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A Palestinian symbol, now made in China
The square piece of cotton cloth is folded once to make a triangle and placed over a skullcap, held in place by a doubled black cord of tightly woven black goat hair and sheep’s wool.
It is designed to shield the summer sun and ward off the winter chill.
Once the sartorial preference of the Arab peasant, the headdress, sometimes called a kefiyah, was adopted as a symbol of Palestinian nationalism during the 1936 Arab Revolt, and later popularized by longtime Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
These days, it seems, the black-and-white checkered Palestinian headdress, has worn out its usefulness.
Old men still wear it, but younger farmers are more likely to wear a baseball hat. Some employ it as a scarf in the winter. In Gaza, it is discouraged because it represents Arafat’s secular PLO movement, a rival to the Islamist Hamas party that seized power there last year.
What’s most disturbing to Yasser Harbawi, who is in his mid-70s and wears one everyday, most of the Palestinian-style kefiyahs now sold in the Palestinian territories are made in China.
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Christmas lights in the Holy Land
Over the decades, as their numbers have dwindled, Christians have become mostly silent in the din of the conflict over the Holy Land.
Even their church bells are often drowned out by electronically amplified Muslim calls to prayer and sirens that herald the Jewish Sabbath.
But once a year, they assert their faith.
The other day, I set out to the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City to buy Christmas lights for my tree.
The dividing lines between the city’s four quarters — Muslim, Jewish, Armenian and Christian — are mostly invisible, but during the month before Christmas, they are very clear. Homes are decorated with strands of lights, Arabic Christmas carols waft from open doorways, shops spill onto the sidewalk selling the latest Christmas kitsch — made in China, of course.
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Holy tomatoes!
I grew my first garden this year. It turns out the sun, or the soil, which more than one visitor pointed out is holy, worked to my advantage.
Or, call it beginner’s luck. I harvested a bumper crop of peppers, strawberries, melons, and eggplant, which are still growing. So are the tomatoes. (The photo was taken this afternoon). I expected to be turning over the soil by now, yet even with cold nights — no frost yet, however — and mild days, my mostly north-facing garden is still producing.
Some of the herbs are also hearty. The mint has shriveled and I finished off the basil — pesto is just as delicious in the Holy Land — but there’s still oregano, sage, rosemary and thyme. (No parsley.)
The sage goes with winter tea, which you’ll find served in the Old City markets this time of year. I’m warming the water now on top of my wood burning stove.
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Another holiday … and more good food
In the land of religious holidays — it seems like someone is celebrating something every other week here — there is one thing that binds together the faithful: food.
Don’t let the extra prayers fool you: most holidays in this part of the world celebrate the kitchen. And when folks aren’t eating — fasting plays a role in all three of Jerusalem’s monotheistic religions — they’re thinking about food.
There is often a specific food that goes with a specific occasion. It’s a time when women show off their best recipes and are the focus of the feast.
“This is what I’ve been waiting for,” my neighbor, Ra’ed, explained to me, as he eyed the leg of lamb and heaping platter of rice that his mother had prepared.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Thank you very much for that superb article
... read the full comment by ofigennoe.ru | Comment on Escaping from Israel -- or finding it -- in Tel Aviv? Read Escaping from Israel -- or finding it -- in Tel Aviv?
Can you still say “Put it where the sun don’t shine ” on a nude beach?
... read the full comment by ofigennoe.ru | Comment on Escaping from Israel -- or finding it -- in Tel Aviv? Read Escaping from Israel -- or finding it -- in Tel Aviv?
Amazing article, lots of intersting things to digest. Very informative
... read the full comment by ofigennoe.ru | Comment on Escaping from Israel -- or finding it -- in Tel Aviv? Read Escaping from Israel -- or finding it -- in Tel Aviv?
А я люблю Ниссаны.
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