In Kibbutz Negba, a dozen Israeli teenagers attending a summer camp in the guesthouses of this Negev kibbutz were asked to model small trees, and then decorate them with photographs of themselves.
The soap opera, argues Shlomo Ben-Zvi, is the most Jewish of all television formats.
Omar Baransi, a 71-year-old retired building contractor with a lined, leathery face, brags that he won\’t be voting in Israel\’s general election on Jan. 28. \”We don\’t trust anyone these days,\” he said, \”not even the Arab candidates. We\’ve been citizens for 55 years and nothing has changed.\”
Tommy Lapid, who has made a second career hammering the ultra-Orthodox, says he didn\’t go into Israeli politics in order to become a government minister. But the outspoken, 71-year-old veteran journalist is suddenly warming to the prospect.
The maverick Irish writer-politician Connor Cruise O\’Brien once celebrated Abba Eban, who died in Tel-Aviv Sunday at the age of 87, as \”the most brilliant diplomat of the second half of the 20th century.\”
It\’s as if the Palestinians are having their own Yom Kippur this year.
At times of crisis, Israelis reach for a general. Public anxiety brought Moshe Dayan to the Defense Ministry on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, Yitzhak Rabin to the premiership after the traumatic near-defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the aging Ariel Sharon to power in the midst of the intifada in 2001.
After Osama bin Laden demolished the World Trade Center, then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani made a point of dining out in Manhattan.
David Kosak, a 35-year-old rabbinical student from the University of Judaism, was lunching with classmates at Hebrew University\’s Frank Sinatra cafeteria on Wednesday when the bomber struck.
In the reoccupied West Bank town of Hebron, an activist in Yasser Arafat\’s Al Fatah, a graduate of Israeli prisons, lamented the other day: \”I gave up my dream of the whole of Palestine for the sake of the Oslo accord. And what did I get? Corruption, no democracy, security services abusing and blackmailing our people. And now I\’m getting Israeli soldiers invading my town and the Palestinian Authority is doing nothing to protect me.\”
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