The Rest of the Week

On Tuesday morning I went to meet with Benny Morris to discuss my paper topic and my thesis. He was really helpful, although now it looks like I'm going to need to go to the archives in Jerusalem and sift through lots of cabinet meeting minutes from September-October 1948. I was a little nervous that my Hebrew wouldn't be good enough, but he asked me to translate parts of Plan D into English for the class.

So yesterday, Thursday, I sat down with Yoni from my class to translate. Plan D is often pointed to by anti-Israel historians as Israel's plot to expel the Palestinians during the war, but after reading it myself, it seems pretty clear that this is a distortion of the facts and doesn't take into account the context in which it was drafted or the fact that most of the plan was never even implemented. It was pretty cool sitting down with original documents from that period and translating them. It took a few hours but we were able to get through the document and come up with a working translation. That felt pretty good.

After we were done translating, I headed back to Dimona to help set up a Hanukkah party at one of the middle schools. I was asked to say the "blessings" (it wasn't Hanukkah yet) and light the Hanukkiyah. After some announcements, a group of girls sang songs and retold the story of Hanukkah. Then I ran a booth where the kids tried to knock over stacks of cans. Which really meant that I just stood there constantly setting up the stacks. But one of the kids decided that it would be fun to stack them with me, so that made things easier. We then had some sufganiyot and headed home.

Today was my turn to help clean up the village. It didn't take too long and Shoko finally realized that it was more fun to wander around than try to "help" with the cleaning.