Just an ordinary day
With a blue sky
With no feast nor dance
No drum and no fife
Nothing special had happened
But Senator Mitchell has been here and gone
(Variation of Yossi Gamzu's poem)
And at the airport Senator Mitchell, envoy of US President Barack Hussein Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, reiterated the United States' commitment to conduct substantive talks with the Israelis and the Palestinians in order to achieve significant progress towards signing a framework agreement between the two parties which would be the basis for a definite peace agreement which will be signed sometime. And the newspaper readers yawned and turned the page in search of more interesting news. And the settlers shrugged and continued the accelerated construction. And the Palestinians also shrugged and continued mobilizing international support for the State of Palestine, due to be declared in Auguest or September 2011, with or without an agreement. And seekers after peace, who remember very many peace processes and rounds of negotiations and international mediators, said that when someone had not been able to achieve a three months' freeze, it is up him to prove that he can truly achieve the complete dismantling of the settlements.
And meanwhile, the Knesset plenum was today in upheaval and uproar about a major contentious issue which has the potential of bringing down the government coalition. Namely: what should be the status of a young man whose mother is not Jewish, who is an Israeli citizen speaking Hebrew as well as Russian who is clearly part of the Israeli society, who enlists in the army of this Jewish Democratic state and gets sent on its behalf to the territories which it occupies, who imposes the rule of the Jewish Democratic state over people who are not Jews and have no share in Israeli democracy, who performs the dirty jobs with a high motivation and efficiency and the needed brutality. Doesn't such a young man deserve the right to call himself a Jew - no less so than do his comrades in arms, whose mothers are Jewish and who wear the very same uniform he does and perform with him the same dirty jobs with the same amount of motivation and efficiency and needed brutality?
Truth be told, most likely he does deserve it.
