This "Is Raf OK" series is, according to the stats on Substack, read by 100-150 people a day. I don't know who y'all are (there are fewer than 75 subscribers). As mentioned, feel free to write with questions, comments or howls. Just reply to any of these emails, or find my via LinkedIn or other coordinates. This can be shared by either forwarding the email or sending the link (https://zimberdvar.substack.com) via email or text.
Where does this stuff come from?
A few social media feeds and chat groups
One of these is a rollup of Arabic language sources in translation into English
IDF (Israel Defense Forces) official releases
Israeli media (television and news)
Friends and family (esp. A.K., also N.Z.) who are part of their own chat groups and feeds
Raf's lifelong study of history (primarily the Cold War and the Middle East)
The "media" -- primarily the Washington Post and the New York Times.
I will say that the New York Times is harder and harder to read. First they were sucked into the Trump verse, morphing (in my eyes) into a free of charge broadcast platform for that movement, easily and effectively ‘played’ (read: abused). In recent months, their attitude to the Israeli state can only be articulated as deeply hostile. Deep enough they may not even notice. (I’ve been meaning to present an analysis of their language usage.)
Read
Generational Differences
A piece in the New York Times (PDF here) captured something for me: My kids have basically grown up with the background music of Bibi and unrestrained West Bank settler violence. My parents were born before there was a State. I grew up with a consciousness of Israel being both part of the region's historical arc and an experiment in social and economic organization. I grew up with Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres.
When I was in Poland (in 1986), I learned of an American guy in my extended circle who spent years looking for socialism. He spent time in the Soviet bloc. He only found it when he went to a kibbutz in Israel.
To his dismay: He didn't want a village in the Galilee to be the only place his ideology lived. But he was, I believe, happy to have found it (and shattered that the USSR was not the place).
Years ago I co-taught a college class with a woman who was taken from the U.S. to Moscow by her parents in the 1920's because... her parents wanted to raise her under socialism, and it looked like Moscow was the place for that. (In the late 1930's she appealed to the Soviet authorities to leave back to California... her petition had to be approved by Central Committee of the USSR, by then WWII had broken out, she took the Trans Siberian and ended up via Japan in San Francisco. Just before Pearl Harbor.)
Anyway, I recognize my foundational “Israel context:” Palestinians were terrorists and the late 1960's and the 1970's were a heyday (Israel was widely respected and loved in the West). My children observe a different world. One that, to top it all, has a deeply distorted "Israeli Jews are Oppressors" background music. (When I was in college, the hostile atmosphere of SFSU was an exception in the college-campus-verse.)
I never had a peer group 1/5 of which approve of Hamas (according to a Yahoo News poll, the 18-29 age group)
25% of young Americans believe Israel is entirely responsible for current conflict. 18% have favorable view of Hamas.
That is heavy, and I haven’t lived with that. (Israeli Arabs seem to be more hostile toward the actions of Hamas than young adult Americans — that is a twist.)
Bernie Sanders Agrees with Bibi: Hamas Is A Showstopper
From the New York Times in the past couple days (PDF here).
Hamas has made it clear, before and after Oct. 7, that its goal is perpetual warfare and the destruction of the state of Israel. Just last week a spokesman for Hamas told The New York Times: “I hope that the state of war with Israel will become permanent on all the borders, and that the Arab world will stand with us.”
and
If Hamas is going to be removed from power, as it must be...
Bernie doesn't give a strategy to remove Hamas. But he is on the same page as Presidents and Prime Ministers: Hamas stands between where we are and where we want to be.
Television
Israeli TV, embedded with soldiers in Gaza. Not gory (but a lot of destroyed buildings) 14 minutes, English subtitles at top. (Note: Part way through they refer to an Israeli commander, Salman, who was killed in combat with Hamas. Salman is an Israeli Druze.)
Rays of Hope
Thomas Friedman, who I will quote at length. (If you want to know a reason Raf is in Israel, this essay captures a chunk of it.) (PDF here):
... I devoted a lot of time on my trip to Israel and the West Bank this month observing and probing the actual day-to-day interactions among Israeli Arabs and Jews. These are always complex, sometimes surprising, occasionally depressing — and, more often than you might expect, uplifting — experiences. Because they reveal enough seeds of coexistence scattered around that one can still dream the impossible dream — that we might one day have a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
It began soon after I arrived in Tel Aviv, when I sat down with perhaps the most courageous Israeli political leader today, Mansour Abbas. Abbas is a Palestinian Arab citizen of Israel who happens to be a devout Muslim and a member of Israel’s parliament, where he leads the important United Arab List party. Abbas’s voice is even more vital now because he did not respond to the Hamas terrorism with silence. Abbas understands that while it’s right to be outraged at the pain Israel is inflicting on Gaza’s civilians, reserving all of your outrage for Gaza’s pain creates suspicion among Jews in Israel and worldwide, who notice when not a word is uttered about the Hamas atrocities that triggered this war.
The first thing Abbas said to me about the Hamas onslaught was this: “No one can accept what happened on that day. And we cannot condemn it and say ‘but’ — that word ‘but’ has become immoral.” (Recent polls show overwhelming Israeli Arab condemnation of the Hamas attack.) ... “One of the hardest things today is to be an Israeli Arab,” Abbas said to me. “The Arab Israeli feels the pain twice — once as an Arab and once as an Israeli.” ... After the Hamas rockets started falling on Tel Aviv on Oct. 7, he called his regular contractor, Emad, an Israeli Arab from Jaffa, to say that the doors on the bomb shelter in his basement couldn’t be closed. “The problem was happening in a lot of shelters, and after Oct. 7 everyone wanted to get theirs fixed,” said Wolf. Indeed, when his neighbors got wind that a repairman was on the block, they asked him to fix theirs, too.
“Emad is a good friend, and he refused to take any money for two days of work,” said Wolf. Keep in mind, he added, that Emad lives in Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv. In the 1948 war, Emad’s father stayed in Jaffa and his uncle fled to Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. “So he was raised in Israel — but half his family is now in Gaza,” Wolf said. “He himself got a Hamas missile 200 yards from his home in Jaffa” the other day, he added.
Get out your kaleidoscope: Today you have Jaffa Palestinian refugees living under a Hamas government in Gaza who are firing rockets at Jaffa Palestinians who are Israeli citizens, one of whom repaired the rocket shelters of his Jewish friends in Tel Aviv — for free.
Relief Area
Alef
A vegetarian restaurant named The Butcher’s Daughter. (This is not a joke, it is across the street from my hotel.)
What childhood experience brought her to that?
I am grateful for the good in people. That people can see each other as people. (Labels and diagnoses are so much easier… seeing people as people isn’t necessarily natural.)
Happy Turkey Day,
Raf