On Writing As the Lonely Fly, Sara Dowse

Sara Dowse

It was a winter’s night in Canberra, 1974. My American mother had come from sunny LA to help look after my kids, but she found Australia’s capital less than hospitable. It was too cold and I was too busy. The Whitlam government had just been re-elected after Gough had called a double dissolution. It took two weeks to learn whether they were still in office or not.

I was the bureaucratic back-up to Elizabeth Reid, Whitlam’s women’s adviser, and we had a lot of work to do. We were working to get a child care program up, finding funding for refuges and plans were afoot for the International Women’s Year program the following year. We had done our best to make my mother feel welcome, but she was bored in the company of women. We were going to change the world, but my mother had been around and had her doubts. Would Australia become a feminist paradise? She didn’t think so. I did arrange for her to have dinner with Moss Cass, Whitlam’s environment minister, and she was happy with that, but she remained highly sceptical. She was an actor, and had been blacklisted in the McCarthy years. She was exasperated with our seeming naiveté.

The kids had gone to bed, and we were trying to get warm in front of the house’s one oil heater. (This was Canberra in the 70s.) Suddenly my mother blurted out, ‘You women think you’re such hot shots. You had an aunt who was a member of the Soviet Politburo!’

What? I had never heard of this woman, but it turned out that she was one my grandfather’s sisters. I had known the other two, but not this Lisa. That was her name – Lisa Fich. It also turned out that my mother had all her facts wrong. Yet when I eventually did learn the story, I found it far more compelling than anything my mother had said. Of course, her aunt had never been on the Politburo – no woman had. And though my mother had said she was some kind of high-ranking apparatchik, that wasn’t true either. Lisa Fich was a dedicated Zionist who went to Palestine after the First World War, changed her name from Lisa to Leah, and joined the G’dud Ha’Avodah, or Labour Battalion. Even before the Battalion split into factions, she and some of her colleagues had joined the Communist party and in 1929 were sent back to Russia, where they set up a kolkhoz, Voya Nova, in the Crimea.

My dream was to write a biography of her, and I began by learning Russian, and saturating myself in Russian and Zionist history. In my search for her story, I interviewed many people, including one who knew her when she was still alive. But I was stymied on a couple of occasions – once, when I got to Israel and found that the Central Zionist Archives were closed for renovations; another time, in Moscow, when I was given a wrong lead and lost an opportunity to look for her in the recently opened Soviet archives. And because of changes in my personal life, I wasn’t able to travel anymore, so I finally decided to abandon my idea of a biography and write another novel. This is As the Lonely Fly – my sixth. The shorthand is that it took 25 years of research and writing, but there were many interruptions, including two other novels in the meantime.

Only last year, as this latest novel went to the printers, an Israeli friend found a mention of my great aunt. She was listed as the G’dud’s delegate to the Histadrut conference sometime in the 1920s. This would have been before the G’dud was ostracised by the Labor Zionists – Ben Gurion’s crowd. I would like to follow this up, but it was clear almost from the beginning of my research that she and her comrades were dissidents who came to renounce the idea of a Jewish state. Their reasons were partly ideological – they subscribed to Trotsky’s permanent revolution, to which they gave priority over nationalism – but the catalyst for their breaking with Political Zionism was what they saw happening to Arab labour. With the advance of Jewish settlement, idealistic as it was, many Arabs lost their jobs, and they were as well excluded from the Histadrut. For the first time in my life, I began to see, through this story, that the path that Herzl laid out for us was a very dangerous one indeed. It was sobering to realise that there were many, including my grandfather’s sister, who saw that right from the beginning.

Now, some say, we have the fact on the ground - Israel is a nation, a Jewish state, and it’s far too late to question the wisdom of its creation. But my answer to this is that knowing that there were paths not taken can help us find a way out of the very grave situation the Jewish-privileged state is in. I have come to believe that we in the Diaspora have a very important role to play in this; we need to probe our consciences and recognise our responsibilities. There is, in my opinion, no escaping this.

As the Lonely Fly is a novel, not a polemic. The characters throw light on the complexity of the situation and, through them, various perspectives are explored, each of them with sympathy and understanding. The story is the story, and it’s a big one – bigger than you or me – but the Jewish tradition that I was raised in was, above all, a tradition of justice, and I’m very proud of that. But I have had to ask myself, where does justice lie now?

Sara Dowse

August 2017

To hear Sara speak about this story she had to tell, join her at the Shalom | Sydney Jewish Writers Festival on Sunday August 27th at 3.15pm.

Ideas and books abuzz at Sydney Jewish Writers Festival

Bondi was abuzz this weekend as hundreds of people gathered for the 2016 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

The festival opened at the Bondi Pavilion with a fascinating and hopeful discussion between award-winning Israeli journalist Matti Friedman and stereotype-defying Rabbi Dov Lipman about fractures in Israel and the quiet, slow progress being made to overcome some of them.

“Israel is such a dynamic and complex place, it is always wonderful to hear different perspectives on issues,” said Festival Director Michael Misrachi. “Friedman and Lipman offered analysis, reflection and vision, which are as essential as ever.”

(L-R) Festival Director Michael Misrachi, Rabbi Dov Lipman, moderator Debbie Whitmont, author and journalist Matti Friedman and Waverley Councillor Leon Goltsman.

Audiences were then serenaded by Lee Kofman and Adi Sappir, who performed the poetry of celebrated Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai.

Orli Wargon, David Gonski, Kathy Shand & Michaela Kalowksi 

The program continued on Sunday at Waverley Library with sessions on refugees, music, true crime, and both fictional and real-life stories of Holocaust survival. Audiences were inspired by philanthropist and businessman David Gonski, and moved by authors Shelley Davidow and Alexandra Joel, who explored how one passes on a family legacy without transmitting difficult and traumatic aspects. Matti Friedman spoke to a capacity crowd about his books, The Aleppo Codex and Pumpkinflowers, which promptly sold out at the bookshop.

Davidow, who appears at the Brisbane Writers Festival in the coming weeks, enthused that the program was so topical: “It explored issues facing the country, the world, and people’s lives.”

Dina Gold’s riveting story of reclaiming a family building stolen by the Nazis, the book launch of Rebellious Daughters, and the session on death – which featured authors Leah Kaminsky and Steven Amsterdam along with Rabbi David Freedman and SMH Literary Editor Susan Wyndham – also drew particularly large crowds.

“Audiences flocked to engage with the issue of the end of life, which touches us all but remains highly emotive and still largely taboo,” Misrachi said. “It was thought-provoking and poignant to confront issues like suicide and euthanasia, as well as the panellists’ personal experiences with death.”

Kids enjoyed getting to meet the mother-daughter team of Barbara and Anna Fienberg, authors of Tashi. 

Children were also highly engaged at the festival through three sessions run in conjunction with PJ Library. Kids played with words and language with Erica Bental, author of Has a Book Got a Spine, and intensely quizzed Anna and Barbara Fienberg about how they wrote the beloved series Tashi.

For photos from the Festival please go to our facebook page.

Stay tuned to www.sjwf.org.au for podcasts from the 2016 Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. 

Looking forward to next year!

Matti Friedman: soldier, journalist and author

by Sydney Jewish Writers Festival

Canadian-born author and former Associated Press journalist Matti Friedman will be speaking exclusively in Sydney this weekend as the guest of the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival before travelling to the Melbourne Writers Festival.

Matt Friedman

Friedman has travelled from Jerusalem to Sydney for the SJWF 2016, and is currently promoting his newly released book Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story.

Pumpkinflowers centres on the contentious withdrawal of the Israeli Army from Lebanon in the late 1990s, and Friedman’s own experience as a soldier for Israel during that time stationed on an isolated hilltop outpost called ‘the Pumpkin’.

Friedman describes himself as “the first, and I fully expect to be the last, historian of this particular hill”. 

“For many years, this hill was very important to me and was probably the most important place in the world,” Friedman has written since releasing Pumpkinflowers.

“If you map my mental landscape, the centre of that landscape is the Pumpkin.”

Friedman explains his motivation to write this book: “I thought that if I could nail the story of the Pumpkin and make it comprehensible, and make it understandable to people very far away, it would enrich people's understanding of what has happened in the Middle East since this new century began.”

The book has received high praise already: The Jewish Standard has described Pumpkinflowers as “well on its way to joining the select group of wartime narratives that continue to grip and grate on the conscience long after they have been read, put back on the shelf, or passed along”; while the New York Times’ book critic Jennifer Senior described it as “a truly fine war memoir”.

Friedman will talk to many of the issues raised in his book as well as the broader geo-political realities of the Middle East in the opening night session on Saturday August 28 at Bondi Pavilion. The session entitled Israel’s battle lines with former Israeli parliament member Rabbi Dov Lipman will discuss both the internal and external challenges faced by Israel.

Before Pumpkinflowers, Friedman has previously received great acclaim for his 2012 book The Aleppo Codex; as well as viral internet attention in 2014 for essays Friedman wrote in Tablet and The Atlantic about the ties between foreign press corps in Jerusalem and non-governmental organisations that results in media bias against Israel, and in early 2015 for a speech he made on the subject at the annual Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (BICOM) dinner.

Friedman boldly stood up at that dinner and explained the systematic bias against Israel inherent in media organisations in his experience as a journalist covering Israel and the Middle East for The Associated Press in its Jerusalem bureau. 

Friedman speaking at the 2015
BICOM dinner

“In my time in the press corps I saw, from the inside, how Israel’s flaws were dissected and magnified, while the flaws of its enemies were purposely erased.

I saw how the threats facing Israel were disregarded or even mocked as figments of the Israeli imagination, even as these threats repeatedly materialised.

I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality.”

The video of the speech can be viewed here. 

The Aleppo Codex, which traces the journey of the thousand year old manuscript of the Hebrew Bible known as “the Aleppo Codex” through the Middle East – discovered hidden in a grotto in the Great Synagogue in Aleppo, Syria; smuggled between countries; and eventually arriving in Israel in the late 1950s. The book explores how 200 of the pages went missing, who was involved, and the cover ups surrounding the whole affair.

The Aleppo Codex earned Friedman the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, the American Library Association’s 2013 Sophie Brody Medal, the 2013 Canadian Jewish Book Award for History, and the book was named one of Booklist’s top ten religion books of 2013.

An incredible speaker on all matters relating to Israel and more, Matti Friedman is a must see at this year’s SJWF!

Matti Friedman will be speaking in two sessions at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival. In “Israel’s battle lines” on Saturday August 27 from 7:30-8:40pm, Matti will be speaking alongside former Knesset member Rabbi Dov Lipman about the challenges currently confronting Israel from all angles, moderated by Four Corners reporter Debbie Whitmont. 

Michael Visontay will be in conversation with Matti about his own journey and experience as a journalist, soldier and now author on Sunday August 28 at 12:30-1:30pm in “Unearthing Israel’s hidden stories: In Conversation with Matti Friedman”.

Book your tickets now to see Matti in his only Sydney public appearance at www.sjwf.org.au!

Ideas and literature shine at Sydney Jewish Writers Festival

We are excited to be back, for the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival (SJWF) returns on 27-28 August 2016! It features a remarkable line-up of international award-winners, thought leaders, acclaimed authors, new talent, and plenty of extraordinary stories.

“We are thrilled to showcase such a fine and fascinating line-up of writers”, said Festival Director Michael Misrachi. 

“They stir us to grapple with big, global issues – war, religious extremism, refugees, end of life, and family dynamics – but also write beautifully and invite us to enjoy the poetry and music of life.”

Opening night is a case in point. It features award-winning Israeli author and journalist Matti Friedman whose new book Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story was described by Pulitzer Prize-winner Kai Bird as “destined to become a classic text on the absurdities of war” and critique of media coverage of Israel after its 2014 war with Gaza went viral on social media. He discusses Israel’s battle lines with stereotype-defying Rabbi Dov Lipman, former Member of the Knesset and campaigner against religious extremism in Israel.

The panel is followed by cellist and composer Adi Sappir and author Lee Kofman performing an uplifting, musical rendering of the work of Yehuda Amichai, modern Israel’s most beloved poet.

US-based author Dina Gold shares her
incredible search and long legal battle to reclaim a building that belonged to her German-Jewish family but was stolen by the Nazis, in the spirit of the Helen Mirren movie Woman In Gold. Precious possessions lost during the Holocaust also feature in the fiction of New Zealand author, Julie Thomas.

SJWF will host the Sydney launch of Rebellious Daughters and feature hot-off-the-press authors Steven Amsterdam, Nathan Besser and MeredithJaffe.

“We are struck every year by the wealth of Jewish literature being published”, enthused Misrachi, “There has been a flurry of excellent Jewish writing in the months leading up to the festival!”

Leading figures David Gonski and Mark Tedeschi open up about their writing, along with Mireille Juchau, whose recent masterpiece The World Without Us won the 2016 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for The Stella Prize and Australian Book Industry Award.

SJWF features prolific acclaimed author Arnold Zable, who will also talk about his work as a refugee advocate with Kooshyar Karimi, who shares his experience as a Jewish-Iranian refugee who languished in Turkey for years.

Holocaust survivor Baba Schwartz tells her story publicly for the first time, recounting the horrors of Auschwitz as well as her happy childhood in Hungary, a period often overshadowed by the subsequent tragedy. She is joined by Frank Vajda and Marcel Weyland, who were both saved by Righteous of the Nations – Raoul Wallenberg and Chiune Sugihara respectively.

SJWF offers writing workshopsfor adults with Lee Kofman and for children with word play extraordinaire Erica Bentel, in conjunction with PJ Library. There is also a special parent-child session with the mother-daughter creative genius behind Tashi, Barbara and Anna Fienberg.

SJWF will once again be hosted by Waverley Council, with events taking place at the Bondi Pavilion and Waverley Library.

For further information or to book tickets, visit www.sjwf.org.au

Israel. A Country Overflowing with Stories

By Leah Kaminsky, www.leahkaminsky.com

Photo credit: Nicola Bernadi 

My mother was a sole survivor of Belsen. After she died I promised myself I’d write a book about her, but all I had were small snippets of memory of stories she had told me when I was much younger. I’ve drawn on these, as well as my own real experiences living and working as a doctor in the Middle East, to weave together a tale about values we share in common. The novel took me over ten years to write. 

It started with a childhood memory of a story my mother once told me about her father. He died in the Lodz ghetto aged 42. He was a pious man who insisted his six children burn their nail clippings in the fireplace, using matchsticks as witnesses. I found out years later, while researching THE WAITING ROOM, that according to the mystical thinking of the Kabbalah, the fingernail is a remnant of the membrane covering Adam’s body before he ate the forbidden apple. Nails are pieces of the soul and if you do not burn or bury them you cannot pass into the afterlife until you have found each one you have scattered. 

A pregnant woman, who represents life, is in danger of miscarriage if she steps over a stray nail clipping, which is dead matter and represents our own mortality. This intrigued me and became the prologue for the novel, as well as one of its leitmotifs – the wispy realm that lies between life and death.

The face of war has changed dramatically over recent years. In the past, those at home used to mourn for their fallen soldiers who died far away on foreign battlefields. Nowadays, as civilians, we have all been conscripted into global conflict and are threatened with random acts of terror as a part of our everyday lives. Even the countries we once thought blessed with peaceful borders have now become non-too-safe sanctuaries.  THE WAITING ROOM is a love-story, set amongst this new landscape of war, affirming that at heart we have more in common with each other than our differences might suggest. Trauma carries down through generations, but so does love. And love is ultimately what gives us hope.

Dina is an Australian family doctor, trying to live her day-to-day life in Haifa, a port city which prides itself on being an oasis of co-existence in the Middle East. Pregnant with her second child, she juggles her patient’s needs and eccentricities, a fraying marriage and the demands of motherhood, with the threat of terror looming near. Trying hard to hold everything together, she is haunted by the legacy of her holocaust survivor mother. 

Despite attempts to escape the persistence of her ghosts, focusing instead on her relationship with her Israeli husband, her young son and her work, Dina finds herself reliving her mother’s imagined past. She can’t keep out her mother’s presence, the weight of their history and the reality of living in Israel; everything is seeping through the cracks and imploding. Dina’s internal psychological bomb is ticking away alongside the sudden terror threat that casts a shadow on an otherwise ordinary day. THE WAITING ROOM explores what it means to be a mother, a lover and a listener (for her patients), at a time when Dina can’t even hold herself together.

THE WAITING ROOM has all the elements of misery woven into its narrative – death, war and depression – but at its heart it’s an uplifting love-story about hope and that’s the overriding message of the book I would like people to take home. 

Pre-order copies of the book from Random House. 

The Sydney-launch of THE WAITING ROOM entitled Israel. A Country Overflowing With Stories: In Conversation with Leah Kaminsky will kick off the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival from 7:15pm-8:15pm on Saturday, 29 August at Waverley Library, Bondi Junction. Book here! 

To see the full program: www.sjwf.org.au 

Spinning Israel's story - Alan Gold

Inspiration from the most unlikely places,
 including The Simpsons

by Alan Gold

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked when I lecture to students on creative writing, is where my ideas for a novel come from. Yet I’m never believed when I tell my students that it’s either the front page of a daily newspaper, or the latest edition of The Simpsons. 

But the idea for the most recent novel I’ve written came to me four decades ago, when I was weeding an Israeli tomato field with a Professor of Philosophy from an Ivy League American University. I was living on my kibbutz and as he and I were alone in the field under a broiling sun, hacking away with our hoes at the roots of the weeds, he asked me what I wanted to do when I’d left the Ulpan and the Kibbutz and was working in Israel. Did I want to remain a journalist or go into another area of life? I told him I wanted to be a novelist, the ambition of many journalists. The problem, I told him, was finding a story which sufficiently original that a publisher would be interested.

“The only originality you need,” he told me, “is telling an old story in a new and compelling way.” I admitted that I couldn’t even think of an old story to re-tell, and he stood up straight, took a drink of water, and said, “Jerusalem! There’s three thousand years of stories there, and writers haven’t even scratched the surface of one of its stones.”

The holy city of Jerusalem 

For forty years and more, I’ve been thinking of writing a story about the 3000 year history of Jerusalem, but told fictionally. Why as fiction? 

Because facts like dates, wars and sieges are never as memorable to a reader as are well-developed characters and the stories they tell. Told as fiction, a reader or viewer develops a deep empathy with the characters, and are absorbed far more memorably than dry facts from a history book.

Think, for instance, about Israel’s Hasbara. The Palestinians trot out fabrication after fabrication, soaked up by the world’s media. It makes front page news. And then some poor, hapless Israeli spokesperson will appear in the media the following day and say that what the Palestinians are saying is all lies, and here are the facts. So whose story is remembered by viewers and readers? Not the Israeli side…of that, you can be certain.

http://www.booktopia.com.au/exodus-leon-uris/prod9780553258479.html

But it was a phone call from the head of the UIA, Harold Finger, which put these two aspects together, and created a trilogy which, we hope, will begin to alter the way non-Jews view Israel and its right to nationhood.

I’d only just returned from two months in Indonesia, writing a book about the nation’s history, when Harold phoned me out of the blue. He was deeply and increasingly concerned about the continual bad press which Israel was getting around the world, and wanted to discuss the concept of me writing a book which told the truth about Israel’s history and its inalienable right to its existence. He knew that the facts either weren’t understood, or were disbelieved, by a majority of the non-Jewish world, and felt that a good book – like Exodus or Roots – was needed to make people understand the historical and moral claim which Israel had to its ancient land.

http://www.booktopia.com.au/bloodline-alan-gold/prod9781922052834.html

And as he spoke, the idea grew and grew in my mind, until by the end of the hour-long conversation, we’d created The Heritage Trilogy, a dramatized television series, a multi-lingual teacher’s resource for curriculums throughout the world. These would not be Israeli propaganda, but a factual analysis of the history of the Jewish people, the diaspora and the regathering of a people into their historical land. Bloodline, published world-wide by Simon & Schuster, was the first of the books; later this year, the second in the trilogy will be published, followed by the third next year. The books trace the 3000 year history of the Jewish people, told through the eyes of two families, from the time of the First Temple to today’s Israel.

And in that phone call a couple of years ago, grew the idea of a storyworld. This is a way of telling multiple stories at the same time, across a variety of media. Increasingly with the contraction of the book industry, publishers, television producers, movie studios and internet creators, are coming together to tell vastly bigger stories than can be told in a film or a book. And the concept which Harold and I were creating during an electrifying phone call, was, arguably, the biggest of them all … the three thousand year history of the Jewish people, told in book, television, animated games, interactive books, and much much more.

But I’m a writer and Harold is a property developer, so we needed an expert on trans-media multi-platform story-telling.  Along came my dear friend, Mike Jones…and that’s the beginning of the story. 

Watch the trailer for his book Bloodline here - http://youtu.be/KKrUwuWns9g

Hear Alan Gold at the upcoming Sydney Jewish Writers Festival @ Shalom College, UNSW on Sunday 25 August.

• When past meets present - fiction and history with Dr Bernard Cohen from 2pm-3pm moderated by Joanna Kalowski. 
• Spinning Israel's story with Dr Yoaz Hendel and Debbie Whitmont moderated by Yair Miller from 4:30pm-5:30pm. 

Full program details and ticket information are available at www.sjwf.org.au or call 9381 4160. Join us on Facebook and Twitter @SJWFestival #SJWF2014

Breaking down stereotypes from left to right - Dr Yoaz Hendel

Visiting scholar of The Shalom Institute and Sydney Jewish Writers Festival guest author Dr Yoaz Hendel arrives next week from Israel. As Chairman of the Institute for Zionist Strategies he is dramatically rethinking the political discourse in Israel and shattering typical stereotypes about right-wing and left-wing. In these difficult times, he brings some fresh, new ideas to a stalemated conflict.

Dr Yoaz Hendel 

TimesofIsrael.com wrote about the journalist, commentator, analyst, author and former Director of Communications for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Excerpts of the article are below.

Yoaz Hendel is undoubtedly a right-winger, having served as an adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and today chairing the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a right-leaning think-tank. His interest, the overarching theme of his voluminous writing and commentary, is Israel itself, its many identities, social fractures and shared future.

Left-wingers, he believes, are too quick to surrender both their particularism and self-criticism; right-wingers are too eager to cling to unexamined tropes and unthinking maximalist positions. The Jewish people’s future as a nation will depend on Israeli society’s ability to resist these centrifugal forces pulling it apart.

“Jewish kingdoms have a tendency to collapse not from external pressure but from internal pressure,” he told The Times of Israel in a recent conversation. “The second Jewish kingdom [under the Hasmoneans] stood for 80 years.” Israel, he notes, is already 65.

Hendel is one of the most active and visible of Israel’s political journalists. He is a ubiquitous presence in Israeli media. He may be the most widely-read right-wing voice in the country.

“Yoaz has an influential and unique voice in Israeli mainstream media, a voice that is not heard that often,” says Yaakov Katz, a former Jerusalem Post military correspondent who co-authored a book on the Iranian nuclear crisis with Hendel.

Slim, talkative and earnest, Hendel doesn’t seem to fit his resume. He served for years as an elite Flotilla 13 naval commando, and then for several years in undisclosed operational roles in the defense establishment. He holds the rank of major in the IDF reserves. He rarely adds the appellation “Dr.” to his name, so his readers are unaware that he holds a PhD in Hellenistic and Roman-era guerrilla warfare and intelligence gathering, including in the militaries of the Hasmonean Jewish kings commemorated on Hanukkah. And he rarely speaks of his service at the prime minister’s side, a relationship that imploded after Hendel turned to prosecutors over sexual harassment allegedly perpetrated by a member of the prime minister’s inner circle against a subordinate, an act that led to the sacking of the senior official — and a falling out between Hendel and Netanyahu’s closest aides.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu with Dr Yoaz Hendel

His latest passion, which he tackles with the same energy evident in his military record and his media presence, is the Jerusalem-based Institute for Zionist Strategies. Since taking over as chairman in May 2012, Yoaz has shifted its focus to a complex, assertive effort at undermining the assumptions of Israel’s current political debate.

 “If there’s one thing you need to know about Yoaz, it’s that he breaks up monopolies,” an influential journalist said of him recently. “He wants to break up the religious monopoly of the rabbinate, the left’s monopoly on human rights, the right’s monopoly on Zionism.”

It’s a comment that summarizes succinctly Hendel’s political mission.

“The IZS tries to turn the State of Israel into both a more Jewish and a more democratic country,” Hendel explains, riffing off the common assertion that there is a tension between the two.

“We’re unflinchingly nationalistic. We have no doubts about our identity, even in a world that doubts the right of a Jewish state to be Jewish,” Hendel says.

“We believe the state was born primarily to be a home for the Jewish people, but at the same time we strive to make it more democratic.”

Democracy is not optional, he insists. “Jews have never lived in peace with each other without an external law.” Democracy is that set of rules required for Jews to live together.

 “The Zionist movement can’t be built on the denial of the other. My purpose isn’t just to teach the world [Israel’s side of the story], but to teach the Israeli as well, to teach parts of the left that not every statement that ‘smells’ nationalistic signals the end of democracy, and to teach the right that a national identity can’t be built on hate.”

One of Hendel’s first major steps when he took over the chairmanship of the institute was to establish “Blue and White Human Rights,” a group of self-identified right-wing activists who perform actions usually considered the sole purview of the far left, such as standing at roadblocks in the West Bank to ensure that IDF soldiers perform their duties according to the rules of the army, Israeli law and international norms.

The right -wing Blue and White Human Rights group monitors IDF soldiers at roadblocks. 

The left’s “monopoly on human rights” has been damaging for Israel because it has given credence to the idea, not least on the right itself, that the right is somehow less responsible for or less interested in human rights, he argues.

We say that morality doesn’t belong to anyone. If anything, morality is on our side more than theirs, because some of the human rights organizations use human rights discourse for political ends, to oppose Israel’s existence. We deal with human rights without making them dependent on narrow politics.”

Most observers of Israeli politics believe the Israeli right is a triumphant political force that has ruled the country for the better part of the last two decades and faces a fractured, confused opponent on the left. But Hendel refuses to celebrate. The right, he argues, has failed Israel. Its electoral victories are not a function of its political message. In fact, he worries, the Israeli right barely has a political message.

As he seeks to break the left’s monopoly on human rights, Hendel devotes perhaps even more effort to liberating what he calls the “paralyzed” discourse on the right when it comes to the Palestinians.

The abysmal electoral failure of the left over the past two decades has created a strange mirror effect on the right. Since the right appears to be unable to lose an election, “it feels no need to speak to the mainstream or the center.”

“I don’t want to see Likud fail to form the government” in an upcoming election, Hendel insists, “but I also want Likud to stay in the Israeli mainstream. Without the liberal nationalist voice, without the appeal to the Israeli mainstream, which is patriotic but liberal, wants peace but understands its limits, Likud will turn into Jewish Home,” its more hawkish coalition partner.

“Unlike others on the right, I think the status quo is damaging to Israel. We have to start finding our own answers as to how things should develop.” Instead, he says, the right has allowed itself to be dragged along by events.

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Don't miss Dr Yoaz Hendel in person at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival at Shalom College, UNSW. 

• Secrets and Lies with Prisoner X author Rafael Epstein and Michaela Kalowksi on Saturday 23 August from 7:30pm.
• Israel: Dreams, Observations,Visions with Helen Gottstein, Michael Kagan and Dr Hilton Immerman on Sunday 24 August from 11:15am-12:15pm. 
• Spinning Israel's story with Bloodline author Alan Gold, Debbie Whitmont and Yair Miller. 

Full program details and ticket information are available at www.sjwf.org.au or call 9381 4160.

Join us on Facebook and Twitter @SJWFestival #SJWF2014

HOPE

by Michal Kagan

Last week July 15^th 2014 was a day of disappointment and grief, and a day of hope and wonder.  

It was the 17^th day of Tammuz.  The longed-for cease-fire that would put an end to this stupidity died before birth leaving behind it explosions and death while, at the same time, traditional Jews fasted and mourned the siege of Jerusalem that eventually led to its fall.  

It was also the 17^th day of Ramadan.  In the yeshivah of Maale Gilboa, that overlooks the magnificent Beit She’an section of the Great Rift Valley, Sheikh Ghassan Manasra, his father, his son and his disciples together with rabbis and students prayed together, sang together, learned together, laughed together, cried together, and we broke our fasts together.  

What a magnificent sight to see the rift closing, the walls coming down, the siege ending.  What a fulfillment of God’s Prayer to hear the sounds of the adhan - the Moslem call to prayer - echoing off the walls of the Beit Midrash (house of study).  What a profound experience to daven the standing, silent prayer of Maariv, the evening service, while Moslems are prostrating on the carpets, regularly used by the cohanim, reciting the Maghrib prayer.  And then a sweet date and a glass of water to calm our hunger before the meal.

Sitting there with my sheikh, with my son and daughter-in-law, with my rabbis and their students, and their students’ students, the words that came through me, that form God’s Prayer, began to unwind:

It has started – it can be stopped.

Listen to the Word of the Lord:

it can be stopped!

The great war machines of my children,

the offspring of my servant Abraham,

the man of loving-kindness,

you prepare for battle – again.

Widows will be made from the loss of husbands,

orphans will be made by the loss of parents,

cripples will be made by the loss of limbs,

graves will be made by the loss of life.

I say to you: No!

A new gate has opened,

and it is not a gate of war.

Do not turn your backs on this gate,

for it stands open for you.

It is a new Gate:

a Gate of Cooperation,

a Gate of Sharing,

a Gate of Giving,

a Gate of Resting,

a Gate of Peace,

a Gate of Plenty,

a Gate of Purpose,

a Gate of Repair,

a Gate of Healing,

a Gate of Hope.

Michael Kagan transmitter of God’s Prayer (Albion-Andalus, 2014)

Hear Michael Kagan at the Sydney Jewish Writers Festival.

• Israel: Dreams, Observations, Visions from 11:15am - 12:15pm on Sunday August 24.  
• The Meaning of Life? In conversation with Michael Kagan from 3:15pm-4:15pm on Sunday August 24. 

Full program details and ticket information are available at www.sjwf.org.au or call 9381 4160. Join us on Facebook and Twitter @SJWFestival #SJWF2014