It is the evening of the morning in which many people were blown up just ten minutes’ drive from where I am living in Yafo, right next to Tel Aviv, and at least one killed. Everyone else in the blogosphere, and in the journalistic world in general, is writing about it.
Ten minutes away, and I have nothing to say. Nothing to write. I did not see it and I did not hear it and the workmen building the house next door didn’t pause one second.
Indignation? yes. Anger? yes. But what do you do? I don’t know.
Maybe you go to the café up the street and have a cheese sandwich and a beer. Maybe you glare at the oblivious, self-righteous girl at the table next to you, who is wearing a palestinian flag wristband. Or wonder how knowledgeable the woman across from you is… the middle-aged one with the cheap red-brown hair dye and the black t-shirt with an anti-war slogan in Italian on it… how knowledgeable she is about the books in Arabic she’s discussing over coffee and cigarettes with her friend.
You’re closer than anyone else in the fucking blogosphere, and you eat cheese sandwiches and drink Gold Star.
I ask Mordechai, “How do you live here all the time, like you do, during days like these, and not end up hating anything Arabic?”
“You think,” he said.
white pebble 