On identity, and cats

I haven't blogged for a while, mostly because since the promotion that gave me a new office (but sadly not a kitten, of which more later) I have been trying to stay afloat in a wide, deep sea of work that has been worsened by the imminent arrival of a group of inspectors.  It's not like I'm unused to inspections as they are a regular feature of teaching in the UK; Ofsted is the British schools inspection body and their frequent visits to schools make teachers break out in a cold sweat.  The inspection we're preparing for is much more in-depth, much more repetitive, much more persnickety and, I'm not kidding, is making me nostalgic for Ofsted.  However it's the weekend, I don't have to go into school until tomorrow afternoon, I'm off to Tel Aviv for some fun this evening and so I'm taking advantage of a quiet Shabbat morning, with BBC iPlayer on in the background, to pull together all the little threads I've been thinking about lately and create a coherent whole.

So, first and foremost: cats.  There are cats everywhere in Jerusalem (this you will know if you are a regular reader), they are generally pretty feral and ragged and once or twice a year they embark on a breeding program so comprehensive it makes the ultra-Orthodox Haredi, with their enormous broods (an average of 7 children per Haredi woman), look like regular visitors to the family planning clinic.  Why is this relevant?  Because this population expansion has suddenly hit the Anglican School and it now looks as if the cats are taking over.  We've always had cats living on site - there are in fact a few that are long-termers and there is, I believe, a budget line somewhere (small, obviously) for feeding them.  One of the teachers living on site has a cat called Mattie that she found on the street.  This cat has one eye, half a tail and a fairly mischievous approach to life which sees it coming into lessons, attacking people's ankles and deciding that my desk is the best place to sleep.  Plus - and I've never seen another cat do this - it sneezes enormous, lurid-green cat bogies all the time.  Apart from all the house cats, for some reason there has been a rather dramatic explosion in the number of feral cats at school which has created population numbers of, at a conservative estimate, around two thousand.  There are half-grown kittens living under the sports equipment shed; there are more kittens in the Middle School Yard, along with their mother who appears to be pregnant again; there are kittens getting trapped in the drains by the Pre-Primary playground; and there are kittens living on the Director's balcony.  He has embarked on a massive propaganda campaign to get people to adopt these particular animals, including sending regular e-mails with photos of them eating or sleeping or playing or just looking cute.  

I came perilously close to falling for it on the basis that I could keep one in my office, call it Chairman Miaow and have it on my lap during meetings like Dr. Evil, plus I'd even managed to talk my other boss around to it, but then the guy in the office opposite mine vetoed the idea on the grounds that he has allergies.  Given that when I went on a prospective visit to these kittens the one that the Director said I should have was so feral it was literally quivering with rage at the proximity of a human, I think this might be a good thing.  However with the idea of an office kitty foiled once again, I'm starting to think the universe doesn't want me to be a cat-owner.  

Secondly, ulpan.  I am now back in Hebrew lessons at my local ulpan (a place where Hebrew is learned by all and sundry), where I have reached the dizzy heights of cita bet (כיתה ב) and I'm starting to wonder if this was a good idea.  The classes are marginally shorter but a damn sight harder - the teacher speaks a lot faster, uses much wider vocabulary and sets less of the easily-achievable worksheets for homework and more extended reading and writing, plus the new textbook is scarier and doesn't have the useful dictionary at the back (thank heavens for my new smart phone and Google Translate).  

There are less German teenagers since by the time you reach cita bet, the Johnny-come-latelies have been weeded out and you're left with a room full of people who are learning Hebrew because they actually need it for the long-term, rather than because they thought it would be a bit of fun during their gap year.  So my current class includes a lot more olim (people who've made aliyah and moved here permanently), a lot more local Arabs and a few randoms like me who will be here for more than five seconds and want to be able to argue with taxi drivers as fluently as possible when the need arises.  After a vacation from ulpan for several months I spent most of the first class feeling like I'd been hit over the head with the stupid hammer, which was not helped by the presence of one American girl (since departed) who confused everybody firstly by speaking very, very fast and secondly by speaking Hebrew with a thick American accent that made it impossible to understand her.  I spotted one of the Arab girls staring at her with a look of total horror and confusion on her face and I thoroughly sympathised.  

The other thing about my new ulpan class is that skipping one lesson is much more of a mistake than it used to be.  I've never really been the type to bunk school, especially not in this case when I'm the one paying for it rather than my parents, but last Sunday I'd spent the afternoon in and out of the hospital at Misgav Ladach getting my knee scanned (the knee saga rumbles on - according to the scan the reason it still hurts so much is because there's a big black worm curled around the knee joint, though I'm guessing proper analysis of the results will tell me that it's fluid or something like that) and I got home just as class was starting, so I caved and sat at home watching Strictly Come Dancing instead.  This, it transpires, was a massive error because that was the class when they finally covered the future tense, so when I returned on Wednesday and we reviewed it I spent the whole lesson once again staring at my teacher in confusion and horror.  I'm going home for Christmas and will therefore miss four classes, which I'm now starting to panic about.  I am really enjoying being back in ulpan, even though I still get my masculine/feminine verbs mixed up and therefore look stupid all the time when talking to people (a recent example being at the butcher's this week when I said thank you in the feminine form to a very bald man), and despite my current inability to remember the vocabulary I need at the right moment I think the Hebrew is coming along nicely.

Thirdly and in a departure from the relatively mundane, something I've been pondering on lately is the issue of identity.  The Supreme Court in Israel recently handed down a decision that has caused a bit of a storm in the press.  A lawsuit was brought before the court by a fairly diverse group of people, including Professor Uzzi Ornan and Uri Avnery, a veteran of the Irgun and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement, proposing that people be allowed to have the word 'Israeli' written on their national identity cards.  If your Israeli id card (teudat zehut or תעודת זהות) was issued before 2005 there is a section on called le'om (לאום), which roughly translates into English as ethnicity or nationhood and it is this section of the id card that has caused the controversy.  It seems to me that ethnicity is not the same as nationhood, since you can have many ethnic groups in one nation, so I find that idea of le'om confusing - the word conveys two very different meanings, to my understanding.  The Israeli population registry covers a whole range of ethnic groups - Arab, Druze, Jew and so on - but, bizarrely, it doesn't actually permit you to put 'Israeli' down as your le'om.  The group argues that denying people the choice to be labeled Israeli discriminates against secular Israelis of all ethnic and religious groups, plus it will probably lead to Israeli policies favouring Jews over minorities because the majority of people in Israel are Jewish (roughly 75% of the population).  The court argues that doing this will endanger the founding principle of Israel, which is to be a Jewish state for the Jewish people and so it has rejected the group's argument.  This, for me, is one of the most important currents in Israeli society: defining what an Israeli is, defining what a Jew is, deciding whether, in a nation that was created as a Jewish state, you can be Israeli if you aren't a Jew.

I asked some Israeli friends about this and they actually said the law-suit was a bit of a non-issue, more of a storm in a teacup than an actual thing most people care about.  Their point was that if you have the teudat zehut then it didn't really matter what your le'om was because you were still Israeli and that was what mattered.  It made me think of the time I spent last year with a young Jewish Israeli guy just out of the army who talked to me about what being Israeli meant to him. I found what he said so interesting: he is definitely very secular, but being Jewish has placed him in this nation and he is fiercely proud of being Israeli; he feels safe in Israel because he feels surrounded by his people; he talked about the prejudice he senses towards Jews and towards Israelis when he goes overseas.  In fact, I was complaining about the racial profiling at Ben Gurion airport (and the fact that it takes me at least an hour, usually more, to get through the security checks) and he said that the same thing happens to him everywhere.  I thought he was being perhaps a little melodramatic but I also took the point: when you're a target at foreign airports and night-clubs and resorts, I can see how important it is to take refuge in the collective Israeli identity. 

If it is the default that being Jewish makes you Israeli, and Israel is the Jewish homeland, what of those who are not Jewish but for whom Israel is home?  I read an opinion piece in Haaretz which addressed the issue head on (http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.551731).  The writer, Rachel Neeman, makes some interesting points, including this one: even if the state registers all its citizens as Israelis, Israel will still be the home of the Jewish people and the national flag’s colors will not fade.  It does not follow that all Israelis are Jews, or that all Jews are Israelis, so why should the teudat zehut define people according to ethnicity and create a differentiation between Arabs, Druze, Armenians, Jews, and the many other ethnic groups?  Does this not just reinforce ethnic barriers?  Why not just get rid of the le'om sub-section altogether?  Or are the ethnic and religious group definitions more important than the the meaning that the broader term 'Israeli' gives?  And here we are, back at the question of what actually is an Israeli, without having even addressed what it is to be, say, an Arab living in Israel, or an Armenian.  The Israeli writer Amos Oz says that the most important unifying factor in modern Israeli society is the Hebrew language; others would say that the experience of the army is a large part of the glue that holds Israeli society together.  So what of, say, the Haredim, who speak Yiddish and don't serve in the IDF?  (Though if our man Yair Lapid really gets his way all of that is going to change.)  Obviously I don't have an answer, and I think for those who attempt to formulate their own answer the water is constantly muddied by the melting-pot that is Israeli society.  

I've blogged before on how people who don't live here miss a lot of what's actually going on in the country - the national debate about illegal immigrants, the frustration with the Haredim felt by many secular Israelis, the rising price of food, to name just a few examples - because the international press focuses so much on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rightly so, because it is an issue that shapes the politics of the whole region.  But to focus on just the conflict without understanding the context of both Israeli and Palestinian society leads to a narrow understanding of what is a very complex situation.  I find the idea of a nation state based on religion a curious one, especially when Judaism is about more than just religion and is also about history and tradition and ethnicity.  It creates so many problems for Israeli society.  As an active, practising Christian with a faith that affects my day-to-day life I actually used to feel in the minority in the UK, a country where religion feels like it's fading into old stage scenery.  Here, religion defines people in so many ways, a lot of which I really don't understand.  Actually, the longer I live in Jerusalem, the less I feel I understand and the more questions I have.  Sometimes I feel like Alice heading down the rabbit hole into a world of total confusion and strangeness.  I used to be, I think, pretty black-and-white in my approach to many things; now I think I see things in many, many shades of grey (although not Fifty Shades of Grey) and I think this is one of the most profound changes that I've undergone since I moved here.  On balance, though, I don't think that's a bad thing.