Goats on a hill
The Alon Road near Mitzpe Hagit
A few weeks ago, on a trip to the Dead Sea, we picked up a friend of our youngest son.
Nesya lives in an outpost deep in the West Bank. It is so tiny we couldn’t find it on any map until I set Google to maximum zoom and slowly traced a winding road north from the settlement of Kfar Adumim. The resulting satellite image revealed an enclave of just eight homes.
The entrance to Mitzpe Hagit, which was established in 2001 and named after Hagit Zavitsky, who was killed in Wadi Qelt in 1995, is more like a gravel driveway than an actual road. The houses are arranged along a single street with a fenced off “zimmer” (Hebrew/German for “country inn”) at the end. Maariv wrote about the latter, pointing out that the bed and breakfast’s owner had built a semi-Olympic sized pool overlooking the Jordan Valley.
Up until now I had read about these hilltop encampments but never seen one up close. The homes were not the corrugated shacks I’d imagined, but neither were they proper buildings. Nesya’s house consisted of a modified caravan on stilts, a broken window facing out and a sort of half-completed wooden awning that reminded me of a Tanzanian safari lodge. Around the back there was a large yard where 20 some goats lived with an equal number of turkeys, chickens and menacing, unceasingly barking dogs.
Nesya told us how she wakes up at 4:30 AM to milk the goats (taking a few squirts for her own breakfast) before catching a school bus from Kfar Adumim into Jerusalem. The family makes its own cheese and eats the eggs from the motley mix of fowl.
It all sounded like an idyllic life – nestling high on a mountain, living one with the land, organic and serene – except for the inseparable politics that have deemed Nesiya and her family a statistic who, depending on the narrative you choose, are either an obstacle to peace or patriotic pioneers.
Driving home, we continued on the road, passing Ma’aleh Michmas and several other settlements of varying sizes before reaching a very large, very red sign that warned in utterly unsubtle terms out that it was forbidden for Israelis to continue – we had reached Ramallah. A sharp left and we were in the Jerusalem suburb of Pisgat Ze’ev. Twenty more minutes and we were home.
No matter where you are in the political spectrum of the Middle East, you owe it to yourself to see what a hilltop outpost in the West Bank really looks like. While you’re there, you might spend a night in the zimmer. And be sure to say hi to Nesya and her goats.
Peace talks or target practice?
Filed under: A New Reality, coexistence, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics, War
Security personnel inspect the car containing four Israelis which was bombarded with bullets on Tuesday night near Kiryat Arba. (AP)
It’s horrible, but unfortunately true. I think everyone is starting to remember how previous waves of terror began – a shooting here, a bus bomb there, and before you know it, it’s an everyday thing.
I’m getting on a bus in a few hours, and for the first time in years, I may be looking around and checking out the passengers getting on, doing my own personal profile checking.
I guess the big difference this time, though, is the fact that we have a security barrier which is supposedly preventing potential suicide bombers from arriving at their destination, and the facts that the cooperation we’re getting from the Palestinian security forces are helping to prevent and catch terror acts before they happen. But not always, as the last two nights have tragically shown.
I, like most Israelis who want the peace talks beginning today in Washington to succeed, want to believe Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when he said that Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the other Palestinian terror rejectionist groups are Israel and the Palestinian Authority’s common enemy.
But if all Israelis, and not just settlers (who for some, incomprehensibly, don’t count as they are bringing it on themselves by living in the West Bank) are now going to be open targets for the guns and bombs of terrorists, it’s clear that the peace attempts in Washington are going to fail miserably. And our Palestinian neighbors will only have themselves to blame when their statehood once again moves beyond their reach.
Only Israel
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Music, Politics, Pop Culture
In between all the clips of flash mobs and dancing soldiers, one of the latest YouTube sensations shows just a young woman sitting solo at the piano.
The unlikely newest viral celebrity is Yedida Freilich, the 22-year-old Israeli resident of West Bank settlement Neve Daniel, whose song “Only Israel” has received almost half a million views since it was posted at the beginning of the month.
The pro-Israel song is a little heavy handed lyrically, as much as it is haunting and moving musically, but it has struck a chord in among viewers who feel that Israel is being subjected to an international double standard regarding what it can do to defend itself.
With a chorus stating “Darfur is ignored, Russian troops in Chechenya, only Israel has no right to defend itself, because the world cares nothing about Jewish blood,” the song is not going to become a Top 40 hit, but long gone are the days when radio is required to make a song popular.
Freilich, a composition student at the Rubin Academy of Music and Dance, wrote the mournful piano ballad along with her father Gabby and brother Yuval, following the Gaza flotilla incident last month.
The video clip of Yedida’s peformance on piano and vocals, with lyrics switching between English and Hebrew, is juxtaposed with images of Kassam rockets, Gilad Schalit, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Richard Goldstone, and the Mavi Marmara.
It’s not very subtle, but it’s certainly effective. And with one svelte swoop, the nationalist camp in Israel has received a new mouthpiece.
Balmy or Buggy
We were invited by friends to join them for dinner at a country-style restaurant in the middle of nowhere. Well, not exactly nowhere – it was situated deep in the Gush Etzion area of the West Bank.
You reach the restaurant, Gavna, by traveling down a winding, partially paved road that in any other part of the world would scream out “quaint.” But here in the Middle East, off the beaten track also means that much closer to potential danger; it was not that long ago that I remember terrorists killed an Israeli outside the gates to nearby Bat Ayin.
To tell you the truth, I’m wary even driving the well-traveled route to Efrat from Jerusalem – nothing has happened for years but I am the perennial worrier. And don’t even get me started on whether or not I’ll use highway 443 for a quicker trip to Tel Aviv by way of Modi’in.
All that consternation is a shame – Gavna is a real delight, a faux-Swiss chalet with lots of wood, a rustic feel, and an eclectic Italian/dairy menu (the salmon and stir fried veggies with tofu were good; the stuffed squash didn’t fare as well). At night, the view towards Beitar Ilit gives the normally black and white settlement a colorful aura.
Clearly we made it to Gavna and back in one piece. Indeed, our biggest decision was whether to sit indoors or out.
We had gone out a couple of weeks ago, on what was so far the hottest day of the year, and it still felt close to 40 degrees Celsius inside (that’s over 100 Fahrenheit) at 9:00 at night. Inside was a sauna; the standing fans mostly moved the humid air around rather than providing any relief.
But outside, our waitress warned us, was rather buggy which we noticed immediately – that crawling black bug didn’t look part of the tablecloth design. We eventually to opted to grin and bug it and take our chances with the great outdoors rather
Balmy or buggy – those should be the least of our concerns.
Just another ghost in the Wall
Filed under: A New Reality, Business, coexistence, General, Technology
A poster for ther G.ho.st launch on the security barrier near Beit Jallah. (AP)
For this startup, the product may be less important than the people who created it.
According to the Associated Press, Israeli entrepreneur Zvi Schreiber partnered with Palestinian engineers to launch G.ho.st Virtual Computer, a Web-based operating system based in Jerusalem and Ramallah that recreates the attributes of a personal computer’s desktop from any computer with an Internet connection.
“Our idea is simply to use the Internet to give people a computing environment that is not just stored on a physical device, but is available on a Web page or any mobile device and gives you everything you need: your desktop, your files, your programs,” G.ho.st CEO Schreiber said at the launch, in the West Bank town of Beit Jalla, close to Jerusalem’s southern edge.
The company started more than three years ago after Schreiber sold his second high tech startup. He had never worked with Palestinians and knew very little about the fledgling software industry in the West Bank.
“I wanted to combine my technological interests with my social interests. I always wanted to do something to help resolve the complete mess that we’ve all made of this part of the world,” he said.
According to Schreiber, the company’s name refers not only to the virtual computer’s ability to float through the boundaries of a physical computer, but also to the G.ho.st team’s cross-border collaboration.
There’s a Palestinian staff of nearly 30 workers who confer with their Israeli counterparts mostly by video conference. Many of the engineers living in the West Bank aren’t able to get the permits needed to get into Israel, while Israelis are barred from most Palestinian areas in the West Bank due to security concerns. Schreiber has never been to the company’s Ramallah office.
Tuesday’s launch in Beit Jallah was against the backdrop of the security barrier – an intentional decision.
“Ghosts go through walls and the very first wall that G.ho.st goes through is the … wall and fence that Israel is building in the West Bank between itself and the Palestinians and which physically divides the G.ho.st team into two,” the firm’s Web site says.
AP reported that International Mideast peace envoy Tony Blair attended the launch, commended G.ho.st’s initiative and called for more such partnerships across the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
“One thing we know is of course we need a political solution, but we also know it’s not just about politics. It’s about business,” Blair said.
It would be nice if G.ho.st succeeded, not only with its Internet platform, but in forging real ties between people on both sides of the wall.
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