Tel Aviv Diary September 24-28, 2008 - Karen Alkalay-Gut

Tel Aviv Diary - September 24-28, 2008 - Karen Alkalay-Gut

September 24, 2008

If Jerusalem is united, one big city, we've got a problem. Here we've been making walls all around the city - to keep the bad guys out - and we didn't notice that - what do you know - the bad guys are part of the city.

Where are all the cats at the university? Last week I was eat shawarma at the university, and I noticed that I wasn't surrounded by cats. I asked Jerry, "where did they all go?" and he pointed to my shawarma. Today I was at a cafeteria on the other side of the campus, and noticed that there too there were very few cats - were they just lonely and went away, or did the city come and take them to their destruction?

Here's a cat on our building:

September 25, 2008

more street cats, random pictures:

Motorcycle cat.

a less contented cat. Very clearly a Tel Aviv resident.

cats in line. Although they may appear like locals, only the female tiger cat is from here. The one on the end is Russian, the one up front is Finnish, and the one in the middle is Himalayan.

September 26, 2008

I was just about to put some cats from Orient House up, and realized I've gone too far. Instead here's a little New Year's card you might like

The somber Herzl, with his 'if you will it, it is no dream.' somehow it fits into my mood this year.

This one from world war I works nicely too.

You have to have a sense of humor about these things. After all, there is someone on a mission from Allah to wipe us off the face of the earth, and he's got the weapons to do it.

I've actually been getting mail from Iranians about how gassing of people couldn't have taken place in Auschwitz and Maidonyk because sample from the walls of the gas rooms don't have the proper residue. This scares me more than the news, because the point of denying the Holocaust is to justify the erasing of Israel (and Israelis) or in other words, to create another Holocaust. And since I know how many of my relatives were gassed, and my mother always believed she was the only survivor of her large family because she had a mission to tell about it, I find this denial of their deaths problematic.

Here are some more cats:

In case you think I've lost all political perspective, this white angora and the tiger cat are fooling around together in front of Orient House, which was the center of Jerusalem-Arab politics, but was closed for public activities by Bibi long ago, Some Nusseibas remain, but only the multicultural cats are talking to each other.

September 27, 2008

When I took the dog out the sun was shining as usual, but by the time I came home to my computer the sky became overcast and it will be raining any minute. The first rain actually came before dawn a few days ago, but it wasn't serious, so this will become officially the 'yoreh.' It is a very exciting moment.

And yes, Tamar, I am officially running for the municipality on the animal rights ticket. But even though there are a mess of cats on the page here, the animals are not the only point. My underlying cause is citizen responsibility. I want the residents of this city to become involved in their neighborhoods, to organize and to have some choice in the decisions made. The issue of the cats were the straw that broke my indifferent camel's back, because i found out only when I noticed the cats were missing. But there have been numerous local issues I've been long interested in - many of them green ones: the recycling of plastic and glass, for example, the responsibility of shops and cafes to clean the streets around them and maintain a level of cleanliness in their storefronts, the necessity of reorganizing a volunteer corps of citizens to help look after their neighborhoods. Only within this framework can our responsibility for the local animals be reasonable.

As for international politics, here's an answer

September 29, 2008

Tomorrow we begin the celebration of a new year = tashsat, which reads both ways - a palindrome - Theoretically it would mean that the year will end as it begins. So we should do our best to start the year right. Here are some beginnings

1. Ezi is unofficially in remission. Let's make it official and permanent. 2. Let's keep working on making this place honest and democratic. 3.Lets all make sure that we're secure. 4. Let's try to minimize the damage of the up and coming economic crisis.

i wanted to say some nasty things about the extreme right, but i can't make myself/

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