A Loud and Promised Land

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still.trucking
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A Loud and Promised Land

Post by still.trucking » May 9th, 2009, 5:00 am

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: April 16, 2009
TEL AVIV



On my 12th visit to Israel, I finally had my baptism by traffic accident. I was sitting at a red light, when a bus turning the corner honked at me to back up. When I did, I scraped the fender of the car behind me.

The driver — a young, hip-looking, alt-rocker dude — came running out of the car in a fury. He ran up to the bus driver and got into a ferocious screaming match. Then he came up to me graciously and kindly. We were brothers in the war against bus drivers. Then, as we were filling out our paperwork, another bus happened by and honked. The rocker ran out into the street and got into another ferocious screaming match with this driver. Then he came back to me all smiles and warmth.

Israel is a country held together by argument. Public culture is one long cacophony of criticism. The politicians go at each other with a fury we can’t even fathom in the U.S. At news conferences, Israeli journalists ridicule and abuse their national leaders. Subordinates in companies feel free to correct their superiors. People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.

Ethan Bronner, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, notes that Israelis don’t observe the distinction between the public and private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice on how to live.

One Israeli acquaintance recounts the time he was depositing money into his savings account and everybody else behind him in line got into an argument about whether he should really be putting his money somewhere else. Another friend tells of the time he called directory assistance to get a phone number for a restaurant. The operator responded, “You don’t want to eat there,” and proceeded to give him the numbers of some other restaurants she thought were better.

We can all think of reasons that Israeli culture should have evolved into a reticence-free zone, and that the average behavior should be different here. This is a tough, scrappy country, perpetually fighting for survival. The most emotionally intense experiences are national ones, so the public-private distinction was bound to erode. Moreover, the status system doesn’t really revolve around money. It consists of trying to prove you are savvier than everybody else, that above all you are nobody’s patsy.

As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel, but I have to confess, I find the place by turns exhausting, admirable, annoying, impressive and foreign. Israel’s enemies claim the country is an outpost of Western colonialism. That’s not true. Israel is, in large measure, a Middle Eastern country, and the Israeli-Arab dispute is in part an intra-Mideast conflict.

This culture of disputatiousness does yield some essential fruits. First, it gives the country a special vividness. There is no bar on earth quite so vibrant as a bar filled with Israelis.

Second, it explains the genuine national unity. Israel is the most diverse small country imaginable. Nonetheless, I may be interviewing a left-wing artist in Tel Aviv or a right-wing settler in Hebron, and I can be highly confident that they will have a few things in common: an intense sense of national mission, a hunger for emotionally significant moments, an inability to read social signals when I try to suggest that I really don’t want them to harangue me about moving here and adopting their lifestyle.

Most important, this argumentative culture nurtures a sense of responsibility. The other countries in this region are more gracious, but often there is a communal unwillingness to accept responsibility for national problems. The Israelis, on the other hand, blame themselves for everything and work hard to get the most out of each person. From that wail of criticism things really do change. I come here nearly annually, and while the peace process is always the same, there is always something unrecognizable about the national scene — whether it is the structure of the political parties, the absorption of immigrants or the new engines of economic growth.

Today, Israel is stuck in a period of frustrating stasis. Iran poses an existential threat that is too big for Israel to deal with alone. Hamas and Hezbollah will frustrate peace plans, even if the Israelis magically do everything right.

This conflict will go on for a generation or more. Israelis will keep up their insufferable and necessary barrage of self-assertion. And yet we still dream of peace and the day when I am standing in line at an Israeli cash register and an Israeli shopper sees a chance to butt in front of me, and — miracle of miracles — she will not try to take it.

More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on April 17, 2009, on page A29 of the New York edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17brooks.html
"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous." Barbara Ehrenreich

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Post by jimboloco » December 26th, 2009, 5:46 am

People who move here from Britain or the States talk about going through a period of adjustment as they learn to toughen up and talk back.

Ethan Bronner, The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, notes that Israelis don’t observe the distinction between the public and private realms. They treat strangers as if they were their brothers-in-law and feel perfectly comfortable giving them advice on how to live.
David Brooks has a name like a Gentile. What's his problem?
He is the object of my last successful letter writing to the St. Pete Times, in which he had called out Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe the ambassador Wilson.
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Post by jimboloco » December 26th, 2009, 5:47 am

Wilson became known to the general public as a result of his op-ed "What I Didn't Find in Africa", published in The New York Times four months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wilson's op-ed documented his 2002 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) investigation into whether Iraq had purchased or attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. He concluded that the George W. Bush administration twisted intelligence to "exaggerate the Iraqi threat."[4]

The week after the article's publication, Robert Novak, in his syndicated Washington Post column, disclosed that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, worked for the CIA as an undercover officer. Subsequently, former Ambassador Wilson and others alleged that the disclosure was part of the Bush administration's attempts to discredit his report about his investigations in Africa and the op-ed describing his findings because they did not support the government's rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Wilson's allegations led to a federal investigation of the leak by the United States Department of Justice, to the appointment of a Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, to the CIA leak grand jury investigation, and to a major American political scandal variously dubbed by the press "Plamegate", the "Plame affair", the "CIA leak scandal", and other terms relating to the public disclosure or "leak" of Mrs. Wilson's then-classified covert CIA identity as "Valerie Plame".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson,_IV
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Post by jimboloco » December 26th, 2009, 5:54 am

In his op-ed several years ago, while Tex Bush 2 was the prez, he called Joe "the strutting little peacock of the intelligence set in Washington, " paraphrased except for the peacock bit.

Si I dissed him and also the ST Pete Tmes for allowing such an insult to an American of character. Now I see where he is coming from, and his Americn Jew culture and sentiment is not so embarrassed about making over the top pronouncements in conversation, which it was, as well as disrespectful to what Wilson did. Joe Wilson did not want to see a rain of terror onto Iraq and the people there, nor did he want to see our nation doing it, in the name of "yellow cake."
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Post by jimboloco » December 26th, 2009, 6:02 am

His eyewitness report into Israel is interesting for sure, however vain and contentiously misled he may be at times. No wonder Christian pilgrims stay on the guided tours.

ISRAEL IS SURVIVING, YES, BUT NOW IS NOT FIGHTING AGAINST POLYTHEISTS. iNSTEAD IT FIGHTS AGAINST ANOTHER MONOTHEISM, ISLAM, BECAUSE IT DOES NOT RECOGNISE ISLAM AS IT'S BROTHER, NEE COUSIN. Caramba.

I would like to go ther, after being prepped by Brooks. But I would be like a snake, man. I want Israel to survive too. But Brooks makes a clear distinction between fighting for survival with her neighbors and asserting that Israel is a middle eastern country, not a western outpost. My, my, my. I thought it was both.
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Post by still.trucking » February 3rd, 2010, 5:04 pm

Brooks is a recovering American Jew too. At least he don't have no Xtian hang up.
"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous." Barbara Ehrenreich

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Post by mtmynd » February 3rd, 2010, 9:01 pm

he don't have no Xtian hang up.

like Jesus? ;)

I enjoyed this article you posted, JT. Interesting viewpoint and I could almost hear all the cacophony in the Tel Aviv he spoke of.

Thx.
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Post by still.trucking » February 12th, 2010, 2:14 am

Yes
But no so much Jesus as the brand that has grown up around Him. I guess I mean the Christian Zionists.

I guess what I meant is that I liked the article too Cecil. I thought it painted a sympathetic picture of Israel.

As an American Jew, I was taught to go all gooey-eyed at the thought of Israel
But I was not taught that lesson.

I would like to go to Haifa someday. Go to the naval museum there. I would like to see if the ship's bell and wheel of the torpedo boat that attacked the USS Liberty are still still on display as honored symbols.
They say it is there because it was the last torpedo boat in service not because it was the boat that attacked the Liberty. I guess that makes it okay.

I wonder. Does it ever cross the minds of the Israelis that it is insensitive and offensive to the memory of those 34 American sailors who lost their lives that day. 171 wounded.

We killed four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. I wonder what the Canadians would think if we put the plane that killed them in the Smithsonian among our military artifacts that we are most proud of?
The wheel and bell of MTB-203, which launched the fatal torpedo, are displayed in Haifa's Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum
http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13 ... 03,00.html
"Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous." Barbara Ehrenreich

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