Yom Ha’Shoah is an Israeli holiday Diaspora Jews have adopted, for obvious reasons.

It is commemorated on the 27th of Nisan, to be adjacent to the Hebrew date of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which occurred on April 19th to May 16th, 1943.

It was also made to be adjacent to the Israeli Independence Day, the anniversary of the creation of the State.

This is no coincidence.

I would love nothing more than for this day to be a day of reflection and memorial of the victims and survivors of the Shoah, wherein entire branches of my family tree were decimated. My grandfather had run away from Europe long before the war and he died decades before I ever met him. I will never know who the members of my family. Even if members of my grandfather’s family and community survived, their names have been lost.

But it isn’t a day of reflection and memory.

Tonight Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the Iran nuclear deal was proof the world had not learned its lessons from the Holocaust. This, whilst refugees from Sudan and Eritrea rot in a prison camp and are forcibly deported to Rwanda. This, whilst there is a displaced Palestinian population under siege in our back yard.

Tomorrow an air-raid siren will sound to remind us to stand still in a moment of silence for 6 million members of family.

An air-raid siren.

I know, I know, why can’t I just let this day be about the memory of Jews who were murdered by the Nazis and the survivors who heroically made it out alive.

The above is how that memory is desecrated. If you’re going to commemorate an Israeli holiday, know its cost.

יזכור.

Tumblr crosspost: http://stillnotanonymous.tumblr.com/post/116486214091/yom-hashoah-is-an-israeli-holiday-diaspora-jews

First of all, to everyone who commented, sent me emails, pm's, etc. Thank you.

Thank you.

You are all wonderful and I'm so lucky to have you in my life one way or another.

As you may have heard there is a ceasefire. I'm still extremely nervous as I do not think it will last long, nor do I consider my nation's memory strong or long enough to remind ourselves that our current government brought rockets to the centre of the country and brought bus bombs back from the past.

The occupation, of course, remains and will not be moved at this time, no matter how much violence and damage it puts us through (Israeli and Palestinian).

Despite the ceasefire I didn't go to the office today, but rather spent my entire day working from home. I finished working but moments ago, technically still the 22nd of November, so my work didn't slide into the weekend. Whew.

I didn't go because I was anxious and because there was traffic that would have kept me and my co-workers who live in the same city stuck on the highways into Tel-Aviv for about 2 and a half hours.

Oy.

So I worked and faffed from home.

I'm rather pleased, but for a totally different reason. The reason being I'm going away for the weekend with friends! We'd planned this long weekend (took a day off and everything) over a month ago and god, I need this. I need this weekend like burning, I just need to clear my head, get away and regroup.

My hypervigilance was way out of whack this week. I have other thoughts about that, but that's for another day, I feel.

Right now I need to unwind from my long, long day of work and prepare for my long weekend ahead, which will be full of friends, puppies and rain!

Plus my laptop, there shall be some writing done!

Two sirens went off in Tel-Aviv. Countless ones in the south and on the border with Gaza. Dozens of people in Gaza were killed.

I'm not keeping a tally, I did that last time and it's an insane thing to do. I'll leave that for the other people.

I'll talk about myself and my cushy-only-twice-in-a-day descent down to the shelter of my office building.

The first one was at about 10 am, just as I was sitting down to actually start working. We're supposed to stay ten minutes in the shelter after we hear the sirens. When I was back at my desk to check on updates I saw that the Iron Dome interception system did it's job and got the two rockets that headed our way.

[Sexy!Ex-Roommate] and I commenced a gallows humour tweetfest in which we tried to think of a dry drinking game for each siren during the day, seeing as we can't drink at work. We discarded coffee, considered cookies, eventually decided on songs.

She tweeted Alive.

The second siren was at the end of the work day, around 6 thirty pm and just my crummy luck I was in the bathroom when I heard the siren. I was more annoyed than anything else let me tell you. It's awkward. I pulled up my big girl pants, washed my hands like a civilised human being and went down, to the shelter.

This time I was a bit shakier, possibly because of the compromising position in which I found myself during the siren, possibly because it was two sirens in one day and I'm still, ha, sheltered and don't want to think about what it means.

Regardless, the song I tweeted was Tubthumping (I Get Knocked Down).

I just got home.

I spent the evening with friends.

We amused ourselves, played with the dog-niece, talked about almost anything other than the fact that we're at war.

Again.

What else is fucking new.

I'm so sick of this shit.

Rockets are now reaching Tel-Aviv. There was a siren and the office travelled down to the underground parking lot where we waited the ten minutes we're supposed to. It was tense, but not overly so. Someone said there was an anti-war demo being planned and she couldn't understand that.

I said, "It's very easy to understand when you see that violence doesn't actually solve anything, but only make things worse."

I can handle a lot, but I can't handle dehumanisation. It doesn't matter to me who is dead on which side, I only care that a life was lost. There is a disproportionate amount of life lost on the side of the people who don't have the option of escaping and have much weaker weapons.

That doesn't make them better than us. We are no better, we just have bigger guns.

The Israeli government is as blood thirsty as Hamas, make no mistake. They have no intention on stopping the fight, the IDF is calling up 30,000 reservists.

A ground assault is immanent.

With it, a bigger body count.

It doesn't matter to me who is dead on which side.

I'm fine.

I see no horizon.

We're not.

Organizers of the pro-Palestinian campaign said that more than 1,500 foreigners from at least 15 countries had planned to travel to Bethlehem in the West Bank for what they described as a week of peaceful activities in solidarity with the Palestinians.
[...]
Israel had provided the airlines with the names of hundreds of people whom the government said would face immediate deportation. Once notified, the airlines would bear the responsibility and cost of flying the passengers back to their point of departure.

By early Sunday afternoon, 17 suspected activists had been refused entry, the Interior Ministry said, among them 15 French nationals, a Portuguese and a Canadian.
[...]

Emphasis mine.

The article mentioned an official letter that came out of the Israeli Prime Minister's office that was given to activists who did manage to land and enter Israel.

The gist of it, that there are more worthy causes like in Syria, Gaza and Iran and they suggest they go help with the "real problem of the region".

Here is a copy of the letter* handed out to the activists.



Footnote:
*This letter is a work of satire, not written by me. Whoever wrote it, is a genius.

Just because Israel doesn't automatically persecute gay men, lesbian women, bisexual people and trans people, mean that Israel is so bloody progressive when it comes to LGBT rights.

As regular readers know, I've been pretty vigilant about the way the LGBT community is being used as a way to cover up the disastrous human rights violations Israel commits on a daily basis, not only to the various ethnic minorities, but to LGBT people - a minority that crosses ethnic and religious "divides".

"Pinkwashing" isn't new, but it's getting a lot of news due to the fact that Israel's "re-branding" is, hah, failing.

Back in November, Sarah Schulman wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about this strategy that Israel uses, through its foreign ministry, its tourist industry - don't you know that Americans voted Tel Aviv as the best Gay city in the world! - and just plain flinging all those wonderful "rights" us queers have in the Holy land. Excuse me, I must go vomit.

Taking all that into account - the fact that there is this constant push and pull regarding Israel's image as a liberal oasis in a desert of religious conservatism - people seem to forget that all those "rights" lovingly bestowed onto the gay community (and yes, there is a big difference between the gay men and every other group put together in the alphabet soup of LGBT) are not presented accurately to the world, or more to the point to the United States.

A recent pinkwashing op-ed by a fellow by the name of Scott Piro wrote that:

Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where people are not persecuted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

He then lays out the "facts" about Israeli LGBT life:
Israel has passed anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBTs.

Formal laws, do not rights make. Not to mention that women still receive 75% of the average salary as opposed to men. Consider a two women house-hold, when both women work in what is considered a "second-salary slot".
I can't even begin to tell you how fucked transgender people are when it comes to labour, because no one will fucking hire them - trans people are not protected under anti-discrimination laws with regards to the work place - putting that T in LGBT, launders the reality of trans people in Israel, who I can safely say are the most fucked over group under the queer umbrella.
Unless they also happen to be Palestinian. More on that, in a bit.
And sure, businesses are not allowed to discriminate against same-sex couples or people who have a gender non-conforming appearance, but hey, if you're a religious institution you most certainly can!
That's just the tip, of course.

Israel Recognizes same-sex marriages performed abroad.
No, Israel does not. It writes on the ID card "married" for couples who got married in a country where same-sex marriage is legal, because international law requires that there be equal status in all documents. The fact is, if you are same-sex couple and you got married in, say, Canada (like many of the wealthier gays and lesbians do), your status will be written, but not recognised and you have the same rights as a registered co-habitated or common-law married couple.

So, uh, you can scratch that off the list.

Israel has legalized LGBT adoption rights.
The supreme court allowed one lesbian couple to cross-adopt each other's biological children. It is a legal precedent, like most LGBT "rights" in Israel, as opposed to actual pro-active legislation.

Can this horse get any higher?

LGBT soldiers serve openly in all military branches, including special units; discrimination is prohibited.
Only Americans find this special. Seriously. Just because you had DADT for too fucking long (read, at all) doesn't mean that the fact that LGB (if you are a T and are out you will most likely be exempt from military service for reasons relating to mental health. Snack on that.) serve "openly" make the IDF in any way progressive. Considering the fact that the IDF is growing more religiously conservative as we speak and has rabbis telling soldiers to not hear a woman sing on pain of death, I can't see the fact that some boys and girls in certain units are out (you are not likely to be out in a cambat unit, as opposed to an intel unit, for instance) make the army liberal.

And in any event, why would we want to emulate a militaristic, hierarchical, masculine-supremacist, racist and patriarchal institution?

Same-sex couples have the same inheritance rights as heterosexual, married couples.
Wrong again. Inheritance rights for unmarried, common-law married or co-habitating couples relies on drawing up official papers and making your spouse your beneficiary, unlike heterosexual married couples, where it is automatic.

So you see folks. We may not be the worst, but really, when you compare us to actual Western countries (because we pretend to be one), we are not in the best shape. In other words, it's really easy to compare us to countries where things are really bad and come out looking quite good.

Also, of course, all this is related to Jewish LGB(T) people in Israel. The fact is, Israel uses the hard won fights the LGBT community has wrought throughout the years in order to cover up the fact that it violates international law and human rights in the West Bank, Gaza and in Israel proper - where is the help for Palestinian LGBT's in the West Bank and Gaza? There is a reason Israel based Palestinian queer groups like Aswat and Al-Qaws are critical of the mainstream and Jewish LGBT community for lapping up the fact that we are being used as a fig leaf for Israel's human rights violations.

Don't tell me Israel is a "queer oasis".

It occurred to me that my previous post was a whole lot of whine and cheese about a life, in which, I really don't have all that much to complain about.

(BIG WARNING:Graphic Pictures of Wounds and Violence)

I mean, why complain about a leaky toilet when the IDF shoots a protester at point blank with a grenade launcher, subsequently kills him and proceed to attack the funeral procession.

Don't talk to me about the most moral army in the world, 'kay?

Speaking of fallacious images. Did you know that Israel is the best place to be gay in the Middle East? No, really, it is.

We have rights, and parties, and freedom of expression and places in which we can gather safely!

Oh, wait.

Considering what happened in 2009 at the LGBT youth club and the fact that the people who come to the Tel-Aviv LGBT centre and the park in which it is situated are routinely assaulted, the whole, "it's goo to be gay in Israel" stance is more dissonant than ever before.

My age is showing, because what I consider a "gay park" is not what they mean in the article.

Especially when you consider the fact that pinkwashing as a propaganda tactic is at an all time low. At least, I hope my fellow siblings aren't as gullible as the Foreign Office would like to believe.

I've spoken about Pinkwashing before and last month the whole shebang was blown out of the water by Sarah Schulman who posted a brilliant op-ed in the New York Times titled Israel and 'Pinkwashing', in which she writes:

[...]
In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.
[...]
The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

'nuff said, really.

Stop what you're doing and just watch.

Just, listen.

A response to the question and accusation often hurled at Palestinians by Rafeef Ziadah.

A month ago when the civil unrest in Israel began and I put aside my cynicism in order to participate in the protests and demonstrations, I was irked to hear people (friends and not friends) say they hoped these demonstrations don't turn "political".

I was baffled.

Social justice is probably the most political standpoint in society at large. The demand that resources, the economy and legislation treat everyone fairly is without a doubt a hard political line.

But in Israel, "politics" doesn't mean the power dynamics between groups of people, or how one's identity creates intersections of privilege and disparity, oh no, politics is that dirty laundry best left to elected officials, you know, which dirty laundry I'm talking about.

Racism. Occupation. "Security".

One of my friends the other day accused me of not liking her as much, because she's Right Wing. I'm like, you're not Right Wing, you support economic justice and she's said, in more words but that's the gist, that I was being deliberately obtuse and that Right and Left in Israel don't mean what they mean in other places in the world.

It's true, Left in Israel means opposing the Occupation to the point of hating Israel and Right means that the only way for Israel to survive is for the Occupation to stand because then Israel will be on the brink of destruction.

Safe to say those are two extreme positions even without breaking down the facets of race, nationalism and trauma that are intertwined into both arguments.

The demonstrations against the high cost of living, the class disparity and the over-all economic injustice that swept through the nation did not touch on the subject of the Occupation. I felt that it should have, because so much of what creates the economic disparity in Israel has to do with building settlements in the West Bank, has to do with building the Separation Wall, has to do with troops out there culling non-violent protests and with pushing an Apartheid economy in the West Bank.

An unregulated cartel like economy thrives in conditions like an Occupation.

I don't know much about the economy, but I do know that.

So the Occupation and the Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank were excluded from the discourse and activity to do with the social justice campaign the Tent Demonstrations started.

For good reason, Left and Right, such as they are conceived in Israel have to do with security, how Israeli Jewish bodies can be kept safe in the face of the big bad terrorists.

The government solution, bomb the shit out of civilians living under siege (because of Israel) and under social and religious oppression (because of Hamas), even though the People's Resistance Committee (PRC), who committed the co-ordinated attack, are not affiliated with Hamas, have nothing to do with the Hamas government and were all ID'd and killed by the IDF on the day of the attack.

And not to mention that the skirmishes that followed on the Egyptian border killed 5 Egyptian soldiers, after they had to deal with a suicide bomber of their own.

This, as they say, is a clusterfuck.

Beyond the diplomatic nightmare (Egypt has withdrawn its ambassador to Israel) and the "cease fire" between Israel and Hamas being thrown out the window.

Yes, beyond that, the Israeli paradigm that Security trumps society will be tested, and I fear that it will hold true, because we are nothing if not predictable. Our fear and trauma prevents us from seeing that war benefits very few (Israelis and Palestinians) and hurts the innocent more than anyone who actually perpetrates violence.

The Hebrew Leftists blogosphere is already talking about the end of the social justice demonstrations in light of the government's hawkish endeavours. I'm hoping the people have wised up a little, and notice that the government who sweated due to the fact that we know they used the economy against us, will have wised up and see that the government will exploit this renewed violent conflict in order to get back the control it had briefly lost on the citizens.

My response?

Resist and go back to the streets where we've been for the past month.
Resist and don't accept the idea that "security" demands social justice to be forfeited.

*V For Vendetta. What else?

My speech (which, no matter what people say, has never been absolutely free) has been curtailed in a frightening way.

I cannot tell you which companies not to buy from, because I could get sued and fined (but not confined) for it.

The "anti-Boycott" law which passed last week in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament stipulates that it is a civil wrong (not a criminal offence) to call for a boycott on Israeli made, well, anything.

It is meant to protect Settlement made goods from the West Bank from financial loss.

In effect, it punishes people from doing the most non-violent action possible, asking people to be conciousness consumers.

I am not telling you to boycott, because that would open me up for law suits that could sue me for more money that I've got, due to hypothetical financial loss.

If ever there was a time for you to learn about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction campaign and movement, it is now.

But, well, I can't tell you what you should do regarding that.