Tel Aviv Rooftop

Appropriate street art in Florentin With any luck, the government will declare a unilateral cease-fire this evening and the fighting (or at least the worst of it) will be over. Apparently Israel has enough guarantees, from the Egyptians, the Americans and others to be able to call it a day and declare a victory of sorts. If all goes according to plan, the residents of southern Israel can at last look forward to not being shelled for a while, while on the Egyptian side of the Gaza-Egypt border and even further afield, steps will be put in place to prevent the Hamas from re-arming. If that indeed happens the Israeli public, which has overwhelmingly supported this war, will be satisfied (for a while) and the politicians can go back to running for the elections (set for Feb 10). Moreover, the prevalent Israeli notion that every once in a while the country has to "go crazy" and show the neighbours that we are just as barbaric as they, will have been validated yet again. Public op...

One of the the interesting aspects of any war is how the media covers it and to what extent the government controls the flow of media to the population. In this one , the mainstream media, with the noteable exception of the doveish Ha'aretz , has been uniformly pro war while dissenting voices have hardly been heard. Friends were at an anti-war demonstration organised by various peace groups last weekend and told me that thousands took part but I don't remember seeing any media coverage. Protests by Israeli Arabs have been continuing on an almost daily basis but since there has been no real violence and since their opposition to the war is to be expected, these have been relegated to the back pages. According to a recent poll, 94% of Jewish Israelis support the operation, although it's not clear how many would like to halt it now. It's hard to escape the feeling that there's a guiding hand feeding this almost wall-to-wall support. For one thing we are not being shown...

Day 15 of the war. Saturday evening. Today we drove to the Jerusalem hills where we met old friends and took a look at the pretty Beit Jamal convent near Beit Shemesh. From there we drove to a restaurant on a moshav surrounded by greenery for a pleasant lunch . Next door at the excellent Flam boutique winery we bought a reasonably priced bottle of their Classico. We then drove home to the rooftop to hear that the death count in Gaza now exceeds 800. illustration only Yesterday the security cabinet rejected the United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire and decided to continue the military operation. By the look of the fighting however, it doesn't seemed to have given the green light to launch "stage three" of the operation. This would involve going into whole neighbourhoods that Hamas have turned into booby-trapped warrens in and around Gaza city and rooting out the Hamas gunmen among the civilians. The results would be devastating f...

Enough. There's a point when even a justified military campaign turns into a bloodbath and this I think is the point we are at. With over 600 Palestinians killed (up to half of them civilians according to Palestinian sources), I think we've done enough damage. Today at least 30 civilians were killed and scores wounded in a school in Gaza when the building was hit by Israeli mortars. The incident carried all the hallmarks of the fighting that is going on there. The school was closed because of the fighting but UNWRA opened it to provide shelter from Gazans who had fled the fighting in the south. Apparently, a Hamas mortar unit positioned in or near to the school (in the belief that the Israeli army wouldn't open fire on a school) opened fire on the army which, in line with the new policy of returning fire everywhere (after warning civilians when possible) returned fire. Splits are beginning to appear in the Israeli leadership. Olmert wants a cease-fire soon with clear condit...

The top part of this poster, designed by graphic arts students at the Sapir College near Sderot, says 'Sderot'. The bottom half which says 'Rothschild' (elegant Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, a symbol of the Tel Aviv 'bubble') shows capuccino-sipping Tel Avivians oblivious to the hostilities. The 8th day of Operation Cast Lead finds Israel at a crucial juncture and facing difficult choice. Stop now and hope for a cease-fire that will create the "new security environment" that was the goal of the operation? Or send in the ground forces massed at the border and deliver Hamas another crippling blow that will guarantee the objective of halting the rocket fire into southern Israel? With some 430 Palestinians killed in Gaza and over 2,000 injured in a week of aerial attacks, many think that enough is more than enough. The Hamas will have learned its lesson and a cease-fire should be called to allow the mediators to move in and find a diplomatic solution....

Palestinians surveying the wreckage It's been a while since I posted a blog, part of the reason being a very welcome family visit. During this time, the bits of news that filtered through the family fun focussed on the growing debate over the necessity of a military operation against Hamas in Gaza. This reached a new peak on Wednesday about 80 rockets were fired into Israel . By Friday, the media were reporting that the decision had been taken to undertake a limited military operation with "defined goals". Yesterday at about 11 a.m. we started to hear 100 planes bombed Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip in a "shock and awe" opeation that came earlier than everyone expected. You can get an idea of what Gaza looks like here . This morning there was a second air strike and the the death toll in Gaza is approaching the 300 mark. Unclear how many were civilians and how many were armed. The reports that I've heard talk of overflowing hospitals, a complete breakdown ...

On my Sunday morning bike through Yaffo this morning I heard (on the radio/phone) that the government had decided to block a ship carrying humanitarian supplies for Gaza from sailing from Yaffo port. The ship was sponsored by the Israeli Arab community (the Islamic Movement according to Ha'aretz) and nearly all Arab members of Knesset were supposed to have been on board. Since I was nearby, I decided to take a look. It wasn't hard to pick out the knot of cameramen around the grounded MKs. On the sidelines, I heard one worried man saying that the police had confiscated his ship last night. The man in the middle with the grey beard (click pic to enlarge) and the scarf is Sheikh Riyad Saleh, formerly the mayor of Um el Fahem and today the leader of the main wing of Islamic Movement in Israel. To his right, in a sweater, is Knesset member Mohamad Barakeh, who leads the secular/communist mainly Arab Hadash party. Since the ship had been whisked away by the authorities, this was obv...

graffiti Florentin Israel's siege policy against the Hamas government in Gaza has swerved badly off course. With the wall separating Gaza from Egypt (known in Israel as the Philadelphi Corridor) breached and Egyptian forces unable (meanwhile) to herd hundreds of thousands of Palestinians back into the Strip, it seems that a new era is unfolding. Egypt, whether it likes it or not, may be increasingly forced to take responsibility for the million and a half Gazans on whom Israel badly wants to turn its back. It's unlikely that this is the result of some well conceived Israeli master plan. Much more plausible is that Hamas cleverly orchestrated both the telegenic electricity cuts and the breach of the wall at the height of the Israeli sanctions to score thereby global sympathy and the possibility of an open border with Egypt. Palestinian journalists have confirmed that at least one of the ...

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...