An Arithmetic of the Soul in an Uncivil War
From Yom Kippur 1987 to Independence Day 1988
through the Intifada: By Robert Rosenberg

The following stories are part of a narrative to show first, how blind Israeli society was to the coming uprising; second, how once it broke out, people tried to ignore it; and third, how it nonetheless influenced Israeli society. These are not political analyses, but rather subjective reporting on the events, as they took place.

All the stories originally appeared in The Jerusalem Post on the date noted, and all were written by Robert Rosenberg between the Yom Kippur before the Intifada, when Israelis would have done well to do some penance for what we wrought to the Palestinians, and Israeli Independence Day 1988, by which time everyone knew the word Intifada.

• October 2 1987 REFLECTIONS ON PAST YOM KIPPURS These are some of the unexpected or expected things that happen on or about Yom Kippur in recent memory. Memory being as short as it is nowadays, this chronicle deliberately begins a year after the only Yom Kippur that is remembered by those who happened to be here in that year - 1973.
• October 22 1987 VANITY AND ILLUSIONS ON LILIENBLUM "All right, you look like a nice guy. You listen to what I say and make sure to write it just like I tell you.
• October 27 1987 A REFUGEE'S VOICE IN THE CITY Ibrahim is a third-generation refugee, born to a teenage mother who was born in Gaza two weeks after Ibrahim's grandparents left Jaffa. He has been working in Tel-Aviv for the last seven years, since he was 17 and able to convince his father that it was better to go to the big city and, as Ibrahim says, "sleep and work God knows where", than to be another Unrwa-fed mouth in his 12-member family. He says "God" instead of "Allah" when he speaks Hebrew.
• October 28 1987 JAFFA'S LOVELESS FEUD Despite Shakespeare's drama of the Montagues and Capulets, there's no romantic moral in real life feuds between warring families, especially in the Jaffa underworld.
• October 30 1987 THE FEASTING BEGAN 10 YEARS AGO The nightly movable feast shifts around like the sand dunes on which the city was built. Openings here, affairs there, the same crowd attends all.
• November 3 1987 THE GLORY DAYS ARE GONE ON LILIENBLUM "It's you again. First it was Wall Street and now you believe the papers when they say there's going to be a devaluation.
• November 4 1987 WHEN HOME IS A PARK BENCH There are people sleeping on park benches in the middle of town nowadays, wrapped in blankets as dirty and grey as the clothing they wear, carrying their lives in plastic bags and rope-tied bundles of old newspaper.
• November 6 1987 THE HALF OF FELAFEL MAY BECOME A NOSTALGIC MEMORY In a country that, despite its leaders, is somehow growing up, the demise of the half-pita of felafel is one more example of loss of innocence-even if it's hardly as devastating as the discovery that all those nice boys from the Shin Bet did all those naughty things.
• November 9 1987 MOURNING A MAN WITH A GOLDEN ARM Even before he became a junkie, Zohar Argov had the gaunt, hollow-cheeked look of the hungry. Looking hungry was part of his appeal for in those days, only about 10 years ago, that kind of music was as much about being hungry, being on the outside, as it was about being from the disadvantaged neighborhoods. It was the music you heard in the open-air markets and in the bus stations, played over ghetto blasters. And the hunger wasn't for food-anyone can go into a grocer's. The hunger was for acceptance. The radio wouldn't play that music.
• November 11 1987 MOST LOCAL BOAT-OWNERS DON'T STRAY FAR The most recent and macabre farce of international terrorism on the open seas sent a lot of journalists down to the Tel Aviv marina this week, where they heard a lot of stories.
• November 15 1987 A NOVEMBER SECRET AVAILABLE TO ANYONE One of the biggest secrets in the country is out in the open, available to anyone who wants to take a look. In a way, it's a secret almost as important as the one Mordechai Vanunu is accused of handing out, for while his secret was all about security, this one is about sanity and its preservation.
• November 26 1987 STORIES YOU WON'T SEE WHEN TV IS ON THE AIR These are some of the things that television, even if it were on the air, would probably not be able to report. An exposition of the non-violent philosophies of a Palestinian-American intellectual, with an explanation of why the tactics of Ghandi, Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr. are much more effective than terrorism when used as the underdog's strategy in an ostensibly democratic society.
• December 4 1987 THE SAD STORY OF THE UPROOTED OLIVE TREES The story began about olive trees, passed through a Latin American novel, got lost in a maze of bureaucracies, and ended up with an unexpected irony. Most of all it's about the daily tragedy of assumptions made too easily by all types, Jewish or Arab, liberal or conservative, cunning or naive, about each other. In short, its about Israel nowadays.
• December 7 1987 WINTER--OUR ANNUAL SURPRISE One of the few utterly reliable and predictable things in this city is that winter takes it by surprise.
• December 14 1987 LIVING WITH THE FEAR OF THE FRIER TAG At their most desperate to be publicly identifiable, this city's thousands of either locally acclaimed, or self-proclaimed, celebrities seem to operate a kind of angst-ridden fan club for themselves. Many cities have an ambiance of narcissism. But only Tel Aviv preens before a dusty mirror, reflecting a self-importance that derives from a peculiar paranoia.

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