My name is Daniela Fubini and this is my personal blog.
I grew up in Italy in a Jewish family very active in the Jewish life and culture. After living in New York for a few years in the early 2000′, I made my alyiah to Israel in December 2007. I live in Tel Aviv and I am a proud Israeli who can criticize the country like a child criticizes his parents: out of love and need of rebellion.
Not long ago I realized that my natural attitude at writing about what happens around me has changed, and not for the best, since FB come into my life. Too much information, mostly unnecessary and redundant; too much noise.
This blog is my personal way of making space for interesting, possibly even useful thoughts in the Facebook era. It is my writing outlet in my mother tongue, Italian, with chapters from my previous lives (a few), and small stories about my present.
NOTE – No racism, no anti-something, no shouted comments will be allowed on this blog. This is not a democracy: it’s my personal blog.
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Diario da una città di mare 
Hi Daniela – I was looking at Alessandra’s blog and see that you are in Israel. It’s me- Karen, your old friend from NY from the Upper West Side. I live in Jerusalem. It would be great to see you.
XO, Karen
From the few lines in English, I feel that I miss an original and sensitive piece of litterature and information about Israel by not knowing Italian.
cara Daniela, non mi conosci, ma non posso fare a meno di scriverti, dopo aver letto il tuo articolo su Moked. Sono un discendente di marrani sefarditi napoletani e ho scritto un libro di racconti sulla identità ebraica della maggior parte degli abitanti del comune in cui vivo. Interessandomi alle vicende della diaspora dei nostri comuni antenati, ho potuto capire che la Shoah è stato l’atroce punto di arrivo di persecuzioni feroci attuate dalla Chiesa e dai re e principi cattolici. A scanso di equivoci, auguro una lunga e pacifica vita al popolo Abramo, Isacco e Giacobbe; perchè oggigiorno chi apre bocca per criticare la politica del governo israeliano è tacciato di antisemitismo e il suo pensiero viene cestinato. Ma veniamo a noi. Ti scrivo perché nella maggioranza degli articoli sulla guerra in corso, pubblicati su Moked, vedo che gli autori operano una sorte di rimozione (sì, proprio quella freudiana) delle cause della guerra e delle vittime innocenti della parte avversa, ricordando solo i propri morti e i missili di Hamas. Ora sarebbe lungo illustrarti il mio pensiero e i miei sentimenti (molto simili, questi ultimi, a quelli di quel funzionario dell’Onu che ha pianto in diretta, sopraffatto dal dolore per la morte violenta di piccole vittime innocenti), ti dico solo che leggendo il tuo articolo mi sono commosso: è pieno di una semplice saggezza profetica, che tradotta in politica potrebbe salvare il popolo di Israele e quello di Palestina dall’odio, dall’inimicizia e dalla violenza e farli convivere in pace. Tu che adesso vivi là datti da fare, insieme agli altri, e mi risulta che ce ne siano (Oz, Jehoshua ecc,) per portare avanti questa tua “visione”. Sono ateo convinto, tuttavia ti dico ” che il tuo Dio ti benedica”. Shalom. Rosso
Good morning. I would like to summarize some points with regard to antisemitism:
1) Unfortunately enough, the very powers preaching for tolerance (as the Catholic Church, for instance) are the same that during WWII supported fascist and nazi movements across of Europe, among which the bloody-bestial Ustashe dictatorship in Croatia. I hope one day I can visit the Jasenovac extermination camp, if else to reestablish a piece of silenced truth. Anyway, it is a fact that a lot of the money stolen to the Jews (at the time, Jewish properties were “Aryanized”, i.e. stolen by the Nazi regime) also ended up in the Vatican Bank.
2) There’s a risk on the implication/simplification that the Shoah existed because Oswiecim-Auschwitz existed. That’s very dangerous: the Holocaust existed because there was an organization and ideology that supported it. Oswiecim was the epiphenomenon, but the horrors of extermination existed in the whole Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, where antisemitism still today is very strong. I mean, there’s not Auschwitz alone to keep in mind, though Auschwitz was the slaughterhouse of hugest proportions.
3) Now the Holocaust is not concentrated anymore in very small areas, but widespread, and also the organizations that perpetrate it aren’t identifiable any more with the charcater of a dictator: very often they are diffused and with a flat organizational pattern that make them more resilient.
4) I strongly hope that Israel is not turned into a confessional country. This would be in my opinion a huge mistake, especially in the light of what’s happening in neghboring countries. As an atheist, I would feel this as a defeat of the idea of tolerance that always permeated Israel, since its inception.
Hear you soon
Marco – Treviso, Italy
Israel and Palestine: a case story
Very often, if not always, big interests need a mask to show to the public.
After WWII, a mask was needed to cover one fact: that many so called “neutral” governments had really been edges to the Nazi regime, on the financial, logistical or economical side.
Especially, many of them had sided with the widespread choice to annihilate Jews wherever they were.
Hence, once the war was over and the evidence of genocide went public, the idea of creating a Jewish State was formalized. This way, on the one hand the winning superpowers could get rid of a “problem”, given the inbred anti-Semitism in many of them (including UK monarchs), and on the other the Zionist movement could fulfill the dream of having a land.
In this context, anyway, my attention is focusing on the ideological basis for this operation: the fact that the Bible had put Israel on the Mediterranean shores, and that the people of Israel had the right, even the duty to reclaim that land.
Now, ideology, of course, is prone to the historical context leading certain choices. In the case of the creation of the State of Israel, the decision was basically taken by the United States and UK, especially in the light of the British mandate and various attempts to find a common ground for the creation of an Arab-Jewish confederation that proved impracticable.
Zionist ideology and related movements were functional in coordinating and coagulating the efforts towards that end.
The point is, that in the ideological approach, the cause/effect relationship seems reversed: it is not history and contextual interests that use ideology, but ideology is thought to be the cause for a choice, an event, an outcome.
This is a general pattern, not limited of course to Zionism.
Being an atheist also under this standpoint, I could mention a wonderful example by Hillary Putnam: a fly draws Mr Churchill’s face on the beach, but actually the fly doesn’t know it’s drawing a face, indeed it doesn’t know it’s drawing, it doesn’t even know what drawing is, and maybe doesn’t even “know” in the meaning or meanings a human being “knows”: it’s just flying unaware, so Churchill’s face arises because our cognitive act is basically intentional and experience-driven.
So the creation of the Israeli State was clearly intentional, and ideology was the means to get this result.
On the other hand, by prying into the Bible itself, one could find infinite hints to justify the most disparate claims. One for all: if it’s true we all descend from Adam and Eve (and, in a self-referential attitude, it’s surely true, because we believe it is), why not claim the Garden of Eden, i.e. Irak, to be our homeland?
Israelis (Jewish and non-Jewish) have the right to live a peaceful life, not one marred by heighboring hatred and an A-bomb under their ass to face the worst-case scenario.
So, giving a (credible) land to Palestinian is a necessary, though maybe not sufficient, step towards a peaceful or, at least, less warlike future in the area.
History, in the end, pays a tribute to the (often minimalist) interests drive behind historical events. Ideology masks this for a while.
Hear you soon
Marco – Treviso, Italy
A Shintoist State
From my outside (and, definitely, quite marginal) post I followed the increasing debate in Israel about a proposal by Mr Netanyahu to turn, by Constitutional Amendment, Israel into a “Jewish State”.
Shunning ideological contrasts over the opportunity to enforce such a bill, in practical terms, what would be likely to change?
First of all, this implies the Jewish Religion becomes the official religion of the country.
And this official nature, in turn, means that the political role of the religious structures get intertwined with the constitutional foundations of the country.
It is clear that in Israel, given its past history, the Jewish religion is the most practiced one. But we mustn’t forget that one question is to be Jewish, and another one to be Israeli.
Citizenship and religious affiliation are different notions, whereof we have sheer evidence in the fact that a substantial 20% of the population is Arab-Islamic.
Clearly, a confessional state is a giant leap forward by comparison to the laic foundations of most modern countries and to the separation between religion and state.
This reasoning, however, is quite complicated in Israel because, even without the need to introduce a specific bill declaring Israel to be “Jewish”, there are provisions on the very law on immigration, and more specifically the Law of Return 5710-1950, as modified in 1970, granting the right to settle to Israel not only to Jewish people, but also to those having Jewish ancestors. A right to settle that leads to the immediate right to claim for Israeli citizenship.
Clearly, this law is confessional. It introduces a element favoring immigration of Jewish people and not, for instance, of an Italian atheist as I am.
But we must also be aware that Israel was born out of the Holocaust, and the Law of Return was a means to give a safe shelter to all Jewish people in the world.
The picture complicates, and here is another practical fact, quite much if we consider the Palestinian population born and living inside the Israeli borders. There’s a section of the law of immigration that deals with these people, actually those who were residents after the proclamation of the state of Israel and the Arab-Israeli war. Apparently, in this case the jus soli does not apply, because this way of acquiring citizenship is by now marginal, and absorbed into the naturalization process.
The “standard” (by an outsider like me) way would be to acquire citizenship via a naturalization process, which requires at least a three-year stay in Israel and anyway subject to a valuation by the Ministry of the interior.
Under this aspect, if we want, Israel is much more “open” than other countries: by comparison, a naturalization to Italy requires a 10yrs stay.
By the way, this problem does not affect most Arab countries: there, there’s no democratic debate, especially in the Gulf Sheikdoms, and the Shaaria is a State Law. No or little religious freedom is guaranteed.
All this said, what appears to a non-Jewish, maybe one day Israeli citizen is the political move behind the Basic Law. In my opinion (but really, a personal one), its introduction won’t change substantially the situation, but including this “reform” into the Constitution would left open a very dangerous gate to the mixing between religion and state, by also postulating that Israel’s main religion would always be “Jewish”. What if, one day, we would discover we were all Shintoists? Simple, declare Israel…a Shintoist State. Sayonara.
Tiveron, Marco – Treviso, Italy