micah.sifry.com

I’ve been doing a lot of media commentary around this week’s CNN/YouTube debate. Here are some links in case you’re interested:

NPR’s All Things Considered, July 24, 2007: “Did Web’s Role Shape Debate, or Was It a Gimmick?”

KCRW’s nationally syndicated show To the Point, with Warren Olney, July 24, 2007: “Will YouTube Change the Substance of Presidential Politics?”

NY Daily News, July 25, 2007, “Hey CNN & Google, Give Us a Presidential Debate 2.0”

The Politico, with Andrew Rasiej, July 26, 2007: “Democratic Debate: Still Not Democratic Enough”

Andrew Baron and Joanne Colan, who put together the daily video-blog Rocketboom, were at the Blogference with us, and also took the helicopter tour. They’ve put up several segments (running the full week of July 9-13) and if you watch carefully, you’ll spot me and Jesse in this one about halfway through. You’ll also catch a snippet of bizarre dialogue with our guide, Calev Ben-David. He’s standing next to Kent Nichols of Ask-a-Ninja, and at one point he asks “How would a Palestinian ninja get thru this border fence?” Kent says, “Wouldn’t he just meditate across?” This led Ben-David into an extended discussion of the powers of Palestinian ninjas, which unfortunately the Rocketboom folks cut…

We landed early this morning at JFK, and right now I’m trying to figure out what time-zone I’m in. I’m listening to a CD that I bought of Shlomo Artzi and Shalom Hanoch, two of Israel’s top singer-songwriters, in concert together. I’ve always felt grounded by Israeli pop music, because it reminds me of a time when I was younger and more innocent, and my experience of Israel then often involved long bus rides listening to the radio along with the other passengers. My hebrew isn’t what it was then, but I still like to think that Israel’s musicians are the purest expression of the best of what modern Israel can offer–their music is honest, full of yearning for love and peace, and completely Jewish without an ounce of religious orthodoxy (at least the artists I follow).

Once in my life I was innocent enough to accept all those songs at face value, to believe that Israel wanted peace more than anything else. Now I know the story is much, much more complicated. My eyes started to open in my late teens and early twenties, at a time when I and my then-to-be wife Leslie seriously contemplated making aliyah to a kibbutz, along with a group of close friends from our summer camp days. Little things that I noticed bothered me: the fact that cars registered to Arabs in Israel have a different color license plate than to Jews, making them easier for police to spot and pull over; the fact that many kibbutzim, socialist in name and internal practice, sit on formerly Arab land and have no Arab members. I was already full of pacifist leanings, and the idea of having to serve in the Israeli Army, if I did make aliyah, bothered me immensely. And I was even more bothered by the idea that if I chose to conscientiously object, I’d never be accepted as a “full” participant in Israeli public life. (I know this has changed somewhat in recent years, but we’re talking the early 1980s now.) Ultimately, we chose not to make aliyah, obviously, but given all the family we have living in Israel, we’ve never abandoned the connection.

I’m not going to blog about the intimate facts of my extended family in Israel. (On my mother’s side, I have an aunt and an uncle and various cousins with their own children.) I’ll just say that they’re a mix of working class and middle class people, of both Ashkenazi (Western) and Mizrachi (Eastern) background. And they’ve had more than their share of life’s hard knocks. Whenever we visit–and my mother makes this trip at least once a year–we try to offer as much support as we can. But some of their difficulties are deeply ingrained. This is a part of my Israel experience too, and one that colored the last few days of our time on this visit. But I’m not going to go there. Not now anyhow.

Back to politics. During this trip, I re-read David Grossman’s book The Yellow Wind, and I also read a collection of dispatches written by Amira Hass in her role as Ha’aretz’s correspondent from the occupied territories. It was a useful counterpoint to the tour we got on the helicopter ride, which climaxed with a close-up view of the border with Hamas-controlled Gaza and a visit to a synagogue that had been hit by one of the daily Kassem rocket attacks aimed at the Israeli border town of Sderot. Our guide, an American-Israeli named Calev Ben-David, concluded his explanation of the situation there by arguing for Israel’s current policy of “targeted killings”–where the Air Force fires missiles at Palestinian militants that they have identified as bomb-makers, sometimes killing innocents at the same time. From his point of view, everything Israel is doing is justified self-defense.

Amira Hass makes you think twice, hard, about that argument. Her work covers the years between 1999-2002, when the brief hopes of the Oslo process and the Rabin-Arafat handshake all went sour and the second intifada began. If I can, I’ll dig up some links to the most cogent articles in the collection. She documents, in careful and excruciating detail, how Israel has dominated the Palestinian population, and how the ongoing expansion of settlements during the Oslo period (when they were supposed to be frozen) and the ongoing humiliations of daily life and Israeli military action in the territories embittered and helped kill Palestinian hopes for a peaceful solution to their predicament. Again and again, you read of an arbitrary house demolition, or a permit refusal, and the sum total of these experiences begins to weigh heavily on the notion that justice is all on Israel’s side.

I don’t know what has happened to the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian compromise or even dialogue. (Unfortunately, there just wasn’t time on this visit for me to see some of my old friends who are still involved in the Israeli peace movement.) Clearly, the outbreak of the second intifada (triggered by Ariel Sharon’s provocative stroll on the grounds of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in Sept. 2000) and the failure of the Camp David summit between Ehud Barak and Yasir Arafat later that year, and the usage of lethal force and then suicide bombing by Palestinian militants, has poisoned nearly all possibility for dialogue, though it’s clearly not completely dead. But the rise of the “security fence” and the enormous consensus among Israeli Jews in its favor, suggests that we are into a new chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One glimpse of what that might be came in a conversation with one of my cousins…

Friday morning last week we drove to the artist’s colony of Ein Hod, nestled in the hills about a half hour south of Haifa. My cousin Nechama and her partner Nadav have made their home there, and this week they were hosting a menagerie of artists from all over Europe who were visiting and creating art while on their visit. Their home, which doubles as their studio and display space, was overflowing with half finished paintings. Two of the visiting artists held a playful “instant art” competition in the road below their house, complete with a referee who timed each stroke of paint. It was a delight to see Nechama in her element, the ringmaster of a gentle exhibition of creativity.

On the way there, I recounted the details of our previous days with Katy, another cousin of mine, who was driving us, along with her mother and mine and Jesse, on the visit. On past visits, Katy has struck me as generally not one to talk about politics, out of a general disgust with men in public life (she grew up in Netanya, which has a reputation as one of Israel’s most chauvinistic cities). On this trip though, politics was very much on her mind. The day we arrived she told me there was a big demonstration against the light punishment given to disgraced Israeli President Moshe Katzav, who apparently harassed and molested and perhaps even raped many of the women who worked in his office. At her house later, she talked about how she couldn’t bear the thought of her grandchildren potentially having to go into the army and asked how we were going to end this cycle. And on the car ride to Ein Hod, she objected to my singling out the director of Israel 21c for living in Ma’aleh Adumim and not mentioning to our tour group that that was a settlement.

“Netanya is a settlement too, you know,” Katy said. “So is Tel Aviv. The Arabs say that, and I think they are right. There is no difference between Netanya and Ma’aleh Adumim.” For a minute, she had me floored. At some level, it’s true. A hundred or so years ago, there was not much of a Jewish presence in this area, other than a community in Jerusalem. When the first Zionists came to settle places like Tel Aviv and Netanya, they were a minority of the population—the same way today’s settlers in the West Bank are a minority of the population.

But to accept Katy’s argument, you have to ignore one critical difference. When the first Zionists came to settle in Palestine, the ruling power was initially Turkish (the fading Ottoman Empire) and then, after WWI, British. There was no state of Israel in any boundaries at all, and the state that came into being was the product of the UN partition plan and then a climactic war between the nascent state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. Tel Aviv was the heart of a new country that was a majority Jewish, and that began its existence with the imprint of the United Nations (even if the 1949 armistice boundaries were beyond what was contemplated in the 1947 partition plan).

By comparison, when Israel began settling the West Bank and Gaza, it was doing so as a sovereign state acting in contravention of international law governing the responsibilities of an occupying power, and it did so in places where there was an overwhelming Arab majority.

But there may be something to what Kati said, nonetheless. There was a sense in her words that in the wake of the failure of the Oslo process Israel is no longer facing an adversary that is willing to compromise around the 1967 boundaries, that this is an existential conflict over whether or not to roll back the reality created in 1948. Certainly that is the sense one gets from the rhetoric of Hamas. But I still have to ask, who missed the opportunity of the 1990s? Was it just Arafat? That answer may make many Israelis feel better, but critics like Amira Hass certainly makes a strong case that the Israelis also misunderstood their adversaries, and traded the peace of the brave for a humiliating non-peace, one that is now bearing very bitter fruit.

Perhaps you can begin to see why I stopped writing intensively about this issue a decade or so ago…it’s so frustrating.

My feet hurt, my heart aches and once again instead of being able to sleep, my mind is awake with a swirl of impressions. In the last seventy-two hours, we have been flown across the country–seeing everything from new “security fence” to Jerusalem to the Gaza border in less than 45 minutes; we have run our fingers over the exploded casings of some of the thousands of “Kassem” rockets that have rained down on the border town of Sderot in the last five years from Gaza and wondered how the rise of Hamas there may affect the conflict; we have seen how Israeli high-tech ingenuity is transforming medical care and training; we have met two of Israel’s top filmmakers and actors and discussed how their new film portrays and tries to puncture the “bubble” of unrealities that different Israelis and Palestinians live in; we have pondered at the Yad Vashem memorial museum how the Holocaust could have happened and what its memory does to Israelis and Jews today; and we have gazed upon the 2000+ year-old foundation stones of the Temple Mount that have been uncovered in a still-unfolding archeological dig deep below the streets of the Old City; and we have listened to Israeli Jewish and Arab artists meld American hip-hop music with their own experiences into a sound that is uniquely theirs. All that was with our tour group of bloggers under the auspices of Israel21c.

We (my son Jesse and my mom, who is also here visiting) have also dined in Jerusalem with some American cousins of ours who have been living here 30 years and heard them declare that they have never been so depressed at the prospects of finding any solution to the conflict; I met with the director of the Hartman Institute, Donniel Hartman, and discovered the movement for Jewish renewal and relevance in modern times is alive and beating; and Jesse and I searched out and found the site of a tree that was planted at Yad Vashem 29 years ago to honor a Polish man named Walter Ukalo who was a friend of my in-laws and who saved eight Jews during the Holocaust, making him one of the good souls known here as a “Righteous Gentile.”

I can’t process all of this in any kind of narrative form. It’s too much. I’m also sacrificing sleep to even get these thoughts down while they’re semi-fresh. But here are a few jottings:

– I have always said to myself that sooner or later, Israel’s neighbors would have to reconcile themselves to its existence. “Like it or not, Israel is not going away,” I’d say. And just from the explosion of construction that you see everywhere, this feeling of mine has only gotten stronger. Tel Aviv is unrecognizable to me. What was once a relatively modest city of five and six-story buildings with a handful of larger apartment towers is now a sprawl of genuine skyscrapers. In 1982, when I was here doing research for my Princeton senior thesis on the rise of Shalom Ackshav (Peace Now), I could walk from one interview at an Israeli newspaper to a meeting at the Kirya, Israel’s defense ministry. Now I could perhaps still do that walk, but the borders of the city have spread at least four-fold. Same with Israel’s highway system, which has gone from a handful of two-lane roads connecting its main cities to an array of super-highways and three-lane thoroughfares laced throughout the whole coastal metro area.

– The helicopter tour, on the other hand, reminds me of how small Israel is. But while the Israel Project, the organization that took us on that flight, might want that to prove how vulnerable the country is, all it reinforced for me is how land alone is no guarantor of security. In an age of “home-made” Kassem missiles and spreading high-technology, no country can ensure its security perfectly. Unfortunately, so much of what is going on now seems to me to be the bitter fruit of so many years of Israeli hubris. The peace movement warned for years that holding onto the territories and building settlements on them would, among other things, embitter the Palestinians and poison the chances for peace. How horribly ironic that just 15 years ago, it was against the law for an Israeli to meet with a member of the PLO, and today Israel is trying to prop up Fatah, the core of the PLO for all these decades.

– Tunnels. In Gaza, the Palestinians are digging tunnels. In Jerusalem, in the Old City, so are the Israelis. In Gaza, the tunnels are for smuggling weapons in from Egypt to supply Hamas, and for occasionally attempting raids on Israeli border outposts (one of which resulted in the killing of an Israeli soldier and the kidnapping of another). In Jerusalem, the tunnel is for uncovering the deep Jewish past there that dates back to the time of the Second Temple, more than two thousand years ago. These are not morally equivalent projects. No human beings are being harmed by that archeological dig. And yet there is a similarity, because these tunnel projects ARE both about national self-assertion. Israel’s new Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, once created a stir when he declared on Israeli TV that if he were a young Palestinian living in Gaza today, he too would be a terrorist. This is not to justify what Hamas is doing or what it stands for but to realize that the Palestinians are in their own cycle of history, and maybe the moment for compromise has passed for this generation. I hope not for all.

– The Temple Mount. Walking underground on our guided tour of the underground tunnel along the Western Wall, listening to our enthusiastic young guide gush about the beauty of the foundation stones, how we were passing just 300 feet from where the “Holy of Holies” once stood, closer than any Jew had stood in 2000 years; watching him kiss the rock wall, and then gazing on a sophisticated model of the Temple Mount that explained the archeological work we were walking through, I had a very bad feeling. It is one thing to see how archeology can uncover and confirm facts from the past. Yes, the ancient Jews built a great Temple here, and it is awe-inspiring to walk underground and know that you are standing in a bathing area built by King Herod, or what was probably a changing room for people coming to worship. But it is another thing to see how these discoveries fuel a Jewish neo-mysticism that thinks everything that Israel has accomplished is a miracle from God rather than the hard work of human beings, and how they fire a zeal for the return of that Temple, no matter how unrealistic or dangerous such a project might be. After all, if God brought the Jews of 150 countries back from Exile, won’t God protect them if they fulfill His commandments regarding the building of that Temple?

– Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem was stunning. The new museum, which was built in 2005, is nothing like the old one. Gone are the simple photographic exhibits that my colleague Joann, the Nation’s copy editor, had so diligently copy edited as we walked its halls in 1985. Moshe Safdie, the world renowned Israel architect, has built a beautiful and stark gash in the earth made of steel and concrete, and most of the time you are underground walking the halls. Above us there is a thin beam of light coming thru the roof, meant to symbolize the occasional shafts of goodness that pierced the dark times of the Holocaust.

Our guide pierced my heart right away. A softspoken Orthodox Jewish woman with the slightest of Hebrew accents, she startled me at the beginning of our tour by asking the group, “Is there anyone here who knows someone who was in the Holocaust?” I cleared my throat and said, somewhat embarrassed, “Yes, my mother, who is with us here, was a hidden child during the war in Belgium. And my father-in-law, on his side of the family, lost at least 70 immediate family members. I have the list with me here.” My mother then said a few words about her experience during the war, but she too seemed a bit startled. It was not going to be an easy walk through the exhibit, even though we were rushing and only had an hour or so for what is normally a three hour tour.

Several times I felt myself tearing up. Once, when I read the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who was quoted from the 1820s saying, “When they burn books, the burning of people is not far behind.” This as we watched a short movie showing Josef Goebbels presiding over a mass bookburning at a German university in the early 1930s. Once again as we looked at a giant wall-sized poster of the massacre site at Babi Yar, where more than 50,000 Jews were shot and killed in the open air. I hadn’t realized that Babi Yar was a picnic site. You could see how the grounds were green, below the bodies stacked like cordwood. A third time as we looked later at pictures of the days after the liberation of the camps, and we listened to a chorus of emaciated Jewish children singing hatikva, “The Hope,” which later became Israel’s national anthem, and looked at a photo of the first Friday night Shabbat candle-lighting to take place in Bergen-Belsen. “That 8-year-old boy sitting in the corner there,” our guide softly told us, “later made aliyah to Israel and grew up to be one of the country’s chief rabbis.” Gulp. Finally we stood in the Hall of Names, a circular virtual cemetery lined by simple black file boxes. There are 3.5 million names of victims of the Holocaust that are collected here, our guide told us. There were many empty rows, waiting to be filled.

It’s now almost 6am in the morning, and I’ve been up since 5, and I am
grumpy and can’t fall back asleep after last night’s dinner with a
group of Israeli Anglo bloggers. It’s day three of our visit to Israel
with a group of American bloggers and videobloggers to attend the
first Israeli “Blogference”
under the auspices of the Interdisciplinary
Center of Herzliyya (Israel’s first private university) and Israel21c (a nonprofit group that
seeks to make sure the media covers the Israel “behind the
headlines” — i.e. all the amazing technology being invented here and the
realities and richness of daily life). I’m tossing and turning because
the biggest attraction of this trip, for my 13-year-old son Jesse, who
has joined me for this week and a half of business and personal travel
in Israel, was abruptly pulled out from under us. It was supposed to
be a helicopter ride to the south later this morning, to visit the
border town of Sderot and see how civilians living next to Gaza have
been shelled by Hamas. The helicopter they were planning to use is in
repairs, we were told, and the smaller one they are using doesn’t have
room for Jesse (and thus I am not going either of course), but I am
also aware of the fact that it was always kind of an odd deal being
offered (come on our wonderful propaganda tour–the Israelis call it
“hasbara,” meaning information–and say nice things about us in your
blogs) and I wonder if something I said in the last two days offended
our hosts.

At the same time I am thinking that’s nonsense, don’t be paranoid,
you’re not that important and it’s entirely reasonable for them to say
the helicopter they originally managed to reserve needed repair and
the one they’re using is too small to take Jesse along (and thus
neither me). [UPDATE: It turned out that one of the folks in our
little delegation wasn't feeling up to it, and so there was room for
both me and Jesse to get on the helicopter! It's been a whirlwind of a
day and while I am quickly posting this at 6pm, I don't have time to
get into details about the trip, I will as soon as I can. I think the
rest of this post still stands... and seeing both the "security fence"
from the air, the geography of the conflict, and the battle around
Gaza playing out now, I've got plenty more to chew on...]

I am also frustrated that despite my efforts last night at a delicious
Ethiopian restaurant to draw out the Israel21c people and the Anglo
bloggers they invited to join us for dinner, I couldn’t really get
them to engage on the issue of how they deal with what is
euphemistically referred to as “the situation” or “the conflict” and
in particular what it does to Israel to be continuing to be occupiers.

When I described for them David Grossman’s effort in his book The
Yellow Wind, which I am re-reading and savoring on this trip, to
get Israelis and Palestinians alike to take one moment to empathize
with the suffering of the other, and his failure to get anyone to do
so, I got no meaningful response. Maybe they were tired. Maybe they
were tired of being asked such questions. I know I’ve gotten tired of
them at times.

Blogger Lisa Goldman,
who had been involved in a fascinating dialogue with Lebanese and
other Middle Eastern bloggers starting last year, and who had just
come back from Lebanon, didn’t really respond and if anything seemed
frustrated at my effort to raise the issue. “Don’t you understand that
we are exhausted of the conflict and just trying to get by and raise
our kids?” she asked. We have a government that is at 4% popularity in
the polls (makes Bush look popular!), everyone is under indictment,
and we’ve tried almost every option for peace, she added. Actually,
there are some things we haven’t tried, she said in passing, but
didn’t want to get into it when I asked. (But you just came back from
Beirut and sat on the beach with a Syrian blogger, what else can you
tell us, I thought to myself.) She just must have been tired. I can
understand that!

David Brin, the head of Israe21c who hosted our dinner, casually
mentioned that, in fact, he lives in Ma’aleh Adumim, which is a giant
settlement of 40,000 people east of Jerusalem, but he insisted, with
no rancor at all, that it really wasn’t considered a settlement any
more, just a part of Jerusalem, one of its neighborhoods. I had in
front of me a perfect example of how the settlement movement had
succeeded in making its zealotry part of Israel’s “normal life”, to
borrow from the “This Normal
Life” title of blogger Brian Blum’s autobiographical blog, and I
didn’t have the heart or gumption or will to challenge him further.
(My dear departed friend Robbie
Friedman was right, I thought to myself, the settlement movement
has succeeded in dragging Israel into an untenable situation, a cancer
on Israel’s soul.)

Brian, who was sitting across from me and who was the friendliest guy,
and who has a really cool business in the works helping bloggers turn
their best posts into cyber-books, had also told us that he started
his blog five years ago, after a cousin of his was killed in a suicide
bombing, and out of respect for his loss I didn’t really want to probe
too hard what is after all an unacceptable tragedy for him. I also
kept sensing how badly these Israeli-Anglo bloggers want us to accept
them and embrace them as part of the larger political blogosphere (Allison Kaplan
Sommer, a blogger here who works for Pajamas Media, told us during
dinner how she felt uncomfortable being totally rejected by the left
side of the blogosphere and totally embraced by the right, even though
that wasn’t where she thought of herself, and I couldn’t help but
empathize with her)…the same way the Israeli techies we met over the
last two days want to be (and in many ways are) seen as Silicon Valley
(Middle) East and not necessarily as part of the “situation” that is
still festering and threatening to explode once again. (No, we haven’t
spent a second talking about that!) But when you meet people
face-to-face over a nice meal, the last thing you want to do is get
into an argument.

I am also grumpy because so far I feel like we’ve been visiting a
bubble, that we’ve had little to no contact with “real Israelis” but
instead are being handled, with the greatest of finesse, by
Professional Israelis, people who have made it their job, either by
day or by avocation, to “represent” the country to outsiders and make
sure we get a varnished view while claiming they are giving us a
rounded picture. Out of politeness again, and a sense that, hey, after
all, they invited me and paid my way, I bit my tongue when David Brin
said that Israel21c had organized a post-Blogference touring itinerary
that aimed to give us a balanced experience–seeing the border fence
(with an IDF guide), visiting Sderot (a border town being regularly
shelled from Gaza) and also meeting an Israel Arab economic
development group. I should have said, and what about a meeting with a
Palestinian, or one of the Israeli human rights groups? Are you so
sure every option for peace has been tried? You say that the
Palestinians rejected a two-state solution at Camp David, but what
about the fact that after Oslo in 1993 Israel doubled the size of its
settlement population and kept demolishing Palestinian houses (built
without permits from the occupying authority) at a prodigious rate?
But then again I am not staying for the full tour, as Jesse and I have
various family and friends to visit around the country over the next
few days, so while we are going to get spend the next two days with
the group in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, which we are very much looking
forward to, we will miss the trip to the border fence and the economic
development group.

I don’t feel good about biting my tongue…but at the same time I don’t
need to make a stink, this isn’t my passion any more, thinking about
all of this gets me depressed and angry, and why should I upset
Jesse’s experience of the country? (And hey, the Jerusalem Post just
did a story
yesterday about the Blogference where I am cited as having written
“several books” on the Internet and politics–if only this were true!)
I am wondering also what I should do with the time we have to make
sure that Jesse does get a more rounded view of things–can we somehow
squeeze in a meeting with the Seeds of Peace people, since
after all we’ve been sending the kids Tzedakah donations to them for
years. Or should we try to go parasailing, so he has a great story to
share with his friends back home. But how can I take him on such a
privileged activity when, after all, here were are in the Middle East
and just a few miles away from us things are not gleaming and bright?
So, that’s what is keeping me up this morning when I should be
sleeping…

And at the same time I am also still chewing on and savoring the
conversations with all the interesting and creative people I met over
the last two days, both from among the Israeli techies and bloggers
who came to the Blogference and sought me out in the hallways for a
conversation, and also the other members of our little delegation,
like Andrew Baron and Joanne Colan of Rocketboom, and Doug Racine
and Kent Nichols of Ask-A-Ninja, and Garrett Graff and Jessica Coen and
Om Malik. Yesterday, I met one
Israeli entrepreneur, Eran Reshef, who has started a company called Collactive that helps individuals
and groups amplify their voices on social media sites…and another,
Yaron Charka, who has started a company called Speakitz that enables anyone to add
their voice or comment to any site on the web…and a woman named Taly
Weiss with an absolutely brilliant if still not-fully-baked idea to
create an international “United Nations 2.0″ on the web and invite
people from around the world to join and group them, by their IP
addresses, to their own countries and enable them to vote on how their
country should vote on issues actually coming before the UN. Imagine
that, an Israeli who wants to think of a way to get the UN to actually
work!

Dr. Noam Lemelshtrich-Latar, the organizer of the Blogference and Dean
of the Sammy Ofer School of Communications at the IDC, also impressed
me with his knowledge of how search technologies and personal tracking
systems were being deployed, without our knowledge or consent, in all
sorts of business settings, and his anger and concern for the mass
invasion of privacy taking place was real and urgent. The School of
Communications itself is an impressive new facility that should be a
major draw for the IDC. The two thirteen-year-old pre-pubescent
Israeli boys who sat in the back of the Ask a Ninja’s workshop,
furiously scribbling notes while the Ninjas spoke about how they build
up their videoblog, wowed me completely. “Oh, we’re really enjoying
the event,” they told me. “We’re learning so much. We have our own
blogs, you know.” Same with the first year Israeli students at the
IDC, Tammy Berger and Dorin Bornovski, who were interviewing all of
us for a documentary they are making about the event. Same with the
Israelis who came to my and Garrett’s workshop on blogging and
politics, and who genuinely seem to be searching for a way to foster
the rise of an independent Hebrew political blogosphere that might be
able to do for Israeli politics what the netroots movement in America
has done for the left there (more on that topic maybe later). Their
questions and enthusiasm and hard work were infectious.

Ach, I hate to feel so conflicted with myself. No wonder I can’t sleep.