Tel Aviv Rooftop

Playing dominoes in Bat Yam with an abacus to keep score. Normality tinged with illusion. Pessah, this year, at least in the area surrounding the rooftop, felt more like Yom Kippur. We took a stroll around the neighbourhood yesterday (erev chag) and a bike ride to Kiryat Shalom in south Tel Aviv this morning and were struck by the tranquility . Almost no cars on the roads, datiim (religious people) walking to and from beit knesset in their holiday best alongside chilonim (seculars) just enjoying the spring sunshine. entire families congregating on plastic chairs in courtyards and here and there the whiff of a charcoal grill from a back garden sprouting wild flowers. In ancient times Pessah, a spring festival, was the start of the year, a much more fitting time than Rosh Hashana. A family making a Pessah mangal (grill) in the pine wood next to low-income neighbourhood of Kiryat Shalom this morning. One of the reasons that Tel Aviv seemed to empty out is that so many people have gone o...

From time to time my efforts to keep this blog light and fluffy give way to an urge to delve more deeply into the complexitities, contradictions and conundrums that surround the rooftop. This temptation has been increasing as the 60th anniversary celebrations grow inexorably closer (officially Independence Day is on May 8). The official celebrations for which no-one seems to have much stomach, have even been the subject of an on-line protest petition calling to spend the money on projects more urgen than fireworks and DJs. The urge has also been exacerbated by a spreading feeling of national hope-less-ness, an entry into a very uncertain era in which peace is not merely difficult to attain but accepted as permanently unattainable. Consequently, the stark choice that is beginning to emerge is between apartheid (contination of the occupation with a Palestinian majority betweenthe Jordan and the Med) or Israel/Palestine as a 'state of all its citizens (i.e. no more Israel as a Jew...

Tonight, Israeli minister of infrastructures, Binyamin (Fuad) Ben Eliezer said that in the next war it will be much safer to live in (isolated)Naharia or Shlomi because he foresees hundreds of missiles raining on major population centres like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Oh, and he also mentioned that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, "Iran would no longer exist as a nation". But why concern ourselves with mere trifles when a classic Israeli story is developing in these crucial days before Pessah. Last Thursday a Jerusalem court ruled that chametz ( not 'kosher for pessach' goods - notably pitot, see below ) could be sold during Pessah (in Jerusalem) as long as it was not 'in a public place'. It turns out that the definition of a not-public place, could be an aisle in a supermarket for instance. Naturally, the religious parties are on the warpath and are tring to urgently push through a law (even though the Knesset is in recess) that would explicitly ru...