Israel’s News Blog Magazine: Daily Stories Video and Photos

by David Levy

My favorite place to study is in a little, nameless nargila shop located directly across from the clock tower in Jaffa. The nargila is always fresh, constantly reloaded with charcoal, head and shoulders above the dirty nargilot you get on the Tel Aviv beachfront and half as expensive. The interior is admittedly dull, save for the magnificent tapestry—covering a hole on the wall—of a beautiful Arab warrior-princess, laying topless in a field next to her gigantic broadsword, seductively stroking her pet black panther.

There is a constant bustle in the shop, as groups of Arabs play backgammon and argue loudly, locals yell greetings from the street, soldiers saunter in with their M-16’s and drink the delicious mint tea, occasionally challenging the other patrons to a game of backgammon. The television in the corner invariably plays either the World Wide Wrestling Federation or soccer, and the beautiful Arabic music playing on the stereo challenges the hum of Hebrew and Arabic for the title of dominant background noise. All this is intermittently pierced by the haunting call to prayer from the nearby minarets.

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Finally we have a site that is devoted to the Mohammed Cartoons. It was just a matter of time. I especially liked the official apology from Denmark page.

Photo of Gay Pride Day in Tel Aviv by Josh Meles.

And a gallery of photos by Ilan Rosen.

Teenagers who receive exemption from military service can volunteer for national service through Association of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexuals and Transgenders in Israel
by Noa Raz, Ynet

Exchanging the compulsory military service for national service is popular among females in the religious sector who opt to serve Israeli society outside the military. But as of Monday, teenagers who receive an exemption from the IDF can volunteer for national service through the Association of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexuals and Transgenders in Israel (Aguda).

Read the complete article here.

By Denis Schulz

Panel of notables:

Jethro Bodine

Baron von Frankenstein

SigmundFreud

Porky Pig
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by Jill Cartwright

In a chilly hall somewhere in the anonymous streets of Tel Aviv’s working class southern neighbourhoods, Lisa and I checked out the Machsom Watch Endless Checkpoints photograph exhibition that opened on Friday.

Machsom Watch is an organization of Israeli female volunteers who do vital work monitoring the checkpoints all over the occupied territories, often keeping the behavior of the soldiers in check.

The aim behind the event was to “help the Israeli public understand what is going on on their doorsteps and to make it clear to them that they are involved in the denegration of human rights,” said Susan Lourenco, a Machsom Watch volunteer and one of the event organizers.

Click “more” to see a selection of photographs taken from the exhibition.

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Zohir Andreus, the editor of the Israeli Arab newspaper Kol el-Arab (The Arab Voice), wrote a fascinating op-ed piece that was published today on the Ynet site.

It seems that none of the Arab-Israeli political parties has seen fit to put a woman in a realistic slot on their list. This, despite the facts that there are several very worthwhile candidates and that the Israeli Arab women tend to be highly educated. In fact, it was the leftist Zionist party Meretz that put the first Arab woman on its list in 1999. And now Labour has put an Arab woman in a realistic place on its list, too.

How can we explain to ourselves that, once again, it took a Zionist party to grant Arab women equality, whereas we continue to ignore them?

The Arab parties have declared non-entities two elements that threaten them, and they threaten to leave them out of the Knesset altogether: the low voter turnout in the Arab community, and the penetration of Zionist parties into Arab communities.

Read the whole article here.

Hat tip: Yael.

Israel is now just over one month away from general elections. So far the campaigning has been pretty muted, but over the past week more and more campaign billboards are appearing around Tel Aviv.

Meretz is a left-wing Zionist party that advocates a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the creation of a Palestinian state; it also demands a complete separation of religion and state in Israel.

This campaign poster shows Meretz party member Avshalom Vilan. The slogan is:
I am a happily married man.
But I will push for a civil divorce law. *

*Currently the only way to obtain a divorce in Israel is via the religious courts. All matters pertaining to marriage and divorce are contolled by the religious authorities.

A group of Ohio farmers hopes to use Israeli expertise to improve productivity. A 29-person delegation is leaving Sunday for a 10-day trip to Israel to learn everything from water management to milk processing to handling urban expansion.

Read the whole story here.

Etgar Keret (left) and Samir el-Youssef at a literary conference in Israel.

Etgar Keret, 38, is an Israeli author whose many collections of short stories have all been best sellers. His parents are Holocaust survivors; his sister is ultra-Orthodox, married, the mother of 11 and lives in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighbourhood; his brother is one of the leaders of the movement to legalize marijuana use in Israel.

Samir el-Youssef is a Palestinian author of satirical novels who grew up in a refugee camp in Lebanon. Today he lives in London.

Keret and el-Youssef first met and became friends in 2000, at a meeting of Arab and Israeli writers in Switzerland. While everyone else at the event was busy flinging out the usual tired old political slogans and playing the blame game, Etgar and Samir discovered that they had a lot in common. They were both born in the 1960s and came of age during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon - an event that affected their lives profoundly. Neither identifies with a political leader: El-Youssef is critical of Yasser Arafat, and Keret of Ariel Sharon. And both believe that the human connection is more important than politics. Change, said Keret, will come from the bottom up - when people from both sides of the conflict transcend the political framework, leave aside conventional ideas and thus humanise each other.

During the height of the recent intifada, el-Youssef called Keret from London and suggested that they collaborate on a book of short stories. The result, Gaza Blues, became a best-seller in Europe. The two authors are now close friends. Last year el-Youssef made his first visit to Israel, to attend the Jerusalem Book Fair, and gave a joint presentation with Keret.

Keret’s stories are anything but conventional. He has a wild imagination, a fantastic sense of humor, and he takes his readers on crazy trips with totally unpredictable twists and unexpected endings. He writes about intimacy, love, death, grief, and friendship - all the things that are so much more important than the most recent speech given by a famous politician. And he makes you think.
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Part One of “Not Jewish?!”, ends in the winter of 2002, when I moved into a shared apartment in Tel Aviv and started working at Haaretz newspaper. Boaz did not accompany me to Tel Aviv; he returned to Ben-Gurion University in Be’er Sheva and I moved in with a flatmate in the Big Orange. Part Two is the story of how and why we broke up.

So there I was in Tel Aviv, in the winter of 2002, dealing with my increasingly questionable sanity and generally failing health. My thyroid was malfunctioning and I suffered from anxiety attacks, sleeplessness and hiatal hernia – all within the space of six months in 2002. I went to the doctor once complaining of an acidic burning in my stomach. He asked me if I was stressed at all, and then realised what he had said. Who wasn’t stressed? My relationship with Boaz was also rapidly deteriorating.

We had met on a paragliding course in Peru and had traveled together for two months through luscious Amazon greenery and deserted white-sand beaches. The Middle East on the outbreak of war was never going to match up.

It’s tough on a relationship when one person moves to another country for the other. There’s the language barrier and there are the culture differences. One feels too dependent, the other feels too responsible –and when that other country is Israel, the odds are really stacked against you: Stress and pressure, no-one to vent on but each other and too many questions for which neither of us had the answer.

But if you ask me, what really put the nail in the coffin of our couple hood was the two-month stint we lived with his parents.

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