Here’s a narrative, fascinating in its detail, compassion and forthrightness. I couldn’t stop reading it.
Ed
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/reflections_on_israel_from_idealism_to_ethnic_cleansing_20110608/
From: Truthdig [mailto:newsletter@truthdig.com]
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2011
"Reflections on Israel: From Idealism to Ethnic Cleansing" -- When I was a youngster learning Jewish history in Jerusalem’s schools, the story was clear and even simple. “A land without people for a people without land.” Well, there are several striking problems with this aphorism.
By Larry Gross
In 1953 my family—my parents and their four boys, aged 4 to 12, I was 10—moved from the suburbs of Washington, D.C., to Israel, where we remained for seven years. My father was what might be called a McCarthy refugee, a former Truman administration official who was also a “premature anti-fascist” (look it up) and thus not eminently employable in that chilly era of Red-hunting. I’ve since read my father’s FBI file and I know how close he came to being fingered as a former Communist Party member (my parents both left the CP after the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact). My father received offers to join many other former government officials in taking overseas posts in such imperial outposts as Japan, Indonesia and Pakistan, but my mother said she wouldn’t raise her children in a “foreign nationals” bubble surrounded by servants. An offer to my father to join a group of economic advisers to the prime minister of the then 5-year-old state of Israel was another matter. To my mother, the daughter of longtime Labor Zionists, this was an appealing option, and we left the States for what was to be a two-year stint. After the two years were over, my father moved to the Hebrew University, where he taught for the next five years before we returned to the United States and I started college.
I’ve long thought that it wasn’t a bad bargain, missing out on the 1950s in the United States, by all accounts a very missable decade, and instead experiencing life in the young and then exciting and idealistic state of Israel. From the sixth grade through high school I went to Jerusalem schools, using Hebrew and absorbing a blend of nationalism and Jewish-slanted perspectives on history, within a context of widely proclaimed external threats and internal nation-building. This was a period in which education—history, geography and even Bible studies—was clearly in the service of the national enterprise. Even in the secular schools Bible study was required, but the subject largely was taught as an extension of the story of the Jews, reinforcing the connections of the Chosen People to the land, with the names of biblical places still present all around us, cementing the historical continuity we were now experiencing after 2,000 years of exile. As the familiar song went, we have come to the Land, to build and to be rebuilt in it.
Even then there were tangles in the stories that were woven through the nationalist tapestry: The barely disguised racism to which Sephardic Jews from the Arab countries were subjected, in comparison with the preferential treatment of Ashkenazi Jews from Western Europe and the United States—to my parents’ amusement, British and American Jews were routinely referred to as “Anglo-Saxons”—and the even less disguised racism directed at Arabs. Traveling with my father, whose advisory brief included public housing, to visit settlements for Sephardic immigrants—Maabarot—it was easy to see the contrast between the government’s views of various categories of olim (immigrants), and the vast difference in social services and opportunities extended. It was also easy to see that Israeli Arabs occupied a distinctly lower status.
At the same time, to be blunt, it was also clear to me that the beauty of the landscape and the indigenous architecture that seemed to grow organically on the rocky hills, a landscape and architecture that has etched itself on my soul, was the creation of the Palestinian people who had lived in these hills for generations. In contrast, the new settlements built by the Israeli government spread across the hilltops like an ugly ribbon of concrete.
For more, click on http://www.truthdig.com/report/page3/reflections_on_israel_from_idealism_to_ethnic_cleansing_20110608/
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| Humor from My Pen | | 
An exhibition of political cartoons by Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo
June 4 - June 17, 2011
At the Old Venice Jail (SPARC)
685 N. Venice Blvd.
Venice, CA 90291
The International Committee for the Freedom of the Cuban Five, in conjunction with the Social Public Art Resource Center's (SPARC) 35th Anniversary Celebration: giving voice to art makers and building cultural bridges between communities, and Honorary Committee: Actors and Artists United for the Freedom of the Cuban Five presents Humor from my Pen, an exhibition of political cartoons by Gerardo Hernández Nordelo.
Includes works by Politico's editorial Cartoonist and Illustrator, Matt Wuerker; and the creator of the nationally syndicated daily cartoon "La Cucaracha", Lalo Alcaraz. Contact: Suzanne Thompson (310) 570-5419
suzannethompson55@gmail.com
Alicia Jrapko (510) 219-0092
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| by and for: Democracy and Art | | 
by and for: Democracy and Art a visual conversation on the role of art in democracy Presented by the
Southern California
Women's Caucus for Art
Ave 50 Studio
131 N. Avenue 50
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323-258-1435
Opening Reception:
Saturday, June 11, 2011
7-10 pm
Thirty works were selected by curator, activist and art historian Carol A. Wells, who also serves as the founder and executive director of the Center for Study of Political Graphics. Chosen artists address the shifting meanings of freedom and equality, censorship and civil liberties. Using art as a vehicle for the discussion of political issues has a rich history, at times shrouded in censorship. Please join us as 23 artists converse on questions of democracy.
The Southern California Women's Caucus for Art (SCWCA) is one of 27 chapters of the Women's Caucus for Art, the leading national organization for women actively engaged in the visual arts. professions and an affiliated society of the College Art Association.
Public Conversation:
Saturday, June 18, 2011
2-4 pm
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