Current Events

My 21 year old daughter, Brodie, entered Israel on Nov. 8. She’s just spent the last two months travelling through Turkey, Syria, Jordon and Egypt. Her original plan was to go to Greece from Egypt but circumstances have led her elsewhere.

I read the Globe & Mail on-line most mornings, along with the CBC’s web pages, and sometimes Aljazeera.net, the Guardian and the New York Times. On Nov 8, the World News section of the Globe (it’s an Associated Press story) carried the headline, “Hamas calls on all factions to resume attacks on Israel”. The second paragraph of the article reads, “Hamas' exiled leader, Khaled Mashaal, said a 2005 truce with Israel was finished and appealed to all Palestinian factions to resume attacks: “There must be a roaring reaction so that we avenge all those victims [of Beit Hanoun].” Two Palestinian militant groups promised to step up suicide attacks in response.” I spent the next hour tracking the story through various news sources. Every one had something different to report. It’s all such a tangle. I coarsely patched together information about Khaled Mashaal and his position in the maze of Hamas’ leadership, but still I don’t yet have a sense of how serious, influential and/or potentially dangerous his declaration really is.

Trying to look past the sensational headlines to see what I can learn has led me into a swamp of historical sludge and sediment. I recognise the importance of knowing a country’s history in order to speak or write about it responsibly, but the history of this region doesn’t even seem to be sequential.

My daughter called from Jerusalem two days later. She reported on her culture shock (“I feel like I’m back in civilization.”), how no one seems to be worried about any trouble and how maybe she and her friend will go to Bethlehem in a day or two. I responded by emailing her the Canada government’s warning to all Canadian citizens to stay out of the West Bank. She’ll probably go anyway. I know what it’s like being on the ground and having your big picture view/sense of things obstructed by the sense of normality everyone tries so hard to (falsely) maintain. I lived that way in Belfast and Johannesburg.

How can anyone ever write about Israel? How could you keep your writing unbiased in sentences any longer than three words. No adjectives, no adverbs. They’re too revealing.

I found a wonderful website of old photos of the ‘Holy Land’. They look like the images of a world that was used as the model for the modern creation of the biblical ‘look’. http://www.eretzyisroel.org/~dhershkowitz/index2.html