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.
Posted by msifry at July 3, 2007 12:40 AM