This what the Old City looked like, just days after the war ended.
(Click on image to view larger).

Israeli citizens began flooding to the Western Wall…

Soldiers and civilians alike (you can count my parents among them) took a close look at enemy weaponry…

A makeshift memorial of flowers and a small plaque was set up in memory of five paratroopers from Division 80 Reconnaissance Unit 75 who were killed in the battle for Jerusalem…

This was eventually replaced with a larger memorial, by sculptress Yona Palombo, for Paratrooper Division 80′s fallen. Today, it includes the names of 47 more soldiers killed in Israel’s wars and stands on the outskirts of the Old City.

This photo courtesy of the Paratrooper Brigade website. All other photos graciously provided by Moshe Lavi.

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© Pes & Lev

One such oasis is the Wohl Rose Park (Gan HaVradim), located opposite the Knesset and government precinct, at the foot of the Israeli Supreme Court. Established in 1981, the park has over 400 varieties of roses, and is one of the few parks of its kind in the Middle East.

© pmos_nmos

© RomKri

Jerusalem is seldom described as green and yet the city’s neighborhoods are dotted with flowers, flower boxes and flowering trees…

© RomKri

© Pes & Lev

The Jerusalem Botanical Gardens (JBG) is another great place for those who love flora and fauna. It’s also located adjacent to Givat Ram and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

© RomKri

All photos are courtesy of the excellent Jerusalem Shots website where there are plenty more images to enjoy.

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Etgar Keret not being bothered in Tel Aviv. (Marc Israel Sellem)

Who can forget the Kotel dustup between Leo’s bodyguards and photographers when he and Bar Raphaeli went to pay a visit, or Bieber escaping the hordes on a moped and running over the foot of a lensman?

But aside from teeny boppers who hang out in hotel lobbies hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite performer or artist, I think most Israelis are respectful – and even blasé about spotting celebs.

Earlier this week, I met Israeli author Etgar Keret (whom Brian wrote about attending the International Writers Festival) at a café in his Tel Aviv neighborhood.

Now, I’m not attempting to compare Keret to an international celebrity like Madonna, but he is one of Israel’s top authors and on his way to becoming an international icon in the short story field, with glowing reviews in the New York Times for his latest collection Suddenly, A Knock at the Door.

I think most Israelis who read probably know what he looks like (as opposed, say to how few Americans would recognize John Grisham at a local Taco Bell). However, he sat at that café for almost two hours, and aside from the server calling him by his first name (which could be due to the fact that he’s a regular), not one patron or passerby looked, approached or talked to Keret.

Maybe it’s because Israelis have a cool quotient that prevents them from acknowledging things like that – or maybe it’s because there just isn’t that gap between every day people and celebs here. They eat at the same places, take their kids to gan with your kids, and have the same complaints about long lines at the supermarket. In other words, our celebrities – in their own environment – aren’t glamorous, which is kind of nice.

However, if I see Bar Raphaeli in a Tel Aviv café, all bets are off.

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Back in 2007, after the death of former model Hila Elmalich who was 34 and weighed less than sixty pounds, he told me the following for Women’s Wear Daily:

“The problem is with society, and the low self-esteem of these girls,” says Barkan. “We need to put this out there, to make it a societal norm in Israel and the rest of the world. People need to see these anorexic bodies and move their butts and do something about this.”

Israel21c interviewed Barkan several times about the issue, and posted the following video:

In March, his perseverance paid off, as the Knesset passed what is being called the Photoshop law, for the aspect of the law that regulates the use of Photoshop to make women appear perfect in advertisements. That’s a huge accomplishment. The bulk — no pun intended — of the law focuses on banning underweight models based on their BMI, or Body Mass Index.

The law is making waves in Israel, and around the world. Can Israel set the precedent for changing the way the fashion industry views and uses models’ bodies?

Interestingly enough, it was on Israel’s new fashion channel, Fashion.net., that a panel of fashion professionals, including clothing designer Yosef and a local fashion magazine editor, agreed that despite the new law and its groundbreaking potential, the fashion world will still view impossibly thin model bodies as the ultimate in goal.

“No one wants to see a curvy, zaftig model,” said Naama Chaisin, who is the second generation in the Tovale designer line of clothing. “And I say that as someone who is curvy and has fought to lose weight my whole life.”

Here’s to hoping she’s wrong.

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But even when it looks like easy street, there is danger at your door. And I’m not talking about existential threats… but earthquakes.

Friday night was gorgeous, one of those spring evenings with a beautiful breeze that provided a nip to the air. We had dinner outside in our back yard with a few guests, including one visitor from the US on a 10-day tour of Israel.

After filling up on the great food, including delicious challot from Russell’s Bakery in Mahane Yehuda, we were sitting around the table munching on fresh fruit salad and rogelah from Marzipan.

I didn’t know it then, but it was precisely 9:48 pm when I felt my garden chair below being to vibrate. I immediately looked around to see if either of the people sitting to my left and right were shaking their legs against my chair, and was surprised that they weren’t.

After about five seconds, the vibrations stopped. I looked around at the seven people sitting around the table, and none of them had stopped, or expressed any kind of surprise in their faces. Well, I thought, maybe I was experiencing some kind of drug-induced flashback from my wild youth, because nobody else seems to have felt what I felt. So I didn’t mention it.

Imagine my surprise, when on Saturday night, after Shabbat, I went online to check out the news of the last 24 hours and read that a 5.3 magnitude earthquake shook the eastern Mediterranean on Friday night at 9.48 pm.

Thousands of Israelis evidently called the police to report the tremors which were felt from Rishon Lezion in the south to Safed in the north. Luckily, no damages or injuries were reported. Political pundits noted that the quake was probably just the seismic aftershocks of last week’s cataclysmic events in the government. Talk about thunder and lightning…

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The international musicians of The Bridge Project.

But it was no joke for Ittai Shaked, Andy Bussuttil and Umit Ceyhan who make up The Bridge Project - based in cyberspace but coming down for landing this week in Israel.

All three musicians have a day gig at the successful Israeli startup Waves, which was profiled in ISRAEL21c a few years ago. Violinist Shaked is a quality assurance manager for the Grammy Award-winning company that develops audio mixing software for the digital age for sound engineers and producers. And Bussutil, a multi-talented musician who runs his own recording studio in Australia, and Ceyhan, the Turkish Muslim who currently lives in France and teaches sonic and cinematic arts at the University of Toulouse, are part of Shaked’s team testing the company’s new products.

When, over a year ago, Shaked posted a message to his more than 100 testers around the world asking if anyone wanted to get together virtually and create some music, Bussutil and Ceyhan responded. Thus began ongoing file sharing and music creation between the three, with each adding his own instruments and ideas onto the previous take of their world music combining everything from Middle Eastern sounds to klezmer and Balkan beats.

The chemistry between us was amazing – we found out we shared and loved the same kind of music, more or less, with different spices,” Shaked told me. “And all three of us play instruments that combine together very nicely. At some point, I realized that what we’re doing here is making an album.”

The result is Three Waves Under the Bridge, the fruits of their online efforts, and the arrival in Israel of Bussutil and Ceyhan this week to meet Shaked and each other face to face and perform a series of live shows around the country.

Three Waves Under the Bridge, mixed by Shaked and mastered by Bussuttil, is a reflective world music mosaic brimming with musical ideas, and featuring a genre-hopping range of instruments – North African percussion like bongos and darbukas, strings ranging from violin, viola and cello to clarinet and sax, and traditional Turkish instruments like the duduk, kopuz and saz.

The music is only part of their accomplishments. As Bussuttil said, “Our efforts were an attempt to unify people rather than divide them. And we hoped to demonstrate that people from different backgrounds can create more than conflict, we can create things of beauty as well.”

If you’re in the country, you can catch the Bridge Project on May 14 at the Tmuna Theater in Tel Aviv. Other shows on the mini-tour, supported by the Foreign Ministry and the Australian Embassy in Israel, include The Jame Club in Acre on May 17, The Jazz Club in Mitzpe Ramon on May 18, and Hemdat Yamin in the Galilee on May 19.

But anyone can enjoy their music here.

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Pardo studied photography at Hadassah College, Jerusalem, then worked in New York for a year, returning to Israel to open his pet photography business.

Pardo works with Israel’s pet food manufacturers, ad agencies, breeders, animal-related publications, professional and non-profit organizations as well as pet-lovers, shooting commercial studio work and portraits, and photographing animals in the great outdoors.

One organization that has benefited from his talents is Shaar HaGai Kennels, breeders of Israel’s national dog, the Canaan.

Pardo has documented kennel owner Myrna Shiboleth on her treks to seeks out new desert and Bedouin bloodlines so as to retain the natural characteristics of this “semi-feral” breed.

A previous post reported on Shaar HaGai’s current woes: the kennel — and with it its Canaan breeding program — is under threat of closure by the Israel Lands Administration (ILA). Shiboleth, a world champion dog breeder, dog show judge and the world authority on Canaan Dogs, is lobbying for public support via on an online petition. (50,000 signatures are needed and she’s up to 39,855, so if you support this cause, please sign and share the link).

Far from the wild, Pardo also photographs dog shows for the Israeli Kennel Club.

And cat shows, too!

A cat-owner himself, Pardo has stated that although his specialty is dogs, it is from cats that he’s learned the most about photographing animals.

“It is the dog’s nature to please his owner. When the owner brings them to a photographer, from the dog’s perspective, the photographer is an ally… The cat is not interested at all to please humans… but fortunately, he is also very curious and we can take advantage of this curiosity when we take the pictures.”

Great photos of animals of all kinds can be found on Yigal Pardo’s page at PetNet.co.il.

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Mitch Pilcer in front of the grave he discovered. (Arieh O'Sullivan)

That doesn’t likely happen too often in most parts of the world, but it did in Israel, to Mitch Pilcer, who owns picturesque bed-and-breakfast country establishment in the Galilee village of Tzippori, the home of early rabbinic sages.

Pilcer’s 2009 discovery of Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi’s grave, whose commentaries appear in the Talmud and legend has it was a close friend of Elijah the Prophet, has sparked an ongoing struggle with the Israel Antiquities Authority who have been demanding that Pilcer allow them to excavate the tomb.

According to a report by The Media Line, the IAA won a court order, and late 2009 it conducted a dig on the property and confiscated the headstone door, which had been inscribed in plainly legible Hebrew: “This is the burial place of Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Levi Hakapar.”

Later the IAA filed charges against Pilcer for carrying out an illegal excavation, damaging an ancient site and possession of antiquities. Pilcer’s trial began at the Nazareth Magistrate’s court last week where he pleaded not guilty. He has also made formal demands to have the stone returned to its original site.

Full disclosure here is that Pilcer is an old friend, and I’m on his side of this battle over the ownership of the stone and the site. Read the full story about his battle with the ‘Man’ here.

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So I switched to another favorite web source of news and, damn, it had basically the same headline. Could this be? How could a nation that at midnight was 95% of the way heading to early elections with the Knesset about to dissolve itself have veered so drastically in a few hours in which most sane people are fast asleep? Welcome to Israeli politics.

Whether the largest national unity government in the short history of the country is good for us or not, I’ll leave to the political pundits. But the whos, whys and hows behind the dramatic turnaround that caught everyone – including the nation’s usually plugged in media – totally off guard will be the subject of speculation and dissection for weeks to come.

Most people, whether they admire or disdain him, are calling this Bibi Netanyahu’s master stroke, strengthening his government and creating a national consensus for everything from changing the Tal Law to planning to cope with the Iranian threat. And it’s not a bad deal for Kadima either, which was on its way to the dust bins of history – with one leader, Tzippi Livni out the door, and its new figurehead, Shaul Mofaz fighting to create a persona for himself.

Now he’s a vice premier, and Kadima is in the government, even though he had repeatedly stated Kadima would never join a Likud-led government and has been widely quoted as calling Netanyahu a “liar.”

But that’s all politics, he told today’s joint press conference with Netanyahu where they announced the deal, and as opposition leader, he was required to criticize the leadership.

Fair enough. Regardless of the cynicism of self-serving interests surrounding the decision, it’s maybe time to let this government see what it can do, and determine if Bibi and Mofaz are just spouting more politics or are serious about working together to better the country at a critical time in its history.

I’m willing to give them a chance, but I’m a little scared about going to sleep tonight and waking up to find another unbelievable headline in the morning.

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Early elections seem to be a done deal, with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu announcing Sunday night at a Likud convention the plan to dissolve the Knesset and establish the election date of September 4.

Nobody really knows why virtually every party is clamoring for new elections over a year ahead of their scheduled appearance. But it’s clear why Bibi is agreeing – his Likud party stands to be the big winner according to all the recent polls.

With tour operators bemoaning the likelihood that Israelis are going to cancel late summer travel plans in order to be here for the elections, and the nation bracing for another symbiotic coalition of strange bedfellows, there’s not a lot to be optimistic about.

Luckily we have the campaign ads to look forward to. A truly entertaining exercise that wastes millions of shekels that could be better put to severely lacking social services, the party ads offer some unique ‘only in Israel’ moments that reveal a juicy cross-section of Israeli society.

You want to know what makes Israelis such a ornery, loveable bunch? Watch some campaign ads. Here’s a small sampling from 2007 – from Yisrael Beyteinu, Meretz and the defunt Shinui party.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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