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

By Rafael D. Frankel, Jerusalem Post
Musaid, Libya

“Israel does not exist as a country, it is Palestine, and we do not allow occupiers into our country,” was the explanation a special representative of the Libyan government gave the nine-person group of a peace mission for barring their entrance into the country Wednesday morning.

The group, which includes three Israelis, was camped out in the no-man’s land between Egypt and Libya after failing to gain entrance to the latter country late Tuesday night.

Members of the group trek on camels in the Eastern Sahara desert of Egypt. Photo: AP

Latif Yahia, the Iraqi participant who was once a double for the son of Saddam Hussein, Uday, and who functioned as the group’s spokesman at the border, was unsuccessful in his effort to persuade the Libyan official to allow them entry.

Read the rest of the article here.

Breaking the Ice is an international non-profit organization, established by individuals and business professionals from around the world who believe in building peace at the grassroots level. Its mission is to inspire people to transform conflicts from enmity into trust and mutual respect.

Amongst its sponsors are King Abdullah of Jordan, Shimon Peres, Hillary Clinton and the Dalai Lama. Breaking the Ice was founded by Heskel Nathaniel, 44, an Israeli businessman living in Germany, who decided to make peace his mission after he survived leukemia.

The current group consists of 10 people - Israelis, Palestinians and Iraqis - who have been traveling by camel, jeep and foot across the Sahara desert to promote peace. The idea of the mission is to put the participants into a survival situation that forces them to depend upon and trust one another. They are carrying an olive tree from Jerusalem that they want to plant in Libya, the last stop on their journey, as a gesture of peace.

Now it seems that Colonel Khadaffi is not going to allow them to complete their journey.

Read more about the fascinating backgrounds of the participants - all of whom have suffered terribly as a direct result of conflicts in the Middle East, here.

Yael Nazer, 18, is the new Miss Israel. Photo: Moshe Sasson/Ynet

Yael Nazeri, an 18 year-old high school student from Kiryat Shmona, was crowned Miss Israel 2006 in a televised ceremony last night.

I watched the event in bits and pieces - mainly while zapping away from elections coverage during commercial breaks. To be honest, I don’t like beauty pageants: they make my inner feminist cringe. But still I’m kind of drawn to the glitter and the pomp - especially the evening gown competition.

So I guess this means that Yael won’t be serving in the army next year?

Here she is, second from the right, with the three runners up.

Photo by Moshe Sasson, Ynet.

If you read Hebrew, detailed coverage of the pageant (plus more photos) is here.

by David Levy

“Oh my, isn’t that bizarre,” Dorit gasped into the phone. “Thank you so much for calling me.” A friend in the media had just told her that there was an imminent terror threat in central Jerusalem: a suicide bomber was loose in the area, the same location as the Jewish Agency office in which we were at that moment meeting. Now I faced an impossible decision: do I stay in the office for an indeterminate time until the bomber is caught and/or explodes, or do I brave the streets? Looking around at the empty office, flourescent tubes pulsating above, the answer was clear- I was out of there. Besides, as every post 9-11 American knows, if you change your actions because of terrorists, they win.

After telling me she would feel pretty bad if I was blown up, Dorit and I decided that my best option was to make for the Tel Aviv-bound taxi service vans across from Zion Square. We reasoned that the vans there were too small to be an attractive target, and I figured I’d be out of the blast radius if the terrorist decided to blow up in the square. We ruled out the option of going to the central bus station, where I’d arrived in Jerusalem that morning, because it made the most obvious target. Besides, I could only get there by bus.

As I left the building, the security guard cautioned me to be extra vigilant. I assured him that I would, but then I immediately began to think: What the hell does that mean anyway? I looked around the street. Nobody seemed vigilant to me. They weren’t even looking around. I inspected the crowd. I didn’t notice any wires hanging from beneath winter jackets, which served to comfort my anxieties a bit. Anyway, I was certainly the only one on the street checking people for wires, so I figured my extra-vigilant requirement had been satisfied, and I continued my walk with renewed confidence.
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Amit Saphir, Israeli body builder

by David Levy

Amit Saphir is Israel’s number one weightlifter and bodybuilder, and, for his weight class, one of the strongest men in the world. He bench presses 167.5 kilos, and can squat and dead-pull 250, almost three-and-a-half times his weight. Not only does this make him far and away Israel’s best squatter and dead-puller, it rates him as the eighth best in the world.

Saphir qualified for the 2004 Athens Olympic team, but dislocated his shoulder attempting to break an Israeli weightlifting record in the last trial round, and was forced to watch from the sidelines. Afterward, he decided to focus solely on bodybuilding. He placed a disappointing nineteenth at this year’s World Bodybuilding championships in Shanghai, four spots short of advancement to the semifinals. However, at 24, Amit has not yet reached his peak (A bodybuilder’s prime is from the late twenties to mid-thirties), and the finish spoke to his boundless potential.
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I got this from a few different sources and some of these are good. You can see here some of Israel’s leading politicians in different film roles. This was circulating as an election and Purim gag. Shimon Peres stars in Peres Gump, Amir Peretz and Shelly Yechimovitz star in Grease and Shaul Mofaz is 007 to mention a few..

Click HERE to see the full PowerPoint presentation. More images Here.

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Although Tel Aviv was founded in 1909, its real growth and development occured during the 1930s. The architects who created what came to be known as the White City were Jewish graduates of Le Corbusier’s School of International Architecture, founded in Germany in 1919.

The Nazis closed the Le Corbusier’s school shortly after they were elected in 1932; as persecution of the Jews in Germany increased, many of those architects came to Tel Aviv. The city was their blank canvas, and they built the first planned Bauhaus city in history. From 1931-1956, 4,000 Bauhaus buildings were constructed in Tel Aviv; most of them are still standing today.

In 2004, UNESCO declared Tel Aviv a world heritage site.

The city was chosen to be honored by UNESCO not only because of the buildings themselves but also for the city’s original urban design, which was based on an urban plan by Sir Patrick Geddes.

“The new town of Tel Aviv is an outstanding example of new town planning and architecture in the early 20th century, adapted to the requirements of a particular cultural and geographic context,” a UNESCO statement said.

Bauhaus, or International, style is characterized by asymmetrical composition and regular repetition instead of classic symmetry, and avoidance of all decorations that do not have a useful purpose. The modern style, functional, simple and free of decorations, was seen as the most fitting for a young, rapidly growing city.

The architects and planners who designed Tel Aviv envisioned a city that would be a sort of socialist paradise - a place where working class people could afford spacious, airy apartments that were simultaneously aesthetically pleasing and low in cost.

You can read more about Bauhaus architecture in Tel Aviv here.
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Update to the post made March 5th (Wafa Sultan Video courtesy of Memri TV) - This was published in the New York Times. Seems like Dr. Wafa Sultan has now been getting threats on her life.
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Although this one is in Hebrew the message is clear. This Shinui ad aired with a blitz of ads that have hit the small screen. This is one of the more talked about ads so far in this election campaign. Shinui “The Secular Party” drove home the the need for strong secular government presence protecting us against the financial, security and social burden brought on by Shas - Israel’s largest and most vocal orthodox religious party.

Click here to view the clip. The clip may pop you over to the Shinui site after running - just pop back if it does
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Love is Blind

by Jill Cartwright

In Part Five of “Not Jewish?!” our newly single heroine is set up on a series of blind dates and discovers that Israeli men may not be as exotic as she’d thought. Meanwhile the intifada heats up and she discovers that one can, indeed, get used to anything - even regular terror attacks. But then there’s a new, even scarier threat: Gulf War Two. Faced with the knowledge that Tel Aviv might soon be attacked by biological weapons, Jill must decide whether she’s going to stay or leave…

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

“Jilly, I’ve got the perfect guy for you,” he would shout down the phone at me…

And God only knows why I ever listened to him. Because although Shahar has one of the biggest hearts I have ever known, he also has one of the biggest imaginations in the Middle East.

Ziv , the first such “perfect” guy , was a champion kick boxer – he must have informed me about 15 times – and a commander in some elite army unit. Before I’d even managed to shut the car door he had already started to tell me about his heroics in Lebanon, where he’d “seen things that would turn my hair white.”

He drove me to some awful concoction of a sushi-dance bar where he proceeded to scream in my ear about how many girls there wanted to date him while I tried to concentrate on dipping my salmon maki in the soy sauce rather than the ashtray.

After he had done what he felt was the groundwork on me, which involved telling me I was lucky he liked girls with some flesh on them, he threw his Gold card at the waitress, gave me the wink and the nod and headed back out for the car. He was stunned I didn’t want to go back to his place and with a huff and a tutt dropped me at home, I never saw him again.

Then there was Roi, whose dazzling green eyes and smooth olive skin were betrayed by the fact that his head barely reached my shoulders. Roi saw me as a dumb and innocent tourist, a bare canvas on which he could splatter his right-wing politics. He was determined to “educate” me, to “tell me how it is” and impress upon me his narrow-minded views as if I’d never opened a history book or a newspaper in my entire life and was quite incapable of forming my own opinions about anything because I am neither Israeli nor Jewish and therefore cannot possibly understand anything about anything.

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Last week I wrote a post about Ale Yarok, the Israeli political party that favours the legalisation of marijuana for personal use. The party describes itself as ultra-liberal, which means that it also has a pro-peace platform and a social equality message as well.

Their campaign broadcast is absolutely fabulous. It features a traditional Jewish wedding that’s actually not so traditional and…

Oh, just watch it:

Who said that Israeli politics was boring?