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.