Aaah Einstein

The Old Woman

I live in the heart of Tel Aviv in what was once one apartment covering the entire floor of my building but that has been divided up into 5 different apartments. There is a front door and then 5 more doors that lead to each of our own homes. I like it there my neighbours are all young, Tel Aviv types. Until the old woman moved in.

She is at most 4”11, she is wrinkly, she speaks Hebrew with a heavy French accent. I met her when she was moving in, she said hello and told me her name which I instantly forgot. I picked up on her accent and said Bonjour which is pretty much the only French I know. Her apartment is the smallest of the 5 consisting of just one room for sleeping, eating and living plus a shower room. After a couple of words were exchanged between us ran out of things to say and so did she. Someone else came in through the front door, the sound of the key in the lock makes her physically jump. Her mobile phone rings. I watch in consternations as she physically shakes once again at the sudden sound.

She looks at me apologetically and says “It’s terrible everything scares me!” The front door opens and she shakes again making me wonder whether this woman is actually going to be able to live alone.

That night it’s 4a.m. and I can’t sleep for the sound of Israeli folk music coming through my paper thin walls. I get out of bed looking for the source of the music opening my front door to hear it emanating from the old woman’s one room palace. I say nothing. I have to get up for work in three and a half hours.

Sometime later I bump into her in the busy café across the street from our building. She stops me and asks “you live in my building don’t you?” “Yes” I say. “Well, I have had the operation, it went fine and I am all better now.” She says this in a matter of fact way. I didn’t know that she had had an operation and felt uncomfortable with her sharing this information with me. I shifted my weight from one foot to another unsure what to say. The waitress arrived to tell me my table is ready. I say “Goodbye”.

A few days later I came home from a day of work that was mostly spent trying not to fall asleep at my desk and find some asshole smoking in the lobby. He stubs the cigarette out and joins me in the lift. We went to the same floor. “Ah you know the old woman who has just moved in?” he asks. “Yeah” I say. “She’s my cousin” he says. “Oh I know her…she seems very frail” I hint. He agreed, “she has no one really, we are distantly related so I come down here and see to her sometimes” he said.

“she literally jumps when she hears a loud noise” I added

“Oh that’s not because of her age she’s been like that since he was a little girl” he says.

“It’s from when she was in the camps”

A Night at the Dead Sea

I left work early, bought myself a thick new fleece and invested in a sleeping bag before jumping on the bus to Tel Aviv and from there to Jerusalem. I fell asleep on the bus, what would usually be a journey of less than an hour took an hour and a half but I didn't care. I jumped off the bus at Jerusalem's central bus station and moved through the metal detectors, through the building and out the main exit from where I caught a cab to Iddo's place.

Iddo wasn't there of course, he was never where he said he would be and if he said he was on his way somewhere it meant that he wasn't yet, so when he told me he was on his way home and would meet me there I figured I had about 45 minutes to chill with his flatmate Yaela before he arrived.

About 45 minutes after my arrival Iddo made his appearance, he always reminds me of the Israelis I see in old TV images of Israel in the 1970s. He looks scruffy, he has curly hair and glasses and a constant smile on his face. Iddo was with me in the army, in boot camp at the end of each day while everyone else was asleep he explained to me in English all the things I had failed to understand during the day, you just don't forget things like that.

He has a big double bed which he never sleeps on, favouring a small couch in the corner of his room, a book of Mozart's opera Idomeneo lies open. In one corner of the room sits a piano, in another a guitar and sitting on a desk is half of an old, broken flute. Iddo's one of 'those' people, great with just about any instrument you can think of and Spanish guitar has always been his weapon of choice. That's why it won't surprise anyone to learn that he's studying for a degree in Biology.

Yaela grabs her stuff, Iddo  grabs nothing and we're ready to go, we pick up Ya'ar's cousin Or from outside Jerusalem's theatre and we're on our way. Or got back from Europe two days ago, she's got dreadlocks, a nose ring and a hat that looks like a cake on her head, she has jumped into the Purim spirit.

I can't see much once we're out of Jerusalem, somehow it's past ten and darkness reigns. We stop on the way to get water and bamba, I get ripped off for 70NIS when I buy it. And then we're off again, the lights of Jordan are in front of me allowing me to make out their high mountains in the darkness. The Dead Sea is right in front of me but all I can see is a big, dark shade of night. We drive through checkpoints manned by bored looking soldier girls and see cops stopping cars on the road looking for drugs. Or says her favourite dealer is a cop selling the rewards of his lucrative job.

Iddo ploughs on through the darkness in his Mum's car and eventually the signs say Ein Gedi and we've driven too far. He turns the car around and 5 minutes back up the road to where the sign says Qedumim or something like it and we have arrived. A car pulls up next to us and out get Subari another army buddy, we all do greetings and then grab the contents of Iddo's car to take with us down to the place. Sleeping bags, bottles of water, ground mats, extra clothes and a giant lamp.

We don't know where we're going as we climb down from the side of the road in the dark. Rocks and stones and sand shift beneath the weight of our feet as we make our way down the steep hill towards where Yaar and the others are supposed to be. Down we go, at one point I fall, I get up and carry on going down. I see the specks of light from 3 disparate bonfires in the distance. We keep walking as we close in on one we realise it's not them, second time lucky as we close in and hear the reassuring sounds of Yaar and Netanel talking.

There are chips sizzling in a frying pan on the open fire and the two of them are sitting there chopping vegetables to throw in a pot along with a load of meat they've already gotten ready. That pot will soon be sitting on the fire along with some water, oil, spices and rices that'll be thrown in later, we'll eat it in a couple of hours. There's 10 people there already and the fire is looking good, more will arrive soon and our numbers will swell to about 30.

Yaar and his girlfriend Nitzan have just gotten engaged. Yaar was in the army with me too, I called him Forrest because that's what his name means in English.

Iddo picks up a guitar and so does Netanel, they play, then they play some more, the whole evening is punctuated by their strumming, Netanel's girlfriend is called Anat, they recently broke up and then got back together again, she arrives about 20 minutes after us along with Nitzan.

The music is going, the beers are flowing and then Yaar pulls out a bottle of Black Label, something I really hadn't expected. I pull a couple of cubes out of the icebox and fill his glass and mine up to the top, none of that little shot nonsense. Netanel complains, he wants some too so I fill a glass for him, Iddo is only interested in sipping Arak while he strums the guitar. Netanel abandons the guitar for his drink and someone else picks up the instrument. We all talk shit for a while, the fire burns and now someone is walking around with a silver foil tray offering us all chicken wings straight off a small grill that was until recently sitting on the bonfire.

The others sang along to songs in Hebrew and in English while I sat there in the sand dunes by the still invisible Dead Sea, the lowest point on the planet and sipped my whiskey.

I think of the checkpoints we passed through, of the land we love, of the shit we share to live here.

I think of the fact that my ancient people have never had it as good as we have it now.

I look at these people around me and remember their stories. I remember Yaela telling me how her Dad came to Israel at the age of 7 with his 5 year old brother. They grew up in Beirut and ran when things got bad, they ran alone, the rest of the family coming when they could, taking solace in the fact that they got their sons out.

I think of Yaar at age 17 hunting in the night for his younger brother's two best friends only to find their bodies mere meters away from his settlement after being stoned to death. The horrors that we leave behind and the horrors that we still face.

Israel is a nation of refugees, of people running away and of people running to. We created this country out of sheer desperation and we keep flocking here for the same reason.

While everyone sings and I get drunk on whiskey I keep thinking that we're here because of all the things that happened so far away, that Zionism isn't a response to the shit we suffered around the world for so many years, it's the solution to it.

A live people, by a Dead Sea.

Beyond the Green Line: Urban Warfare Training

Haim was shooting into the house when he called me over "number two to me!" He shouted and I came running over from my position at the corner of the small building. I immediately shouldered my way to the door and knelt right next to him and opened fire, the next thing I heard was "preparing a grenade!" to which I shouted "Haim's preparing a grenade!" Then he shouted "Grenade!" to which I responded "GRENAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDDDEEEEEEE" then I felt his hand on my collar pulling me away from the opening and we both ran along the wall of the house away from the imminent explosion. We counted together, 31, 32, 33, EXPLOSION!! The grenade exploded and a cloud of acrid, black smoke washed out of the door just as we barged in weapons blazing, him from left to right and me from right to left, anyone in there would have been DEAD.

Green clapped us both on the shoulders, "nice" he said before calling Netanel and Yoni over to take their turn. Haim and I joined the others who were carrying out the same exercise but without using live rounds. We picked one of the many concrete 'houses' that filled this purpose built village that generation upon generation of Paratroopers had practised storming. The weather had closed in and a fog obscured the beginning of the village, which was where Oran was standing guard. I could barely hear anything over the cacophony of bullets and the occasional whoomp of a grenade exploding from the guys who were continuing with the exercise.

Over and over again during the course of that week we practise one simple exercise; taking an individual room. I learned where to stand and how to throw a grenade into a room properly, how to storm a room with another person and not accidentally shooting them on the way in. I learnt the things to say and the techniques for killing someone who was holed up in a room without getting myself or my friends killed in the process. I learnt how and where to stand on the door and that once I was moving in to move in as quickly as possible because the doorway is without a doubt the most dangerous place to be. It was stage one and we went through it over and over again.

When night fell we practised moving through the village together in formation but never on the main thoroughfare through the centre, always around the back. There was patrolling where we all basically walked down in a line, there was moving in fours and there was moving in twos. There was moving in fours but with two guys covering another two guys and then vice versa as we made our way through this mock Arab village.

We were there for a week, alternatively shooting up these empty hulks of buildings and practising taking the whole village. One night the Captain turned up and told us to take the village, he had positioned a couple of his own guys at strategic points to play 'enemy' soldiers. He wandered through the central path while we were busy moving around the back of the houses. All he did was shake his head the whole time. At one point I ran out from behind one of the houses to lie flat and shoot a sniper on a roof opposite, to which he shot me a look that seemed as dark and as fatal as any sniper's bullet.

He waited for us to 'fight' our way to the end of the village before calling a halt to the exercise, he then took Green aside. It was about 15 minutes before our officer returned and I had no doubt as to the kind of conversation he had been having. We were sitting in one of the buildings taking shelter from the cold, our sweat soaked bodies ensuring that no shelter could really prevent any of us from shivering. Yuval was telling us about something that had just happened to a friend of his in combat and were listening in rapt attention. Every story about some soldier who was actually in the field, caught our attention. There were stories about snipers, about capturing terrorists about ambushes in open country, about the fighting in Nablus or Jenin or Qalqilia or any of a thousand other places I had never heard of before and whose names I forgot as quickly as I heard them. The guys had friends in just about every unit in the army from tanks to Duvduvan to engineers and Sayeret Matkal, we got a glimpse into everything but never anything more than just that glimpse, the real thing was still a long way off.

Eventually Green returned looking grim, he didn't shout at us though, in fact his voice was soft to the point of being gentle, "Okay we're going to go back to some basics, come back outside." So Yuval stopped talking at exactly the point where a terrorist was in someone's scope and we stepped back into the cold and fog to practise some more. There was no talk about taking the village again, Green simply, quietly explained that we were going to walk through how to move once again. He told us to look ahead and plot our next 'Zig', how to use the walls to cover our movements, how to stick to those walls and never leave them, not even to take on snipers on rooftops...especially not to take on snipers on rooftops!

It was very slow and precise at first, moving slowly along a wall before stopping and lowering to one knee when the wall ended, sneaking the barrel of the rifle slowly and deliberately around the corner without exposing myself to possible enemy fire before scooting forward to the next wall once the person behind me took my place.

Once I had made it to the back of the next building the whole process began again and always there was Green aided by the Captain and the two previously unknown guys he had brought with him. It was while learning the art of urban warfare that I learnt the term 'Zig' for you can't know anything about fighting in a built up area without understanding how to make a Zig. In short a 'Zig' is the corner of a building that a soldier takes over. You look ahead of you for the next Zig and through a series of Zigs make your way to the target where, more often than not, you'll take your last Zig and stay there.

Moving correctly and moving incorrectly in an urban environment is the difference between life and death. When moving between zigs I slowly grasped the difference between moving stealthily in a way that afforded me the best possible protection and scampering through in a way that afforded an enemy in waiting the opportunity to shoot me.

We went through it over and over again until the Captain nodded to Green and turned away, apparently convinced that we now had a fairer idea of what we were doing. Green assembled us all together in the gloom and when he had our attention he didn't speak, didn't say a word, he just looked at us all. We stood this way for a few minutes, the tension built between us, something was coming.

The Captain stepped back in, he was holding a stopwatch. "When I was here with my team we were able to get the whole team on to the roof of that building in 20 seconds in full kit." The building he was referring to was one of the smaller ones in the 'village' and by a seemingly lucky coincidence we had been assembled right next to it.

I tensed, in this situation to utter a single word under your breath, even to sigh could have gotten all of us in much greater trouble than having to climb onto a roof. Staying quiet was almost too much to bear since the urge to mutter "in the best traditions of the Paratroopers" every time he finished a sentence was on the tip of my tongue. Then I heard "Go" and along with everyone else I was running to the house to try and climb my way up an 8 feet high smooth concrete wall with no conceivable way of actually making it up there.

After a couple of seconds of looking like I really wanted to get on the roof but without being able to think of any practical way of getting there I heard someone call my name. I looked up to to see that Haim and Yuval were already up there and leaning their hands down towards me, I took a run up to the wall, kicked out and waved my arms in the air for them to catch, they got me and as I ran my legs up the wall they pulled me onto the roof.

The whole episode took over a minute of floundering around but eventually we were all up there. Clearly not 'in the best traditions of the paratroops'.

The Captain shouted out the time and told us all to come down. We returned to our starting positions, I felt like I was on the bloody gibush again. He shouted "GO", we ran, fumbled around, someone pulled me up onto the roof and this time it took even longer. He barked "1 minute 37 seconds" up to us and down we climbed down knowing that we were going to go again and again until we had beaten his supposed time of 20 seconds.

"Take 3 minutes to discuss what you're going to do" he said, in the best traditions of the paratroopers I mouthed. This wasn't anything new, in fact doing this kind of nonsense on the gibush had been my introduction to army life, but after months of training and hours of going through house to house fighting I had had enough. It was frustrating to do this, it gave me the feeling that there had been no progression. I had already been through boot camp, parachute course, a week without sleep and a whole load of other things and here I was, cold, tired and doing the exact same thing I had been doing on my first day.

But then again no one asked me for my opinion, I had two options, to get on the roof as quickly as possible or to shake my head and sit on the side, exactly like on the gibush. That was when I formed my first mental picture of all the rest of the team finishing their training without me. Perhaps I would go to the ceremony and watch as each of them was handed their unit insignia, knowing that it could have been me too if only I hadn't been so weak...

As per usual it was Asaf who was talking, Asaf who would go on to become an officer and deputy commander of the unit. The smaller guys, like me were going to run to the wall and boost the taller guys up onto the roof, they would then hang down and pull the rest of us up. We had a plan and once you had a plan the end was in sight.

"GO!"

We went, I ran to the wall and bent double only to feel someone's leg hit my back and then someone else's, when there were no more I took a run up to the wall, kicked up the side of it and flailed with my hands and felt the reassuring tug of friends pulling me up.

"38 seconds, you think that's good?" He shouted up to us? Personally I thought it was pretty damn good, especially down from a minute and thirty something, but obviously I wasn't going to say so, instead no one answered, in fact no one even looked at him. The ground had suddenly become a very interesting place to rest my eyes on.

"Get back down and do it again."

And so we went back down, we did it again, then we did it again, then we did it again and we kept doing it until we had refined our method, until we knew exactly what spot was best climb the wall at, where there was a slight dip in the ground and where a little bump make it that tiny bit easier. I wasn't bent double any more, now I was linking my hands together and as soon as someone stepped into them I would push them up getting them onto the roof as quickly as possible. A few of us positioned ourselves by the wall and the rest simply waited their turn rather than everyone running to the wall at the same time and bundling into each other.

Eventually I found myself on the roof watching the Captain click his stopwatch and call out "18.7 seconds, excellent!" At which point he simply turned around and walked off. Green sent us to sleep, I can't remember what time it was, I had stopped caring, I only knew that I was tired and that tomorrow held more of the same.

An Article of Brooding Arrogance

I feel strange sometimes, as though my life is simply a long wait for something to happen. At work I have a calendar and I cross of each day with an X, people who see it asking me what it is I am waiting to happen and I just shrug, because I don't know.

Day follows day, the nights are eternal sometimes other times I have drunk myself into a stupor and they pass mercifully quickly.

What does my life hold for me?

I know what I want, I know my own hopes and dreams, I know my own soul and spirit and even my own strength though I wonder if I genuinely have the conviction to push myself continually forwards in pursuit of them, it would be far easier to sit back and live a comfortable though somewhat boring life doing nothing in particular with dreams only of normality.

I find it hard to sleep.

All day at work I am tired, I drink cups of coffee to keep my eyes from closing, today I found my head resting on my arm while at my desk and got up to pour myself another cup, but at night it's a different story entirely. The night comes and I find myself alone, tortured by mental images of the man I wish to be, the dreams I dream while my eyes are open, the world I wish to make for myself. These waking dreams are irrepressible, if only they weren't.

It starts with a book about me, I don't know where it ends.

I have started the book but I can't find the ending, or even the middle. There are so many books by so many authors, I wonder if there is enough room for another book by another author.

It feels terribly arrogant for me to write in this way, I ask myself over and over again "who am I to think in this way? What evidence have I that I even know how to write? That there is anyone interested in reading the words I place on the page?

I wrestle myself down to the computer every time I attempt to write, I force myself to place the words on the screen with no knowledge as to whether they genuinely impart the meaning to the reader that my mind insists they possess. Who am I to write? Who am I to expect to impose myself upon the thoughts and dreams of the millions I am attempting to reach?

If I write my book and publish it that will not be enough. If the book is not of a monumental success to put every other book ever written to shame it will not be enough.

I am scared of what the future holds.

I should not be.

Windows 8

Is it just me or is everyone out there finding it impossible to get to grips with Windows 8?

Recently I bought a brand new Samsung laptop, was really happy to get it home and start playing with it and finding out what it could do. But before I could even begin Windows 8 insisted on an update that took me about 2 hours to download, which already irritated me.

Then I started messing around with the new operating system and have so far (we're talking months later here) failed to see what added value it has brought to me.

Now instead of being able to do 2 things at once, like have a chat on Skype whilst working on a document that we are both discussing, I find that I simply can't. I have to leave my desktop behind, then open Skype and have a conversation and then go back to my desktop to work on my document. This is a lot worse than their older operating systems and I am at a loss to explain why on earth Microsoft have made this the case.

Speaking of Skype, I keep getting asked for my Microsoft email address when I want to log in. Since I don't have one I have no idea how to access the most basic functions of the computer.

Cheers Microsoft you tossers.

Such apps as photos, Amazon and well just about everything that they have in the apps screen could just as easily sit on my desktop and allow me to do 2 things at once. I find this new 'thing' of taking everything away from my fingertips incredibly frustrating.

What is also killing me are all of these shitty so called 'shortcuts'. Whenever I try to move the arrow across the screen using the touch pad I get taken away to another part of the Windows 8 world. Clearly Microsoft understand just how unwieldy their operating system is which is why they insisted in adding in all of these annoying shortcuts in the first place, what they neglected to realise was the fact that someone may want to scroll diagnally down not in order to be taken into random photos but merely in order to move the arrow to another part of the screen!!

In short I have a whole load of apps that I don't want, didn't ask for and can't use (because of this Microsoft email crap) and a computer that is less effective than it would be if I had simply bought it with Windows 7. And please don't anyone give me any of this "you just don't know how to use it, you have to get used to it" crap. I don't want to get used to my computer I want to USE my computer and thanks to Microsoft this is now a whole load more difficult!

I am not a Mac I am definitely a PC.

As far as I am concerned that means that I don't get a computer that is aspiring to be a piece of artwork, I get a computer that I am familiar with and that works!

Windows 8 gives me nothing extra and takes away a whole range of functions that I would normally use.

Thanks Microsoft, you wankers!

Taking Life as You Find it

A number of years ago I was living in Jerusalem in something resembling a halfway house for people who had just moved to the country, where we could study the language for 5 months and also have a place to stay before moving out into wider society.

There was a security guard there called Meir, he had just come back from the rite of passage trip many Israelis take in the wake of their military service and was studying to be a dentist. He worked nights as a security guard to pay for the course, we became pretty friendly and sometimes we would chat in his booth.

One night he told me that shortly after breaking up with his girlfriend of three years his best friend started dating her and that they were getting married the next day.

Naturally I asked him if he was upset with them that they had gotten together, especially so soon after he had been dating her.

He looked at me in confusion and asked? "Why? She gave me the best three years of my life and now she is going to make my best friend happy forever."

It hadn't even occurred to him to be angry with them.

His lack of animosity struck me as a lesson in humanity that I have taken with me ever since.

Remembering Avner

3 years ago you took the train
you had no ticket though it took you there anyway
you had no bag but you packed everything away.
Plans you made all came to fruition and even your seed has since been spread.

I stood at your grave and watched your mother shed her tears 3 years after you left on your trip.
Few of us came 3 years later
unlike when you first took your trip
some remember some forget.

You took the train but you had no ticket
it took you there anyway.
Did you change your mind at the last moment i wonder
Did you try to get away before you were taken on your last journey?

You had tried and failed but this time you won,
I would have stopped you but you wouldn't have wanted me to.
I knew you before,
I knew you when you were young.
You will always be young
You died young

I saw your mother and father bury you
They both hugged me and every other friend you forgot you had
They asked themselves why you had to leave but you weren't there to answer

I remember drunken times
I remember bullets flying
I remember TV shows watched
I remember

I never would have thought it of you
You never would have thought it of yourself.
You who the women loved,
You who ran faster than I,
Who cared less than I
Who enjoyed life more than I.

You who chose to die

Beyond the Green Line: Eli

The most memorable thing about guard duty had been the loss of Oran. The constant need for sleep and sloshing around in the eternal mud of the base had not been fun and much as I would like to say that the army had done it with some kind of special Jedi training purpose in mind I can safely say that there was nothing behind it other than an indifference to the suffering of soldiers. It was in the wake of our guard duty that we set out on our 60km march, meaning that there was only a month to go before the final 90km march and our red berets.

The 60km was where we lost another of our number, the medic who wasn't Netanel and who no one ever called for when we simulated a wounded comrade. He arrived a couple of weeks late to boot camp having failed his medic's exam at the end of the course so he had to stay on and re-take it. He never quite managed to integrate into the team. His inability to complete the 60km surprised no one and made many of us sigh with relief. It was just the inevitable departure of someone who was never one of the us to start with. To Mark's credit he tried to alternatively cajole and bully him into staying on his feet through the final 15kms but he was wasting his time and his breath and we all knew it. Soon he was sitting on the ambulance that had been following us at a snail's pace. He and Oran suddenly became fast friends while the rest of us merely waited for them to be officially dropped.

That march was nowhere near as tough for me as the previous one, I felt justified in not taking anything on my back this time and so moved freely. Once it was over we were sent to bed and woke up the next day when Green decided that we all needed to go for a run in full kit, so run we did, very slowly and laughing at each other's inability to move. We arrived back at the base and changed, we had earned a trip back home but before we did we were called to a briefing. The Captain stood before us and in characteristic fashion said "next week we are going to be guarding settlements, I trust you will carry out this mission in the greatest tradition of the Paratroopers." And then we were free for a day and a half to do whatever we wanted before "guarding settlements in the best tradition of the Paratroopers" began.

The settlement of Eli was not the settlement that I, along with four others had been tasked with guarding for a week. The bus transporting all of us travelled along a solitary road dropping small groups of soldiers in various lonely looking settlements. Ya'ar had been smiling when we drove through Eli, it reminded him, he said of Tekoa, another settlement further South that he grew up in. The bus dropped him off on a lonely looking hilltop before depositing me, Mark and another three of my team mates on a lonely hilltop of our own. The settlement I had been tasked with guarding didn't actually have a name, officially it was called Eli outpost B. It was a hilltop next to the settlement of Eli, it consisted of about six caravans and one house. The house had a small area fenced off, within which resided a solitary horse.

It was heaven.

Inside our caravan there was a fully functioning shower complete with shower head and toilet, there was hot water and no human excrement on the floor around it. I was there along with Netanel, Yoni and Elad with Mark in charge of us. The caravan had a kitchen equipped with a small electric stove and a sink. There was an actual roof over our heads, there were two bedrooms, Mark took one of them leaving the four of us to the other one, we had an electric heater. We also had no rain water dripping on me in the night, no worrying about a tent falling down, no more worrying about when we were going to get to sleep.

It was infinitely reasonable.

I took first guard, it was a four hour shift and I spent the first ten minutes wandering around the entire perimeter of the settlement. It comprised entirely of these temporary caravans save for the one structure, I couldn't fathom anyone choosing to spend their life there but here they were nonetheless and here I was guarding them. At the beginning of January a double suicide bombing in Tel Aviv had killed 23 people and wounded 120, there were attacks almost every day. While I had been trudging through the mud of the base I had been safely insulated from the horrors of the second Intifada by the army, but now I was plonked right into the middle of it in an area likely to be attacked.

I had no particular job other than to be armed and ready and there were no restrictions as to where I was to stand for my time on guard so I just wandered around taking the place in. There was a road that came into the settlement and went in a loop around it. The settlement was on a hilltop and as a result the caravans were on different levels. The house with the horse was on the top and along a short road there were about three or four caravans next to each other. The families there had created small gardens for themselves with little plastic slides for their kids. There was some grass growing but alot of mud too. Continuing my circuit I pulled a right around the final caravan and walked down the hill to another row of caravans which belonged to students at a nearby religious seminary as well as our own home for the week. They consisted of the remainder of the settlement, walking past them along the small road I found myself walking back up the hill to complete my circuit at the house.

Looking around I could see Eli not far away, a much larger settlement which surely would have been more fun to live in. I couldn't understand why anyone would choose to live there, but then I found it difficult to understand why anyone would ever choose to live outside of Tel Aviv. I was switched by Elad whose big head was visible from a distance and I went back to our caravan to lie down. To my surprise no one prevented me from doing so and I slept, in my clothes, until Netanel woke me up the next morning to guard. My second stint at guard duty passed in a blur and I understood that I could really get used to this way of life. Perhaps that's why it wasn't scheduled to last longer than a week.

When I woke up I was told that it's time to cook lunch and that as the oldest person there I'm the one who's cooking it. I couldn't stop smiling, could it really be that there is a side of the army that's like this? Everyday we cook and relax and pull a few hours of guard duty? After the mud and sleep deprivation there was something to all of this that didn't sit right, as if all of that luxury was some kind of other test, perhaps to see if we get too used to it. I took the whole thing in my stride, agreeing to cook some pasta with tuna for everyone. I added in some sweet corn and some tomato ketchup and the delicacy was ready.

On Friday night we were invited over to a member of the settlement's caravan for dinner. We say the prayers and sit down to eat. The caravan belongs to a couple, the husband was in a unit called Sayeret Golani, the sister unit of the Sayeret Tzananim that I was so desperate to join. Funnily enough shortly after failing to be accepted into that unit I had learnt that it was, as a point of fact, nowhere near the standard of Sayeret Golani. That made a lot of sense to me at the time. The man was about 26 and he mentioned that he had spent way too much time in the training camp of the Golani special unit. I had heard that above the entrance to their training area there was a sign that said God can't hear your prayers and the Chief of staff doesn't know about them, welcome to Sayeret Golani. Just to let them know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were going to get seriously fucked with. And now even though he was done with his army service he still lived with a short M16 close at hand in a place where there was every likelihood he would need to use it.

The caravan was well equipped, there was an oven, a dishwasher, a washing machine and even a drier. It surprised me to see the place so well equipped since from the outside it looked like such a dump of a portable home. She made us roasted chicken and we sat there and ate, conversation moved in fits and starts. Mark, as our commander, did his best to make the atmosphere jovial though no one could seem to think of anything to say. Elad whispered to me that the woman was a daughter of a famous head of yeshivah there in the territories. She looked about 23 or 24 years old and had long brown hair tied into a pony tail, she was short and had a smile that lit up her face, she smiled often and it was a joy to behold every time she did so.

Sitting there in that caravan I couldn't help but wonder once again what these two lovely people were doing in a caravan on a hilltop. She chattered away regardless of the awkward silences left by myself and my comrades, or perhaps because of them and we all shovelled the food in our mouths. We put some food aside for Yoni so that there would be something for him after I switched him over.

When it was my turn for guard duty, I thanked our hosts and took the leftovers to Yoni who was waiting near the house where the road enters into the settlement. We exchanged a couple of words before he went to our caravan to tuck in. Darkness was in full effect and Mark was due to join me when he finished dinner. Until he did I wandered around thinking about the man from Sayeret Golani who lives with a short M16 never far from his hands and why he would have chosen to do so.

An hour or so later Mark joined me and we wandered around the settlement together, he told me about his magic eyes that allow him to see in the dark without night vision goggles. I put him to the test while we stood on the hilltop settlement looking into the ravine below, I told him there were specific objects down below and he pointed them out to me. I had to admit he was pretty good. We passed the time talking about my upbringing in London and his in Russia it was difficult to comprehend what it must have been like for him to grow up in a place where being a Jew was essentially illegal. His family had been desperate to get away for years and years before arriving in Haifa. We got on pretty well, he knew what it was to come into the army barely being able to speak the language and he was usually pretty understanding, except for that time he gave me the MAG.

It became obvious to me soon after arriving at the hilltop that my job wasn't really to stop terrorists myself while on guard duty, it was simply to die loudly should any terrorists actually come. Everyone living there was armed and there were my friends around too, all I had to do was squeeze the trigger before dying. Oddly enough I took some comfort from that thought. It meant that the actual defence of the settlement wasn't really on my shoulders when I was guarding, it was just about me firing that one shot, then I was allowed to die.

When Netanel and I guarded together we talked about what to do in different scenarios. We would quiz each other on what to do if say we saw a terrorist run into one of the caravans, if we saw someone running away from the settlement, if we see someone trying to break in and so on. I instinctively said that I would go into the caravan after the terrorist and kill him. "What are you crazy?" he asked me, you sound the alarm and prevent anyone else from going in or coming out until the hostage rescue team comes. "But he could have killed everyone by then" I protested, "he'll easily kill you if you try to go in after him" he retorted, he might have had a point there.

I liked arguing while on guard duty, it made the time pass more quickly. Occasionally an army jeep would turn up at the settlement during the night. Those guys were conducting eight hour patrols and they were just as bored as we were so we would chat for a half hour or so when they arrived to pass the time, it also had a military purpose ensuring that for certain periods of time the number of soldiers in the settlement doubled.

Every time I guarded I wondered if this would be the time when a terrorist attacked, if this was the time that I would be called upon to fire that magic bullet. I envisaged a commando raid, a bunch of guys wearing balaclavas and carrying Kalashnikovs. Sometimes I hoped they would come so that I could be a hero and take them all on.

Some nights each shadow seemed to me to shelter a terrorist, I would hear random noises and think that maybe something was happening, a child's swing creaking, the wind whistling, a dog crunching gravel as it wandered along the side of the road. Every noise might have been someone coming to kill me but no noise was. I wasn't overly worried, I had my rifle and the knowledge to use it. The feeling of responsibility on my shoulders to protect the settlement from any intruders came and went during each of my four hour shifts as my mind shifted from one topic to another while I walked around in the dark.

The days passed by one by one, sleeping in a room was something I was just getting used to when Yuval called me up with news that next week was urban warfare training.

The Words You Can't Bear to Hear | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel

The Words You Can't Bear to Hear | Marc Goldberg | Ops & Blogs | The Times of Israel: "There is a new Knesset sitting in Jerusalem and soon there will a new government running our lives. We have also found out today that Barack Obama, the most powerful man in the world, will soon be arriving in the Middle East, presumably to ensure that there is some kind of dialogue between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Without an election to worry about Obama can afford to be a great deal more robust in his dealings with his erstwhile ally and our Prime Minister than he has been previously and by all accounts that is saying something."

'via Blog this'

Beyond the Green Line: The Breaking of a Soldier

In the same way that the triumph of spirit over adversity was a beautiful thing watching someone's soul shatter into so many pieces when the realisation dawned on them that they didn't have what it took to carry on was a tragedy. This was what happened to Oran, the strongest member of our team the night he simply couldn't take it any more, the night he abandoned us and how we in turn abandoned him.

The two of us had the midnight to two a.m. shift in the bunkers overlooking the road. At that time of night the checkpoint was closed and there was nothing to see on the road, the fact that it was raining made being there even more miserable, the wind howled so loudly that we weren't even able to shout words of encouragement to one another. The rain blew into our bunkers and the chill left us both shivering, there was no way of getting out of the weather and the two of us, separately, had to stand there and suffer through it while waiting for our relief to come and switch us over, but they never did. We stood there waiting in our positions as five minutes passed and then ten minutes, which became twenty and then thirty. The only thing on our minds was that the delay was cutting into our sleep time and that all too soon we would have another shift. We couldn't abandon our positions to find out what was going on and there was no one on the end of the radio, we had to just stand there hoping it would be okay.

Eventually my relief arrived in the form of a soaking wet member of the Sayeret, he came up to the bunker, "sorry man but it's the storm all the tents have been blown down!" I didn't believe him, I figured they had overslept, that there was no way the storm was bad enough to have made all of the tents housing all three of our units collapse and anyway it was a rule never to believe anything that the guys in the Sayeret said. On the way back Oran said "well if they have blown down I'm going to sleep in the toilets." "yeah me too!" I jokingly agreed as we sloshed through the mud back to our encampment.

The scene was carnage, all of the tents had in fact collapsed just as we had been told my thoughts immediately jumped to my bag of once dry clothes now underneath that big, leaky square of canvas with water running through it. Haim called me over, I ran to our tent and along with the others worked to get it back up. It was no easy task, in order to make sure that the tent stayed up again we needed to fill sand bags with dirt and figure out a way to tie enough of them to the bottom of the tent to make sure that none of the pegs would be tugged out again by the strength of the wind.

Inside the tent there were two large wooden poles, one towards the front, one at the rear which basically served to hold the whole thing up, both of them had fallen because of the strength of the wind and the fact that there wasn't enough weight supporting the small pegs buried into the ground around the tent. I got to work shovelling dirt into sandbags and tying them to the fringes of the tent along with the others while Elad went under the canvas to lift up the two central beams and slot them back into place and still the rain poured and the wind attacked. We worked together and when the beams were up I knew that we were on our way to winning this tiny victory against nature...but where was Oran?

Someone had shouted out the question and for a moment we all stopped and looked around, in all the commotion I had completely forgotten about him but I soon realised I knew where he was. Several of the guys followed me to the bathroom where we found him fast asleep on a bench. Most of the guys were still outside working while he lay there refusing to move. We shouted at him, tugged him, kicked him and tried everything we could to get him up but he wouldn't budge...he was finished. Just like on the march when I knew that if I had given up the stretcher I would have been turned into an outsider so it was with Oran now, he had walked away when we had needed him the most. That's how it happened just that quickly, one minute he was an integral member of the team the next he was a ghost.

It was a shock, Oran was the biggest, toughest guy in the team, the one who had been a core member from the beginning but now he was nothing but a casualty of training. None of us had ever actually spoken about the rules of the group but somehow they were crystal clear and rule number one was always that you don't abandon your friends. Oran had put himself first, it was the greatest sin a soldier in training could commit and without even speaking of it to each other we all abandoned him. From that moment on no one wanted to be seen with him, to sit next to him, to talk to him. Eventually he was kicked out by Green but that wasn't for a good couple of months, it was right there in those filthy toilets during that storm that he had opted out, that he had made the decision that this wasn't for him. And we had decided that he wasn't for us.

Beyond the Green Line: Guarding

We all returned from the course with smiles on our beaming faces. We had silver jump wings on our uniforms and we were the first on the base to get them, giving us an immense though temporary feeling of superiority over everyone else there. The wings now also had a huge amount of symbolic value, you see soldiers in training are issued with a snot colour beret to wear until they qualify as fighters, it's also a beret that administrative soldiers wear for their entire service. So wearing it either tells the world that you've only been in the army for a very short period of time or that you are as far away from being a combat soldier as it's possible to be while wearing the colour green. The silver wings on our chests served to say that although we still had to wear these awful berets at the least we were on our way to becoming Paras.

So when we arrived back at the base it was in the spirit of hope, able to see the light at the end of the tunnel that resulted in us gaining the red beret and being treated more like real people than raw recruits. That hope was ripped from us with barely a word spoken. All three units were gathered together simply to hear "we are now going to be guarding the base, I am confident that you will carry out this duty in a way that best represents the traditions of the Paratoopers." And that was that. The captain had spoken and our immediate future had been set in stone. The Captain was a tall man, about 24 years old he originated in the Orev and once out of officer's course had originally been in charge of training within the unit. Administrative changes to the way that all three Paratrooper reconnaissance units were trained ensured that he was promoted and assigned to be in charge of the overall training for the August 2002 intake to all three special units. I had barely heard him speak and had almost no contact with him.

When I heard that we had guard duty coming up I was ecstatic, we all were, even Yuval hadn't heard anything negative about what was coming up, unfortunately he couldn't predict the lunacy of our Captain who had decided that guard duty would be conducted in two hour rotations. This meant that for 24 hours a day, every day we would spend two hours guarding and two hours resting. Green then made that worse by insisting that it was forbidden to go to sleep between 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.

Day and night the area rang with the sound of small arms fire, it was eerie in the night to hear weapons being fired constantly by one group of soldiers or another. When you're the one doing the shooting you notice the sounds of gunfire a lot less.

Guarding brought with it its own challenges, it was to be the first time I would have any contact with Palestinians as it included manning the checkpoint outside the base. There were a lot of different positions to be manned and the checkpoint was only one of them albeit the most interesting. Guard duty began with a whimper and continued in that fashion. The weather went from bad to worse which made me glad not to be in the field but since all of our tents seemed to be Korean War vintage and had US Army printed on them they provided little shelter for us, the holes in them ensured that when it rained we all got wet, when the wind blew we got cold and when both were happening at the same time the tents collapsed altogether.

At first I liked guard duty, no one was fucking with me and usually there was someone else in a guard post so nearby that we could chat. Each two hour shift finished quickly and after a quick nap it was off to the next one, no stretchers and climbing up hills or mountains and no assaulting dummy enemies at the top of a hill. After 24 hours of two hours on and two hours off guard duty I felt the pressure. The fact that we weren't allowed to put our heads down during the day ensured the maximum amount of sleep I could get at any one time was about one hour and forty five minutes. Soon I was counting every minute of my two hours off, weighing up every action on the basis of the amount of sleep I would lose doing it.

It started off with counting the amount of time it took to get from my guard post to my tent and trying to run in order to get there as quickly as possible but as time moved on other things would be entered into the equation. Do I spend the five minutes that it takes to brush my teeth? Do I spend the three minutes that it takes to get my uniform off? Do I spend the one minute that it takes getting my boots off? The longer the week dragged on the more every action simply became an obstacle to sleep, the first thing to go out of the window was showering. There was simply no way that I was going to give up on a massive 10-15 minutes of my sleep time in order to get clean only to stomp out of the filthy showers into the mud and get dirty all over again, it just wasn't going to happen. The next thing to go out of the window was brushing my teeth and I waited as long as humanly possible before wasting time going to the toilet.

After about three days I wasn't sure if I was awake or asleep at any given moment in time, entire shifts of guard duty would fly by leaving me unsure as to whether I had been asleep on my feet the entire time or genuinely guarding. Other times guard duty would seem to take hours and hours as I fought a mental battle to force my eyes to remain open. Once I was guarding at a position in the rear of the base along with Netanel the medic. There were two medics in our team and by the end of our service two more of our number would pass through medic's course and one of the two that started at the beginning would have been kicked out, but whenever anyone needed to call for a medic we always shouted out his name. I guess he simply fit the role. His parents had moved to Jerusalem from Canada and had insisted on speaking to him mostly in Hebrew so despite his heritage his English was halting. He was quiet and reserved but not shy, he earned the nickname Snake when Haim noticed that in some strange way he actually looked like one, the name stuck, I thought it was a much cooler nickname than 'Brity' which was what everyone called me.

We arrived at our guard posts covering the rear of the base, they were close enough to each other that we could chat from our positions but after a couple of minutes Netanel stopped answering. I brought my rifle up to bear and crept over to his position. I found him sitting on the concrete floor of his position hugging his legs with his knees up under his chin fast asleep. I tried waking him only to have him open his eyes briefly only to close them again, he was finished. Now it's utterly unacceptable according to the army for a soldier to fall asleep on guard duty but I could see that he was too exhausted to carry on so I spent the remaining time wandering between my post and his constantly shaking my head and slapping myself in a desperate attempt to keep myself from falling asleep in the same way Netanel had, I got him up a couple of minutes before our replacements arrived and we headed back to the tent to lie down.

Time went on in this way, we were kept awake during the day with various activities like races to field strip our weapons and put them back together again or working on our equipment and then at night we slept as best as we could in between shifts. When it looked like someone was falling asleep during the day time sessions he would have to stand and drink water, sometimes I watched guys fall asleep while standing up, when they did so we'd all stop what we were doing and watch them until someone started laughing and then we all started laughing and the noise woke them up.

The only really interesting place to guard was the checkpoint on the road in front of the base. We would open the road at about 4 a.m. when it was still dark and close it at around 10 p.m. The checkpoint consisted of a concrete barrier narrowing the road into just one lane and a position for a soldier to stand at and provide cover to another soldier who would check the vehicles and question the people in them. Both soldiers outside were covered by more soldiers sitting in bunkers at the entrance to the base giving them a panoramic view over the road, each was able to provide covering fire should it be needed. Next to guarding the checkpoint itself these were the next two most interesting positions to be in as at least there was something going on outside. If the checkpoint were closed they were every bit as boring as every other position.

It was while standing in one of the bunkers overlooking the road that I heard an explosion. I had been standing in there watching the road trying my hardest to stay awake. It wasn't easy but I had developed a trick, I told myself to look at a fixed object, to tell myself details about it. "look at the rock, how would you describe it?" I asked myself, "well it's mossy and has plenty of stones around it, there are weeds around it too and it has a whitey grey colour." Unfortunately at a certain point I would become aware of the fact that my eyes were closed and that I had moved from thinking about the rock to dreaming about it. I blinked my eyes back open again and tried to find something else to stare at.

The scenario played itself out over and over again during the shift until I heard the crash! I opened my eyes and climbed off the floor, rifle at the ready and searched for the source of the explosion. Mark the commander was still on the road checking cars with Netanel backing him up, neither of them seemed to have heard anything. I turned and looked down at the ground that I had just been lying on and understood that the sound of the explosion had been my helmeted head hitting the concrete floor and that I had fallen asleep on my feet and collapsed. I drank some water and tried to focus on the road and on Mark checking the Palestinians and on Netanel covering him.

When my first time manning the checkpoint finally arrived I was backing up Mark who was doing the questioning. I was standing about 20 feet away from him behind a concrete block with a couple of sandbags on it. I was locked and loaded and aiming my weapon at real people for the first time, I aimed my weapon at everyone he spoke to, young men of military age, fat middle aged men, old women, young women, pregnant young women. Who was a real threat and who wasn't? Was that bump a real pregnant belly or was it a cover for carrying a bomb, was the car going to blow up when Mark stopped it? Questions endlessly went through my mind when I was on guard, circumstances and scenarios endlessly played themselves out while I stood their aiming my rifle at everyone who went past.

The routine was pretty simple, the cars were all lined up in both directions and Mark would work the cars travelling from East to West or vice versa depending which direction had the heaviest traffic. One by one they showed us their orange ID cards and we looked at them pretending that they meant something to us before waving them through the check point. By four in the morning when we opened the checkpoint opened there was already a line of cars waiting to move from East to West and when we closed it at night the road was already deserted.

More often than not the cars were beaten up pieces of rust and metal that somehow seemed to chug their way down the asphalt roads to their destination, more often than not they were filled way beyond capacity. One time Mark summoned me from my post to inspect the rear of a vehicle. He lifted up the boot and exposed no less than seven sheep stuffed into the rear of the car. We looked at each other attempting to stifle our smiles while the moustachioed owner of the car stood awkwardly by.

There were mini buses and regular buses and beaten up cars and even the odd horse and cart and Palestinians, the first Palestinians I had ever met, the only people I had ever pointed a gun at and I pointed it at each and every one of them. Most of the time I saw them through the cross hairs of either my day or my night scope while I waited for one of them to make a move and earn one of my bullets. But no one did, I stood there time after time, concentrating as hard as I could while the boredom and the frustration and  fatigue attempted to take me away to neverland.

I loved working the checkpoint it made me feel like I was doing something useful with my time rather than staring at the fields outside the back of the base listening to the snap crackle and pop of small arms fire coming from the units in the field carrying out their infantry drills. The week dragged on and on and on, everything was a battle, by the end of it I wasn't taking off my uniform or my boots before collapsing onto my cot, every guard shift was a test of will as to whether I would be able to stay awake and it was while guarding that we lost Oran.

Jews, the UK and the Holocaust, a Personal View

Now that the dust has settled in the wake of Liberal Democrat MP David Ward's series of comments concerning Jews, Palestinians and the Holocaust and artist Gerald Scarfe's anti Israel cartoon being published in the Sunday Times on Holocaust Memorial Day I think it's worth ruminating in some depth about the reaction of the Jewish community in the UK and what it is to be British and Jewish.

Firstly let's look at the outcome, if this were a boxing match between the leaders of the Jewish community on the one hand and David Ward MP and Gerald Scarfe on the other the community won by knockout in both bouts. While there were many accusations of anti-Semitism thrown about at the time I think it cannot be seen as anything other than a positive when it comes to the Liberal Democrat Party machinery and The Sunday Times that apologies were made and humble pie served up. It answers a lot of accusations of fundamental concerns about anti-Semitism that this was the case and hopefully people will be able to rest a little easier because of it.

David Ward was censured by the Liberal Democrat Party to the point where he almost lost the party whip and was forced to make an (albeit clearly grudging) apology. I think that the letter sent by the Liberal Democrat Deputy Chief Whip was both reasonable and reflected a complete understanding of the offense caused along side a willingness to put the situation right and I have posted it in full below:

Regardless of the opinions of Ward personally the Party he represents has taken pains to take a big step back away from his comments and I think that is worthy of recognition. "I wish to dissociate the Liberal Democrats without reservation or ambiguity from these remarks." That's good enough for me.

The second, involving Gerald Scarfe saw the big man himself, Rupert Murdoch, take time out from whatever it is that ruthless media magnates do all day to condemn his own paper for publishing the cartoon. Rupert Murdoch tweeted the following vis-a-vis the Gerald Scarfe cartoon in the Sunday Times "Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon."

But what I hated was the timing of all this, for me an undercurrent of hostility which occasionally raises it's head, the dark side of an England in which I was hard pressed to feel at home came into the light. The Holocaust Educational Trust has done sterling work in making sure that the tragic event that saw so many Jewish communities in Europe wiped out has become a part of the national consciousness but there has been a blowback effect, the likes of David Ward and Gerald Scarfe put this on centre stage and the people who rallied around Ward in particular, show off the extent to which this is a point of view that is bigger than him alone.

The Holocaust is so clearly an evil event that no politician on earth will ever be able to refuse to condemn it and/or not back to the hilt the work of the Trust. But herein lies a problem, I feel that some people, like Ward, look at Holocaust memorial as some kind of Jewish victory, as if the Jews have imposed Holocaust education upon the UK and that therefore they will do their utmost to make Jews all over the UK feel like crap every year that it comes about. The best way to do that is by comparing the Holocaust and the Nazis to Israel versus Palestinians.

I think that's why the community really reacted so quickly and so robustly, this linkage of the Holocaust and Israel touches on such a communal nerve that Jewish leaders int he UK were instantly appalled by Ward's comments. I said it before and I'll say it again, the Holocaust was the attempt to kill all the Jews, it was not a cathartic learning experience which taught all Jews about morality. Nor has it laid the responsibility upon the shoulders of all Jews everywhere to solve the problems of the Middle East.

In fact if someone really is looking at 'the Jews' or more correctly certain Jewish organisations and asking what they have done since the Holocaust to prevent a repetition they should probably look at the very fact that there is an international Holocaust Memorial Day and education about the evils of racism and dictatorships and say "wow look at the steps the Jews have taken to make sure that never again is a reality" rather than castigating us all together using the words 'Palestinian' and 'atrocities' and 'Jews'.

For a few years now the Jewish community has moved away from a kind of 'keep your head down' activism and moved more into the public forum. The debate over what anti-Semitism is, is now a very public one and I think it's right and necessary to have these arguments in public though I despise the fact that Jews have to stand up and argue for their right to be offended. If someone says the word Palestinian while being anti-Semitic it really doesn't mean we all have to start arguing about the Middle East in order to determine whether a Jew has the right to be offended by the attack on his or her heritage.

I was disappointed by news outlets who framed the story in this way, saying that Ward was in deep water for attacking Israel's actions against Palestinians when in truth that had nothing to do with it. But rather his blanket use of the term Jews and his clearly expressed belief that 'we' should have learned something from being murdered in such great numbers. I am often struck by the differences between the way that Jews born and bred in the USA react to anti-Semitism and the way that Jews in the UK do, this latest reaction was more American in style and more aggressive in character, I think that the roots for the differing attitudes between the two communities go all the way back to the 1880s.

In the latter part of the 19th century when the Jewish migration from Russia was occurring those Jews who made it to the USA found themselves in a country still in the making, in a place at a time when everything was still up for grabs. Jewish entrepreneurs, actors, bakers, gangsters, financiers, garment makers and every other type of Jew not only found themselves a home but also a place where they could make their imprint upon wider society, the fact that there were so many fellow Jews nearby also didn't hurt. And so Jewish humour became New York humour, a bagel became a national delicacy, Hollywood exploded with Jewish talent and businessmen, Las Vegas had a decidedly Jewish and very American crook to take it from a small town to becoming America's playground. In short when the Jews arrived in America they found a blank canvas upon which they could paint their own hopes and dreams along with all of the other immigrant communities in a place where being a hyphenated citizen was something to be proud of rather than discouraged; African-American, Italian-American and ahem Jewish. In this respect whenever there is the merest whiff of anti-Semitism US Jewry won't think twice before standing up and screaming about it from the rooftops. It's a confidence borne of feeling truly at home within US society, of not having any kind of fear that the result of such complaining may well be to boost anti-Semitism rather than countering it.

Those Jews landing in the UK had an entirely different experience, these were Jews arriving at the homeland of the masters of the world, complete with their own culture, their own global empire and their own established ways of doing things along with a considerable distaste for foreign aliens. Becoming one of 'them' meant that blending in was the order of the day and blend in we did.

In the UK you see the imprint of individual Jews upon UK business and the arts etc but not the assimilation of Jewish cultural norms and traditions into British society, in fact when I look at the Milibands, Disaeli (if saying those names in the same breath isn't too offensive) and other politicians born with Jewish heritage I see a trend of Jews going to great lengths to declare that the religion of their ancestors is something that they have very much shed and that those with whom this is not the case have risked their political careers by refusing to do so rather than enhancing them.

And so the message from Jews in the UK to wider British society was always clear "we're one of you, please don't hate us!" There was always a feeling lurking in the collective consciousness of UK Jewry that if you make it clear you are toeing the line, that you have no feelings whatsoever for any other country then maybe, just maybe our people will be...left alone? Not hated? Not attacked on Holocaust Memorial Day by politicians who should know better? Not made fun of by cartoonists?

These fears are something utterly alien to Jews in the USA who are used to Irish Catholics identifying with the old country and Italians doing the same. For Jews in the USA expressions of support for as Israel are as  quintessentially American as apple pie and well...bagels. In the UK it is considered utterly anathema and I have no doubt that this same feeling of unease applies to other immigrant communities in the UK where an expression of solidarity with the another country is very much frowned upon and a sense of Britishness very much encouraged from the Commons to Oxbridge to Eaton and on down. The term 'multicultural' is all well and good but just don't mention the old country...you might be labelled as an extremist!

And so we come back to the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust and other bodies which have managed to ensure that one day a year has been set aside to remember the attempted extermination of European Jewry all around the world. And the truth, which is that some people in the UK simply don't like that fact that dead Jews are being remembered every year and will try their best to ensure that the Jews are made to feel that discontent while they miss the point of the day in the first place.