Jerusalem Diaries: In Tense Times

Rating:
Summary: A book to make you cry
Review: Judy Lash Balint leaves nothing unsaid. Her diary tells us everything Judy Lash Belint sees just by living in Jerusalem: from the daily terrorist attacks to the water being turned off when she gets back from yet another grueling day of work (in Jerusalem water is rationed and every apartment complex votes on when they will have no water but Judy Lash Balint was not there for the meeting and so did not vote and did not know...) and yet being so tired, no exhausted that never mind she can collapse and sleep without water or a bath or a drink.

And from her we hear what it is like to visit a family right after a horror attack. Vadim was murdered and a Palestinian soaked his hands in his blood and held them up for the cameras of the world to see. Irina his pregnant wife was watching television and saw it all on TV... and when Judy Lash Belint pays a condolence call and Irina says nothing because what is there to say?

And Judy Lash Belint tells us also of the Ethiopian Jews' custom of going up to the Western Wall to celebrate their gratitude for the Torah and she tells us of drinking coffee in a Starbucks and of the regular election debates.

The ordinary and the recognizable intermingle freely in these pages with the horrible and the incredible. It is a book all those who are interested in Israel should read because it tells of one woman's experiences in Israel, in Jerusalem; day by day.

Rating:
Summary: Essential Moving Stories Ignored By CNN, BBC, Sky et al.....
Review: Judy Lash Balint reveals an extremely moving side to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict seldom seen through the cameras of CNN, Sky, the BBC or any other Western media outlet for that matter. Judy Balint reveals the side of a victim long forgotten by the media.

The author presents the oft-ignored story of the innocent Jewish/Israeli victims of the Palestinian terrorist war. The innocent victims whose lives have been shattered and whose bodies have been battered and wounded through gut-less suicide bombings and other terror attacks aimed squarely at babes, children, teenagers, fathers and brothers, sisters and mothers, nearly all of whom have just been going about their daily lives like you or I, with no evil intent or political extremism.

Whilst we have all witnessed the aforementioned media sources devoting whole reports to the plight, claims and circumstances of Palestinian terrorist organisations and even many individual Palestinian suicide attackers, rarely does the Jewish victim receive any publicity, which is why this book is so important.

Judy Balint reveals the story of an Israeli civilian population under siege of Palestinian terrorism, where just visiting a public area such as a café, restaurant, cinema, disco, shopping mall or travelling on a bus is enough to place one's life at risk due to the threat of wholesale, indiscriminate terrorist attacks.

The author's words show the underlying fear and frustration of those who must live under this deliberately imposed horror by a neighbouring population that, through it's leader Yasser Arafat, does not even recognise their very right to exist or their ancient claims to their homeland of Israel.

Reading these words, one can feel what it must be like to have to send your own children of tender years to school in armoured school-buses under escort, never knowing if they will arrive or return safely.

The author's distress is clearly evident when she describes that even after fifty years of Israeli statehood, Israel still has to justify it's existence in a land that has belonged to the Jewish people for thousands of years. A claim to the Land that precedes and predates any Palestinian and indeed any Arab/Moslem claim to the territory. A Jewish claim that extends back through history for some 4,000 years and based upon a Biblical heritage which has yet to be and indeed cannot be rescinded.

Judy Balint provides through 55 essays a fact often quoted elsewhere. That although being unsuccessful on the battlefield in destroying & terrorising the Jewish people, Palestinian/Arab & other terrorist entities can terrorise 1,000 by killing one person and by killing civilians they can terrify people and the public at large far more effectively than when engaged in a full scale war. A fact that we too have since experienced in the West since 'September 11th'.

The author's frustration is clearly evident as she passes comment on the moves of various Israeli governments towards peace and the concessions which have brought only more violence. In exchange for land, Israel did not get peace, it got suicide bombers, suicide machine gunners, drive-by terrorists, snipers, mortar bombs, car bombs, fire bombs, grenades, booby traps, explosive packages, remote controlled explosives, forest fires, lynching, and kids bludgeoned to death. Israel also got a few staged arrests and revolving prison doors.

Attention is frustratingly paid here to the indisputably unbalanced coverage of this conflict provided by the BBC/CNN et al., where despite repeated factual and accurate complaints having been made against this principle, basic rules of media objectivity are still ignored. Any reference to Palestinian terrorists being downplayed to the usage of lesser terms of 'militants', 'extremists' or 'activists'. The 'T' word being purposely ignored in a conscious decision not to show Palestinian terrorist barbarity.

These views might seem extreme in themselves, but they are deeply felt in isolation by the victims whose plight and the backdrop to Israeli society is at last brought to the written page so adeptly by Judy Balint. This is an essential read for anyone who wishes to truly understand the situation in Israel at this present time.

Rating:
Summary: This book gets it right !
Review: This book gets it right!
I know - I was there... If you lived in Israel during the period November 1998 to May 2001, the period covered by this book, your sense of recognition will be stimulated most powerfully. If you did not live here, you will learn what many of us went through. I happen to share deeply the values of Jewish pride and determination to hold on to this Land as our home that inform and illuminate Judy Balint's essays. But even if you do not share her values, or even contest them, you will find this book a powerful and moving depiction of very difficult and daunting times.

In 55 short essays, ranging in length from 2 to 4 pages, Judy Balint describes graphically real places and people who are so close to me in my comfortable life, I could visit in a matter of minutes or at most a couple of hours. She describes events that made the world news broadcasts and others of a local or even private nature that reflect the experiences undergone by large parts of a whole nation. Her diary could, to a large extent, be my own, and undoubtedly that of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of Israelis.

Judy Balint writes with a cool passion. Often I could not help being deeply moved as I read her words. Her descriptions are a vivid revelation of events, personalities, scenes and scenery, heroism, suffering, forbearance, defiance, and dedication, the actions, emotions, and living values of very many of my fellow Israelis. A good read if you want to understand what Israelis have been going through in recent year.