Rechavia Berman – GangstaYid

Posts Tagged ‘Occupation’

Israel: The Bamba Nation That Worships Gandhi

Posted by: on: March 17, 2012

Shortly after Purim, Judaism’s ancient costume festival, the masks came off in a frenzy in three completely unrelated incidents – and I’m not even talking about Israel’s calculated decision to throw a match on a dormant gas keg, throwing the lives of a million of its own people into disarray and giving the other side a free calibration test.

 

First came the ludicrous decision by Israel’s Olympic Committee to throw any shred of self-respect to the wind and not simply accept an ordinary corporate sponsorship, but to make a corporate logo the official Olympic mascot for Israel’s delegation to London 2012. Perhaps so short a time after Israel’s sucker population rose up last summer against “porcine capitalism” wasn’t the best of times to try that one…The collective snort of derision caused the powers that be to about-face in under 24 hours. Pity, tho. The logo in question: (A baby in a diaper with a forelock and a fresh mouth who represents the quintessential Israeli snack “bamba” [a peanut-flavored puff thingy]) is a perfect representation of Israel in its 64th year of sovereignty.

 

Like the logo, Israel is a rather infantile nation. Like the logo, it has a one-track mind (the bamba baby for bamba, Israel for its occupied territories and its trauma-ridden rationale for choking itself on them). Like the logo, Israel is crassly commercial, mercantile and mercenary. Finally, the choice of the bamba baby is a perfect illustration of so many of Israel’s cherished and misguided narratives. You see, although bamba is indeed an Israeliana-laden word, the sad fact of globalism is that Ossem, the long-time purveyor of said peanut-flavored mush, is no longer a plucky Israeli company. It is, rather, a small division of the Nestle Corporation – a firm which, incidentally, did not escape the 1930’s and 1940’s with an unblemished record. Nuff said? So all in all, a most apt capsule of Israel’s true current essence.

 

Then came the big story of the week. Haaretz’s crack reporter Gidi Weitz uncovered that the State of Israel is currently funding the “legacy” of former Minister and transfer-advocate Rehav’am “Gandhi” Ze’evi at twice the amount of a bunch of actual fathers of Zionism and founders of the state (Herzl, Jabotinski, Ben Gurion, and Begin) combined.

 

A bit of background on Ze’evi. First, to dispel confusion, he acquired the moniker after appearing one morning at the Palmach mess wrapped in a bed-sheet, and not due to any pacifistic convictions. He was a long-time military careerist, peaking at Central Command General, where he was known for keeping a pair of chained lions at the entrance to his HQ. Years later a famed actress would claim that as a young soldier she was sexually assaulted by an unnamed famous high-ranking officer, “who thought he could fondle the girls the way he did his lions”.

 

In 1981, shortly after a notorious gangland double murder, “Gandhi” was recorded speaking on the phone with Tuvia Oshri, one of the two men later convicted of the murders. He was asked “Can you come” and answered “If you need me I’m coming.”

 

On the other hand, he was a very well-read man who spoke fabulous Hebrew and did much for the study and disciplines of history and archaeology in Israel. Politically, he is chiefly known as the first and primary advocate of “transfer” (i.e. ethnic cleansing, although of course called for “in peaceful ways”) as a solution to Israel’s dreaded “demographic problem.” He ended up being shot to death by a senior member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, while staying at an East Jerusalem hotel AND blowing off his security detail.

 

In numbers, Gandhi’s legacy gets about 4.9 million ILS a year. Rabin, who was actually PM and was murdered and alla that, gets around 2 million, as does the iconic Likud PM of the 70’S and 80’s, Menachem Begin. The father of political Zionism Theodore Herzl and the father of the Israeli right-wing Ze’ev Jabotinski get 250K each. So these are the express preferences of Israel today, as written in the most indelible ink there is: cash.

 

The third mask-shedding event of the week is still categorized as unproven, despite the first-hand nature of the source. Hosni Mubarak, the deposed tyrant of Egypt, states flatly in his memoirs that he used to pay Israeli politician Binyamin “Fouad” Ben Eliezer a cool $25K/month retainer as an “advisor”.

 

Now it was never a secret that Fouad was a close personal friend of Mubarak’s and an undisguised friend and advocate of Egypt within the various Israeli governments in which he served as Trade, Infrastructure, and Defense Minister. It’s also not exactly news that the guy is not completely free of any rumors of improprieties, so to speak. Still, if this is true it does set a new mark in Israeli decay, I think.

 

Finally, while all this was happening, and while the world gives itself a good close fingernail check as Syrians are slaughtered by their supposedly anachronistic villain dictator, the Israeli occupation of Palestine (the West Bank part of it) continues in full and innovative swing.

 

First to the tried-and-true methods of thuggery. You know how the IDF like to invade homes in villages all over the West Bank at 1, 2, 3 in the morning, pull everyone (including babies) from bed for a lineup, take pictures and often arrest someone for a few hours of friendly interrogation? (if you don’t know about it, you should).

 

So this week on March 11, at 01:45, our brave, brave troops raid the dangerous terror nest of Nabi Saleh – a village that’s only any trouble because settlers stole their spring with active IDF aid – and hit the home of the nefarious mastermind Anan Naji al-Tamimi. 11.

 

The resolute Israeli DEFENSE forces took Anan, blindfolded him and bound his arms, and loaded him onto a jeep. They drove a bit out of the village and proceeded to interrogate him with some “mild violence” (slaps to the back of the head) about his involvement in the use of WMP (Weapons of Mass Petrification, dismissed by the enemies of Israel as mere rocks) in the weekly demonstrations against the theft of the spring at the village.

 

After this time they drove back, stopped about 1 km from the village, removed the blindfold but left Anan’s arms bound, and dropped him off, leaving him to negotiate the 15-minute walk with arms bound in pitch darkness. His wrists were swollen upon his return home.

 

An official response from IDF spokesman has yet to arrive. Unofficial back-channels have yielded this claim: You got the wrong name, he’s 15 and not 11 (plausible from the photo too btw), he was questioned for one hour and not two and was dropped off unbound 300 meters from the village rather than 3 times that far, and this only to avoid re-igniting the village.

 

So according to the IDF, if he was 15 it’s ok to roust him and all his family from bed at 2 in the morning and interrogate him with no guardian or legal counsel present out in the open and then drop him off somewhere other than the front door. Gotcha.

 

Here’s the thing: You do that to ME? To MY boy? Police, IDF, Navy fucking SEALS of the invisible New World Order? Rocks will be the least of your worries from my side. And that’s if the unofficial version is true. If the al-Tamimi version is true? And the IDF don’t lock up the guy that was in charge of it? For his own protection, like? I find him and use a 10 pound tin can to turn his face to mush. But don’t listen to me. Remember Gilad Shalit? Yeah, he’s doin’ it right. Travelling a lot. Getting laid I do hope. Anyway, his dad’s running for Knesset in the Labor party. He said that if he was a Palestinian, he’d be trying to capture soldiers too.

 

Oh, I promised an innovation. Those who survived the holocaust remember with dread the German use of dogs to instill terror in their prey. Those of them still struggling to make ends meet, in the state that uses their name and traumas daily but leaves them less than table scraps are no doubt smiling in the knowledge that their own country has finally learned from those canine-related lessons as well.

 

And on that woof-woof note, we will now return you to you locally scheduled bullshit, which I seriously hope is tame in comparison or you should be looking into relocation. This has been a visit to the precipice of demise, brought to you by The Weekend Holyland Update, in conjunction with Brown Acid Bad Trips Inc. This excursion didn’t cost you a dime, but there’s a collection plate button thingy, if you have a mind. Also, you can buy my book: Jewcy Story: How the Jews blew redemption the last time around.

 

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Marching for Home

Posted by: on: July 25, 2011

Welcome ladies and gentlemen to another excursion to the mad Middle East, where nothing – not even wide-spread housing protests – stands in the way of the continued theft of other people’s land. In this week’s installation we take you camping, have a little water fight with the powers that be, and do the creeping annexation jig. So put on your dancing shoes, here we go:

 

Last night Tel Aviv saw one of its largest protests in years. At least 30,000 people (I was there, I say around 50K) marched from the edge of Rothschild Boulevard to the Tel Aviv Museum Plaza to protest the insane housing prices. After the protest march, a few rowdy anarchist types stuck around and blocked one of the major intersections along the march route, resulting in a few dozen arrested, and most released this morning. The protesters played it smart and left a tent full of candy and chocolate outside Tel Aviv PD HQ, with signs “sorry for last night” and “We’ll continue to fight for you too”.

 

The interesting thing to watch was the newspaper coverage. Yediot and Haaretz were both pro-protesters, Maariv was more or less balanced, and Israel HaYom, the free newspaper founded by gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson for the explicit purpose of promoting and defending PM Bibi Netanyahu, is simply trying, for nigh on two weeks now, to pretend that the protest isn’t happening, or isn’t as big a deal as it is. The paper devoted 5 full pages to the massacre in Norway, and less than a page to the uprising of the serfs here at home.

 

Bibi himself, regressing into his Munchausen’s disease, claimed this morning to have “foreseen the housing crisis years in advance”, and blamed it on the fact that the state controls 90% of the land and poses procedural impediments to construction of new housing. Of course, he promised a reform in Israel’s Land Authority, then let it melt away. Part of it was supposed to be included in a new Planning Committees Law, the final vote on which was just postponed today. So that’s how hard ole Bibi is pushing for this reform, the need for which he foresaw.

 

The tent encampment protest has spread in the past week from Tel Aviv all over the country. Even my sleepy semi-rural hometown of Pardes Hannah has one. The question is whether the energy will be sustained and channeled productively, or will it dissipate. The energy last night at the march (which I attended) was weird – but not necessarily in a bad way. Some have defined it as “not angry, just resolute”. We shall see.

 

In a related incident, protesters stormed the meeting of the Knesset’s Finance Committee (held at Kfar HaMacabbiah in Ramat Gan, rather than in Jerusalem) and threw water at the participants, in protest of the fact that the housing crisis was not on the committee’s agenda. Shoulda used something stronger than water, says I, but nobody ever listens to me. Armenia 1999, anyone? (Kidding. Violence, particularly indiscriminate violence, is very rarely the answer, if ever. However, the thought is savagely satisfying).

 

Another protest gaining steam is that of the MD interns, who are subject to insane hours and extremely pathetic pay (their base pay is around $1,500 a month). Their attempt to have themselves admitted as patients so as to get around a court order forbidding them from walking off the job was foiled, but they are still striking (the entire MD community has been on a court-modified strike for weeks now). After a couple of days of dithering, the housing protesters got wise and embraced the young docs.

 

Turning to the place where all the money lacking for affordable housing and decent wages for MD’s is poured down the drain, Israel’s stupid government is now renouncing the policy of ambiguity which has thus far sustained its occupation. The government passed a resolution tying government support for museums in “Judea and Samaria” with that of museums in Israel proper. Give this government enough time and they’ll give us all a one-state solution…

 

Meanwhile the Israel Occupation Force has been pursuing a policy of land theft using an Ottoman law, saying that any private land that isn’t being cultivated can be seized by the state – but they’re doing it only for the benefit of settlements for the master race. Apparently they are heeding the call of far-right MK Aryeh Eldad to “end the Muslim occupation of the Land of Israel”.

 

Approaching landing, this is how the IOF recruits deal with non-violent protests. It’s not really the fault of the recruits, but that of the state that brainwashes them and throws them into impossible situations.

 

Finally, the departing head of the Personnel Department of the IOF, General Avi Zamir, sounded the alarm at his farewell ceremony about the religious radicalization of the armed forces. Of course it is too late for that, as reports from “Operation Cast Lead”, in which soldiers were given sermons by rabbis exhorting them to “holy war” before battle, amply prove.

 

That’ll do it for this week. The Weekend Holyland Update is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours. Please collect your senses and check your comments where appropriate. Thank you for flying the crazy skies.

 

My book, “Jewcy Story”, a popular history of the 2nd Temple Era, can be bought for Amazon Kindle, for cell phone or for PC here.

 

 

 

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Tough As Cottage Cheese

Posted by: on: June 20, 2011

Welcome, intrepid travelers, to another excursion of the Weekend Holyland Update airlines. Today’s flight will take us to the realms of faux-popular uprising, low-grade racist pogroms, the upshot of a sad joke, another one, an altar where the people are sacrificed to a bloodthirsty deity,and finally a mass wedding. The menu will consist of bland lumpy cheese with a subversive sperm sauce. Off we go!

The big story of the past few days has been the uproar over the price of cottage cheese. A little half pound cup of cottage cheese has hit 8 ILS (about $2.35, or about twice what y’all pay), and people freaked out, starting Facebook protest groups and all manner of oh-so courageous actions, vowing in the face of mentionable peril to refrain from consuming said curdled lumpy stuff for a month(!!) in protest. I think they crossed the 100K threshold on all the groups combined, and the big shopping chains have already begun to “heed the voice of the people” and lower the prices somewhat. This, of course, is the classic retail ploy: Jack the price, wait for the outrage, score for heeding the voice of the people and lower the price to somewhere between the old price and the original increase, thus still raising the price but fronting like you gave a discount. Even the pols are rushing to join in on the “cottage revolution” and are now “promising” to put basic dairy products back under price control. Gotta heed the people!

What most people missed, of course, is that it’s not about the fucking cottage cheese (or koh-tej as we call it here). In Israel, we make less for equivalent work than anywhere in the developed world, yet pay more for virtually everything. Milk, sugar, salt, meat of any kind… we pay more for a liter of olive oil than they do in Britain. Surely you’ve heard of the vast olive orchards of Albion? The proud olive oil heritage of Wessex? The presses of Cornwall? I mean, no wonder they pay less for the stuff than a country like Israel that…oh, wait.

In the case of the cottage cheese the only difference was that the three dairy giants (Tnuva, Strauss and Tara) got caught up in their own greed and bottom line-worship and made the price-creep a little too damn noticeable. One of the financial rags claimed it was Tnuva that started it. This time, that is. It doesn’t matter who started it, just like it’s not about the cottage cheese. It’s the same with everything. While I’ve accepted, to the immense sorrow of my steak-loving heart, that we pay double to triple than in the states for beef, because cattle really does have production challenges here so that it needs to be imported, in most cases there’s absolutely no good reason for any of this. Israel is a dairy empire. Our cows regularly win prizes for the yield and quality of their milk. Anyone trying to sell me any crap about the size of the market and economy of scale will get smacked. Ain’t no way it should be feasible for Muller to ship yogurts all the way over here and still be price-competitive. None. In related news: In the past year, five people in Israel joined the ranks of billionaires. Over 123,000 joined the ranks of the poor.

But the Goddess-cursed sheeple in this country don’t get it. They don’t get that it’s the occupation and the constant garrison-state mentality that perpetuates the unholy deal in which the major companies provide various clandestine services to the security apparatus (and jobs to any donkey that got tied long enough to the gate of a military base to retire as a colonel or better), and in return get the right to rape the populace and its sovereign resources with a sandpaper prophylactic. This started in Israel’s infancy, when the economy really was weak, and the socialist state needed to cut entrepreneurs all kinds of slack so that the invisible hand wouldn’t wither and die, and so that the populace would get some sort of services and goods. But now? Sheeeet.

This all ties in nicely with something from the previous dispatch. Remember Sami Ofer, the octogenarian billionaire who was shitlisted in the US for doing business with Iran, the Knesset debate on which was abruptly halted after the chairman was handed a mysterious note and who then promptly died (the tycoon, not the chairman) in the midst of the whole affair?

Well, he was being brought to rest at the Trumpledor St. cemetery, where like 90% of Israel’s founding fathers are buried, and where no common folk have been buried in decades. Somehow (gotta love the somehow), the Ofers were able to buy a plot or a few there some 20 years ago. So Sami’s procession is winding down Trumpledor street, near the beach, when suddenly, from one of the balconies, thunder the sounds of Hefner’s “The Day That Thatcher Dies“. Turns out that Alon Uziel, a clwnish “hipster” and semi-obscure music critic for major portal “Walla!”, decided to throw a little fuck-you party. He was even silly enough to write a blog post bragging about it, with footage and all. Most of my friends (myself included) felt this was highly childish and in terribly bad taste (although a surprising number of serious people felt otherwise), but we don’t pay Uziel’s freelancer fees. Walla does – or rather did, since it sent him a terse telegram (love the quaint touch there) terminating his “association” with the site, for the high felony of offending the mighty. This, of course, was enough to tilt most people – even those who found Uziel’s original stunt revolting – back in his favor.

A few days later billionaire Yithak Tshuva (the guy who threw a tantrum when the public demanded he pay a semi-fair tax on the oil he found off our coasts [the government originally gave him the concession to drill for a criminally low share of any profits], then launched a smear campaign accusing those in favor of the tax hike of trying to sell Israel economically to the Arabs) married off his son. This of course is fine. What isn’t fine is that he did this on public land in the Ben Shemen forest, which he occupied for ten days despite being turned down for approval by the authorities. I got married at Ben Shemen forest myself. My guy threw up a little hippie/Bedouin compound among some pine trees, it cost next to nothing and we occupied the land for less than 36 hours from setup to cleanup. We didn’t take over a huge chunk of land and bring in heavy machinery to smooth the ground and so the fuck on. Then came the cottage cheese thing. The wonderful Dror Fuer wrote the following in the financial paper Globes:

“They say we’re just jealous. Sure we are. When one of us faces ruin due to a kid’s root canal or a transmission replacement for his beat up jalopy, while one of them spends $2M on a single evening, while his friend is forgiven a $20M debt just because he deigned to buy a newspaper while selling another company to the Chinese, how shall our heart not fill with dark rage? When a young couple moves in with the folks because they can’t afford the rent or mortgage while the rich man buys another private jet, when I gaze sadly at a cup of cottage cheese at the supermarket as they compete for another discounted, privatized public asset, how shall we not be envious? When they are protected in their tax shelters while we can’t even write off our kids’ kindergartens – how shall we not clench our fists??”

In other words, suddenly many more people understand how normally mellow people can hate the rich fucks enough to shit on their funerals. It won’t stop there, either.

OK, that was long. Snapshots the rest of the way:

The judonazi faction among the settlers went on another of their little pogroms (which they call “price tags” and which are designed to harm the IDF and the government by forcing them to protect Ishmaelites), and torched a mosque near Ramallah. A few days later, the operators of the “Jewish Voice” website were detained for questioning in an operation that involved about 100 cops and stasi agents. Jewish Voice is the mouthpiece of the followers of a rabbi named Yitzhak Ginzburg, who is so hopped up on kabbalah his racism is completely off the charts (he has stated that there are no innocents among the Palestinian enemy, and has supported the “King’s Torah” book, published about 2 years ago, which sanctions the killing of babies if one “reasonably suspects” they might grow up to harm Jews.) This website has also been reporting, with uncanny insider dope, on the “price tag” attacks – kinda like the Hutu radio stations were “just reporting” on massacres of Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994. But anyone who thought that the authorities were starting to take the budding krystalnacht kids seriously was soon disabused. The police categorically denied that any of the detainees was even suspected in connection with the arson. They also denied that the arrest had to do with a little scoop the Jewish Voice ran the day before, about a regional IDF commander keeping settler and religious-right soldiers away from certain activities – but this last sounds more likely. The Green Beast and the Stasi always get their panties in a bunch whenever media, especially non-conglomerate media, dares to make them look bad. So expect the price tags to keep on tagging.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak – the guy who dragged Labor to its worst election results ever, then effectively killed it by teaming with Nutanyahoo in the most right-wing and racist government this country has ever seen, then broke up the party and kept his four little midgets while the other Labor idiots finally managed to go cold turkey into opposition – he appears to be negotiating a merger with Likud, where he and two other lucky souls will be given safe spots in the party’s list for the next elections. You could see it coming a mile away, but still.

This is old, and my bad for leaving it on the cutting floor last time when it was fresh, but you gotta check this out. The religious disease in full effect.

For a new bit of “religion fucks with your mind” – remember Yithak Ginzburg? The guy who wants to kill Palestinian babies so they don’t endanger future good Jews? Well, he was troubled, as religious fucks are wont to do, by sins of the flesh, and by the wasting of manly vigor on the equally empty pursuits of pussy and jerking off. But fear not!

“if you fell in your lifetime into too much sex (whether in the form of self-abuse or abuse to others), don’t despair – become totally involved in overthrowing the contemporary, corrupt and anti-Torah political system. That’s the way to repair the damage you’ve done to yourself and others by misusing your sex drive. In Kabbalah we are taught that rectification must come from the very same psychological drive that brought about the damage.

So rectify sex with politics.”

In other words, if you’re a nebbishi yemenite student, hopelessly in love with the Ashkenazia chick with the pretty braid, and have sinned once too often by substituting your hand for her, don’t worry – here’s a gun, and there’s the PM, and….

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Ganz has decreed that the official mourning for fallen soldiers, Yizkor, will now read “May God remember the soldiers” rather than “May Am Israel (the People of Israel) remember”. It’s especially funny since he decreed that it should read “Elokim” and not Elohim. Elokim is what devout Jews say when they are mentioning their skydaddy casually and don’t want to profane the term. So not only is the common grief over fallen soldiers being denied to those who don’t care to involve Jehovah (whether because they’re agnostic, atheist, Druze…whatever) – but it’s not considered solemn enough to say “God” in full. Not Jehovah, mind. Not the explicit, forbidden name. Just the generic “God”.

And finally, on a pseudo-light-hearted note, 153 Israeli couples fell 11 short of a world record when they held a mass wedding in Cyprus. The reason all these Israelis tied the knot on the island is not a shared craving for souflaki and ouzo, but because for whatever reason, either one or both of each couple is not considered Jewish according to the orthodox establishment, and therefore can’t marry in Israel. There is no civil marriage in Israel, and if the medieval fucks from the rabbinate don’t like you or suspect the purity of your Aryan – sorry, I mean Jewish, of course! – blood, you may be in trouble, as this guy found out.

The Palestinian Fatah-Hamas “reconciliation” ceremony was called off for now, and we’ll talk September and UN votes next time. You can look up Tom Friedman’s latest (maybe not-that) silly suggestion on the matter on your own if you need a guffaw.

 

That’ll do it for now. WHU Airlines is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours. Please collect your senses and check your comments (and donations, if you’ve a mind) where appropriate. Thank you for flying the crazy skies.

P.S. I’m the world’s WORST salesman, so I forgot to mention: My book is up on Amazon Kindle! Read “Jewcy Story: Volume 1 (The unofficial, unorthodox, unabashed story of an unusual tribe)” and get 500 years of Jewish history for only $5! What really happened on Hanukah, what did the sages say about Purim, why do Yemenite Jews sing so well, when did the circumcision go full-cut, and many other mysteries explained in this seriously sourced, flippantly written history book for the masses. Plus, you can bring nearer the day when I stop whining about my broke ass and start asking for donations to buy weed like a normal person. Enjoy the book, or buy it for your favorite Kindle-using Yid!

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Dear Bob: Skip Israel

Posted by: on: March 29, 2011

Dear Bob,

Some people call him Bobby

I hope you’re OK with me calling you Bob. I’ve never had the honor of meeting you in person, but you’ve been a big part of my life for over 25 years now. At 12 I first heard “Jokerman” on an Israeli TV pop show, and from that moment I didn’t rest until I had every one of your albums I could lay a hand on. At 16 I used to walk around with the words to your songs scribbled on my T-shirts. People even said I looked like you (I had curls back then, which goes to show that you have me beat not only in talent, but also in luck regarding hair – or if to believe the rumors, money for quality rugs).

I know, you’re not a big fan of your fans, but I ain’t no crazy chick jumping you with scissors after a concert, and I’ve even outgrown the scribbled T-shirt phase, so hear me out a second. I know you’re not just or even mainly about politics and alla that, and that you still get annoyed thinking about folks who try to pigeon-hole you as a “protest singer”. That’s all good. After all, everyone knows you gave the world your best work after you shrugged that label off and pissed off the folk purists with the voltage. )

I also know you had a religious Jewish phase, and that you’re still chummy with elements from Chabad – the most nationalist Chasidic school of all.

Even so, you and I both know that just because you blew off the political pests, sent them to write their own damn anthems and turned instead to disappear through the smoke-rings of Mr. Tambourine Man‘s mind – that doesn’t mean that injustice doesn’t still infuriate you, that theft and murder and callousness don’t burn you up inside.

True, the last time you famously did something about it, the man for whom you went to bat (and whom you got a retrial and an eventual acquittal by reminding the world of how he was railroaded) threatened to sue you for using his life story without permission. But in this case you don’t have to write a song. You don’t even have to sing a song. What you have to do is simply NOT sing – at least not in Israel.

Personally, I’d love the chance to see you on stage one more time, and at your age (70 in under 2 months, congrats man), with reported health problems and life on the road like a real troubadour, who knows how many more opportunities there will be. But here’s the thing: The only way for this state, which you and I both deeply care for, to snap out of its delusions and stop trying to kill itself by chewing off more than it can swallow, stop slowly losing its humanity and honor by trying to maintain this stupid and destructive occupation, is for its friends to stop enabling the addiction.

The people who run this occupation – under which land is stolen every day from dirt-poor subsistence farmers, 11 year olds are arrested and treated with shameless brutality, and 66 year-olds are shot in their beds in actions deemed to be utterly proper by those who commit them – aren’t really scared of terrorism. On the contrary, it gives them the perfect excuse. What really terrifies them is that people like you, with the ability to reach and influence tens of millions, will look them in the eye and say “Sorry, but I can’t condone what you’re doing, no matter how much I may feel for you.”

28 years ago you recorded a brilliant defense of Israel, and told all its fanatic haters to grow the hell up and stop blaming all their problems on it. Back then, there were only a smattering of settlements. Since then the duration of the occupation has nearly tripled, the scope of land theft through illegal settlement activity has skyrocketed, and the amount of blood spilled over the insane dream of “A Greater Israel” has long since passed the tolerable.

Once again, you have a chance to sound a clear call and do your part to help Israel escape its bad trip. This time it won’t even require any effort. On the contrary – rather than land in Israel, play hide-and-seek with the paparazzi, do a single gig and then fly back out the next day, stay put by some pool, chill out and let your absence speak for you: Stop the occupation. 

Remember, Bob? You don’t play apartheid venues

 

 

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Welcome to my new English blog. Some of you may know me from my “Weekend Holyland Update” posts on Open Salon. This is the new place for that and more. For those who are new to my schtick – management is not responsible for any illusions, sympathies or misconceptions that may have been misplaced on our tours. Please share the location of this blog with your friends. Also, please note the donation button and help keep this fine and educational feature available, and its author out of debtors prison. Most obliged.

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