Tel Aviv Diary: Karen Alkalay-Gut

Let’s start from now and go backwards. Early evening at Beta Cafe. I was avoiding that place for at least a year because the food was awful the last few times, but a birthday party brought me back, and the menu was delightfully rich and promising. All kinds of new things. But I ordered my early favorite, the Beta salad. When the food came, it was overall good. Not great, but good. Good company, though. Nice atmosphere too.

Last night we were included in a wonderful birthday party at Pappa’s, and the eggplant gnocchi was unbelievable. Ezi says the linguini was on the same level. One more pisces tomorrow, and then the birthdays are done until passover.

For a change, we left the restaurant scene of Tel Aviv had a doctorate celebratory picnic this afternoon in the middle of the forest. Pine trees, wild flowers, hills… the air of the Jerusalem hills is always intoxicating, but on a clear spring afternoon, it’s another world. We moved from there to the home of some friends who live on the edge of the forest and look out from their flower garden onto valleys of trees. The birds celebrating loudly cannot be reproduced, but I’ll see if I can’t get Ezi to reproduce something of the atmosphere in pictures. The house is a compilation of the natural and the cultural in the land – Hebron embroidery on the bathroom curtains where you can sit in the jacuzzi and look out at the Keren Kayemet trees, sculptures from ancient and modern Israel, Palestinian embroidery on the turquoise wood cupboard. Inside and outside, everything fit together in this house. That’s the way everything should be here.

We seem to be getting a lot of flak lately. Some with good reason, some really not deserved. Take the rededication of the Hurva Synagogue, for example, which has created a “Day of Rage” on the part of Arab residents. According to Wikipedia, this synagogue was around for a very long time before it was destroyed by the Jordanians in 1948 and there is a good reason to rebuild it and rededicate it. But there is no reason to do it right now, when tensions are so high about building in Jerusalem. No synagogue is that important that it can’t be moved, delayed, or just quietly used.

“Beware the Ides of March,” the seer warns Caesar, but I didn’t realize until today that this day is not only the day he was murdered but also a celebration of the god of War. We are exceedingly involved in letting loose the dogs of war around here today, and I can’t wait for a new day to begin. Maybe it will happen the way the weather changed today – as I walked into the front of the administration building it was hamsin – hot and dusty and the sky was beige, but when i walked out the back door one minute later it was grey and cool and i could breathe.

That siege on Gaza? Those tunnels transporting food, viagra and explosives? What if we sheetpiled the tunnels and checked the bags at the border? What an unusual solution.

Those displaced people in Sheikh Jerach? By the same law that displaced them they should be displacing the people in Jaffa who live now where their families lived (oh no, i forgot, we made that against the law).

So now the Corrie Family is here to sue the state for Rachel Corrie’s death. What a tragedy. Still from all the information publicized on tv here way back then it really didn’t look like the driver of the reinforced bulldozer could have seen her. In this case one should not expect evil when stupidity is sufficient to explain it.

The young woman who called asking for responses to one of those Mina Tsemach surveys didn’t sound like she was surprised when i questioned every question. “are you scared about the future?” “I wasn’t until you made me think about it” “would you vote for Netanyahu, Barak or Livni?” “that’s a loaded question. i would vote for Mitzna if i had my choices” “if we get out of the golan without a public referendum, would there be a civil war?” “aren’t there any other alternatives?” I protested the whole concept of the questionnaire, and gave my age, making me officially a crochety old woman.