Home > Olives & Thorns
One place, two histories
While there was no conclusive archaeological evidence of the second temple, our Israeli guide Amir Cheshin told us, “We know it was there.”
There is the western retaining wall — Judaism’s holiest site — and “those boulders over there.” Several dozen large stone blocks excavated since 1967 are believed to have been part of the temple.
Scientific proof — so far mostly lacking — that the two Jewish temples of the Torah actually existed, is sought by many Israelis as further validation of the creation of the modern state of Israel. Even so, faith trumps science on this holy patch of land.
Our Palestinian guide told a different version of history. There were no temples on this spot, Mohammad Abu Aktash, told us. “Nothing they have in this area for him,” he said, referring to Jews.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Blaming the victim?
Tawfiq Jamal is an Israeli, an Arab and a Muslim. He helped found a community center for coexistence and two Jewish-Arab day care centers in the mixed city of Acre, his hometown. His neighbors are Jews, and for years, he helped care for an elderly Jewish women who lived alone in the apartment below him.
He wants to set the record straight.
Jamal, 48, a truck mechanic and father of four, is widely blamed in the Israeli media for triggering some of the worst violence between Arabs and Jews in Israel since 2000.
Last month, during the holy Jewish day of Yom Kippur, he drove his car in a mixed neighborhood and was attacked with stones by a group of Jewish residents, apparently angry that he was driving that day.
(Most Jews don’t drive on Yom Kippur, but Muslims and Christians do. It’s not illegal to drive a car in Israel on Yom Kippur.)
What followed were several days of riots between Arabs and Jews. Jamal is not accused of taking part in the riots, but was detained for three days, placed under house arrest for eight days, and is being investigated on suspicion of “harming religious sensitivities,” speeding and reckless endangerment.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Who owns hummus?
Greece is to feta as Lebanon is to hummus.
Not so fast, says Uzi Ginati, an Israeli hummus gourmand, who has run a popular restaurant in Netanya for the past 21 years that only serves hummus.
The Association of Lebanese Industrialists is seeking protected status in Europe for the chickpea paste. Members were upset that some hummus sold in Europe is called “Israeli.”
Just as Greeks have the sole rights to the name feta cheese in the European market, Lebanese hope to own the name, hummus.
But the dip, eaten for breakfast, lunch or dinner, is a staple across the Middle East, including Israel, where nearly half the Jewish population traces its lineage to hummus-eating Arab countries.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
My olive harvest
My olive harvest proceeded this past weekend without incident. I filled a large stainless steel bowl with black olives from the tree outside my office window. A neighborhood orange cat joined me.
This contrasted from the experiences of many fellow olive pickers these past few weeks. As every year, olive harvesters have been beaten, and olives stolen. This season, according to Israeli police, is the worst in years.
There have been at least 20 clashes between Jewish settlers and Palestinians, while harvesting their olives, according to police. The violence has become ritual. As sure as the olives will ripen with the turning of summer to fall, settlers will confront Palestinians as they harvest them.
Many settlements were built atop terraced Palestinian olive groves and their boundaries often abut trees that are reached once a year by their Palestinian caretakers.
Palestinians fight back, usually with rocks.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
An eviction in Jerusalem
The neighborhood was stirring this morning. The Israelis came in the middle of the night, they said, and evicted Fawzieh and Mohammad Kurd.
The family has lived in the same home since it was built, legally, in the 1950s. But a Jewish organization brought forth a 19th-century deed to the land, and Israeli courts ruled in their favor.
A neighbor told me this morning that after the Kurds’ furniture was loaded onto a truck, Jewish settlers filled the house with song and dance. The newly Jewish home is adjacent to others recently adorned with the Israeli flag, part of a strategy to widen the Jewish presence in East Jerusalem, claimed by Palestinians as their future capital.
We visited the Kurds two months ago. Elderly and enfeebled, they said their life’s memories were wrapped up in the modest home. They had received hundreds of well-wishers, including foreign diplomats, some of whom live in the neighborhood. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had protested against moves to evict the family. In the end, none of that mattered.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment |
Change they can believe in?
The buoyancy of Barack Obama’s message has yet to reach these shores.
Palestinians and Israelis don’t agree on much, but they echoed each other this week in the wake of Obama’s victory: Change is not likely here.
Skeptics all, folks here hold little hope of the sort that has swept up so many people in so many other places these past few days.
“There’s no difference because there will never be peace,” Yair Gilor, 30, from Haifa, told me the day after Obama’s landslide win.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
I voted today
Six weeks ago, I called the elections office in the county where I’m registered to vote.
Voting was simple: Just print out a federal form from the Internet, complete it and drop it in the mail. Wait a couple weeks for an absentee ballot to arrive. Then, mark your choices and mail it back.
It didn’t quite happen according to script.
After nearly a dozen international phone calls, an international fax, countless fruitless trips to my mailbox, and an express mail delivery, I voted.
Voting from abroad is, if anything, a test of democratic fortitude.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Exit poll: McCain in a landslide! (in Israel)
The room was packed this morning. The television cameras were rolling. The first exit poll of the 2008 U.S. presidential election, we were told, was about to be released. And the findings:
McCain 76 percent; Obama 24 percent. An exit poll, that is, of American Jews living in Israel and casting absentee ballots.
“I’m shocked that it’s three to one,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli-American pollster who formerly worked for conservative Israeli governments.
The survey found that large numbers of registered Democrats and independents voted for McCain. Over half the surveyed voters said they had an “extremely unfavorable” impression of Obama.
The journalists were skeptical.
“Does this mean there will be a surprise on Nov. 4?” one woman asked.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment |
‘Like a pogrom’
They came in the middle of the night, like a river of black-clad troops, she said. They smashed the windows, barged through the door and handcuffed the occupants. Then, the bulldozers came and crushed the house.
“Like a pogrom,” Elisheva Federman, 36, mother of nine, told me today. “I just couldn’t believe my eyes.” In an interview with Israeli media, she invoked the Holocaust.
In the latest chapter of a simmering conflict between the Israeli government and religious nationalist Jewish settlers, the rhetoric has reached new levels.
In response to the government evacuation of an illegal Jewish outpost near Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, settlers rampaged in a nearby Palestinian neighborhood early yesterday morning, vandalizing dozens of cars and overturning gravestones in a Muslim cemetery.
They also threw rocks at Israeli police and one protester said on Army Radio: “The Jews need to carry out a revenge attack against the security forces … We hope they will be defeated by their enemies, that they all become Gilad Shalit, that they are all killed, all slaughtered because that is what they deserve,” referring to the captured Israeli soldier who has spent more than two years in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment |
Of camels and pyramids
What would the pyramids be without camels?
Egyptians were asking themselves just that this week after officials announced that camels would be banned from the Giza pyramid complex — Egypt’s No. 1 tourist attraction — as part of a $52 million project to transform the area into an open-air museum.
The camels, also popular among tourists — a photo in front of the pyramids is always better on a camel — will be penned into an area well away from the Great Pyramid, and the other pyramids that make up the Giza necropolis.
“They are ruining the site. They make the Giza pyramids like a zoo,” Zahi Hawass, the country’s top Egyptologist, told me this week.
Latest comments
This innocent family is of Kurdish origion .The Kurds are living in jerusalem since Saladdin was on power.They have gone there to liberate Jerusalem from the Crusaders’ occupation.The Kurds could defeat the Crusaders and they treated the prisoners
... read the full comment by Aram | Comment on An eviction in Jerusalem Read An eviction in Jerusalem
Most American Jews living in Israel are extreme orthodox, many are settlers in the West Bank from Brooklyn, NY. They radical, the want the return to the “solomon empire”. They dont want peace, they want war. McCain can never bring peace in the
... read the full comment by Russell | Comment on Exit poll: McCain in a landslide! (in Israel) Read Exit poll: McCain in a landslide! (in Israel)
Good for Mr. Hawass! The “touts” are obnoxious. The cops get into also, they want 20 LE to let you illegally climb on the pyramids.
Also, I hope the gauntlets of screaming aggressive vendors at sites like Edfu and Karnak will be cordoned
... read the full comment by peter | Comment on Of camels and pyramids Read Of camels and pyramids
Muslims are ordered to “not go near” alcohol (no drinking and no serving). I met an old city Jerusalem Muslim that owned a restaurant. He did not serve alcohol. He does not get much of the business of the Christian Pilgrims, as some like
... read the full comment by Clay Chip Smith | Comment on "The finest beer in the Middle East" Read "The finest beer in the Middle East"