Tel Aviv Rooftop

For my morning exercise I've been taking pre-breakfast bike rides around Yaffo armed with the morning news on the radio (the litany of horrors is the soundtrack of my life) and my camera. I caught this little old fisherman on the sea wall by Yaffo port. I just clicked away as usual but the photo somehow ended up looking like a painting. The old port, the traditional point of entry to Palestine for centuries, is today in a pretty dialpidated state. There are plans for it to be tarted up and developed, hopefully without spoiling its charm, part of which lies in the rusty old wharehouses like the one below. There used to be a flourishing fish restaurant in this building at street level. Deep in Yaffo I stumbled across this ungainly sculpture. I guess someone in the municipality thought the local residents would be able to identify with it. Yaffo has a high crime rates and poverty levels. Next to the traffic island I met a kid who asked me why I was taking pictures. I told him that ...

Late night revellers peeking through the chic exterior of the newly opened French Cultural Institute on the corner of Herzl and Rothschild. Click for detail. On Thursday night we took a rare trip to Jerusalem to hear Itai play at the Jerusalem Jazz festival. It was the night of the Gay Pride Parade and we planned a route that would circumvent both the marchers and their haredi opponents who were demonstrating in another part of the city. Friends who joined us said that had to navigate their way through burning tyres to reach the (magical) concert. We eventually exited the holy city and raced back to the Bubble to catch the International Music Festival that was spread over the centre of Tel Aviv . This was heavily subsidised by the French government which the same night opened the new French cultural institute situated in a beautiful bauhaus building on the corner of Herzl and Rothschild, thereby symbolically cementing the Republic's ties with Zionism's founding fathers. By...

The Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv held at the beginning of June caused about as much interest (outside of the gay community) as the annual Arab-Jewish festival in Yaffo or a concert by the Israel Philharmonic in Park Hayarkon for that matter. Tel Aviv's drivers were annoyed at the traffic arrangments and that was it. Not so in Jerusalem where, by all accounts, all hell is going to break loose tomorrow night. The wilder and younger elements of Jerusalem's haredi (ultra-orthodox) community have vowed to stop the march at all cost and the organisers from the Open House (the organisation that supports the embattled gay community in our intolerant capital) had to resort to the High Court for permission to hold it as planned. For much, much more on gay issues in Israel see h ttp://www.glbtjews.org/article.php3?id_article=446 This is what the gay parade looked like in Jerusalem last year and there is a school of thought inside the gay community that since Tel Aviv holds a succ...

Gaza has fallen to Hamas . Abu Mazen has fired PM Haniyeh and, in an attempt to save Fatah in the West Bank, has finally declared a state of emergency. Instead of seeking a two state solution we'll now have to seek a three state solution: for Israel and what the media are already calling ' Hamastan ' and ' Fatahland '. About an hour and a half's drive from the rooftop, here in the Tel Aviv bubble, guys like our friend on the right from the Hamas military are ruthlessly ruling the roost. We have an Islamic ' statelet ' governed by a branch of the Moslem Brotherhood on our doorstep, the first of its kind in the Middle East. All this is sending shudders down moderate backs from Cairo to Washington. The new situation raises so many questions. How to govern the Gaza-Israel and Gaza-Egypt crossing points (all presently closed)? What is Israel's exit strategy or how to transfer responsibility for the Strip to international hands? How to coordinate h...

"40 years of occupation is a stain won't be able to erase, " reads the sign. At at another productive rehearsal with Mid Life Crisis http://www.myspace.com/mlcisrael yesterday two of the guys mentioned that they were going to the peace rally protesting 40 years of occupation. I hadn't been planning on going, knowing that it would be a small, ineffective, ashkenazi affair that wouldn't even register with the media. The power lies with the politicians, not with the street and certainly not with the side-alley that is the active peace camp in Israel today. At best, it would be another social occasion where ageing lefties and keen youth movement members rub-shoulders nostalgicly for an hour. Still it had been a while since I'd gone to a demo and so we showed up at the end of the march from Rabin Square to the plaza in front of Tel Aviv Museum (where even a small demo looks bigger). My fears were quickly realised. There were maybe 2,000 demonstrators coming fro...

The 40 th anniversary of the Six Day War has engendered a spate of articles, TV programmes and reminiscences . Apart from the fighter pilots who knocked out most of the Egyptian Migs while they were still on the ground, no-one seems to be relishing the moment too deeply. Today's Ha'aretz had some thought provoking pieces : http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867052.html Tom Segev on how the common wisdom in Israel before the war was that the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was contrary to the national interest and how the occupation came about in an unplanned way in the war's euphoric aftermath, as in a ‘wild fantasy’. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867057.html Amira Hass on how the occupation at initially made it possible , for the first time since 1948, for Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel to reconnect but also how it later hemmed them into increasingly small spaces. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867053.html Fatah negotiator Saeb Er...

A new dawn breaks over a tower under construction on Rothschild Boulevard. A new dawn breaks too for the latest musical offering by Mid Life Crisis , a cheerful little number called War Zone. The lyrics were strongly influenced by Lebanon II but are applicable today and will be for any foreseeable time in the future. If the link doesn't work, the address is www.myspace.com/mlcisrael Today, following recently acquired habit of visiting art galleries on shabbat mornings we took a look at an exhibition at the Givon Gallery on Gordon St (gallery alley) http://www.givonartgallery.com/default.asp . It was called "Looking at trees and not seeing only the forest" and was curated by the the recently deceased artist, teacher and music critic Rafi Lavie . Some excellent, thought provoking pieces. On the way home we stopped off at the legendary Mersand Cafe on Ben Yehuda cnr Frishman . Although the place has changed hands, the new owners have kept the classic 60s chrome an...