Haredim and (Zionist) Women

Jerusalem.
"I took a seat at the front of the bus because I suffer from car sickness and sitting in the back makes me nausea," she said.
"At one point, a group of 20 men who belong to an extremist Haredi branch, bordered the bus and ordered me to move to the back.
When I refused, they began yelling at me, pulling my hair and finally one man took off his shoe and shoved his dirty sock in my face," she said.
(Ynet, 1 August 2022)

The role and position of women in society have always been a problem for religious zealots. In Muslim societies, the dress and behaviour of women are governed by law.
On the one hand, women are hussies. They have to dress "modestly", to protect men from them.
On the other hand, they are seen as children who have to be "protected" by a male family member. They have to obey the rules of the men who protect them.
Many ultra-orthodox (Haredi) Jewish religious authorities have a perception of the role and position of women in society that is similar to the Muslim perception.

"A History of Zionism" by Walter Lacqueur is an admired general history of the Zionist movement before the establishment of the state of Israel.
I used to write papers on Zionism for my university study group on Arab Nationalism. 

I found Laqueur to be an excellent frame of reference.

Most religious authorities in the shtetls of Eastern Europe hated political
Zionism.
According to Laqueur, one of the reasons for this and the hatred of the larger socialist Bund movement, was the equality of women in both movements. He also writes that the animosity towards political Zionists was more intense than the animosity towards the Bundists.

Why?
The "immodest" clothing of Zionist women when working in the fields.
At least the Bund women knew how to dress modestly. 

Lo-ammi (Not my people)

During the Holocaust there were some Jews who betrayed fellow-Jews. Often out of fear, sometimes because of a reward.
One of the most nefarious of these traitors was the Dutch Jewess Ans van Dijk. She even betrayed her own brother and his family. She was hanged at the end of the war for her crimes.

People tell me that I cannot compare modern-day Jews who betray (Israeli) Jews to war criminals like Ans van Dijk.
They are right. The Jewish war criminals feared for their lives.
Today’s Jewish “as a Jew” traitors do not have that fear. They betray other (Israeli) Jews out of narcissistic, arrogant “moral righteousness” or because it helps their careers.

Is the British Jewish journalist Jonathan Freedland an example of an “as a Jew” betrayer of Israeli Jews?
Let’s take a look.

He has just penned an article for the Jewish Chronicle with the title, “The 55th anniversary of the Six Day War merits no celebration”.
Why not celebrate? 

Because, according to Freedland, of what the “occupation” is doing to Israelis and “us” (British Jews).

Wait a minute.
The Six Day War was first and foremost an existential war. The goal of the Arab armies was the destruction of the state of Israel and the killing or expulsion of the Jews who lived there.
I know, I was in that war. I listened to the Arab propaganda in Hebrew. They did not ask us to surrender. No, they gloated about how they were going to kill all the men and rape all the women.

His objection to the “occupation” is Freedland’s legitimate political opinion.
However, he does not say that he will celebrate that Israel won the existential war and Jews were not slaughtered. 

No, he will not celebrate that the people of Israel live. 

All he cares about is the occupation.

To put it personally: He does not give shit about Jews like me, my family and my friends who survived. He does not give shit about the Jewish soldiers who died fighting for Israel in that existential war.

“As a Jew” all he cares about is his narcissistic, arrogant, perceived moral righteousness.
This is not just a difference about politics. This is an existential difference.

No country for old people

The Dutch Safety Board (OVV) has just published its report into the way the Dutch government handled the first phase of the corona pandemic in 2020.

If you want to assess the success or failure of actions, you first have to clarify what the goals of the actions were. There is usually a discussion of these goals in a report, at least in the preamble.

How do we remember earlier pandemics?
We conclude that the flu pandemic in 1918 was the worst pandemic in recent history because it killed the most people worldwide. The 2009 swine flu pandemic resulted in less than 300,000 deaths globally and is considered relatively mild.

Therefore, in my opinion, preventing excess deaths is a major goal of preventive measures during a pandemic. There are of course other goals and the different goals should be weighed before choosing a course of action.

A discussion of goals with the emphasis on saving lives cannot be found in the OVV report. The reason is simple: saving lives was/is not a relevant goal in the Dutch corona policy.
There are three illustrations for this lack of interest in mortality during the pandemic.

1. It is not compulsory to report deaths from corona in the Netherlands.
A policy directed towards preventing deaths from the virus would want to know how many people were dying from the virus.

2. The infected elderly were not given the necessary treatment that could have saved them.

No smiling photos of old people leaving hospital after a long fight against the corona virus in the Netherlands, as they would not have been admitted to hospital.
This also happens in other countries, but there is a difference.
In the UK it was exposed in a Sunday Times article: “Revealed: how elderly paid price of protecting NHS from Covid-19”.
In the Netherlands it is the accepted norm.

3. Lack of priority for vaccinating the elderly.

Remember the smiling photos of the old people who received the first corona vaccines. They were a signal of hope.

Not in the Netherlands. The first photo was of a happy nurse, the second was of a beaming television doctor. 

I remember an uplifting photo in German newspapers; it took another three weeks before the first old person was vaccinated in the Netherlands.

The German nurse who vaccinated the first person in Germany said he was happy that Germany had started to vaccinate. It was important to start as soon as possible because every day people were dying.
The Dutch Minister of Health when confronted with a question about the Dutch tardiness with vaccinations replied: it was not important when you started as the Dutch would eventually catch up with the rest of Europe.

My back burner

We lived behind and above my parents’ shop in the Elephant & Castle. When I was 6, my parents sent me to a Jewish boarding school in Hove. I stayed there until I was 12.

One of the problems of the boarding school was that other children only stayed one or a few terms. It was quite usual for me to return from a school holiday and find that some of my friends had left the school.

I unconsciously developed a defence mechanism for this recurring form of loss.
When I went home, I put all my school friends on a back burner. If they were gone when I returned, I left them there and eventually forgot about them.

Since then I have always used my back burner for events and people. It has enabled me to hide traumatic events and move from people and countries more easily.
For me, it is literally: out of sight, out of mind.

When I was 18, I left England to go and live on a kibbutz in the northern part of the Negev desert. I was the only member of the kibbutz from an English-speaking country. 

The Romanian Holocaust survivors who founded the kibbutz did all speak a foreign language, but that was German.
I put my family and old friends out of my mind and concentrated on the present and the future.

Fast forward 3 years. The 6 day war is over and I have been demobbed. I was back on the kibbutz but that was difficult. 

The relentless routine of work, eat, work, sleep was eroding my motivation.

I had a relationship with a South African tourist. She was pleasant company and I found her attractive.
For me, she was a diversion. For her, I was an experience she could relate to her girlfriends when she returned home.

We were together in my room. A knock on the door: telephone for you. Where is the telephone? In the office.
I went down to the office that was in a wooden hut. There was a telephone there that I had never seen before.

I picked it up. It was my mother.
She knew I was in the paratroopers because she had been to the Israeli Embassy about my father’s illness.
She was phoning to find out if I was still alive. I had not contacted her since the war.

That’s the problem with back burners.

A New Beginning

In order to make Aliyah in 1964 I tagged on to a “Hashomer Hatzair” European youth “garin” (group) that was going to settle in kibbutz Magen, in the north of the Negev desert near to the Egyptian border.

The group was composed of 15 to 20 Jewish teenagers from Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and Italy.
I am not sure about the exact number because some had emotional or mental problems and were quietly returned to the countries they came from after a short period in Israel.

Before I could make Aliyah I had to spend a few weeks at a training farm in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire. This was to prepare me for physical labour on a communal farm.
The Hashomer Hatzair “shaliach” (emissary) was an Israeli man who lived on the farm with his wife and young child.

I met Gidon for the first time on that farm. He was visiting on his way to Israel. I thought it was a strange detour to make from the Netherlands, but he said he wanted to visit the shaliach.
We hit it off well and he later confided in me the real reason he was there. He was knocking up the shaliach’s wife.

I was an 18-year-old innocent British teenager about to start on a life changing adventure.
The first person I met who was going to be part of that adventure told me he was knocking up somebody else’s wife.
Was I shocked? No.
I thought to myself: bring it on.

Rich families

The west coast of Sicily is one of the poorest and most underdeveloped areas of Italy. There is an old, dilapidated public hospital in Castelvetrano that you should avoid.

How do I know?
I spent 3 hours there waiting to be admitted to their emergency department and then another 14 hours with an intravenous cannula in my arm waiting to be seen by a doctor. There was no bed for me, I was allocated a stretcher in a large open space with about 15 Sicilians on stretchers and beds.

It was difficult for them to register me because their computer programme did not accept British as a nationality.

I knew that I had (recurrent) erysipelas and all I needed was antibiotics.

The place was in a constant state of bedlam. The nurses shouted at patients and patients shouted at nurses.
There was only one doctor for the whole emergency department. When he had to walk past patients he would keep his head in the air. They would call to him, but he did not respond.

There was no bedding, only a sheet of paper for the stretcher. I had an extra roll that allowed me to change the paper when it got torn or too crumpled. 

There was no food or potable water. At the front of the building there was a vending machine for cola and other fizzy drinks.

The one toilet had no toilet paper. I asked a nurse for toilet paper and he gave me some surgical cloths.
The other patients ignored me. Not in a hostile way, more not wanting to bother me.

On the other hand, all the patients had family at their bedside who looked after them.
They brought food and water, helped them to the toilet (they had their own toilet paper), and helped them wash. Some had even brought their own bed linen.
Most important of all they were there to comfort their ill family (or friends): talking, smiling and sometimes stroking and hugging.

I remember one older woman with little hair who was coughing a lot. Every now and then she was sick. 

A middle-aged man sat close to the head end of her bed. He read from a book for her.

Those poor people, rich with family.

Fornicating memories

Music can bring back memories.
Sometimes of a period in life, other times of a specific occurrence.

I was working on the docks in Amsterdam doing rather hard and dirty work. My pulmonologist says I now have a scar on my lungs from that period.

In those days I was paid in cash at the end of the week; in a brown paper envelope with my name written in ink on the outside.

We had been living in the flat of my girlfriend’s mother for a couple of weeks. Now, as the mother was coming back from her holidays, we needed a place to live.

In the east of Amsterdam there is a building near the Zoo called the Hollandse Schouwburg (Holland’s Theatre).
Originally the Schouwburg was a Dutch theatre, but in 1941 the Nazi occupiers used it as an assembly point for the deportation of Jews.
Nowadays it is a monument with an eternal flame in memory of the deported Amsterdam Jews.

Right behind the Schouwburg in the adjacent street there was a courtyard that could only be reached through an alley.
In the courtyard there was a large building owned by a carpenter. He had his workshop on the ground floor.

The other floors had been converted into rooms separated by walls made of hardboard. That is where we went to live when my girlfriend’s mother came back from her holidays.

The room was small and the carpenter had used hardboard (again) to separate the room into three even smaller areas. One of these areas was an alcove big enough for a three-quarter bed.

Our neighbours were a young couple. Their alcove and our alcove were next to each other, just separated by hardboard.
The young couple were not too keen on us listening to their sexual activity. 

They solved the problem by playing a record of the Mamas and the Papas during their lovemaking.

Since that time, the music of the Mamas and the Papas reminds me of fornication.