HER STORY #80 - Shiri
Study
I was born in Israel. I live in Israel.
My name is Shiri. I’m 49 years old. For almost a decade I lived in Europe.
My occupation covers animation, technology, games, and art – a mixture of all these things.
I have studied for many years, and many things, including design and Technology. I have also studied technological subjects, especially within the field of 3D animation, game designs, and I have also drawn for many years, covering classical art to comics.
Within the last couple of years, I’ve studied character animation. I study online in a school located in California. The studies mostly cover animations that are relevant for US cinema, such as Disney, Pixar, and those kinds of animation-styles Or AAA Gaming.
There was also a period where I taught game development at Shenkar [Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, located in Israel]. Afterwards I was part of the game lab at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] for a couple of months, and then I mostly worked in hi-tech companies, until I left everything to start studying animation.
That’s more or less it.
Engineering/Art
I’m from a family of engineers – with four generations of engineers, so in a way I come from a strong technological family.
But I’m an artist above everything.
I study animation nowadays on a very high level, and I guess I’ll stay within this field from now on.
Home / I Almost Forgot Where I Came From
I was born in Ramat Gan but most of my childhood I spent in Herzliya, and at the age of 20 I moved to Denmark. After Denmark I moved to Holland, where I studied at the Academy of Arts, and then I came back to Israel. I moved back to Herzliya and then to Tel Aviv, where I have lived for more than ten years.
Israel is home to me, and the second home is Denmark.
I decided to move to Denmark at the age of twenty, as I had a Danish partner. We eventually got married and were married for ten years. I spent about five years in Denmark, and when I moved to Holland, my ex-wife worked at the European Parliament in Brussels, so I travelled a lot between Holland and Brussels.
[Denmark] was the first home I had after leaving my parents’ house, so I inherited all the habits [in Denmark], and I was “raw” enough to suck in [Danish habits] on to my personality, and I learnt the language very quickly.
After a year I had learnt Danish, and I was only spending time with Danes (no Israelis). I almost had no relation to Israel. I went through a transformation, and I almost forgot where I came from.
It really affected my personality, and I’ve stayed this way. I also haven’t forgotten the language. It has stayed in my head, as if it was a childhood language.
I have a dream of buying a summerhouse in Denmark. Sometimes I think about how it would be nice to have a house here and one there [in Denmark] and being here and there a little bit – when I go on pension. I could be there during summer and here during winter. I have dreams like that. I like the forest and the fall. I connected to it very strongly. It’s difficult to explain, but that’s what happened.
Israel
My feelings about Israel get better.
I always felt very disconnected from Israel and not belonging, but within the last couple of years, I have felt better and better – mostly also because I live according to American time. My studies make me live according to American time, and I’m always chatting with them [classmates], so I kind of feel that I live in America.
I have a great relation with my family as well.
Also, moving to a different country is very difficult, and I’ve already tried it with Denmark and Holland, so I’m not sure that I’d like to go through it again, but of course I’m not excluding the idea [of moving to a different country] at all, and the concept of living between two countries seems great.
Mentally there are many things here that I don’t feel connected to. For example, I like long and deep processes, and my professional mentality is much closer to the American one. That’s how I feel at the moment, although there is something about the creativity within hi-tech in Israel that I really connect to, and the fact that one is encouraged to always learn and renew. That actually fits me a lot.
On the other hand, I am fond of politeness, being structured and organized. I can plan things months ahead, which is different from Israeli mentality.
When I came back to Israel, it took me time to reconnect the Israeli mentality.
Also, I’ve never listened to Israeli music, but within the last year it’s become my hobby to listen to Israeli music, so within a few months I have got to know who singers such as Marina Maximilian are, and I have become acquainted with many different Israeli bands. It’s another way for me to connect to Israel – something I didn’t have all my life.
I left this place [Israel] easily. It was clear to me. I also really suffered in the army.
Army
I asked my parents not to go to the army and to send me abroad to study classic painting instead. That’s where my head was back then. I wanted to go abroad and study.
Today I think I would have behaved differently, but it also happened many years ago.
I wanted to study art on a high level. That was something I really wanted to do, and it [army] stopped me from doing that.
Uniforms
I also didn’t really fit into the army, socially too. But the most crucial factor in all this was that I had a big urge to study and not just to sit in an office, with a uniform. I didn’t understand the concept of uniforms. I was a very free-spirit youngster.
The uniforms gave me claustrophobia. When I was a scout, uniforms were also required, but I didn’t want to wear them, so on my first day of scout I was told: “Next time come in a uniform,” to which I answered: “Uniforms? In the army I’ll wear a uniform,” and I stopped going. (I was only 11 years old).
I was ten years old back then – that’s how I was as a girl.
My brother was an army officer, and my family is very Israeli, so when I told them that I didn’t want to go to the army, they were like: “No way, you will do the army, that’s it.” So, I did it.
Chauvinist Society
I don’t have encounters [with Arabs] in my daily life. In the neighborhood that I live in I only meet Arabs in the local kiosk that I buy things from. I guess they are from Jaffa, and I tell them “Hi,” but that’s it. That’s the truth.
Well, every year, I go to the church on Christmas eve, at midnight – usually in Jaffa. I do that because I used to do that, when I lived in Denmark, and I really love this holiday. So there [in the church] I see Christian Arabs.
In terms of what I feel about Israeli Arabs, I feel a lot of things. I feel a fondness, and also a little bit of fear. It’s complicated of course.
I tend to avoid any society that is chauvinist, which means that I’m equally angry at the Orthodox Jews’ treatment of women and the Arab society’s treatment of women. I can also get angry at Israeli society’s treatment of women and in the world in general, but either way that’s something that makes me very angry. And perhaps that’s a big thing standing in the way. If I speak to an Arab man, and I know that it [Arab society]’s a very chauvinist society, it creates anger in me.
You Can Like And Dislike At The Same Time
The conflict is not something that pops up in my head on a daily basis – perhaps when I enter a [Arab] restaurant, because as I told you, I have some fear of Arabs.
It’s a form of suspicion but also awareness of how this feeling of suspicion should not be there. It’s complex.
I don’t know the person standing in front of me. Perhaps he really loves living in Israel because of the good things here, or perhaps he hates Israel. I don’t know, and within that there is some suspicion and fear, but I’m aware that perhaps what I’m imagining is not true at all. It’s complex. You can dislike and dislike at the same time. It’s complex.
Childhood
I think when I was a girl, the fear was bigger than it is today. We grew up like that. The fear was passed on to us.
I had my childhood in the eighties. I was born in 1972, and I recall the knife terror attacks, which took place around the end of the 80s until the beginning of the 90s. Every day we would hear about someone that had been stabbed. It mostly happened in Jerusalem.
You can’t do anything about it – as a child, who grows up like that.
When I was a small child, my family and I moved to Singapore, and during the Yom Kippur War [1973], all the members of my father’s military unit had died. When I heard about this later on, at the age of six or eight, that was enough [to have an effect].
Transylvania / Transsexual
I remember that when I was 18 years, before the army, I travelled with friends to London and Paris.
People would ask me where I was from, and I would answer: “Transylvania.” I didn’t want to say Israel. I was scared, and then they would ask me what language I spoke there, and I answered: “Transexual,” which I had copied from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” Someone once then asked me if I was Israeli.
So, think about this: You are 18 years old, you travel abroad, and you’re scared of saying that you’re from Israel – scared that they will do something physical to you. So that’s how we grew up.
Collective Post Trauma
And don’t get me started on the Holocaust, but it’s not connected to the conflict, or perhaps it is.
We basically grow up with this survival fear.
My grandparents got married in Poland and then immigrated to Israel together, and all the family members that had stayed in Poland were killed – everyone, a huge family.
In Israel, during the war [Second World War], they would cry at night, but nobody would talk about it with my mother and sister – not a word. It’s only within the last decade that we have begun to talk about it – and only after they [grandparents] died, so there is a kind of repression and not talking about things, and things like this are passed unto you in the unconsciousness, within your soul. It’s a collective post trauma, and it’s also connected to the conflict, because of the many wars [in Israel] and the fact that we [Israelis] have a lot of enemies.
But it’s not what leads our lives. It’s just one aspect of our lives here, and we have become so accustomed to living with this form of repression, which we have partial awareness about, while placing it within a box, and we have other similar boxes.
I feel that only within the last decade I have become aware enough to talk with myself about this and to understand all this complexity.
Baruch Goldstein
Another thing, which I remember happened in the beginning of the nineties was the terror attack carried out by Baruch Goldstein. I was affected by it very badly. I fell into a depression because of that, and I began drawing drawings about that specifically.
I always knew that terror was done unto us [Israelis]. I didn’t know that we could do it too. The moment I realized that my world got destroyed, and I took it very badly. It’s interesting, but that’s what happened.
All the drawings I made looked like “The Scream” by [Edvard] Munch – with a lot of blood. That’s what I was doing in the week after the incident. That’s how badly it was affecting me.
Perhaps the place that I was thinking from was: We are not capable of committing terror. I was a cute, naïve girl, and I thought that, like me, [Jewish] people don’t support terror. I was perceiving my [Jewish] community as how I was perceiving myself, and I hadn’t heard of terror [committed by Jews] prior to this, so perhaps I felt a sort of responsibility. I don’t know. It’s difficult for me to answer that.
We Are Not The Chosen People
What I think about it today? Today I don’t like to hear about any killing of course – including those in the US, when you hear of someone who entered a school and shot at children – it sends chills down my spine.
Today, honestly, I also think that they [Palestinians] experience, what they do to us [Jews/Israelis], and at the same time, we are not better than anyone else. I also say: We are not the chosen people.
With this said, on one hand, its bad for them [Palestinians] and bad for us [Jews/Israelis]. On the personal level, of course such incidents are a disaster for the family, the parents.
1991
The first missiles that I remember took place in 1991, during Saddam Hussein [reference to Gulf War].
It was the first time that I was in a room in the house with my family, with a gas mask on my face. I got an anxiety attack, and I remember my mother giving me chocolate, when that happened.
At the end of the war, I remember driving in the car with my friends, and we didn’t hear any sirens, but when we stopped at the traffic light, we laughed at the people in the car next to us and yelled: “There is a siren! There is a siren!” And it became a game. I was very young, and young people usually do stupid things.
Angry
During the penultimate war with Gaza, I felt that there was a lot of anger around the world directed at Israel, and I was obsessed about this. I was very angry at the foreign media – a big anger.
I entered many online foreign media forums and began commenting on the war.
I was angry, because I felt the media was one-sided, very anti-Israel. Also, I’m very against the whole BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel] because, well, let’s talk about the conflict.
Camp David / Cancellation of Israel
My opinion [about the conflict] changed after Camp David [reference to Camp David Summit in 2000].
Before Camp Dvid I was 100% part of the peace camp. I had moved to Denmark, and I was very happy about there being peace. I also voted for [Yitzhak] Rabin.
Today, however, I know that the other side [Palestinians] is not ready for it [two states], and I will explain why.
I know that on our side, there is also extremism – an extremism that didn’t exist so much before, although in the end Rabin was killed because of extremism, which I believed was caused a lot by Benjamin Netanyahu’s incitement.
But at the end of the day, the peace agreement itself was bluff, and why? I’m not saying that Israelis are completely innocent, but my anger towards the other side is based on the fact that they don’t really accept for there to be a Jewish state. If we separate the lands [between Israelis and Palestinians], according to ’67 borders and the division of Jerusalem (this is fair in my opinion), they will still want the right of return of some million Palestinians within what is Israel.
That’s the point that broke the mainstream Israelis – ideologically, because it basically says: Cancellation of Israel, as I know it, because if there is a demographic change leading to a Jewish minority, political elections as we know them are over, and Israel won’t be as it is today. And that’s clear. That’s what it is, so why are you asking for that? We will never be able to give this.
During the Camp David talks, they [negotiators] said: “We’ll get to the tough things in the end. We’ll begin with the ‘light’ things first, so that we, towards the end, can make it possible to solve the tough things amicably,” and that was a mistake, because [Yasser] Arafat didn’t intend to give up on this [refugees] ever, and basically this agreement would never have succeeded, and as long as this is the requirement of the other, then I, as part of the mainstream Israeli peace camp is basically not a member of the mainstream peace camp anymore, because we don’t see that there is a chance.
On top of that Israel has become more and more extremist and more religious. Religion here is getting strong, which removes any chance of [politically] moderate people (and I see myself as a moderate person) to give the tone of what is happening, and within this there is an exhaustion – an exhaustion of there not being a solution.
A State Of All Citizens
During the last war [with Gaza, May 2021] I felt calmer, because I felt that the world didn’t hate us as much as they did in the preceding wars. In the wars preceding this one I felt an anger towards the world.
I remember a known Danish journalist, whose [Facebook] page I would visit, and I was always commenting on the chats. I would speak to people visiting his page.
People there explicitly said that the Palestinians recognized the right of Israel as a state to exist, and Israel disagreed with the peace agreement. They don’t know anything about the [Palestinians] refugees. They have no idea what kind of demographic problem this could cause, and why we basically can’t agree to this. It’s simple.
That’s My Survival
The idea of Israel becoming a state for all its citizens is not possible.
I’m very scared of the Muslim culture. I also don’t like the culture of the Orthodox Jews [as mentioned earlier]. I can’t stand it. It goes against all my values, as a secular person, and it’s a ticking bomb. If this became a one state for two peoples, Israel as a free country would stop to exist. I wouldn’t have anything to do here.
It’s the country that I grew up in. I want it to be as secular as possible, and I don’t like the chauvinistic culture here and the treatment of women and choosing this to be part of our country is a choice – so I will always be against these groups giving the tone of my country. It’s very simple. It’s my survival.
Synagogues
If they [Palestinians] were Danes, I would very much like to connect, because I feel that that’s the culture that I’m built to live in – as someone living in Tel Aviv. Connecting with Danes wouldn’t hurt my way of life, as an individual.
I’m different from many Israelis because I’m not very connected to Judaism. My connection to Judaism is that my grandfather’s family died in the Holocaust, and the fact that I grew up in Israel.
I’m not religious. I can’t stand synagogues because of the separation between men and women – women having to sit behind a wall [in the synagogues]. It’s not acceptable for me. I don’t feel that I belong to this. It makes me angry, and that’s it.
Two Women Will Fight Like Cats
I believe it [sexism] exists in the entire world.
My personal experiences [of sexism] took place in the workplace. Today I experience it less, but in the beginning [of career] they weren’t used to seeing such a technical woman.
In the workplace I have been confronted with comments such as: “Women aren’t that good at technical things,” or “We will only hire one woman in our workplace, because two women will fight like cats.” Someone told me this just seven years ago.
It’s sad.
I used to date a man, and I remember telling him: “They should let former [female] technological students become assistants [in a certain collage ],” and I told him that I heard something about how women weren’t fit for such positions, and then this man said: “Yes, that makes sense. When a woman is present in a workplace, it can bother the men. There is nothing to do about this.” I yelled at him: “Deal with it!”
Also, once a 20-year-old man sat next to me [at work] and told someone else: “Her computer is slow. Clean the temp files” and, as a volcano, I exploded out of anger, because I’ve cleaned temp files before he was born. Who do you think you are? He didn’t think that I was capable of working with an operating system.
I’ve also experienced instances, where hard disks needed to be replaced at work, and when I came to replace the hard disk, someone told me: “I’d prefer for him to do it instead, not you.”
I think you will find less of this [sexism] today, or perhaps I’ve just made a name for myself as someone with strong technological skills. I’ve also studied so much – more than others; I’m very curious, but I’ve also studied so much, because I have felt the need to be much better than the average. You need to know things ten times more than men for them to respect you.
Ideal World / Current Reality
I wish that there could be two states, but after hearing how ISIS and Hamas have developed, I also know that any other country can become a small Hamas. I don’t know. It’s complex, it’s scary. I don’t know what will be. I’m not optimistic. That’s all.
At the end of the day, I think that the solution, in an ideal world, should be two states for two people. The only thing is that this solution feels so far away with the current reality.
During the war in 1948, about 700-800.000 Palestinian refugees fled to neighboring countries, and to this day they still live in refugee camps, as the countries don’t want to integrate them. For Israelis this is viewed as an interest of the country to keep the conflict going.
In Jordan there is also a local demographic interest to keep them as refugees, since the [Jordanian] royal family isn’t Palestinian, and it would break the population scale.
Similarly, about 700-800.000 Jews were expelled from Arab countries. This is not known in the world, nor recognized, but Israel took in these people.
In the Danish political chat that I referred to earlier I wrote about this, and someone answered that it had never happened. That’s a denial of history, which shocked- and angered me.
There is also anger among Israelis vis-à-vis the neighboring countries, as they seem to have held on to these refugee camps as a tool to use against Israel.
Interviewed by Sarah Arnd Linder on January 4, 2022 in Tel Aviv