Rain of Falafel

So the morning after my MDA test I woke up feeling really sick. I struggled through that day, and spent a lot of it in bed, before heading to the MDA barbecue, which was annoying because I wasn't feeling well. I got back early and called it a night, even though it was Thursday night. Friday morning I realized that I wasn't better yet and so I canceled my Shabbat plans and arranged to be on base. Of the 25 hours that make up Shabbat I probably slept through 17 or so. After Shabbat ended, David, Seth and I went out for schwarma and then we went back to base to wait for our friends to come back (I was feeling much better by then, though I am still even now a little under the weather). Ariella and I had a very engaging conversation about the Goldstone report, about which I've started to draw some conclusions (I'll share later). I couldn't sleep last night, but that was fine, because every time I tossed and turned myself into wakefulness, I was able to check the score on the Yankees game and see (eventually) that the Yanks beat the Angels to take a 2-0 lead in the series. Joshy and I woke up at 10:05 and got ready for our exciting first day of class. After a little hunting we found the bus stop and boarded the #19 bus for Hebrew U. We got there at 11:45 - perfect timing for a 12:30 class, since we were planning on grabbing lunch at the delicious Hebrew U cafeteria. We got to class (Silicon Wadi: Global Entrepreneurship in a Middle Eastern Economy) right on time and settled in for the 4 hour session. Class went well and seems like it will be really interesting. The professor isn't really a teacher, he is an entrepreneur who has also done stuff at MIT, which apparently qualifies him to teach. I enjoyed him so I'm not complaining. Once we got home, we watched Lost with the girls and went out to dinner. Josh is playing basketball now so I figured I'd take this opportunity to blog.

Since this is a short post, I figured I would share some musings and interesting discoveries - feel free to read, skim or skip as desired.

1. Professor Halperin (I think we're supposed to call him Avner, but until he explicitly says that I'm playing it safe) told a story about Israel in the early 1960's. People were emigrating from the State, the economy was bad, and things weren't looking good. Someone actually erected a sign at Ben Gurion Airport that said "Will the last one out please turn off the lights." I thought that was clever.
2.Did you know that PM Levi Eshkol had to give up much of his power (or something like it) because he stuttered while delivering a radio address about Israel's national security?
3. Did you know (this one really blew me away) that in 1984 Israel's elections produced a tie atop the seat-getters in the Knesset which led to an agreement to rotate which party would be in power halfway through the term?
4. My thoughts on Goldstone: Israel shot itself in the foot here. By refusing Goldstone access to government officials, military officials, residents of Israel or even access to the STATE of Israel, they opened the door for statements like "20. By refusing to cooperate with the Mission, the Government of Israel prevented it from meeting Israeli government officials, but also from travelling to Israel to meet with Israeli victims." While I don't believe he had Israel's best interests at heart, Justice Goldstone has stated that his report is a compilation of the facts as he found them. Israel supplied him with no facts, thus the report is very one sided. The report does, however, still manage to criticize Hamas, along with Israel (or the Zionist Menace, as I sometime refer to Israel, tongue-in-cheek), something the UN Human Rights Commission managed to omit. Goldstone seemed genuinely upset that the UNHRC took his (already biased report), and boiled it down to a purely anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic resolution. No one is entirely innocent - not in the actual Operation Cast Lead (though a retired British officer had this to say about Israel's conduct - really fascinating), nor in the Goldstone/UNHRC debacle that is still unfolding (and will probably continue to unfold until it eventually reaches the Security Council and the US puts a stop to it).

Ok, I've rambled on about politics long enough - I think we're about to have a boys movie night down in the auditorium - 300 on a really big screen, pretty exciting.

Later: 300 never happened, oh well. To explain the title of this blog post - many of you may be familiar with the American children's book (now movie) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. In Israel it's called...Rain of Falafel. Oh Israel.

Talk to you soon,
Seffi