Tel Aviv Rooftop

Normally it takes an event of the magnitude of the World Cup final for me to actually watch sports. But since a kind friend sent me a spare ticket to the Israel vs Estonia Euro 2008 qualifier, I said what the hell. I tried to remember the last time I'd gone to a professional soccer game in a real stadium and came to the conclusion that it was in about 1965! (Aston Villa vs Birmingham City). Warned of massive traffic jams I arrived by bike. Unnecessary since this wasn't Israel vs. England and the crowd was a mere 24,00 that only half filled the smallish, old fashioned National Stadium in Ramat Gan. As I entered, the stadium was on its feet for Hatikva . It's an uplifting sight: the perfect green pitch in the floodlights, the razzle dazzle of the flag-waving majorettes, the thousands of roaring spectators (some holding a sign welcoming the Estonians to ' Israhell ' ). Shuffling into my seat I checked out my neighbours . To my left, a dubious looking guy in a lon...

The lower end of Chelouche Street in Neve Tzedek with the Neve Tzedek Tower in the background. Support for the argument that the construction of the Neve Tsedek Tower is a crime against the neighbourhood it markets itself as being a part of came from an interview in Ha'aretz with the controversial architectand former Tel Aviv engineer Yisrael Goodovich . Goodovich says that the Neve Tzedek Tower is a case of : "Chutzpah that has no parallel anywhere in the world." In his new book on the tower phenomenon , he warns in a paraphrase of Marcel Proust, that Tel Aviv is turning into "towers that gather a city around them." Goodovich has always been outspoken, not to mention crude and wild, but at least he is providing another view in a city gone tower mad. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/840951.html

Good friends invited us to the wedding of their daughter who lives on a goat farm near Yodfat in a beautiful corner of the western Galil . The groom's family comes from Yodfat whose residents worked en masse for days to turn the simple farm into the set for one of the more unconventional Jewish weddings I've been to. We missed the entry of the groom on a camel but arrived in time to catch this line of local Bedouin neighbours doing a wedding debka . There were lots of musicians down on the farm, many of them wielding instruments picked up in India. Here a tabla player and a local Arab flute player accompany the dancers. Many of the young people were of the shanti shanti type , i.e. 21st century hippies deeply influenced by India. Here's the girls' debka circle with the beautiful bride in white. About 500 people showed up for this wedding which turned into a celebration for the whole village, l ike a wedding in an Arab village or on kibbutz for that matter. As the...

The leadership continues to self destruct, the latest "victim" being finance minister Avraham Hirschson suspected of embezzling the equivalent of about a million euro when he was a Likud activist http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/840096.html .Come to think of it Hirschson has always been a shadowy figure, seeming to appear out of nowhere to be quickly entrusted with managing the nation's finances. In authentic Israeli fashion, Hirschson , after a 7 hour grilling by the police shrugged off questions about his political future , noting that , "I am now running the treasury, and will go on doing so." His political buddy Ehud Olmert said much the same the other day when he noted that, despite his acute unpopularity, the PM's Office is "my place of work". The second they find themselves in deep shit, our politicians ditch all the high-minded verbiage and their public positions are suddenly transformed into simple places of employment apparent...

All good things come to an end. Back to the grindstone tomorrow. Since I'll have less time for blogging I thought I'd post some photos taken on Friday. Starting with the rooftop itself, in its winter aspect still but with plants budding madly. On the way, on the corner of Herzl and Lillienblum , they are restoring a late 1920s building in art-deco style. For years the details had been covered with soot and grime but are finally being revealed. Since I was on holiday on Friday, A. and I decided to visit a gallery or two. We started with an exhibition at the Kibbutz Gallery on Dov Hoz which promised ("A search for the margins") far more than it delivered (a few fuzzy kodachromes and mangled lumps of plaster). Then we visited the Bauhaus Gallery on Dizengoff itself and saw some excellent photos of Tel Aviv by a new immigrant from Latvia (Marina someone). The permanent exhibition there is of restored ernational Style buildings such as this one on Menachem Begin (my...

These posters of slightly distorted photos of faces pasted onto a shop window in Herzl St are part of a peace project called face2face. The woman above is a lawyer from Tel Aviv and the man below is a lawyer from Bethlehem. The idea was to take Israelis and Palestinian doing the same job and portray them in sets of two to show how similar we are. This brainwave came after the (French ?) initiators JR and Marco travelled around Israel/Palestine for a whole week(!) and stumbled across a great secret: "After a week, we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families.A religious covered woman has her twin sister on the other side. A farmer, a taxi driver, a teacher, has his twin brother in front of him. And he is endlessly fighting with him.It's obvious, but they don't see that.We must put them face to face. They will realize." Oh JR and Marco, if only it were that sim...

Storm clouds approaching the rooftop from the west and today a suitably blustery day for catching up on the news after our all too brief trip to a relatively sane country. A sift through the papers over a large cappuccino at a cafe on Rothschild Blvd revealed political storm clouds on the horizon as well. Domestically, Olmert , suffering from chronically low popularity and haunted by a string of corruption investigations is now anxiously awaiting the results of the interim report of the Winograd Committee he himself appointed to investigate the fiasco of Lebanon II. By all accounts, the results will be damning. http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?173879089840& pagename = JPost / JPArticle / ShowFull Various scenarios could emerge: Olmert's resignation and replacement as Kadima head and PM by Tsipi Livni ; the mass defection of Kadima MKs to Likud thereby instituting Bibi as PM, even new elections. Whatever happens, a weak and rudderless leadership and a Knesset full...

On the banks of the Serpentine, Hyde Park Landed at wet and windy Ben Gurion airport from Heathrow at unearthly hour this morning. Tel Aviv looking a bit grim compared to London in its first flush of early spring. There the magnolias are about to pop and there are daffodils and crocuses on every green patch. But while everyone was enjoying the unseasonably warm weather, the pleasure was tinged with the nagging question, "Is this part of global warming?" Unlike Israel, where the post of environment minister is considered a sort of booby prize for ambitious politicians, the environment seems to be dominating the political agenda in the UK. While we were in London the two men who will apparently be competing for the premiership - Labour's Gordon Brown and the Conservatives' David Cameron - released radical plans for drastically reducing carbon emissions and in a draft Bill published yesterday, ministers promised to legally enforce their commitment to cut emissions by ...

Off to London for a family celebration the day after tomorrow which means that for a week or so I'll be in a completely different environment . The plants on the rooftop will be watered but you'll have to survive without me. Already experiencing the feeling of being ineluctably sucked towards the airport terminal and being spat out at the other end. Will the cell phone work abroad? How come El Al closed down the pre -flight check-in on Arlozorov ! How many pairs of socks... After reading that Israel was again rated by people in 27 countries as having the most negative influence in the world (together, ah the irony, with Iran) ttp://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbccntryview/ I wonder if we'll be attacked by an angry mob when the plane touches down at Heathrow . In case we are I'll leave you with a (touched up) image of 'Bauhaus' architecture one of the buildings that made up what was later called the 'White City'. I just finished reading 'When I L...

Starting tomorrow night it's Purim -the festival that everyone can relate to because it's so much fun. The dressing up, the parties, the craziness. It's even a mitzva to get so blasted you can't tell wrong from right - ad lo yada . This concept of crossing moral lines in the service of God was literally on the Purim of 1994 when Baruch Goldstein fired on Moslems praying in the Cave of the Patriarchs killing 29 people. Adloyada is also Hebrew for 'Purim carnival parade', Tel Aviv held the best and biggest adloyadas back in the 20s and 30's but the Queen Esther crown is now worn by it's upstart neighbour Holon . It always rains on Purim (but it won't this year they say). I wanted to snap kids on their way to their school Purim parties clad as pirates, policemen and superheroes but my camera is in Amsterdam and the next time I see it (hopefully), I'll be in London. So I searched my collection for something wacky but all I could come up with ...