Israel, Indonesia talked during Lebanon war

Cleveland Jewish News [US]
September 23, 2006


Israel, Indonesia talked during Lebanon war

(JTA) — Ehud Omert told the heads of a US Jewish group
that he had direct contact with Indonesian leaders
during Israel's Lebanon war.

The Israeli prime minister met last week in Israel
with Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for
Jewish community-relations councils, and Martin
Raffel, the group's associate executive director.

Olmert said Indonesian leaders contacted Israel during
the war. He did not divulge details of the
conversation, but Israel subsequently dropped
objections to Indonesian participation in a
peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Israel has no
formal relations with the world's most populous Muslim
nations, but ties have warmed in recent years, and
Israel delivered aid during the 2004 tsunami.

(JTA) — Ehud Omert told the heads of a US Jewish group
that he had direct contact with Indonesian leaders
during Israel's Lebanon war.

The Israeli prime minister met last week in Israel
with Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish
Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for
Jewish community-relations councils, and Martin
Raffel, the group's associate executive director.

Olmert said Indonesian leaders contacted Israel during
the war. He did not divulge details of the
conversation, but Israel subsequently dropped
objections to Indonesian participation in a
peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon. Israel has no
formal relations with the world's most populous Muslim
nations, but ties have warmed in recent years, and
Israel delivered aid during the 2004 tsunami.

Photos

Jogya (And Gumpas) on My Mind

In typical Indonesian fashion, at five PM last night, Pak David, my contact at the school where I work, notified me that I am on holiday for the next ten days. I was speaking with students, asking them what they wanted to discuss next week, when they told me that there will be no school because the fasting month of Ramadan is set to begin on Sunday. I have no complaints whatsoever. As the adage goes, better late than never. I would, however, have been angry if I arrived at school next week to find no one there. As the case may be, I have nearly two weeks to continue exploring this wonderfully disorganized country.
I arrived in Jogyakarta last night around midnight. A dozen or so of the Fulbrighters are meeting up here for the weekend for a mini-reunion of sorts. The city is home to the ancient capital of Srivajaya and Borobodur, acclaimed as one of the seven ancient wonders of the world. I’ll post photos and thoughts once I visit.
The city was also close to the epicenter of the May 24 earthquake (gumpa, in Bahasa Indonesia) of this year. Hands On International, the retooled version of the group Hands On USA that I worked with in Mississippi, is working here rebuilding houses. This fact slipped my mind until I arrived, when my taxi driver Suparman (real name) told me that there is a group of bule from America volunteering here. Within minutes, I was on the phone with Scuba, one of the main coordinators from Biloxi, Mississippi who is running the Hands On show here, on the other side of the globe. On the way to my hotel, Suparman picked-up from the train station a girl named Jacqueline, who is working here for Hands On, and whom I also met while in Mississippi. Yet more evidence that, as Thomas Friedman put it, our world is flattening and shrinking every day.
I’m staying in a hotel with my buddy John, who is posted in South Sumatra in the only locale more rural (and much more removed) than mine. There is no internet in his village, and hordes of people linger outside his apartment, waiting to practice their English and to whisk him around town on motor bikes. He seems a bit crazed already, suffering from rock-star-bule syndrome and the lack of any substantive conversation over the past month. His hard drive on his computer also recently crashed, so he has no music to console his lonesome, bored, and intelligible English-deprived soul. The next week should be good for him!
After spending a few hours talking with Willow, a girl stationed here in Jogya, John and I retired to our room. Within ten minutes of lying down, the room started shaking. I’m proud to say that I survived my first earthquake unscathed! Nothing fell from the walls, but for half a minute, the window panes rattled and the building swayed, sending John and me out into the hallway away from the threat of falling ceilings and swan-shaped ceiling lights.
If the past twelve hours are any indication of the way my current holiday will go, it should certainly be an exciting and good one.

The Commoditization of Mr. Nick – Part Two

Wednesdays are traditionally a day off for Mr. Nick. Today, however, I was invited to MU, one of Madiun’s two local vocational universities. I spent two hours addressing crowds of roughly one hundred first-year college students, answering their questions about education reforms, cultural comparisons, the cost of university, sports, and religion. I surprised myself with my Indonesian, and was actually able to carry on some substantial parts of the Q&A in Bahasa. At least I understood what I was saying!
After the two hours were up, I was swarmed with requests for photographs. If I didn’t have the ego of a rock star already, Madiun certainly hasn’t deflated it at all. After the photo session, I promised to meet some of the students for coffee and tea to practice their English, and my Bahasa. We’ll see if that ever comes to fruition.
As I was walking out the door, my contact at the university pulled me into a side room, and gave me a box full of the local take on cake, and an envelope filled with the equivalent of fifteen dollars. Considering that the vice-principal whom I eat lunch with every day only makes one hundred dollars per month, fifteen dollars for two hours’ honest work is remarkably good. Actually, it’s ridiculously good.
I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with the money – I’ll either buy something for my students at school, or I’ll use it to reregister my motor bike, which expires tomorrow. In any case, I brought the cake over to Pak David’s for lunch, and consumed about two-thirds of it with a big glass of unfiltered coffee before falling into a late afternoon nap. As I was leaving Pak David’s house to return home, I got into a minor motorcycle accident with an imbecile of a high school girl who was turning right in the wrong lane. I scraped up my hands, and the bike is a bit tweaked, but I’m okay. For the most part, it was only my pride that was hurt. Just another day in Indonesia.

Bali

Bali is quite simply paradise. I imagine that whatever you’ve seen and read has not led you astray.
Sandwiched between two fifteen hour bus rides, I spent my four-day weekend surfing and attending Balinese traditional ceremonies. Hillary, a fellow Fulbrighter, has the good fortune to live in Denpasar, about fifteen minutes from the world famous Kuta Beach. I arrived bleary eyed and bedraggled on Friday morning, and spent the day dressed in a sarong and Balinese version of the do-rag, reciting Hindu incantations and dousing myself with holy water and rice (see photos).
Hillbo and I spent the afternoons on Kuta, Legian, and Seminyak beaches, where I rented a surfboard for three hours for the equivalent of two dollars. For an extra five dollars, I was given my first real lessons (sorry Caspary, Malibu doesn’t count).
The crowds weren’t what I expected them to be, which can be attributed to two factors: it being the beginning of the low season, and the spate of bombings that took place the same time last year. Hillbo and I spent some quality time (and money) at Seminyak’s nicer eating establishments, which included a swank on-the-beach lounge/resto/disco called KuDeTa – clever, no?
It was nice to get out of Madiun for the weekend, and to harken back to what it’s like to eat pasta and drink beer. But I actually did start to miss this place. It really has become a home of sorts.

Korupsi

Today, I was given an insider’s view into the means and machinations of Indonesian bureaucracy – and by nature of the beast, corruption. Pak David, the vice principal of the school, took me to the local police station to get me my driver’s license. To make a long story short, the equivalent of seventeen dollars and twenty-five minutes later, I had become an official, legal driver, having bypassed the official, legal Indonesian drivers’ test and the official, legal four-hour line. I entered the examination hall, and after looking over his shoulder, the administrator slipped an already completed test (with a passing score) from under his stack of papers, and handed it over for me to sign, and make official. When I asked Pak David about the matter, he gave me one of his loud, squeaky laughs in return. “It’s funny, yes? You no wait in line, they do test for you, so now you drive. Is funny, yes?”
Well, my brother Simon once gagged, “Have you heard the joke about dehydration? NO! That’s because there are no jokes about dehydration.” The same could be said for korupsi. For a government, society, and people that are trying to break free from poverty and the shackles that come with it, I don’t think corruption is a laughing matter at all. Apparently the locals don’t share my point of view.
Decades of strong bureaucratic centralism left Indonesian local-level officials unprepared and unable to conceive of governing in any democratic form. I continuously have to remind myself that Indonesia’s first “free and fair” elections were held only two years ago. Up until that point, collusion and nepotism had dictated who would run the government. A natural reaction for many of the local and regional leaders who found themselves in power was to follow the previous thirty-year Suharto example, the only model of effective leadership they really knew. Thus, the centralized corruption of the Suharto years from 1965-1998 rapidly turned to local corruption, as increased local revenues brought about through increased foreign direct investment went directly into local leaders’ pockets.
The national elections of 2004 demonstrate that post-Suharto Indonesia’s combination of optimistic reformism and cynical fatigue has led to an uncertain approach to governance. Under Sukarno, who led from independence in 1945 to Suharto’s coup-of-sorts twenty years later, the catch-word of the country was “revolution.” The following thirty-some years were dominated by promises of “development.” Under these two nation-wide umbrellas of political focus, common Indonesians began to develop a clear sense of national direction. With the economic crisis of 1997, and the four new presidents who have followed in eight years, that direction is now uncertain for most people here.
As Vickers writes, “The good intentions of genuine reformers have been drowned by a political culture in which access to power is synonymous with access to the economy” (For an excellent, relatively short introduction to contemporary Indonesia, try Vickers’ “A History of Modern Indonesia” published in 2005 by Cambridge University Press). I take this next passage from Vickers in order to illustrate exactly how destabilizing and ultimately harmful corruption has been, and can be, in Indonesia:
“The ultimate symbol of what was going wrong with [Suharto’s] New Order was its most extravagant scandal, which began late in 1995. News seeped out that the world’s largest gold deposit had been discovered in Busang, Kalimantan [Borneo]. The main foreign company involved, an obscure Canadian firm called Bre-X, ended up in a bidding war with major US companies in which more and more generous offers were made to members of the governing inner circle to see who could buy the most influence. One of the Suharto children was rumored to have been offered US$1 billion. With all the international agencies publishing accounts of Indonesia’s growing prosperity, investors felt assured of returns on their money. In true New Order style, there was of course no gold. The geologist who had signed off on the discovery mysteriously fell out of a helicopter, but the fraud was revealed late in 1996 through the actions of honest public servants and the investigations of the international media. The Suharto children… were not at all concerned that Bre-X and other companies had lost millions on the investment, or that Indonesia’s reputation was irreparably tarnished in the eyes of international investors. They had got their commissions. While some economists maintain that a level of corruption is a normal part of the operations of capitalism, the Bre-X scandal showed that the regime’s corruption was eating into the base of the economy” (my italics).
In addition to the century’s worst drought and the Asian economic crisis of 1997, Suharto’s regime was ultimately brought down my KKN – corruption, collusion and nepotism. If history teaches us anything, the people of this country struggling to develop a sense of national promise would be well-advised to start following a new path.

Photos

Weekend in the Kampung

I've been pushing it pretty hard since Friday night, this is the first real chance that I've had to sit down and think, let alone write. My friend Deanna - a Fulbrighter stationed in Surabaya, about three hours away by bus - came to town. We spent Friday night at another basketball game, where Madiun thrashed the opposing team. Deanna stayed in my house, which we were both expecting to generate massive amounts of controversy in the community; we were both forewarned that people of the opposite sex should not spend the night in the same house until marriage. Either the local elders didn't find out, or they just didn't care. The event went without issue.
Saturday, we drove my motor bike an hour West of Madiun to Lake Sarangan. The lake was less than we had hope for, having been nearly drained to compensate for the recent lack of rain. But we putt-putted farther up into the hills, where we hired a guide who toured us around the hills, valleys and terraced rice paddies for the day. It was some of the best beauty-to-accessbility hiking I've ever done. Hobbled ibus came running by with sacks of hay flung over their shoulders and farmers worked the land and fed us raw carrots (see photo) as we talked with them. At one of the waterfalls in the valley, I also met a group of students from my school (see photo), who were convinced that Deanna was my istri (wife). The thought of spending extended periods of time alone with a person of the opposite sex who is NOT your spouse is seemingly antithetical to local culture and custom.
Saturday evening, after a long and excellent day, we huffed it to Solo, one of the colonial centers of Central Java, where we spent the night in a Quality Hotel. Deanna left the next day, but I met up with the owner of KOMPIP, a local yayasan (NGO) committed to disaster relief and supporting marginalized peoples, like prostitutes and street children. I spent the day touring earthquake-affected kampung (villages) with Akbar and three of his staff. Working on behalf of the Los Angeles-based NGO Real Medicine, I spent my time evaluating how best to use Real Medicine's funds to support villagers who had been affected.
Priorities in post-disaster situations, once disease and deaths have been dealt with, go from providing housing, to treating post traumatic stress, to establishing new mechanisms of generating income. Since the government will most likely be providing shelter, Akbar and I decided to start a "community savings," or microfinance, program in a village called Biren in the district of Klaten. Assuming Real Medicine approves the plan, KOMPIP will establish a sub-center in Biren, where a director and two assistants will infuse money into local neighborhoods over the next six months. I saw several villages where similar plans had been implemented. Through uniquely designed saving mechanisms, whereby villagers contribute a set rate per month (normally the equivalent of ten cents), the money initially supplied (around $US250) multiplies nearly exponentially over a matter of years.
Akbar, the head of KOMPIP, returned from a conference on democracy and economic sustainability in Helsinki the day before I met with him (ie Saturday). His goal is to expand the "community savings" model so that it can be implemented by local governments. The idea is amazing, and very inspiring. If Real Medicine backs our plan, we can support over 1,000 villagers who were left with literally nothing after the May 24, 2006 earthquake.
It was a RAD weekend.

Photos

The internet is painfully slow here, and I don't know how many more photos I'll be able to post before I get to another major city, but here is a sampling of what I've been seeing. Madiun is on the cusp of modernity and development, and the contradictions that come with its position in the international pecking order are omnipresent and often painfully obvious.

A Modern Race

In my classes at school, of which there have been seven in two days, I introduce myself to the forty or so students per class, and then write “U.S.A.” on the whiteboard. I ask, “When you see this word, what is the first word that you think of?” The responses that I get have been, to varying degrees, entertaining, funny, and in some cases, provocative. The usual first response is “big” or “beautiful,” followed shortly by “White House,” “Hollywood country,” or “FBI.” After the rabblerousers have had their turn, the introspective girl with the glasses and long bangs will posit “cruel” or “modern and liberty.”
In the late nineteenth century, the Dutchman CLM Peders wrote, “I interpret the natives’ reluctance to attend school not as laziness, but as carelessness and thoughtlessness about their futures. The main reason for this is that they do not use their brains, because they have not been taught to do so.” Despite such colonial muttering, historians have shown that many native Indonesians actually valued their educations quite highly. According to Adrian Vickers, “Some were grateful, looking to the Dutch as examples of all that was modern.”
In Indonesia, modernity apparently still maintains positive and as yet unreached connotations. Where in the U.S. we’ve moved on to post-modernism, and then some, I find it fascinating that “Modernity” is still considered a holy grail of sorts.
After my introduction, I give the students an opportunity to ask me questions. Again, most are banal, ranging from “what is school in America like?” to “are you married?” Yesterday, though, a young man named Karisma asked a great question that jarred me a bit. “Are you proud of American culture?” Well, that’s a tough one, K-bone.
I am implicitly expected to embody stereotypical America, and I have embraced the role to a certain extent, as might be evident from my jingoist ranting in previous entries. But there are also times when a massive wave of depression washes over me when I think of what WE have done.
For instance, tonight’s regional high school basketball tournament at the local stadium, where Madiun was playing Surabaya, East Java’s capital city. I was amused and horrified to see that the tournament was sponsored by Surya, one of the country’s biggest cigarette manufacturers – apparently I haven’t yet become entirely accustomed to being bombarded by tobacco product placements, which are literally everywhere.
The tournament was testament to what could be called modernity; high school boys wearing bootleg Nike shoes and uniforms shooting freethrows to the unrelenting pulse of Jock Jams Volume Seven, only superficially oblivious to the halftime dancers – a troupe of local women with enticing bodies and scanty, skintight white outfits – shaking rhythmically out of unison. Remember please, this is a highly conservative Muslim community.
Only seventy years ago, over ninety percent of native Indonesians lived in the countryside, while over seventy-five percent of the Europeans here lived in the cities. The colonial rulers needed to be able to keep social groups apart, keep the locals from developing common interests, such as anti-imperialism. The main mechanism by which the Dutch achieved this was through institutionalizing the concepts of race. Today, as I’ve mentioned in previous entries, race – or what I have termed the Bule (white person) Effect – is still an omnipresent reality of everyday life, especially in Madiun, where Bule sightings are few and far between.
I’ve made friends with some local guys here, and we spend the evenings – Madiun essentially shuts down by 9PM – riding motorbikes from rumah makan (literally eating house) to mall to the city square. The guys own a mechanics shop in town, and were friendly with Mr. Richard Thompson, the Fulbrighter who was in Madiun last year. When I am not hailed as “BULE!” while riding my motorcycle – bought second hand off Richard – around the city, I am inevitably called “Richard.”
Friendship with the Indonesians here can be a touchy matter, though. After an unsuccessful attempt at trying to use my Mac laptop at the local Warnet (internet shop) today, I briefly exchanged numbers with one of the shop owners after he promised that he would call if they found a solution – highly unlikely. In any case, after returning from the basketball game, I found the following SMS (text message) waiting on my phone: “Good evening, do u have friend in here, if no friend, u can plan/come to my home, sorry about internet I cant help u. am had married, how about u? I want to be friend u.”
Although it may sound hyperbolic, I am starting to see myself as one more commodity in the race to develop, a product to be consumed and shown off like a pair of Nikes. As Vickers wrote, “The tragedy of Indonesian history is its continued pattern of exploitation, lives lost and opportunities squandered.”
Earlier in the evening, my neighbor brought me a bowl full of picture-perfect ripe mangoes. After one of my new friends dropped me off from the game, I dove into the yellowness, sucking every rind dry, consuming it like a pound of flesh.

Hari Pertama

I’m on the internet at a WarNET (warung internet, internet shop) about two hundred yards from my house. The service is abyssmally slow, costs 40 cents per hour, and I have to deal with Rod Stewart circa 1981 blaring overhead. The shift key also has the tendency to jammmmm for extended periods of time.
This past weekend was the 53rd anniversary of my school (SMA Negeri Dua, SMA2), complete with student-run bazaar, fun games, and the new international teacher embarassing himself on stage, again.
I had my arm twisted into performing in front of the crowd of several hundred, and lacking any better ideas, I was cajoled into singing the school’s alma mater, in Indonesian. Put on the spot, I abandoned the traditional lyrics, and in Indonesian, sang something like “SMA Negeri Dua, Saya guru bule gila” – which translates roughly as “I’m the crazy whiteboy teacher.” Good work, Mr. Nick.
Later in the day, the school’s rebel faction, the Caution Skaters and Breakers clique, performed in the warehouse across from the school, and then in front of the crowd. Most of these kids, dressed in low-rise jeans, trucker hats and skater shoes, could have been pulled out of any American suburb.
I taught my first few classes today. The students’ English isn’t bad, but it’s painfully obvious that they’ve been learning from books for five years, and have minimal experience actually holding a conversation with anyone. My goal is to get the kids out of their shells - which they are perfectly comfortable doing in Indonesian, especially when whispering about me behind my back – and to introduce a measure of analytical reasoning, which seems to be devoid from most classes here. I am also co-coaching the debate team, made-up of several older students who have already studied abroad in the U.S. I’m also slated to teach English to the English teachers, and to coach the basketball team.
As I was leaving school today, one of the ibus (older women) grabbed my arm and in Indonesian said, “I hear you’re Jewish. Be careful. It’s best if you don’t tell your students, because there are some fanatics in your classes.” Well, I’ve decided that I’ll hold back for the first few months, but my job here is to serve as a cultural ambassador and to break-down cultural and social stereotypes. Even the teachers here have a very hard time understanding the difference between Jews, Christians, and Israel. I feel that at some point, it will be my obligation to clear things up – with caution, of course.
Selamat malam.

The Kid's New Vektor

I have found myself the prototypical Indonesian village. If I were a director trying to find a more perfect Javanese backdrop for my new movie (I'm thinking "When the Chickens Revolted: Attack of the Bird Flu, Part Deux"), I would be hard pressed to do so.
My house is a two-storey affair with two bedrooms, a cement-floored kitchen and a living room on the bottom floor. I have a paved-over front yard with an enormous mango tree sprouting in one corner. I can pick fresh mangoes from the second-storey balcony cum rooftop, where I do yoga and read in the sun, and where there are two more bedrooms. From the roof, I have a picturesque view of the setting sun over rice and sugar cane fields.
Almost every hour of the day, and night, is filled with the chanting of the muezzins from the half dozen mosques that surround my house. The electronic jangle of the Good Humor ice cream man, who pedals around the neighborhood every hour on the hour, and the rhythmic thumping of the omnipresent motorbikes round off my auditory backdrop.
My next door neighbors – the sister-in-law and her husband of Pak David, the owner of my house and principal at my school – own a sundries shop where I buy candy bars, shampoo, and eggs. Their year-old daughter has Down Syndrome, and slaps herself in the face every time I say hello.
Rich, the Fulbrighter who lived here last year, sold me his furniture, DVD player, stove, and mattress. I bought a fan, TV, incandescent reading lamp, and mosquito electrocuter today. I’m putting up maps and photos on the walls, and am adjusting to the naked fluorescent bulbs that adorn the house.
Bathing, or mandi, consists of filling a 20-gallon cement tub with water, from which I splash myself repeatedly until saturated. The toilet is non-squat (i.e. Western) but does not have a flush mechanism. I find myself pouring water into it from staggering heights in order to activate the reverse pressure release, whatever that means. There is also no toilet paper. I still haven’t figured out how to wash myself without soaking all my clothes.
It’s already starting to feel like home.

Home Sweet Home

I was invited to a twelve year-old boy's penis cutting ceremony this morning. VERY exciting stuff.
Needless to say, I'm in madiun. The city (more like a village) is small, sunny, clean, and friendly. My house is between a mosque and a rice paddy. The mullah's call to prayers and the roosters crowing at 5AM are sure to keep me spiritually and pandemically secure.
I'm on the internet at SMAN 2 (my school) right now - they have class on saturdays, poor kids! It's the school's 53rd anniversary here today (this country loves to celebrate dates), and they're having FUN GAMES in the courtyard. Upon arriving, I had to address the whole school and community, about 900 people. I tried to make a speech in Indonesian, but everyone just started laughing at me, so I switched to english, and everybody still laughed at me. This is going to be awesome!
There are a few exchange students who speak top-notch English (former American Field Service exchange students to Oklahoma, Texas, and Pittsburgh) and everyone is trying their best to make me feel comfortable/like royalty. They even gave me the anchor spot in tug-of-war guru-guru versus murid-murid (teachers vs. students), although I think the honor was due more to my ponderous size rather than any sort of cultural respect.
I'm going shopping for kit for my house this afternoon, and I'll post some photos as soon as I have 'em.