Sometimes it's worth thinking about what there is to love in Israel, for a change. Donald Macintyre, of the Independent, picks Haifa as the country's mellowest city and Kalmaris as one of the tastiest restaurants. His thumbnail guide to Haifa is erudite and encouraging. What ultimately attracts Macintyre is "the vein of history, some of it ineffably sad, some tinged with what may just be a sliver of hope for the future."
Have you seen something curious in the water? Huffington Post apparently took the bait and linked to a cute ABC news online filler piece about how Israeli officials are offering a million bucks...or four million shekels...for a verifiable snap of an Israeli mermaid. This certainly is not the typical siren that concerns Israelis in places like Sderot --- and this sea creature supposedly was spotted off the coast of Haifa. Multiple sightings, according to Murdoch's SKY News.
"Many people are telling us they are sure they've seen a mermaid and they are all independent of each other. People say it is half girl, half fish, jumping like a dolphin"Hmmm. Good score for the tourist board. Some snide commentators suggest that photoshoppers will be working overtime and that a Jewish siren would be known as Ethel Merman! Even though mummified mermaid remains have proven to be a hoax, it's remotely possible that a Mediterranean version of a Stellar Sea Cow or dugong,
Not everyone tracks the flight path that blinks on those little electronic maps installed on jet tray tables, and many travelers prefer to watch the in-flight movie instead. Yet the omission of Israeli cities on an airline's progress marker infuriated a plane load of charter passengers flying to Tel Aviv recently. Rhetorical threats to "wipe Israel off the map" had been shrugged off by Israelis for many months, but a British-owned airline had the temerity to actually do the deed. What's more, from the map's route, it appeared that they all were being redirected towards Mecca. What about Al Quds? Or Tel Aviv? Grumbles mounted into outrage.
The British company bmi--which stands for British Midlands, not Body Mass Index, by the way--say their map blunder was merely an oversight, and that the maps needed to be recalibrated for new flights into Israel. Two of bmi's lowcost flights now arrive every day at Ben Gurion airport. They asserted that there was no political agenda behind the act, but in a politic-addled Middle East, complaints and conspiracy theories quickly spiralled. After considerable fallout in the press and fury on the airwaves of Army Radio stations inside Israel, the company apologized, appropriately, on May Day.
Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has become the face of evil here in Israel ever since his election, has repeatedly questioned Israel's legitimacy (as in his often-mistranslated statement about Israel "vanishing from the page of time" -- wiping maps apparently is not on his agenda.) Apparently, he's leaving that act to Heathrow's second largest airline, which currently is discussing opening a route into Baghdad. You couldn't make these things up.
Somber salutes to the Holocaust victims will mark this Monday, April 16th, with special poignance because many of the quarter million ageing survivors here in Israel are nearing the ends of their natural lives. About one third live in poverty, according to government census records.
Scandalously, these holocaust survivors-- so distinctive with their wrist tattoos, woe-filled faces and obliterated families-- have not always been viewed as heroic inside Israel. This shocked me. Many gruff Israelis tend to view the first Zionist pioneers as far more admirable than European Holocaust victims, the ones who hid, ran away, or did not fight back. Few of these European survivors went into Israeli politics, perhaps because such a life story was a reminder of weakness and self-deception to voters, who tended to shun them. Before they can get Israeli state medical compensation these days, holocaust victims are forced to prove that their health problems were caused by Nazi maltreatment and are not the inevitable decrepitude of old age. Even inside Germany, the compensation for concentration camp survivors is more generous. This situation is deplorable and activists are working towards change.
Against this prevailing attitude, Yossi Zur is making sure that attention is paid to ordinary Israelis who are killed out of hatred. The bereaved father, whose teenage son, nicknamed Blondi, was killed by a suicide bomber on a Haifa bus four years ago, has pledged to remember all civilian victims in the country. He quotes Winston Churchill: "A nation that forgets its past has no future."
Zur has not purged the anger that festers inside the families of the fallen who stay inside contemporary Israel. But commemorating the sacrifice of lives-- whether at Kiryat Shmona, the successive Intifadas, or under Qassam rocket fire-- gives a focus to his grief. Ynet features his campaign to document all civilian memorials to terror victims and name each one. His work will also be showcased in an exhibit at the Castra Gallery in Haifa. The show is called simply "A People Remembers," and a website lovingly compiled by Assaf Zur's bereft father accompanies it.
The memorials to civilians come in myriad shapes and sizes, and Zur photographs them all.
Little Sara, a young Palestinian Christian acquaintance, has dubbed this website a Jewish Cyber-Shaheed. This is her way to comprehend the tears behind each random death. It's more of a cyber-Kaddish. Visitors can lay a pink, red, or white flower in cyber-space for each terror victim.
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