New Life

So here it goes: the obligatory apology for being a horrible blogger and not writing anything here for a long while. I'M SORRY.

There. That was easy.

And now for an update from the Middle East (as this blog promises). A month and a half ago I got a call from someone in the army whom I had been talking to with regard to expediting my enlistment date. She told me that I would be enlisting in 1 day and that I had to pack all of my things and be at a base in the center of the country at 7:30am. This was both great (I wanted to go into the army as soon as possible) and horrible (one day is just about enough to rummage through the clusterfuck of things in my old apartment and take stock).

I went into 1 month of basic training with a mix of people like me (post-grad immigrants) and 18/19 year old Israeli guys. Basic training involved shooting, running, pushups, hand to hand combat and all of the other things that you'd expect from basic training... actually, you'd probably not expect that my commanders were 19 year old girls and that they yelled at all of the old guys with various degrees as if we were 18 year olds. But that's exactly what happened. It was a pretty humbling experience, but also a great one. On rainy days, although all of my clothes, my sleeping bag and my equipment would be cold and wet because of a gigantic leak in my tent that let in torrential rain, I would still have laughed more that I had laughed in years because of simple, stupid things that happened in the army. Although being treated like an animal getting herded around crushed my ego and made me question my decision to put myself through that whole thing, I found solace in that my good friends were also going through the same thing, and saw the good in the decision and in the experience. This one month would make a terrific blog post. But, I just don't have any energy to write about it! Maybe when it's not 2:30 in the morning:)

Anyway, life has changed. I now walk around with a loaded M16, get into bulletproof busses, am relied on as an economic expert, speak Hebrew fluently and am even required to learn spoken Arabic. Why the Arabic and why am I all of a sudden an economic expert? Well, this is what I wanted to do in the army. And this is what the army wanted me to do because of my background in economic development and business studies. I'm an economic analyst for the economics branch of the Civil Administration of the West Bank. As the State of Israel now has an official policy of endorsing and finding a way to come to an agreement for a two-state solution with the Palestinians, and as a result of certain economic stipulations in the Oslo Accords, Israel finds it in it's interest to develop, grow and sustain the Palestinian economy. Not only is economic development empirically proven to reduce the level of violence in a fair number of war-torn corners of the world, but it also is an agent that works wonders in the area of combating Israel's delegitimization.

As I am soundly against the occupation from a political point of view, yet serve as a non-commissioned officer in the mechanism of the occupation, you can imagine how awkward I feel sometimes; however, I realize that the occupation does indeed exist with me or without me. I also realize that the unit I am in is despised by settlers and other political groups on the right for being too leftist and accommodating to Palestinians. On a personal level, with my service, I can knock a number of birds out with one stone: 1.) Integrate further into Israeli society (an original goal of mine), 2.) Progress professionally in an interesting, thought-provoking, and incredibly educational position that will be most likely the highlight of any professional or academic interview for a number of years; 3.) Perfect a language (Hebrew) and learn another one (Arabic).

I can't say that I'll post some more material about how the army is, what sort of work I'll be doing, etc - simply and frankly because I have more interesting things that I can dedicate my time to over the weekends. But, who knows, maybe I'll get an itch to start writing again. Until then - don't worry about my safety... but please wish me luck.

...And Americans Are Superficial??

Just a quick rant.

It's kind of common knowledge that Americans are perceived to be stupid, fat, and superficial. Right? I've already ranted about this. But what I haven't ranted about quite yet is how unfounded that stereotype is compared to other cultures - specifically mediterreanean cultures. And specifically Israel.

When I was in talks with various kibbutzim in the spring to see if I could set a living situation up before I was going to go into the army, I had a bizzarre exchange of emails with the Baram kibbutz secretary. At first it was just the regular Israeli bullshit - questions tinged with distrust about "what sort of horrible things does this guy want to do to our kibbutz"/"how will he fuck us over". Then, as I got my boss to send them a 500 word recommendation about what a nice/innocent/quality guy I was, they started to warm up.. But of course the recommendation did nothing to paint the real picture that the kibbutz secretary wanted - my actual picture.

"Could you please send a few pictures of yourself that might help us with our decision"

ummm. Ok.

Anyway, the other things that I notice in Israel with regard to superficiality is an obsession with jewelry, shiny things, and hair. It's just my observation, and maybe I'm just paying too much attention to it, but girls on dates or girls who are glitzed up for a night on the town constantly check themselves out if they even remotely sense that there might be a shiny surface in front of which they could shamelessly check themselves out for a minute. The weirdest part is that boyfriends just stand, staring admiringly, entranced by this high maintenance idiot and her grooming skills.

Americans may generally like big cars, big houses and big tvs. But Israelis have them covered in spades with the whole physical appearance superficiality thing. That's it. Rant complete.

Country Music and Hebrew

When I lived in Tel Aviv, I used to feel strange every now and then when I was riding my bike, listening to country music that I had a craving for, and stopping for a conversation about Israeli politics in Hebrew with my friend down the street. It made me feel like two worlds were colliding.

"She said you're a ramblin man. You aint never gonna change. You got a gypsy soul to blame and you were born for leavin".

"אגב מה דעתך על ההפגנה דיור?"

But I guess I've kinda always felt like that - I was the quiet guy in college who would play dream pop acoustic songs and bluegrass music, who just so happened to play bass in hip hop shows at fraternities: douche bags, gin and juice, and me, Mr. Sensitivo acoustic guy puttin down some mad bass line behind some black dude's rhymes. In elementary school, I was the inner city kid who had moved to the suburbs after getting stabbed with pins and living in a drive by shooting zone. The notable city "strut" that I had been procuring up until that point, that was widely commented on by my new teachers and friends, was strangely juxtaposed to my new life of smiling, good posture, good grammar, and a 99% white student body.

This is what modernity has produced as a side effect. Increased mobility and ease of information dissemination has created a higher chance that people will have attachments to different cultures that, when juxtaposed, create a strange, dissonant noise.

The whole reason I bring this up, is because every now and then I find it hard to reconcile the fact that I'm a guy who could see himself living in a cabin in the Colorado mountains, fishing and hunting and listening to country, and also driving around in an armored tank, speaking Hebrew and carrying an M16. These two things are so different from each other and come really from different worlds that never, never intersect. Maybe this is what adventuring creates. This blog is even a product of worlds colliding, creating dissonance. But what can I say. Sometimes I enjoy the sound.

Your Son's Name is Moron?

Israelis, however magnificent as they may be with English, have unfortunate luck with how some of their names sound in English. Not only do they sound goofy due to their pronunciation with an Israeli accent, but some of them are hilarious because of what they mean in English.

Sometimes I imagine an American businessman who is salivating over some new contract with an Israeli company, who wants to call the contact guy on the other side to see if both of them can ink the deal, only to realize that he's about to call a guy name Nimrod. Or Moran. It's a wonder that names like "Idiot" or "Shithead" do not exist out here. Aside from the names synonymous with imbecile, there are the names that are, perhaps even more unfortunately, synonymous with excrement. "Doodoo" is a fairly popular name, and is the first name of a very famous singer here, Dudu Aharon. There is also the common variation of "Doodee". If I have a son, I'll seriously consider naming him "Jackass" or "Poop" as my way of adding to the diversity of great Israeli names.

Then of course, there's the accent. With the eastern european style "r" sound embedded in the Israeli accent, and names being short and filled with these "r"s, it makes for funny sounding names. I've always known that "Or" is a very common Israeli name. But I sometimes wonder what it's like to the foreigners that Israelis meet when they're travelling the world after the army, when they first hear the name "Or" - meaning "light" in Hebrew. In English it sounds like "ohhh" - a sort of sound that you can imagine someone makes who has a stomach cramp and realizes he has to go unload in the bathroom. But what if you put all of these silly names that are centered around this awkward "r" sound together. I always make fun of this by pretending I'm a proud Israeli mother:

"Yes, these are my Sons Ahhree, Ooohree, Oooori, and Ohhhhhhhh." - (complete with a look of abdominal pain on the last one).

Maybe I'll just have a daughter. That way I won't have to worry about a life of torment in the English speaking world...

Same Street, Different Fireworks

Well, I was sitting in my room, happily working my way through some practice GMAT questions today - shabbat. Usually the jewish sections of Jerusalem and even the arab parts are much quieter than any other day of the week on Shabbat. It's the day of rest, and usually the lazy man inside of me, although not shomer shabbos, happily conforms to the prevailing mood.

Over the last week, there have been intermittent fireworks going off around the old city. I guess Jerusalem day was a couple weeks ago and Shavuot was a week ago, but I'm still not exactly sure why these stupid fireworks keep going off. The first couple times I heard them I thought they were automatic gun fire and made a point to stay inside my room. One night I went to a barbeque with some friends and heard the same noise as I was looking out over the rooftop where we were perched to see some very colorful fireworks exploding over the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Ok, I thought, it's just fireworks. No more rubber bullets, no more light rounds, not more flying rocks.

Today was a little different, however. During my study session I heard the same firework noise and didn't think too much of it - in fact I barely noticed it because I was so concentrated on studying. But a minute later, the fireworks sounded about twice as loud. Within 30 seconds I heard non-stop honking and police sirens blasting away from a distant part of Jerusalem, getting closer. There were people yelling on the street below me and the loud fireworks continued. I decided to get up and see what the hell was happening, so I walked into the main lobby area of the hotel only to see that one of the windows looking out over the street had been broken. Within a couple of seconds I started to smell what I thought initially was gunpowder, but as my throat and eyes began to burn, I realized that it was indeed some tear gas that had wafted into the lobby. The other guys in the room, some arabs and some tourists, were bent over coughing and, well, crying. We all retreated to an adjacent area to the lobby to try to recover, and I went over to another smaller lobby to get some water. I decided to look out of the lobby window into the square where all of this noise was coming from, and saw Israeli SWAT officers firing light rounds into the air with handguns and rifles. There was pandemonium on the street, bloody faces and, most surprisingly, arabs fighting arabs.

Apparently, two arab families, one of whom owns the falafal/kebab shop that I eat at frequently, have a history of violent quarrels. By the time the Israeli police had moved in to disperse the families and the crowd that had gathered, the falafel shop was wrecked - windows smashed, signs destroyed, frying oil vat tipped over and blood over the ground. The Israeli police had arrested the offenders and had created a perimeter around the scene.

Anyway, I'm holed up in my room, listening to more fire fights that are happening around the corner wondering when I can get safely leave the hotel. I'm not sure it's in my interest to stay in this volatile of an area of Jerusalem for much longer... I think I'll move soon. In the meantime, where will I get my felafel?

Jews Throw Rocks? Arabs Throw Wood? I'm Back in Israel?

It's been about 2 months since I've been in Israel. In the face of some serious bureaucratic messes, I decided to go home and attend one of my best friends' wedding and my brother's medical school graduation. It was refreshing to be back, not only because I was able to enjoy a glimpse back into domesticated, homely stability - a total rarity in these parts - but it got me away from complications that had arisen from the Israeli army.

Excuse the metaphor, but the army is being very much of a selfish girl right now, I would say. Unsure of whether "she" really needs me right now based off of her needs and my advanced age (in military terms). "She" is indecisive and is making me sweat it. But the good news is that this old guy has a meeting with the head honcho at the recruitment center to see if some decision can be made, rather than keeping me up in the air. Despite the ambiguity of my future, I decided that I'd return to Israel to attend some work interviews (in high-tech, project management, and non-profit) and keep on trucking in Israel. I still love the place and know that even if I do end up serving in the army, it will be later this year. I want to continue building a life, speaking Hebrew, learning Arabic, meeting people and travelling around this fascinating country.

So, after a day of travelling, I arrived in Jerusalem to get acclimated and ready for some upcoming interviews. I just so happened to choose a hotel right outside of the Damascus gate in the Old City of Jerusalem. The owner, who showed me around the hotel and my room, is a dishonest and seemingly conniving arab guy who, according to tripadvisor.com, has a history of fuzzy math, hugely inflated currency conversion rates, and a "violent attitude". In keeping with the reviews, he did try to screw me over with a 30% premium on the room that I had booked on a website; however, I held his reputation captive by threatening to write an honest review of the place on various travel review websites. He begrudgingly relented and we went our separate ways.

Anyway, at about 5 in the afternoon, a procession of religious Zionist Jews was beginning to swell into a relatively small square directly below my balcony. These guys were celebrating "Jerusalem Day" - the commemoration and celebration of the retaking of Jerusalem from Jordan in 1967. As the numbers grew, so did the decible level of their chants - "HaTikva" and "Am Israeli Chai", among others. As I was sitting on my balcony, taking all of this in, I started to notice that every now a group of teenaged boys would walk up to the barricades and police tape separating the square from the hotel area - a completely Palestinian neighborhood - and would start taunting the bystander Palestinians by yelling racial epitaphs toward them and boasting of Israel's reconquest of Jerusalem. The Arabs were standing and observing the spectacle while cleaning up their shop areas for the end of the day; and I was fascinated that this palpable tension that I had always noticed when in Jerusalem was now tangible and brewing before my eyes.After a hundred or so more Israeli teens ran over to the gathering along the barricade, carrying Israeli flags, some Palestinians started to lined up on the other side, making the few police officers noticeably nervous. I went downstairs to get a picture of this from behind the Palestinians:

It looked to be dying down after 5 minutes of this face off, and so I went up to my room to try to take a nap. I was about to knock off for a bit when I heard some more yelling and commotion. Stepping toward the window that leads to my balcony, I saw an Arab guy launch a huge piece of wood, while another threw some sort of heavy metal object at a cop trying to quell the situation. As quickly as that had started, a bunch of elite SWAT style commandos ran in and started shooting a few rubber bullets at the Arabs. The Jews' reaction to this was, for some reason, to throw rocks at the Arabs and at the hotel building. A few rocks hit my balcony and came very close to hitting my window. Check out the video:

Although the celebrations are merited in my mind, as I believe that Jerusalem, in some capacity or another, should be an integral part of Israel proper, this celebration and the quality of people that it attracted truly exposed the warts in Israeli society. I know I may sound naive when I say that people should really make a concerted effort to co-exist in Jerusalem and in Israel in general; but I feel that the root of this type of discrimination and cycle of hate comes from a deceivingly small number of people on each side of the conflict, and it is at these nationalistic gatherings (Jerusalem Day and Nakba Day, for example) that these diminutive groups are exposed. While it is a sorry spectacle to witness, I can find solace in the fact that maybe since these people are exposed as who they are, the rest of society can ostensibly learn from their poor example of egalitarianism and humanity.

No matter what the moral is of these clashes, it was an interesting thing to come back to. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but I really did feel like I came back to a war zone for a bit.

Me and My Muddled Accent

Over time, and definitely due to my international experience, I've been losing my native accent. I have never noticed it myself, but it has been brought to my attention by former coworkers, random people on the street in Israel, and even my family. I've been told that not only has my pronunciation changed, but also that my rhythm, diction and register have changed. Nobody can put a finger on exactly what it's morphed into, but a few claim that it sounds Spanish (after I told them I had just come back from Spain).

I have mixed feelings toward this transformation. On one hand, being an American without one of the ugliest accents in the English speaking world (the American accent) is a plus. It is also something that might give me more of an "international aire" and, thus, perhaps an advantage with employers or graduate schools actively pursuing more diversity. On the other hand, my accent is muddled and indistinguishable. It is neither blatantly American nor blatantly belonging to any other country or culture. I feel that while it may be intriguing to some people, it could also be something that would unconsciously create space between me and someone who is less accepting of foreign-seeming people (would only be a problem in America I feel).

Ya. I'm probably thinking too much about my stupid accent. But it's interesting that it's happened. And interesting what might happen as a result of it.

So You Want to Drive in Israel?

As a new immigrant to Israel, I am allotted 3 years to convert my American driver license. This means that in my first 3 years, I don't have to take the pain-in-the-ass theory test and pay an extra couple hundred dollars. So, I decided to take advantage of this nice little "grace period" and get an Israeli driver license.
I've heard this conversion process being described as "an expensive scavenger hunt". And I think that does some justice to it - at least from an American perspective. It may seem like a simple and painless process to some europeans who tell me their licenses cost them thousands of euros and 6 months to attain. But, to me the whole process was a two-week affair of running around town, waiting for hours on end in the Israeli DMV, and witnessing the ridiculousness of the actual practical test itself.
First, I had to pick up a form from some optometrist in central Tel Aviv, and then, for some reason, walk to another optometrist and get a quick eye check. The next step was to go to a doctor for a "check up". It consisted of him asking me none of the questions on the form, making eye contact with me for about 2 seconds; and then sending me on my way after 2 minutes of checking boxes and signing the form. A couple of days later, I took a bus to Holon, just southeast of Tel Aviv to get the DMV to sign the form saying that I was medically ok to drive. I get there at 8, tear off a number from an extremely conspicuously-placed ticket roll and wait... and wait.. In the 5 hours that I was waiting there.. ya I said 5 hours..
Something registered in my head about how bureaucracy works in Israel in those hours of waiting. Not once but thrice were there huge outbursts from people trying to NEGOTIATE the terms of how the bureaucratic process of whatever motor vehicle issue they were dealing with, would be carried out. In two of these instances, security guards were called in to quell the outburst. You would obviously never see anything like this in the States. I brought this up to my roommate who told me that she felt that people think they can negotiate the terms of anything - even in a government institution - because the wages are so low in Israel that workers feel it is not necessary to do some of the more effort-intensive (and required) tasks that their jobs entail. So, Israelis feel that if they push hard enough and in the right way, they can get whatever it is that they want out of an institution, because, presumably, it is something that is definitely a part of the job description of the person with whom you're dealing.
Anyway, after 5 hours of that, I set up the second-to-last thing that I had to do for this conversion process - setting up driving lessons. It basically consisted of driving around in a piece of shit car and listening to the driver instructor lazily go over Israeli traffic laws for an hour.
Next up was the practical test. It started at 7:30 in the morning in front of some train station. Sketch. I started to drive and stopped at a stop sign, waiting to make a left turn onto a busy street. There was a lot of traffic coming from the left and the right and, although I could have made a quick maneuver to make the left turn, I decided to wait and play it safe so that I could pass the test without a hitch. After about 30 seconds of waiting, the tester sighs and postures in his seat uncomfortably as he tells me, "we could have already made the turn 3 times. This is a very unsafe way of driving".... WHAT? NOT driving quickly to get into to crazy crowded traffic is considered to be unsafe? I know that that is how Israeli drive... but in the driving test, this is what they test for? To make sure you're as crazy as the other maniac drivers out there?
So, finally, I floor the accelerator and get into traffic, driving like a typical Israeli asshole. The tester comments, "that's more like it"... and after 10 minutes, I had an Israeli driver license..

Actually, I'm An Extra

That's right, I was on the silver screen for 3 seconds of a 6 hour movie about the British Mandate in Israel. I'm an amazing extra.

Lull

To everyone who checks this blog: sorry I haven't written in a while. I've been too busy trying to organize my life for the next year (and failing miserably). When something moves, I'll start up again. Wish me luck.