Sukkot

 

This week we are celebrating Sukkot. In biblical times it was one of the three festivals requiring a mandatory pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem. I have always found the standard translations of Sukkot awkward, however for want of anything better I’ll stick with - Feast of Booths, Feast of Tabernacles,. The festival is agricultural in origin.   As proscribed in Exodus. 23:16 - "At the end of the year when you gather in your labours out of the field".          

The Sukkah (booth) is a symbolical reenactment of the makeshift dwellings our ancestors built during their forty year trek in the wilderness.                       

However, some biblical scholars believe the origins of the sukkah are linked more to security and less to our stopover in the wilderness en route to the Promised Land.             

During the harvest season farmers have always been wary of thieves out to steal their crops. To prevent this happening they put up easily constructed temporary shelters in their fields and lived in them till the harvest was over. Now too you can see similar structures, canvas awnings supported by a few wooden poles strategically positioned by the side of water melon fields.

Arab farmers continue this ancient tradition and claim it is effective in warding off potential thieves.  The Jewish agricultural sector places its trust in alarm systems and local patrol groups with coordinated police backing.   

This year dozens of sukkot representing Jewish communities from all over the  world are on display at the Global Sukkot Festival  being held in Netanya and Ashdod. In Netanya  the  smaller representative sukkot  are set up inside a huge sukkah measuring 528 square metres, claimed to be the largest in the world.

My kibbutz like most kibbutzim is a secular community. However our secular way of life has strong ties to Jewish tradition and custom. We observe, commemorate and celebrate all our festivals in a way that is compatible with  our chosen lifestyle. Many families build their own sukkah by their homes and help build sukkot  by the kindergartens and day-care centres This year a very large central sukkah was built on the lawn by the dining room.

Two weeks ago I wrote, “It has been a bad week for Bibi..´” Well this week has been worse. The prime minister’s United Nations address met our expectations. He is a confident and accomplished public speaker.

His polished delivery in fluent American English was indeed impressive. However his bomb illustration drew a lot of flak   

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in the Atlantic  - “He insulted the intelligence of his audience (not just his audience in the hall, which quite frequently deserves to have its intelligence insulted, but his worldwide audience) and he turned the most serious issue facing the world today into something of a joke

. People are laughing at him in places where he can't afford to be laughed at -- I don't mean Twitter, where everyone is perpetually laughing at everyone else -- but in actual important offices of the United States government. Not good for his cause, and not good for the more general issue of focusing the world's attention on this threat.”.

Jon Stewart’s brief piece got top marks from me. Posing a virtual question to Netanyahu he asked, "What’s with the Wile E. Coyote Nuclear Bomb?

You’re going to pretend you don’t know what a nuclear bomb looks like? You’re Israel. Run downstairs and look in the basement."

Critics of the use of visual aids probably agree that on occasions they are effective. In 1975, the UN was riding a wave of anti-Israel sentiment, fuelled by European fears of the Arab oil boycott. The UN had recognised the "right of resistance" (terror) of the Palestinian people, recognised the PLO as the only legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, while the PLO was still committed to destroying Israel and still engaged in terror. The United Nations General Assembly also passed the shameless "Zionism is Racism" resolution.

Israel’s ambassador to the   UN Chaim Herzog’s response  to this resolution was a memorable defence of Zionism. At the conclusion, he tore up the resolution.

David Frum in the  Daily Beast  overlooked the bomb placard  and offset the negative criticism with a bottom line summary- “The prime minister of Israel came to New York to warn of the worst. The president of Iran seemed once again arrived to confirm those warnings.”

Joshua Mitnick in the  Christian Science Monitor  pointed out how Bibi’s chart

confused viewers. “While his presentation certainly got attention, some experts say that Netanyahu’s prop missed the mark, confusing where his red line lies rather than simplifying the issue. The problem, they said, is that his presentation conflated two different types of numbers.

The bomb chart showed percentage progress toward acquiring enough fissile material to make a bomb. Netanyahu said the Iranians were 70 percent of the way there and drew his now famous red line at the 90-percent threshold, a milestone he predicted would be reached sometimes next spring or summer.  

But in his remarks, he spoke of the need to draw that red line between the production stage of enriching uranium to medium level purity – 20 percent, according to experts – and the stage of uranium enrichment for weapons-grade purity, which is 90 percent.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Netanyahu, said that the red line refers to "90 percent upon the path to weapons grade enrichment." Amos Harel, a military commentator for the liberal Haaretz who also noted the confusion among commentators, wrote that it refers to the amount of 20 percent enriched material required to begin high level enrichment.

‘It's not clear if he’s saying that Iran can’t have a certain amount of medium-enriched uranium, or he doesn’t want Iran to have 90 percent enrichment grade fuel,’ says Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council . ‘Where he drew the line was the wrong place. You want to stop them at 20 percent.  You don’t want to let them get to weapons grade.’

Netanyahu's critics ridiculed him for the gimmick, unleashing a flood of satirical riffs, from inserting images of Looney Toons cartoons into photos of Netanyahu on the UN podium (his bomb diagram was compared to that of cartoon villain Wile E. Coyote) to an image of Bob Dylan from his 1960s video Subterranean Homesick Blues, holding the chart.”

Lisa Beyer – took Bibi’s graphic presentation person to task when she wrote in     Bloomberg “Whoever produced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cheesy graphic of a bomb for his United Nations General Assembly presentation today should consider a new line of work. Netanyahu, who tends to pomposity, is an easy target to start with, and his cartoonish graphic was predictably mocked.

Iran's nuclear program -- was as serious as they come, and his message was smart and a little different this time. Noting, rightly, that Israel's intelligence agencies are superb, Netanyahu observed that they nevertheless could not be counted on to know when and where Iran had produced a detonator for a nuclear bomb or assembled a complete weapon.”

Nahum Barnea in Yediot Ahronot had an ‘all’s well that ends well’ moral to the bomb chart debate.

."Despite all the mocking of various individuals of little faith, the image of the Israeli prime minister and the bomb will be broadcast in every news edition around the world, and will be incorporated in the video clips made by the Republican Party for the presidential campaign. There is nothing like a bombshell to spice things up. ‎The technical details will not particularly trouble those who view the image."

"Timelines are very problematic.” said Emily Landau, a fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for International Security Studies. “So many factors can intervene and slow down the progress toward a bomb, It's hard to make predictions about when they will get to whatever stage. That is always precarious." 

Ron Ben-Yishai Yidiot Ahronot’s military affairs analyst said, “We can assume that the chances Israel will launch a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear installations in the near future have been significantly reduced and are actually close to zero - certainly not before the US presidential elections in November and probably not during the upcoming winter either. “

While we are still celebrating Sukkot   I want to conclude by mentioning a number of  new traditions that have taken root. We hold a local kite flying happening for the children. The Arad hot air balloon event draws participants from many countries. A similar even takes place at Maayan Harod. Early this morning  I saw a bevy of hot-air  balloons  heading across the valley. The one in the photograph I took reminded me of an inverted Bibi bomb.

Chag Sameach

Beni                            4^th of October, 2012.