10 Things I Really Like About Living in Israel (Note: This is Not a Sarcastic Title)

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I do not have a positive vision as to what should be here, in terms of political “solutions,” arrangements, et cetera. I do, however, have a very strong sense of what should not be here (for a more detailed list, see: Rothman, Blog About Things That He Thinks Should Not Be, Everyday, All Pages, www.thelefternwall.com). Here’s a metaphor I made up for this friend: let’s say Israel is a garden. There are some people who will try and plant flowers of solutions, of development, of progress here in this garden, and I think that is a good thing and I support them. However, I see my role not as planting flowers, but rather as weeding, weeding out violence, weeding out racism, weeding out oppression, weeding out hatred, et cetera. The weeds here have grown quite powerful, and probably by the fault of no single gardener or even group of gardeners but rather by the breezes, rainfalls, insects and chemicals of history and political circumstance. Someone needs to take them out so that there will be room for others to plant the flowers. If you try to plant a flower of “solution” in a garden overrun with weeds of violence or racism, the flower won’t have much of a chance to grow.

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I can only imagine good coming out of my articulating for readers what it is I love about living here, whether to complicate the picture for those who are overly-excited about Palestine/Palestinians (if you will notice, I don’t often write positive things about Palestine/Palestinians either, and I am not a Palestinian Nationalist, even as I support Palestinians’ right to live in freedom, like everyone else), or to clarify for readers who find my work too critical that I truly do what I do out of love and concern, and a desire to build and improve, even if I think that building needs to come from weeding dangerous phenomena (phenomena, and never people […])

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I will indeed make a list of things I really like. Which is fun for me too.

1. The people. In general I really like Israeli people, even if I disagree with many of them re: politics/Palestine. I like their directness, I like their humor, I like their warmth, I like the diversity of history and of journey and of identity and of belief, I like the way we all share a sort of nutsness, especially Jerusalemites.

Read the rest over at Moriel’s blog, The Leftern Wall »

I love the garden metaphor, and I also love most of the things on Moriel’s list. Many of them really capture why I miss Israel and care so much about what goes on there. This post, like many on Moriel’s blog, is well worth reading.

Meta note: the lack of posts lately was mainly because of some drama I had, which I won’t get into here. The important thing is that everything’s fine now, even better than fine, and once I’ve finished catching up on some things, I expect to be posting again, for real.

Everything you do is political, because not trying to change anything is simply working to keep things as they are.

There’s a song by Skunk Anansie called Yes, It’s Fucking Political. I don’t it hear often, but I’m hearing right now. When I first heard it several years ago, I don’t think I really understood it. “Yes, it’s fucking political! / Everything’s political!” Seemed kind of vague. I only really understood it a few months ago, reading an interview in unerzogen magazin with a couple who decided not to tell anyone outside the family about their young child’s biological gender. The point was made there with incredible clarity, and I’d like to argue it here.

But before I get to my main point, I’m going to start with the arguments that I think should be made in favor of staying out of politics.¹ Why should you bother to be political? Politics is dirty, filthy! It corrupts everyone who does it professionally, even the most ideological politician ends up going against their beliefs. And what’s worse, we simple citizens can’t really do anything about it, because  parties will only push agendas bought and paid for by their donors, and the rest of us can’t afford to get our agenda on the table. And who can even handle dealing with all the bad stuff going on? That kind of worrying can make you go crazy.

All of this, and more, is basically true.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that you don’t have any choice. You’re political, and it’s only a question of what cause you’re fighting for.

Everything’s political!

The reason is surprisingly simple: if you’re not consciously political, or if you’re consciously “neutral”, you’re simply doing your best to make sure nothing at all changes. The reality we live in is made up of a billion tiny choices people make every day. It’s practically impossible to make yourself aware of all of them. If you don’t try to understand the implications of your actions, you’re making a whole lot of choices in favor of the status quo.

Let’s say you’re a normal guy who doesn’t really like feminism. You believe that men and women should basically have the same rights, of course, but you don’t see what all the fuss is about. You’re probably oppressing women in subtle ways that are difficult to understand simply by the way you talk to and about them, even if the last thing you mean to do is oppress them.

Let’s say you’re like me (and most people in the Western world) and get your food from some supermarket, which is cheap enough for your budget but not so cheap you feel poor shopping there. Every time you buy food, you take home probably a dozen items wrapped in plastic of some kind. Each of those pieces of plastic, which you throw away without giving it a second thought, will outlive your grandchildren’s grandchildren. At some point in the next centuries, you can safely assume that at least one animal somewhere (maybe a small ugly one that nobody was going to eat, if you’re lucky) will almost definitely choke to death on it, or die because it blocked its digestion, or whatever.

These are just two tiny examples, and I’m wildly oversimplifying. Your individual action is tiny and almost meaningless. But with almost half the population slightly objectifying and oppressing women, you end up with a situation where a woman has to be really brave to speak out publicly about certain topics she believes in. And with billions of people throwing away a dozen pieces of plastic a week you end up with a whole island made of plastic, bigger than many countries, and growing all of the time.

These things affect your life, and you take part in making them happen, whether you like it or not. Practically every single detail of your life is affected by the tiny choices a lot of simple people make, taken together over time. Yes, it’s way too complicated to ever understand entirely. Yes, the chances of a single activist, you or me or even someone famous, really changing something, are close to zero. But we’re all, always activists for the status quo, and don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to complain about things while you’re working so hard to keep them the same?

Footnotes

1. Keep in mind this all applies to modern, Western-style representative democracies; the situation elsewhere is similar, but still very different.

For a very long time I’ve wanted to be an academic, but when I decided to start studying it was important for me not to think too far ahead and take things one at a time. I wanted to stay open to other options, some of which, I knew, could not have even occurred to me at the time. As the degree gets closer and closer I know I have to at least decide what the next step will be. There have been times when it was clear to me that a BA was not enough, that I’d need at least an MA to satisfy my curiosity. At other times (in particular when I get annoyed at the university’s structure) I’ve wished to just be done with it as soon as possible and go do something else.

What makes the whole thing more difficult is that I find both fields absolutely fascinating, and both engage me in a way that makes use of my skills. Activism stands out to me as a particularly worthy way of spending one’s time, because activism means working for the greater good (or one’s vision thereof) and would have a clear goal. The goal in linguistics is less clear to me, and I know that the best one can do is create, or help improve, a model that is useful for understanding the phenomena of language — hoping to achieve total understanding would only be a recipe for disappointment. On the other hand, I’ve been thinking and speaking about democratic education since I was thirteen, and I don’t think it’s much good to advocate it as a graduate who hasn’t spent much of their adult life outside the movement.

In the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about one way of seeing things, a way that had occurred to me when I started to study but I somehow forgot about in the meantime. The idea is essentially to make a hobby into a career, and work on something you believe in in your free time. In my case, the hobby-career would be linguistics — a pursuit that is valuable to me simply because it’s fascinating and fun. I could be an activist on my free time, as time allows.

I’m far from done figuring this out, but this approach seems like a good one. Going into a career without any lofty expectations would allow me to spend time on something challenging and enjoyable, while pursuing more lofty goals on my free time would let me continue being part of something I consider really important, something that seems to make a real difference in people’s lives (which, outside of academia, linguistics rarely does).

I’m writing this just because it is on my mind and I feel like writing. I should actually be doing my computer science homework. I’d appreciate thoughts on all this, especially if they come quickly enough to distract me from my homework!