Outgoing Encounter Director Ilana Sumka

The last time I even thought about Beit Jalla, it was when rockets were being fired from that Palestinian village towards the southern Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo. Israeli helicopter gunships would regularly fly over our home on their way to fire at terrorist targets. I would wake up at night afraid – that is if I was able to fall asleep at all. To this day, I attribute my ongoing insomnia to the precariousness of those nights.

So it was with no small amount of trepidation that Jody and I made the journey from Jerusalem through the checkpoint toward Gush Etzion, then up the hill to Beit Jalla’s Everest Hotel. The occasion: a goodbye party for Ilana Sumka who, for the past five years, has directed a program called Encounter, which aims to create meaningful dialogue between Jews and Palestinians.

The Everest proved to be no more threatening than a shidduch date in the lobby of a 3-star hotel in downtown Jerusalem. And the evening’s itinerary was the exact opposite of my stance towards Beit Jalla ten years ago.

Several hundred people filled a large events hall, mingling, eating humous, and listening to speakers extolling the virtues of both Ilana and the program as a whole. The attendees we met included several Orthodox rabbis, a secular Jewish filmmaker and a Palestinian tour guide. I wish we’d had time to meet more people.

Of all the speakers, Ilana spoke most evocatively, describing the program’s goals using a real life metaphor of a shared taxi ride from the airport to Jerusalem. She had arrived from abroad early in the morning and was waiting for a sherut to take her home. About 30 people had gathered by the time the first vehicle showed up. The usual Israeli pushing and shoving to get a seat ensued, but Ilana prevailed.

One of the other travelers who made it onboard was, Ilana explained as politely as she could, “unsavory.” He was loud, rude and outspoken. He sat in the front seat and, as the shared taxi made its way up the hill to Jerusalem, began yelling at the driver. The other occupants shifted in their seats uncomfortably.

But as the trip continued, Ilana realized that the unsavory man wasn’t being rude at all. The driver was falling asleep at the wheel and the man was trying to keep him awake. As the other passengers caught on to the predicament, they began doing their best to keep the driver alert too. There was singing, conversation, music.

The experience taught Ilana a number of lessons which she applied to the Israeli-Palestinian divide. First, when Ilana first encountered her “unsavory” character, he was the “other,” someone she had little interest in getting to know. He was not  exactly her “friend” now, but nor was she as frightened of him. Second, when it became clear to the passengers that they were all in potential mortal danger, these former strangers, even adversaries, were forced to work together towards a common goal.

We drove back down the hill from Beit Jalla feeling hopeful. True, the program has only had 1,000 participants since its founding in 2005 – hardly a political game changer (at least yet). And the optimistic statements about peace are not always easy to swallow when you drive home past the separation barrier and recall the very legitimate reasons why it was built. But this is the way dialogue starts – one person at a time.

I wish Ilana luck in her future endeavors. And I hope that I will be able to participate in Encounter myself someday. Perhaps even in Beit Jalla.

This post appeared last month on Israelity.

Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival last year

While it’s the big news that gets all the headlines, sometimes it’s the small stuff that’s the hardest to sweat. Last week, terrorists attacked along the Israel-Egypt border just north of Eilat. The ensuing days have been filled with IDF strikes and Gazan counterattacks. More people have died.

Meanwhile in Jerusalem, the seminal rap-rock band HaDag Nahash was playing a concert at Sultan’s Pool as part of the annual Hutzot HaYotzer arts and crafts festival. Our 17-year-old daughter Merav had a plan to dance up a storm with her friends at the show. She got all dolled up, then received a phone call.

“There’s a terror alert in Mamila (the mall that is adjacent to Sultan’s Pool). Everyone’s been ordered to get off the street and hide in the stores. There are police everywhere. It’s really serious,” her friend on the phone said.

“What should I do?” Merav asked us. “I want to go…”

“…but you don’t want to die,” I finished her sentence.

“Right,” she responded.

We checked the news. There was indeed a “high alert” going on in Jerusalem, but it was mostly along the highways entering the city from the north and west – Highway 443 was reported to have back-ups for up to 10 km coming towards the checkpost from Modi’in. But nothing written about trouble in town.

“If they’re locking down the mall, they must have some good lead,” I speculated.

“Maybe I could get to the concert from the other side,” Merav offered.

“No, they’ll have closed everything,” I said.

“And the other way is kind of dark,” Merav remembered. “Oof, this sucks! I really like HaDag Nahash.”

“And I really like you…alive,” I replied. I wish I were trying to be ironic.

Merav sat in the kitchen, now with two of her friends. While we’d tried to leave the decision up to Merav (with some strongly worded parental advice), one of her friends had much stricter marching orders.

“My mom says I can’t even leave your house,” she said gloomily.

The truth is, this kind of terror lock down has been pretty rare in recent years. During the early 2000s, it was a nearly daily occurrence, but nowadays we take for granted that we can sit at a Café Aroma and sip an iced limon-nana on a warm Jerusalem night with carefree abandon.

But an arts and crafts festival with tens of thousands of nightly attendees makes a pretty good spot for an attack. It’s a reminder that, despite our protestations and blogs to the contrary, Israel is not quite yet that “normal” nation we proffer it to be.

And yet the contrary is just as true: we say (and we mean it) that we won’t let the bad guys stop us from living our lives. If Merav had received a call just then saying the threat had passed, she would have been on the next bus to town, with our blessing.

The girls wound up reluctantly taking a pass on the show. We watched a family movie instead: “The Invention of Lying.” It was an amusing distraction.

Later, Merav talked to a friend of hers who had made it to the show. It was amazing, Merav quoted. “But he said everyone was terrified. They spent the whole concert looking around, trying to spot if there was a terrorist in the crowd.” She added, almost parenthetically, that she was, in fact, glad she hadn’t gone in the end.

There was no terror attack and the threat level was lifted by morning. My wife and I are scheduled to attend the festival and show tonight (Ehud Banai is playing live). And unless the roads are closed, we’ll be there, defiant, proud and enjoying a warm Jerusalem evening.

This post first appeared the day after the terror warning on Israelity.

With another ship of questionable humanitarian aid and activists on its way to Gaza this week, I thought I’d take a look back at what my wife Jody and I did during the original “Free Gaza flotilla” and near lynching of Israeli troops six weeks ago: we went to a concert.

Not just any concert, but the 25^th anniversary of one of the most popular rock acts ever in Israel – Mashina – in an over-the-top performance at Jerusalem’s Sultan’s Pool.

Now, I don’t in any way mean to diminish the gravity of what happened in the sea off the Gaza coast. And our attendance at the show was not really linked to that morning’s events – we’d bought our tickets beforehand. But the juxtaposition of repeated condemnation with the continuation of “normal life” has been something Israelis have been doing for years.

I remember in 2006, as the Second Lebanon War was raging and the world was accusing Israel of war crimes, going with Jody (and a couple thousand other Israelis, mind you) to the annual Wine Festival at the Israel Museum. And all during the Second Intifada, when we were portrayed as both victim and oppressor, we didn’t stop patronizing cafes or shopping at the mall.

So cheering on Mashina might, in some ways, be seen as an act of pure patriotism – an odd but effective, ironically appropriate means towards demonstrating that there is much more to Israel than the one-sided depiction of conflict that makes headlines.

As for the concert itself, the band pulled out all the stops. The stage included 7 screens, laser pyrotechnics, two sets of fireworks and a catwalk into the audience that allowed the band to get more intimate with those paying the $75 for orchestra seats. Band members were all wirelessly mic’d so that even the guitarist and sax players could stroll about the crowd.

Mashina played mostly hits from their 13 albums plus a few lesser-known tracks from the latest release. For me, it was a concert for which I’d been literally waiting 24 years – in 1986, I camped out on the hill facing the same Sultan’s Pool with Jody and our friends David and Shelley, listening to the sound reverberate and bounce off the Old City walls but never seeing the band itself.

Mashina’s closing number was Ein Makom Acher – “No Other Place.” While the lyrics are oblique – is lead singer Yuval Banai singing about love or maybe the shortness of our time on earth? – I’d like to imagine he was also speaking about Israel – that we have “no other place” and that it’s incumbent on us to make good on the great experiment of creating a flourishing Jewish homeland – with competent politics and inspired music – and to put both sides forward to an increasingly hostile world.

I published this story originally shortly after the first Gaza flotilla in June on the Israelity blog.

With negotiations heating up over the release of Gilad Shalit in exchange for up to 1,000 hardened Palestinian prisoners, debate on the merits of the deal have been all over the news for days, as well as in discussions within our own family.

Two recent events have made it particularly personal.

The crux of the issue is, of course, over whether it is incumbent on the Jewish state to strive tirelessly to save any captive taken in war – a promise that the army makes to its soldiers and to which that the Shalit family has been campaigning these past three years – or whether the greater good outweighs the needs of the individual where, in this case, releasing prisoners may potentially lead to the death of tens if not hundreds of Israelis if those Palestinians return to terrorist activities.

This heartbreaking question represents a classic moral dilemma and one that was vividly portrayed on the TV series MASH. In the show, a group of South Korean refugees is hiding in a bus in the vicinity of enemy soldiers. In that group, a mother holds a crying baby. It is clear that if the baby does not stop bawling, the enemy will hear. The hide out will be exposed and all the refugees will be killed.

Does the mother smother her baby in order to save the others?

When this question is put out to test groups, about 50% of the respondents say they would kill the baby to save the group. But when the question is phrased differently – would you kill your own baby? – the number of yes’s drops precipitously. (In the MASH episode, the mother does kill her baby.)

The argument for not killing the baby is that you don’t know absolutely for certain that the enemy soldiers will find you. Perhaps a bomb will explode outside the hiding place and the soldiers will all die or flee. Calculating the odds is a zero-sum game that no parent, or any human being for that matter, should ever have to play.

The same is true for Gilad Shalit. We don’t know that the terrorists released will 100% for sure return to terrorism that will lead to more deaths. We do know, however, that if a deal is cut, Gilad Shalit will be set free. Is it worth it?

Danny Gordis, writing in The New York Times last week, says that releasing Shalit “makes no strategic sense.” But, he goes on, “with the conflict likely to persist, and with our sons and daughters asked to make extraordinary sacrifices to keep us safe, they need to know that we are no less devoted to them than they are to us.”

Now here’s where it gets personal.

Last week, our son Amir joined the army. He is now in the position to be kidnapped as a soldier, just like Gilad Shalit. Were we in Shalit’s parents’ shoes, wouldn’t we act in exactly the same way, doing anything to free our child?

On the flip side, among the terrorists slated to be freed is the mastermind behind the bombing of the cafeteria at Hebrew University in 2002 where our cousin Marla was killed. What kind of justice is there when the murderers of young 22-year-old Jewish studies student can now walk around free and plot similar atrocities? What will stop such a terrorist from killing again?

These are not easy decisions. They are ones that we wish we as a nation didn’t have to make. I’m not going to attempt here to take a stand. There are plenty of other pundits who have articulated the positions better and more vociferously than I could on the relatively small stage of this blog.

Ultimately, it is up to our elected officials to make the call. And they seem intent on cutting a deal. Right or wrong, that’s the nature of democracy and it’s the backbone behind our return to this land. Without it, we might have no Gilad Shalits. But we would also have no country. And that’s a calculation I can live with.

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This article appeared last week on the Israelity blog.

Residents of the southern part of Israel in range of missiles from Gaza can now make phone calls up to 30 minutes to their friends and relatives entirely for free, thanks to a new Israeli startup called PokeTalk. The service, which is already operational in 60 countries around the world, is good for any calls between two phone numbers in Israel’s 08 area code.

PokeTalk has been flying high since its launch three months ago. The company, founded by two 25-year-olds in Tel Aviv – Shai Genish and Boaz Bahar – has signed up 70,000 users nearly entirely on word of mouth and viral marketing alone.

The service is the only one on the market that uses voice-over-IP to connect regular phones, not just two computers ala Skype, at no cost to the caller.

As with any good idea, though, there’s a catch: calls are limited to 10 minutes. The promotion on Israel’s front lines triples that amount.

Ten minutes on the phone is usually enough

Ten minutes (or even 30) may seem like a deal breaker but, says Genish, the average call placed is only two minutes and 40 seconds. And 70 percent of calls from a mobile phone are a mere 80 seconds. “Other than for business calls, 10 minutes is usually more than enough.”

PokeTalk is essentially an automated version of the call back systems that were once popular in Israel as a way of saving money. But rather than calling a certain phone number, with PokeTalk you enter your number and the number you want to call on the PokeTalk site. A few seconds later, your phone rings. You pick up and PokeTalk places the call.

I took a test drive and the quality is quite good – better than most voice-over-IP systems like Vonage, Gizmo5 or even Skype.

So how can PokeTalk offer even 10 minutes of talk time for free? On-site advertising. Since you’re required to initiate your call from the web, PokeTalk can show you advertisements on screen. That’s a whole lot less annoying than some other free phone systems that put 10-second audio ads before a call is connected.

It’s also much less invasive than a firm like Pudding Media, which actually monitors your phone calls to serve up targeted ads from its website, delivered by e-mail, or inserted as audio ads. (That company is based in Silicon Valley but was founded by a team of Israeli software managers.)

In addition to advertising, PokeTalk plans to make money by providing a premium service where users can talk for more than 10 minutes, along with other goodies such as voice mail and call transfers from one country to another.

PokeTalk’s main phone-to-phone competitor is another Israeli-founded company Jajah, which also places calls between two regular phones. But other than the first call, it’s not free.

Free calls originate from 13 countries

PokeTalk is far from profitable – only 50 percent of calls are covered by ad revenue – but the small eight-person company has raised $1.25 million from Maayan Ventures and private investors. Genish says he hopes to be in the black by the end of 2009.

PokeTalk calls can originate from 13 countries – including Israel, the US, Canada and Germany, though notably not the UK – and can be connected to 60 nations, from Kazakhstan to New Zealand. Mobile phones are supported in nine countries.

Of PokeTalk’s 70,000 users, 40,000 are in Israel (including 15,000 from Tel Aviv University alone where the company did more active marketing). A viral “refer a friend” program has been successful at recruiting new users too (if your friend signs up, you receive an extra 10 minutes on your next call).

On an average day, up to 7,000 users login and make close to 18,000 calls.

The company has been featured on Israel’s Channel 10 news and in The Marker and Globes business supplements. Genish estimates that a series of interviews that appeared in the VoIP Guides online publication led to some 10,000 new users.

The company’s current promotion in the south of Israel probably won’t generate a significant number of new customers, but it’s a noble gesture that helps local residents in tough times.

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This article was originally published on Israel21, a great website whose mission is to “focus media and public attention on the 21st century Israel that exists beyond the conflict.” Israel21 reports on Israeli innovations in technology, health, culture, democracy and clean tech. If you haven’t visited the site, check it out. (You can also find a bunch of my articles there.)

Our friend Joan called last night just as the news broke that the IDF had begun its ground operation in Gaza. Joan was panicked. She knew a number of families in our neighborhood who had boys in combat units. “Why are we doing this?” she said. “Can’t we pull them all out now?”

My first reaction was detached, though certainly not uncaring. I had been obsessively following the geo-politics of the last week’s aerial bombardment of Hamas. While inspiring in its precision and speed, it was clear a ground operation would be ultimately required for Israel to achieve its objectives. The duration and effectiveness of the operation would in large part depend on internal Israeli decisiveness, as well as how Israel responded to world pressure to submit to a cease-fire. My initial thoughts, then, were more like those of a strategic analyst than a parent.

Joan’s call, though, reminded me of the very real dangers for the Israeli troops now heading into booby trapped roads and hidden bunkers where Hamas terrorists lie in wait. I thought of my own children: 17-year-old Amir who will be drafted as early as six months from now, and 10-year old Aviv who has eight more years to go when, we all pray, there will be no need for any re-occupation of Palestinian territory.

But what choice do we have? Israel has stood by for close to a decade now while rockets have rained down on its southern cities and towns. Children in Sderot have grown up in fear, sleeping in bomb shelters, watching their homes blown up and their friends killed while Israelis around the country feel emasculated and impotent, their government unable (or unwilling) to act.

Now the rockets from Gaza have reached Beersheva and Ashdod. In another year of unabated smuggling, they could conceivably reach Tel Aviv and even the outskirts of Jerusalem. Should we just wait, maybe accept another temporary cease-fire? Our enemies certainly won’t be standing still.

There are many who say Israel cannot win this war. That the result will be just like the ill-fated 2006 war in Lebanon where Hezbollah emerged triumphant and emboldened. That Israel hasn’t truly prevailed since 1967.

That’s not entirely true. As David Horowitz wrote in The Jerusalem Post over the weekend, “Operation Defensive Shield, carried out in the spring of 2002, was a carefully planned and effectively executed attack on the Palestinians’ suicide-bomb infrastructure in the West Bank that remade our reality in the years ever since.”

Life returned to normal in Israel not because the terrorists decided to stop trying but because the army continues to operate every single night in Jenin and Nablus and other cities across the territories, making arresting and ferreting out bomb factories. The security barrier has helped too.

That would seem to be the ideal end game for the current operation as well. An end to the rockets (the Gaza equivalent of suicide bombers) along with the ability for terrorists to smuggle in the supplies to make more. Is that achievable? I don’t know. I’m not an army planner or a politician.

The Second Lebanon War had similar goals but failed due to its poor execution (something lame duck prime minister Ehud Olmert still refuses to acknowledge). A new army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, and a more qualified defense minister, Ehud Barak (politically unloved but undeniably more experienced than his pathetic predecessor Amir Peretz), gives those of us sitting on the sidelines greater confidence in the current operation than during the summer of 2006.

That the current war has been in the planning for months represents a dramatic change from the impulsive leap to engagement that characterized the conflict in the north. So too the diplomatic initiative. The Israel Defense Forces established a YouTube channel with videos of air force bombings of weapon stockpiles, interviews with soldiers and briefings in English. As of Sunday morning Israel time, the channel had received just under 750,000 views.

As I write this, I am aware that my heart is beating faster than normal. My fingers are trembling and my eyesight is blurred after an uneven sleep. I am at once cheering the army on and terrified at what the day will bring. I know I’ll be checking the news obsessively, refreshing Haaretz and the Post and YNET all day, to the detriment of the “real” work I get paid for.

The name for the war in Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, refers to the lead Hanukah dreidels that were popular before the advent of plastic. Poetic but also ironic: you never know on which side a dreidel will end up.

I have no idea how long this war will last and how hard it will be. But I know we have no choice. It has to be done. And this time, we must succeed.

How much is a human life worth? According to a Washington D.C. federal judge, $12.9 million. That’s the amount that Judge Royce Lamberth awarded to the parents of our cousin Marla Bennett who was killed in the July 31, 2002 bombing attack on the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria at Hebrew University.

Lamberth found that Hamas, which claimed credit soon after the attack, “is an organization supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran, dedicated to the waging of Jihad, or a holy war employing terrorism” and was responsible for the “willful and deliberate killing of Marla Bennett.” Lamberth ordered Iran to pay the $12.9 million to Marla’s mother, father and sister for their suffering and Marla’s lost income.

Specifically, the judge calculated the loss of income to be generated by Marla’s estate as $404,548.00. The judge also awarded Marla’s parents $5 million each and Marla’s sister Lisa $2.5 million. The amounts awarded took into account a fact that was previously unknown to me – that Marla’s death was not instantaneous. A resuscitation tube was found on her body at the scene, which indicates there was some sign of life when the emergency medical team arrived.

The court ruling provided further details on Marla’s assailant, Mohammed Uda, a maintenance worker at Hebrew University, who was a member of the Silwan Gang, a Hamas sub-group named after the Jerusalem suburb where Uda lived, and who meticulously planned the attack using a bomb hidden in a backpack placed on a table adjacent to Marla in the cafeteria. The Silwan Gang also planned a previous attack at the Moment Café in Jerusalem earlier that year.

Judge Lamberth acknowledged that money will never bring Marla back. Lamberth’s opinion states that “though it is impossible for this court to make the plaintiffs completely whole again, the court hopes that this award helps begin the healing process and that one day the plaintiffs’ hearts and minds will be mended by the fact that some measure of justice, no matter how incalculable, was done on their behalf.”

Collecting the damages from Iran won’t be easy. Previous victims of terror attacks who have successfully sued Iran have sought money from frozen Iranian assets in America, but those resources are limited.

Marla’s family will also be competing to a certain extent with another award granted by Lamberth last week which stipulates some $2.65 billion to be paid by Iran to the families of the 241 U.S. service members killed in the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut. Hezballah, which carried out that attack, is trained, supported by and ideologically aligned with Iran.

Nevertheless, plaintiffs in such cases have been encouraged lately by Libya’s eventual decision to accept responsibility for its role in the bombing of a Pan Am flight over Scotland.

Iranian government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters in Washington that Iran considers Lamberths’ rulings “baseless. Some U.S. court issued a verdict without any investigation or listening to opinions from the other sides. The verdict is not legally defensible and we can see the political pressure from the decision to grab Iranian assets in America.” Nevertheless, no one from Iran or its intelligence ministry which were co-defendants in the 2003 case, appeared in court to defend the lawsuit.

Freelance journalist Karmel Melamed wrote on his blog last week that Lamberth’s decision deserves “high praise” and “gives hope to victims of Iran’s reign of international terror that while justice may not be immediate it does arrive in due time.” Melamed also points out that Iranian Jewish victims of Iran’s terror have followed a similar path. Last September the families of 12 Iranian Jewish victims imprisoned in Iran filed a federal suit seeking to collect damages from former Iranian President Mohhamad Khatami. The suit holds Khatami responsible for the kidnapping, imprisonment and disappearance of Jews imprisoned by Iran between 1994 and 1997.

Shurat HaDin, an Israeli organization that gives legal aid to terror victims and that has been at the forefront of bringing more than two dozen lawsuits over the past several years against terrorist organizations and states sponsoring terrorism, has successfully collected on judgments from suits brought against U.S. banks holding funds used by Palestinian terror groups.

In March of this year, B’nai Brith Canada filed suit against Iran’s current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad for incitement of genocide against the Jewish people in a federal Canadian court. The suit also calls on the Canadian government to ban Ahmadinejhad’s entry into Canada.

Marla’s mother Linda said she did not intend to use the money, if she’s able to collect, for the family’s own personal gain “If only it would bring her back, that would be ideal,” said Bennett who still lives in the San Diego home where Marla grew up. “But we know that’s not going to happen.” Linda who traveled with her husband to Washington in March to testify in the case said she was “gratified by the ruling” and expressed the hope that she could “do some good for other people with this judgement. That’s what Marla would have wanted.”

The Bennetts set up several programs after Marla’s death. One is a charity run by the local San Diego Jewish Federation that helps Jews and non-Jews in distress; the other is a fund to help young people who want to study in Israel. Marla was a student at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and had been studying in a Hebrew ulpan at Hebrew University when she was killed along with eight others.

The Bennett’s family lawyer Edward Carnot stressed that he would “make every effort to collect upon the judgement. It’s not going to be an easy task, but we have some avenues we want to pursue.”

Following Lamberth’s ruling, the Hebrew University issued a statement saying that it “pays tribute to the memory of Marla Bennett and all of the other victims of the terrorist attack and expresses satisfaction at the decision of the court, which perhaps will ease, if only slightly, the sorrow of the family.”

Lamberth praised the Bennett family for “their courage and steadfast pursuit of justice through legal means. This noble effort is made even more so when contrasted with the heinous and brutishly unlawful acts undertaken by the defendants and the individuals they support.” Lamberth called Marla “a shining light in the lives of so many.”

The full court judgment can be found here.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been five years since our cousin Marla was killed in the July 31, 2002 suicide bombing at Hebrew University. Marla Bennett had just sat down to lunch at the university’s Frank Sinatra cafeteria when a terrorist detonated the bomb he had planted in a backpack at an adjoining table. 7 people were killed, including Marla’s classmate at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Ben Blutstein.

After Marla died, I wanted to do something to honor her memory. One action was to start this blog, which began immediately following and was in large part a reaction to her death. Since my craft is my words, I also proposed to Marla’s parents that I write a book or a long magazine-length article on Marla’s life. Marla’s parents gave me access to the hundreds of articles, letters, and eulogies they had received in the days and weeks following her death.

I never wrote that book, but I still have much of the source material that I photocopied during visits to Marla’s home in San Diego. I wanted to share some of that with you on this anniversary.

The front page of the August 9 edition of the San Diego Jewish Press Heritage summarized the enormity of Marla’s loss for her friends and extended family. The headline read “Community mourns a martyr for peace: 1500 attend funeral for Marla Bennett.” The coverage continued for 13 difficult pages, quoting Marla’s oft-repeated article where she proudly declares there was nowhere else she’d rather be in the world than Israel. Her words “I have a front row seat for the history of the Jewish people” are as poignant today as they were when she wrote them, months before her death. The publication culminated with two pages of news that sounds like it could be taken from today’s papers; one article was titled “Hamas intensifies bombing campaign.” Sound familiar?

Beyond the headlines, perhaps the most poignant memories of Marla I collected for my book project were a series of letters between Marla and her father written during Marla’s 1998 trip to Israel as an overseas student at Hebrew University. The letters themselves are nothing extraordinary – more recanting of daily activities than sharing of deep personal insights. “Yesterday we had a night hike and picnic with cheese, wine and olives,” Marla wrote in one. “I got a B+ on my Hebrew midterm…I plan to kick ass and ace every test from now on,” she wrote in another. Upon hearing that her parents were planning a trip to visit her in Israel, Marla wrote “if you have extra room in your bags, could you bring lots of gum, a bottle of honey (it is expensive here), and Kraft macaroni and cheese.”

Yet it’s the very ordinariness of these letters that is perhaps the most heartbreaking: Marla was just a regular girl, a young adult filled with promise and typical post-teenage concerns. Marla wasn’t a superwoman who wrote deep Kafka-esque manifestos. She was just like any of us except she found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Then there were the letters written to the Bennett family from Marla’s scores of friends who reflected on what Marla meant to them.

Dipti Barot remembered Marla’s “chameleon camouflage eyes, which looked brown or gray or green or any color in the sea depending on what shirt or blouse she put on that day.” Dipti, whose family came from India, marveled at how Marla introduced her to “the beauty of the Jewish faith and the strength of the Jewish people. She made me sign up for Jewish folk singing at Hillel. And so I went, and I loved it. I was this Hindu, sitting up in Hillel, singing Od Yavo Shalom Aleinu with the best of them. I was officially an honorary Jew now.” After Marla visited Israel, Dipti says she knew she “felt happiest and whole there.”

Marla’s childhood friend Emma agreed. “She really felt at home in Israel…her life was more fulfilled than ever before,” Emma wrote in a eulogy delivered before a gathering of the American Friends of Hebrew University. Marla was what Emma called “a professional friend. She never missed an opportunity to send a card, not just on the holidays but on the half birthdays too.” Emma shared details that might seem slight but make all the difference in understanding who Marla was. “Marla really liked elbows. She would come up from behind you and take hold of the extra skin and just play with it for a second while she greeted you. She loved that she could squeeze that little part of your body and you couldn’t even feel it.”

Marla influenced and affected so many people. Michelle met Marla while they worked together at Camp JCA Shalom in Malibu, CA. When Marla learned that Michelle had never had a bat mitzvah, wrote Michelle, “Marla began meeting with me to discuss Jewish identity and to help me to study my Torah portion. She was completely committed to the idea of my becoming a bat mitzvah and she arranged for me to read from the Torah on the last Shabbat of the summer at camp. Completing my Torah portion was one of the most thrilling experiences of my life. As I danced in celebration afterwards with Marla, I realized how lucky I was to be part of a community in which someone as special and dedicated as Marla could make something I’d dreamed about a reality.

Michelle added: “Marla knew that every trivial decision she made on a daily basis could be the difference between life and death. But her resolve to stay in Jerusalem, to not leave out of fear, to stand in solidarity with Israel, demonstrates to us all that Marla did not die in vain.”

Marla herself reflected on what it meant to stay in Israel at a time when many others were leaving. In a letter to her friend Ricki, she admitted that “Israel is really scary right now. But I still feel so strongly about being here, I am happy here, even now, despite everything that is going on. I still feel I can remain (mostly) safe by making smart choices about where to go and what to do. I do not live in Ramallah. No one is invading my home. Don’t worry too much.”

Marla left behind a devastated community. Her boyfriend Michael shared the following story:

“Six months after our first date, Marla was brushing her teeth and I was standing nearby. Suddenly she put down her toothbrush and said, ‘There’s something I think you should know.’ ‘OK….’ I said, wondering whether this was going to be a good ‘something’ or a bad ‘something.’ ‘You should know that when I get engaged, it’s going to be with Grammee’s wedding ring.’ (this was definitely a good ‘something.’) I said ‘And I should just know this because…?’ ‘It’s just something you should now,” she said, flashing a cute little grin. So in August, during my visit to San Diego, I had planned to ask Grammee for that ring. And I had planned to ask Michael and Linda (Marla’s parents) for their blessing and permission to marry their daughter. Instead, in August I flew from Israel to Southern California accompanying Marla’s body and I met Grammee on the day of Marla’s funeral. As I hugged her, I told her what Marla had told me about the ring and Grammee held up her hand. ‘It’s this ring, kid.’ She was wearing it for Marla.”

To nearly everyone she met, Marla was an inspiration: Her friend Lesley was debating whether to get involved with Hillel when she started school at UC Berkeley. “Though I had been informally Jewishly involved, I hadn’t been inspired by my synagogue’s youth group in high school, and was unconvinced that Hillel would be different,” Lesley wrote. “Marla repeatedly coaxed me into going to Hillel at the start of freshman year and soon I was hooked. I currently work for Berkeley Hillel as the organization’s programming coordinator. Without Marla, I never would have been drawn to this field that I so enjoy. I now it sounds trite, but Marla genuinely changed the path of my life.”

Marla’s friend Ari wanted to “grow old living next door” to Marla. “I wanted our kids to play in little league and soccer and go to camp together. Marla was the person I turned to when something was not right. She cared, not because some law, some rule, some God told her to, but because she genuinely cared.”

In August 2002, after Marla died, I tried to cope with Marla’s death in my own way. “A tragedy such as this puts into perspective our relationship as individuals vs. the national history of the Jewish people,” I wrote at the time. “Too often, in the face of difficult times such as those we are experiencing now in Israel, we tend to bury our heads, hoping it will pass over us and our immediate family will get through this on the way to ‘better’ times. But when someone in your family is targeted because she is a Jew, you are instantly thrust into part of the collective Jewish narrative. Your story of tragedy – and also in entirely different circumstances a story of joy or success – becomes part and parcel of the Jewish totality. You can no longer see yourself as just individuals. In this way, Marla is not alone, none of us are alone. Our struggle is collective.”

Marla knew that intrinsically, I think. In her widely reprinted essay, written originally for the Avi Chai Foundation, she wrote “I’ve been living in Israel for over a year and a half now and my favorite thing to do here is go to the grocery store. I know, not the most exciting response…but going grocery shopping, as well as picking up my dry cleaning, standing in long lines at the bank, and waiting in the hungry mob at the bakery, means that I live here. I am not a tourist. I deal with Israel and all of its complexities, confusion, joy and pain every single day. And I love it.”

We love you Marla. We miss you daily. We will never forget you.

It’s traditional to learn Torah on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot which began this past Tuesday night. Nine-year-old Aviv’s class had a pre-Shavuot student-parent study session at school earlier in the week and my wife Jody and I went. But by the time we walked out, I found myself drawing political rather than religious conclusions.

We assembled in the school library to review several texts from the Midrash that concerned the custom of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. According to tradition, Jews in Biblical times were commanded to ascend to Jerusalem three times a year – for the holidays of Sukkot in the fall, and Pesach and Shavuot in the spring. But wouldn’t all the Jews going on holiday at the same time cause their homes to be left empty and unguarded, open to burglary and pilferage, the ever practical Midrash wondered?

The Midrsah describes several potentially unfortunate cases. In one, the homeowner forgets to lock the door before leaving. In another, nasty non-Jewish neighbors can barely bide the time until the Jewish family’s departure in order to proceed with plans to rob the home.

In both cases, a miracle occurs and the homes are spared. In the first, a snake magically wraps itself around the doorknob preventing entry by those who don’t belong. In the second, God sends angels to Ashkelon who take on the guise of family members to give the home the appearance of being occupied while its owners are actually away.

The stories are simple, charming and on the surface unassuming, seeming to do nothing more than support the Midrash’s main theme: that those who are going out to do a mitzvah cannot be harmed.

Except that they don’t ring entirely true. That is to say if you leave your house unlocked for an extended period, you most likely are going to get robbed. And if you’ve got overtly thieving neighbors, leaving town without any precautions in place and hanging a sign up essentially saying “here are the keys, come on in,” might not be the smartest thing to do. Why is the Midrash, I wondered, teaching what seem to be outright falsehoods?

Don’t be such a grump, you might say. These are kid-friendly stories designed to teach a lesson with a nice pat moral even if the plot isn’t particularly plausible. If so, then why is it that when it comes to contemporary politics, our leaders seem to be struck by the same kind of magical thinking – and this time there are no miracle snakes or angels coming to protect us.

This was the week that rockets returned to Sderot and the western Negev communities that border the Gaza Strip (not far from where we went biking back in February). True, the Kassam attacks have been going on pretty much non-stop since last summer’s escalation which ran in parallel with the Second Lebanon War, but the level of the violence in the past week (140 rockets, one dead, many more injured) was enough to send Israeli troops and tanks back into Gaza in what looks to be a protracted operation.

What struck me as unforgivable, though, was not the inevitable return of the rockets but the utter lack of preparedness that our government showed all along the Gaza border. It’s almost as if the “kids” in our government have been waiting for the kind of magic and miracles the Midrash promised to the Jews making the Shavuot pilgrimage to Jerusalem rather than making concrete plans to take matters into our own hands.  

Since the disengagement from Gaza two years ago, we’ve turned a blind eye as terrorists in the Gaza Strip have smuggled in mortars and guns and Kassams and anti-tank weapons. We’ve watched as Hamas has built, armed and trained a not insignificant army of more than 10,000. That army hasn’t yet mobilized (against Israel at least), though the fighting between Hamas and Fatah forces in Gaza shows that it is certainly ready to roll in a Palestinian civil war. Nevertheless, over the past six years (including before the disengagement), the southern area round the Gaza border has absorbed some 4,500 rockets.

The most high profile destination for those rockets has been the beleaguered border town of Sderot which this week was proposed to be granted the emergency status of a “front line” community (which carries with it various tax breaks) for the first time ever. Along with that change came shocking revelations about the city’s readiness for the next major Kassam salvo.

Of the 58 public bomb shelters in Sderot, only 23 are considered actually usable. The rest lack electricity, ventilation, even running water. The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews pledged $1.5 million to rehabilitate this poor state of affairs. Then along came Arcadi Gaydamak, the Russian billionaire who is the closest Sderot has seen to a contemporary angel.

Last week, Gaydamak poured millions into busing out traumatized residents to hotel rooms in safer places. He then pledged to refurbish the shelters and build the safe rooms that the government has waffled over for so long – critical because many residents, particularly the elderly, can’t make it to the public shelters in the 20 seconds warning they’re given before a missile lands. Last Friday afternoon, Gaydamak offered to fund the cost to the tune of about $50 million. Gaydamak says that there are some 3,500 apartments that need to be reinforced or need security rooms built in them.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, not wanting to be out trumped by an angel (who just so also happens to be planning a run for mayor of Jerusalem), on Sunday finally committed to building 200 safeguarded rooms a month with construction supposed to begin immediately. Other rules were proposed as well, including cutting the usual red tape involved for individuals wanting to reinforce rooms and approving requests when only 50 percent of the residents in a building agree (today, it’s three-fourths).

But where has the government been for all this time? It’s been a year since a “ceasefire” went into place that stopped the bulk of the bombs from flying over the border. Why has Israel lifted nary a finger to protect the population in Sderot which this week was catapulted back into the front pages?

Perhaps the lesson my nine-year-old son learned this year for Shavuot needs to be recast in a modern context where the “thieving neighbors” were literally given the keys to our old homes (those evacuated during the Gaza disengagement) and, while not robbing us of our possessions per se, have stripped too many Israeli citizens of their freedom to live lives without fear.

Once upon a time maybe God sent snakes and angels. But today, we can’t wait for Russian billionaires with their own political agendas to swoop in and solve our problems. The lesson of modern day Israel is that we are in control of our own destiny despite the sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds and problems. We need to take the basic steps of locking the doors to the homes we have left using modern, practical and thoroughly non-magical means. Only then can we claim to have learned something useful from such a simple, charming and unassuming Midrash.

I was interviewed this week by Michele Chabin, a reporter from the New York Jewish Week, and asked to give an “average Israeli’s” opinion on the threat from Iran. How did it make us feel? Were we afraid? Did we have thoughts of leaving? Was the world community’s response comforting or confounding? The interview came up suddenly and I hadn’t had time to think about my answer much in advance. My words shocked even me.

No, we weren’t thinking of going anywhere, I found myself saying. We were staying put, albeit with a newly morbid, much more fatalistic approach to life. Iran might very well make good on its threat to attack Israel, I said. Who knows if the Jewish state will be here in another 5 or 10 years? So we’re trying our hardest to live our life today as fully and joyfully as possible, in the moment and not too obsessed with the future.

Iran as a source of positive psychotherapy? Who would have thunk it?

All kidding aside, what’s going on in Iran is profoundly disturbing. I don’t think there’s any reason not to believe Iranian President Ahmadinejad when he says that he is planning to wipe the “evil Zionist regime” off the face of the planet. His fundamentalist messianic beliefs of the coming of the Iman Mahdi don’t operate according to the same sort of logic we in the West assume must apply. That kind of thinking has already got us into trouble, when we were surprised by the phenomena of suicide bombs, none of which made logical sense to non-believers’ eyes.

Those who hope that Ahmadinejad doesn’t really mean it when he denies the Holocaust and that simply uttering stern words of diplomatic admonition will delay his country’s pursuit of a nuclear option, or that the receipt of such weapons by the world’s leading exporter of terror will not change the planet as we know it, are trading in foolish delusion. He means it, just like Hitler meant it some 70 years ago. And although it’s the entire world that’s at risk if Iran goes nuclear, Israel is first on the shopping list. The question is: how should we respond today? And at this point, can we?

Let’s examine the question from both the national and personal perspectives. On the national level, I think something clearly needs to be done. Severe sanctions could have the intended effect, but they would have to be truly strong and enforced across the board; sadly, there is little unanimity amongst the world’s leaders on how this should be accomplished, let alone that it should.

A military strike seems equally unlikely – the U.S. in the wake of the Baker-Hamilton report and Democratic control of Congress is looking for ways out of the Middle East, not how to add more partners on its dance card. Europe remains its usual impotent self. The job – if it needs to be done – increasingly looks like it will fall on Israel alone.

Could Israel even do anything, though? It’s been pointed out that Iran began preparing for a potential Israeli attack as soon at it saw how Iraq lost its Osirak reactor in 1981 at the hands of Israeli warplanes. Iran’s nuclear production facilities are better protected and more dispersed, making Israel’s job that much more difficult, many would say impossible. What about protecting the country from incoming missiles. Could the Patriots and Arrows in our arsenal do the job?

This is where Israelis who support a military option begin acting messianically themselves. We want to believe that Israel must have some super secret plan up its sleeve that defies the laws of nature. That we can sneak into Iran and destroy every one of their facilities in one go without a single screw up, without a single casualty, and with no counter-response, in the same way that the War of Independence and the Six Day War seemed impossible to win and yet we did. If we are fired upon, our defenses will protect us flawlessly, hitting every target. If we must go up against Iran, the thinking goes, it can only be with God’s help and perhaps His direct intervention.

But we’ve already used messianic language in our last regional conflict, this past summer’s war with Hezbollah. With supernatural faith, our leaders proclaimed that the entire threat from Lebanon would be wiped out in a matter of days by our natural logic-defying Air Force. Even if there are some who still can debate who “won” and who “lost” the war, the fact is that Hezbollah was only dented not destroyed and has already rearmed, ready to launch another 1,000 missiles into Israel at a time of its choosing.

Our family and friends reading this now are probably hitting their heads against the wall. If your analysis is right, what the heck are you still doing there, they will be screaming into a hundred telephones and email messages in the hours to come. You admit you’re potential sitting ducks. Get out while you still can. Forget about the Jewish people, the state, all the values you’re trying to instill in your children. Zionism has failed…you’re courting disaster not defending against it. After all, if Jews had fled Germany when they could have, they would still be alive and that’s the most important goal, right?

But what if everyone had the same thoughts and got up and left? What would be left of Israel? To what extent would a mass exodus from the country only accelerate its destruction by spurring on its enemies to attack what would be correctly perceived as a weak and hopeless enterprise? No, Israel was founded to provide not only a safe haven for the Jewish people in a world hell bent on its destruction, but a place where Jews could fight back.

So how do you cope with such a threat – realized or otherwise, potentially stoppable or not – hanging over your head? On the personal level, you do the only thing left: you go on living as “normal” a life as you can, with even more gusto than ever. The good news: we already know how to do that.

In 2000, when the Palestinian violence in Israel first broke out, we were scared, let’s make no bones about it. And at first, we did alter our lifestyles considerably. We stopped going out to cafes, we refused to ride on public transportation, we pretty much stayed at home, afraid to tempt the suicide bombers who were waiting at the door to every mall, school and restaurant.

Over time, though, we developed the resilience that now seems part and parcel of the Israeli character. “We won’t stop living our lives in the face of terror,” we declared. That was, indeed, the impetus for this column, which I began writing after the horrific bombing at Hebrew University that took our cousin Marla in its wake.

That line of thinking is back now with a vengeance, it seems, when it comes to Iran. We won’t let the threat looming over us stop us from our daily activities. We’ll keep going to “Boogie,” the twice-monthly free-form dance evenings my wife Jody and I have come to cherish. We’ll make our nightly “family dinner” a sacred space. We’ll go on more family vacations to exotic places like the one we recently took to Egypt to see the pyramids despite the warnings against Israelis (or Westerners in general) traveling to the heart of the Islamic Arab world.

I would be delighted if, like on the old Bullwinkle and Rocky show, there really was something surprising up our collective sleeves and we miraculously prevailed against the Iranian threat either militarily or diplomatically. In the meantime, it’s our job to work on our personal battles, to confront our inner Iran, to help us live fuller, better and, yes, ultimately more miraculous lives.

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Here’s the link to the article in the New York Jewish Week.