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Talking peace in Tel Aviv
An Israeli delegation sat down across from their Syrian counterparts to hash out an agreement on sharing water resources in the Golan Heights. Down the hallway, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators discussed the future of Jerusalem in the context of a two-state solution.
For years, the grownups haven’t been able to find a way to peace. Perhaps they should leave it to 50 college students from 18 countries and the Palestinian West Bank at a five-day mock peace conference at Tel Aviv University.
“We hope this can set an example,” said Dana Sender, one of the event organizers, who is a Far Eastern Studies major at Tel Aviv University. “Maybe if we can show our leaders this initiative comes from students who care, maybe it will make a difference.”
One student came from Lebanon via Syria and Jordan on a foreign passport. His circuitous journey to Israel underscores an absence of peace in the region. Tel Aviv is just a couple-hour drive from the Lebanon border.
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Men in front, women in back
If you’re a woman, and you get on the 15A, don’t sit in the front.
“I didn’t even know it was a segregated bus and people started yelling at me to move to the back,” said Mamit Asras, 22, a secular Jew waiting for a bus in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. “I was in shock because it was a public bus.”
The Israeli national bus cooperative, Egged, opened a second gender-segregated bus line in Jerusalem earlier this year after ultra-Orthodox Jews shut down streets demonstrating for more segregated buses.
Last year, the company created the country’s first gender-segregated bus line, also in Jerusalem, which was opposed in petitions by secular Jews.
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Shabbas Goy on Duty
Abu Ali is a taxi driver every other day.
On Friday evening he opens up a small plastic storage shed a rabbi bought for him and he hangs his sign in Hebrew: “Goy for Shabbas.”
Goy is a sometimes-derogatory Yiddish word for non-Jew. Shabbas is the Jewish Sabbath.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews follow a strict interpretation of the Torah, which forbids working during the Sabbath, including turning on a light, making a telephone call or driving. The Jewish Sabbath runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
Abu Ali, who is from the village of Beit Safafa outside Jerusalem, didn’t want to give his full name because he doesn’t report his income as a shabbas goy to tax authorities.
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Jerusalem’s lattes
Israelis call it the most authentically Middle Eastern market in the country. They come for the fresh bread and produce, meat and fish, and also to eat hummus and falafel in tiny storefronts under the shouts of merchants hawking their wares.
So, it is no surprise that when the Israeli coffee chain Aroma — Israel’s answer to Starbucks — moved into the Mehana Yehuda market, a few people were upset.
“It’s an atrocity,” Ran Shacham, a 24-year-old history and law major at Hebrew University told me today. “It’s the end of little Israel, and I can’t stand it. It destroys the chance to sit in front of oranges and hear people scream.”
The market, located in an old neighborhood of West Jerusalem, has landed on the front lines of Israel’s struggle with gentrification.
Jerusalem cleaves to its identity as an old place, where the stones, even the cries of street vendors are sacred.
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The case of the missing key
The other day, I found a large iron key hidden in an old armoire in my house. I saved it for my landlord.
“Where did you find it?” he asked. “It’s been missing for many years.” He thanked me and slipped it in his pocket
Turns out the key was one of three known to exist to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of the death and resurrection of Jesus, according to the beliefs of most Christian denominations.
My landlord, Wajeeh Nuseibeh, is the doorkeeper to the church. His job is to unlock and lock the front door of the church everyday.
According to family tradition, the Caliph Omar appointed the Nuseibeh family, who are Muslims, doorkeepers to the church in 637. Father has passed the keys down to son ever since.
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Attack in Jerusalem near Obama’s hotel
Kenny Lerner, 67, had never witnessed a terror attack before and neither had his wife, Sandy, 65. They’re originally from the Bronx, N.Y. and they’ve lived in Israel for the past 11 years.
“I can still see that man lying on the ground, his leg bleeding,” said Sandy, recalling today’s tractor attack, the second such incident this month in Jerusalem.
They were having lunch at Rosemary’s. It’s a fish and dairy restaurant and they were having fish. They parked farther away than they would have liked, as it turns out a good thing.
Their meal was interrupted as their waiter shouted for them to follow him outside. A yellow front-end loader had left a construction site and was careening down King David Street (coincidentally, very close to where Senator Barack Obama is scheduled to stay tonight on his Middle East tour). It smashed a bus and three cars, leaving four people injured, one seriously.
“We started running after it. That was my first reaction. To stop it. I didn’t know how,” Kenny said.
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Wine and politics in the Golan
“This is the best place in all the country for good wines,” Shalom Blayer, chief executive of Golan Heights Winery, told me today, referring to the 690-square mile sparsely-populated volcanic plateau that rises to the northeast of the Sea of Galilee.
It is home to eight boutique Israeli wineries, as well as the Golan Heights Winery, Israel’s No. 1 wine exporter and “a driving force in its modern wine industry,” according to a recent issue of Wine Spectator. The magazine called the kosher winery’s Yarden label “top of the line.”
Israel’s leaders often talk of the need to make painful concessions for peace with their neighbors. Israel and Syria will soon enter into a fourth round of indirect negotiations over the Golan, seized by Israel in 1967 and considered occupied Syrian land by the United Nations. The renewed talks began in May and the underlying premise, exchanging the Golan for peace, is unpopular in Israel.
According to opinion polls, three-quarters of Israelis do not support giving up the Golan in a peace deal with Syria. In a small, crowded country, the Golan is an escape. In the winter there is skiing, in the summer hiking, and all year around wine tasting.
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In the West Bank, rockets reverse direction.
Homemade rockets were launched toward an unsuspecting civilian population. Residents worried about their safety and a dangerous escalation to the conflict.
This would be a familiar storyline if not for the alleged perpetrators, Israelis, and the victims, Palestinians.
Israeli police this week arrested Gilad Herman, a religious student at the Jewish settlement of Yitzhar, in connection with the rocket attacks. Residents of the Palestinian village of Burin, which lies in a wide valley ringed by Jewish settlements, said two rockets were fired from Yitzhar, and another from the settlement of Bracha. No one was injured in the attacks.
According to Israeli media reports, the rockets resembled the so-called Qassam rockets that Palestinians once fired with frequency from Gaza, before a cease-fire began a month ago.
“Soon, when we go collecting our olives, we will be scared they will shoot rockets on us,” village resident Munir Qadous told me Thursday.
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Spiritual danger in the skies.
US Airways caused a stir last week when it announced it would no longer show movies on domestic flights in effort to save fuel and other costs.
The airline unwittingly may have added a customer base.
The Rabbinic Commission of Transportation Matters recently ranked airlines based on, among other criteria, movies shown on board. They were the first such rankings of their kind, offered as guidance to the ultra-Orthodox Jewish traveler.
Those airlines that did not show movies at all received the highest rankings.
The commission states, alongside the rankings, published in two ultra-Orthodox newspapers: “The problem of in-flight movies constitutes a terrible spiritual danger.”
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Troubling beauty.
If art is a reflection of society, Israelis for the past 10 years have been filled with anxiety and dread.
In a major 60-year retrospective, six Israeli museums are showcasing six decades of Israeli art.
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is displaying the decade 1998-2008. “Troubling beauty,” is how curator Amitai Mendelsohn characterized much of the work.
One of the most talked-about pieces is a staged photograph of Israeli soldiers at a mess table arranged as the Twelve Apostles in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper.
“Is this their last supper? Who has betrayed them?” Mendelsohn told a group of foreign correspondents the other day. He called the large photograph a “powerful political statement on sacrifice and betrayal.”
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lol
... read the full comment by whoever | Comment on Men in front, women in back Read Men in front, women in back
I would lay down my life for my Jewish cousins, but what is true of these Orthodox folks is true of fundamentalist Muslims and Christians and every other society that puts women in the back of the bus: So long as women are held down, a society will never
... read the full comment by The Oddball | Comment on Men in front, women in back Read Men in front, women in back
Actually, it just shows the ridiculousness of religion, period. Xtians tend to think they are so much more forward-thinking than this, but Xtianity is as guilty of subjugating women as the other 2 Abrahamic faiths.
So much concern about “what
... read the full comment by Troglodyke | Comment on Men in front, women in back Read Men in front, women in back
This just shows that the Jews are no better than the Muslims. It is unconscionable that the US has propped up the Israeli regime for so many years.
... read the full comment by SecularHumanist | Comment on Men in front, women in back Read Men in front, women in back