I wrote this entry last night, but due to LJ feeling poorly, I'm posting this just as I'm heading out the door.

Maybe one of you will read it.

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My brother asked me how work was and why I hadn't been writing about it.

My bitchy reply was that I was tired (sorry about that, big brother!)

And I am.

It's been a while since I worked these kind of hours. In fact, I'm pretty sure the last time I worked these kind of hours was way back when, when I was in the IDF!

So, yeah, tired.

Also, annoyed, because it was Remembrance Day eve last night and I told my 6 year old niece I would come see her participate in her school's ceremony - but I was stuck in the most massive traffic jam ever because the entire country was on the move in an attempt to get home before the ceremonies and the air siren that marks the start of the day sounded.

I ended up having to stand in the middle of the street as the siren sounded. I hate that.

I have a big distaste for the whole atmosphere of this day, considering I despise the glorification of death that this day requires, the compulsory heterosexuality of the day - because the dead soldier, who is always a man, will invariably leave behind a mother, a father and a wife/girlfriend - and everything is so bloody war mongering.

In any event, regarding my job. I now work for a big international company, to be known henceforth as The Company (yeah, not that Company... but it does sound mysterious, doesn't it?) in the capacity of content editor and SEO (that's search engine optimisation).

Being a n00b, I'm not actually doing much other than being trained and going through the database and learning things. My boss, to be known henceforth as Boss, is a bit impatient, I think, because I'm not the only new person on the team, so she's a bit stressed. But she is strict and I'm asking so many questions and I like having boundaries and an authority figure who I can identify with.

The floor is amazing, I love my colleagues. One of my best friends works there and he pushed my resume to Boss and he's been absolutely charming and helpful and it's so much fun to be able to be me among these people, as we're all a bunch of geeks!

One of my colleagues is a little, how do you say, not really into the whole slaty language thing and spelled out "bitch" in lieu of saying it and I, in a moment of complete id and fangirrlism, said: "bitca?" A la Xander Harris.

This began a 15 minutes discussion about Buffy, Dollhouse, Firefly, Joss in general, Farscape, Stargate, Battle Star Galactica, Star Trek and even Star Wars.

Boss, who is not into tv or sci-fi or anything like that concluded our status meeting with "Okay, good, and live long and prosper. That's what you people say to each other right?"

I was not the only one to do the Vulcan salute.

So yeah, I'm having a good time on my first week.

Yesterday there was a march in honour of the victims of hate.

It was a pretty standard turn out for the March we were a little less than 100 people, made up of Trans folk and their Cissy Allies (hello there).
The march was set to start on the street of the shooting in August, which made the whole situation a whole lot more loaded emotionally of course.

The way to the march was a bloody disaster, you see, there was a different demonstration happening along the same main streets and we had to wait for it to pass.
The police was all set for that demonstration and basically decided that they would use the same personnel and the same garrisons for both marches.

One march was for Trans awareness, basically.
The other was for protesting the cut of the Disability Pension for IDF Veterans.

Yeah.
Talk about a "clash of civilisations" - one portion of the population that isn't drafted and another that pays the price for it.
*sigh*

As I said, getting to our march was a bloody disaster because the police garrisoned a bunch of main streets which we had to drive through, we also had to drive through the stragglers of the disabled vets march.

We drove through the entirety of central Tel Aviv on the busiest evening of the week, on the evening of a demo that nobody gave a shit about.
Two demos that nobody gave a shit about.

I didn't see anything other than Updates (as in not actual reporting) on the online mainstream news websites.

Of course, once we got to the Gay Community centre the police told us to go through the back so that we don't disturb the other demo.
Even when they're being fucked over by because they're disabled, there's still a hierarchy.

Both population are silenced and made invisible.
Both population intersect - I wouldn't be surprised if there were vets there who were Trans and there was certainly more than one marcher with us who had mechanic (crutches, wheelchair) aid.

Both populations are fucked over.

Still, it was obvious who were more respected by the police - the Disabled Vets didn't "chose" to be freaks and they're "genuinely" screwed over by the government.
Of course.

Sometimes I really feel the people in power just look down on us, eat and throw the crumbs down to see the fights brew.
It's depressing.

It's the eve of the National Day of Remembrance and Heroism of the Holocaust.

Personally, ever since I was a teenager I've disliked the municipal and school ceremonies. More specifically, ever since I returned from a school trip to Poland in which we travelled through Warsaw Ghetto, Treblinka, Bialystock, Lublin Ghetto, Majdanek, Kradow Ghetto, Plashow, Chelmno, Auschwitz-Birekenau and various forests in which bodies are buried in mass graves.

On teevee there is an Israeli made documentary about the Bielsky Brothers, the new Hollywood War-Action film Defiance is based on their story.

I'd really like to see the movie, as I can't recall a WWII movie in which the Jewish Partisans were the heroes and not a side anecdote that existed along side the Jewish victims.

I find the Israeli narrative of the Holocaust problematic.
During the travelling with my school mates and my mother in Poland, we had memorial ceremonies at each of the sites that were the concentration and death camps.
At the time, I remember being overwhelmed by everything.
I remember joking around with the other kids (we were 16-17) and I don't know if everyone was actually aware of what we were doing there.
I remember thinking "why haven't I cried yet?".
Because I didn't.
Cry, that is.
Biggest cry baby in the world, walking around the place I was told my people had been massacred and I just felt numb.
It was only when we got to Birekenau (about two days before we were set to go home) and we walked around through the (in)famous gate "Arbeit Macht Frei" - "Work Shall Set You Free".
The Nazis sure had a twisted funny bone.

I walked around the Blocks (the big red brick houses that were used for different uses) and I decided to explore the very famous Block 10 - that would be Josef Mengele's facility.
It was most likely the heat (we travelled in July) and the smallness of the hallways and the fact that throughout my childhood Josef Mengele was a bit of a Monster Under The Bed kind of figure, but with quite a bit of force I was struck by the enormity of what had actually happened in that place. And in all the other places I had been to that week.
I ran out of the Block and cried like the baby I am to Mummy who went on to tell me that her father's family (he died when she was young and I never got to know my maternal grandfather) were all exterminated - he had immigrated to South Africa in the early 30's, saving his life.

I did not travel to Poland in a vacuum, obviously. In my mind I had the annual ceremonies I sat through as a child and teen, I had Schindler's List, Escape from Sobibor, War and Remembrance (the scene in which they bring the people to the gas chambers, just thinking about it, makes me weepy) and all those other "clean" images.
As I mentioned, throughout the trip we had various memorial services at the sites of the and the Zionist connection was very much emphasised.
The various Zionist youth groups were part of the Jewish resistance and we were always hearing that today, because of Israel, this will never happen again.
Never again.
Never again.
Never again.
That's what we hear all the time.
Remember, remember and never forget.

We talk about the fact that a culture was lost, was destroyed.
We don't talk about the culture itself.
There is a Yiddish revival of a kind in Israel. As the Survivors are now very quietly disappearing and there will truly be no one to tell us what happened to them, perhaps us Israeli Jews are realising that we didn't actually come from nothing, that we had a home somewhere else once.

The Holocaust is very callously used to deflect any criticism of Israel. All our enemies are a "New-Hitler". Holocaust denial is a problem no doubt, but we are not the only people to have been persecuted and had genocide committed upon us.
The Holocaust, while being a part of Jewish history, doesn't actually belong to us... it belongs to the world.
To claim it as solely ours denied the history of other people.
I think the world in general has become callous to the Holocaust when movies like Valkyrie are produced along with Defiance.

Regardless, the way Israel uses the Holocaust is post-traumatic in the extreme and we nurture this post-trauma constantly by the split conciousness we have as both victims and no-longer-victims.
I feel that the lesson learned from the Holocaust is that humanity reached a point of creative destruction that should be examined - because I really think it was the scope and industrialism of the deaths that were committed - after all the Holocaust is hardly the first (or the last) genocide to have been perpetrated.

I can't help but finish this post with my own brand of funny:

I didn't think I'd feel so sad about them being dead.

Coffins of Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev delivered to Israel-Lebanon border.

When I have time to seek out more information, I'll update on this subject.

At least the families have some peace of mind now and can mourn properly. Maybe the country will be able to do the same and move on.

Sometimes I think about the Holocaust, and especially today I do because it is Holocaust Remembrance Day; the public television networks are showing documentaries, the radio is playing dirges and at ten AM a siren, the siren used for air raids and times of emergency and war, was heard, stopping everything – traffic, exams, fights, classes, shopping – creating an ear piercing moment of silence that continued to ring in my ears for a few more moments.
It is surreal, to see the stillness while your brain is screaming that the noise is painful. It forces you to remember what today means and why we must never forget it.

In Israel, we use the word "Shoah" (שואה, eng. Holocaust) lightly, at least in my circle of cynical friends; "This exam is going to be a holocaust" – "המבחן הזה הולך להיות שואתי". We make jokes about German Sheppard's (Alsatian dogs, ya know) in Jewish ghettos and ask how many Jews you can get into one car – one in the boot, two in the front, three in the back and the rest in the ashtray.
Morbid, which is putting it lightly.
I don't know how other nations that have gone through genocide handle the memory.
Do they also make jokes?
Do they go on school trips to Poland to see where our families were murdered, where their hair was shorn and used to make water proof socks and their fat was used to make soap (everything you saw/read in "Fight Club" is true).

I don't think it's the magnitude of death that makes the Holocaust unique as genocides go.
I think it was the industrial-ness of it, the careful methodical planning of it all. The loss not only of life but of an entire culture that had been cultivated over centuries. The pornographically photographed naked women, children and men; dying, dead and piled up in heaps, each body indistinguishable from the next.
Nudity takes away individuality.
The numbering of the people, which took away a little bit more of their humanity in the eyes of the perpetrators; the lies that hid the material reality: "You'll be getting your luggage back soon" a smiling Nazi clerk would say and everything was catalogued in that meticulous bureaucracy the Germans would pride themselves in.

My own opinion on the genocide that massacred the branches of my family on both sides has changed over the years - Those that went on to create what is now my quite large family, who live around the world, left Latvia and Lithuania before Operation Barbarossa, indeed before WWII even began.

It's easy to succumb to the idea that Jews are eternal victims and that the Holocaust was the largest and latest of Pogroms. At the same time, there is the fact that from this incident of violence a new kind of Jew arose, one that is strong, stronger than ever before, with a country of his own and an army that is the strongest in the Middle East. It is with this new strength and army, the Jews will never fear for our existence again.

I'm pretty sure Israeli Jews are the only majority population in the world that fears for its continued existence, not "way of life", but actual life. It is for good reason; Jews are surrounded by nations who don't want us here (when are we ever "wanted" any where).
I always think it's ironic that we went from one ghetto to another, only this time we built the walls, the snipers are ours and we pushed those we didn't want out.
The Holocaust brought about the existence of Israel, it probably would have happened at some point, but the genocide of the Jews made the process that much more urgent, that much faster.

Israel was built to be a home for those who became homeless.
*sigh*

The conclusion Jews and Israelis in particular, must take from our tragedy, is that we must strive to be better than we were.
Than we are.
We must strive to create a country, a world, in which persecution, racism, antisemitism, orientalism, genocide, auto-genocide are History and not reality.

That's my conclusion as an Israeli Jewish girl and that's what I derive from the Holocaust and that's why I make sure to remember, remember and never ever forget.

.לזכור, לזכור ולא לשכוח לעולם

Remember - יזכור:
The Jews
The Palestinians
The Bosnians
The Darfurians
The Rwandans
The Aborigines of Australia and Tasmania
The Cambodians
The Tibetans
The Armenians
The West African Slaves
The Original/First/Native Nations of the Americas
The "Witches"
The Inquisition
There are more, many more, too many. Who else must we remember?

I don't.
( Ashkenazi: Public must also prepare for next war (for the link-phobic) )

War Mongers and Hawks are nothing new in Israel's Military/Political elite, most of them base their entire careers on the fact that yes, there will be blood shed.

But the kind of hype and type of ministry of defense (see "love") newspeaka as shown above, I find so disgusting, I don't even have the words to describe the kind of disrespect this sort of address is, especially as it was expressed by the current and former IDF Chief(s) of Staff at a memorial in honour dead soldiers, who died in what was a tragic accident.
To talk to the families and media and say that more soldiers are going to die in up coming wars, is enraging.

Not to mention that Gaydamak is using this as another opportunity to score browney points, look at the nice man, giving money for memorial monuments - Gaydamak also set up a tent city for the North Israel citizens who stayed in the Centre and South during Lebanon War II - he's definitely trying to do the whole "Private is Better" - yeah, let the Capitalists take over social security and services, that way the government won't need to be bothered with the citizens it supposedly serves... sorry went of tangent there.

I despise propaganda; especially fascist, military propaganda that uses dead soldiers to move and stir an agenda which most people would actually oppose!
Yes we must prepare for War, citizens and soldiers band together against the Enemy...
Bah!

This poem is one of my favourites, the first time I ever read it, I didn't understand the meanings behind Paul Celan's words. I just knew that they were meaningful and powerful in the way they were constructed and in what they conveyed.
Later on, when I was older, writing poetry of my own, I understood what Paul Celan had said and continued to say.
It resonates and hopefully, always will.

( Todesfuge - Paul Celan )

( פוגת-מוות - פאול צלאן )

( Death Fugue - Paul Celan )