A (5:19)
So obviously what the city needs, so obviously more lawyers and more drinking and more places to be. Now as for me, my name is Noah Efron and I do not mean to boast, but a site that collects and correlates such information just informed me that people who entered into Google the search terms Noah Ephron also searched for and these are the top six entries on the list. Noah Ephron Wikipedia, which makes sense. Noah Efron Age about which okay, then top 10 most intelligent races in the world, then famous smart Jews, then Jewish Intelligence Agency, then highest IQ groups. And please believe me when I say that I am not bragging. God knows my parents brought me up better than that. But I have apparently and unwittingly developed a very particular sort of skeevy public profile with weird eugenicist and maybe even slightly Nazi ish undertones. And I think you can just imagine my pride at all that I have accomplished in the one life that I have been given on this planet. Today we got two topics so profound and so weighty that you may wonder if you haven't accidentally tuned into one of those shows you listen to about continental philosophy. Like maybe the Pod Saves Phenomenology podcast, or Good Hang with Husserl and Heidegger, or the John Rawls Experience. But first we got this matter that we are following with alert, interest and great concern as part of an occasional series that we like to call the Promise. Podcast offers a salute to an acutely astute kid in Beirut who set out to recruit IDF brutes and galoots to transmute her school into rubble, a prank for which she got into trouble. Colonel Avichai Adra E is the head of the Arabic Language Media division of the IDF Spokespersons Unit. His YouTube channel has 249,000 followers, his Instagram account has 454,000 followers, his Twitter account has 872,900 followers, and his Facebook page has over 3,600,000 followers. Lots of these followers, most, they say as they got analytics, are young people from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the uae, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other places where Arabic is spoken. Which makes sense given that Colonel Avichai Adrai posts in Arabic. Some of these followers from around the Middle east come in order to hate Colonel Avichai Adrai and to troll him. Some probably come to learn to know better their enemies, to better vanquish them when the day comes. But if you read the comments, you find that some are there out of curiosity, and some are there because, like one Faisal Zaruni, they got a certain admiration for Israel for some reason. Faisal Zaruni, posting under a video from a couple of days ago of IDF soldiers UN booby trapping a pit stockpiled with Hezbollah guns and bombs, wrote, quote, may God give you a thousand healths. This is the right work for you to be doing. End quote. On his YouTube page, in a pinned post at the top, Colonel Avichai Adrai writes all the labels you give me won't change the reality. So to those gloating, you can call me whatever you like. I am avichayadraee, and I will be watching you closely, israelianproud, whether you like it or not. End quote. All of which makes it maybe less surprising than you might think. Than I thought. Anyway, that Colonel Avichai Adrai got this week an Instagram DM from a 12 year old schoolgirl in Beirut written in arabizi. Arabizi, being the hip young people Arabic dialect you see a lot on social media. Arabic words transliterated into Latin letters using numbers and symbols to fill in the gaps for Arabic sounds that are otherwise hard to represent in Latin letters or anyway in ASCII codes such that, for instance, the Arabic word khaleesna, meaning we're done, is spelled out in Arabizi as 5 a l e s n a 5 in Arabizi, standing in for the letter KHA, a uvular fricative that sounds like a chet in Hebrew. In a similar way, the Arabic word foo ua, meaning a bubble, is spelled in Arabizi as F2A 3A, the 2 standing for the letter Hamza and the 3 standing for the letter Ayn. But Arabizi is not just a way of doing Latinate transliteration. It is a method of transliteration with a sort of vibe. Like I said, it is young, it is hip, and it is. Anyway, the message that Colonel Avichai Adrai got through Instagram in Arabizi starts out with laek yache yahe, spelled Y A5E Like I said, which means something like hey man, or maybe hey my brother or yo, dude. And it goes on something like this quote, hey, my brother, I want to give you some very important information. In the Shuafat at National College School, there are Hezbollah weapons. There is a rocket launcher. Rockets are set up. That's the deal. There are shelters under the ground and in them are weapons. I wanted to give you this information. I am not involved, okay? End quote. Now, a little background might be helpful. The Shuafat National College school was started 140 years ago in 1886 in the Shuafat neighborhood in Beirut by a Protestant Lebanese teacher named Tanios Saad and an Irish Protestant missionary named Louisa Proctor. They set up their school in an old abandoned silk factory in Tchuafat near the compound where the Saad family lived, which compound was in time incorporated into the campus. The school was at first the school for girls. Among its main purposes was giving to girls rigorous education at a time and place when Few girls were taught even just to read. The Schuhat school earned for itself a reputation for excellence and a reputation for a certain cosmopolitanism. Its very best graduates would continue on to Oxford or to Yale, and it prided itself on giving its students a strong foundation in European languages, English and French. Above all, the great Lebanese novelist Emily Daoud Nasrallah was a graduate of the Shuafat National College School. She would eventually win the Goethe medal. There were lots more like her also who went forth into the world and did great things. The school prides itself on being non denominational and on being practical and on being flat out excellent, making their students serious citizens of the world. A picture at the school's website shows a big wall mural saying in English, quote, when you walk into this classroom, you are wonderful, strong, important, extraordinary, kind, resilient. And then there are many other such adjectives, but they are blocked from view in the picture by a big wreath of green and white balloons. So it was maybe in a way in the self empowered spirit of the Shuafat National College school that the 12 year old girl who wrote to Colonel Avichai Adrai acted, though it was in a very different way, not at all what the school administrators and teachers wanted and expected from their students. And when word got out, the school sent a harsh letter to all the parents instructing them to instruct their kids under no circumstance to contact the IDF with an implied request that the IDF bomb their school. They wrote, quote, any student who will be found to have been involved in defaming the school through any action or statement that abrogates the law or school regulation, including on social media, will be held legally responsible and put on trial in addition to whatever disciplinary actions the school may take. A Lebanese newspaper reporting on the event called it, quote, a childish action, the aim of which was to avoid an exam which was taken in earnest by the enemy, which added the school to its bank of targets and may attack it on the grounds that it is a weapons depot. End quote. It was soon after the paper got wind of the message sent to Colonel Avichai Adrai that another student, a friend of the girl who wrote the message, told her teachers who it was who did the thing everyone was talking about. And the question of what ought to be done with the girl was discussed in closed rooms, of course, but it was discussed also very much on social media. And it was around this time that Colonel Adrai tweeted a long post in Arabic meditating on the affair, suggesting that there is a lot to be learned from it. First, that there are people in Lebanon, kids and also adults, who see Israel not as an aggressor, but as a solution to the problems they face. In this case, as the press was now reporting, the problem being a test that the girl had apparently failed to study for. Colonel Avichai Adrai wrote further that the affair showed, and let's face it, that everyone in Lebanon knows that Hezbollah is perfectly capable of using a school to stow its missiles. It says something that the girl's prank was so easy for everyone to take to be true. Both of these first points, that lots of people in Lebanon see that Israel is on their side and that everyone in Lebanon sees that Hezbollah really isn't on their side. These were mostly tendentious points, points made to score points. But after making them, Colonel Avichai Adrai addressed directly the administrators of the Shuafat National College school, writing, quote, do not go after the kid just to punish her. Base your discussions with the student on empathy, not punishment. Teach your students always to speak the truth. End quote. After that, Colonel Avi Khayad Ra' I addressed the young people directly, writing, and to the youth and children I say, yes, speak the truth and be bold in raising it, but report to your parents and the relevant authorities any danger or anything else that worries you. End quote. And why I tell you all of this is not to try with Colonel Avichai Adrai to score points saying, look, see, even young school kids in Lebanon know the terrible things that Hezbollah is doing to their country. This could be true, but I would guess one could just as well conclude from this, won't you please bomb my school message that in Beirut, even very young school kids know the terrible destruction that Israel is capable of bringing to their country and is in fact bringing. What I get from this story is something altogether different. And it is that alongside all the harsh, we will bomb you back to the stone age of our wars and the ideological and rigid black and white rhetoric of clashes of civilization and such of our recent wars. There is always, always a quiet, powerful register of human beings just being human beings. Whatever else this thing was, a 12 year old girl dming the IDF asking them to bomb her school so she can get out of a test that is as funny a joke or a prank or whatever it is as I think that I have ever heard. Though it is also obviously reckless and harebrained in a way that kids of a certain age often are, but still it is so funny. And you hear it and you think, that kid, keep an eye on her because she's gonna be doing something, she's gonna be going somewhere, she is gonna be someone. And I hope it is into politics that she goes, because I predict will be someone you can negotiate peace with. Colonel Avichai Adrai too, writing to the principal of the Shuafat National College School to say, hey, go easy on the kid. For all that he's doing his job and just scoring points. And for all that, there is obviously some condescension there too. There is also something human to that too. Kids are kids. Sometimes they want enemy armies to blow up their school, you know, because kids will be kids. Just after we record today, there is a big all day peace conference. It's called the People's Peace Summit over in the Expo, the Tel Aviv exposition grounds across from Hararchon Park. And the place is big, it is cavernous, it holds literally tens of thousands of people for big gatherings. I was at a conference there that had 15,000 people just a couple of months ago. And so I did not bother to rush to get my ticket for the thing, because how many people are gonna come to spend a day talking about peace? These when peace seems so far and so foreign and so abstract and so implausible. But when I finally got around to ordering my ticket last week after I came back from the States, the People's Peace Summit was all sold out and I will have to watch the thing livestreamed in my home instead of being there. Which is okay, though I am disappointed. But it hit me that selling out a peace conference more than a week in advance these days, when it has tens of thousands of places selling it out, there is something good there. And maybe one reason why so many people think, yeah, now is still a time to talk about peace is because we know that it is true now. Because it is always true that on both sides of every border there are people who get it. There are people who see what's wonderful, strong, important, extraordinary, kind, resilient and whatever other adjectives are blocked by those balloons. That it is all these things. And also that it is just funny, just humanly funny. The idea of a kid tap, tap, tapping an Arabizi to the IDF to ask them if they wouldn't mind putting her school out of business for a bit ahead of test day. And there are people on both sides of the border who get that. There are people on both sides of the fence who are brilliant and wry and waggish and mischievous and reckless and harebrained and funny. Which is to say that there are people on both sides of the fence who are human and that therein lies all the reason you will ever need for hope that the time will come when we will, all of us see the humanity in each other, which is how living together when it comes to pass, will come to pass. Today, two discussions. Our first discussion beg your pardon as President Yitzhak Boci Herzog finally responds to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's November letter asking the President to do him a solid and pardon him for the crimes he did not commit and in any case will not admit which request for a pardon American President Donald Trump has repeated and amplified, calling President Herzog disgraceful, weak and pathetic and full of crap when it comes to the fake indictments of his high iq. Prime Minister, President Herzog's response was no can do. But I will host the prosecutors and the defendant to try to massage everyone towards a plea bargain, a split the baby decision that seems to have pleased no one. And we will try to figure out whether or not there was wisdom to the President's middle of the road. Answer, non answer. And our second discussion, this feeling is called hope, which is what opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yair Lapid said at the press conference he held this week together with former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, wherein the two men announced the formation of a new union of their two parties under Bennett's leadership, aiming to unseat Benjamin Netanyahu in the elections that will take place than six months from right now is hope. The thing that we are feeling, we will wonder and for our most unreasonably generous Patreon supporters in our extra special special extra discussion, the link to which you can find in our show notes on your podcast app or at patreon.com promisepodcast on the world Wide Web. We will talk about what we expect, what we hope for and what we worry about from the upcoming elections. Now that the Bennett Lapid announcement, exactly six months to the day before the last possible day the election's gonna be scheduled, pretty much the opening bell to the campaign season. I know that I for one am a very tightly wound ball of anxieties, fears and hopes ahead of this campaign season, which I worry is going to be kind of ugly. I will turn to Linda as so often for insight and for psychotherapy. But before we get to any of that, please listen to this. Kumos. That song is La Chazor La Chigra by Nunu with words written by First Sergeant Noam Bitan of blessed memory, who was killed at 20 in southern Gaza almost two years ago. This song is part of a Gali Sahal IDF Radio project called I Hear your Voices. New songs by some of our best musicians, based on texts written by folks who have lately fallen. We will listen to songs from the I Hear your Voices project over the course of the show. And now it is time for our first discussion. So, Linda, it took President Herzog five months to reply to the Prime Minister's letter asking for a pardon. What did he come up with after all that time?