By Melanie Takefman

Until recently, Israelis could ignore the Occupation. People led normal lives: they drank their coffee and ate breakfast in the mornings, drove their kids to school, worked from 8-5, and went hiking on weekends. People did reserve duty, and some had relatives or friends who were killed in the line of duty or in terror attacks. But a majority, it seems, was able to keep the “conflict” neatly tucked away.
In recent years, something deep inside the Israeli consciousness has begun to rumble. Life is hard, really hard, now. …

The recent nomination of the Israeli movie “Waltz with Bashir” for an academy award has sparked much debate about how it depicts Israel to “the goys”. The movie is an animated journey into the director, Ari Folman’s recovered memory of his experiences as a soldier in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

I can never find it in me to accept the names Ashkelon, Bersheeba or Ashdod. I still refer to them by their Arab names: Asqalan, Beir al sab’ and Isdud. And however hard I try, I can’t find it in me to feel much sympathy for the civilians who live in these towns.To me, Palestine doesn’t symbolize anything, since I don’t identify with it religiously or ethnically as do most Arabs. But it represents one of the greatest injustices in modern history, not unlike the holocaust.

January: To be a Jew and an American, to be so egregious to say: when I left the United States and came to Israel, I left one diaspora and entered another. I am a diaspora Jew, a landless, people-of-the-book Jew. Homelands make me nervous. But here I am in Israel. Looking up the Hebrew word “galut,” meaning diaspora, in an English-Hebrew dictionary, I see that the adjective “galuti” is translated as “ghetto-like.” I suppose that’s how Israelis like to remember the diaspora.

I can’t remember when I became Jewish.

It could have happened when God’s divine handiwork gave my parents their third child. It technically happened when my dear foreskin was stolen from me just eight days into my existence. It even might have occurred when I stepped up to become a man, albeit a barely pubescent man, at my Bar Mitzvah when I was 13.

Arabs have no one to blame but themselves for the plight of the Palestinians

By Josh Scheinert

It’s on the bus driving in from the West Bank where you really appreciate Jerusalem’s grandeur. The Old City creeps up on you from out the window. The sun, reflecting off the Dome of the Rock is almost blinding. Yet, you can’t look away; you don’t want to. This is it, what it all comes down to – so you want to make sure you take in every last glimpse of this city of gold that ignites so many passions.

By Michael Rom

At first glance, Peki’in is a tourist’s dream. The Galilean village is situated on the side of a hill, overlooking a green valley, from which it takes its Arabic name, al-Buqe’a (little valley). In the centre of the Galilean village is an ancient spring, ringed by cafes and restaurants. A little ways north of the spring is a cave, said to be the spot where the 2nd century kabbalist Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai hid for fourteen years from Roman soldiers. According to legend, although the great rabbi subsisted only on carobs from an adjacent tree, and water from the spring, he was able to compose the Zohar, the seminal text of kabbalah.

By Ruth Stevens

Hebrew graffiti in the old city of Hebron calls for death to the traitors against God, presumably including everyone on our tour and a large majority of the citizens of Israel. It’s a bright sunny day. Many of the buildings here are quite old and have beautiful Arabic inscriptions carved into their facades or wrought in their gates. Most are locked, shuttered and abandoned. It seems that living nation of Israel, am yisrael chay, has quite effectively rocked the casbah.

Myth – “A popular belief or story that has become associated with an … institution or occurrence, especially one considered to illustrate a cultural ideal.”

The following is a collection of short stories about my own myths and those of others I’ve encountered; those of Jews and those of Arabs; and finally, their causes and their consequences.