Comments on Israel/Lebanon and the Israeli Blogosphere

My mother sent me an article (dated 14 April, 2006) from the US Jewish newspaper the Forward about Lebanese author Elias Khoury's new book on the Palestinian Nakba called "Gates of the Sun."

Michael Totten recently traveled to Israel, and will begin posting on his travels soon.

Mustapha recently asked Lebanese bloggers to take a look at what an Israeli blogger has to say about Lebanon.

With all of these connections, I decided to check out the Israeli blogosphere and found it remarkably sad and depressing. Perhaps it is just the events of the last month that caused this effect, but similar events happen there all the time.

Here are a few of the subjects of their posts: the Tel Aviv suicide bombing, personal accounts of the terror attack with pictures, terror attacks in Dahab, anger that the Egyptian blogosphere is blaming Israel for the attack, Iran's nuclear program, Ahmadinejad's exterminationist outbursts, the film "Paradise Now," Passover, and Holocaust Remembrance Day. Coindidentally, Holocaust Remembrance Day is just a few days after Lebanese commemorate the civil war; thus, within a week I've read multiple disturbing personal accounts of concentration camps coupled with personal experiences from 15 years of war.

What is most striking is that many Israeli bloggers are incredibly knowledgeable about what is going on here (ie, Lebanon, but also the rest of the Arabic speaking region). Note that my mother sent me an article about the Nakba by the editor of An Nahar Literary Supplement from a New York based Jewish newspaper. I didn't read a single article in the Lebanese press on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The lack of news about Israel - not an unimportant country in the region - is astounding.

Of course, there are crazy fanatics who get everything wrong, but many Israeli bloggers are remarkably well informed and incredibly evenhanded given everything that has happened to them.

I hate exchanging in the usual pan-Arabist tit-for-tat style argumentation, but think about what Israelis deal with on a daily basis: frequent suicide bombs, support for such attacks by the popularly elected Palestinian government, threats of annihilation from a country arming itself with nuclear weapons, constant words of hate from the Arabic speaking world, and remembrances of the Holocaust.

Responding with a litany of Israeli crimes does nothing to better understand who they are and their humanity. When we discuss Syria, we don't talk about the utterly destroying the entire country and population because of the many crimes the Syrian government committed and continues to commit.

Fantastic bloggers like Lisa Goldman have nothing to do with anything you throw at her. Read her blog. Read how her friends think the Palestinian star of "Paradise Now" is a "hottie."

Read paragraphs like this:

I remember the time my mother whispered to me, at the kiddush lunch following a cousin's bar mitzvah ceremony, that the relative at the next table - the one who had just pinched my cheeks and told me what a beautiful young lady I was becoming - had been a Mengele twin. Where is his twin? I asked. In and out of mental hospitals, answered my grandmother.

Or this:

Two years have passed since suicide bombings stopped being a near-daily occurence, but as far as our reactions were concerned - well, we fell right back into routine: don't get too excited, maybe it was just a gas explosion; oops, there are the sirens; how many?; a lot, must be a pigua [terror attack]; start making phone calls ("did you hear? Are you near a television?" How many dead?")

And note the differences in response to bombs between them and us. They kept doing what they were doing without even looking worried. In Lebanon, the nightclubs pack up, Monnot and Gemayzeh empty, and everyone looks incredibly worried - perhaps because bombings aren't daily here; no one gives a good explanation for why. And here, the bombs went off without targeting civilians. They went off in random allies and empty shopping strips.

And note the Israeli response to a bombing: "10 minutes after the explosion, the wounded had already been evacuated to the hospitals. There was police tape around the immediate area of the bombing..."

Provides some perspective, eh?

Not knowing about "them" is the worst crime we can commit. It invalidates them as humans, as if they don't even matter. They are Stalin's faceless enemy, the rabid dog, the evil blood suckers whom it is righteous to kill. Our papers definitely need to start covering more than major political events in Israel. We should remember their tragedies. 'They" already have a massive internal debate going on about the Palestinians, the war in Lebanon, and the wall. Given the reception Elias Khoury's book has received in Israel, it seems the Israelis (including the official IDF education officer quoted in the Forward) are recognizing the Nakba. Why deny the Holocaust?

At first all this unquestioning and uninformed hate makes me angry, but in the end, it's truly depressing, especially after reading the uninhibited first person narratives in the Israeli blogosphere.