I was happy that the court decided to reject Yair Netanyahu's appeal in the trial against Avi Alkalai, and ordered the son to pay NIS 250,000 in compensation and another NIS 100,000 in cumulative legal costs in endless rounds of appeals for sharing lies on his Twitter, the dirtiest place in Israel.
First of all, I was happy because the prosecutor, the same Avi Alkalai whom you doubtless know, has been my closest friend since we first met in the 9th grade, and soon, after 46 years of friendship, we will also realize our relationship and start a business together.
You will hear more about it.
In the meantime, we arranged a meal at Yair's expense, after he petitions the Supreme Court and loses there as well, and will simply have to pay for his hobby of spreading slander without accepting responsibility for the results.
But what makes me happy is not only the money that my friend Abi will receive, after years of a nightmare as the editor-in-chief of "Walla!"
During the reign of the Netanyahu family.
I am also disappointed by the feeling that the court finally emphasized the enormous damage that can be caused to a person even when someone "just" shared an offensive statement towards him, and stated that every word written today in the public arena - has meaning.
The claims "I wasn't thinking" or "I just clicked 'share'" cannot stand up to a person, certainly a public figure, and I wish that these 350 thousand shekels would be a signpost for all those taking shelter in the shadow of the share button.
There is no connection between the effort required today to spread a lie and the damage it may cause, and only the court with large compensation rulings will be able to stop the phenomenon.
It was interesting to see how Bibi Jr.'s conduct and the conduct of his legal representation complicated him, until he was required to pay these damages.
The beginning of the matter in a post shared by Yair, which stated that Avi Alkalai is a graduate of the slandered Wexner Foundation.
If only he had checked, he would have seen that there is indeed Avi Alkalai among the graduates of the foundation, but it is a different person with the same name.
If he had apologized quickly at this stage, this amount would have accumulated to this day in his account with the rest of the money that young Netanyahu has.
But no, Yair chose the path of unfounded arguments such as "I didn't receive the letter", "I currently have no money", "The dog ate my Twitter".
And now Mr. Netanyahu Jr. continues to try to hang in court, with another appeal, instead of standing like the son of a prime minister and saying - sorry, I was in a hurry, I hurt you in vain, take compensation, buy you something nice to wear.
I guess Yair is about to return to the house in Balfour, from where he spreads his hateful tweets.
Too bad for him.
It was good for him to disconnect a little from the digital world and move to real action, in the physical world, to connect with the compassionate place in his heart, there must be one.
Until then, be careful of what he publishes, do not share, lest you too find yourself in court sharing your bank account with strangers.
Sand
I don't know how people traveled in the world before the smartphone.
Here I am in the Netherlands.
I don't understand anything from what is written.
Not on signs, not on menus, not in the supermarket, not in the museum.
detached.
From previous visits, years ago, I remember a feeling of dealing with life here, picking up a crumb here, a shard there, trying to understand what the food on the menu is based on intuition and hope, and in the end something completely different comes, and you go eat it now.
And here these days, the phone understands everything.
He has an application called "Lens", lenses will answer, and I can point the camera at any text in any language, and the translation immediately appears in Hebrew.
Street signs are understandable to me.
This is not an artificial combination of letters, it is a message that there is no entrance to the street, except for bicycles.
Likely.
At the restaurant I order what I feel like, and not what I guessed would be a salad and it turned out to be squid baked in cheese.
another world.
A person can feel in his city, his country, his place, anywhere in the world.
The searches for an English-speaking person that characterized my previous travels, disappeared.
Thus the street conversations about how to get to the museum, the train station, the hotel also disappeared.
A map application takes me everywhere, and I walk through a foreign volume as if I were among its founders.
So is driving.
Instead of driving with a map on the lap of the passenger next to me, the phone gives me directions in Hebrew to that town that everyone recommends seeing.
And if I was wrong, a new route.
What a release from so many tensions, complications, road atlases.
And the payments - no business accepts cash.
No change, no unknown bills, put the phone on the terminal, and let's go to the next expense.
Spending hard earned money has never been so easy.
and hail a taxi?
The Uber app brings in a minute a nice person to take me to my destination.
What a wonderful world, how different Marco Polo's travels would have been had he had a telephone.
And only my little daughter complains: "Dad, you're on the phone all the time!", and I think to myself - I have to develop an app so that the children are also on the phone.
And maybe we'll fly in the app, at ease, and not feel anything at all except for the slight, constant terror that the phone's battery will run out and the trip will go.
material
In the book store in Tel Aviv, my eyes came across a particularly fat book, on the cover of which was a message - "Literary miracle". I took it to me, Yitzhak Livni, "The Material of Life". Although I am not a person who reads books, I never reach the end of them, but I knew that many days lay ahead of me and a thick book May be a friend. The hand took and the eye had already begun to read. I was pumped.
In a matter of seconds I was in the writer's childhood, which takes place in Tel Aviv in the 1980s, the days before the state.
Not a few pages have passed and here I am deep in the details of his small, tiny life, embroidered like the giant tapestries that my mother used to embroider with tiny stitches until they were not seen at all.
Yitzhak Livni, whom I did not know personally, even though he was, among other things, a GLA commander before I got there, demonstrates an amazing display of memory for the smallest things, every hole of a button, every texture of a surface, every color, taste, smell of the objects that made up his distant childhood.
I don't remember my childhood that much.
Here is a picture, there is a feeling.
The details spread to me and turned into a paste.
Only once, during a vipassana meditation course I once did, suddenly after nine days of sitting with my eyes closed, for a moment my childhood returned to my mind, and I could literally smell my childhood home, feel the coolness at noon on a summer day when mother would close the blinds and wet the floor, the primitive version to the air conditioner
I haven't had an experience like this since, and it's frustrating because it's clear that all the information is in the vertices, locked and inaccessible.
And here comes my son, and he tells me about the capillaries of his childhood, and from his childhood my childhood emerges, also because there are many shared memories, the food on the family table, the words spoken, the customs, and also because something in his ability to remember his past with such resolution awakens something in my attention disorder-stricken brain And he releases memories that have been locked away for many years.
And I read about how my son raised two turtles and watched all their ways of life, I remember that I myself had a herd of turtles that housed 13 turtles on the balcony, and how many hours and days I spent watching them stretch their necks forward, open their little mouths and tear a triangular piece from the cucumber I brought them from the neighborhood jade bin.
Who knew this memory was still there at all.
"The Material of Life" is a book about the life of a complete stranger, which somehow connects me to my own life and wakes me up missing.
This is what they talk about when they call the book a "literary miracle."
avrigilad@gmail.com
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