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First off, let me make something really clear. I am a lefty. Yes, that kind of lefty. The liberal kind that thinks that there should be a Two State Solution and all that jazz. I'm a Lefty and a Zionist, which may freak some of you right out, but trust me, these two things are NOT in opposition.

I don't like to talk about the whole Israel v. Palestine thing or Israel v. Arabs thing here. It's much too complex to talk about in the midst of a site about Israel in general and I don't want to give the idea that I think that there are any simple answers. Anyone who tells you that there are simple answers is full of it and has absolutely no idea what's going on here or what has gone on here in the last 100 years.

BUT... there's no REAL logic in closing down a West Bank factory because you oppose the occupation. When you pull a factory out of a place like the Barkan Industrial Park, you aren't really saying "the occupation is bad". You are really taking away jobs from the people that you claim to be standing up for.

I would not live in the West Bank. Let's make that clear. No matter HOW cheap it is in Ariel, that's not reason enough for me. However, I wouldn't think twice about taking a job in the West Bank, if the company was an equal opportunity employer, and especially if there were many Palestinians employed there.

Hell, I'd like to see a lot more (non-Jewish) Arabs employed in high tech startups in Tel Aviv. So far, I've only met one. ONE! Seriously, there's something wrong with that. It's exactly like having no black or female programmers in a startup in Oakland, California. Exactly like that.

The international boycotts around Israel and the Occupied Territories are misguided at best, absolutely anti-Jewish at worst. Hurting pro-Palestinian academics and closing down factories that hire Palestinians is NOT the way to peace in the Middle East.

Will someone please wake up and smell the coffee??!!!

One of the blogs that I read on a regular basis is called Israeli by Day, American by Night. Today I was catching up on some reading and saw this post about bulldozers and construction in Jerusalem and the aftermath of the two recent bulldozer attacks.

Now, I strongly suspect that at least one, if not both, of those attacks were not "terrorist" attacks, but cases of individual men just snapping under the strain of life. That happens everywhere, and when it does it doesn't get political overtones unless there is an ethnic twist. For those of you who haven't noticed, it was in the USA during the 80's that the term "going postal" was coined, and I think that's just exactly what happened here, too. No one started fearing the postman or claiming that postal workers were terrorists. They were mostly white postmen shooting up their coworkers, too, so there was no reason to pull the race card. The problem is that our bulldozer incidents did have an ethnic twist, so there is absolutely no objectivity about the situation.

The post at Israeli by Day is fantastic, because it shows both how this can happen, and how events like these effect ordinary people afterwards.

There's a bit of a trend going on in Israeli advertising these days in which advertisers imagine what our neighbors and other folks who don't like "us" or something about their product would have to say. There are two of these commercials from Satellite TV company YES. One is of ultra orthodox men in black coats and hats singing and dancing about how terrible YES HDTV is because it allows you to sin with clearer pictures. (You know, 'cuz you shouldn't see all that stuff they have on TV...) There's another commercial in which the Iranians get all excited about destroying Israel until they realize that their war timetable is going to interfere with watching their favorite Israeli TV program.

There's another commercial for a fuel efficient Nissan that depicts Arabs cursing the car because it saves so much fuel. I've heard that this one has gotten a reaction. Someone (or ones) has launched a website .. duh-duh-duh! ... cursing Nissan because of the ad.

Ummmm... duh... "We don't do stupid stuff like cursing cars because they are fuel efficient, and I CURSE YOU for even suggesting that we would!!"

Can people just stop being caricatures of the worst of themselves for a minute? PLEASE?

Miriam Schwab at IsraelPlug suggests that someone should start an initiative called "Sense of Humor for Middle East Peace"

Here's the commercial:

Here's a news bit on it (forgive me that it's FOX... I couldn't find anything else):

Now, there's one piece that all falls into place with that FOX news piece. MBC ran a story about the ad and then started a conversation about how Israelis are fueling profits with "hatred and racism". Shall we compare this to the sorts of things in Arabic TV that fuel hatred against Jews and against Israel? This commercial is a JOKE. That lovely mouse that taught Palestinian children to hate Jews and was "killed by Israelis" after getting too much international attention was NOT A JOKE. Can you see the difference?

I think Miriam is right. We need a "Regional Get a Sense Of Humor Day" here.

me: Doesn't this plum look like it's been waxed? coworker (laughing): Yeah. That's weird. It's shiny, isn't it? me: I didn't think that they waxed fruit in Israel. coworker (looking bewildered): Like they do in other places? me: Yeah, in America they wax the fruit you buy in most grocery stores. coworker: What for? me: You know, so it looks shiny. Like this. (holding out shiny plum) coworker: That's just barbaric! Americans are really strange, you know that?

So, I've been doing this streaming israel thing for a couple of weeks now, and I'm wondering what you, the viewing public think I ought to get videos of. The folks over at Seesmic said "street scenes" and "just general life" which is pretty much what I'm trying to give you. I keep the videos short, because I don't want them to turn into mega long boring things, but maybe I'm making them too short? I don't know, you tell me. Some things I'm planning: 1) Interviews. These will be unedited, raw footage just like the rest of the videos here.