Jerusalem Post, Weekend Magazine; September 12, 2007
You don't need to go as far as Ein Boqeq to enjoy the Dead Sea. The northern tip offers ecology, archeology and a great deal of hospitality
When planning a vacation at the Dead Sea, Israelis and foreigners usually conjure up the vast hotel district south of Ein Gedi where Israel's major hotel chains have long set up shop. And while the hotel district offers five star amenities and organized entertainment, a much more authentic, ecologically-minded and historic Dead Sea vacation is available only about half an hour away from Jerusalem in the northern region of the Dead Sea. The nature reserves, kibbutz hospitality and historic sites provide a deep experience of the Dead Sea as the waters, unfortunately, get increasingly shallow.
EINOT TZUKIM: THE WORLD'S LOWEST NATURE RESERVE
Along the road to the Dead Sea are chilling reminders that the sea is suffering. Water extraction from the Jordan River by Israel and Jordan has deprived the Dead Sea of its natural refill, and the waters are plunging approximately one meter every year (1 billion cubic meters). Charred on the hefty brown cliffs along the road are markers drawn by the Palestine Exploration Fund in the 1960s which indicate the waters' former glory. Since then the Dead Sea, the lowest place on earth, has gotten even lower by some 25 meters.
Einot Tzukim, the world's lowest nature reserve, is located at the northern tip of the Dead Sea and is not only recommended as nature's playground, but as a window into the dehydration of the Dead Sea. Tours are available through the minty-green fauna which show where aquifers leading into the Dead Sea from the Jerusalem hills have brought green life, and where the disappearance of the sea has left large patches of arid, dead land.
Einot Tzukim used to be a very popular beach from the 1980s, but in 2000 it has refashioned itself into a nature reserve, due in part to the receding waters. A marker inside the park shows how the waters have receded one kilometer since 1984.
'We could no longer keep moving the facilities,' explained Eldan Hazan, the park ranger.
But a relaxing and cleansing experience overflowing with water can still be had in the springs and streams of brackish waters (lightly salted waters) that flow in random nooks and corners underneath tamarisk and willow trees. One picnic area even features tables and benches set in the waters, where visitors can chill their feet in the waters while eating lunch.
Inside the nature reserve are the remnants of a queer Jewish agricultural ranch and villa from the Roman period that gives a peak into the life of residents there in ancient times.
Entrance fee: Adult NIS 23; Child NIS 12; Summer hours: 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. Tel: (09) 994-2355
AN ARCHEOLOGICAL WONDER: QUMRAN
Every year thousands of Israelis visit the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem where a major portion of the Dead Sea scrolls, one of the most groundbreaking archeological finds, has been on display since 1965. But according to Nati Tzameret, a guide at Qumran National Park, many fewer Israelis have visited the site where the Scrolls were made and found: Qumran. About eighty percent of the visitors at Qumran are foreigners, mostly Christians.
It's a shame Israelis overlook the source of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Qumran site is like a fascinating time capsule of the period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were said to have been written, from the second century BCE to the great Jewish revolt in 68 C.E. Here the Essenes, a breakaway, ascetic Jewish sect, lived a communal live in search of spiritual purity. When there is a full moon at night, the site hardly requires artificial lighting. Qumran means moon in Aramaic, and a full-bodied yellow moon rises from the east in direct contact with the sun's rays.
A short exhibition of life in Qumran opens with a movie dramatizing the ways and behaviors of the Essenes: their ritual of strict silence while eating, their near obsession with ritual baths and their devotion to writing down the words of the Torah. Tzameret explained that John the Baptist probably didn't last at Qumran for too long because he possessed an individualistic bent.
The managers of this site have meticulously preserved the archeological remnants of the Essene commune and have carved wheelchair-friendly path between the ritual baths, cisterns, communal dining hall and scribe room. Insight into the esoteric lives of the Essenes, their agriculture, industry and family life, is provided by knowledgeable guides.
A restaurant and gift shop belonging to Kibbutz Kalia next door is open from 9 am - 6 pm.
Entrance: 18 Nis adult; 9 NIS child; (Tel) 02-9942235
FROM SPIRITUAL TO PHYSICAL PURITY: MINERAL BEACH
The Dea Sea is known not only for its spiritual benefits, but for its physical ones too. Forget the water troubles of the Dead Sea and enjoy the waters at Mineral Beach instead, a relatively simple, quiet, and clean beach where visitors can take a quick, theraputic float in the Sea.
One section of the beach is cordoned off for scooping generous helpings of mineral-rich mud. Just watch your step. It's easy to get your feet sucked into the mud and there are no warning signs, although a lifeguard is on duty. But the small risk is well worth it. The mud is an excellent natural body scrub, leaving the skin soft and refreshed. An outdoor sulphur pool draws its water directly from a sulphur spring that bubbles not far away. On weekdays the beach is particularly peaceful.
Facilities include a snack bar, gift shop, treatment rooms, showers, and lockers.
Entrance: Adult NIS 50; Child: NIS 25; Senior: NIS 37 (discount on weekdays) Tel: (02) 994-4888
WHERE TO STAY
Kibbutz Kalia: Kibbutz Kalia is located adjacent to the Qumran National Park. The atmosphere is more tropical than desert with plenty of grass and flower-filled trees adorning the pathways and corridors. Rooms are simple yet comfortable, and most are equipped with a kitchenette, television, telephone and air conditioner. There is a convenience store and pub on the premises and a beautiful, refreshing pool. Tel: (02) 993-6333. NIS 380/NIS 540.
Metzukei Dragot: Located deeper into the Judaen desert and away from the sea, Metzukei Dragot is a natural choice for spiritual seekers and desert wanderers. They have recently upgraded some of the rooms, but don't expect luxury or televisions, unless luxury is breathing the mineral rich desert air. The purpose of Metzukei Dragot is simplicity and spirituality, and they often host spiritual, new-age workshops. Rooms vary in size and amenities, and sturdy outdoor tents are available for those who really don't mind roughing it.
Rates range from NIS 210-450; Camping grounds: NIS 60 adult; NIS 40 child. Tel: (02) 994-4777
Kibbutz Almog: This very ecologically minded kibbutz is currently building an environmentally-friendly community on its adjacent grounds, what the designers refer to as Israel's answer to Arizona. Homes will be built with an earthy, sandy design and equipped with plumbing for recycling water and pergolas on roofs to provide maximum natural cooling. Almog also has a guest house and spa on the premises, but for those want to make their vacation at the Dead Sea permanent, this is one place to try out. Tel: (02) 994-5201.
WHERE TO EAT:
Second Chance for 'Last Chance'
Last Chance, a shanty cafe and restaurant that has served as a popular stopover between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea for the past twelve years, completely burned down last May due to an unfortunate accident. The Taib family, who owns and runs the business, is clearly heartbroken. They had invested a lot of love, time and energy in building the restaurant with their own hands using all-natural materials, such as sand and rock.
But after some hesitation, members of the Taib family decided to reopen, with the generous help and support of the Megliot Regional Council. They have recently broken ground for a sturdier home for Last Chance, this time to be built with a contractor. In the meantime they have created a large, square, Bedouin style tent where they serve their Middle-Eastern favorites: humus, Bedouin pitas, shakshuka, grilled meats, magluba (a rice dish), and tehina cookies.
Tel: (02) 940-9414; 050-2637020
HOW TO GET THERE:
Route 9 has shortened the driving time from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea by about 15 minutes. Follow Route 9 to the route 1 that connect Jerusalem and the Dead Sea.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Friday, September 7, 2007
Privilege to be a customer (restaurant review)
Jerusalem Post, Billboard; September 7, 2007
It's very rare for a restaurant whose owner scoffs at the phrase "the customer is always right" to be so successful. But don't let Amos Hagai's attitude put you off. He believes the customer isn't always right because he is dedicated to perfection, and if the customer isn't satisfied, well, that's his problem.
"People who come here have to appreciate it," Hagai, owner and manager of Macaroni & Grill, proudly declared upon meeting at the restaurant on a late Sunday afternoon.
It's clear Hagai is a colorful character on the northern culinary scene, and the former cooking instructor gives the impression of someone who has dedicated his life to good food and wine.
Judging from the way Macaroni & Grill was filled, it seems that more often than not, customers are satisfied. Since its founding eight years ago, Macaroni & Grill has emerged as a Rosh Pina establishment famous for its hamburgers, or "am-burgers" as he calls them. It originally started in a small storefront on the main cobblestone road of Rosh Pina (now home to the Lechem Erez cafe), but four years ago it moved to the mini outdoor mall located at the entrance of the city.
Hagai's standards of perfection were evident in the impressive interior, which he designed himself. The place is enveloped in fine wood, the tables and stools handcrafted. It gives off the aura of a sophisticated Western bistro. People generally don't come to Macaroni & Grill to drink by the bar, but Hagai installed a fully-stocked bar for effect.
If first impressions count when it comes to food, the home-made olive starter foreboded well for Hagai. Nestled in olive oil and freshly cut garlic, their flavor was balanced, not too bitter or too spicy.
The menu is large and eclectic. Appetizers include chicken wings, kebab, sausages, carpaccio and an array of shrimp dishes. Entrees include steaks, four kinds of schnitzel, seafood, fish, pasta, and Asian noodles. But first timers are usually recommended to try Hagai's burgers. He comes in early in the morning to grind and spice the meat himself, the way he has for the past eight years. He meticulously chooses the men in the kitchen based on their lack of experience.
"I hire only beginner chefs so that they don't bring in their bad habits," he said. Hagai is intent on training his chefs personally to maintain flavor consistency throughout the years.
That lack of experience definitely makes for good burgers. The 220-gram juicy patty (NIS 38, but different sizes are available) was fresh and delicious. The white buns didn't really justify the fine raw materials of the meat, but Hagai insisted he tried many bakeries before settling on the privileged bun. I would love for him to make his own - and why not try whole wheat? Towards the end I preferred to enjoy the meat on its own - it didn't need all the trimmings. The French fries (NIS 10/20) were fine: definitely nothing to complain about (luckily enough for "good customer" wannabe me).
Hagai demonstrated that he can master desserts as well. His mahlebi, like a homemade sahleb, had an even-gelled consistency. Usually mahlebis are too candy-like for me, but his wasn't too sweet, and it refreshed me after the burger. I'm generally not a fan of knafe, the sweet Lebanese noodle pastry glued together with cheese, but Hagai's was enjoyable and served very fresh and hot, just like the burgers.
All in all, I think I'd be a welcome customer at Macaroni & Grill in the future. I can appreciate it.
Open everyday 11:30 a.m. - midnight; Center HaGalil Mall, Rosh Pina, (04) 680-1592; not kosher.
It's very rare for a restaurant whose owner scoffs at the phrase "the customer is always right" to be so successful. But don't let Amos Hagai's attitude put you off. He believes the customer isn't always right because he is dedicated to perfection, and if the customer isn't satisfied, well, that's his problem.
"People who come here have to appreciate it," Hagai, owner and manager of Macaroni & Grill, proudly declared upon meeting at the restaurant on a late Sunday afternoon.
It's clear Hagai is a colorful character on the northern culinary scene, and the former cooking instructor gives the impression of someone who has dedicated his life to good food and wine.
Judging from the way Macaroni & Grill was filled, it seems that more often than not, customers are satisfied. Since its founding eight years ago, Macaroni & Grill has emerged as a Rosh Pina establishment famous for its hamburgers, or "am-burgers" as he calls them. It originally started in a small storefront on the main cobblestone road of Rosh Pina (now home to the Lechem Erez cafe), but four years ago it moved to the mini outdoor mall located at the entrance of the city.
Hagai's standards of perfection were evident in the impressive interior, which he designed himself. The place is enveloped in fine wood, the tables and stools handcrafted. It gives off the aura of a sophisticated Western bistro. People generally don't come to Macaroni & Grill to drink by the bar, but Hagai installed a fully-stocked bar for effect.
If first impressions count when it comes to food, the home-made olive starter foreboded well for Hagai. Nestled in olive oil and freshly cut garlic, their flavor was balanced, not too bitter or too spicy.
The menu is large and eclectic. Appetizers include chicken wings, kebab, sausages, carpaccio and an array of shrimp dishes. Entrees include steaks, four kinds of schnitzel, seafood, fish, pasta, and Asian noodles. But first timers are usually recommended to try Hagai's burgers. He comes in early in the morning to grind and spice the meat himself, the way he has for the past eight years. He meticulously chooses the men in the kitchen based on their lack of experience.
"I hire only beginner chefs so that they don't bring in their bad habits," he said. Hagai is intent on training his chefs personally to maintain flavor consistency throughout the years.
That lack of experience definitely makes for good burgers. The 220-gram juicy patty (NIS 38, but different sizes are available) was fresh and delicious. The white buns didn't really justify the fine raw materials of the meat, but Hagai insisted he tried many bakeries before settling on the privileged bun. I would love for him to make his own - and why not try whole wheat? Towards the end I preferred to enjoy the meat on its own - it didn't need all the trimmings. The French fries (NIS 10/20) were fine: definitely nothing to complain about (luckily enough for "good customer" wannabe me).
Hagai demonstrated that he can master desserts as well. His mahlebi, like a homemade sahleb, had an even-gelled consistency. Usually mahlebis are too candy-like for me, but his wasn't too sweet, and it refreshed me after the burger. I'm generally not a fan of knafe, the sweet Lebanese noodle pastry glued together with cheese, but Hagai's was enjoyable and served very fresh and hot, just like the burgers.
All in all, I think I'd be a welcome customer at Macaroni & Grill in the future. I can appreciate it.
Open everyday 11:30 a.m. - midnight; Center HaGalil Mall, Rosh Pina, (04) 680-1592; not kosher.
Friday, August 17, 2007
'Terminal' for country love (dance bar review)
Jerusalem Post, Billboard; August 17, 2007
Our intrepid partier heads for the sticks in search of a good club
I would have never made the trek from Jerusalem to Terminal, a new line of private parties at Kibbutz Ramot Menashe near Yokneam (25 minutes south of Haifa) but for the promoter's nudgings, which happened to come in the midst of a particularly arid dating dry spell.
She raved about the music and the men, insisting they were not shallow, pretentious urban guys. Instead, she promised educated, high-quality, down-to-earth students - mostly from Haifa University and the Technion - looking for more intimate, intelligent partying.
Every Thursday night, the party at the kibbutz is themed after an 'ideology,' as co-manager Kobi Shetach put it. He himself is an education and communications student at Haifa University. Themes have included Changing the Courtship Culture, Woman's Lib, and Foreplay. I was invited on Gentlemen's Night, dedicated to bringing back the culture of gentlemen, which Shetach himself admitted is sorely lacking among Israeli men.
I figured, why not explore non-urban partying, particularly with a few nice, smart gentlemen?
A good thing my friend (a local) drove, because it was a long, windy road to Terminal, one I wouldn't have been able to navigate without a GPS. Walking in, I was taken aback.
'This is it?' I wondered.
The place looked like a converted barn, bereft of the sleek modern light fixtures, walls and rails that characterize Tel Aviv dance bars. A misshapen 'crystal' chandelier hung from the center of the lively dancefloor, and beer bottles hung from strings around the hall.
'Maybe this is how they party in the Israeli countryside?' I wondered. 'Maybe they don't need the sophisticated, often pretentious decor of urban centers?'
The atmosphere was definitely more relaxed than that of metropolitan digs, but the men looked like your average Israeli partiers; not particularly bright or beautiful. Of course, one can't judge on looks alone; could be they were all rocket scientists. Indeed, my friend actually introduced me to a physics student (who didn't give me the time of day), but there wasn't much of a chance to talk over the din of the mainstream club music spun by the DJ.
I decided to dance away my disappointment, and noticed staff handing out white roses to men, presumably for them to give to women. I didn't get a rose. No 'gentleman' treated me to a drink either, except for Shlomi, the owner, who sought to make sure a journalist from The Jerusalem Post had a good time.
Maybe he overdid it. He left me a bottle of vodka at the far end of the bar, and whenever I felt a tad bored or uninspired by the music or men, I took an unladylike shluk.
I met a 28-year-old guy (I think he was 28; can't say I really remember) who works at a toy store. He generally wasn't my type, but he was a total sweetie who bought me water and let me share my drunken pain at the conformist nature of Israeli society. We discussed politics, Olmert, and the fragility of this country. He sympathized, and warned me that Israel has only a decade to go.
Then we parted ways - he probably thought I was a little weird - with him wishing me a good decade.
I tried to dance and talk with more people as I waited for my friend to take me home. Eventually the contents of the vodka bottle also wanted to leave, and I ended up over a toilet bowl. Two gentlemen came to my rescue. Then I heard some non-gentleman murmur from behind, mocking me: 'Jerusalem Post! Jerusalem Post!'
I rode home in a stupor, realizing (to the extent that I was able to realize anything at that point) that leaving for a party in the Israeli countryside is not necessarily the cure for a lonely city girl looking for a gentleman.
Terminal, Kibbutz Ramat Menashe; NIS 20, First-timers free. Thursday night ages 25+; Friday ages 20+. Music: Hip-groove, black, hip-hop, dance, house and trance; (054) 555-8939
Our intrepid partier heads for the sticks in search of a good club
I would have never made the trek from Jerusalem to Terminal, a new line of private parties at Kibbutz Ramot Menashe near Yokneam (25 minutes south of Haifa) but for the promoter's nudgings, which happened to come in the midst of a particularly arid dating dry spell.
She raved about the music and the men, insisting they were not shallow, pretentious urban guys. Instead, she promised educated, high-quality, down-to-earth students - mostly from Haifa University and the Technion - looking for more intimate, intelligent partying.
Every Thursday night, the party at the kibbutz is themed after an 'ideology,' as co-manager Kobi Shetach put it. He himself is an education and communications student at Haifa University. Themes have included Changing the Courtship Culture, Woman's Lib, and Foreplay. I was invited on Gentlemen's Night, dedicated to bringing back the culture of gentlemen, which Shetach himself admitted is sorely lacking among Israeli men.
I figured, why not explore non-urban partying, particularly with a few nice, smart gentlemen?
A good thing my friend (a local) drove, because it was a long, windy road to Terminal, one I wouldn't have been able to navigate without a GPS. Walking in, I was taken aback.
'This is it?' I wondered.
The place looked like a converted barn, bereft of the sleek modern light fixtures, walls and rails that characterize Tel Aviv dance bars. A misshapen 'crystal' chandelier hung from the center of the lively dancefloor, and beer bottles hung from strings around the hall.
'Maybe this is how they party in the Israeli countryside?' I wondered. 'Maybe they don't need the sophisticated, often pretentious decor of urban centers?'
The atmosphere was definitely more relaxed than that of metropolitan digs, but the men looked like your average Israeli partiers; not particularly bright or beautiful. Of course, one can't judge on looks alone; could be they were all rocket scientists. Indeed, my friend actually introduced me to a physics student (who didn't give me the time of day), but there wasn't much of a chance to talk over the din of the mainstream club music spun by the DJ.
I decided to dance away my disappointment, and noticed staff handing out white roses to men, presumably for them to give to women. I didn't get a rose. No 'gentleman' treated me to a drink either, except for Shlomi, the owner, who sought to make sure a journalist from The Jerusalem Post had a good time.
Maybe he overdid it. He left me a bottle of vodka at the far end of the bar, and whenever I felt a tad bored or uninspired by the music or men, I took an unladylike shluk.
I met a 28-year-old guy (I think he was 28; can't say I really remember) who works at a toy store. He generally wasn't my type, but he was a total sweetie who bought me water and let me share my drunken pain at the conformist nature of Israeli society. We discussed politics, Olmert, and the fragility of this country. He sympathized, and warned me that Israel has only a decade to go.
Then we parted ways - he probably thought I was a little weird - with him wishing me a good decade.
I tried to dance and talk with more people as I waited for my friend to take me home. Eventually the contents of the vodka bottle also wanted to leave, and I ended up over a toilet bowl. Two gentlemen came to my rescue. Then I heard some non-gentleman murmur from behind, mocking me: 'Jerusalem Post! Jerusalem Post!'
I rode home in a stupor, realizing (to the extent that I was able to realize anything at that point) that leaving for a party in the Israeli countryside is not necessarily the cure for a lonely city girl looking for a gentleman.
Terminal, Kibbutz Ramat Menashe; NIS 20, First-timers free. Thursday night ages 25+; Friday ages 20+. Music: Hip-groove, black, hip-hop, dance, house and trance; (054) 555-8939
Continuing, but not moving on
Jerusalem Post, Up Front; August 17, 2007
Click here for original
For 19-year-old novelist Shifra Shomron, writing about disengagement was a form of therapy
Grains of Sand: The Fall of Neve Dekalim By Shifra Shomron. Mazo Publishers 188 pages; $16.95
After the first few minutes of speaking with Shifra Shomron over the phone, the similarities between this young author and the heroine of her debut novel, Grains of Sand: The Fall of Neve Dekalim, become apparent. She's busy studying for finals, and she asks to hold the interview when they are over.
Shomron, 20, like her heroine Efrat Yefet, is studious, industrious, a 'star student' and something of a bookworm. One probably has to be to publish a novel at 19. She is strikingly poised, mature and idealistic for her age. At times she passionately gives facts and information about her community like a caring yet strict teacher - which is a good thing, since her ambition is to impact society as a high-school English teacher.
Grains of Sand is the first novel to emerge out of the rubble of Gush Katif, and it is through teenaged Efrat Yefet that Shomron allows readers to become familiar with life there in the years leading up to disengagement.
As I step into the Shomron family caravilla (prefab housing unit) in Nitzan, more similarities between the author and Efrat begin to surface. A golden retriever rushes to the door and happily greets me as another fluffy-haired mutt looks on. The Shomrons' three dogs are characters in the novel, and pictures of them illustrate the book.
The portrait of an animal-loving Gush Katif family of four fits with another one of Shomron's literary purposes, to break stereotypes of settlers.
'I wanted my family to be different, to show the heterogeneous nature of the settlers that society often overlooks,' explains the petite brunette in her small kitchen/dining room.
Shomron proves to be an articulate, knowledgeable spokeswoman for her community - thanks in part to her work as an English translator for Friends of Gush Katif - but she also wrote the novel, which she began in April 2005, as a means of therapy.
'Writing my book was incredibly therapeutic for me and it was probably one of the reasons I was able to finish it so quickly - to finish writing my book in one year. It was my way of dealing with things,' she says
Shomron's actual family is much bigger than the family she portrayed. Shomron is the second of seven children. Her family made aliya from Phoenix, Arizona, in 1992 and discovered Neveh Dekalim during their search for a religious-Zionist community.
'It turned out to be a wonderful community. They were incredibly warm and they had a family adopt us and provide us with basic services,' says Shomron, her mother looking on proudly. Her father, like the patriarch in the novel, worked as a mashgiah (kashrut supervisor) at a farm in the settlement of Bedolah. He is currently unemployed, but fortunately, Shomron says, he has many hobbies, like taking care of the dogs and gardening.
Unemployment is still very high in Nitzan. 'They hang around the house all day with no reason to get up in the morning,' she notes.
Her mother instilled within her a love of reading and a sense of Jewish pride and destiny. Her parents named her Shifra after the biblical midwife who defied Pharaoh's orders to kill Jewish male newborns.
'My parents always hoped I would have the ability to stand up for what I believe is right, and Shifra stands up to Pharaoh and goes against him. It's actually an amazing biblical story. And I think that we, the people of Gush Katif, had to experience that - standing up to the government, the courts and the media to a certain extent - holding up our truth and what we believed was our right to stay in Gush Katif.'
In their tiny backyard, another scene from the book comes to life. Her 17-year-old brother is reading a book his sister lent him: the diary of Mordechai Tennenbaum, who headed the Jewish resistance in the Bialystok ghetto. In the novel Efrat reads pro-Zionist books and regularly shares with her brother Yair her admiration for feisty Zionist Jews.
In addition to books about proud Jewish identity, Shomron counts among her favorites the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien and P.G. Wodehouse, but she's not too fond of Anne Frank.
'I wasn't able to identify with Anne Frank at all. She was from an assimilated family, and even with the Holocaust going on around her, she was interested in becoming a Dutch citizen, and she was overjoyed when her father gave her the New Testament to read. I read that and think: My goodness! Doesn't she realize she's part of the Jewish nation?'
The destruction of Gush Katif gave her the impetus to finish the book and become the type of author she admired.
Grains of Sand reads like a young adult novel with a religious orientation, but it is intended for a diverse readership that seeks to deepen its understanding of Gush Katif life. The straightforward, third-person narrative, interspersed with diary entries by the heroine, takes the reader through the ups and downs of the community: the idyllic, happy, tight-knit religious home and community life of the residents; the terrifying intifada that claimed many Jewish lives there; the struggle to enjoy life amid the constant threat of mortar attacks; and the fears and doubts of the community in the year leading up to disengagement.
The novel ends right before the actual evacuation, and the reader doesn't get to witness the Yefets being taken from their home by the IDF.
'I didn't want to focus on the actual disengagement because we all saw that on television,' Shomron says. 'I wanted to focus on what we didn't know.' Some people have told her that the cliffhanger ending is a bit 'cruel,' but that's how she described disengagement. 'It ended very quickly and abruptly. In one week Gush Katif was destroyed and we were all scattered.'
She plans to write a sequel once they are settled in a permanent home, a process which can take up to five years, but for now, she says, the resolution of the disengagement is still painfully unclear.
'It's still very difficult. You always compare. You can't help but compare. There's not one thing for which I can say: This is as good as it was in Gush Katif.'
Aspects of the possible sequel are already apparent. The family is squeezed into the 90 square-meter caravilla. Walls are chipping. Boxes are still unpacked in the living room. Above them are family portraits - the brit mila of her youngest brother, the siblings decorating the succa - pictures that remind them of their happy times. On a counter nearby are some 'souvenirs' mortar shells that fell in Gush Katif.
'Heaven forbid a mortar would land here,' Shomron says. The prefab structures would collapse and there are no bomb shelters in the area, she warns.
'It's been two years and Gush Katif is never out of our mind, and as time goes on, you would think we'd be able to move on, but because we are stuck in caravan sites which are temporary, we can't move on.'
Shomron keeps herself busy with her studies at Givat Washington and working with children in her community to help them catch up with their studies. Grains of Sand has helped her cope with her loss, but the internal unrest and longing endures.
'I had a hope that when I wrote everything down, I'd be able to put it behind me and move on. That was an illusion because after writing my book and even publishing it, Gush Katif continues to live with me.'
Click here for original
For 19-year-old novelist Shifra Shomron, writing about disengagement was a form of therapy
Grains of Sand: The Fall of Neve Dekalim By Shifra Shomron. Mazo Publishers 188 pages; $16.95
After the first few minutes of speaking with Shifra Shomron over the phone, the similarities between this young author and the heroine of her debut novel, Grains of Sand: The Fall of Neve Dekalim, become apparent. She's busy studying for finals, and she asks to hold the interview when they are over.
Shomron, 20, like her heroine Efrat Yefet, is studious, industrious, a 'star student' and something of a bookworm. One probably has to be to publish a novel at 19. She is strikingly poised, mature and idealistic for her age. At times she passionately gives facts and information about her community like a caring yet strict teacher - which is a good thing, since her ambition is to impact society as a high-school English teacher.
Grains of Sand is the first novel to emerge out of the rubble of Gush Katif, and it is through teenaged Efrat Yefet that Shomron allows readers to become familiar with life there in the years leading up to disengagement.
As I step into the Shomron family caravilla (prefab housing unit) in Nitzan, more similarities between the author and Efrat begin to surface. A golden retriever rushes to the door and happily greets me as another fluffy-haired mutt looks on. The Shomrons' three dogs are characters in the novel, and pictures of them illustrate the book.
The portrait of an animal-loving Gush Katif family of four fits with another one of Shomron's literary purposes, to break stereotypes of settlers.
'I wanted my family to be different, to show the heterogeneous nature of the settlers that society often overlooks,' explains the petite brunette in her small kitchen/dining room.
Shomron proves to be an articulate, knowledgeable spokeswoman for her community - thanks in part to her work as an English translator for Friends of Gush Katif - but she also wrote the novel, which she began in April 2005, as a means of therapy.
'Writing my book was incredibly therapeutic for me and it was probably one of the reasons I was able to finish it so quickly - to finish writing my book in one year. It was my way of dealing with things,' she says
Shomron's actual family is much bigger than the family she portrayed. Shomron is the second of seven children. Her family made aliya from Phoenix, Arizona, in 1992 and discovered Neveh Dekalim during their search for a religious-Zionist community.
'It turned out to be a wonderful community. They were incredibly warm and they had a family adopt us and provide us with basic services,' says Shomron, her mother looking on proudly. Her father, like the patriarch in the novel, worked as a mashgiah (kashrut supervisor) at a farm in the settlement of Bedolah. He is currently unemployed, but fortunately, Shomron says, he has many hobbies, like taking care of the dogs and gardening.
Unemployment is still very high in Nitzan. 'They hang around the house all day with no reason to get up in the morning,' she notes.
Her mother instilled within her a love of reading and a sense of Jewish pride and destiny. Her parents named her Shifra after the biblical midwife who defied Pharaoh's orders to kill Jewish male newborns.
'My parents always hoped I would have the ability to stand up for what I believe is right, and Shifra stands up to Pharaoh and goes against him. It's actually an amazing biblical story. And I think that we, the people of Gush Katif, had to experience that - standing up to the government, the courts and the media to a certain extent - holding up our truth and what we believed was our right to stay in Gush Katif.'
In their tiny backyard, another scene from the book comes to life. Her 17-year-old brother is reading a book his sister lent him: the diary of Mordechai Tennenbaum, who headed the Jewish resistance in the Bialystok ghetto. In the novel Efrat reads pro-Zionist books and regularly shares with her brother Yair her admiration for feisty Zionist Jews.
In addition to books about proud Jewish identity, Shomron counts among her favorites the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien and P.G. Wodehouse, but she's not too fond of Anne Frank.
'I wasn't able to identify with Anne Frank at all. She was from an assimilated family, and even with the Holocaust going on around her, she was interested in becoming a Dutch citizen, and she was overjoyed when her father gave her the New Testament to read. I read that and think: My goodness! Doesn't she realize she's part of the Jewish nation?'
The destruction of Gush Katif gave her the impetus to finish the book and become the type of author she admired.
Grains of Sand reads like a young adult novel with a religious orientation, but it is intended for a diverse readership that seeks to deepen its understanding of Gush Katif life. The straightforward, third-person narrative, interspersed with diary entries by the heroine, takes the reader through the ups and downs of the community: the idyllic, happy, tight-knit religious home and community life of the residents; the terrifying intifada that claimed many Jewish lives there; the struggle to enjoy life amid the constant threat of mortar attacks; and the fears and doubts of the community in the year leading up to disengagement.
The novel ends right before the actual evacuation, and the reader doesn't get to witness the Yefets being taken from their home by the IDF.
'I didn't want to focus on the actual disengagement because we all saw that on television,' Shomron says. 'I wanted to focus on what we didn't know.' Some people have told her that the cliffhanger ending is a bit 'cruel,' but that's how she described disengagement. 'It ended very quickly and abruptly. In one week Gush Katif was destroyed and we were all scattered.'
She plans to write a sequel once they are settled in a permanent home, a process which can take up to five years, but for now, she says, the resolution of the disengagement is still painfully unclear.
'It's still very difficult. You always compare. You can't help but compare. There's not one thing for which I can say: This is as good as it was in Gush Katif.'
Aspects of the possible sequel are already apparent. The family is squeezed into the 90 square-meter caravilla. Walls are chipping. Boxes are still unpacked in the living room. Above them are family portraits - the brit mila of her youngest brother, the siblings decorating the succa - pictures that remind them of their happy times. On a counter nearby are some 'souvenirs' mortar shells that fell in Gush Katif.
'Heaven forbid a mortar would land here,' Shomron says. The prefab structures would collapse and there are no bomb shelters in the area, she warns.
'It's been two years and Gush Katif is never out of our mind, and as time goes on, you would think we'd be able to move on, but because we are stuck in caravan sites which are temporary, we can't move on.'
Shomron keeps herself busy with her studies at Givat Washington and working with children in her community to help them catch up with their studies. Grains of Sand has helped her cope with her loss, but the internal unrest and longing endures.
'I had a hope that when I wrote everything down, I'd be able to put it behind me and move on. That was an illusion because after writing my book and even publishing it, Gush Katif continues to live with me.'
Friday, August 10, 2007
Engaging the disengagers
Jerusalem Post, Up Front; August 10, 2007
Click here for original
How were the soldiers who performed the pullout affected by the emotional turmoil? The fact that there aren't reported cases of trauma amongst soldiers who performed the pullout is troubling, says a grassroots investigative team.
Gil stood on a steaming sidewalk in a row of soldiers awaiting orders, while kids and teenagers darted out of the Kfar Darom homes, randomly approaching his brigade, hoping to break their firm physical and emotional barriers and get them to refuse the orders. The lawns of the terra cotta-roofed homes were sprawled with settlers and their supporters, the atmosphere tense and emotionally loaded.
"Many youngsters, mostly young girls, cursed us, yelled out us harshly: 'How can you not be ashamed?'" recalls the 23-year-old kibbutznik from the Jordan Valley.
His determination to carry out his orders was not deterred by their youthful, emotional interrogations, and today, two years after the disengagement, he remains unashamed.
"I don't think I'll be ashamed to tell my kids about it. I don't see myself as an individual person who participated. I think there is a historical process for the country, and I can say I was a part of it - a solder who was a part of it."
Gil has since completed his army service and works as an educational tour guide for young people. The disengagement - a move he favored - remains one of the most significant, difficult and thought-provoking chapters of his army service, but he doesn't classify the operation as any more traumatic or unpleasant than his service in the West Bank.
Shalev, 23, from the same kibbutz, served in Gil's unit. Looking back, he also conjures up images of angry kids and mothers cursing at him. Despite their warnings of shame and trauma, Shalev, too, emerged emotionally unscathed.
"It's hard when you speak to evacuees," he says. "Sometimes it's not pleasant to say that you were there, like when I hear about situations in which people don't have homes. It's hard, but it's not an emotional trauma. It's not that I can't sleep at night."
The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was arguably one of the most contentious and heart-wrenching IDF operations. Prior to disengagement, there were ominous predictions of bloodshed and civil war. In the end, the sandy grounds of Gush Katif absorbed no blood, but many tears. The disengagement produced some of the most iconic images of civil strife: Grown men breaking down while giving their mezuzas their parting kiss; tough, secular soldiers weeping and praying while carrying the Torah as they joined settlers' hands in their final walk through the synagogues; teenagers clad in symbolic orange T-shirts warning soldiers they'd suffer sleepless nights and an aching conscience for destroying happy, Jewish homes.
Two years later, have predictions of post-traumatic stress hurled at the evacuation forces been realized, or are the disengagement soldiers sleeping soundly with clear consciences?
A study co-conducted by Dr. Ariel Knafo, assistant professor of social psychology at the Hebrew University, has found that the soldiers' emotional well-being has largely remained unaffected by the disengagement, with some soldiers having reported that their participation has even contributed to their personal growth.
"When we started the project, we thought there would be very serious consequences over the event," Knafo says. "We learned that some soldiers are better off now than they were two weeks before the disengagement. I think they were extremely anxious before, and actually it turned out not to be that terrible, because they prepared themselves for something more serious than what happened - potential threats, behavior of the settlers and so on. Eventually it turned out not to be so hard."
The study surveyed 1,200 soldiers before the disengagement, an additional 231 soldiers one week afterward and 157 soldiers six months later. It checked the correlation between such factors as the soldiers' locus of control (internal as opposed to external), their degree of training and their attitude toward disengagement as a military task with their level of anxiety and difficulties carrying out orders. The ultimate findings, published in an IDF journal on military psychology, show no signs of any significant post-disengagement trauma.
"IT WAS clear that if we prepared them effectively in preventing violence and escalation, then there are good chances that they wouldn't have any negative reactions," says Haim Omer, a psychology professor at Tel Aviv University and co-author of The Psychology of Demonization with psychologist Nahi Alon. Their work with the armed forces focused on preventing violence - not trauma - although, for Omer, minimizing the level of violence and trauma are intertwined.
Omer and Alon trained IDF officers and settlers based on principles covered in their book, particularly the art of "constructive conflict," a set of strategies designed to minimize violent escalations, provocations and arguments between two sides in conflict. For example, soldiers were taught not to give in to their instincts to react to the arguments, insults, pleadings and curses of the settlers. The self-control exhibited by both the soldiers and settlers played a role in neutralizing the psychological battlefield and accelerating the relatively quick and bloodless execution of the disengagement.
Dr. Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, has not received any soldiers complaining or suffering from trauma due to the disengagement, and he doesn't anticipate that he will. He attributes the lack of reported cases to the comprehensive, psychological preparation.
"They were really prepared, with very good training in all scenarios, so when they were in there - and I've heard this from a lot of people - there was nothing new," says Brom, adjusting his knitted kippa.
He closely followed the psychological training and aftermath as a mental health professional and also as a father; his son, still a soldier, served in Gush Katif during the disengagement. "It was all planned, all known, and that is what happened. I would be surprised if there are a lot of people who still have problems, because one of the issues in trauma is the discrepancy between your expectation and what's happening in reality. The further they're apart the more harmful potential it has."
The harmful results of inadequate preparation, he says, are very evident among Gush Katif evacuees and fighters in the Second Lebanon War, populations which have sought treatment at the center.
As part of their mental preparation, soldiers learned how to maintain an emotional buffer between themselves and the settlers; to demonstrate empathy with residents, but to dissociate emotionally from their cries and outbursts. Soldiers were given specific formulas to recite upon entering the homes, and they were advised not to engage in political, religious or ethical debate. The organization of the soldiers into tight-knit groups provided a protective feeling of belonging and support. In drills, soldiers rehearsed the evacuation to immunize them from potential harmful effects of the verbal insults.
Soldiers who had ethical, ideological or personal dilemmas with destroying the settlements and evacuating Jewish families were taught that they didn't have to take personal responsibility for disengagement. They could find solace in understanding that they were members of the armed forces executing a democratic, government decision that must remain impervious to a soldier's individual, political opinion.
PREPARATION AT the Counseling Center for Women based in Jerusalem and Ramat Gan trained about 800 female soldiers with an eye toward the needs and sensitivities of women, included workshops discussing the nature and effects of trauma after the pullout.
"There was definitely anxiety that this could cause post-traumatic stress problems," says Bella Savran, a clinical social worker and co-founder of the center. "So built into training was very structured training about the issue of trauma, explaining what it is, what are some of the signs that you are having post- or pre-traumatic reactions, to help soldiers be more knowledgeable and aware and hopefully less frightened if they were having any symptoms, bodily or mental."
Many of the soldiers, she says, considered trauma education the most helpful. Ten days after the disengagement, the center held debriefing workshops with some 200 soldiers who volunteered to attend.
At first many of them were hesitant in discussing their experience, says Savran, who is currently summarizing soldier feedback in an article for an American feminist therapy journal, but eventually they opened up to share both positive and negative feelings.
Among their negative emotions included feelings of isolation, guilt and shame for destroying the settlers' homes, and keen discomfort upon encountering evacuees in public places. Soldiers also described feeling moved by the devotion and behavior of the settlers and pride in having participated in a national mission of such importance.
Zvia Kfir, a social worker who led a session, recalls one soldier requesting additional individual treatment, but overall "most of them spoke about a very empowering, powerful experience - there was a feeling of togetherness, collaboration, that they placed them in groups with men as well, and it didn't matter if you were an officer or cadet, there was something very uniting."
A similar sentiment is expressed by Ariella, 22, a former officer in the Liaison and Foreign Relations Division who now works as an editor.
"It's really funny because a lot of things people were yelling at us: 'You're just going to go to Sinai and forget about it so that you can cleanse your consciences, blah, blah, blah.' At the end, most of the people in my group actually organized a trip to Eilat two weekends later. We all went together as a group... And everybody from the disengagement was there. It made me feel like it was all so national."
As someone who had made aliya only months before entering the army, the disengagement seemed at first like a mission that contradicted her Zionist calling.
"As a person who came to Israel to fulfill a certain ideology and then be commanded to go against that ideology is a very difficult thing to have to do," Ariella says. "It's a very contradictory feeling running through you."
She held an ambivalent attitude and dreaded participating in the evacuation. She considered refusing orders, but told herself and others that she didn't join the army to impose her own views on the military, nor did she want to sit in jail and sacrifice her rank. She figured other, possibly less sensitive soldiers or policemen would replace her anyway.
She got called to participate in the evacuation two weeks before it started, and she worried that she missed some of the mental preparation. Her officers assured her that she could seek psychological assistance from the army if she felt she needed it. She didn't.
"The funny thing is that I don't think about it, at least not for any extended period of time," Ariella says calmly and confidently from the office of one of her co-workers, who happened to have been a disengagement critic. The wall still bears an "orange" flag of the State of Israel, a symbol of the struggle against the disengagement. This is the first time the pretty blonde has discussed her disengagement service at length.
She knew it would be a highly emotional experience, and she describes how she cried the minute she crossed the gates of the settlements while settlers shouted at her and her brigade. She restrained herself from answering back, "in case I said something I wasn't supposed to say. When I said something back, I think it generally consisted of 'I'm sorry.'"
The shouts continued unabated as she marched on to evacuate several homes in Neveh Dekalim and the large synagogue in which hundreds of religious girls had barricaded themselves. There were moments when she felt moved by the cries of the protesters, but, with the support of the soldiers in her unit - who had received the full mental preparation - she eventually learned to disregard them.
"I just remember this 19, 20-year-old guy wearing a Golani Brigade patch on his shirt, and he had tears in his eyes, and was saying, 'I was in Golani, and when I heard there was the disengagement, I refused orders and I went to jail.' That was the first thing that got me, and then I wondered, 'How many times has he said this, and how good was he at acting?' When I realized that it was part of some big psychological plan, I stopped. My emotions turned into anger. It was probably about a couple of days into it. It helped me that my friends were telling the same thing. That it was all part of a game, and it felt that way."
She understood the need for non-residents to show solidarity with the evacuees, but thought that their presence in Gush Katif ultimately made it more difficult on the soldiers.
"We were pulling someone out of the synagogue, and we asked her where we she was from - to talk to them, to show that we were human - and she answered me from Eilat. And I thought, what are you doing there? Why are you doing this to us? I couldn't understand. That's another important thing to point out. I can't understand why it was so hard for people today to differentiate between forces that were acting and force that was deciding. The IDF was doing what it was told on behalf of the government. We didn't have a choice in the matter."
SOLDIERS WHO strongly opposed disengagement for ideological, personal or political reasons generally had a harder time opening up about their experience, and they cast doubt on the rosy picture of soldier mental and emotional health. Knafo's study could not question respondents regarding their political opinion, since soldiers are prohibited from airing their political views while in uniform, but the study has found that soldiers who took a negative stance toward disengagement generally showed more signs of anxiety and unease in carrying out certain aspects of their mission.
More than half a dozen soldiers sharply refused to be interviewed. Some said they feared army backlash, while others didn't want to dredge up the painful experience. All soldiers spoke on condition of anonymity. The IDF declined to offer any contacts for soldiers or army psychologists. Several soldiers related that the army hardly discussed the mission or held debriefings once it was over.
"They never mentioned it," says Ron, 23, from Jerusalem, a student in a religious Zionist yeshiva. "I didn't think about it. In the end it was the escape of the army. They didn't have answers. It's not talked about today."
Ron too prefers to keep his own experience "inside," and it's clear reflecting upon the event is not easy for him. His answers over the phone are quick and brief.
Prior to the disengagement, he had requested from his officer not to evacuate settlers from their homes, and instead was assigned to guard the settlements in the northern Gaza Strip from Palestinian violence and illegal Israeli infiltrators. In an officer's training course at the time, he was torn between his loyalty to the army and his sympathy for the settlers. His own siblings were among the Gush Katif protesters.
"It's bad memories for the rest of your life," Ron says. Right after disengagement, he countered his own upset by conjuring better memories; he looked through his photo album of his days studying in the pre-military academy in the Gush Katif settlement of Atzmona. "It was very black," he continues. "It's hard to describe the feeling. It's something very deep and serious. It was the most disgusting period of my life. So was the aftermath."
Despite his inner conflicts, Shai would do it again, on principle, if given the order, and he directs anger at the disengagement at the government, not the army.
"The army is the organization that unites all of Israel. If everyone would do what is good and not good for them, what would happen to the army?" he asks.
Likewise, Gil, who opposes Israel's presence in the West Bank, says he would evacuate an Arab village, however reluctantly, if given the order.
IN CASES IN which soldiers deeply identify with the settlers, says Dr. Brom, emotional complications are more likely to surface. He concludes this in part from an incident his son related to him.
"They went to shul [in Gush Katif], and that was a very strange thing. They were accepted there, they weren't sent away, but that was one of these cracks in the wall, where you suddenly identify with each other. And that was potentially a problem for the work that had to be done."
Brom adds that the gap between someone's ideal self-image and personal values versus his actions can also be the source of potential trauma.
"One of the more theoretical issues in the field of trauma is how trauma can disrupt the way you view the world and yourself," he explains. "Basically, people have the need to experience themselves as good people, and they want to know the world is a just place and that there is some order in the world. Here you are confronted with something you have to do that you might feel is unjust and you are identified with something bad and you have an ambivalent identification."
Kfir at the Counseling Center for Women noticed that soldiers who generally supported the disengagement were more responsive and receptive to the help and solutions offered them.
"It was harder for those who asked the basic question: 'How can I dare do this?' Definitely. For many of them, the fact that they performed a task that they didn't choose made it easier for them."
Shalev and Gil describe their most difficult moments as the personal encounters with the residents, cases in which the settlers welcomed the soldiers warmly without accusations, insults, shouts or curses.
"There was a family of Ethiopian immigrants," relates Shalev. "They explained how they came, how they had nothing, how Gush Katif was the only place that welcomed them. It was hard to hear their story... but that doesn't become the reason for you not to go through with it."
Throughout the evacuation, Gil knew "something wasn't right" when settlers asked the soldiers where they were headed and his officers couldn't offer a clear answer, but he didn't view their smooth resettlement as his personal responsibility.
"It makes me feel bad about the state," Gil says. "It's one of the many things that make me feel bad about the state. It doesn't take care of many things it should - the sick, the poor and also the evacuees."
Nir, 26, a secular Israeli who works as a security officer in Tel Aviv, served in Gaza during the disengagement and continues to regard the pullout as a mistake. As an officer in the air force, he carried out his orders to lead his unit in evacuating hundreds of protesters from the streets and border crossings. He has no qualms discussing his service in Gaza but admits that serving in the outer military circle as opposed to the first circle charged with the evacuation of residents may have lightened his emotional load.
"No doubt it would have influenced me differently, and this is what I heard from people who were there. They have scars that are difficult to fathom," he says.
He had debated whether or not disengagement orders could be classified as "manifestly illegal orders," which soldiers have the right to disobey. A missive from then chief of General Staff Dan Halutz discussing the legality of the disengagement dispelled his doubts. It gave two examples of manifestly illegal orders: the shooting of 48 unarmed civilians at Kafr Kasim in 1958 and Adolf Eichmann's instructions to murder Jews.
During the evacuation, Nir disregarded the angry shouts and responded more favorably to protesters who questioned him rationally about his actions. "You could speak with them and tell them, 'I don't agree with the act, but I'm in the army and I have to follow orders.'"
He didn't have too much time or mental space to debate the issue while there. "We worked mostly as robots because of the volume of work that had to be done. From lack of sleep, your body works on automatic pilot. You don't know what you're going to do the next hour. The lack of knowledge about what's next contributes to your robotic mode."
Ariella too didn't have the luxury to let her personal feelings or opinions influence her course. She recalls at one point shutting off her feelings.
"When the international media interviewed me at the time, and they asked me how I felt about it, I said, 'I'm not allowed to feel anything.' It sounds like a getaway answer, but I really felt that way."
Today, Nir says he "has more scars from Operation Defensive Shield," but the disengagement marked a turning point in his life. A few months later, he decided to scrap his plans for an army career and not renew his army contract.
"I felt like they forced something in a wrong way, like they behaved in the wrong way, as if they higher-ups wanted to prove that they can, like kids in the nursery," he related. "The way they came, the way they prepared, what they stuck in people's minds. The entire mental preparation was harder than the actual evacuation and ultimately only a third of what they taught came to pass. They really exaggerated. For officers at that level, you have to prepare something in proportion. Things bothered me after as well. I noticed people were in the army more for ego and status."
WHEN ARIELLA finished her assignment, she left the ad hoc unit created for the disengagement and returned to her regular unit. The remainder of her service remained largely unaffected by the evacuation, but she came out of Gush Katif with new friendships.
"Everyone who participated in the disengagement became very close. Most of my good friends were people in my unit during the disengagement, and that was only a few weeks out of my entire service."
During her first weekend back home, her friends described her as a "zombie," but about a week and a half later, she already began to heal from the ordeal.
"At the time I thought this is going to scar me for life, this is the saddest thing I have to do. And it still is the hardest thing I ever had to do. I had to do tough things, but nothing like this. This was something completely beyond reality. I think it's awful because I know there are people that are still affected by it today, people who don't have permanent housing, but I don't think too much about it."
She pauses and looks up, a glimmer of guilt in her eyes. "I think I should, but I don't. I think everyone is just living his own life."
(BOX) The sound of silence
Some people aren't taking the quiet of the soldiers so quietly. What psychologists praise as a successful mental preparation, some disengagement opponents and other psychologists are slamming as a successful mental "programming."
A mixed religious and secular five-member team is spearheaded by Ruti Eisikowitch, a retired Hebrew teacher, and banded together right after the disengagement to discover the cause for what seemed to them untenable: the destruction of a vibrant Jewish community by Jewish soldiers with "following orders" as their ultimate justification. They didn't think any governmental or academic institution would critically assess the mental preparation, and they took the task upon themselves - with an admitted bias.
Their work is supervised by senior educational psychologist Dr. Moshe Leibler, who has lectured about the role of psychologists in developing the mental preparation at the Sderot Conference for Society and at Judea and Samaria Research Conference.
Members of the group casually dub the preparation "brainwashing," but refrain from using the term as a professional qualifier in their work.
Eisikowitch is bothered by the relative silence on the part of the soldiers and the army regarding the IDF experience of the pullout. For Eisikowitch, the perceived lack of trauma is troubling. "They were robots, so there was no trauma. That's even worse."
She and members of the team encountered many difficulties tracking down soldiers who were willing to open up.
"Why the silence?" she asks. "I heard from my husband, sons and friends many stories of war. They weren't silent."
The investigation team spent the last year gathering information and documents regarding the psychological training, and the matter engrosses Eisikowitch daily. Upon meeting her at home near Ra'anana, her living room cocktail table was covered with a number of workbooks, presentations and CDs the army prepared about a year ahead of the disengagement. She flipped through workbook after workbook, demonstrating how the army fielded any possible hesitations among the soldiers to make sure they complied.
"War, which is supposed to be much more traumatic and difficult, doesn't have psychological training, definitely not to this extent and it definitely doesn't have pamphlets and lectures," she said, her anger visible.
The psychological training, she argues, was required to invert the natural mission of IDF and goad soldiers to perform a task some of them considered militarily and morally unsavory.
"The psychologists didn't prepare the IDF for an army mission - to protect its civilians," she charges, "but turned the soldiers into a non-thinking police force that harmed its own civilian population."
The team directs most of its criticism and anger toward the disengagement psychologists, and Leibler argues they violated their ethical code, which states that psychologists must work for the emotional and mental welfare of their clients.
"Psychologists, like doctors, have a particular ethical code they have to abide by," he says. "I think there's more of an obligation on us as mental health workers than the soldiers. They're subject to a different ethical code. As far as I know, psychologists are not permitted to cause harm to a civilian population."
About half a year prior to disengagement, Leibler worked to raise his ethical and professional concerns, and he corresponded extensively from his Kochav Hashahar home with the chairwoman of Israel Psychology Association (IPA), Yael Shoshani, after she wrote in an IPA newsletter of the importance of the IPA's role in the implementation of the disengagement. "She understood my qualms about it. It was taken for granted this was the right way of doing things," says Leibler.
The investigation team is planning to launch a complaint against the disengagement psychologists with the Israel Ministry of Health and to submit a report to the Winograd Commission arguing that the military effectiveness of the IDF during the Lebanon war was damaged by the disengagement training.
HAIM OMER, co-author of Psychology of Demonization, who trained the army to minimize violence throughout the disengagement, dismisses the assault on the psychologists' participation in the mental training as a value judgment based on a political position.
"They say, 'We find that this is evil and helping soldiers to do evil necessarily hurts them,'" he says. "The argument is political. According to this argument, you can't make any psychological preparation for warfare. If I try to help soldiers prepare for war, I violate the psychological code according to this argument."
Omer says he has publicly critiqued as irrelevant the argument that service in the West Bank and Gaza can be psychologically damaging to soldiers.
The job of a psychologist is not necessarily to prevent trauma, he says, but to assist people in coping with trauma or suffering that can arise from natural disasters or legislated measures.
"Psychologists, to my mind, have absolutely no monopoly or advantage over other professionals or other people in dealing with human suffering as such," Omer says. "Psychologists cannot prevent suffering from war, from famine, from forced migration or from evacuation. At best, what they can do is to serve people who ask for their help in trying to cope better with their suffering."
Dr. Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, doesn't think psychologists can be held accountable for any of the trauma and difficulties evacuees might have experienced.
"We did some work before the disengagement, and it was a very big problem to be accepted by the [settler] community," he says. "If you came and said a few months prior that it was going to happen, it was not really acceptable. And there were even politicians who said it won't happen, and everyone was waiting for the miracle to happen and things like that, so the preparation on the political side as well was not good. The army did take responsibility for its soldiers, but the state didn't take responsibility to give a clear message that this is going to happen and how it's going to happen."
For Leibler, psychologists recruited by the army had the professional and ethical imperative to at least raise the ethical issues involved in the forceful evacuation of a civilian population. But instead the psychologists took for granted that their participation in what they perceived as a fait accompli was desirable and ethical to minimize any possible damage.
"The psychologists didn't ask: Is it ethical to carry out an intervention that can cause harm to a civilian population? Harm is caused in war, and psychologists give counseling to the army. In the case of the settlers, is this war? What are the relevant ethical issues, and why were they not seriously debated? Not to consider it as an ethical issue because it's a law reeks of fascism. That says that legislation defines ethics and that ethics doesn't necessarily define legislation."
Brom thinks that psychologists from all sides of the political spectrum cannot necessarily divorce their professional practice from their political opinions.
"I think we're way beyond the idea that psychology is value free," he said. "Once there were opinions that psychologists have to be a blank screen and things like that. In these situations it's clearly not possible and not realistic for psychologists to say I have no political opinion."
Click here for original
How were the soldiers who performed the pullout affected by the emotional turmoil? The fact that there aren't reported cases of trauma amongst soldiers who performed the pullout is troubling, says a grassroots investigative team.
Gil stood on a steaming sidewalk in a row of soldiers awaiting orders, while kids and teenagers darted out of the Kfar Darom homes, randomly approaching his brigade, hoping to break their firm physical and emotional barriers and get them to refuse the orders. The lawns of the terra cotta-roofed homes were sprawled with settlers and their supporters, the atmosphere tense and emotionally loaded.
"Many youngsters, mostly young girls, cursed us, yelled out us harshly: 'How can you not be ashamed?'" recalls the 23-year-old kibbutznik from the Jordan Valley.
His determination to carry out his orders was not deterred by their youthful, emotional interrogations, and today, two years after the disengagement, he remains unashamed.
"I don't think I'll be ashamed to tell my kids about it. I don't see myself as an individual person who participated. I think there is a historical process for the country, and I can say I was a part of it - a solder who was a part of it."
Gil has since completed his army service and works as an educational tour guide for young people. The disengagement - a move he favored - remains one of the most significant, difficult and thought-provoking chapters of his army service, but he doesn't classify the operation as any more traumatic or unpleasant than his service in the West Bank.
Shalev, 23, from the same kibbutz, served in Gil's unit. Looking back, he also conjures up images of angry kids and mothers cursing at him. Despite their warnings of shame and trauma, Shalev, too, emerged emotionally unscathed.
"It's hard when you speak to evacuees," he says. "Sometimes it's not pleasant to say that you were there, like when I hear about situations in which people don't have homes. It's hard, but it's not an emotional trauma. It's not that I can't sleep at night."
The unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was arguably one of the most contentious and heart-wrenching IDF operations. Prior to disengagement, there were ominous predictions of bloodshed and civil war. In the end, the sandy grounds of Gush Katif absorbed no blood, but many tears. The disengagement produced some of the most iconic images of civil strife: Grown men breaking down while giving their mezuzas their parting kiss; tough, secular soldiers weeping and praying while carrying the Torah as they joined settlers' hands in their final walk through the synagogues; teenagers clad in symbolic orange T-shirts warning soldiers they'd suffer sleepless nights and an aching conscience for destroying happy, Jewish homes.
Two years later, have predictions of post-traumatic stress hurled at the evacuation forces been realized, or are the disengagement soldiers sleeping soundly with clear consciences?
A study co-conducted by Dr. Ariel Knafo, assistant professor of social psychology at the Hebrew University, has found that the soldiers' emotional well-being has largely remained unaffected by the disengagement, with some soldiers having reported that their participation has even contributed to their personal growth.
"When we started the project, we thought there would be very serious consequences over the event," Knafo says. "We learned that some soldiers are better off now than they were two weeks before the disengagement. I think they were extremely anxious before, and actually it turned out not to be that terrible, because they prepared themselves for something more serious than what happened - potential threats, behavior of the settlers and so on. Eventually it turned out not to be so hard."
The study surveyed 1,200 soldiers before the disengagement, an additional 231 soldiers one week afterward and 157 soldiers six months later. It checked the correlation between such factors as the soldiers' locus of control (internal as opposed to external), their degree of training and their attitude toward disengagement as a military task with their level of anxiety and difficulties carrying out orders. The ultimate findings, published in an IDF journal on military psychology, show no signs of any significant post-disengagement trauma.
"IT WAS clear that if we prepared them effectively in preventing violence and escalation, then there are good chances that they wouldn't have any negative reactions," says Haim Omer, a psychology professor at Tel Aviv University and co-author of The Psychology of Demonization with psychologist Nahi Alon. Their work with the armed forces focused on preventing violence - not trauma - although, for Omer, minimizing the level of violence and trauma are intertwined.
Omer and Alon trained IDF officers and settlers based on principles covered in their book, particularly the art of "constructive conflict," a set of strategies designed to minimize violent escalations, provocations and arguments between two sides in conflict. For example, soldiers were taught not to give in to their instincts to react to the arguments, insults, pleadings and curses of the settlers. The self-control exhibited by both the soldiers and settlers played a role in neutralizing the psychological battlefield and accelerating the relatively quick and bloodless execution of the disengagement.
Dr. Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma of Herzog Hospital in Jerusalem, has not received any soldiers complaining or suffering from trauma due to the disengagement, and he doesn't anticipate that he will. He attributes the lack of reported cases to the comprehensive, psychological preparation.
"They were really prepared, with very good training in all scenarios, so when they were in there - and I've heard this from a lot of people - there was nothing new," says Brom, adjusting his knitted kippa.
He closely followed the psychological training and aftermath as a mental health professional and also as a father; his son, still a soldier, served in Gush Katif during the disengagement. "It was all planned, all known, and that is what happened. I would be surprised if there are a lot of people who still have problems, because one of the issues in trauma is the discrepancy between your expectation and what's happening in reality. The further they're apart the more harmful potential it has."
The harmful results of inadequate preparation, he says, are very evident among Gush Katif evacuees and fighters in the Second Lebanon War, populations which have sought treatment at the center.
As part of their mental preparation, soldiers learned how to maintain an emotional buffer between themselves and the settlers; to demonstrate empathy with residents, but to dissociate emotionally from their cries and outbursts. Soldiers were given specific formulas to recite upon entering the homes, and they were advised not to engage in political, religious or ethical debate. The organization of the soldiers into tight-knit groups provided a protective feeling of belonging and support. In drills, soldiers rehearsed the evacuation to immunize them from potential harmful effects of the verbal insults.
Soldiers who had ethical, ideological or personal dilemmas with destroying the settlements and evacuating Jewish families were taught that they didn't have to take personal responsibility for disengagement. They could find solace in understanding that they were members of the armed forces executing a democratic, government decision that must remain impervious to a soldier's individual, political opinion.
PREPARATION AT the Counseling Center for Women based in Jerusalem and Ramat Gan trained about 800 female soldiers with an eye toward the needs and sensitivities of women, included workshops discussing the nature and effects of trauma after the pullout.
"There was definitely anxiety that this could cause post-traumatic stress problems," says Bella Savran, a clinical social worker and co-founder of the center. "So built into training was very structured training about the issue of trauma, explaining what it is, what are some of the signs that you are having post- or pre-traumatic reactions, to help soldiers be more knowledgeable and aware and hopefully less frightened if they were having any symptoms, bodily or mental."
Many of the soldiers, she says, considered trauma education the most helpful. Ten days after the disengagement, the center held debriefing workshops with some 200 soldiers who volunteered to attend.
At first many of them were hesitant in discussing their experience, says Savran, who is currently summarizing soldier feedback in an article for an American feminist therapy journal, but eventually they opened up to share both positive and negative feelings.
Among their negative emotions included feelings of isolation, guilt and shame for destroying the settlers' homes, and keen discomfort upon encountering evacuees in public places. Soldiers also described feeling moved by the devotion and behavior of the settlers and pride in having participated in a national mission of such importance.
Zvia Kfir, a social worker who led a session, recalls one soldier requesting additional individual treatment, but overall "most of them spoke about a very empowering, powerful experience - there was a feeling of togetherness, collaboration, that they placed them in groups with men as well, and it didn't matter if you were an officer or cadet, there was something very uniting."
A similar sentiment is expressed by Ariella, 22, a former officer in the Liaison and Foreign Relations Division who now works as an editor.
"It's really funny because a lot of things people were yelling at us: 'You're just going to go to Sinai and forget about it so that you can cleanse your consciences, blah, blah, blah.' At the end, most of the people in my group actually organized a trip to Eilat two weekends later. We all went together as a group... And everybody from the disengagement was there. It made me feel like it was all so national."
As someone who had made aliya only months before entering the army, the disengagement seemed at first like a mission that contradicted her Zionist calling.
"As a person who came to Israel to fulfill a certain ideology and then be commanded to go against that ideology is a very difficult thing to have to do," Ariella says. "It's a very contradictory feeling running through you."
She held an ambivalent attitude and dreaded participating in the evacuation. She considered refusing orders, but told herself and others that she didn't join the army to impose her own views on the military, nor did she want to sit in jail and sacrifice her rank. She figured other, possibly less sensitive soldiers or policemen would replace her anyway.
She got called to participate in the evacuation two weeks before it started, and she worried that she missed some of the mental preparation. Her officers assured her that she could seek psychological assistance from the army if she felt she needed it. She didn't.
"The funny thing is that I don't think about it, at least not for any extended period of time," Ariella says calmly and confidently from the office of one of her co-workers, who happened to have been a disengagement critic. The wall still bears an "orange" flag of the State of Israel, a symbol of the struggle against the disengagement. This is the first time the pretty blonde has discussed her disengagement service at length.
She knew it would be a highly emotional experience, and she describes how she cried the minute she crossed the gates of the settlements while settlers shouted at her and her brigade. She restrained herself from answering back, "in case I said something I wasn't supposed to say. When I said something back, I think it generally consisted of 'I'm sorry.'"
The shouts continued unabated as she marched on to evacuate several homes in Neveh Dekalim and the large synagogue in which hundreds of religious girls had barricaded themselves. There were moments when she felt moved by the cries of the protesters, but, with the support of the soldiers in her unit - who had received the full mental preparation - she eventually learned to disregard them.
"I just remember this 19, 20-year-old guy wearing a Golani Brigade patch on his shirt, and he had tears in his eyes, and was saying, 'I was in Golani, and when I heard there was the disengagement, I refused orders and I went to jail.' That was the first thing that got me, and then I wondered, 'How many times has he said this, and how good was he at acting?' When I realized that it was part of some big psychological plan, I stopped. My emotions turned into anger. It was probably about a couple of days into it. It helped me that my friends were telling the same thing. That it was all part of a game, and it felt that way."
She understood the need for non-residents to show solidarity with the evacuees, but thought that their presence in Gush Katif ultimately made it more difficult on the soldiers.
"We were pulling someone out of the synagogue, and we asked her where we she was from - to talk to them, to show that we were human - and she answered me from Eilat. And I thought, what are you doing there? Why are you doing this to us? I couldn't understand. That's another important thing to point out. I can't understand why it was so hard for people today to differentiate between forces that were acting and force that was deciding. The IDF was doing what it was told on behalf of the government. We didn't have a choice in the matter."
SOLDIERS WHO strongly opposed disengagement for ideological, personal or political reasons generally had a harder time opening up about their experience, and they cast doubt on the rosy picture of soldier mental and emotional health. Knafo's study could not question respondents regarding their political opinion, since soldiers are prohibited from airing their political views while in uniform, but the study has found that soldiers who took a negative stance toward disengagement generally showed more signs of anxiety and unease in carrying out certain aspects of their mission.
More than half a dozen soldiers sharply refused to be interviewed. Some said they feared army backlash, while others didn't want to dredge up the painful experience. All soldiers spoke on condition of anonymity. The IDF declined to offer any contacts for soldiers or army psychologists. Several soldiers related that the army hardly discussed the mission or held debriefings once it was over.
"They never mentioned it," says Ron, 23, from Jerusalem, a student in a religious Zionist yeshiva. "I didn't think about it. In the end it was the escape of the army. They didn't have answers. It's not talked about today."
Ron too prefers to keep his own experience "inside," and it's clear reflecting upon the event is not easy for him. His answers over the phone are quick and brief.
Prior to the disengagement, he had requested from his officer not to evacuate settlers from their homes, and instead was assigned to guard the settlements in the northern Gaza Strip from Palestinian violence and illegal Israeli infiltrators. In an officer's training course at the time, he was torn between his loyalty to the army and his sympathy for the settlers. His own siblings were among the Gush Katif protesters.
"It's bad memories for the rest of your life," Ron says. Right after disengagement, he countered his own upset by conjuring better memories; he looked through his photo album of his days studying in the pre-military academy in the Gush Katif settlement of Atzmona. "It was very black," he continues. "It's hard to describe the feeling. It's something very deep and serious. It was the most disgusting period of my life. So was the aftermath."
Despite his inner conflicts, Shai would do it again, on principle, if given the order, and he directs anger at the disengagement at the government, not the army.
"The army is the organization that unites all of Israel. If everyone would do what is good and not good for them, what would happen to the army?" he asks.
Likewise, Gil, who opposes Israel's presence in the West Bank, says he would evacuate an Arab village, however reluctantly, if given the order.
IN CASES IN which soldiers deeply identify with the settlers, says Dr. Brom, emotional complications are more likely to surface. He concludes this in part from an incident his son related to him.
"They went to shul [in Gush Katif], and that was a very strange thing. They were accepted there, they weren't sent away, but that was one of these cracks in the wall, where you suddenly identify with each other. And that was potentially a problem for the work that had to be done."
Brom adds that the gap between someone's ideal self-image and personal values versus his actions can also be the source of potential trauma.
"One of the more theoretical issues in the field of trauma is how trauma can disrupt the way you view the world and yourself," he explains. "Basically, people have the need to experience themselves as good people, and they want to know the world is a just place and that there is some order in the world. Here you are confronted with something you have to do that you might feel is unjust and you are identified with something bad and you have an ambivalent identification."
Kfir at the Counseling Center for Women noticed that soldiers who generally supported the disengagement were more responsive and receptive to the help and solutions offered them.
"It was harder for those who asked the basic question: 'How can I dare do this?' Definitely. For many of them, the fact that they performed a task that they didn't choose made it easier for them."
Shalev and Gil describe their most difficult moments as the personal encounters with the residents, cases in which the settlers welcomed the soldiers warmly without accusations, insults, shouts or curses.
"There was a family of Ethiopian immigrants," relates Shalev. "They explained how they came, how they had nothing, how Gush Katif was the only place that welcomed them. It was hard to hear their story... but that doesn't become the reason for you not to go through with it."
Throughout the evacuation, Gil knew "something wasn't right" when settlers asked the soldiers where they were headed and his officers couldn't offer a clear answer, but he didn't view their smooth resettlement as his personal responsibility.
"It makes me feel bad about the state," Gil says. "It's one of the many things that make me feel bad about the state. It doesn't take care of many things it should - the sick, the poor and also the evacuees."
Nir, 26, a secular Israeli who works as a security officer in Tel Aviv, served in Gaza during the disengagement and continues to regard the pullout as a mistake. As an officer in the air force, he carried out his orders to lead his unit in evacuating hundreds of protesters from the streets and border crossings. He has no qualms discussing his service in Gaza but admits that serving in the outer military circle as opposed to the first circle charged with the evacuation of residents may have lightened his emotional load.
"No doubt it would have influenced me differently, and this is what I heard from people who were there. They have scars that are difficult to fathom," he says.
He had debated whether or not disengagement orders could be classified as "manifestly illegal orders," which soldiers have the right to disobey. A missive from then chief of General Staff Dan Halutz discussing the legality of the disengagement dispelled his doubts. It gave two examples of manifestly illegal orders: the shooting of 48 unarmed civilians at Kafr Kasim in 1958 and Adolf Eichmann's instructions to murder Jews.
During the evacuation, Nir disregarded the angry shouts and responded more favorably to protesters who questioned him rationally about his actions. "You could speak with them and tell them, 'I don't agree with the act, but I'm in the army and I have to follow orders.'"
He didn't have too much time or mental space to debate the issue while there. "We worked mostly as robots because of the volume of work that had to be done. From lack of sleep, your body works on automatic pilot. You don't know what you're going to do the next hour. The lack of knowledge about what's next contributes to your robotic mode."
Ariella too didn't have the luxury to let her personal feelings or opinions influence her course. She recalls at one point shutting off her feelings.
"When the international media interviewed me at the time, and they asked me how I felt about it, I said, 'I'm not allowed to feel anything.' It sounds like a getaway answer, but I really felt that way."
Today, Nir says he "has more scars from Operation Defensive Shield," but the disengagement marked a turning point in his life. A few months later, he decided to scrap his plans for an army career and not renew his army contract.
"I felt like they forced something in a wrong way, like they behaved in the wrong way, as if they higher-ups wanted to prove that they can, like kids in the nursery," he related. "The way they came, the way they prepared, what they stuck in people's minds. The entire mental preparation was harder than the actual evacuation and ultimately only a third of what they taught came to pass. They really exaggerated. For officers at that level, you have to prepare something in proportion. Things bothered me after as well. I noticed people were in the army more for ego and status."
WHEN ARIELLA finished her assignment, she left the ad hoc unit created for the disengagement and returned to her regular unit. The remainder of her service remained largely unaffected by the evacuation, but she came out of Gush Katif with new friendships.
"Everyone who participated in the disengagement became very close. Most of my good friends were people in my unit during the disengagement, and that was only a few weeks out of my entire service."
During her first weekend back home, her friends described her as a "zombie," but about a week and a half later, she already began to heal from the ordeal.
"At the time I thought this is going to scar me for life, this is the saddest thing I have to do. And it still is the hardest thing I ever had to do. I had to do tough things, but nothing like this. This was something completely beyond reality. I think it's awful because I know there are people that are still affected by it today, people who don't have permanent housing, but I don't think too much about it."
She pauses and looks up, a glimmer of guilt in her eyes. "I think I should, but I don't. I think everyone is just living his own life."
(BOX) The sound of silence
Some people aren't taking the quiet of the soldiers so quietly. What psychologists praise as a successful mental preparation, some disengagement opponents and other psychologists are slamming as a successful mental "programming."
A mixed religious and secular five-member team is spearheaded by Ruti Eisikowitch, a retired Hebrew teacher, and banded together right after the disengagement to discover the cause for what seemed to them untenable: the destruction of a vibrant Jewish community by Jewish soldiers with "following orders" as their ultimate justification. They didn't think any governmental or academic institution would critically assess the mental preparation, and they took the task upon themselves - with an admitted bias.
Their work is supervised by senior educational psychologist Dr. Moshe Leibler, who has lectured about the role of psychologists in developing the mental preparation at the Sderot Conference for Society and at Judea and Samaria Research Conference.
Members of the group casually dub the preparation "brainwashing," but refrain from using the term as a professional qualifier in their work.
Eisikowitch is bothered by the relative silence on the part of the soldiers and the army regarding the IDF experience of the pullout. For Eisikowitch, the perceived lack of trauma is troubling. "They were robots, so there was no trauma. That's even worse."
She and members of the team encountered many difficulties tracking down soldiers who were willing to open up.
"Why the silence?" she asks. "I heard from my husband, sons and friends many stories of war. They weren't silent."
The investigation team spent the last year gathering information and documents regarding the psychological training, and the matter engrosses Eisikowitch daily. Upon meeting her at home near Ra'anana, her living room cocktail table was covered with a number of workbooks, presentations and CDs the army prepared about a year ahead of the disengagement. She flipped through workbook after workbook, demonstrating how the army fielded any possible hesitations among the soldiers to make sure they complied.
"War, which is supposed to be much more traumatic and difficult, doesn't have psychological training, definitely not to this extent and it definitely doesn't have pamphlets and lectures," she said, her anger visible.
The psychological training, she argues, was required to invert the natural mission of IDF and goad soldiers to perform a task some of them considered militarily and morally unsavory.
"The psychologists didn't prepare the IDF for an army mission - to protect its civilians," she charges, "but turned the soldiers into a non-thinking police force that harmed its own civilian population."
The team directs most of its criticism and anger toward the disengagement psychologists, and Leibler argues they violated their ethical code, which states that psychologists must work for the emotional and mental welfare of their clients.
"Psychologists, like doctors, have a particular ethical code they have to abide by," he says. "I think there's more of an obligation on us as mental health workers than the soldiers. They're subject to a different ethical code. As far as I know, psychologists are not permitted to cause harm to a civilian population."
About half a year prior to disengagement, Leibler worked to raise his ethical and professional concerns, and he corresponded extensively from his Kochav Hashahar home with the chairwoman of Israel Psychology Association (IPA), Yael Shoshani, after she wrote in an IPA newsletter of the importance of the IPA's role in the implementation of the disengagement. "She understood my qualms about it. It was taken for granted this was the right way of doing things," says Leibler.
The investigation team is planning to launch a complaint against the disengagement psychologists with the Israel Ministry of Health and to submit a report to the Winograd Commission arguing that the military effectiveness of the IDF during the Lebanon war was damaged by the disengagement training.
HAIM OMER, co-author of Psychology of Demonization, who trained the army to minimize violence throughout the disengagement, dismisses the assault on the psychologists' participation in the mental training as a value judgment based on a political position.
"They say, 'We find that this is evil and helping soldiers to do evil necessarily hurts them,'" he says. "The argument is political. According to this argument, you can't make any psychological preparation for warfare. If I try to help soldiers prepare for war, I violate the psychological code according to this argument."
Omer says he has publicly critiqued as irrelevant the argument that service in the West Bank and Gaza can be psychologically damaging to soldiers.
The job of a psychologist is not necessarily to prevent trauma, he says, but to assist people in coping with trauma or suffering that can arise from natural disasters or legislated measures.
"Psychologists, to my mind, have absolutely no monopoly or advantage over other professionals or other people in dealing with human suffering as such," Omer says. "Psychologists cannot prevent suffering from war, from famine, from forced migration or from evacuation. At best, what they can do is to serve people who ask for their help in trying to cope better with their suffering."
Dr. Danny Brom, director of the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, doesn't think psychologists can be held accountable for any of the trauma and difficulties evacuees might have experienced.
"We did some work before the disengagement, and it was a very big problem to be accepted by the [settler] community," he says. "If you came and said a few months prior that it was going to happen, it was not really acceptable. And there were even politicians who said it won't happen, and everyone was waiting for the miracle to happen and things like that, so the preparation on the political side as well was not good. The army did take responsibility for its soldiers, but the state didn't take responsibility to give a clear message that this is going to happen and how it's going to happen."
For Leibler, psychologists recruited by the army had the professional and ethical imperative to at least raise the ethical issues involved in the forceful evacuation of a civilian population. But instead the psychologists took for granted that their participation in what they perceived as a fait accompli was desirable and ethical to minimize any possible damage.
"The psychologists didn't ask: Is it ethical to carry out an intervention that can cause harm to a civilian population? Harm is caused in war, and psychologists give counseling to the army. In the case of the settlers, is this war? What are the relevant ethical issues, and why were they not seriously debated? Not to consider it as an ethical issue because it's a law reeks of fascism. That says that legislation defines ethics and that ethics doesn't necessarily define legislation."
Brom thinks that psychologists from all sides of the political spectrum cannot necessarily divorce their professional practice from their political opinions.
"I think we're way beyond the idea that psychology is value free," he said. "Once there were opinions that psychologists have to be a blank screen and things like that. In these situations it's clearly not possible and not realistic for psychologists to say I have no political opinion."
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Tasting Titora (restaurant review)
Jerusalem Post, Weekend Magazine; August 2, 2007
Titora lies nestled on a road that literally has no name, amidst the rundown hothouses of Moshav Shilat a few minutes from Modi'in. The abandoned farm setting suits the quaint and rustic restaurant, built in an old storage barn for bouquet wrappings. A garden filled with thyme and peppermint plants and adorned with passion-fruit vines leads to relatively small and modestly decorated indoor and outdoor seating areas.
Titora may be hard to find for non-locals, but the location couldn't be more convenient for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv residents who use Road 443 to commute. It's a place to stop for lunch or a late-night drink, and also an apt middle point for residents of the two cities looking for an equidistant place to meet.
Residents of Modi'in and surrounding areas, particularly those who don't keep kosher, should consider Titora a find in an area not commonly associated with fine dining.
Chef-owner Bucky Dasa has used his experience as a restaurateur in Tel Aviv to combine high culinary standards with a homeyness and authenticity less prevalent in Israel's metropolis. The menu is eclectic but with a Medierranean touch, and it's clear that careful thought was put into each dish to produce aesthetic, creative and delicious results.
I started off with the passion-fruit shrimp (NIS 39), a favorite at the restaurant. It comes with six pieces of shrimp sauteed in sauce made from fruits plucked from the garden. The seafood absorbs the flavor of the tangy, sweet and buttery sauce, and the seeds of the passion fruit add a little punch.
The salmon ceviche (NIS 33) was well-done, in both senses of the phrase. It was served on a bed of beet carpaccio (thin, freshly sliced beets) swimming in olive oil and topped with freshly plucked thyme. The long, amorphous pieces of salmon on their own tasted decent, but when I wrapped the fish with the carpaccio, the appetizer turned into a particularly scrumptious, fun-to-eat and refreshing treat. Save the olive oil as a dip for the hot Moroccan bread - a wonderful combination.
The Buri Buri (NIS 68) is a generous and unusual, fresh and tasty dish. Two hefty fillets topped a mound of grilled eggplant sprinkled with lentils and parsley. The dish is garnished with olive oil and dried fruits.
The combination of all these ingredients is unconventional, but they created a perfect blend of aromas and flavors - sweet, healthful and earthy. Definitely recommended for fish and eggplant lovers.
The beef fillet (NIS 88) cooked in port wine sauce was a much heavier dish, but not any less creative or good. The beef, served with onions stuffed with nuts, bulgur and cinnamon, was superb, soft and sweet, with an extra delightful flavor added by the garlic jam sprinkled on top.
It's hard to find anything bad to say about Titora. The food is excellent, the service is friendly, the prices justified and the atmosphere pleasant.
While its isolated location on the side of an obscure road is part of its charm, it seems like it deters people from discovering it. The restaurant was empty around 6 p.m., although I'm sure if the restaurant were more accessible to passersby, it would be much more crowded.
Titora is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The outdoor patio is well-equipped to handle strollers. On Saturdays the restaurant doesn't serve its regular menu, and instead opens up as a buffet revolving around an asado meat grill (NIS 89 per person).
Shilat Industrial Zone, (08) 976-1499
Breakfast: 9-12; business lunches: 12-5;
dinner: 5-1 a.m.
Not kosher
Titora lies nestled on a road that literally has no name, amidst the rundown hothouses of Moshav Shilat a few minutes from Modi'in. The abandoned farm setting suits the quaint and rustic restaurant, built in an old storage barn for bouquet wrappings. A garden filled with thyme and peppermint plants and adorned with passion-fruit vines leads to relatively small and modestly decorated indoor and outdoor seating areas.
Titora may be hard to find for non-locals, but the location couldn't be more convenient for Jerusalem and Tel Aviv residents who use Road 443 to commute. It's a place to stop for lunch or a late-night drink, and also an apt middle point for residents of the two cities looking for an equidistant place to meet.
Residents of Modi'in and surrounding areas, particularly those who don't keep kosher, should consider Titora a find in an area not commonly associated with fine dining.
Chef-owner Bucky Dasa has used his experience as a restaurateur in Tel Aviv to combine high culinary standards with a homeyness and authenticity less prevalent in Israel's metropolis. The menu is eclectic but with a Medierranean touch, and it's clear that careful thought was put into each dish to produce aesthetic, creative and delicious results.
I started off with the passion-fruit shrimp (NIS 39), a favorite at the restaurant. It comes with six pieces of shrimp sauteed in sauce made from fruits plucked from the garden. The seafood absorbs the flavor of the tangy, sweet and buttery sauce, and the seeds of the passion fruit add a little punch.
The salmon ceviche (NIS 33) was well-done, in both senses of the phrase. It was served on a bed of beet carpaccio (thin, freshly sliced beets) swimming in olive oil and topped with freshly plucked thyme. The long, amorphous pieces of salmon on their own tasted decent, but when I wrapped the fish with the carpaccio, the appetizer turned into a particularly scrumptious, fun-to-eat and refreshing treat. Save the olive oil as a dip for the hot Moroccan bread - a wonderful combination.
The Buri Buri (NIS 68) is a generous and unusual, fresh and tasty dish. Two hefty fillets topped a mound of grilled eggplant sprinkled with lentils and parsley. The dish is garnished with olive oil and dried fruits.
The combination of all these ingredients is unconventional, but they created a perfect blend of aromas and flavors - sweet, healthful and earthy. Definitely recommended for fish and eggplant lovers.
The beef fillet (NIS 88) cooked in port wine sauce was a much heavier dish, but not any less creative or good. The beef, served with onions stuffed with nuts, bulgur and cinnamon, was superb, soft and sweet, with an extra delightful flavor added by the garlic jam sprinkled on top.
It's hard to find anything bad to say about Titora. The food is excellent, the service is friendly, the prices justified and the atmosphere pleasant.
While its isolated location on the side of an obscure road is part of its charm, it seems like it deters people from discovering it. The restaurant was empty around 6 p.m., although I'm sure if the restaurant were more accessible to passersby, it would be much more crowded.
Titora is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The outdoor patio is well-equipped to handle strollers. On Saturdays the restaurant doesn't serve its regular menu, and instead opens up as a buffet revolving around an asado meat grill (NIS 89 per person).
Shilat Industrial Zone, (08) 976-1499
Breakfast: 9-12; business lunches: 12-5;
dinner: 5-1 a.m.
Not kosher
Women: Put down your swords!
The Jewish Journal; August 2, 2007
Click here for original
"I let men be men, and I give up the right to castrate men forever."
Do I really have to say this? I wondered to myself as I tried my best to participate without skepticism in a relationships seminar I'd signed up for not long ago. Do I really "castrate" men? Do I expect them to behave more like women and as a result emasculate them? Do I not understand the differences between men and women in relationships, and is that one source of my dating woes?
I didn't have time to think too deeply about these questions, because I was immediately instructed, along with some 100 other women in the room, to stand up and recite this mantra. And I did. Some women started crying in bouts of catharsis. I didn't really feel anything when I said it, except a little wonder at myself for joining the chorus.
The mantra had jump-started the two-day workshop for women titled "Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women," which I attended not long ago at a conference room in a hotel near LAX. The program was created by a woman named Allison Armstrong, a self-professed expert on men, and it promised to foster better communication, understanding and respect between the sexes.
The session leader admitted that the language of the mantra was purposefully hyperbolic, but said that one point of the seminar was to allow us to embrace male characteristics that might fluster women, but which are an indelible part of the male psyche. This may seem like an anti-feminist lesson to some, but it is by empowering men, the workshop taught, that we actually empower ourselves. By "putting down our sword" and letting men be the best men they can be, women can begin to view men not as antagonists, but as partners.
I had decided to sign up for this workshop after attending the introductory preview course, "Making Sense of Men," which outlined some "secrets" of male attraction to women. I'd heard about it on the radio and it was free, so why not? It turned out to be pretty enlightening, making the point that confidence, a passionate interest and authenticity are among the specific qualities in a woman that can tip a man's attraction from purely physical to enchantingly spiritual.
The two-day workshop was less enlightening. The first day felt like a recap of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus." It outlined differences between the sexes, some of which are already common knowledge to many women, like: men are single-focused; men act from reason before emotion; and, most of all, men like to be the providers.
At the start of the second day, we were given a formula with specific phrasing on how to ask men for what we need. The point of some of the phraseology is to cater to a man's instinct to provide and feel appreciated for what he has done in the past. It all seemed contrived. The instructions actually made me more confused, and little time was left open for questions throughout the seminar.
I wondered if I should drop out and ask for my money back, which was quite a nice sum: about $400.
I stayed because the end promised to tie everything together: a panel of men who would field our questions about men.
But when we were prohibited from asking the men questions about sex -- of course, the most alluring topic -- I decided to head out. The topic of sex was reserved for a different, equally expensive workshop, titled "Celebrating Men in Sex." Then came the live advertisements: If you sign up today, you get a discount.
It all seemed a little exploitative to me. Women are so vulnerable when it comes to relationships that they'll spend a lot of money when someone promises them insights into positively transforming how they interact with men. Perhaps some women need the live oration of this kind of seminar, where they actively recite phrases and perform exercises. As for me, I'd rather read a good book that costs about 20 bucks and includes critical research, detailed examples, back-up and references.
When I told the workshop manager that I wasn't satisfied and wanted a refund, she was very kind and understanding, giving me the best advice of the day: It's important for women to do what's true for them and to be themselves with men.
Although I missed the men's panel, I decided to create my own. Given my confusion about the workshop lessons, I checked the premises and prescriptions of the seminar with my male friends and even with men I've dated. How do you feel about women making the first move? What qualities do you like in a woman? Do men really need a woman to completely zip up when they talk? How should a woman ask a man for what she needs?
It was amazing to discover how receptive and talkative these men became when I asked them about what makes the male species tick. Their answers actually validated many of the ideas I'd learned in the seminar, while challenging others.
That's when I realized the best workshop I could ever attend is the workshop of my own life. By communicating openly, honestly and freely with the opposite sex -- platonic or romantic -- is how we all, men and women alike, put down our swords. And it's free.
Click here for original
"I let men be men, and I give up the right to castrate men forever."
Do I really have to say this? I wondered to myself as I tried my best to participate without skepticism in a relationships seminar I'd signed up for not long ago. Do I really "castrate" men? Do I expect them to behave more like women and as a result emasculate them? Do I not understand the differences between men and women in relationships, and is that one source of my dating woes?
I didn't have time to think too deeply about these questions, because I was immediately instructed, along with some 100 other women in the room, to stand up and recite this mantra. And I did. Some women started crying in bouts of catharsis. I didn't really feel anything when I said it, except a little wonder at myself for joining the chorus.
The mantra had jump-started the two-day workshop for women titled "Celebrating Men, Satisfying Women," which I attended not long ago at a conference room in a hotel near LAX. The program was created by a woman named Allison Armstrong, a self-professed expert on men, and it promised to foster better communication, understanding and respect between the sexes.
The session leader admitted that the language of the mantra was purposefully hyperbolic, but said that one point of the seminar was to allow us to embrace male characteristics that might fluster women, but which are an indelible part of the male psyche. This may seem like an anti-feminist lesson to some, but it is by empowering men, the workshop taught, that we actually empower ourselves. By "putting down our sword" and letting men be the best men they can be, women can begin to view men not as antagonists, but as partners.
I had decided to sign up for this workshop after attending the introductory preview course, "Making Sense of Men," which outlined some "secrets" of male attraction to women. I'd heard about it on the radio and it was free, so why not? It turned out to be pretty enlightening, making the point that confidence, a passionate interest and authenticity are among the specific qualities in a woman that can tip a man's attraction from purely physical to enchantingly spiritual.
The two-day workshop was less enlightening. The first day felt like a recap of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus." It outlined differences between the sexes, some of which are already common knowledge to many women, like: men are single-focused; men act from reason before emotion; and, most of all, men like to be the providers.
At the start of the second day, we were given a formula with specific phrasing on how to ask men for what we need. The point of some of the phraseology is to cater to a man's instinct to provide and feel appreciated for what he has done in the past. It all seemed contrived. The instructions actually made me more confused, and little time was left open for questions throughout the seminar.
I wondered if I should drop out and ask for my money back, which was quite a nice sum: about $400.
I stayed because the end promised to tie everything together: a panel of men who would field our questions about men.
But when we were prohibited from asking the men questions about sex -- of course, the most alluring topic -- I decided to head out. The topic of sex was reserved for a different, equally expensive workshop, titled "Celebrating Men in Sex." Then came the live advertisements: If you sign up today, you get a discount.
It all seemed a little exploitative to me. Women are so vulnerable when it comes to relationships that they'll spend a lot of money when someone promises them insights into positively transforming how they interact with men. Perhaps some women need the live oration of this kind of seminar, where they actively recite phrases and perform exercises. As for me, I'd rather read a good book that costs about 20 bucks and includes critical research, detailed examples, back-up and references.
When I told the workshop manager that I wasn't satisfied and wanted a refund, she was very kind and understanding, giving me the best advice of the day: It's important for women to do what's true for them and to be themselves with men.
Although I missed the men's panel, I decided to create my own. Given my confusion about the workshop lessons, I checked the premises and prescriptions of the seminar with my male friends and even with men I've dated. How do you feel about women making the first move? What qualities do you like in a woman? Do men really need a woman to completely zip up when they talk? How should a woman ask a man for what she needs?
It was amazing to discover how receptive and talkative these men became when I asked them about what makes the male species tick. Their answers actually validated many of the ideas I'd learned in the seminar, while challenging others.
That's when I realized the best workshop I could ever attend is the workshop of my own life. By communicating openly, honestly and freely with the opposite sex -- platonic or romantic -- is how we all, men and women alike, put down our swords. And it's free.
Friday, July 13, 2007
The nexus
Jerusalem Post, Up Front; July 13, 2007
Click here for original
For followers of controversial novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, Israel is the one glimmer of light in the Middle East's cultural and intellectual darkness. Dr. Yaron Brook applies Ayn Rand's philosophies to Israel's predicaments.
Anyone who has heard Dr. Yaron Brook lecture on foreign policy would likely call him a militant, unflinching champion of Israel. His loyalty, however, does not derive from his Jewish or Israeli background. He's a proud atheist, who admits to not knowing - or really caring - when the Pessah Seder falls. He relentlessly defends Israel and the West because he puts his faith in the rational, free, individual soul.
Brook is the president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in Irvine, California, an educational institute and resource center entrusted with spreading Objectivism, the formal name of the philosophy of the controversial 20th-century novelist-philosopher.
'We view what happens in Israel as an indicator of what will happen in the rest of the world. To the extent America abandons Israel, it abandons itself. Israel is a beacon of civilization in a barbaric, backward area,' Brook said on a recent trip here to visit family with his wife, also an Israeli expatriate, and their two children. 'Israel represents, despite its flaws, the values of the West: individual rights, free speech, freedom of the press, equality before the law and the rule of law.'
Objectivism upholds values generally associated with Western culture - individualism, reason and science - but its distinctive development is a moral ideal of 'selfishness,' whereby someone's own happiness is a moral responsibility. The home page of ARI presents Rand's mantra: 'My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.'
ARI was founded in 1985, after Rand's death, by her intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, to pave the way for a philosophical and cultural renaissance in the US and to reverse what ARI sees as anti-reason, anti-individualism and anti-capitalist trends in today's culture. It concentrates on American domestic issues, but Israel figures prominently in its lectures, essays and editorials.
'Ayn Rand herself commented that Israel was one of the few causes she ever voluntarily supported,' Brook said. 'The West turning against Israel - which she saw occurring in the late 1960s and early 1970s - was the West committing suicide.'
Those familiar with Rand's disdain for religion and socialism might find her sympathy for Israel surprising. '[Rand] said Israel has problems, as all countries, but Israel is still West,' Brook said. 'It respects individual rights, reason and science. She could separate out essentials from non-essentials. If Israel abandoned all its Western values, it wouldn't deserve support.'
BORN ALICE ROSENBAUM in 1905 in St. Petersburg to a secular, middle-class Jewish family, Rand fled to the US from the Soviet Union in 1925 because she saw America as the best model of a free country. The new communist regime had already confiscated her father's pharmacy.
Rand maintained no Jewish affiliation throughout her life and shunned religion because it was based on faith as opposed to reason. At 29, she wrote in her philosophical journal: 'I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.' She observed no Jewish holidays, but kept Christmas as an American holiday celebrating life and human productivity. Her only acknowledgment of her Jewish identity came in the face of anti-Semitic remarks, as a retort to racism.
She married an American named Frank O'Conner and deliberately had no children so she could give birth to fictional characters who upheld her vision of a hero. Her trademark character is Howard Roark, the intransigent architect of The Fountainhead, who refuses to bend his architectural vision to society's irrational standards. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, dignifies the villain of socialist artists - the industrial capitalist - through a futuristic depiction of a collectivist America.
From the 1950s until her death in 1982, she led an intellectual movement based on Objectivism, although some critics have dubbed it a cult. Brook thinks her popularity is now at its highest, with more than 750,000 of her books sold annually.
Historically, American academia has been dismissive of Ayn Rand, but in recent years her work is increasingly being included in mainstream curricula. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, which works to raise her profile in academic circles, more than 30 professors teach Rand in leading American universities, with the number continually growing.
Rand remains an obscure figure in Israeli academia, even though many Israelis read her novels in their teens and 20s, including Prof. Elhanan Yakira, head of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University. 'I don't know anyone with us that really teaches her philosophy,' he said. 'There could be people that deal with her, but I don't really know. Sometimes people mention her name, but not a lot.' He can't comment on whether her lack of representation stems from any antipathy to her ideas.
In the 1970s, a capricious philosopher named Moshe Kroy taught Rand's philosophy at Tel Aviv University, but he eventually abandoned rational egoism for Scientology, and later, Indian mysticism, which may have contributed to the perception that her philosophy is a fad. Rand's philosophy is no longer taught at Tel Aviv University.
When asked what he thought of Rand, Joseph Agassi, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and York University in Toronto, reacted with sharp dislike, calling her a 'fool' and her philosophy unserious. 'It's very low quality,' he said. 'It's extreme right, although not religious right.'
He'd rather teach someone like Khalil Jibran, a Lebanese-born inspirational philosopher. 'He's much more friendly; I just like him more, but I wouldn't teach him either.' He adds that Rand's philosophy is generally easy to study independently and doesn't require a university course.
Prof. Noah Milgram, who attended Brook's lecture, would not be surprised if Israeli professors shy away from her. 'The socialist bent of many Israeli-born and Israeli- trained academicians is such that if they read Ayn Rand's novels, they'd probably dismiss them as inhumane stories about egoism,' said Milgram, dean of graduate studies at the College of Judea and Samaria and professor emeritus in psychology at Tel Aviv University.
Milgram first heard of Rand in the early 1950s, when The Fountainhead was on the reading list of a course on American intellectual thought he took as a student at Harvard. The course was taught by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Milgram remained an admirer of her works, and his daughter, Shoshana, a professor at Virginia Tech University, does biographic and literary research on the life and work of Rand.
'In America there is more respect for the notion that the goals of individuals are more important than the goals enforced upon him by society,' he said. 'Admittedly, American universities also have a slant toward liberal and left-leaning thinking, but her ideas are more acceptable in American philosophical and political thought, precisely because they are in accord with the American ideal of the individual acting in accord with his conscience, conquering the frontier and advancing from the log cabin in which he was born to the White House.'
Unlike in the US, where there are many campus clubs dedicated to Objectivism and several independent organizations that systematically study and discuss Rand's work, there are few organized outlets in Israel for Rand scholars and admirers. Over the years there have been attempts to create campus clubs and fan networks here, but none of them stuck.
BOAZ ARAD, an Objectivist who runs his own company selling mobile computers and accessories, started a magazine dedicated to Objectivism in 1987. In 2005 it evolved into Anochi.com, the only comprehensive Hebrew Web site dedicated to Rand's ideas and which received the blessing of ARI. ('Anochi' means 'I' in archaic Hebrew, as a reference to Rand's virtue of 'selfishness.') According to Arad, the site's number of visitors is on the rise, reaching several thousand a month. He estimates there are about 100 Objectivists in Israel and about 1,000 ardent Rand admirers.
Arad developed an interest in Rand after reading The Fountainhead as a teen. He and Brook met in their late teens, united by their interest in Rand's ideas, and it was Arad who organized Brook's lecture.
While the Jewish state may lack serious representation of Rand scholarship, in the US, many leaders of the Objectivist movement are Jewish.
'Most communists are Jewish. Most professors are Jewish. Jews are intellectuals, so they dominate any intellectual movement,' Brook commented. 'Jews dominate the anti-Zionist movement. I wouldn't be surprised if Jews head up Holocaust denial. Jews are intellectual; they gravitate towards ideas. Why that is, that's a deeper question. I think they'd certainly gravitate towards a set of ideas that make sense.' In fact, many of the writers and fellows at the Ayn Rand Institute are Jewish.
Arad said the lack of crossover of Rand's ideas to modern Israel is not terribly surprising. 'Israel had very strong leftist roots historically, especially among the intellectuals, and they felt very intimidated by Ayn Rand ideas, but this didn't cancel the fact that many Israelis read and love Ayn Rand and consider her books to be very moving and inspiring. Not as many applied her ideas to their lives and pursued the philosophy behind the books.'
He related how he recently received a call from an elderly lady who said she was a fan of Ayn Rand. 'She never knew there was any activity related to Ayn Rand, whom she always liked since she was young. I'm sure there are many more like her around.'
(BOX) 'You don't fight a tactic'
Dr. Yaron Brook, 46, speaks and carries himself like a Rand hero. His facial features are angular, his demeanor self-confident. His language is principled, logical, certain, fired by moral passion, replete with absolute terms: good and evil, right and wrong, defeat and victory. He has a slight lisp, which is easily overshadowed by the controversial and harsh words that roll off his tongue.
For the first time since he left Israel for America in 1987 - for essentially the same reasons Rand did - Brook gave a lecture in his mother country: 'Israel and the West's War with Islamic Totalitarianism: Why We are Losing.'
Born in Jerusalem and raised in Haifa, Brook met few intellectuals here who could nurture his interest in Rand's ideas, which he first developed at 16 after reading Atlas Shrugged. The novel catapulted him out of the socialist-Zionist way of thought he had inherited from his South African-Israeli parents and from Israeli education and culture.
'I resisted Atlas Shrugged when I read it, but she convinced me,' he said.
After serving in the army and receiving his BA from the Technion, he took off for the US. 'Israel is small, but with its socialist policy, ridiculous political system, constant external threats, I didn't think it was the place I could make the most of my life,' Brook said.
He went on to receive a PhD in finance and taught finance for seven years at Santa Clara University while running his own consulting firm and a company that organized objectivist conferences. He became head of the Ayn Rand Institute in 2001.
September 11 marked a turning point for ARI, which saw itself in a unique position to defend America morally and intellectually. Brook's Israeli background, along with Israel's struggles with terror, made the Jewish state an even more popular topic on the institute's agenda. Brook has lectured at numerous US college campuses, often under tight security, appeared numerous times on Fox and CNBC, and is emerging as one of the most outspoken voices when it comes to the 'War on Terror,' a title, Brook says, that already dooms the West to failure.
'You don't fight a tactic,' he said in his talk. 'Terrorism is a tactic, and I believe we have to look at the ideological source of terrorism in order to identify the true enemy.' He defines this source as Islamic totalitarianism, which he describes as an expansionist philosophy that seeks to spread Islam by the sword, but he thinks that the enemy's identity has been blurred or ignored by government leaders and the intelligentsia.
'We don't have the guts, the courage, the self-esteem to even identify who the enemy is. We couch it in terms of terrorists who happen to be Muslims who are 'hijacking a great religion.' We're afraid to say 'Islamic anything': Islamic fascism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it.' The fear stems, he said, from the academic trend of multiculturalism, in which all cultures are morally equal, and moral relativism, in which 'anything goes' in human behavior.
But, he said, the most damaging idea to the cause of the West is the opposite of Rand's virtue of selfishness: altruism, which Rand didn't define as good-hearted kindness and generosity, but as the idea that one must sacrifice his own interests for the sake of others. Altruism, said Brook, leads to pacifism because 'self-defense is a very selfish act. It's a very self-interested act to defend one's own life, especially in war.'
Brook argues that this form of altruism goads both America and Israel to wage 'compassionate wars': for the American army to build sewers instead of ruthlessly bombing terrorist targets, and for the IDF to send food into Gaza instead of troops and tanks. With such an altruistic approach, Brook says, Israel is setting itself up for defeat.
'There's a whole generation of post-Zionist professors who've been writing for the past 20, 30 years, here in Israel, how this country was founded on original sin,' Brook said in his talk. '[They say] there's no basis for this country; there's no moral reason why this country should exist. We've exploited; we've stolen; we've taken from peaceful people. It's our fault for all these problems. When that's the center of your focus, when you're filled with self-doubt, when you don't believe that your values are better than anyone else's, you cannot fight. You cannot win.
'I believe victory is possible, it just takes something we're not willing to do.' That 'something,' he said confidently, is to wage war with little restraint and without apology against Islamic totalitarianism.
'Israel should plan and execute a systematic invasion of Gaza in which its goal is to wipe out the political and military leadership and infrastructure of Hamas, and to do so systematically and brutally. It needs to send a message to the world, to the Muslim population of the world, to Palestinians in the West Bank, that Israel will not tolerate a terrorist state at its border and would not tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas.'
What about international opinion? 'The issue of Israel's survival is at stake, so the choice, I believe, is between the world loving us and we're dead or the world hating us for a while but we survive and thrive and we live. You cannot make life-or-death choices based on other people's opinions of you. You have to make choices on what you believe is necessary for your survival, your success.'
'If you want to win, innocents will die. There is no way to get around it. There was no war in which innocents didn't die, and there won't be. At the end of the day, the question is whose 'innocents.' Ours or theirs? If we have pride, self-respect, we have to protect our own innocents.'
HE CONCEDES the validity of Jews banding together in the face of the collective threat of anti-Semitism, but in his essay 'The Rise and Decline of Israel' he argued that the Jewish state's collectivist and religious basis, socialist Zionism, has sown the seeds for its own downfall.
'Zionism fused a valid concern - self-preservation amid a storm of hostility - with a toxic premise - ethnically based collectivism and religion,' he wrote.
Socialist Zionism, he said, also led to the Oslo Accords, through which Israel agreed to set up another ethnically and religiously based state along its border, despite it being headed by a proven terrorist. 'Here was a man [Yasser Arafat] who represents a suffering people, an ethnic group that sought to make its claim for statehood a reality. How could Israel say no? Wasn't it similar to - and so just as legitimate as - the claim of the Jews?'
Given objectivism's capitalistic ideal of private property, he opposes government confiscation of private Arab land for Jewish settlement as much as he opposes the notion of 'public land' - Arab or Jewish. Yet he regards the settlements as security - and moral - buffers; they are a test of the Palestinian's true intentions.
'If the [Palestinians] really want peace why do they want settlements dismantled?' Brook said. 'Why wouldn't they say we want a Palestinian state and we want these Jews to stay here and live as full citizens of the Palestinian state? They're productive individuals, they create jobs, they bring a wealth of knowledge. If Palestinians are about ethnic cleansing, getting rid of Jews so that the Palestinian state is pure, then they're not ready for peace, and Israel should not make peace with them.'
Given his strong opposition to evacuating settlements, one might guess that the right-wing settlers are natural allies for objectivists. Editorials of the Ayn Rand Institute have been published in such right-wing outlets as Arutz 7.
But Brook disagrees. 'I think their whole basis for agreeing with me is corrupt and wrong. Most settlers agree with me for religious reasons. They believe it's some kind of Holy Land that God promised them. The rest of their analysis is derived from that premise, not from a true, rational observation of reality. I think the logic of 'God promised this and gave me this' is one that can only lead to bloodshed and war. I don't think people who have that approach can come up with solutions to deal with the threat.'
Click here for original
For followers of controversial novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand, Israel is the one glimmer of light in the Middle East's cultural and intellectual darkness. Dr. Yaron Brook applies Ayn Rand's philosophies to Israel's predicaments.
Anyone who has heard Dr. Yaron Brook lecture on foreign policy would likely call him a militant, unflinching champion of Israel. His loyalty, however, does not derive from his Jewish or Israeli background. He's a proud atheist, who admits to not knowing - or really caring - when the Pessah Seder falls. He relentlessly defends Israel and the West because he puts his faith in the rational, free, individual soul.
Brook is the president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) in Irvine, California, an educational institute and resource center entrusted with spreading Objectivism, the formal name of the philosophy of the controversial 20th-century novelist-philosopher.
'We view what happens in Israel as an indicator of what will happen in the rest of the world. To the extent America abandons Israel, it abandons itself. Israel is a beacon of civilization in a barbaric, backward area,' Brook said on a recent trip here to visit family with his wife, also an Israeli expatriate, and their two children. 'Israel represents, despite its flaws, the values of the West: individual rights, free speech, freedom of the press, equality before the law and the rule of law.'
Objectivism upholds values generally associated with Western culture - individualism, reason and science - but its distinctive development is a moral ideal of 'selfishness,' whereby someone's own happiness is a moral responsibility. The home page of ARI presents Rand's mantra: 'My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.'
ARI was founded in 1985, after Rand's death, by her intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff, to pave the way for a philosophical and cultural renaissance in the US and to reverse what ARI sees as anti-reason, anti-individualism and anti-capitalist trends in today's culture. It concentrates on American domestic issues, but Israel figures prominently in its lectures, essays and editorials.
'Ayn Rand herself commented that Israel was one of the few causes she ever voluntarily supported,' Brook said. 'The West turning against Israel - which she saw occurring in the late 1960s and early 1970s - was the West committing suicide.'
Those familiar with Rand's disdain for religion and socialism might find her sympathy for Israel surprising. '[Rand] said Israel has problems, as all countries, but Israel is still West,' Brook said. 'It respects individual rights, reason and science. She could separate out essentials from non-essentials. If Israel abandoned all its Western values, it wouldn't deserve support.'
BORN ALICE ROSENBAUM in 1905 in St. Petersburg to a secular, middle-class Jewish family, Rand fled to the US from the Soviet Union in 1925 because she saw America as the best model of a free country. The new communist regime had already confiscated her father's pharmacy.
Rand maintained no Jewish affiliation throughout her life and shunned religion because it was based on faith as opposed to reason. At 29, she wrote in her philosophical journal: 'I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.' She observed no Jewish holidays, but kept Christmas as an American holiday celebrating life and human productivity. Her only acknowledgment of her Jewish identity came in the face of anti-Semitic remarks, as a retort to racism.
She married an American named Frank O'Conner and deliberately had no children so she could give birth to fictional characters who upheld her vision of a hero. Her trademark character is Howard Roark, the intransigent architect of The Fountainhead, who refuses to bend his architectural vision to society's irrational standards. Her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, dignifies the villain of socialist artists - the industrial capitalist - through a futuristic depiction of a collectivist America.
From the 1950s until her death in 1982, she led an intellectual movement based on Objectivism, although some critics have dubbed it a cult. Brook thinks her popularity is now at its highest, with more than 750,000 of her books sold annually.
Historically, American academia has been dismissive of Ayn Rand, but in recent years her work is increasingly being included in mainstream curricula. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, which works to raise her profile in academic circles, more than 30 professors teach Rand in leading American universities, with the number continually growing.
Rand remains an obscure figure in Israeli academia, even though many Israelis read her novels in their teens and 20s, including Prof. Elhanan Yakira, head of the philosophy department at the Hebrew University. 'I don't know anyone with us that really teaches her philosophy,' he said. 'There could be people that deal with her, but I don't really know. Sometimes people mention her name, but not a lot.' He can't comment on whether her lack of representation stems from any antipathy to her ideas.
In the 1970s, a capricious philosopher named Moshe Kroy taught Rand's philosophy at Tel Aviv University, but he eventually abandoned rational egoism for Scientology, and later, Indian mysticism, which may have contributed to the perception that her philosophy is a fad. Rand's philosophy is no longer taught at Tel Aviv University.
When asked what he thought of Rand, Joseph Agassi, professor emeritus of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and York University in Toronto, reacted with sharp dislike, calling her a 'fool' and her philosophy unserious. 'It's very low quality,' he said. 'It's extreme right, although not religious right.'
He'd rather teach someone like Khalil Jibran, a Lebanese-born inspirational philosopher. 'He's much more friendly; I just like him more, but I wouldn't teach him either.' He adds that Rand's philosophy is generally easy to study independently and doesn't require a university course.
Prof. Noah Milgram, who attended Brook's lecture, would not be surprised if Israeli professors shy away from her. 'The socialist bent of many Israeli-born and Israeli- trained academicians is such that if they read Ayn Rand's novels, they'd probably dismiss them as inhumane stories about egoism,' said Milgram, dean of graduate studies at the College of Judea and Samaria and professor emeritus in psychology at Tel Aviv University.
Milgram first heard of Rand in the early 1950s, when The Fountainhead was on the reading list of a course on American intellectual thought he took as a student at Harvard. The course was taught by the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Milgram remained an admirer of her works, and his daughter, Shoshana, a professor at Virginia Tech University, does biographic and literary research on the life and work of Rand.
'In America there is more respect for the notion that the goals of individuals are more important than the goals enforced upon him by society,' he said. 'Admittedly, American universities also have a slant toward liberal and left-leaning thinking, but her ideas are more acceptable in American philosophical and political thought, precisely because they are in accord with the American ideal of the individual acting in accord with his conscience, conquering the frontier and advancing from the log cabin in which he was born to the White House.'
Unlike in the US, where there are many campus clubs dedicated to Objectivism and several independent organizations that systematically study and discuss Rand's work, there are few organized outlets in Israel for Rand scholars and admirers. Over the years there have been attempts to create campus clubs and fan networks here, but none of them stuck.
BOAZ ARAD, an Objectivist who runs his own company selling mobile computers and accessories, started a magazine dedicated to Objectivism in 1987. In 2005 it evolved into Anochi.com, the only comprehensive Hebrew Web site dedicated to Rand's ideas and which received the blessing of ARI. ('Anochi' means 'I' in archaic Hebrew, as a reference to Rand's virtue of 'selfishness.') According to Arad, the site's number of visitors is on the rise, reaching several thousand a month. He estimates there are about 100 Objectivists in Israel and about 1,000 ardent Rand admirers.
Arad developed an interest in Rand after reading The Fountainhead as a teen. He and Brook met in their late teens, united by their interest in Rand's ideas, and it was Arad who organized Brook's lecture.
While the Jewish state may lack serious representation of Rand scholarship, in the US, many leaders of the Objectivist movement are Jewish.
'Most communists are Jewish. Most professors are Jewish. Jews are intellectuals, so they dominate any intellectual movement,' Brook commented. 'Jews dominate the anti-Zionist movement. I wouldn't be surprised if Jews head up Holocaust denial. Jews are intellectual; they gravitate towards ideas. Why that is, that's a deeper question. I think they'd certainly gravitate towards a set of ideas that make sense.' In fact, many of the writers and fellows at the Ayn Rand Institute are Jewish.
Arad said the lack of crossover of Rand's ideas to modern Israel is not terribly surprising. 'Israel had very strong leftist roots historically, especially among the intellectuals, and they felt very intimidated by Ayn Rand ideas, but this didn't cancel the fact that many Israelis read and love Ayn Rand and consider her books to be very moving and inspiring. Not as many applied her ideas to their lives and pursued the philosophy behind the books.'
He related how he recently received a call from an elderly lady who said she was a fan of Ayn Rand. 'She never knew there was any activity related to Ayn Rand, whom she always liked since she was young. I'm sure there are many more like her around.'
(BOX) 'You don't fight a tactic'
Dr. Yaron Brook, 46, speaks and carries himself like a Rand hero. His facial features are angular, his demeanor self-confident. His language is principled, logical, certain, fired by moral passion, replete with absolute terms: good and evil, right and wrong, defeat and victory. He has a slight lisp, which is easily overshadowed by the controversial and harsh words that roll off his tongue.
For the first time since he left Israel for America in 1987 - for essentially the same reasons Rand did - Brook gave a lecture in his mother country: 'Israel and the West's War with Islamic Totalitarianism: Why We are Losing.'
Born in Jerusalem and raised in Haifa, Brook met few intellectuals here who could nurture his interest in Rand's ideas, which he first developed at 16 after reading Atlas Shrugged. The novel catapulted him out of the socialist-Zionist way of thought he had inherited from his South African-Israeli parents and from Israeli education and culture.
'I resisted Atlas Shrugged when I read it, but she convinced me,' he said.
After serving in the army and receiving his BA from the Technion, he took off for the US. 'Israel is small, but with its socialist policy, ridiculous political system, constant external threats, I didn't think it was the place I could make the most of my life,' Brook said.
He went on to receive a PhD in finance and taught finance for seven years at Santa Clara University while running his own consulting firm and a company that organized objectivist conferences. He became head of the Ayn Rand Institute in 2001.
September 11 marked a turning point for ARI, which saw itself in a unique position to defend America morally and intellectually. Brook's Israeli background, along with Israel's struggles with terror, made the Jewish state an even more popular topic on the institute's agenda. Brook has lectured at numerous US college campuses, often under tight security, appeared numerous times on Fox and CNBC, and is emerging as one of the most outspoken voices when it comes to the 'War on Terror,' a title, Brook says, that already dooms the West to failure.
'You don't fight a tactic,' he said in his talk. 'Terrorism is a tactic, and I believe we have to look at the ideological source of terrorism in order to identify the true enemy.' He defines this source as Islamic totalitarianism, which he describes as an expansionist philosophy that seeks to spread Islam by the sword, but he thinks that the enemy's identity has been blurred or ignored by government leaders and the intelligentsia.
'We don't have the guts, the courage, the self-esteem to even identify who the enemy is. We couch it in terms of terrorists who happen to be Muslims who are 'hijacking a great religion.' We're afraid to say 'Islamic anything': Islamic fascism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it.' The fear stems, he said, from the academic trend of multiculturalism, in which all cultures are morally equal, and moral relativism, in which 'anything goes' in human behavior.
But, he said, the most damaging idea to the cause of the West is the opposite of Rand's virtue of selfishness: altruism, which Rand didn't define as good-hearted kindness and generosity, but as the idea that one must sacrifice his own interests for the sake of others. Altruism, said Brook, leads to pacifism because 'self-defense is a very selfish act. It's a very self-interested act to defend one's own life, especially in war.'
Brook argues that this form of altruism goads both America and Israel to wage 'compassionate wars': for the American army to build sewers instead of ruthlessly bombing terrorist targets, and for the IDF to send food into Gaza instead of troops and tanks. With such an altruistic approach, Brook says, Israel is setting itself up for defeat.
'There's a whole generation of post-Zionist professors who've been writing for the past 20, 30 years, here in Israel, how this country was founded on original sin,' Brook said in his talk. '[They say] there's no basis for this country; there's no moral reason why this country should exist. We've exploited; we've stolen; we've taken from peaceful people. It's our fault for all these problems. When that's the center of your focus, when you're filled with self-doubt, when you don't believe that your values are better than anyone else's, you cannot fight. You cannot win.
'I believe victory is possible, it just takes something we're not willing to do.' That 'something,' he said confidently, is to wage war with little restraint and without apology against Islamic totalitarianism.
'Israel should plan and execute a systematic invasion of Gaza in which its goal is to wipe out the political and military leadership and infrastructure of Hamas, and to do so systematically and brutally. It needs to send a message to the world, to the Muslim population of the world, to Palestinians in the West Bank, that Israel will not tolerate a terrorist state at its border and would not tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas.'
What about international opinion? 'The issue of Israel's survival is at stake, so the choice, I believe, is between the world loving us and we're dead or the world hating us for a while but we survive and thrive and we live. You cannot make life-or-death choices based on other people's opinions of you. You have to make choices on what you believe is necessary for your survival, your success.'
'If you want to win, innocents will die. There is no way to get around it. There was no war in which innocents didn't die, and there won't be. At the end of the day, the question is whose 'innocents.' Ours or theirs? If we have pride, self-respect, we have to protect our own innocents.'
HE CONCEDES the validity of Jews banding together in the face of the collective threat of anti-Semitism, but in his essay 'The Rise and Decline of Israel' he argued that the Jewish state's collectivist and religious basis, socialist Zionism, has sown the seeds for its own downfall.
'Zionism fused a valid concern - self-preservation amid a storm of hostility - with a toxic premise - ethnically based collectivism and religion,' he wrote.
Socialist Zionism, he said, also led to the Oslo Accords, through which Israel agreed to set up another ethnically and religiously based state along its border, despite it being headed by a proven terrorist. 'Here was a man [Yasser Arafat] who represents a suffering people, an ethnic group that sought to make its claim for statehood a reality. How could Israel say no? Wasn't it similar to - and so just as legitimate as - the claim of the Jews?'
Given objectivism's capitalistic ideal of private property, he opposes government confiscation of private Arab land for Jewish settlement as much as he opposes the notion of 'public land' - Arab or Jewish. Yet he regards the settlements as security - and moral - buffers; they are a test of the Palestinian's true intentions.
'If the [Palestinians] really want peace why do they want settlements dismantled?' Brook said. 'Why wouldn't they say we want a Palestinian state and we want these Jews to stay here and live as full citizens of the Palestinian state? They're productive individuals, they create jobs, they bring a wealth of knowledge. If Palestinians are about ethnic cleansing, getting rid of Jews so that the Palestinian state is pure, then they're not ready for peace, and Israel should not make peace with them.'
Given his strong opposition to evacuating settlements, one might guess that the right-wing settlers are natural allies for objectivists. Editorials of the Ayn Rand Institute have been published in such right-wing outlets as Arutz 7.
But Brook disagrees. 'I think their whole basis for agreeing with me is corrupt and wrong. Most settlers agree with me for religious reasons. They believe it's some kind of Holy Land that God promised them. The rest of their analysis is derived from that premise, not from a true, rational observation of reality. I think the logic of 'God promised this and gave me this' is one that can only lead to bloodshed and war. I don't think people who have that approach can come up with solutions to deal with the threat.'
Friday, June 29, 2007
The music scene's new groove
Jerusalem Post, Metro; June 29, 2007
Record companies, musicians and schools are dealing with the cellphone and Internet era by restructuring the way they make and sell their music.
The digital age has claimed many casualties the world over: printed classified ads, snail mail, music CDs, and no less than all of these, record companies. Music technology and the internet have transformed the way creative musicians produce, market and distribute music, rendering many artists less reliant on record companies.
Artists can now brand themselves as record labels, creating full albums from the comfort of their own bedroom for little more than the cost of computer hardware and software.
Israeli record companies are restructuring their business models to adapt to industry developments brought on by new technologies. Music schools are adding technology and music business courses to their curricula, and artists are picking up new, non-music related skills in order to compete as self-sufficient artists.
To help musicians navigate the redrawn industry battleground, Koltura, a Tel Aviv-based production and public relations company, held its first 'Conference for Israeli Musicians' earlier this month, drawing over 100 musicians over the course of three days, covering topics such as breaking into international markets, grass-roots concert promotion, penetrating the cellphone market and self-management.
'In our two years of operation, we have encountered many artists who are very talented but face obstacles in getting their music heard, making a living from music, and managing themselves in the music industry,' explained Oded Mizrachi, public relations director of Koltura. 'Many musicians manage themselves in a way that was relevant 20 years ago - they view record labels and radio as the main means. Today, in the world of the internet and cellphones - an age when everyone can record in their home studios - there are many more opportunities for artists who haven't signed with a record label to promote themselves, whether through internet marketing or intense field work to get gigs.'
During the same week of this conference, the Hed College of Contemporary Music in south Tel Aviv held a week-long seminar on the music business - a largely underdiscussed topic in local music schools - as part of the school's 16th anniversary celebrations. Entitled 'How to Advance a Music Industry Career,' the seminar brought top industry professionals to lecture on topics such as copyrights, the functions of a record company and public relations.
'Today the name of the game is marketing, PR, collaborations and initiative,' says music producer Danny Recht, who lectured on the effect of industry changes in the market. Recht runs his own music consultancy firm and has produced hit albums for Israeli bands including Rockfour, Teapacks and Knesiat HaSechel.
Speaking with Metro at his sleek studio loft in south Tel Aviv, he noted that the most striking change in the music industry has been the proliferation of quality home studios that have made the 'master recording' - the main commodity of music companies - obsolete.
Some music today doesn't even require packaging. Songs or tracks could be created using digital synthesizers and then transferred as a digital file with the touch of a button.
Recht pulled out a 'relic' from Israeli modern history: a two-inch tape of the 1994 album of Knesiat HaSechel on which 24 pre-mix audio channels, symbolized by grooves in the tape, have been recorded. 'I keep it as a souvenir,' he said.
Today, modern sequencing programs simulate the process of a two-inch tape, allowing producers and artists to record and mix dozens of music channels through their personal computer. New sounds can be synthesized using sound design software and some artists can bypass recording acoustic instruments by incorporating natural-sounding instrument music samples into their tracks.
As methods for creating and distributing music have become cheaper and more accessible, artists, managers and record labels must divert their energies and resources to creative marketing and promotion if they want to break into the mainstream market. 'I think music production geared for a commercial audience has to have behind it someone who can strategize and develop an artistic concept,' says Recht. 'Today, it's not enough that a song will sound good. A place has to be created for it on the crowded shelf.'
Udi Henis, A&R director for one of Israel's largest record labels, Hed Artzi, and teacher of music business at the Rimon School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon, considers record companies 'passe' and notes that they must now refashion themselves as 'music companies' to stay afloat. This means focusing more on distribution, public relations and artist management rather than traditional music production. 'They've suddenly understood - it took a bit of time - that you can't make a profit from CDs alone,' says Henis. 'They're getting more into management, booking.'
This does not mean that artists do not seek homes - and transformative backing - within large record companies that have already built up connections, credibility and resources to advance their artists. Henis himself has been responsible for signing breakout artists such as Harel Skaat, Keren Peles and Din Din Aviv.
'We still have a lot of artists. The A&R department is also searching for artists, not necessarily those who are just starting out,' says Henis.
Realizing the importance of the home studio, contemporary music schools in Tel Aviv have all made classes in sequencing technology a required course for its students, although schools vary on the weight they give to music technology.
Muzik, a relatively new music school founded in 1997 as 'the DJ School for Contemporary Music,' has recently developed a three-year academic program born out of the recent changes in the music industry. The approach at Muzik is that technology is not only a means to record, but an indelible part of the creative act, often expressed in electronic music genres such as electro punk, minimal techno, industrial R&B and funk metal. The school offers courses in traditional topics such as music theory, orchestration and arrangement, alongside courses in professional home studio creation, sound design, live performance software, self-promotion and management.
'Until about 12 years ago, a composing musician would have to create a demo, in which he recorded himself singing with accompaniment and presented a cassette to a record label,' explains Ronen Heruti, director of Muzik, from his office near the Azrieli towers. 'A band would go into a recording studio and create a rough sketch. There was only one address: the record company, who usually rejected them. [If not rejected,] the record company would begin the process of signing the artist: producing an album in a professional studio; hiring a musical arranger; coordinating rehearsal rooms; recording, finishing and mastering the work. It was an expensive process. Few artists could afford this production process on their own.'
The mass marketing of the CD-R, the increased speed of computer processors and peer-to-peer technology have changed all that. 'The home studio was born. Suddenly, the computer could be the center of music creation. You may not achieve the same results as recording in a very expensive studio, but you can create something at a professional level,' Heruti expounds.
Muzik's curriculum is based on the vision of an independent artist who can rely on his home computer to draw from a full orchestra - plus original synthesized sounds - to produce a self-made album. 'Our students build their own independent home studios from the moment they enter school,' explains Amit Hecht, the academic director at Muzik. 'They view it as their most important creative toolÊand do most of their production workÊfrom home already at the end of their first year.'
Muzik recently partnered with the Open University to offer a BA in humanities specializing in music production. As part of its pioneering approach, Muzik does not offer formal classes for more traditional musical instruments such as guitar, but rather requires students to study keyboard skills and a percussive instrument. The keyboard serves not only as a piano simulator, but as MIDI controller. For the uninitiated, it is hardware or software which generates and transmits MIDI data to MIDI-enabled devices.
Many artists point out that technology still has its limits, and some are wary of jumping on the 'do-it-all-yourself' bandwagon. Even those conversant with the latest sequencing program or instrument plug-in prefer to focus on developing their musical talent and vision, deferring recording and mixing to technicians.
Michael Gottlieb, a recent graduate of Hed and an aspiring film soundtrack composer, does not rely on his home studio to produce his songs, even though music technology is an integral part of Hed's curriculum. 'The home studio is mostly to create demos. For electronic music it is an alternative, but for recording live instruments, it's not.'
Some genres are less affected by the digital age, among them classical music and jazz. 'Jazz is something that is live. You don't record jazz albums at home,' points out Rimon saxophone student Udi Aranoff. 'CDs of instrumentalist music are not recorded at home, [although] the work of a creator can be done at home.'
Aranoff uses the sequencing program CuBase to compose and test his own melodies. 'No musician works without technology. It's like a kid who doesn't know how to surf the net,' he says.
Na'ama Waisel, 18, a first-year student in composition and arrangement at Rimon, envisions herself as a 'total musician.' 'The musician of tomorrow wants to do everything, to multi-task: production, playing, arrangement, composition, sound and promotion,' she proclaims.
Rimon, Israel's largest school for contemporary music that began its career two decades ago as a school for jazz, has embraced music's technological advances, having added required courses in computer sequencing programs for all students. Yet the school maintains a focus on producing quality musicians steeped in traditional principles of music and performance. 'We teach music first of all and then add technology, hoping that good musicians will know how to use technology to make good music,' says Amikam Kimelman, director of Rimon.
'You can view technology as a new platform - it's like another orchestra. It has new sounds, new abilities, but it's still another platform. It doesn't work by itself - you have to fill it with music.'
Nor does he think that the Internet or cellular phones are powerful enough platforms to create stars. Radio and television still remain the medium of choice for exposure. 'Of course you get plenty of stuff in the internet, but psychologically people prefer to be heard on Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) rather than an internet radio station,' says Kimelman. 'That's where most of the action is. People use television and radio more than computers for music. Songs do sell, you can now buy music on-line, but you can't really be heard. People still try to get into the major labels or a spot on television before trusting their website. It doesn't promote itself.'
Henis of Hed Artzi maintains that (Army Radio's music and traffic updates station) Galgalatz, for example, is still very popular and a coveted destination for mainstream artists. 'We're very much dependent on radio. We try to use the Internet as much as possible, but radio is the secret.'
As it has been for decades, getting on a radio playlist is not as easy as posting music on a Myspace page or Youtube. 'Radio is a very sore subject,' says Henis. 'We have no control over the radio. Many times I get music which I know from experience and my guts will do very well, but the only way it'll get heard is through radio, and they won't play it.'
To reach the radio and television, even extremely talented artists cannot rely on their entrepreneurial spirit alone. Like actors need agents, a musician generally fares better with a creative, insistent, visionary manager.
With the decline in income from disc sales, artists and record companies must look elsewhere for sources of income - and for the resourceful artist, they are not lacking.
Moshe Morad, a music consultant and manager who served as CEO of NMC and marketing executive at EMI, dispensed advice and encouragement to students at the Hed seminar, slamming the myth that piracy has robbed artists of a significant source of income. 'Today people buy music more than they ever did: computer games, telephones, ring-tones, elevators, cafes. Music is now a part of life. Even if you don't hear the first source - you don't buy discs - you're surrounded by music, in commercials, on television.'
As an example, he passed around an e-mail he received from an advertising company seeking a 'unique' musical piece for a telephone commercial. The musician is given specific guidelines for the piece: 'distinctive, not retro, original, fresh, unique, warm, positive and emotionally charged.' Such solicitations, however, wouldn't reach an artist directly and are generally channeled through a manager.
The potential of publishing - selling the music's rights - is becoming an increasingly developed field in Israel, as it is abroad, with artists charging hefty sums for the use of their music in television, commercials, films and a variety of other consumers.
Among the leading purchasers of rights are cellphone companies, who pay artists handsome sums for exclusivity. Artists receive royalties for every download - instead of boasting gold albums, they now literally boast 'gold ringtones' which means their song was downloaded from cellular companies at least a certain number of times. [see sidebar]
Recht notes that the phenomenon of sponsorship is increasing and that big companies will seek to associate themselves with certain artists to maintain a certain image, making branding all the more important for an artist seeking to make megabucks.
Merchandising, Henis said, is still an underdeveloped field in Israel, mostly because 'it's hard to have idol quality in Israel because everything is so close.'
But while Israel, the hi-tech bubble that it is, has adapted rapidly to technological changes, the local music business still lags behind. 'Changes in the music industry allow almost everyone with talent to check out the potential of his or her music to reach a crowd, but on a parallel level there's not enough grooming of professionals in the music business,' remarked Recht.
Unlike American and European schools, no Israeli colleges offer a Bachelors or Masters in music business. As an example, Recht pulled from his library a sample of books in English on the music business, noting that 'there are no equivalents in Hebrew.'
'There are very few entertainment lawyers,' said Henis, who says that Israeli studios can easily out-do some European studios in their level of sophistication - a sophistication generally not matched in the field of music business. 'Money is always a problem here. Music doesn't have the allure and money that it has in the States, but I think [the local music business] will grow.'
Recognizing the need for good music business professionals, the Hed music college is seeking to team-up with a local business college to offer a BA in music business. 'I think the industry in Israel is run by people who don't have a clue about how business should be run. Most of them are musicians,' says Yehuda Cohen, director of Hed. 'To know how to run a school, orchestra, band or theater company, you have to have knowledge - and it's not something you can learn in a regular music school.'
Given all the advances in technology, there are some musical experiences that technology can assist, but not replicate. 'The digital age still can't reconstruct the art of stage performance,' notes Recht.
And performing artists who don't perform have little chance of surviving beyond the computer screen.
'I won't sign artists who won't gig,' says Henis. 'If an artist won't gig, there's no use. They won't sell a copy. Before they come to us they have to gig. I have to know that they're hungry, that they want to get their music out there.'
According to Henis, Israel suffers from another ailment that no software can fix. 'There's a huge lack of talent. There's so much happening. So many studios and home studios, so many people recording, but very few stand out. I don't know why that is. I have a hard time explaining it. We'll sit through huge amounts of stuff. It's not easy.'
He attributes this in part to the fledging rock and pop culture in Israel. Another cause may be the need for local artists to spread their energies. With such a small market, a creative musician must be a jack-of-all-music trades to make a living: teacher, performer and technician. 'Because of the economic situation in Israel,' notes Henis, 'someone who only does one thing has no chance unless they're the best at what they do. For the very best, there's room for only four or five.'
The technological advances that make creation and promotion much more accessible to artists do not mean that success is achieved with the touch of a button. 'One of the important things the musicians learned is that being a musician is a full-time job,' said Mizrachi, speaking after the Koltura conference. 'They let go of the fantasy that you can be signed to a record label and sit back. Musicians have to understand that their success depends on their own efforts.'
Record companies, musicians and schools are dealing with the cellphone and Internet era by restructuring the way they make and sell their music.
The digital age has claimed many casualties the world over: printed classified ads, snail mail, music CDs, and no less than all of these, record companies. Music technology and the internet have transformed the way creative musicians produce, market and distribute music, rendering many artists less reliant on record companies.
Artists can now brand themselves as record labels, creating full albums from the comfort of their own bedroom for little more than the cost of computer hardware and software.
Israeli record companies are restructuring their business models to adapt to industry developments brought on by new technologies. Music schools are adding technology and music business courses to their curricula, and artists are picking up new, non-music related skills in order to compete as self-sufficient artists.
To help musicians navigate the redrawn industry battleground, Koltura, a Tel Aviv-based production and public relations company, held its first 'Conference for Israeli Musicians' earlier this month, drawing over 100 musicians over the course of three days, covering topics such as breaking into international markets, grass-roots concert promotion, penetrating the cellphone market and self-management.
'In our two years of operation, we have encountered many artists who are very talented but face obstacles in getting their music heard, making a living from music, and managing themselves in the music industry,' explained Oded Mizrachi, public relations director of Koltura. 'Many musicians manage themselves in a way that was relevant 20 years ago - they view record labels and radio as the main means. Today, in the world of the internet and cellphones - an age when everyone can record in their home studios - there are many more opportunities for artists who haven't signed with a record label to promote themselves, whether through internet marketing or intense field work to get gigs.'
During the same week of this conference, the Hed College of Contemporary Music in south Tel Aviv held a week-long seminar on the music business - a largely underdiscussed topic in local music schools - as part of the school's 16th anniversary celebrations. Entitled 'How to Advance a Music Industry Career,' the seminar brought top industry professionals to lecture on topics such as copyrights, the functions of a record company and public relations.
'Today the name of the game is marketing, PR, collaborations and initiative,' says music producer Danny Recht, who lectured on the effect of industry changes in the market. Recht runs his own music consultancy firm and has produced hit albums for Israeli bands including Rockfour, Teapacks and Knesiat HaSechel.
Speaking with Metro at his sleek studio loft in south Tel Aviv, he noted that the most striking change in the music industry has been the proliferation of quality home studios that have made the 'master recording' - the main commodity of music companies - obsolete.
Some music today doesn't even require packaging. Songs or tracks could be created using digital synthesizers and then transferred as a digital file with the touch of a button.
Recht pulled out a 'relic' from Israeli modern history: a two-inch tape of the 1994 album of Knesiat HaSechel on which 24 pre-mix audio channels, symbolized by grooves in the tape, have been recorded. 'I keep it as a souvenir,' he said.
Today, modern sequencing programs simulate the process of a two-inch tape, allowing producers and artists to record and mix dozens of music channels through their personal computer. New sounds can be synthesized using sound design software and some artists can bypass recording acoustic instruments by incorporating natural-sounding instrument music samples into their tracks.
As methods for creating and distributing music have become cheaper and more accessible, artists, managers and record labels must divert their energies and resources to creative marketing and promotion if they want to break into the mainstream market. 'I think music production geared for a commercial audience has to have behind it someone who can strategize and develop an artistic concept,' says Recht. 'Today, it's not enough that a song will sound good. A place has to be created for it on the crowded shelf.'
Udi Henis, A&R director for one of Israel's largest record labels, Hed Artzi, and teacher of music business at the Rimon School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon, considers record companies 'passe' and notes that they must now refashion themselves as 'music companies' to stay afloat. This means focusing more on distribution, public relations and artist management rather than traditional music production. 'They've suddenly understood - it took a bit of time - that you can't make a profit from CDs alone,' says Henis. 'They're getting more into management, booking.'
This does not mean that artists do not seek homes - and transformative backing - within large record companies that have already built up connections, credibility and resources to advance their artists. Henis himself has been responsible for signing breakout artists such as Harel Skaat, Keren Peles and Din Din Aviv.
'We still have a lot of artists. The A&R department is also searching for artists, not necessarily those who are just starting out,' says Henis.
Realizing the importance of the home studio, contemporary music schools in Tel Aviv have all made classes in sequencing technology a required course for its students, although schools vary on the weight they give to music technology.
Muzik, a relatively new music school founded in 1997 as 'the DJ School for Contemporary Music,' has recently developed a three-year academic program born out of the recent changes in the music industry. The approach at Muzik is that technology is not only a means to record, but an indelible part of the creative act, often expressed in electronic music genres such as electro punk, minimal techno, industrial R&B and funk metal. The school offers courses in traditional topics such as music theory, orchestration and arrangement, alongside courses in professional home studio creation, sound design, live performance software, self-promotion and management.
'Until about 12 years ago, a composing musician would have to create a demo, in which he recorded himself singing with accompaniment and presented a cassette to a record label,' explains Ronen Heruti, director of Muzik, from his office near the Azrieli towers. 'A band would go into a recording studio and create a rough sketch. There was only one address: the record company, who usually rejected them. [If not rejected,] the record company would begin the process of signing the artist: producing an album in a professional studio; hiring a musical arranger; coordinating rehearsal rooms; recording, finishing and mastering the work. It was an expensive process. Few artists could afford this production process on their own.'
The mass marketing of the CD-R, the increased speed of computer processors and peer-to-peer technology have changed all that. 'The home studio was born. Suddenly, the computer could be the center of music creation. You may not achieve the same results as recording in a very expensive studio, but you can create something at a professional level,' Heruti expounds.
Muzik's curriculum is based on the vision of an independent artist who can rely on his home computer to draw from a full orchestra - plus original synthesized sounds - to produce a self-made album. 'Our students build their own independent home studios from the moment they enter school,' explains Amit Hecht, the academic director at Muzik. 'They view it as their most important creative toolÊand do most of their production workÊfrom home already at the end of their first year.'
Muzik recently partnered with the Open University to offer a BA in humanities specializing in music production. As part of its pioneering approach, Muzik does not offer formal classes for more traditional musical instruments such as guitar, but rather requires students to study keyboard skills and a percussive instrument. The keyboard serves not only as a piano simulator, but as MIDI controller. For the uninitiated, it is hardware or software which generates and transmits MIDI data to MIDI-enabled devices.
Many artists point out that technology still has its limits, and some are wary of jumping on the 'do-it-all-yourself' bandwagon. Even those conversant with the latest sequencing program or instrument plug-in prefer to focus on developing their musical talent and vision, deferring recording and mixing to technicians.
Michael Gottlieb, a recent graduate of Hed and an aspiring film soundtrack composer, does not rely on his home studio to produce his songs, even though music technology is an integral part of Hed's curriculum. 'The home studio is mostly to create demos. For electronic music it is an alternative, but for recording live instruments, it's not.'
Some genres are less affected by the digital age, among them classical music and jazz. 'Jazz is something that is live. You don't record jazz albums at home,' points out Rimon saxophone student Udi Aranoff. 'CDs of instrumentalist music are not recorded at home, [although] the work of a creator can be done at home.'
Aranoff uses the sequencing program CuBase to compose and test his own melodies. 'No musician works without technology. It's like a kid who doesn't know how to surf the net,' he says.
Na'ama Waisel, 18, a first-year student in composition and arrangement at Rimon, envisions herself as a 'total musician.' 'The musician of tomorrow wants to do everything, to multi-task: production, playing, arrangement, composition, sound and promotion,' she proclaims.
Rimon, Israel's largest school for contemporary music that began its career two decades ago as a school for jazz, has embraced music's technological advances, having added required courses in computer sequencing programs for all students. Yet the school maintains a focus on producing quality musicians steeped in traditional principles of music and performance. 'We teach music first of all and then add technology, hoping that good musicians will know how to use technology to make good music,' says Amikam Kimelman, director of Rimon.
'You can view technology as a new platform - it's like another orchestra. It has new sounds, new abilities, but it's still another platform. It doesn't work by itself - you have to fill it with music.'
Nor does he think that the Internet or cellular phones are powerful enough platforms to create stars. Radio and television still remain the medium of choice for exposure. 'Of course you get plenty of stuff in the internet, but psychologically people prefer to be heard on Galei Tzahal (Army Radio) rather than an internet radio station,' says Kimelman. 'That's where most of the action is. People use television and radio more than computers for music. Songs do sell, you can now buy music on-line, but you can't really be heard. People still try to get into the major labels or a spot on television before trusting their website. It doesn't promote itself.'
Henis of Hed Artzi maintains that (Army Radio's music and traffic updates station) Galgalatz, for example, is still very popular and a coveted destination for mainstream artists. 'We're very much dependent on radio. We try to use the Internet as much as possible, but radio is the secret.'
As it has been for decades, getting on a radio playlist is not as easy as posting music on a Myspace page or Youtube. 'Radio is a very sore subject,' says Henis. 'We have no control over the radio. Many times I get music which I know from experience and my guts will do very well, but the only way it'll get heard is through radio, and they won't play it.'
To reach the radio and television, even extremely talented artists cannot rely on their entrepreneurial spirit alone. Like actors need agents, a musician generally fares better with a creative, insistent, visionary manager.
With the decline in income from disc sales, artists and record companies must look elsewhere for sources of income - and for the resourceful artist, they are not lacking.
Moshe Morad, a music consultant and manager who served as CEO of NMC and marketing executive at EMI, dispensed advice and encouragement to students at the Hed seminar, slamming the myth that piracy has robbed artists of a significant source of income. 'Today people buy music more than they ever did: computer games, telephones, ring-tones, elevators, cafes. Music is now a part of life. Even if you don't hear the first source - you don't buy discs - you're surrounded by music, in commercials, on television.'
As an example, he passed around an e-mail he received from an advertising company seeking a 'unique' musical piece for a telephone commercial. The musician is given specific guidelines for the piece: 'distinctive, not retro, original, fresh, unique, warm, positive and emotionally charged.' Such solicitations, however, wouldn't reach an artist directly and are generally channeled through a manager.
The potential of publishing - selling the music's rights - is becoming an increasingly developed field in Israel, as it is abroad, with artists charging hefty sums for the use of their music in television, commercials, films and a variety of other consumers.
Among the leading purchasers of rights are cellphone companies, who pay artists handsome sums for exclusivity. Artists receive royalties for every download - instead of boasting gold albums, they now literally boast 'gold ringtones' which means their song was downloaded from cellular companies at least a certain number of times. [see sidebar]
Recht notes that the phenomenon of sponsorship is increasing and that big companies will seek to associate themselves with certain artists to maintain a certain image, making branding all the more important for an artist seeking to make megabucks.
Merchandising, Henis said, is still an underdeveloped field in Israel, mostly because 'it's hard to have idol quality in Israel because everything is so close.'
But while Israel, the hi-tech bubble that it is, has adapted rapidly to technological changes, the local music business still lags behind. 'Changes in the music industry allow almost everyone with talent to check out the potential of his or her music to reach a crowd, but on a parallel level there's not enough grooming of professionals in the music business,' remarked Recht.
Unlike American and European schools, no Israeli colleges offer a Bachelors or Masters in music business. As an example, Recht pulled from his library a sample of books in English on the music business, noting that 'there are no equivalents in Hebrew.'
'There are very few entertainment lawyers,' said Henis, who says that Israeli studios can easily out-do some European studios in their level of sophistication - a sophistication generally not matched in the field of music business. 'Money is always a problem here. Music doesn't have the allure and money that it has in the States, but I think [the local music business] will grow.'
Recognizing the need for good music business professionals, the Hed music college is seeking to team-up with a local business college to offer a BA in music business. 'I think the industry in Israel is run by people who don't have a clue about how business should be run. Most of them are musicians,' says Yehuda Cohen, director of Hed. 'To know how to run a school, orchestra, band or theater company, you have to have knowledge - and it's not something you can learn in a regular music school.'
Given all the advances in technology, there are some musical experiences that technology can assist, but not replicate. 'The digital age still can't reconstruct the art of stage performance,' notes Recht.
And performing artists who don't perform have little chance of surviving beyond the computer screen.
'I won't sign artists who won't gig,' says Henis. 'If an artist won't gig, there's no use. They won't sell a copy. Before they come to us they have to gig. I have to know that they're hungry, that they want to get their music out there.'
According to Henis, Israel suffers from another ailment that no software can fix. 'There's a huge lack of talent. There's so much happening. So many studios and home studios, so many people recording, but very few stand out. I don't know why that is. I have a hard time explaining it. We'll sit through huge amounts of stuff. It's not easy.'
He attributes this in part to the fledging rock and pop culture in Israel. Another cause may be the need for local artists to spread their energies. With such a small market, a creative musician must be a jack-of-all-music trades to make a living: teacher, performer and technician. 'Because of the economic situation in Israel,' notes Henis, 'someone who only does one thing has no chance unless they're the best at what they do. For the very best, there's room for only four or five.'
The technological advances that make creation and promotion much more accessible to artists do not mean that success is achieved with the touch of a button. 'One of the important things the musicians learned is that being a musician is a full-time job,' said Mizrachi, speaking after the Koltura conference. 'They let go of the fantasy that you can be signed to a record label and sit back. Musicians have to understand that their success depends on their own efforts.'
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