Diary

I cut the grass and the weeds around the house this morning with the brush cutter. It took about 90 minutes. There’s more to do.

Afterwards we went out to a plant nursery to buy mainly flowering plants for pots + fertilizer for the lawn and the citrus trees. We noticed this year that the skin seems to be growing thicker and thicker on the oranges and gratefruits, and this apparently indicates a need for potassium, in particular. We got some organic fertilizer and resisted the advice to get a chemical to treat the crinkling of the leaves. Similarly for the bit of lawn, I didn’t get the fertilizer that has insecticide built in. I don’t want to be responsible for killing the critters or harming birds.

VPNs

According people who understand these matters better than me, VPNs are becoming almost a necessary feature for privacy on today’s web.

I have been experimenting with some of them lately. I started with Njalla. It worked well with MXLinux, I activated through a script in the terminal. The cost was, if I remember rightly €6 per month for one device, and it was not possible for me to choose a local server.

ProtonVPN has both a free and a premium plan. The premium version costs about the same as Njalla, but is for 8 devices. There are servers all around the world, so I was able to find a local one. Linux support is through a dedicated gui app. However I found the app to be buggy under MX Linux / KDE. After I got rid of it, I had a hard time getting back into the Internet. The app works fine in my aging Samsung phone however – it’s still working there, till I cancel the subscription.

Now I’m trying Mullvad VPN – I came upon it by chance since I have started to use Mullvad browser. This also has a Linux GUI app for Linux, which works well for me, so far (2 days). It costs about the same as the others, and is good for 5 devices, which would be enough for all our computers and phones. Like ProtonVPN, there are servers around the world, including local servers that we can use. The speed seems fine.

Mullvad browser

Mullvad browser is a new browser produced by Mullvad VPN company in cooperation with the organization behind Tor browser. After reading a review on it in The Verge, I am giving it a try. So far it seems quite usable; like a slightly downgraded version of Firefox. One noticeable “feature” is that the actual size of the browser window is smaller (evidently they are trying by this means to standardize the canvas size, which is one of the things that trackers use in order to establish a unique browser fingerprint). There are also no sync options, and the addition of addons is discouraged. I will probably use it in conjunction with my other browsers.

The country

I haven’t been listening too much to the depressing news. My assumption is that it is in the interest of our wise leaders to create a fracas or maybe start a little war in order to distract people from the other harmful stuff they have been up to. Nothing unites the (normally divisive and polarized) Israelis better than a healthy reminder that it is surrounded by enemies. Starting a minor war offers a win-win situation. You can easily start one by sending border police into the Al-Aqsa mosque to beat everybody up, raiding Syria night after night and then bombing Gaza again. Everyone will feel sorry for the Jews cowering in their shelters over the holiday. The people will unite against external threats that are, with a stretch of the imagination, just real enough to be believable. After weeks of warnings about the dangers of Ramadan, it seems that the holy month got off to too quiet a start.

Diary

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I’m getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn’t enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).

Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn’t make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta’s book, through which I’m still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.

It’s almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.

That won’t help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I’m not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.

Diary

Shifting as I do between Markdown, BBCode, Orgmode, SPIP PHP tags and plain HTML there’s a tendency to get a bit mixed up sometimes. Bill Gates would say that the wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them.

Lately I haven’t found the inspiration to write in my blog, but, on the other hand, I’ve written lots of little things in various other places, so I’ll collect a couple of them here.

In sickness and in health

A person who has to be laid up for several months due to a couple of unexpected spinal operations wrote that:

“I’m feeling ok now – a little mentally traumatised still from the urgency and unexpectedness of the surgery. The randomness of life really hit me.”

I wrote back that I wasn’t sure that “life is random” because I’ve been conditioned to think of it as prarabhda karma – which Jiddu Krishnamurti would have laughed at, because we create theories to explain away life’s mysteries. I also wrote that I try to relate to the “random” things that happen to us as gifts from the universe, as a bhakti would do. Baruch ha shem be tov ve ba ra as they say in Judaism.

But then she asked me to explain all these words, so follows my explanation:

‘Prarabhda karma’ is one of three types of karma according to brahmanist texts: it’s the kind that you have already been landed with, as against the karma you are now creating, or the karma that you have already perpetrated, but which has not yet resulted in anything. Actually, there’s nothing mystical about the word karma itself – it simply means action – the Indo-European root is cognate with our word “create”, but there’s a whole philosophy built around it (in both Hinduism and Buddhism): the result of “bad” actions, good “actions”, and doing action without seeking reward, etc. – the Bhagavad Gita, a poem of 700 verses, spends a lot of time on it.

‘bhakti’ means someone of a devotional bent, who might find himself in opposition to, say, a “raja yogi” or a dhyani. The analogy they usually give in India is that a bhakti is like a kitten, who his mother picks up by the scruff of his neck, and allows himself to be carried along, surrendering personal will to divine providence, whereas other kinds of yogis are more like the monkey baby, tenaciously clinging to their stated objective.

‘ blessed is God who brings goodness and ba ra’ I suppose “praise G-d whether he brings us good things or bad things” is the spirit of it. Bhakta, or devotion, is pretty much the same in all religions, I think. In one of Paul Bowles books, set in Morocco, there’s a scene where the narrator accidentally slams the taxi door on the hand of an elderly fellow passenger. Wordlessly, the old guy wraps his bloodied fingers in his shawl, mutters “alhamdulillah” (praise be to Allah!) and goes on his way.

I find I don’t have a problem reconciling between the attitudes of these different religions, while not believing in a conceptualization of God as some of them do. “God” is just a shorthand term used for convenience; a personalisation similar to the way some people assign personal names to inanimate objects. If they find it helpful, let them do so. Just don’t try to persuade me that divinity is the way that you imagine it, based on what has been drummed into you in churches and temples. Or that the god you yourself have set up on a pedestal needs to be pulled down, because either way, it is of no consequence to me. Agnosticism and atheism are nonsense terms and only imply that we haven’t understood, while “belief” will always be extremely fragile.

Progressive web applications

On my phone, using Epicyon, I noticed that there are interesting differences between Firefox (and Mull) and Chrome, in the way they handle progressive web apps. The launcher I use does not directly support pwas. But I found that if I create a Chrome pwa in Samsung’s default launcher, I can then go back and use it in my launcher. But the same is not true for Firefox pwas. They can be added to Samsung’s home screen, but do not show up among the applications, as do Chrome pwas. I don’t normally use Chrome and when it began to pester me about syncing between devices, I decided not to use it for Epicyon either. So, since I can’t use Firefox web apps under my launcher, I simply open Epicyon from a Mull tab. I might eventually put Vivaldi back on my phone, so then I’ll see what happens with the web apps that it creates, but for Epicyon I can manage like that. My launcher, by the way, is Baldphone – it’s supposed to be a simple launcher for old people. Maybe I’m getting old, because although I’ve experimented with every launcher in F-Droid, I like it best.

Unfediverse

Someone said the other day that it isn’t entirely true to say that “the Fediverse is bigger than Mastodon” because, as it stands, Mastodon by itself has many more people on it than any of the other non-Mastodon instances. (And what happens if all of Tumblr joins the Fediverse?) Anyway, for now, the effect of Mastodon’s “market dominance” is that all the other instances need to conform to Mastodon first, and then worry about being interoperable with each other only later. As a result, although almost everything I do in Epicyon and Hubzilla will work in Mastodon, and everything I receive from Mastodon is likely to come through fine, this is not true if I try to follow someone on Hubzilla from Epicyon, and, as I just discovered, posting an image in Hubzilla will come through blank to Akkoma (a Pleroma fork). Even with Mastodon, Epicyon and maybe Hubzilla have compatibility problems. From Epicyon, I discovered that I cannot respond to surveys, for example. Images can be given alt tags in Hubzilla (through a non-intuitive and undocumented syntax), but these do not seem to work in exactly the same way as in Mastodon. It’s all a bit wild. So, for interoperability it’s best to keep posts as simple as possible.

Palestine

When political realities change for the worse, we tend to adapt to them by hardening our positions. When Russia invades Ukraine, this has an inhibiting factor on all discourse that tries to be even-handed. Suddenly we are all against Russia, siding with the warmongers of NATO. That’s too bad, because the necessary nuances are lost – with the darkness of night comes our inabilities to perceive differences in colors.

It’s the same now with what’s happening in Israel/Palestine. Israel’s new regime is so harsh, anti-Arab and Fascist, the world cannot do other than to side with Palestinians and to unite against Israel. This usually results in sending Israeli Jews into defensive mode. A people so traumatized by historical antisemitism have a strong defensive reflex. This too is dangerous.

But what can one do? What can one do when a conflict seems to require that we take sides? To sign up anyway but just not to be happy about it?

Lao Tsu has the following to say about war:

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 31

Good weapons are instruments of fear; all creatures hate them.
Therefore followers of the Tao never used them.
The wise man prefers the left.
The man of war prefers the right.

Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man’s tools.
He uses them only when he has no choice.
Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.
And victory no cause for rejoicing.
If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;
If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

On happy occasions precedence is given to the left,
On sad occasions to the right.
In the army the general stands on the left,
The commander-in-chief on the right.
This means that war is conducted like a funeral.
When many people are being killed,
They should be mourned in heartfelt sorrow.
That is why a victory must be observed like a funeral.

I’m told that there’s a parallel Talmudic passage.

War and peace may be governed by firm principles, or be in the domain of realpolitik. But they are also matters of the heart. When it comes down to it, I am not going to listen to Lao Tsu, Marx, Jesus, my elders, the Prime Minister or the laws of the nation. I’m going to do what my heart tells me to do.

Links

Palestine: Unite or die | Israel-Palestine conflict | Al Jazeera This article by an al-Jazeera senior journalist suggests that it’s imperative for Palestinians to put aside their differences if they want to struggle against the new political realities in the region.

2022’s Best Investigative Stories in India – GIJN

There are amazing stories here.

Diary

For Christmas, one of my sons gave me a new set of in-ear noise cancelling bluetooth earphones, which are very nice; great in fact – they remain comfortable after hours of use and I’m not bothered by things like the TV.

I also bought myself another set of headphones, though fortunately with a different purpose – they come as part of a sleep mask and are comfortable for nights when I want to fall asleep to music or hear it through the night. Lately I’ve been doing ok without them – I always sleep better in winter: the womby effect of thick blankets, probably.

Most of my music continues to be long mixes that SoundCloud chooses for me: right now it’s “May Peace be Everywhere in the World” – an almost 3 hour track by Andi Rietchel. No need for mainstream first-tier musicians with me. My mainstray is Cafe de Anatolia, especially the stuff mixed by Billy Esteban.

It may be a sign of the times that we spend a lot of time piping music to our ears. I have at least 7 functioning sets of headphones by now. Perhaps it’s to drown out all the negativity around us. The toxic politicians and cruel, divisive politics. There are no doubt stronger drugs that people are resorting to.

I have three social media streams now; having set up Hubzilla and Epicyon on my VPS while continuing to use Akkoma on Disroot’s server. I’m making sure to follow different people on each. However, I’m not so much enjoying the experience; maybe I’ve just fallen in with the wrong crowd. As for my own contribution, I haven’t felt much like sharing anything of late, so I don’t. I think I’m more interested in social media from a technical point of view; when it comes to actually using it, I find that I don’t have a great deal to do there.

I have a greater interest in creating my own corner on the web, “a digital garden”, so I keep thinking about that.

VPN service and internet connections

I made a trial subscription to njalla’s VPN service. This came after I followed a link to a world library site recommended, which asked if I’m in “Neve Shalom”. Usually, the sites that I encounter have suggested that I’m somewhere in the general region – where my ISP server is located, for example. I didn’t understand how it came to know I’m in this tiny village. I don’t have location services enabled in my browser and Google Maps always has to ask whether I wish to enable them. Anyway, I thought that’s just a step too far. It’s not that it’s hard to know where I live, for anyone who makes a bit of effort: I mention it in my blog and my fediverse accounts, but how does some random site knows where my computer is? That I didn’t get. Anyway now the library site believes I’m in Finland, which is fine with me. Njalla’s service seems OK, but was a bit hard to set up, and I still didn’t manage to incorporate the VPN into my computer startup sequence.

The whole business of connecting to the internet never seems to settle down. New protocols and standards to learn, and deliberate obfuscation on the part of telecoms and companies that don’t want us to know. I just bought a new mesh router but apparently it’s the wrong one for the proprietary fiber modem-router of my carrier. There’s some other mesh router that’s supposed to go with that. Bummer.

And I hate all this proprietary stuff. This new mesh component does not come with the traditional website interface but a stupid simplified phone app that claims to be super-easy but is much less configurable. The approach of telecoms and companies is “Don’t bother trying to understand: we’ll take care of everything for you.” And instead of explaining how everything’s supposed to work, they try to keep us in the dark, which limits our freedom.

We need to counter such attempts through hacker-groups and websites that tirelessly explain whatever information is being kept from us. Locally I’m at a disadvantage, because I am less aware of Hebrew-speaking groups that specifically address the obfuscation and fud of the local telecom and its competitors. For sure there are people out there that understand the field much better than I do.

Israel’s new government

It’s all dark stuff. There’s still a disconnect in my brain; I didn’t completely internalize what it means, though rationally I know how bad it is, and how much worse it can become. I don’t know what to do with this information. Of course, we should leave this country and go to some other, slightly better, place. But, as an individual: should one do that, when the rest of one’s family remains behind? This must have been the same question that Jews and left-wing intellectuals would ask themselves during the 1930s in Germany and central Europe. With the difference that they were directly endangered themselves. So maybe it’s more like the circumstances in which ordinary white Christian Germans without overt political affiliation found themselves during the same era. They would not be hunted down by the SS or the Gestapo, but they might suffer the effects of the war. And they might feel sympathy for the direct victims of the Nazi regime.

The situation may yet arise that we will all simply need to flee; I would not be too surprised, but I can’t be sure, and I’m old after all, with family responsibilities of my own.

Instance blocking; the open web

After so many years in the Fediverse, I thought that I understood it well by now. But looking lately at the landscape, through the portal of Mastodon, I’m not so sure. What I see there is a culture where blocking becomes the solution for whatever you don’t like, particularly instance blocking.

On the conventional social networks, you can block a person. On Mastodon, if you don’t like somebody, you can block the whole instance. While I initially felt some sympathy for blocking instances like Gab, now I’m beginning to see how far this can go. Last week, someone set up an instance to “onboard journalists”, without vetting so well who could join up there. A couple of days later, other instances began blocking that one due to the presence of a few unsavoury members. Today I read that another Mastodon instance decided, in the name of free speech, to allow persons with controversial opinions, so people on other instances are urging to block that instance.

I can imagine that eventually someone will decide that it’s advisable to block all instances that aren’t on some kind of a master-list whose member instances endorse a particular constitution – perhaps one that is similar to that of mastodon.social* (I have only heard about these, but haven’t read them). And why not block instances on the basis of their geographical location while we are at it? Russia? Ukraine? Israel? Palestine? Africa?

Update: What there currently is, is the list maintained at joinmastodon.org that is governed by the criteria of the Mastodon server covenant:

Thus, we are proud to announce the creation of the Mastodon Server Covenant. By highlighting those communities that are high quality and best align with our values, we hope to foster a friendly and better moderated online space. Any server that we link to from joinmastodon.org commits to actively moderating against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

In practice, it’s very demanding for volunteer moderators to perform such moderation, but super easy to block an entire instance.

In an environment of hair trigger instance-blocking, we’re arguably better off in one of the mainstream social networks, where we’re chucked out mainly for egregiously bad behaviour – but our own behaviour, not that of our neighbours or due to our affiliation with some group – say, the US Republican Party.

Although it’s very tempting to filter out all the voices that we don’t want to hear, the consequence is that we live in an ever more intolerant society.

I’m not going to change the world, but I’m in favour of a return to the open web, in combination with RSS news feeds and email newsletters. The need to set up a personal site, or to be published to an existing journal sets a high bar, but maybe that’s a good thing. There are many problems yet to solve, such as discovery, comment spam, payment issues, government censorship, etc. but there are also advantages: returning control and responsibility to the individual; independence from any kind of control or banishment by corporations, billionaires, groups, cliques, etc.

What the Indieweb people propose is, as always, a pragmatic and favourable compromise: publish first to our own site, and then to everywhere else: we don’t have to be in love with the networks we use in order to benefit from their reach. So we publish where we can and if we get blocked we get blocked.

Because I happen to be not-so-interested in spreading my germs far and wide, I try to keep my site out of the search engines and don’t publish to Facebook and Twitter, hardly even to the Fediverse. So I probably won’t take that advice.

Urushiol

Poison flowers

It’s the pleasure of finding articles like this that makes the web worthwhile. The non-commercial web. The writer describes the qualities of the oil found in poison ivy, which causes so much grief to Americans, but which is prized in Japan for its use in traditional lacquer-making. He also points out, or claims, that Japanese and native Americans are less susceptible to injury by the oil or the plants that contain it. The plants are related to the cashew and the mango that hail from South Asia, which also cause nasty allergic reactions in those who need to deal with the trees or harvesting their fruit. Only humans, it seems, suffer from the bad effects of urushiol.

Music

Y found music by an interesting artist couple – he sent the link to Spotify but I also found them on SoundCloud: Santi & Tuğçe – I am listening on headphones to their stuff just now, and it is nicely blocking out the lousy music from a hinna party taking place next door, as well as the sounds from the TV. There is so much good and interesting music that is being produced. I don’t know how the artists are making their money, when we can listen to it for free, but the variety is so varied that something must be happening right.

Epicyon

It seems that I made yet another mistake with my server while trying to get Friendica working the other day – the support person claimed that I’d deleted the ETC directory. All I know is that I had attempted to get Filezilla working better, and was trying different configurations – then suddenly nothing worked. I deleted the server, and then created another to try again with Epicyon – this time with nginx. Meanwhile, I’ve put the blog and the photos back on Fastmail.

Thorns

I so love thorns.

Gardening

Hubzilla

I have been working at a snail’s pace at the Hubzilla installation, with flagging enthusiasm as I’m not really convinced of the need for it. Zap would have been a better fit, but Hubzilla has better instructions. I just had a look at Friendica; which I once used, though never installed. I suppose that’s another a candidate. There’s no platform that really wows me. I have always thought that the best way to use social networks would be a desktop client like pidgin. Android clients exist, but I see nothing similar in Linux. Anyhow, I still need a server.

Lately I’ve been thinking that WordPress still offers me the best ability to create websites, among the platforms that I understand. But my indecisiveness is prodigal.

Gardening

I just bought the chain saw attachment for my Stihl combi tool. It’s quite impressive. I have always been scared of chain saws, and like the idea of keeping the chain on the other end of a rod; as with the hedge trimmer.

So I took the new toy out for a spin this afternoon. All went well, though, due to my lack of experience, there was one occasion when I got the thing stuck in a tree trunk, which is awkward when the machine is at shoulder height. I had to call for D and eventually she came. While she held it, I managed to climb up on the roof and push the trunk away from from the blade. I never thought to disengage the machine end from the chain saw attachment; that would have made it a little less awkward to handle.

Anyway, the machine did quite an impressive amount of work, lopping off high branches and weed trees. The expense already seems worthwhile.

The outdoors

There are less mosquitoes this year; possibly because we haven’t set up drip irrigation to the plants around the balcony. I’ve been sitting outside, and although I put on some Odomos, it wasn’t needed. There hasn’t been a single mosquito buzzing around me. It’s really pleasant outside in the evening, during the hours when no breeze enters the house and the walls continue to radiate heat absorbed during the daytime.

New server

After my recent problems with the phone company’s new fiber network and its restrictive modem, I decided to look for a VPS for my hosting needs.

I began by considering solutions like Neocities. But actually I have had my fill of shared hosting providers, and economically it absolutely makes sense to prefer a VPS. I have done it a couple of times before over the years. The one I have now picked is Kamatera – mainly because I saw they are cheap and have servers in Israel. Their lowest cost is currently $4, which gives a server with 1 MB of RAM + 20 GB of file space. That should be more than enough for my modest needs, and the cost is about the same as what the phone company charges for a permanent IP.

At Kamatera it was possible to use a server image that already included a LAMP installation and Phpmyadmin, so that was convenient. For now I need only PHP.

I learned a new word today, “KISS” – someone coined it to refer to simplicity as a software principle, and that well describes what I’m trying to do: to always choose the simplest solution and as close as possible to what I, with my lack of tech knowhow, can have a hope of getting my head around. It certainly won’t always mean using the best tool for the job, but will be the closest to what I understand. Modern languages and advanced frameworks will often get the job done in a better way. But on various occasions I have had difficulty with some of these. Sometimes there will be dependency problems, or inconsistencies between versions that are difficult to sort out. So, whereas the software application itself may be elegant and simple, the framework that supports it may be complex.

In general, whenever a software developer boasts about his product’s beautiful simplicity and ease of use, I have learned to take that with a lot of salt. The 2-minute installation will take hours to get working because he didn’t factor in my stupidity, evidently.

We are living in an age – fortunately – where we can create amazing, beautiful websites with almost no technical skills. And we can opt into networks like Tumblr or Blogger or WordPress where everything is done for us. My attempts to avoid these platforms look stuborn, almost ludicrous by comparison, and the results are unimpressive, old-fashioned and primitive. I spend hours to obtain something that can be done in a few seconds otherwise.

But on the other hand, without being a trained programmer or developer, I am doing things my own way and am closer to being in control of the tools that I use. That’s the extent of my aspiration. And hopefully to do some nice things with these tools.

I don’t want to be too much of a Luddite (I know, that’s a term that is wrongly used) Wired has an interesting article about OpenAI and the growing use of artificial intelligence in writing code. It’s a pity that Microsoft got their clutches on it, but I can really see how this could change everything. It has potential like the Internet, like Guttenberg, to empower ordinary people. On the other hand, in trying to explain its value to my wife, I was unable to come up with many good examples to prove my point.

Fiber | Israel-Palestine

Yesterday we were connected to the fiber infrastructure and, hopefully will receive more robust internet connection, though that flimsy wire hanging flapping about among the bushes, leaves me feeling rather doubtful. In the newer section of the village, the cables are buried; in the older section where we live, we depend on wires and poles, which occasionally get hit and pulled down by passing trucks. The phone company technicians are known for their resourcefulness. For years, our connection was dependent on cables twisted together inside an old coke bottle on our roof. I suppose the technician didn’t have a proper connection box handy on his several visits.

Now we have a formal connection speed of 1 Mb, though stability, rather than speed will be the incentive of most of the village residents to adopt the new service.

I still haven’t got around to asking the phone company to give me a permanent ip and open port 80, so this post will be offline till I so so.

For the Thich Nhat Hanh sangha I suggested to share the Nextcloud folder I use, so that we’ll have a joint folder for sangha-related activities. It’s hosted at Disroot.org. They are a bit slow in responding to requests for new user registrations, so we’ll see if this actually works. Most people are used to instant responses for new registration from the big tech companies, so the idea of a sign-up taking several days is foreign to them. I’m also not sure exactly how the Nextcloud federation plays out in real life, so we’ll see. The service actually wasn’t working at all for me for the past several months, till I figured out that I need to update my client. Then it worked again. This is one of the problems with AppImage and the other newer Linux software installations. The Debian package management system is much more dependable by comparison. And the more that software developers come to rely on the newer installation methods, the less motivated they are to keep the repository versions updated. (The other main problem is the variety of competing installation types, so that one has to remember whether an application was informed from the repository or snap or appimage, or Git or compiled from a tar ball, or whatever. The result is chaos, whereas formerly it was a lot easier to manage to update a Linux system than in Windows.

Link

‘The land beyond the road is forbidden’: Israeli settler shepherds displace Palestinians This is typical of the painful story that happens beneath the radar of international attention. Shepherding weaponized and used simply to take over Palestinian lands. The occupation is violent in every one of its aspects, but when Palestinians resort to desperate means like blowing themselves up in order to protest the occupation, they are the ones who are castigated for being violent.

The phone company sub-contractor who came to install our new fiber line were Palestinians from East Jerusalem. He was impressed to hear that our village is shared by Arabs and Jews living together. “It’s the only one, unfortunately, I said.” – “Inshallah, one day there will be peace” . – “Sure, after we are dead,” I joked. His young worker, who hadn’t understand this exchange in Hebrew, asked him afterwards why he was hearing the teachers from the adjacent primary school speaking in Arabic. So his boss explained to him that the school has Arab and Jewish kids learning together. The two of them had nothing more to say about it. In the reality of East Jerusalem, such a reality is even more difficult to contemplate.