As soon as shabbat went out today I turned on my TV to watch the England vs Israel European Championship qualifier. [note to Americans: this is an important football match for both teams. Football is a sport that the rest of the world understands and thinks is really good. You, who believe that American Football is actually a sport, as opposed to a series of TV adverts occasionally interspersed with some big men bumping into other big men, are totally misguided.]
Anyway, this was the first time that I have really seen Israel play football, and they were really, really bad. You can take the Jews out of the ghetto and you can have them grow oranges in the desert, but let's face it, Jews are not good at sports. Even "new Jews".
So this gave me a great idea. The Arabs kicked Israel out of the Middle East qualifying groups when it came into existence. I think the original reason was because there was no room for the phrase "The Evil Zionist Entity" on the scoreboards in those days. But this was a big mistake. If the Arabs played the Jews at football, things would be a lot better in the Middle East. Egypt and Iran are pretty good teams. Make no mistake, they would wipe the floor with us. And this would make the Arabs feel a lot better. They would be able to say: "Well, the Evil Zionist Entity may have destroyed our armies, bombed our cities, stolen our territory, and ripped out our olive trees, but we beat them 3-0 last week! Hah!"
They say that pride is an important thing in the Middle East. If the Arabs would re-admit Israel into their football league, they would get a lot of it back, fast. Why has Tony Blair not thought of this?
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Back to School
It has been a very busy couple of weeks, all leading up to today, when all three boys in the family (Eshy, Aviv, and yours truly) had their first day of school in Israel.
Eshy started kitah aleph (first grade), Aviv started Gan (nursery school), and at the Hartman Institute we had the first orientation day for the new cohort of students.
Eshy's and Aviv's stories are the most interesting of the three. Eshy is going to a school called Yachad, and it's (so we understand) a genuinely pluralist school, with religious, secular, and in-betweens, all in the same school. This is extremely rare in Israel. One of the only other similar models is a school called Keshet, in Jerusalem, but that isn't really pluralist, it's what I call dualist: you have to choose to be either "dati" (religious) or "chiloni" (secular). For those of us who are in the middle somewhere, or who are religious-but-open, or religious-egalitarian, there's no place in a school like Keshet. We hope that at Yachad, there will be.
Yachad has a gan program but we couldn't get Aviv in (it was only by a minor miracle that Eshy got in to kitah aleph, and that was only at the last moment). So Aviv is going to a local religious gan. We went to a parents' evening there last week to meet the ganenet (gan teacher) and other parents. Well, I thought that American parents were uptight, but I've never seen anything like this. These people were crazy! Imagine a vociferous and raucous debate in the Knesset about the peace process, with left-wingers and right-wingers screaming blue murder at each other for destroying the Jewish people and suchlike. Now imagine that kind of screaming blue murder transposed into a group of parents sitting on little kindergarten chairs around little kindergarten tables so that your knees are in your cheeks, with pictures of toy trains on the walls and wooden building blocks in the corner, and all these parents with their knees in their cheeks are screaming about snack time being at 10.30 whereas last year it was at 10.00.
Maybe there is a large segment of the population here with congenital hearing defects, and that is why everyone shouts the whole time. Has this been investigated?
Eshy started kitah aleph (first grade), Aviv started Gan (nursery school), and at the Hartman Institute we had the first orientation day for the new cohort of students.
Eshy's and Aviv's stories are the most interesting of the three. Eshy is going to a school called Yachad, and it's (so we understand) a genuinely pluralist school, with religious, secular, and in-betweens, all in the same school. This is extremely rare in Israel. One of the only other similar models is a school called Keshet, in Jerusalem, but that isn't really pluralist, it's what I call dualist: you have to choose to be either "dati" (religious) or "chiloni" (secular). For those of us who are in the middle somewhere, or who are religious-but-open, or religious-egalitarian, there's no place in a school like Keshet. We hope that at Yachad, there will be.
Yachad has a gan program but we couldn't get Aviv in (it was only by a minor miracle that Eshy got in to kitah aleph, and that was only at the last moment). So Aviv is going to a local religious gan. We went to a parents' evening there last week to meet the ganenet (gan teacher) and other parents. Well, I thought that American parents were uptight, but I've never seen anything like this. These people were crazy! Imagine a vociferous and raucous debate in the Knesset about the peace process, with left-wingers and right-wingers screaming blue murder at each other for destroying the Jewish people and suchlike. Now imagine that kind of screaming blue murder transposed into a group of parents sitting on little kindergarten chairs around little kindergarten tables so that your knees are in your cheeks, with pictures of toy trains on the walls and wooden building blocks in the corner, and all these parents with their knees in their cheeks are screaming about snack time being at 10.30 whereas last year it was at 10.00.
Maybe there is a large segment of the population here with congenital hearing defects, and that is why everyone shouts the whole time. Has this been investigated?
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