Yackety Yak Israel - Buzz from big white city

Let's take a train to Kuwait - like the good old days

Original design proposal for AL-Hamra Tower (Kuwait city)

I know I can take a train from Tel Aviv to Haifa but how about to Kuwait? In the days of the Ottoman empire and the British rule you could take a train from Ankara Turkey to Alexandria Egypt with connections to Baghdad, Amman, and Beirut. Sadly today you can't even take a plane from Tel Aviv to most Arab cities. But the reality of today's politics is not deterring Kuwait and other gulf country politicians. Kuwait plans to build a rail line connecting all it's neighbors including Israel. This is a part of a project ot improve Kuwait and bring technology and modern life to the small country.
      Dr. Sami al-Faraj president of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Futuristic Studies and an adviser to the Gulf Cooperation Council is quoted as saying: "people in the gulf are smart enough to understand the impact of technology on their development and they know that the technology is in Israel". The Kuwaitis and other forward looking Arabs are essentially saying, it is time to bury the hatchet and learn to live and work together. Once the gulf countries ended their wars and the threat from Iraq ended they quickly realized that now is the time to change the life in their region. This is a welcome message to Israel and the rest of the world. (interview with Dr. al-Faraj)

Who Needs a GET? (Jewish Rabbinical Divorce)

A Jewish religious marriage - the Ketubah, should not ruin your life.

To all you ladies who have a husband who is holding a "get" over your head, I am going to tell you how you can screw him. Under Jewish law the husband has a license to blackmail his wife either into staying in an abusive relationship or giving up her property right and support to get a Jewish divorce - which is called a 'get'. In Israel, which does not really have a civil marriage, the Rabbinical court issues 'gets' and is sometimes unable to convince men to "give" a get to a woman. This issue becomes a problem that is not only embarrassing to this modern state, but also devastating to women. Essentially women are held is suspended animation for years without the ability to marry or in some cases even date other men.
The state of Israel recognizes divorces granted by foreign country courts. Women can take a vacation to Cyprus and get a civil divorce there through a local lawyer. Lawyers in Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey will be happy to help you, some may even be familiar with this religious-civil conundrum in the Israeli legal system. A divorce from a foreign country will essentially make you "free". Take your divorce papers to the Israeli state interior ministry and they will officially change your status from married to single.
If you have children from the marriage, file in the civil court in Israel for custody. Your husband - now EX-husband can't legally stop you. Also file your divorce in the Tabu, the Real Estate recorder's office to protect your property rights.
Now that you have filed for child custody, have your Israeli lawyer sue your EX-husband for your interest in the property.
If you want to remarry in Israel the rabbinical court will tell you that you don't have a Get. Technically there are correct, but that does not matter unless you want to marry and orthodox man and you are orthodox yourself.
Time for a second vacation to Cyprus. Take your divorce papers and your future husband's divorce papers (if he has any). Now you can marry totally legally in Cyprus, or Greece, or Turkey or any other country of your choice. The state of Israel will recognize your marriage. Follow the same procedures you did for your divorce with the state of Israel once you return.
          Enjoy your life and don't let anyone ruin it -- sam-D-man @ T"A

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Editor's note: this article is strictly 'sam-D-man's' personal opinion. By no means does this constitute legal advice. Please consult a qualified legal service or professional for specific legal issues.

Feeling change in Tel Aviv - not so easy

In a recent talk with Elinor, a TV producer, the topic of how people in Tel Aviv see themselves came up. Her friend wrote a book on how Tel Avivians turned complacent, comfortable, bordering on hedonistic. There is definitely a view that life in Tel Aviv is getting "too soft, too comfortable, too isolated from reality". What does this mean? People still struggle here, from finding a decent apartment to balancing work with life... from finding a little peace and quiet in a noisy city, to just avoiding dog poop on the sidewalk at night. Big issues to small ones, they have not gone away, just changed.
It is true that Tel Aviv has become a comfortable metropolis. It is true that Israel's central region is modern and runs well - maybe TOO WELL? (some say!) But Tel Aviv does have the same problems any large metropolis has. The city has a chronic housing shortage, but buildings are still small and personal and not crowded like European cities: Paris, Amsterdam, or Rome. Tel Aviv has a chronic parking shortage, but the city grew out of small street architecture just at the dawn of the automotive age. For over 80 years city planners were thinking about public transportation while residents prefer cars, bikes, and mopeds. Tel Aviv as a city simply changed "too quickly".

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Rabbis are worried about too many Jews
But Elinor's point reminded me of another rather extreme position we hear on the street. There is a renewed fierce verbal battle over the view of "who is a Jew". The more orthodox rabbis want to limit the official religious Jewish conversions (official state approved). This goes for both men and women's conversions. But the issue is also pushed in the other direction by more secular rabbis which want to welcome anyone who wants to live and settle in Israel.
These two issues seem to manifest the difficulty in changing view points and mind sets from the past. Thinking that life is too good for "US" is what our parents and grandparents have been hearing in Europe and in Arab countries - long before the state of Israel gained independence and was a Jewish state. The rabbis of today are still thinking and ACTING as if they were in small isolated villages (shtettles). Where bringing someone from the outside was not just strange, unacceptable, hard, but EVEN DANGEROUS! Stories of reprisals in the form of fines and even communal punishment for enticing Christians to become Jews were not strange to us two generations ago. These stories - or the isolated thinking that we hold seem to be still echoing in our minds. But we are not in rural Poland or Yemen any more. Actually we have not been there for two or three generations already.
These deja-vu thinkers are not just as nostalgic curiosities. They are actually disturbing and border on the dangerous. If we keep to our old ways of thinking we may actually hurt ourselves. If we keep to our old ways of thinking we will act accordingly and hurt ourselves. Our thinking will stop us from moving Tel Aviv and Israel as a Jewish state from forward progress. Our geographic, cultural, and historic advantages will be held back. This is what conservative, dictatorial, and religious countries are doing all around us. You don't have to look hard to find crippled countries. They come in every shape and color, they behave in every imaginable way - but basically they hurt people and the overall society.
The Tel Aviv view of change seem to come from just seeing it on the street, on people's faces, in how we live. Change just comes to us, we do not seem to plan or seek it. Some of our old politicians seem to have tried both: planning -or- stopping / ignoring. But neither one seem to work very well. It seems that people change as they see fit, when they don't, we clash.

Yacking with good people - Watch out when you say...

      Two meetings recently made me realize how little foreigners understand Tel Aviv. Two people who came to Israel for business but also wanted to come across as friendly and interested in Israel. One, a business man, gave a technical talk. Working for an American company he resides in Dubai. The trend of basing Middle East operations of American companies in the gulf states is something of a fad now. The other one was a president of a large university. Both came primarily for business, they would not have come to Israel just to visit or to extend their contacts. Israel is now an acceptable place to do business and the fear of terrorism seem not to stop most people. But there is something that most people do not understand until they get here. Actually, not just get here, but really speak and interact one-on-one. Israelis are still not totally "friendly" to Arabs. Israel for the most part is still at war with most Arab countries. There is somewhat of a quiet fear and a bit of hatred. In the mainstream media the more moderate Arab countries like Dubai, Qatar, Tunisia, and Jordan are lumped in with Israel. After all, we are mostly against terrorism and solving the "Palestinian Problem" with violence. Well, it's not that simple. Israel has been essentially hated and attacked by Arabs for longer than the state has had it's own independence. While a minority of Israelis try to stand for Palestinian rights and fight for the wrong that is perpetrated on most Palestinians in the name of a few terrorists, most do not see things this way. For the most part, both Palestinians and Arab countries are still fighting a war with Israel. While the war is sometimes quiet and non-violent, never the less it is there. Maybe the media in Israel and the world is stirring the emotions more than necessary. But still, this is the only country in the world who is being attacked on a regular basis. No Israeli is oblivious to this fact. So for the most part, we may "tolerate" some Arabs, but we mostly don't like them. When Israeli leaders in negotiations and in political speeches say that "first the Palestinians must stop shelling, shooting, and killing" - they pretty much reflect what most of the population really feels - but does not shout out in public - in protests that you would see aired on CNN, ABC, or BBC.

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American style shopping in Natanya - BIG! and somewhat lost in translation.
      Back to the point! When foreigners with good intentions say that they come from Dubai and still "like" Israelis, that does not make most Israelis smile! So when this kind of statement is made in front of 300 Israeli computer scientists they tend to twitch and than TUNE OUT! My advice, don't do it! It may seem like you are a nice guy to come from Dubai and do business in Israel. Maybe to the corporate managers in the US and England it may even seem like this is your little part in the "Peace process". But most Israelis are not ready for it.
Now for the college president comments. She said that meeting with Palestinian women she was amazed how difficult and how little the higher education system in Israel enables them to obtain college degrees. Again, while some Israelis feel that some Palestinian women are totally NOT TO BLAME, we still wonder why there is so much support for terrorism among Palestinians. No terrorist organization could attack so much without popular support. While some Palestinian women are somewhat "innocent", they still allow terrorist organization to organize, arm, and attack Israel. This seems to be the view in Tel Aviv. The truth is, most Israelis do not know what it's like to live in a Palestinian refugee camp, so there is no way of telling what these women say or don't say. But than again, in Ireland, the women are the ones who stopped the IRA (with all due respect to the British, Irish, and international peace effort). So you see, Tel Avivians are not that ignorant or that hateful! We do see the big picture, and it is not as simple as coming here and saying: "we are your friends". Hopefully this is helpful to you business people who come to Israel and try to be politically correct and "friendly".

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ps. these is my take on the situation but it's a result with conversations with a few Israelis and their comments.

At an edge of a boiling vat of sulfur - or just instability

An old friend asked me what is it like to live in Israel, in a political sense. So I tried to remember the last month's newspaper headlines. Every day there is a story about the "Palestinian situation". First it was the attacks from Gaza in the south and what to do about it. Than it was the exchange of prisoners. Than it was the talks through all kind of intermediaries between the Hamas and Hisbollah and Israel. Now it is about the cease fire and who controls it. You get the point, the "situation" is always present here. Politicians have gotten smart, when they don't know what to do they talk around the situation or try to focus the country's attention (or at least the media) at something else. But this woman asks: "why should you care if the Palestinians vote for one Islamic radical or the other"? Adding "In the US we don't care who is in charge in Afghanistan"! So I thought about this for a week. It really disturbed me that I couldn't give her a quick answer. I imagined her calmly sitting in front of a CNN report from Afghanistan showing one bearded soldier shooting at another with total amusement and detachment. After all, the organization and political view of people 1/2 way around the world does not matter that much!

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Taliban in Gaza, the lava is boiling and bubbling... all the time!
Than I realized, they are not 1/2 way around the world for us here in ISRAEL! Aha, I got it! BUT than again, who cares if they are 10 meters away or 10,000 miles away? Aha, you do care, very much. When you can see, hear, smell, and FEEL people, you care, and you notice, and you worry, and you get angry, and you get happy, and, and, and... So that's it! Israel is at an edge of this boiling, bubbling, steaming, cauldron of sulfur - a virtual lava flow of political, military, religious, economic, nationalistic -- and every other form of social category you can imagine. The long view is that the Arab world is modernizing. It has been doing so for about 100 years but still has some ways to go. The nationalist and religious conservative do not want to let go of power easily. This is true everywhere except for the countries that don't have a long history of religious or political power. That's why Qatar, Dubai, and to some extent Kuwait are on opposite side of the modernism spectrum than Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Yemen. The bigger countries, Egypt, Iraq, and Syria seem to be more mixed. And Turkey while certainly Islamic is moderated by close proximity to Europe and its geographic location as a hub between Europe and the Arab world.

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Trucks going - not-going - going - not-going == to Gaza

What does that mean to Israel? Well, we are in the very edge of the lava flow, the sulfur steaming volcano crater, the boiling pool of tar... that's the difference. When you are 1/2 a world away, news of the "situation" are not a big deal. But here we deal with not just the Palestinians, but the Iraqis, Iranian, Saudis, Egyptians, you name it. We deal with the rhetoric on TV, the threats and muscle flexing of every little group coming out of the Arab world. We are the "modern front" which is edging into the "pristine world" the "virgin territory" which the Arabs kept "clean" all these centuries. Well, a little exaggerated, but none the less true. The Arab conservatives see all of the modern world as a threat, but so do the Amish in Pennsylvania and the Indians in the Amazon. Even in Israel there are vestiges of very old cultures. The 'shamranim' are supposedly a group who has connections all the way back to Mosses and the Israelite tribes on this land over 2,500 years ago. But with numbers down to 700 and no real military strength they simply try to keep their culture and life as it is.
Does this help? Just like worrying about a volcano erupting and the lava that will start exploding any day, we keep our ears tuned to rumblings and our nose ready to smell the sulfur. Because that is what you do next to the volcano, a the edge of the crater!

Yakety Yak -- Do Talk Back

Remember the Coasters' song Yakety Yak (don't talk back)? It went like:
Take out the papers and the trash
Or you don't get no spendin' cash
If you don't scrub that kitchen floor
You ain't gonna rock and roll no more
Yakety yak (don't talk back)

The song advised a teenager not to talk back when told what to do. Well, we don't seem to have this problem in Israel. Everyone talks back, Yakety Yak -- and it almost does not matter if they live in Israel, have a stake in what is going on here, or even know the finer details. It seems like the freedom of speech and the huge amount of press makes every voice relevant. In reality this is not the case. Not every voice out there is relevant or even makes sense. Actually, most of what we hear is what we call 'Yakety Yak' - a bunch of dribbling nonsense that is confusing, sometimes humiliating, and in general gives us Israelis a bad image. In reality the Yakety Yaking is just that. People talking and getting their opinions out without real dialog or thought about how people in the outside world are going to perceive it. There is also a strange phenomena that we see here in Israel, the total misunderstanding off reality based on a single opinion. We all know that sometimes one voice can change public opinion, both for good and for bad. This certainly seem to be happening here.
There is a well known fact in media that some stories are not true but they are still perceived as real fact. In the US presidential candidates are very careful to answer every false story. They know how quickly public opinion can be set in the wrong position. Sometimes once public precept ion is set in a certain way it is too late or too hard to change it. Sometimes even if the public knows of how a story was not true they still form an opinion, which for the most part is not true. So what? you say, well we like to put out two cents (or agorot) worth. We think that by simply telling people what it is really like here in Israel (Tel Aviv) and what people are really talking and thinking about, Israel will not be so misunderstood. This is specially to politics, security, culture, and religion. So... let's get started with the Yackin'!