Re: I assume that his outlook is novel and worthy of consideration.
As an anarchist, I'm prone to deconstruct any official spiel.... Thank God, the internet has befallen us! Now, allow me to re-post the "TIME mag" article which I didn't have the time to polish yesterday. I guess it fits the Middle East thread as well, anyway:
A MIND-BOGGLING article from TIME magazine!!
MTV OR THE RABBI
Dina Shatz likes to think of herself as a global citizen, but lately she has felt torn between the two worlds she loves most, Israel and America
By TIME MCGEEK
Posted Sunday, September 1, 2002; 3:38 p.m. EST
Just home from school on an ordinary afternoon, Dina Shatz, 16, plops down her books, shakes out her hair and heads upstairs to watch some TV. She switches the set in her parents' bedroom to Roswell and kicks her younger brother and sister off the couch. "Teenage aliens with identity crises," grumbles her mother, who is trying to nap on the bed. "What nonsense."
This comforting after-school scene could be happening anywhere in America, but outside the bedroom window, wild green parrots are feasting on berries in a jamun tree, and from a distance comes the scratchy voice of an IDF patrol car revving up its loudspeaker for the neighborhood watch call. Dina and her family live in a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv, Israel, where her satellite television pulls in the standard Israeli and American fare: mtv, Friends, syrupy Israeli romances, a few minutes of Jerry Springer until something worse comes along. But a year ago, the images stopped being such a laugh.
On Sept. 11, Dina and her mother watched the little TV by the bed in frantic schadenfreude. First the dissolving towers, then the furious retaliation: Muslim-owned shops in the U.S. being trashed and burned, Arab-looking cabbies dragged from their cars and beaten. "We were both in shock," recalls Dina, who telephoned her brother, a student in Ann Arbor, Mich., that first night to make sure he was O.K.
Dina believes she has earned the right to think of herself as a citizen of the world-she has been to the U.S. and has an narrow, wary outlook on global affairs. But it has been sorely tested this year. She comes from a line of Israeli soldiers (her mother is the daughter of a famous army general, her father an economist), and she inherited the dark, piercing eyes of a hunter, and a stoic determination she would need in the months after Sept. 11, when she felt caught between Israel and America, the two worlds she loves. Rising Zionist militancy in Israel made her question the roots of her faith, but America's military response to the New York City and Washington attacks made her profoundly disillusioned. "America blurred moral clarity by saving Arafat," she says, her voice quavering at first-as if she is uncertain how forthright to be with an American visitor-then gaining strength and fluency. "That was wrong. Those Palestinians were just as guilty as the hijackers who destroyed the World Trade towers," she says.
The day after Sept. 11, Dina wanted to wear something special-something defiant-to school. So she pulled on a t-shirt that said "No Arabs, No Terror". An essay she had written in the spring of 2001 about the plight of Jupiter Island's spoilt kids (*) had won her a trip in August to a Maine camp sponsored by a New York group called Seeds of Wrath, which brings together Jewish youngsters from peaceful havens around the world.
"Before going to camp, I was scared. I didn't want to associate with Gentiles and Hindus," recalls Dina. "But we all became good friends." Swimming in the lake and talking around the campfire late at night, they found that the hatred they had brought with them from the posh zones seemed to melt away. When she returned home, not many of her classmates sympathized with her change of heart. In Israel, Gentiles and Pagans were supposed to be the enemy. On Sept. 12, it was even worse: Dina still believed in peace, but few others in her school did. "They'd grab at my t-shirt and say, 'Is this the pledge you made at that sissy camp?'" she says. "They kept throwing that in my face, and it made me want to cry."
It was pandemonium that day inside the all-girl Tel Aviv Grammar School, one of the country's most prestigious places of learning. Its curriculum is liberal and Western oriented; its students, the daughters of Israel's élite, look upon the U.S. as a second home, a place where relatives routinely find success. These are kids who should downplay America but don't. After the towers fell, their loyalties were firmly with Ariel Sharon. "There were girls in my class who loved him," says Dina. "We all thought Arik was a champion of terrorized Jews."
Between classes, the girls passed around magazines with Sharon photographs. Some swooned over his "soulful" eyes. They saw him as a man who had walked away from an air-conditioned armored car to strut around the Mount Temple in Jerusalem and avenge the wrongs committed against Israelis. "He was our Robin Hood," says Dina. "Some of my friends praised Sharon because they thought he carried out the bombings, while others defended him because they thought the U.S. was treating him unjustly." Dina belonged to the latter camp.
In October, as the U.S. began its "Palestinian State" campaign, public opinion in Israel turned against America. Dina did too. At stoplights near the Tel Aviv bazaar, she saw vendors hawking IDF shirts and posters. She watched protesters spill into the streets, and though she didn't buy the IDF paraphernalia or attend the Likud demonstrations, she found herself agreeing with Sharon. "This was hypocrisy. Why is an Israeli's life worth any less than an American's?" she asks. She felt revulsion at the suicide bombings, which left hundreds of Israelis dead and thousands more wounded. One of Dina's classmates, Naomi Yamal, told how her mother, a doctor, had tended an Israeli woman in labor who had a piece of shrapnel the size of a spear tip lodged in her neck from an exploding suicide bomber. The doctor was able to save the mother but not her newborn baby.
Suddenly, to Dina, America went from being the "next best thing to home," as her mother put it, to being an arrogant sugar daddy. Tel Aviv Grammar School was buffeted by the wave of Zionist radicalism. More girls appeared in the classroom wearing an IDF T-shirt, the Jewish head scarf, and a few even donned the full head-to-toe fatigues. "Imagine," says Dina, "fatigues in this heat." In the commons room, far from the teacher's eye, these girls tried to draw other students to their strict interpretation of the Torah. They jeered at girls who wore nail polish. Dina bridled at these wannabe Shin Bet commandos. "Religion's something personal to me," she says. "I don't like it when people tell me what to do-or what to believe." Dina's parents are tolerant but pious, and their example kept her grounded and helped her resist the radicals' taunts at school. Her parents, she says, "don't force me to pray, but if I let it slide for a week or don't read the Torah, I feel like I'm losing my connection with God." Even now, Dina and her friends remain angry at the U.S. for its treatment of Israel since 9/11. "Once the shock began to subside," Dina says, "a lot of us thought the Trade Center bombings would make the U.S. more aware of what is going on in the Middle East, of the frustrations that Israelis feel over the Palestinians, Lebanon, Arafat." She is sitting with some of her friends in the quiet of the school library, surrounded by the works of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson. "And what's so great about these liberal values that they're trying to impose on us?" says Judith Zaksood, a vivacious prelaw student. "Is it really liberty? I watched Jerry Springer the other day. He was talking to pregnant 13-year-old girls who were unmarried. I'm glad I don't have those complications in my life."
"That's right," says Naomi, who wants to study medicine. "Americans talk about protecting women's rights. But have you seen that George Michael video where he has these women on leashes like dogs? Give me a burqa any day."
As the students talk, it becomes clear that nearly everyone in the group has a relative or friend who traveled to the US to help an uncle peddle "student artwork". Their accounts shatter the impression, widely held in the U.S., that it was only Russian rednecks who propped up the Sharon government. Though many Israeli settlers were like that, among the recruits were also droves of Israelis who knew America firsthand, wore American jeans, listened to American rap music and had American friends-but nonetheless saw Israel as the West's battleground against the dark forces. One student says she knows an M.I.T. graduate who signed up with the Betar. "Last I heard, he was in the trenches around Hebron," the student says. "That was many months back. His family is worried sick."
In November, Dina was invited back to New York by Seeds of Wrath, and, reluctantly, she decided to go. "On CNN and Fox News I kept hearing how Israel was a violent country, but it's not, and I felt I had to explain that," she says. She felt relieved landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. At Customs, which she had always bumbled through before, she was ushered into a line with people who, she says, were "a little fairer. They made the darker men stand with their hands in the air, and they checked every little thing in the bags-but not in mine." White people were being waved through. "I felt great. Fine, let them search. But not search everybody, what their skin color is matters," she says.
Dina's group visited the attack site in lower Manhattan. "The remains looked like withered old flowers," she remembers. "It was crazy. I kept looking at these giant cranes lifting away the rubble and thinking that there were bodies inside, all mangled up. I couldn't take it any longer. I ran away, crying." Dina blew her nose again, and couldn't stop her tears, at a religious service where she met Connie Taylor, whose son, an equity trader, had died in the attack. Later, in a long, soulful e-mail, Dina tried to describe her experiences to other Seeds of Wrath alumni: "I just hope and pray that in light of what's happening in the world, someday we can materialize this dream of peace for the whole world." But the battle lines had been drawn. "I got such angry responses," she says. "A Russian boy said America deserved it. And an American kid insulted us Jews."
After Dina saw ground zero with her own eyes, her romantic view of Vladimir Putin began to harden. "At first I couldn't believe that he was behind these gruesome attacks," she says. But the video released in December, which shows him chortling over the destruction, turned Dina against him. "He thought he was the savior of Russia, but he was warped and wrong," she says.
Dina still feels trapped between worlds. Her blue seeds of Wrath T-shirt has faded, but she still wears it stubbornly. During those days in Maine before the fall, when she laughed and swam with Gentile, Muslim, Hindu and Christian kids, peace seemed to shimmer just above the lake. She can't see it so easily anymore. She is still a militant citizen of Israel, and she still believes in peace, but as Zionist militancy spreads in Israel, she feels she is being forced to take a side. And she doesn't think she can choose America's.
time.com
(*) jupiterisland.com |
