Tel Aviv Rooftop

                 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...

 

  Four Views From the Roof   Introduction      In 1994, against the advice of friends and family, we managed to scrape together the deposit for a dilapidated three room, third floor flat in an old apartment building on Yehuda Halevi Street in south Tel Aviv.  It was all we could afford if we wanted to put down a stake in Tel Aviv.    The building and its environs literally reeked of negligence. The once impressive but now deserted building opposite ours that had once served as a courthouse, was populated by  drunks and junkies. To the west was tumbledown Neve Tzedek just starting to attract artists and students. To the east was a business area heavy on cheap eateries, wholesale textiles and low-end fashion outlets. Old men on tricycles navigated long bales of textiles against the traffic on the narrow streets (and still do). On parallel Lilienblum Street, dubious characters would whisper “Dollar? Dollar?” to passers-by interested in by-...

A trip downtown We are staying with our gracious Filipino hosts in Santa Rita, a suburb of Olongapo, a city of about 240,000 situated on the coast, a two hour drive north-west of Manilla. The street outside the family compound is buzzing. Mom and pop stores and street restaurants are doing brisk business. By 11 a.m. pupils in school uniforms are returning for their lunch break after starting at 6 a.m. A peddler yells “taho!” - a popular breakfast drink made of silken tofu and tapioca pearls. There’s plenty to see here but today we’re going downtown. Getting to downtown Olongapo involves two trips using public transportation, first by a motorized tricycle or tuk tuk taxi and then by a jeepney bus (originally made from leftover American jeeps). Both vehicles are canvases for the Filipino art form of kitsch decorations that add anarchic flashes of colour to the streets.   Many of them also carry the uplifting municipal slogans – “Transparency and Good Govern...

We coalesced in the early oughts, four, middle-aged men with full time day jobs and families, closet strummers and pickers looking for something more. For years, Danny B and I had been playing acoustic guitars and Zev and Danny Z had been sawing away on electric guitars.  But by the time the two musical duos got together and became a quartet, Danny B was also playing bass and I was taking my first steps as a rock drummer. Mmm …two guitarists, drums, bass– a classic lineup. Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t too late to realize the definitive male boomer fantasy - and play in a rock band. We jammed, we clicked, we sensed we had a future and we decided to call ourselves Midlife Crisis.   Rehearsals began in the moldy air raid shelter of our apartment building, and graduated to a series of bare-bones rehearsal spaces in nearby Florentin. It was cool to hang with younger, unknown bands wrapping up their sessions before ours or coming in after us, to compare styles and sound...

While rockets from Gaza were flying above our heads last week, angry messages were flying from Jerusalem to Brussels. Not over the targeted killing of Islamic Jihad commander Bahaa Abu al-Ata but over the decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) that the EU’s labelling of Israeli settlement goods in European supermarkets was legally binding. All EU member states needed to label certain products from settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, e.g. with a label that reads “Made in The West Bank - Israeli settlement” Speaker of the Knesset, Yuli Edelstein for example sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament David Sassoli, expressing his “dismay and disappointment” over the “disgraceful” decision. Edelstein’s letter contained most of the Netanyahu government’s standard arguments on this issue. The verdict “applies a double standard to Israel […] since out of “dozens of such areas around the world, […] only Judea, Samaria and the Go...

1. Crossing the border The transition into the Third World is immediate. Time slows down. The Egyptian customs officials greet the trickle of incoming visitors from Israel with a lazy indifference.   At the entrance to the marbled Taba terminal there is a sort of podium where visitors are supposed to fill in entry forms. The forms have been commandeered by three men who, in return for baksheesh, fill them in for you. At the bank, my dollars are turned into an unwieldy wad of Egyptian pounds. The ATM machine doesn’t work. In a Bedouin taxi we speed unnervingly along the twists and turns of Israeli-laid southbound coastal road. No-one’s wearing seat belts; Khaled, the driver, is singing along to a hit song. To the left, the beaches and sparkling waters of the Red Sea/Gulf of Aqaba and the rosy outline of the Jordanian side of the gulf; to the right, imposing red granite mountains, changing hue in the late afternoon sun.   The once unspoiled desert coast is...