This Cataclysmic Event

Thanks so much to my new friends who are concerned for my well being and encourage me on my efforts with this blog. I am grateful for your comments and messages.

It is very strange to me, that by coincidence, so shortly after I started this blog there has been this cataclysmic event in my world that put an accent on my thoughts, quite different from what I intended when I first thought of writing a personal blog. To begin with, I intended to revisit the landscapes, and the places of my greatest adventures in youth, and to try to understand what had changed objectively in my country, and what had changed in me. My primary interests are art and culture, and my background is one of religion and science. I thought that this would be an opportunity to do some soul searching, and see whether those things that interested me most, that is, art and photography as art, would have an appeal for others who did not know me personally.

But then, here I am, just starting to try out the blogging tools that are new to me, and there is an event in my home country that is unprecedented in Israeli history. Some thirty villages are being destroyed, and the people who live there, some 10,000 people, have been forced to leave their homes, their work places, their schools, their friends. And their dead are being dug out of the ground to be buried somewhere else. I could tell you a lot more. This description is very minimalistic. And if this were some mutual transfer of populations, I think I could somehow find a way to deal with it. But the knowledge that the Arab population has lived among us for all these years and continue to live among us; and that they enjoy more freedom and higher standard of living than Arabs living in any of the many neighboring Arab countries, but that those areas given to the Arabs for the sake of establishing their own state must be free of Jews… this causes me a feeling of outrage, and viewing the plight of my fellow Jews forced to leave their homes and communities just breaks my heart.

So instead of sharing with you my views on the pleasures of man, and the use of photography as an art form, you will find me crying here on the plight of the new refugees. Have patience. I hope you will get to know another side of me. I teach at a local college here in Jerusalem, and I have numerous students who live in the Gaza strip which is presently being evacuated. I have had a student of mine killed in this last war of terror that we have had to endure. And I have a student who lives in Gush Katif, and is now forced to evacuate, whose father was killed by an act of terror which was then heralded as a "victory" by the PLO. And meantime, here we are, each of us, sharing our lives in the blogosphere.

16/8/05

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