The Jewish-Arab Choir "Shirana" at the 2016 Israeli-Palestinian Memorial ceremony (Photo: Tatyana Gitilitz)
Welcome one and all to the Holyland Update, brought to you in a new, more digestible format, in which we'll have more posts and fewer topics and stories per post. Kicking off this new era of bemused Israel/Palestine reporting, we're gonna talk about the alternative, Israeli-Palestinian Memorial Day Ceremony.
Unlike in most countries, in Israel Memorial Day, when the nation commemorates its fallen soldiers (and, more recently, civilians murdered in terrorist strikes, or as the official phrasing has it, 'hostile operations'), is a day before Independence Day. There's a sharp, even dissonant swing from mourning rituals to unbridled merry-making. Memorial Day is a BIG DEAL here. Most of the restaurants, movie theaters and other recreational venues shut down for 24 hours; most of the TV channels are shut down and the ones that aren't devote their schedule exclusively to bereavement and military history content. There's a channel that does nothing throughout the entire day except scroll the names and photos of the fallen. All ~23K of them. There are two sirens, one at around 8 on the evening before and one at 10am the day of. The customary behavior is to stand at attention (if you're driving you stop your car, be it in a street alley or the freeway, and get out of it to do so) for the minute-long siren. If you're in public when the siren goes off and you don't stand, you get dirty looks from most people. Shit ain't no joke around here.
DON'T DESERVE BEREAVEMENT
Now, as you may imagine, all these rituals are not necessarily conducive to fostering the mental state required to stop creating so many fallen soldiers and citizens. So 12 years ago, a bunch of bereaved Israeli families partnered with a bunch of Palestinian families who had likewise lost loved ones to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and together they've been holding an alternative memorial day ceremony, one focused more on making peace than on lionizing war. In that time this event has gone from one you could fit in an opulent bathroom to one attended by thousands of people. This, as you may also guess, does NOT sit well with a lot of folks.
"A lot of folks," of course, includes the nationalists running the country. Defense Minister (and corrupt as fuck crook [the witnesses against whom tend to turn up dead], and likely Russian spy) Avigdor Liberman used his authority to deny entry into Israel for the ceremony to 110 Palestinians. Liberman, who did four months of non-combat service when he moved here from Moldova, is telling the families of fallen warriors how and with whom they should commemorate their loved ones. Dig it?
Liberman. Chickenhawk crook.
Now, "Combatants for Peace", the organization running the alternative ceremony, isn't stupid, and therefore wouldn't try to invite people tied to terrorism. All the Palestinians in question have entry and work permits in Israel, so Liberman couldn't pretend there was a a security reason to deny them entry. He flat out said it was because of the ceremony, which of course led to an appeal to the Supreme Court, which will be heard today (Monday) afternoon.
Now, the vast majority of the traditional Memorial Day ceremonies are 100% respectable events commemorating the fallen and nothing else, but I can assure you that at many of the ceremonies (held in every village and town for the local fallen) there will be speeches glorifying war as the only choice, indeed a religious duty[1]. But dare take the ocassion of remembering the fallen to even try to prevent future fallen, an oh, no, how can you be so insensitive?! And if you're a bereaved parent, and THIS is how YOU choose to commemorate your fallen loved one? Well, the prevalent rejoinder among our local variety of MAGA morons is that "you don't deserve to be a bereaved parent." This statement actually leads to all sorts of fascinating psychological insights, which I'll be glad to discuss in the comments. But before all that it must be acknowledge that indeed, they don't (deserve to be bereaved).
And a final funny tidbit: Combatants For Peace held a joint Israeli-Palestinian event at Barbur Art Gallery in Jerusalem. The Mayor, Nir Barkat, sent a letter to Vulture Minister (not a typo) Miri Regev urging her to look into discontinuing the modest state support this venue receives. Now, you'd expect Regev, who has made the war on insufficiently-loyal cultural institutions her signature cause, to be only too happy to oblige Barkat in his call for petty censorship. However, Barkat has recently announced that he won't be seeking another term as steward of Israel's capital, and will instead run for Knesset in the very same Likud party Regev sees herself leading after Netanyahu. Hence, Barkat is now a direct primary threat to Her Ministership. Upshot: What Barkat got from Regev for his trouble was a wagging finger of a letter telling him to shut the place down under his own authority as Mayor, and not try to score headlines and political capital on the Culture Minister's back. So there.
Haaretz
[1]In the past two weeks, two videos have come out of speeches by two different rabbis from "Sons of David" at Eli, a state-funded religious military prep-school. In one the rabbi says that "even if there was peace all around and all the Arabs loved us, there's still a commandment to conquer all the country, at least to the Syria-Turkey border"; in the newer video, another rabbi says that "In a war to conquer the country I can kill them all. I won't, because of international treaties Israel is part of" - I swear, is what the man said - "but apart from that, there's no reason I won't." This comes on top of the multiple repugnant statements from Rabbi Yigal Levinstein, one of the heads of this fine educational facility, in which he delegitimizes gay people, women in the military, all non-religious folks really. This cesspit is generously government-funded, but the drizzle that goes to culture venues who have the nerve to give a platform to peace-seeking has to be cut off. A state shows who and what it is by the way it gives and denies funds.
RIP Sister Maya and thank you for those wise words.
WILL MUSIC SAVE YOUR MORTAL SOUL?
As part of the format change, we're gonna end with some music from around here. I'll try to make it topical, but I can't promise that'll always happen. Anyway, this being the first time we'll do a two-fer: One non-hiphop song by Israel's greatest hiphop crew, and a song by Canadian Celtic rockers Enter The Haggis, because it's a great fuckin' song.
Hadag Nachash - One More Brother (Went Down To The Grave)
Momma is hurting, another child orphaned,
The sidewalk is once again painted red.
Enter The Haggis - No More Stones
Would we even listen then
Or could we only see the damage
When the dust had settled
And we finally saw the waste?
Hey, ho, the wind has blown.
Won the war, now there's nothing to show...