Observing the ruins

-

I was thinking about an image that might illustrate how most Israelis view their political institutions at this point in time and happened upon this ruined, dangerous, old pre-fab(erected in the 1860s by Christian 'Lovers of Zion' in the American Colony). In the background the get-rich-quick-and-screw-everything-else Neve Tsedek Tower dominates the landscape.

Rabin Square was filled last night with 150,000 (or whatever) people holding a variety of political views yet united in their demand for Olmert and Peretz to resign. Peretz seems to be wavering but Olmert (with the backing of most of his Knesset faction) is hanging on. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/855600.html

After Tsipi Livni blew her chance to grab the leadership of Kadima, who knows what will happen. If the public wants to bring down the PM, thousands will have to demonstrate in Jerusalem -and for long, bitter weeks. Somehow, despite the general disgust with Olmert, I don't see that happening.

Today, Tel Aviv saw another sort of demonstration. ' Houses from the Inside', a day when scores of homes and buildings were thrown open to the public. We visited a restored house/museum in the American Colony and this amazing loft on the top floor of an undistinguished office building in south Tel Aviv. The 300 sq metre space is owned and was designed by a member of the Castiel family whose shop happens to sell outlandish and expensive furniture for very large spaces. The man dressed in white standing on a table in the centre is Mao Tse Tung.

Here's a small corner of the space, regularly rented to companies making TV commercials.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zoltan Kluger

-
Image
A Hagana despatcher in the 1948 War of Independence on what seems to be a stationary motorbike. I took the photos in this post at today's exhibition. Went to see an exhibition at the Eeretz Yisrael Museum. Zoltan Kluger, Chief Photographer 1933-1958." These are official Zionist propaganda photos, some of them staged, but many of them impressive nevertheless. He also photographed Palestinian refugees (although not for the Zionist institutions) and workers clearing the rubble from abandoned Palestinian villages after the War of Independence. Although a staunch Zionist, the Hungarian born Zoltan also had an uneasy relationship with the Zionist institutions that provided his livelihood and, like many Israeli artists even today, fretted about being unnoticed because he was working in a Levantine backwater. Well to do residents of British Mandated Palestine taking a flight from Haifa to Tel Aviv (1930s) "I'm suffocating," he was quoted as saying. "I'll die....
Read more

The only matkot museum in the world

-
Image
Meet Amnon.  We met him on a stormy Shabbat morning on the side of a steep side road in Neve Tzedek. He was putting away his bicycle after giving up the idea of playing matkot on the beach, something he does on a daily basis and has been doing for at least 50 years. He invited us to see his apartment otherwise known as the Only Matkot Museum in the World. Amnon was born and bred in Neve Tzedek and is a major figure in the matkot community. There are some 350 matkot (beach paddles) of every conceivable size and colour in Amnon's matkot museum interspersed with large paintings of the northern European forest scenes so popular among people who live in hot countries. His devotion to the sport is boundless. Amnon, still sprightly now, thanks to matkot, is surrounded here by photos of him in action in younger days (click to enlarge). Now he and his fellow matkot-obsessed friends play on a concrete strip underneath one of the hotels on Gordon Beach where they have been gr...
Read more

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of bo...
Read more