Tel Aviv Rooftop

"Lo rotzim lo tzarich" (roughly : "If you don't want to make it happen , don't do me any favours") states a pissed-off Theodore Herzl in this piece of street art shot just round the corner from the rooftop. To the uninitiated, Herzl, "the visionary of the state" , provided Zionism with a motto : "im tirzu ein zu agada" ("If you want it, it's not a fairy tale") or in the parlance of the US primaries - "Yes we can!" As the graffiti aptly expresses, the mood in Israel today is hardly in 'yes we can' mode. In fact it's more like: "how the *&%$@# are we going to get through all this?" Instead of Herzl's utopian vision of a well-ordered European style state, what Israelis see around them today is a sick political system, rampant corruption, threats from Hamas, Hizbullah, Iran (nuclear) a government crisis and, right now, an agonising human drama. This revolves on whether to agree to a Hizbu...

Sagi, optically challenged but still getting the job done. "Sababa? " After pointing and shooting for a good few years now, I finally joined a digital photography course. It's a simple affair , a few hours a week in the universita ha-amamit (popular university) which is neither a university nor - at least on a Sunday morning - popular. It seems to be run by Tel Aviv municipality and its student body (let's face it) is composed of senior citizens doing quick courses that aren't too challenging. Our teacher is Sagi. It took me a moment to fully realise that my first photography teacher was blind in one eye. The other one seems to work pretty well though. He's running us through both the basics of photography and a better knowledge of our individual cameras. I'm on good terms with mine but I know that she could offer me much more if I could only get to know her better. Whether or not it's a side effect, Sagi sometimes strikes his head in frustration in m...

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....

A few nights ago we were invited to the premiere of the much touted Israeli animated documentary 'Waltz with Bashir' . We arrived early to pick up our tickets but encountered a lengthy queue moving only at a snails pace in the airless corridor outside the Lev Cinema in Dizengoff Centre. While it was diverting to pick out the celebs in the crowd, - famous military correspondent Ron Ben Yishai , talented actess Keren Mor - it didn't make the line move any faster and we soon gave up and peeled off for home. Last night we paid up and saw the film, without the celebs but including Ron Ben Yishai who actually appears in his own voice but in animated form. 'Waltz with Bashir' (Bashir being Bashir Jamael, the Lebanese Christian President first crowned by Israel only to be assassinated), deals with the quest of the hero, then a young soldier, to remember what he experienced in the first (1982) Lebanon War. It is brilliant and harrowing and knocks you sideways. Worth making...