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The Wall at
the Heart By Israel
Shamir 
We watched Pink Floyd's The Wall in a small,
bare and shabby cinema called Semadar, The Vine Blossom in
the quaint German Colony of Jerusalem. Emptied of ethnic Germans by
the Jews in 1948, it still preserves its old stone houses roofed
with red tiles, gables with immured plaques quoting Psalms inscribed
in Gothic script, ivy creeping up its masonry and the mysterious
Templars' Cemetery beyond heavy gate.
The
Shadow of Zog By
Israel Shamir
In Luc Besson¹s delightful film, The Fifth Element
(with perfect Milla Jovovich and supreme Bruce Willis), an
absolutely evil force, the Shadow, Messenger of Death, comes from
Outer Space to destroy human life on our planet. It is impervious to
bombs and missiles, and regardless of what people do, it closes in,
and its cover ever thicker upon the earth. Yet in order to succeed
the Shadow needs some human help. Who will, for personal profit,
assist the satanic Shadow in his quest to destroy our Mother Earth?
In the best tongue-in-cheek tradition of Swift, Besson gave the
monstrous volunteer, that servant-of-profit, a scary name: Zog.
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Divine
Wind - A Homage to Simone Weil By
Israel Shamir
Walls of cold rain and hail encompassed my Jaffa.
Streets turned into ferocious streams and snow touched palm trees
and whitened the sidewalks of subtropical Tel Aviv, in violent
counterpoint to the violet skies hanging low, just a handbreadth
above the belfries and minarets, as the hurricane rushed masses of
sand and rain clouds over the deep cleft of the Dead Sea into
Palestine. A sandstorm of unheard-of magnitude broke all over the
Middle East, stopping American tanks in the desert, blinding the
pilots of their planes, covering the crosshairs of their weapons,
threatening to capsize the monstrous battleships in the Gulf. A
hundred armoured troop carriers were savaged by the sandstorm. Such
a Divine Wind had saved Japan from the Mongol landing of Kublai
Khan; such a storm had preserved Elizabethan England from Spanish
occupation..
The
Maid and the Ogre By
Israel Shamir
A dreadful monster assaults the city,
kills its brave defenders, and advances to devour the citizens. At
the last moment, a young maiden demurely walks forward to meet the
monster. Her very sight, the sight of feminine innocence,
vulnerability, spirituality, certainty of the right cause, stops the
ogre in its tracks. The beast suffers her to tie her belt to his
mighty neck and walk away, tamed. It is the story of St. Genevieve
and of other beautiful and virtuous saints; a part and parcel of
human heritage, and the subject of many ggu apestries and
paintings.
Midas
Ears By
Israel Shamir
A new spectre haunts America. It enters the
well-protected boardrooms of newspapers and banks, shakes the deep
foundations of its towers. It is the spectre of glasnost: the dark
secret of Jewish power is out. Just recently it was 'third rail',
touch-and-die, deadly dangerous to mention, certain end to a career.
Just recently, Joe Public snapped his TV from an eminence with an
Israeli passport to a member of a Jewish think-tank, and muttered to
himself: Surely it is just a coincidence that so many important and
largely unelected people in our country happen to belong to this
small minority group.
The
City of the Great King (A Talk
Given in Istanbul City Concert Hall on 22.02.03) Heavy
snowfall blocks the mountain passes of Anatolia, lays thick Persian
carpets on the streets, paints white the mosque domes, churches and
markets of your City, the eternal capital of great empires. I came
from Jerusalem al-Quds via Moscow, two places intricately connected
to the Second Rome. A few days ago I stood at the formidable walls
of Jerusalem and read the still preserved letters: the city was
fortified by Suleiman the Magnificent, the great Ottoman Sultan.
Signs of Ottoman rule are found everywhere in Palestine, for
Ottomans were the Middle East protectors for 400 years. They took
over the Byzantine Empire but preserved the rights and religious
freedom of the Orthodox and not-so-Orthodox Christians. Your
ferocious Janissaries gave the Middle East its chance to develop in
relative peace until the modern times.
A Yiddishe
Medina By Israel
Shamir America prepares for a long war. It is
called 'the war on terrorism', but the name has no meaning but 'a
war on the enemy'. Noam Chomsky gave a witty definition, "terrorism
is what they do to us". However, in the course of this war,
thousands of our brothers by Adam and Eve will be strafed, napalmed
and nuked. Boys and girls, unborn babes and old men will be brought
to the altar of Vengeance and ritually slaughtered.
The
Malaysian Solution By
Israel Shamir
Take a country populated by diverse communities, the
indigenous and immigrant, of roughly equal size. These communities
profess different religions and ply different trades. The immigrants
are better at business; the natives prefer to till their soil. It
could be a description of Palestine with its native Palestinians and
the immigrant Jewish communities. But here the comparison ends. In
Malaysia, the communities live in peace without UN peacekeepers,
they pursue their cultural and religious interests without
submitting to bleaching multiculturalism, their country prospers
while rejecting the IMF recipes, and it is a native son of soil who
stands at the helm of good ship Malaysia.
McENROE OF
THE LOBBY By Israel
Shamir
Colin McEnroe spared no vitriol while debunking the
Hartford Courant columnist, Ms Ami Pagnozzi. He didn’t draw line at
her political views, but gave her full treatment of Jezebel,
larger-than-life Scarlet Woman with a 666 cell phone. The result is
somewhat grotesque: journalists exist to describe others, not to be
described in a minute detail. I would not enter the controversy
whether Ms Pagnozzi’s treatment of Middle East conflict was fair or
harsh. It is, after all, a question of political preferences. For
me, an Israeli writer from Jaffa, the exciting part of his story was
the wealth of biographical detail surrounding Amy’s nativity.
McEnroe claimed at great length that Ms Pagnozzi is a child of a
Jewish woman raped by a wild Iraqi Arab. In our modern days, this
sort of archaic allegation seems to be unusual, even for hired
hatchet job. But it rang a bell in my memory.
OMENS
By
Israel Shamir
Omens, good and bad, are sent to us like beacons to
facilitate our navigation in the sea of troubles, said the renowned
Portuguese writer Paulo Coelho. Wise and successful men constantly
watch out for the telling signs and act accordingly. Silly and
arrogant folk disregard omens and court disaster. Santiago, the main
character of his hugely popular Alchemist, made his decisions by
paying close attention to omens, especially those given by birds,
and eventually won love, glory, wisdom and riches. With or without
the bestseller, we also pay heed to the celestial hints of destiny,
but usually we call it 'a hunch'.
The
City of the Beloved By
Israel Shamir
Their names bear a touch of medieval morality plays,
but instead of Hope, Penance and Mercy, the three sisters are called
Amal, Taura, Tahrir, or Hope, Revolution, and Liberation. Dressed
like ordinary college girls they were - they would not stick out at
Yale or Tel Aviv University. Their books and CDs are the same ones I
saw this morning on my son's shelf. But their smiles, their
wonderful happy smiles and high spirits, are quite out of the
ordinary, considering their circumstances.
The City of
the Moon By Israel
Shamir
An arch is homage to the moon, as it is formed by two
mirroring crescents. Full moon produces the perfectly round barrel
vault favoured by Romans; the pointed Muslim arches are formed by
waxing seventh-day crescents. In Nablous, there are arches for every
day of the lunar month, even upturned arches composed of waning
moons. A diligent student of architecture could compose a conclusive
History of the Arch in this ancient Palestinian city.
The Green
Rain of Yassouf By Israel
Shamir Most soothing, tender and sensual to
the touch, picking olives is akin to telling beads. Oriental men
wear 'mesbaha' beads of wood or stone on their wrist, reminding of
prayer and calming down frayed nerves, but olives are much better:
they are alive. Olives are tender but not fragile, like peasant
girls, and picking them has a touch of comfort: nothing can go
wrong. Olives detach themselves from the branch without fear and
remorse, smoothly enter the palm and roll down into the safety of
the ground sheets stretched to catch them.
Mamilla
PoolBy
Israel Shamir Things move really fast
nowadays. Just yesterday we hardly dared to call the Israeli policy
of official discrimination against Palestinians by the harsh word
'apartheid'. Today, as Sharon's tanks and missiles pound defenceless
cities and villages, the word barely suffices. It has become an
unjustified insult to the white supremacists of South Africa. They,
after all, did not use gun-ships and tanks against the natives, they
did not lay siege to Soweto. They did not deny the humanity of their
kaffirs. The Jewish supremacists made it one better. They have
returned us, as if by magic wand, to the world of Joshua and Saul.
Discussion
of anti-Semitism
The Good Men's Crime At the
height of the Great Cultural Revolution, the Chinese had the
temerity to embark upon a monumental, nature-changing enterprise:
they decided to exterminate ALL flies. The spirit of their
solidarity was so powerful that they succeeded. For a while, they
enjoyed peaceful summer evenings without this great annoyance. No
buzz, no fuss: life was great without flies!
The Martial Arts
of Discourse (Response to the article `In the
Same Camp as Hamsun?' by Haakon Kolmanskog in the Norwegian
newspaper Klassekampen. His article can be found below). Usually,
newspaper polemic is akin to epee fencing: one tries to keep the
opponent at arm's length, avoid his thrusts and draw his blood. The
thoughtful and friendly query of Haakon Kolmanskog deserves a quite
different attitude and a most sincere reply. Haakon poses a
question: We can't be indifferent if friends of the Palestinians are
branded anti-Semites. Who will benefit in allowing the Zionists to
have a free go playing the anti-Semite card against anyone who
criticise them?
Yom
Kippur Blessings to My Brothers in Zion By
Israel Shamir Our teachers of blessed memory
forbade us to enter the Land of Israel until we shall see the light
of Messiah. We thought we were wiser and rejected this commandment
with contempt. But they knew what they meant and they knew harshness
of our hearts. We came into this sweet Land and we are locking
ourselves in a high-rise ghetto surrounded by the double ring of
barbed wire and endless hostility. Inevitably we re-create the way
of life of our ancestors in a Polish schtetl. One can not escape
oneself. We carry Exile in our hearts and that is why we create
Exile.
The State
Of Mind By Israel
Shamir The steep slopes of Wadi Keziv in
Western Galilee are walled by squat local oaks and thorny bush. On
the streambed, oleanders and cypresses look into shallow ponds
formed by its springs. I like this secluded canyon. On hot summer
days, one can hide in an intricate deep cave and laze in its cool,
clear waters, waiting for deer and hoping for a nymph. On cooler
days, you can climb up a steep spur that rises from the depths of
the gorge. It is called Qurain, the 'Horn' in Arabic, hence the Arab
name of the valley, Wadi Qurain. Astride the spur, the Crusader
castle of Monfort raises its donjon high and gazes towards the
distant Mediterranean Sea.
Our Lady of
Sorrow By Israel
Shamir  [It was written after another Israeli
invasion of Bethlehem, in March 2002]. In the Upper church of
Annunciation in Nazareth, there is a striking collection of images,
homage of artists to Mary. A dainty Virgin in colourful kimono holds
her child dressed in ceremonial Japanese royal robes among blue and
golden flowers; a naive Gothic face of Madonna transferred from
French Cluniac illuminations; the Chinese Queen of Heaven cut in
precious wood by Formosa devotees; the Cuban richly inlaid statue of
Virgen del Cobre, the Polish Black Madonna, the tender face of
Byzantine Mother of God, a modernist steely Madonna from the United
States look from the walls of the church, uniting us in one human
family. There is hardly an image in the world as universal and
poignant as that of the Virgin and the Child.
Christ
and Jews Apocalypse
Now On the green lawns of Hyde Park an old
tramp walks about and carries a scruffy cardboard poster, 'The End
is Nigh'. He has been doing it for years, if he is still the same
tramp I spotted some thirty years ago. But a broken clock will
sooner or later show the right time. Could it be that this ominous
moment has arrived?
Review of Review,
Part II Offensive
or Defensive? (Second Part of discussion with
www.jewishtribalreview.org . Chad Powers' response to the first part
can be found on that site) It is good we agree on many points, and
it is equally good we differ on others. Probably the greatest
difference in our reading emerges from your words: "Being Jewish" ÷
manifests itself as primarily a defensive allegiance against the
non-Jewish Other.
Four Blind
Men By Israel
Shamir The Author of the Critique is worried
that he will be considered 'anti-Semitic', but my main objection is
quite an opposite one, namely, The Critique is too 'Jewish' by its
outlook.
 Galilee
Flowers (The Collected Essays of Israel Shamir)
by
Israel
Shamir The essays collected in the this book
were written during the years 2001-2002, in the old Palestinian
port-town of Jaffa, on the shore of the Eastern Mediterranean,
during the Second Intifada, or Intifada al-Aqsa, but they are not
limited to events in Palestine. The war in the Holy Land is
presented as the centre-stage of the world-wide struggle of ideas,
against a backdrop of such momentous modern developments as the
growing influence of American Jewry ("the Rise of the Jews"), the
decline of the Left, the ascent of Globalisation, the first steps of
the anti-Globalisation movement, and the outbreak of World War Three
with America against the Third World. It is a daring attempt to tie
together various political, theological, military and social
threads, and to formulate fresh concepts that provide people with
new tools for analysis and action. While seeking the Liberation of
Palestine, the author pursues another, more broad goal as well: that
of the Liberation of Public Discourse.
FULL TEXT - GALILEE FLOWERS (in HTML
and PDF)
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Israel
Shamir
About the Music
The music was composed and text written after an experience in
the occupied territories somewheres there - during last Christmas
bringing the Message to Palestinians.
The Phoenix song was written by Michael Piano, both the
words and the music. He is a full time missionary in the Family,
working in a group called Heart to Heart. It was performed by
the group which consists of Joy Frances, Angelina Dunbar, Christy
Gibson, Michael Fogarty, John Listen, Michael Dooley, Jono D’souza,
George Assad, Mohammed Ali Abbas, Ali Musa and others.
- Shamir
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Israel Shamir is an Israeli writer from
Jaffa. For his Biography, click
here.