, with the occasional response. Now they want actual papers--absolute madness.


Actually, these are probably some of the last essays that I will need to do for a while. I finally decided on a major, and it is biology! Yay! So I won't be taking as many humanity-type classes after this semester.


But on to the happenings of the weekend!


Last Friday, my journalism class went to Jerusalem. We did an Ir Amim bus tour of East Jerusalem, which was interesting, but also cold. For a collection of their maps of Jerusalem, click here. The locations of the green line, municipal boundary, and wall are worth looking at (although the best map for this at their website is 2 years out of date, and doesn't show a difference between planned wall and existing wall).


In the afternoon, we spoke to a formerly American woman who used to live in Itamar, and now lives in a predominantly Jewish enclave in the middle of a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Click here if you feel like crying.


It was an interesting conversation. I know that I tend to stereotype settlers, and this woman was a surprise. She said that she wanted people to get along; she was much more interested in that than she was in whose land was whose, or who had done what to whom. She lives in Israel because it is the land that she loves, not because she feels politically motivated. She was remarkably open, sharing details of her life that I never would have inquired about without the least bit of prompting. Also, she was pretty clearly a former hippie. All in all, a conversation well worth having.

Price Tag

Today in my Arabic class we were checking fill-in-the-blank exercises, and one of the sentences mentioned tabouli and hummus. This reminded my teacher of something that happened two days ago in Jaffa, specifically this. According to my teacher, the fire was alarmingly close to the gas line, so it's lucky that there wasn't an explosion.


I've eaten at this restaurant. NYU-Tel Aviv takes incoming students there for the meet-the-faculty dinner.


I know when I write, I try to avoid inflammatory words like "terrorist," but it really bothers me that the strongest word the article uses is "vandal." Somehow I don't think that "vandalism" encompasses hate crimes.

Back from Jordan!

Hi! Safely returned from my Jordan trip. It was quite the interesting experience; I had a great time, but there are definitely downsides to traveling there alone as a woman. I'm going to do a more complete post later of my adventures (and there were many!) but for the meantime, here's words on the Holocaust Museum, which we visited as a group last week. Also, not cheerful, obviously. Sorry.


The museum looks like a prism filled with concrete, and pushed into the side of the hill. To reach the door, we walked across a clattering, wide wooden bridge. Inside, it was dark. Turning to the right, I could see down the immense length of the museum, illuminated in part by natural light. It was a hard contrast to the Herzl Museum that I had visited only hours previously, which had featured jovially self-aware propagandist films and glowing statues of people. The Herzl Museum didn't try to present truth--it sought to tell the story of a semi-mythical national hero.


The Holocaust Museum also has a goal: to transform the easily-recited numbers of dead into innumerable stories of broken lives, broken families...


Once you enter the museum, you cannot turn back. It is not shaped like a flower, enabling the visitor to flit from petal to petal and learn a bit about this, and a bit about that. Instead, the visitor must walk through every exhibit before reaching the exit, forced to traverse chronological cutbacks through ever increasing emotion.


What was worst for me were the shoes. A coffin-sized pit in the floor, filled with age-blackened shoes of victims...


The word "murdered" is repeated throughout the museum. It is a word that makes it impossible to ignore that the responsibility for millions of deaths lies on human shoulders, and that every single murdered person dies as a result of human cowardice, complicity, or consent. "Killed" is an easy word; "murdered" is much harder.


There is so much more to the Holocaust Museum, but I feel hesitant as to what words would be appropriate. Should I say that the story of partisans starving in the woods was a comforting relief from the rest of the museum? Should I say how it feels to see endless binders filling a room with the names of the dead? Should I say that sometimes I am terrified of the seemingly endless human capacity for evil?


Maybe I will just say that after walking out of the museum and on to the sunny paths surrounding it, after smelling sweet flowers, and touching fresh air, I know that someday I will need to plant myself a garden, and grow beautiful things in it, and pretend, once in a while, that nothing ever goes wrong in the world or in the human heart.

Sderot, Part II

The questions:

Nora said...

Is Sderot an old city? Is it interesting (besides the bombs & the concrete)? Does it get hit solely because it's close enough? Is Sderot unusual in being so active on the p.r. front (glancing at Wikipedia, I gather a Sderot-ite wrote it)? How was the pastry?

September 23, 2011 2:19 AM 

I don't know much of anything at all about the history of Sderot. The focus of the tour was mainly to convince us of the severity of the psychological damage of feeling perpetually at war. In terms of demographics, Sderot is very homogenous compared to Tel Aviv or to Ramla, which makes me think that it is probably a relatively new city, but I am feeling like not googling it. 

Is it interesting? Well, I wouldn't call it a destination city. It's a poor place. I think that there's some manufacturing, although I couldn't tell you of what. It is interesting if you are interested in people--like any inhabited place is interesting if you are interested in people. If you like blocky architecture, this is your place. If you are really into adrenaline surges, you could do pretty well here. If you like parties, or clubs, or nice bars, or shopping at high-end stores, this probably isn't your place. The view of Gaza from a hill on the edge of the city is gorgeous, but I can also see how the aesthetics of the place where the rockets originate might interest city inhabitants a little less than they interest me.

On media and such things: according to the quite obviously biased media center people, Sderot is not very publicized at all. I don't really know what to tell you on this one--I was aware that something happened sometimes down south before I got to Israel, but my personal ignorance or knowledge doesn't really speak that much to the overall efforts of p.r. people...

The pastry: pretty solid, although I desperately wish that it had been a huge amount of green chile or salsa instead. :)

Other Sderot things:

First up, Qassam rockets.

Often, materials used in the construction of the rockets include lamp poles and fertilizer 

Apparently, groups paint the rockets different colors to make it clear who was responsible for each one.

This rocket is from Al Qaeda.

I was surprised by the difference it made to me personally to know the origins of each rocket. Our guide explained that green meant Hamas, red meant Islamic Jihad, yellow meant Fatah, and black meant Al Qaeda. I am generally able to look at the leftovers of violence somewhat dispassionately--a shell is not a person crying, it is a reminder of the lengths people will go to when they want to destroy each other. But knowing what the black on that rocket made me much more emotional than the green, or the red. Those colors were interesting; all they signified was pride in causing suffering. The black... I have never been able to touch something created by Al Qaeda before, but their existence has been a huge part of the American mentality throughout most of my life. I'm not explaining this very well. It's just very very strange to be confronted with a local reality that includes the evil of my childhood years.

On to something else.

No architectural awards here. Concrete safehouse? Check.

Bus Stop Shelter outside a school.

This is one half of a shelter. It's there for kids getting off the bus on their way to school. There is not enough room for more than about 10 adults standing more or less on top of each other. Pee covers the floor--apparently from people loosing control of their bladders out of terror, as well as from people using the shelter as a public restroom. Once the alarm sounds, everyone has at least 15 seconds to get in to a shelter.

Shelter at a playground.

This is one of 3 really big shelters at a public playground. To be honest, the face on this giant worm creatures is liable to haunt my nightmares. Look at those huge, vacant human eyes on this chimeric, horned worm. shudder. It's no wonder no one was at the park when we visited (from about 3-4 in the afternoon). Also, there's this:

I almost wonder why they bothered making the park "safe" from rockets when the play structure was apparently being routinely lit on fire and never repaired. That blue melted plastic? That's from the bottom of a tube suspended around 15 feet above the ground. Are my imaginary children playing on that? Possibly. If I'm sure they're big enough that they aren't going to fall through the hole in the play structure, and also if I'm in a good mood and they've been well behaved recently. Park trips are a privilege.

Gaza

Trash

I spent all of 3-ish hours in Sderot, but my main impression was not that it was a city besieged by rockets so much as that it was a city besieged by the poverty caused by them. The people behind the rockets might hope that the constant terror will drive Sderot inhabitants away, but it seems more likely that the barrage will only make it more unattainably expensive for people to leave.

Next up (probably--unless I decide to talk about lightbulbs and energy conservation, which is totally on the list of things I intend to talk about) adventure to the Golan!