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According to the Jerusalem Post, Netanyahu has made significant progress in convincing a faction of Kadima to split away and (re)join the Likud. As to be expected, while unnamed sources claim it's all but a done deal, named sources, such as Kadima MKs Marina Slodkin and Yaakov Edri, say that there is nothing in the works. Time will tell who's right.
At the end of the article, there's an interesting quote:
"Bibi is the only prime minister who is busy with taking apart the opposition instead of taking care of the problems of the country," Ramon said. "The prime minister's people keep selling political reporters the story, but there is no chance it will happen. This government will come apart a long time before Kadima will."
I find the quote interesting because it's attributed to Chaim Ramon, the Yoshev Rosh of the Moetsa of the Knesset's largest opposition party, Kadima. As any Israeli knows, the primary goal and objective of any opposition party is to bring down the government (or to weasel a way inside the government - sometimes I think it's just a matter of a coin flip)*. IOW, the #1 priority of a large percentage of our lawmakers is to obstruct the smooth functioning of the government and to throw the body in which they serve into such fundamental disarray that new elections would be required.
So if I understand Mr. Ramon's reasoning, the routine SOP for the opposition is unseeming for the ruling party. The opposition is entitled, in fact expected, to exploit any chink in the government's armor to bring it down. The weapon if choice is a crowbar is to be inserted in every crack in the coalition's foundation. But the government must sit idly by and wait for the inevitable to happen.
Mr Ramon's reasoning is so very odd that I admit that I'm at a loss for words to describe it any further. Suffice it to say that perhaps it is indeed for the greater good that he is in the opposition.
* By way of contrast, if you'd ask the "leader of the opposition" in the US (if such a function actually existed) what his/her #1 goal was for the rest of the current term, the answer would be some variation of: "to pass legislation that's good for my constituents and the citizens of the United States of America."
Monday, December 21, 2009
Poll Results: Where are you on the Political Map?
The results are in from Oleh Vatik's latest poll:
- Left 5 (21%)
- Right 11 (47%)
- Center 3 (13%)
- Floater 1 (4%)
- Petek Lavan 1 (4%)
- Confused 2 (8%)
Hmmm ... that looks about what I expected, although I wouldn't have been surprised to see an absolute majority on the Right.
I'll post a new poll later tomight.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Spotlight on the News: A Valid Nobel Candidate
Last week, as Israelis and Jews from all over were once again filled with pride that yet another one of ours - Professor Ada Yonat - was awarded a Nobel prize, Americans and others the world over were somewhat embarassed and at a loss for words to describe how they felt about Obama's prize.
It was an odd choice, made even odder by the fact that his candidacy had to be submitted for consideration before he'd even spent a fortnight in the Oval Office. It would appear that, as others have already said, the award was a giant in-your-face to the Bush Administration, showing them what Europeans truly thought of the past 8 years of American leadership; an expression of the sheer joy felt on the continent about the changing of the guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Personally, I view the episode instead as an expression of the schizoid way Europe views America. This one odd, strange award to Obama wraps up quite nicely the way "the Leader of the Free World" is viewed in Europe: there's more than a little resentment, but in the end they still look to the New World for leadership and a moral compass. Seemingly without realizing it, they hold America to a higher standard, and are quite disappointed when the Americans fail to deliver according to expectations. Now that I think of it, it reminds me just a bit of the way the World looks at the Jews.
Of course the funniest part of the whole affair is that the Pressident of the United States just won the Nobel Peace Prize ... and he got no political capital from it whatsoever. The idea that he won is just so outlandish that nobody takes it seriously and if anything, it's actually hurt him as far as the public's perception. Personally i think that his advisors missed an easy "gimme" - Obama should have refused the award by quite truthfully admitting that he didn't deserve it. That would have least gained him points in my opinion anyway.
When I first heard that Obama won the Peace Prize, I, like most people, thought it was a joke. After the initial shock wore off, I began to think of ways to quantify how incredibly stupid a choice it was. What I came up with was this: Everyone should make a list of people that they have personally met who are more deserving than Obama. It shouldn't be that hard - all you need to do is find someone who has actually done something to make the world a better place.
Accordingly, my first candidate for the Nobel Peace Price is Doris Mainzer z"l. Doris was "the mouse that roared" that founded the Keren Yosef volunteer organization in 1999. In six years the organization that Doris had founded in memory of her husband became known instead as a monument to one woman's tenacity and determination. Keren Yosef provides medical equipment and first aid training in Beit Shemesh and other areas in Israel. In less than a decade the organization has contributed to significantly raising the standard of immediate medical care available in a number of Israeli communities.
Doris passed away about 4 years ago, but her work continues today and Keren Yosef is as active as ever. She may not be as famous as Barack Obama, and she certainly wasn't as good a speaker. But she made a difference for thousands of people and she got things done. All in all, I think that she would have made an excellent Nobel Laureate.
Please feel free to submit any of your own candidates that you have actually met. It'd be nice to give us all a chance to give credit where credit is due.
It was an odd choice, made even odder by the fact that his candidacy had to be submitted for consideration before he'd even spent a fortnight in the Oval Office. It would appear that, as others have already said, the award was a giant in-your-face to the Bush Administration, showing them what Europeans truly thought of the past 8 years of American leadership; an expression of the sheer joy felt on the continent about the changing of the guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Personally, I view the episode instead as an expression of the schizoid way Europe views America. This one odd, strange award to Obama wraps up quite nicely the way "the Leader of the Free World" is viewed in Europe: there's more than a little resentment, but in the end they still look to the New World for leadership and a moral compass. Seemingly without realizing it, they hold America to a higher standard, and are quite disappointed when the Americans fail to deliver according to expectations. Now that I think of it, it reminds me just a bit of the way the World looks at the Jews.
Of course the funniest part of the whole affair is that the Pressident of the United States just won the Nobel Peace Prize ... and he got no political capital from it whatsoever. The idea that he won is just so outlandish that nobody takes it seriously and if anything, it's actually hurt him as far as the public's perception. Personally i think that his advisors missed an easy "gimme" - Obama should have refused the award by quite truthfully admitting that he didn't deserve it. That would have least gained him points in my opinion anyway.
When I first heard that Obama won the Peace Prize, I, like most people, thought it was a joke. After the initial shock wore off, I began to think of ways to quantify how incredibly stupid a choice it was. What I came up with was this: Everyone should make a list of people that they have personally met who are more deserving than Obama. It shouldn't be that hard - all you need to do is find someone who has actually done something to make the world a better place.
Accordingly, my first candidate for the Nobel Peace Price is Doris Mainzer z"l. Doris was "the mouse that roared" that founded the Keren Yosef volunteer organization in 1999. In six years the organization that Doris had founded in memory of her husband became known instead as a monument to one woman's tenacity and determination. Keren Yosef provides medical equipment and first aid training in Beit Shemesh and other areas in Israel. In less than a decade the organization has contributed to significantly raising the standard of immediate medical care available in a number of Israeli communities.
Doris passed away about 4 years ago, but her work continues today and Keren Yosef is as active as ever. She may not be as famous as Barack Obama, and she certainly wasn't as good a speaker. But she made a difference for thousands of people and she got things done. All in all, I think that she would have made an excellent Nobel Laureate.
Please feel free to submit any of your own candidates that you have actually met. It'd be nice to give us all a chance to give credit where credit is due.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Living in Israel: The dreaded gan party
Have you been hearing a strange sound every evening for the past week or so? Sort of like the sound of air intermittently escaping from a soon to be flat tire? In case you were wondering, what you've been hearing is the sound of thousands of Israeli parents trying desperately to stifle ther yawns as they once again suffered through another annual round of Hanuka gan parties. If you listened really carefully you might have noticed how after 90 minutes or so the yawns turned into sighs of relief as the sufganiyot were brought out and the yearly rite came to a merciful end.
I have four children, each of which attended three years of gan before moving on to first grade. Each year of gan brought with it three parties: Hanuka, birthday and siyum. Multiply 3 parties by 3 years by 4 children and you get 36 parties. Average that over 10 years (from my oldest's first year of gan to my youngest's last) and you get an average of 3.6 parties a year for a solid decade.
36 opportunities to sit for an hour and a half on a munchkin chair with my knees competing for space with my shoulders. 36 opportunites to take out my old PSD camera and try to get a decent picture of my beloved one reciting his/her lines without including the 4 adults standing up in front of the first row while they video the whole show. 36 opportunities to ooh and ah when the teacher turns off the lights and the ribbons tied to the kids hands glow with reflected UV light. 36 opportunities to watch the kids mill around the "stage" with cardboard candles affixed in some way to the general area of their foreheads.
At least the cardboard candles provide some variety: some years they're stapled together; sometimes they're glued; occasionally they're just slotted together; and I think I've also seen paper clips and rubber bands used as well.
3.6 parties a year. And then it stopped. But not really. It turns out that kids continue with gan parties all the way through school - they just call them something else. For example, when my daughters graduated 6th grade they each had a tekes siyum. But the only material difference that I noticed between the tekes siyum in 6th grade and the misibat siyum in kindergarten, was that that the 6th grade tekes lasted a lot longer. Well, maybe there was another difference - the gan parties seemed a bit more organized and better planned. I guess practice does help.
Sometimes there's no school milestone to celebrate, but that's not a problem because your child's youth group fills in nicely with at least one or two similarly mismanaged and boring events a year.
Of course there is one common denominator between all these events that I've ignored up until now. While we parents are typically invited, the event is usually for and about the kids. So if they can enjoy them, I guess I can grin and bear it for their sakes. That is, of course, until medical research proves that sugar, oil and small yearly doses of UV radiation cause cancer in labratory rats.
I have four children, each of which attended three years of gan before moving on to first grade. Each year of gan brought with it three parties: Hanuka, birthday and siyum. Multiply 3 parties by 3 years by 4 children and you get 36 parties. Average that over 10 years (from my oldest's first year of gan to my youngest's last) and you get an average of 3.6 parties a year for a solid decade.
36 opportunities to sit for an hour and a half on a munchkin chair with my knees competing for space with my shoulders. 36 opportunites to take out my old PSD camera and try to get a decent picture of my beloved one reciting his/her lines without including the 4 adults standing up in front of the first row while they video the whole show. 36 opportunities to ooh and ah when the teacher turns off the lights and the ribbons tied to the kids hands glow with reflected UV light. 36 opportunities to watch the kids mill around the "stage" with cardboard candles affixed in some way to the general area of their foreheads.
At least the cardboard candles provide some variety: some years they're stapled together; sometimes they're glued; occasionally they're just slotted together; and I think I've also seen paper clips and rubber bands used as well.
3.6 parties a year. And then it stopped. But not really. It turns out that kids continue with gan parties all the way through school - they just call them something else. For example, when my daughters graduated 6th grade they each had a tekes siyum. But the only material difference that I noticed between the tekes siyum in 6th grade and the misibat siyum in kindergarten, was that that the 6th grade tekes lasted a lot longer. Well, maybe there was another difference - the gan parties seemed a bit more organized and better planned. I guess practice does help.
Sometimes there's no school milestone to celebrate, but that's not a problem because your child's youth group fills in nicely with at least one or two similarly mismanaged and boring events a year.
Of course there is one common denominator between all these events that I've ignored up until now. While we parents are typically invited, the event is usually for and about the kids. So if they can enjoy them, I guess I can grin and bear it for their sakes. That is, of course, until medical research proves that sugar, oil and small yearly doses of UV radiation cause cancer in labratory rats.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
Living in Israel: The "Kick me!" sign
A little while ago my brother mentioned to me that he had recently noticed that driving in Israel - never the most relaxing sport - had gotten worse. It seemed that every few minutes behind the wheel another driver would cut him off, fail to yield the right of way, flash his brights, honk, etc. He couldn't figure out what the problem was. Was it possible that there really had been a fundamental shift in Israeli driving etiquette? Or maybe he was just getting old and driving a bit more timidly than in the past.
It took him a few weeks but he finally figured out what was going on: it was the "Kick me!" sign on his rear window. Other drivers saw the "Kick me!" sign and instictively began to kick him.
It wasn't his fault, of course. It wasn't his idea to hang the sign there, the law mandated that he do so. Or rather that his daughter do so. For as you have likely already figured out, the "Kick me!" sign is that orange sign that you hang in the back of your car to proudly proclaim that a new driver is at the wheel. My niece had recently received her license and instead of putting the sign up and taking it down every time she drove, they just left it up. Big mistake. Everyone who drove the car got kicked, not just the newbie.
That of course is not the stated purpose of the orange sign; it's supposed to let others around you know that it'd be a good idea to cut you some slack. Good luck with that.
If they'd asked me before passing the sign law I could have told them what would happen. I remember my first car pool driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and back every day close to 20 years ago. Every day as we descended the crowded LaGuardia on-ramp, one of the guys in the pool would always say the same thing: "look for a naheget chadasha to cut in front of." The logic was clear - no one else would let us in, whereas the new driver wouldn't be able to stop us.
And why davka naheget instead of nahag? For the answer to that question you have to think back 15-20 years. Before the law was inacted, when did you ever see a nahag chadash sign? A true gever would never point out that he needed a break.
It took him a few weeks but he finally figured out what was going on: it was the "Kick me!" sign on his rear window. Other drivers saw the "Kick me!" sign and instictively began to kick him.
It wasn't his fault, of course. It wasn't his idea to hang the sign there, the law mandated that he do so. Or rather that his daughter do so. For as you have likely already figured out, the "Kick me!" sign is that orange sign that you hang in the back of your car to proudly proclaim that a new driver is at the wheel. My niece had recently received her license and instead of putting the sign up and taking it down every time she drove, they just left it up. Big mistake. Everyone who drove the car got kicked, not just the newbie.
That of course is not the stated purpose of the orange sign; it's supposed to let others around you know that it'd be a good idea to cut you some slack. Good luck with that.
If they'd asked me before passing the sign law I could have told them what would happen. I remember my first car pool driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and back every day close to 20 years ago. Every day as we descended the crowded LaGuardia on-ramp, one of the guys in the pool would always say the same thing: "look for a naheget chadasha to cut in front of." The logic was clear - no one else would let us in, whereas the new driver wouldn't be able to stop us.
And why davka naheget instead of nahag? For the answer to that question you have to think back 15-20 years. Before the law was inacted, when did you ever see a nahag chadash sign? A true gever would never point out that he needed a break.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Poll Results: Who's Responsible for your Aliyah?
The results are in from Oleh Vatik's latest poll:
- Parents: 1 (9%)
- Children: 0 (0%)
- Spouse: 2 (18%)
- Siblings: 0 (0%)
- Youth group: 1 (9%)
- Friends: 0 (0%)
- Yourself: 8 (72%)
- Don't know / Other: 0 (%)
Frankly I was a wee bit surprised by the results - I had expected a more even spread. I guess it means that the most likely candidates to stick it out on aliyah are those that came without undue outside influence. Hmmm ... now that I think of it, that actually makes sense.
I'll try to have the next poll up later in the day.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Nostalgia Corner: Photo IDs
Before I left the Old Country ...
In the late 70s the State of Illinois added photographs to drivers licenses. Prior to that time, all an underaged teenager had to do to buy alcohol or get into an 'R' rated movie was to borrow a license from a friend who had the same eye color and was roughly the same height. Looking back, I realize that while I got a nice laminated photo ID issued by my high school when I was a freshman in 1975, it would be several years before my parents got a card of similar quality from the State.
When I made Aliyah ...
I was given an orange teudat zehut at the airport with my photograph stapled in. Even though my arrival had been coordinated with the Misrad HaKlita weeks in advance, my personal details were entered by hand on the spot. As luck would have it, the pakid made a mistake entering my lastname which I didn't notice until later. When I opened up my first bank account, the bank officer noticed the discrepancy between the way I spelled my name on the forms and the way it was spelled in the teudat zehut. When I explained what had happened, he said "no problem," and just took a pen and corrected the spelling in the teudat zehut.
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