I’ve been getting so many emails from friends in the states and Europe telling me about how they’re going to rallies against the war and hoping the rallies will be big. I have to say that sitting here, it just seems strange to be completely against the war. The biggest influence on my inability to just be against the war is that every single Iraqi I speak with is desperately for this war. (more…)
01/17/2003
I went out for drinks with some friends the other night. At one point, one of my friends said to me, apropos of nothing, “You know, journalists in Israel are not respected. It’s not considered a respected profession. It’s not like the US.”
Last night, I went to cover this politician, Tommy Lapid, who was doing a pub crawl to promote himself among young people in Tel Aviv before the elections at the end of the month. Lapid is the huge event of this election, he’s talked about much more in the papers and TV shows and by Israelis than Sharon or Mitzna. He was a famous journalist, himself, and he’s become the head of this party, Shinui, which means Change. There’s all these signs all over Tel Aviv “We need a Change in government.” His basic thing is to be against the religious Jews in Israel. Ever since Israel was founded, in 1948, there has never been a party with a majority of seats in the Knesset, the parliament. So every government–left wing, right wing, doesn’t matter–has included some of the religious parties. The deal used to be that the religious parties would let the head party–Labor or Likud or whatever–to do whatever they want in foreign policy so long as they gave the religious some perks. Basically, the religious parties wanted to run everything religious in the country. So, every marriage in Israel has to be an Orthodox marriage. (more…)
The funniest thing that happened to me this week happened on Friday. I was sitting in my hotel room in Amman working on a very important article that was due that day. I needed to finish it before 7 pm local time and it was around Noon and I was nervous. I had a lot more to do than seemed possible in 7 hours. I had done so many interviews that week that I was a bit overwhelmed by the material and was sorting through, trying to figure out which quotes to use. Anyway, around Noon, this guy calls me, I’ll name him Faisel. (more…)
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| Centrale Bar, Beirut |
I’m sitting in the house I’m renting in Tel Aviv. It’s in the middle of nowhere, a twenty minute drive from the center of the city where all my friends and the bars and restaurants are. It’s just me out here and two cats who scream all the time. Even when I’m petting them, if I lift my hand up too long, they scream at me. Meow. All the time. Yep, there they go. Screaming right now. I realize that it’s an adjustment, here. That time in Amman was so strange. Working like a maniac all day. Meeting Muslims who want to kill us, meeting sweet people who just want some peace, meeting these Iraqis who make me so sad. And then going out drinking and eating all night. Every day there were new reporters coming from Baghdad or from London or New York and every night was some other reporter’s last night. So this house feels empty, sad. Writing that, I just got up and took out my iPod so I could have some music. I found myself, today, excited that the war is coming. (more…)
Driving around Tel Aviv is stomach-wrenchingly frustrating. Drivers are awful and obnoxious, of course. When you’re waiting at a red light and it turns green, the guy behind you will honk his horn so quickly, quicker than it would be humanly possible to get your car moving. And if you take an extra tenth of a second turning a corner, that same guy behind you will honk. People are honking at you so often and so obnoxiously, it’s actually worse than New York. I immediately took to driving very slowly when anyone honked at me, just to piss them off some more. I spoke with some Israelis who said, of course, that’s what everyone does. So it’s this great cycle of honking and slowing and more honking and even more slowing. But the other drivers aren’t the worst thing about Tel Aviv. The roads seem to be on a grid system, but they’re not. You’re going down Namir Street and you know it was parallel to Ibn Gvirol. But what you don’t realize is that they have been subtly diverging so that by the time you want to take the quick left and get on Ibn Gvirol that street is now several miles away, rather than the couple blocks you thought. It is so easy to get completely lost in Tel Aviv. Someone in the Tel Aviv municipality obviously got very excited about street signs. They made them huge and lit from inside, I guess to make them easier to read in the dark. (more…)
It feels so different, for me at least, to wake up in Tel Aviv . I’m in this nice house on a tree-lined street. In Amman, I’d wake up, shower, and would be off to my first interview in twenty minutes. Here I felt the lethargy fall all over me; which isn’t good, since I have to report stories from Israel and I’m going back to Jordan soon. Worse, it’s Friday morning, a sort of semi-weekend day here, so I couldn’t reach anyone on the phone to interview them. I spent the morning reading Israeli news sites and coming up with story ideas and calling people and getting no one. I didn’t even get voice mails. Finally, I decided to get up and get out of the house and just go find a story somewhere. (more…)
A couple nights ago, I was drinking with a bunch of reporters in the Hotel Intercontinental bar. Several of them were getting absolutely panicky. It was Tuesday night and Thursday is the beginning of Eid al-fitr, the end of Ramadan holiday that closes everything in the Arab World for five days. They all knew if they didn’t get their Iraqi visas by the next day, they weren’t going in for a while. That would mean missing the day Saddam is supposed to release his list of weapons of mass destruction. (more…)