During the winter of 2002, a friend of mine started to suffer from strange physical symptoms - shortness of breath, allergic reactions to foods she'd been eating all her life, vivid dreams that made her perspire profusely. Her physician referred her to a psychiatrist; the psychiatrist's diagnosis was anxiety, and he prescribed a mild anti-depressive. When my friend went to have the prescription filled, the pharmacist looked at the slip of paper she handed him and said, "Oh, another one. Lately I've been selling these pills like Acamol [an over the counter painkiller]."

People reacted differently to the daily violence of 2002. Some, like my friend Diana, hibernated. She coined the term GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) for her emotional state. When I sent her an SMS inquiring, "Meet me for coffee?" she sent a cryptic reply: "Nope. GAD." Others insisted on living their lives as usual, and there was actually an amazing flurry of creativity that winter: new bars opened all the time; there were tons of new art exhibitions and many theatre and music performances. I could hardly keep up with it all. A lot of people were in a constant state of anxiety, and feared crowded places like shopping malls. Some became violent: there was a marked upswing in physical altercations between strangers over things like parking spaces and jumping what passes for a queue in Israel. Most of all, people were depressed.

Nearly all my diary entries for December 2001-May 2002, when I left for Tokyo, contain some reference to depression. I was depressed, and so was practically everyone I knew. I remember someone joking during that time that what Israel needed was a crop duster to fly over the country and spray liquid Prozac on the population.

The thing is, it wasn't a black existential depression. I didn't know anybody who was wondering about the point of being alive; in fact, there was a pervasive atmosphere of living life to its fullest. I cannot remember a single evening spent alone against my will during that entire half year. Either friends dropped over to hang out, talk desultorily and listen to music, or we went out - to lounge bars, music clubs, gallery openings and house parties. Every place and event I attended was packed with people, even at 3:00 AM on a weekday, even though hardly anyone had any money, and even though the inevitable presence of tough-looking, armed security guards was a constant reminder of the danger all around us.

And that buzz of sexual energy that is one of Tel Aviv's characteristics became a full-fledged roar. The Tel Aviv singleton's standard joke at the beginning of each winter is that it's time to find someone to help keep the bed warm during the cold, damp rainy season. But that winter finding a partner was about more than just keeping the bed warm; it was about pulling the duvet high over our heads and creating a warm little tent of safety and comfort. Nobody defined the quest for intimacy in those terms; that kind of self-awareness comes only in retrospect. But reading over my diaries and talking recently with friends has made it pretty clear that the natural human desire for intimacy was fulfilled with unusual intensity that year.

I know that there's a contradiction in writing that we were simultaneously depressed and anxious, and joyfully socializing and making love. I am unable to resolve the riddle of that contradiction, even now. After I wrote the previous installment of "How Lisa Came to Israel," I took out my diaries from that time and read them for the first time. The experience brought memories flooding back with such intensity that they felt like hallucinatory flashbacks. I was overwhelmed, and at a loss: the objectivity that made writing the previous installments relatively easy was suddenly gone, and I started to feel afraid of composing the next chapter in this saga. How could I convey accurately the strange combination of normalcy and insanity, of intensity and banality, that characterized that time?

After alternately staring at the computer monitor and walking around in a haze for a couple of days, I gave myself a mental shake and went out for drinks with Jill at Ackman, a bar on Dizengoff Square.

I told Jill about my reaction to reading my old diaries, and asked her what she remembered about that period. My question released a flood of emotional memories for her, too; we ended up talking for more than two hours, and after awhile I dug a notepad and pen out of my purse to take notes. What struck me most strongly was how similar our recall of events and emotions was, and how vivid. We discovered that we had both become obsessive diarists during that time, that we had both been dogged by a constant, heavy tiredness; that we both remembered a constant round of socializing - parties, nights out at restaurants and bars - in an atmosphere that was characterized by what Jill termed a "sick rush." And we both had one clear memory of an occasion when we were suddenly overcome by a moment of irrational panic. We talked a lot about the fear - and about the adrenalin high it generated.

For me, the fear started on December 1, 2001, with the suicide bombing on Jerusalem's Ben Yehuda Street. I was actually alerted to the bombing via an Instant Message from my friend Cecile, who then lived in New York and worked for ABC News. I switched on the television immediately upon receiving her message. It was a Saturday night, and the pedestrian mall was crowded with teenagers having a good time, roaming around and buying felafel. A suicide bomber blew himself up, killing around 20 and wounding many others. (When I mentioned that bombing to Jill, she shuddered and told me that a Hungarian friend of hers had been there, and that a severed head had landed at his feet). The rescue services and television news crews had already arrived, and police had cordoned off the area, when there was a shockingly loud, second explosion. An enormous fireball rose from behind a building at the other end of the mall. The crowd of people had been directed toward the second bomb by the police, because it was in the opposite direction from the first bombing.

When that second explosion occurred, a huge scream of terror arose from the crowd. People scattered in all directions, while the television cameras recorded the whole thing. A friend with whom I'd planned an evening out had walked in the door just as I switched on the television. We gasped when the second bomb, which turned out to be a car packed with explosives, went off on live television. We sat there, mutely, watching that unbelievable scene. After awhile I turned to him and said, "Don't you feel, lately, as though you're just waiting for the next bomb to go off?"

Yes, he said. That's exactly the way I feel.

Less than 12 hours later, a suicide bomber detonated himself on a municipal bus in Haifa, killing 14 passengers. At the time, I was living in an apartment right near the Dizengoff Center - which had been the scene of a huge bombing in 1996. And that's when the fear set in. Take a look at this short email exchange between me and my sister Adina.

That Sunday, the song played on Army Radio (Galgalatz) was U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday."

As the suicide bombings became ever more frequent, my diary entries became ever more curious. One day in January 2002, I filled several pages with a long description of an argument I'd had with the man I was then seeing, G. The entry ends with the words, "I can't believe I'm writing all this stuff about G. when the world is falling apart all around me. There were four bombings today." There was this constant see-sawing between self-involvement and intense, unavoidable awareness of the events going on around us. The rush of emotion following each bombing was so intense that after awhile it became too much, and I stopped reacting to the "small" bombings - the ones that killed "only" a couple of people. Actually, they merged together and I forgot about them within a day. I saved my energy for the big ones that killed more than 10 people.

And yet, while I went about my daily life on the normal-looking (except for all the security guards) streets of Tel Aviv, that anxiety was lodged in the back of my consciousness all the time. I pretended to myself that I wasn't afraid, but one day I discovered just how disingenuous the mind can be.

I was sitting in a small cafe on Jean Jaures street, near Dizengoff, writing in my diary and drinking a coffee. It was a weekday afternoon, a light rain was falling outside and the cafe was quiet, except for the voice of Jacques Brel singing "Ne me quitte pas" emerging from the stereo speakers over the espresso machine. The door opened, and a young, swarthy, bearded man with a backpack slung over one shoulder walked in. He smiled at the waitress, put his backpack on a chair near a table, and continued on to the washroom. I stared at that backpack, frozen. My mind said, "backpack, swarthy man, beard, Hamas terrorist, BOMB." I dropped my pen and stood up. There was a roaring sound in my ears. I looked at the waitress, and simply did not know what to do. I couldn't decide if I was panicking over nothing, or if I should obey my instinct to get out of there as fast as possible. But then the bearded young man emerged from the washroom, just as a smiling young blonde woman, dressed in a short denim skirt and knee-high boots, entered the cafe, greeted him in Hebrew and gave him a warm hug. I sat down again, a bit shakily, and listened to the roaring sound in my ears subside to a high-pitched ringing as I signaled the waitress for another coffee. And that's when I knew that my cool facade was just that - a facade.

One of the reasons I had so much time for writing in my diary was, of course, that I was unemployed. Desperately unemployed. For reasons that are too complicated to detail here, my former employer had paid me off the books for the first seven months of the year I worked for the company. That made me ineligible for unemployment benefits, because I needed proof - in the form of pay stubs - that I'd been employed for at least six months. Then, in one of those "I can't believe this is happening to me" turns of events, the sub-lettor of my New York apartment suddenly sent me a curt email, in which he informed me that he would be vacating the apartment at the end of the month and would leave the keys with whoever I wished. Not only was I counting on the profit I made from renting out a rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan at near-market value, but I couldn't afford to fly to New York to sort things out and find a new tenant.

So I had no money coming in, and no job. I'd sent my CV to 43 companies, but only one bothered to reply. A certain well-known Ra'anana-based company that provides billing solutions dangled a possible job in front of me for nearly two months. I was interviewed by phone, sent a test via email, invited in for a face-to-face interview, sent to do a ridiculous day-long evaluation test ("What would you do if you didn't get along with a co-worker?"), invited in for a second interview, in which I was informed that the job involved at least two weeks of travel per month, - and then, after all that, I didn't make the final cut.

During that period the Israeli economy simply shriveled up. Foreign VC funds closed their offices in Israel, claiming there was nothing left to invest in. The industrial parks felt like eerie ghost towns. The few employed people left walked the paths between the buildings, looking haggard and speaking in muted tones. Many sandwich and salad bars that had provided lunch for people in the business districts closed; a couple of times I saw hand-written signs taped to the doors of the empty premises, announcing simply that "due to the situation" they had been forced to close.

Each night on the news, after the summary of that day's violence, there were reports that average incomes were dropping by 30 percent, and that employment was hovering around 12 percent. The reality of those numbers was a lot worse. My friends who were still employed had seen their incomes drop by 50 percent; those who were unemployed had all but given up on finding a job. After one downsized employee of a high-tech company climbed up on the roof of his office building and threatened to jump, a lot of large companies instructed the security personnel to lock the doors leading to the stairs before the latest rounds of cutbacks were announced.

There were almost no foreign visitors in the city, either. The hotels were all-but empty: walking along the beachfront at night, one could see that the multi-story hotels were like chessboards with only dark squares. Occasionally there was a single yellow square of light - indicating, I imagined, the presence of some intrepid journalist or diplomat. Nobody was coming to Israel, nobody was investing in Israel, the huge high-tech industry was on its knees, the middle class was squeezed and the poor were unable to feed their families. Chen, one of the two adorable young guys who own my local corner grocery, told me that one of his regular customers had sent her daughter in with a sandwich bag containing 10 agura coins (each worth about 2 cents), to buy half a loaf of bread.

Eva, my Algerian-born bank manager, was aware of my situation - and sympathetic. But as my overdraft grew and the weeks of unemployment became months, she started speaking to me in French - the language she uses when she is showing tough love. When her frequent phone calls began with the words, "Leeza, ma chere, il faut que..." I got knots in my stomach. She put me on a strict budget, which meant that I'd have to find a much cheaper place to live.

So I gave up my modern two-room apartment near the Dizengoff Centre, and moved in with two flatmates. The apartment was in an old building near Rothschild Boulevard, close to the first apartment I'd rented in Tel Aviv. Eran and Ilanit, my two flatmates, were nearly a decade younger than me, but we became close friends almost immediately - and have remained so ever since. They both worked full time while studying for their undergraduate degrees at Tel Aviv University. Ilanit worked for El Al as part of the ground crew, and Eran was apprenticed to his father's diamond business (his wealthy father didn't believe in spoiling his kids; until they could make a contribution to the business, they got minimum wage). Our apartment became a sort of commune, with each of us assuming responsibility for the tasks we liked. Ilanit collected the money for the bills and paid them; Eran, because he had a car, did the errands; I bought food at the shuk and prepared our meals. We let the dirt collect until we couldn't stand it anymore, then chipped in to pay a hapless foreign worker to scrape the gunk off the shower and wash the floors. The apartment was always full of people, and it became our little refuge from the scary world outside its walls.

And with Eran's help, I finally found a job - in the diamond exchange.

And thus ends Part Five - which is, once again, much, much longer than I'd planned.

NEXT: Three months of hell in the strange, strange world of the diamond exchange. Passover 2002: five bombings in five days. 20,000 reserve soldiers called up for Operation Defensive Shield. Jenin, Jenin. And what about the suffering of the Palestinians? And, finally...Tokyo.

I have received many anxious emails regarding Part Five of "How Lisa Came to Israel." Unfortunately my computer was absolutely dead from Thursday afternoon through Saturday, so I was unable to write. It's back from the laboratory now (turns out that it was simply overheating because it was full of dust) and I'm writing away. Please check back later today for the next instalment...

I've been busy, but that's not the reason I haven't finished writing the latest installment of "How Lisa Came to Israel." The truth is that the writing is raking up a lot of emotions, and to be frank I'm having a bit of trouble dealing with them and sorting them out. I'd forgotten (willfully, I think) a lot, and reading over my old diaries has made me remember. Sometimes it ain't so easy, revisiting the past.

But I'm working on the next installment, and will certainly finish by Friday night. Meanwhile, here's the first paragraph. Call it a teaser.

During the winter of 2002, a friend of mine started to suffer from strange physical symptoms – shortness of breath, allergic reactions to foods she’d been eating all her life, vivid dreams that made her perspire profusely. Her physician referred her to a psychiatrist; the psychiatrist's diagnosis was anxiety, and he prescribed a mild anti-depressive. When my friend went to have the prescription filled, the pharmacist looked at the slip of paper she handed him and said, “Oh, another one. Lately I’ve been selling these pills like Acamol [an over the counter painkiller].”

Sometime in 2002, the cover of Achbar Ha'Ir (City Mouse), a Tel Aviv weekly that is sort of a combined equivalent of The New Yorker and Time Out, featured a cover drawing that was a strikingly accurate reflection of Tel Aviv's attitude in the face of what was then universally referred to as "the situation." A young man lies on his back on his living room couch, his eyes closed and his hands clasped behind his head as he listens to music via his stereo headphones. A purring cat lies curled up on the man?s belly. A statue of the Buddha sits on top of his television. His shelves are filled with novels and potted plants, and his walls with framed art posters. Outside the window, which is behind his head, soldiers in Israeli army uniform and Palestinian fighters with keffiyehs wrapped around their necks shoot at each other, teeth bared in animal rage, against a background of tanks and exploding bombs.

I guess you could say that 2002 was Israel's annus horribilis. The economy had bottomed out; suicide bombers were detonating themselves in Israel's cities nearly every day; and Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen were killing each other in the occupied -and re-occupied - territories. Each day brought a stupefying new tragedy, for Jews and Arabs alike. Confined by the IDF to his headquarters, the Muqata, in Ramallah, Yasser Arafat had become an international media darling  - 'cause everyone loves the perceived underdog. Many international airlines had suspended their flights to Israel, having deemed it too dangerous. The hotels were empty of tourists; Israel had become a pariah nation.

So we disconnected. We put on our headphones and turned up the music.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's go back to where I left off -November 2000.

The major suicide bombings didn't start until the end of May 2001. For the first six months of the intifida, daily life in Tel Aviv wasn't really affected. This was not the case for Jerusalem. Gilo, a Jerusalem residential neighbourhood, was shot at by Palestinian fighters in bordering Beit Jala throughout the month of December. Residents of apartments facing Beit Jala put sandbags in their windows, kept the lights turned off at night, and crouched low when they moved from room to room. One evening I was at my local laundrette, watching the news on the television mounted on the wall while I waited for my clothes to dry. The woman sitting next to me pointed her long, thin cigarette at the footage of bullets tracing streaks of light through the darkness and said, "It's madness. Forty-five minutes away from here, there's a war going on. And we're sitting here doing our laundry." 

Other than that, inside Israel there were a few small bombs in a couple of towns that were close to the border with the West Bank. They killed one or two people each time, but Tel Aviv remained quiet. I don't quite know how to describe the general feeling in the city at that time. On the one hand we were very shocked by the intifida, but on the other hand life went on pretty much as usual, and there was still some hope that the genie could be put back in the bottle. But the general consensus was that Barak, due to his failure to negotiate a final settlement with Arafat at Camp David and his utter ineptitude in dealing with the uprising in the territories, was a bankrupt leader. He resigned and called elections, and the people - many of whom had voted for Barak just two years previously - chose Sharon, because he was regarded as a real tough guy who would take an uncompromising attitude to Palestinian violence. By then both Palestinians and Israelis were saying of each other, "They only understand power. Power and violence." Well, there was plenty of violence. But I didn't notice anyone getting the upper hand.

Soon after Sharon was elected, I saw a rather interesting interview on CNN. A veteran member of Barak's just-ousted Labour party and a prominent member of the Palestinian National Council (PNC) were interviewed, simultaneously but from different locations, by a studio moderator. At one point the Palestinian shook his head mournfully and said that Israel's willingness to discuss peace had been called into serious question by the recent election of Ariel Sharon, the man who many believe was indirectly responsible for the infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres. At that, the Israeli Labour politician grew red in the face, rose up halfway from his chair, and, pointing his index finger at the camera, shouted, "We did not elect Ariel Sharon! You know who did?! You did! You! With your decision to initiate this violence instead of negotiating!"

"And we're out of time, gentlemen," said the moderator. "Thank you both very much and goodnight."

At work, things were going quite well. We hired several new programmers, and had received some serious inquiries regarding our product from a couple of Fortune 100 companies. By then the U.S. State Department had issued a travel warning for Israel, so none of them was willing to run the risk of sending a representative to visit us. We tried to explain that Tel Aviv was perfectly safe, but they all seemed convinced that we were cowering under our desks, waiting for the next bomb to explode. So we spent a lot of money on sending the business development manager and the CTO abroad.

A few interesting things happened in the spring and summer of 2001. One day I received an email from a Ramallah-based software outsourcer, inquiring into the possibility of mutual cooperation. At first I thought it was a joke; by then army checkpoints had been set up along the Green Line dividing Israel from the West Bank, and freedom of movement for Palestinians was pretty limited; Israeli civilians couldn't get through many of the checkpoints, either. I checked the company's Web site and saw that it was for real. But how were we supposed to meet? How were we supposed to pay them? The whole thing was ridiculous, but also a rather poignant statement from normal Palestinians just trying to make a living - proof that, contrary to the impression given by the international media, not all Palestinians were out on the streets braying for Israeli blood.

Around that time someone from the University of Dubai hacked into our company Web site. The enterprising student from the Gulf replaced our homepage with a news photograph of a Palestinian boy who had been throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers. The photo shows two heavily armed soldiers dressed in full battle gear, each twice the boy's size, grabbing him by his shirt collar and lifting him off his feet. The wet stain where the petrified boy had peed in his jeans was clearly visible. The Dubai-based hacker let us know that our files were safe and retrievable, and that he was just sending us a message. We increased our firewall protection. I wrote a supercilious and unwise email from my computer at home, using my personal email address, in which I asked what, precisely, this student at the University of Dubai was doing to help the Palestinian people in their time of distress. Besides staying up late and hacking into the Web sites of Israel-based companies that produced business software. Funny, I never did receive a response.

Then we all got excited because we were on a short list of three companies to provide a business solution for the European branch of an important international corporation. This was great news, because our CEO was running through the VC funding pretty fast, and we needed to see some progress. Based on the flurry of emails and phone calls from Europe, we were convinced that our company would be chosen to provide the solution. But we weren't. And you know why? Well, the Europeans wrote us, unfortunately we are on a very strict schedule. We must have the product customized within six months. And given the current situation in Israel, we are concerned that you may be short-staffed if your programmers are called up for army reserve duty, making it impossible for work to continue as scheduled.

This happened about one month after the major suicide bombings began. I was at home when the first one occurred - at a discotheque patronized mostly by teenage immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It was called the Dolphinarium, and it was about 10 minutes' walk from my apartment, on the beachfront. The suicide bomber detonated himself shortly after midnight on June 1, 2001. I'd just escaped from a very raucous and boring wedding celebration, and I was padding around my apartment, barefoot, drinking a glass of water and enjoying the blessed quiet after the loud wedding, when suddenly there was a loud, distant, concussive "whump." One of the open windows slammed shut. About two minutes later I heard one siren, then two, then three - and then there was just a huge cacophony of wailing sirens, all merging together. Of course I knew what it was, so I turned on the television. And spent the next three hours watching the horrifying scene where 17 teenagers were killed in the parking lot outside the discotheque, while queueing to enter. The terrorist had mingled with the crowd, and then detonated his bomb.

The next morning I took a book to read over my morning coffee at the branch of Arcaffe located on the corner of Allenby street and Rothschild boulevard. I ordered a double espresso and a croissant, and sat at an outdoor table next to a father with two young children who were drinking freshly-squeezed orange juice and eating cookies. It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning, but the atmosphere was very, very muted. Even the children seemed to have absorbed the sense of heaviness in the air. They sat quietly and drank their juice.

After breakfast I walked down to the scene of the bombing. I'd heard that there was an anti-Arab demonstration going on, and I wanted to see it for myself - instead of relying on the television to tell me what to think. What I saw was not very impressive. Basically, it was a crowd of young men who probably spent most of their free time hanging out on street corners, smoking cigarettes and bitching about how society had screwed them. Or committing petty crimes. There were a few women as well - mostly the type referred to in 1930s Chicago as "mafia molls." Some enterprising businessmen had set up stands selling boiled corn on the cob and soft drinks, to nourish the masses - one gets thirsty and hungry, no doubt, from yelling out crude racial slurs. Later I heard that Abulafia, a popular Arab-owned bakery in nearby Jaffa, was set upon by a crowd, and that the mosque across from the discotheque was attacked as well. But I didn't see that.

One of the consequences of that bombing was the suspension of flights by many foreign airlines to Israel. A British Airways flight crew was staying at the Dan Panorama hotel, located across the street from the Dolphinarium, on the night of the bombing. They saw and heard everything, and they were - understandably - terrified. They told their bosses at BA that they refused to fly to Israel anymore, so BA decided to suspend their flights to Ben Gurion airport. A few other airlines followed their example. Those who continued to fly to Israel decided not to wait on the tarmac to refuel and clean the plane, but to fly to nearby Cyprus as soon as the passengers had disembarked and refuel there. This, of course, contributed significantly to Israel's growing sense of isolation.

After that, things really started to go downhill. There were several major bombings, and many small bombings. By the summer of 2001, they were a daily occurrence. Pretty soon there was a routine: wait for the news of that day's bombing, determine its location, call everyone you knew who might have been nearby, to check that they were okay, and then go back to whatever you were doing. Once I was running on the treadmill at the gym, trying to ignore the boredom of running in place by watching some American sitcom on one of the televisions mounted on the wall, when the program was interrupted with the usual "initial reports" icon. The guy running next to me didn't have the earphones one needed to plug into the little console on the treadmill, so he tapped me on the shoulder and puffed, "Where is it?" I lifted one earphone away from my ear and puffed back, "Jerusalem." "Oh," he said, "Not in Tel Aviv. Good." And he kept on running.

So bombs were going off all the time. Riding a municipal bus started to feel like some weird form of Russian roulette. Sitting in a cafe on a busy street looked like a risky proposition. A couple of times I caught myself checking to make sure my apartment was clean before I left for the day, in case I didn't make it back and some strangers saw the hairs in my bathroom sink or the dust bunnies under my bed. If things were so bad, why didn't I leave?

Well, here's one of the interesting things about human nature: people don't usually leave a place because of the risk of random violence. Yes, they'll run away from a war zone, but Tel Aviv was not a war zone - as strange as this may sound, the fact is that life was mostly normal. We sat in cafes, went out to restaurants, visited art galleries, threw parties and went to work. And I love Tel Aviv. I love its unique rhythm, its throbbing cultural life, its cafe scene, the beach, my social life. Tel Aviv was my home - the only place I ever missed when I was absent.

People do leave a place, however, for economic reasons.

By the autumn of 2001, the bottom had fallen out of the global high-tech market. My employers had run through most of the VC funding, and there was no more coming in. There were also no customers on the horizon. First we fired a couple of QA people, then a few programmers. The office grew quieter and quieter. Then, in November 2001, it was my turn. Over the previous year I had been on a not-very-cheap trip to Paris, I'd moved into an apartment for which the rent was comensurate with my income, I'd bought furniture and clothes, and I'd also spent a fair amount on having a good time. I hadn't saved anything. And when I started looking for a new job, I discovered very quickly what a lot of people already knew: there weren't any.

And that's where I'll leave it for tonight (er, this morning). Is there a category for "longest blog post" in the Guinness Book of World Records?

NEXT: Jobless and broke in Tel Aviv. My special relationship with Eva, the Algerian-born bank manager. Moving in with two flatmates to save money on rent. The Israeli economy in a complete shambles. The horrible week of Passover, 2002, when there were five major suicide bombings over five consecutive days. Operation Defensive Shield. Jenin, the massacre that wasn't. The feverish flowering of Tel Aviv's night and cultural life. Finding a job, at last - but in Tokyo.

Part 4 of "How Lisa Came to Israel" will be posted sometime on Tuesday - probably late, if I know my vampire self. Don't you just hate it when the exigencies of making a living interfere with the really important stuff?

If you had parachuted into Tel Aviv in October 2000, didn't know Hebrew and had no knowledge of current events, you wouldn't have noticed anything amiss. The cafes and shops remained full, the high-tech industry continued to flourish, people got up, sent the kids to school and went to work, all as if nothing were happening.

But it was a terrible month. For the first two weeks the intifada was contained in the occupied territories - which seemed far away, although they could be reached in an hour by car. But those violent events spelled the end of - well, in retrospect it seems like a dream, but at the time it felt like having one of life's certainties proved wrong. Like seeing the Berlin wall being rebuilt, or apartheid re-instated in South Africa. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict was supposed to be over, for God's sake! How could this be happening? How could we be going backward like this - seven years backward?

For hours on end, I sat with groups of friends and watched the news on television. Everyone wanted to be among friends, but we couldn't tear ourselves away from the news coverage. So we watched together. The shooting, the killing, the horrifying siege of Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, when a group of soldiers were trapped for days under severe Palestinian fire, before finally being evacuated. It was all violence, all the time, brought to us live by our local and foreign news services. We drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigarettes as we sat on chairs grouped around the television screen, leaning forward anxiously. We groaned at the sensationalistic foreign news coverage, that was full of factual errors, delivered dramatically by reporters who looked ridiculous in their flack jackets and helmets. The events of October 2000 were the top story on all the foreign news networks, which ran continuing coverage that deviated from their normal broadcasting schedules.

Except for on October 5, when crowds stormed the Serbian parliament building in Belgrade and Slobodan Milosevic was ousted. And do you want to hear something crazy and perverse? We were pissed off that Israel was bumped to second place in the news that day. What? said one friend, only half-jokingly, Suddenly we're not important anymore?

I was at home alone on October 12, the day of the lynch. I'd just showered, and was still wrapped in a towel when suddenly I felt an urge to turn on the television news. I'm not trying to say that it was some spooky sixth sense; I'd simply become addicted to watching the bang-bang. It was like watching the second plane crash into the World Trade Centre: you hate yourself for watching it over and over, 'cause it seems morbid and sort of pornographic, but you just can't stop. But what I saw literally made me scream. Out loud. And I'm not a drama queen, trust me. A huge crowd of cheering people was standing outside the police station in Ramallah, watching while two Israeli reserve soldiers were beaten to death. While the police stood by and did nothing. It was all happening in real time, as I watched. I saw the man who stood at the window and showed his blood-covered hands to the crowd, saw the body of one of the reservists tossed from the second floor. It was the most barbaric thing I'd ever seen. But I was so shocked that my Hebrew - which was still a bit shaky in those days - deserted me. I called my friend Danny, a nice guy I'd had a brief "please help me get over my ex" fling with in Thailand, and, trying to keep my voice calm, ordered him to turn on the television. Immediately. And explain what was going on.

Oh my God, he said. Oh my God. They're killing them.


And that's when I understood how deep the hatred went among some Palestinians. Not all, obviously. It's just dumb to villify a whole nation because of the behaviour of a few. But that psychotic, murderous rage frightened me badly. I understood that things were way out of control, and that the existence of that kind of hatred meant that not everyone was in love with peace.

In mid-October the violence came a lot closer to home. There were riots in Jaffa, and in several Arab villages in the Galilee, where the police opened fire and killed several people. I don't want to go into the politics of those events. The reason I bring them up is to emphasize the growing sense of fear, of being under siege. The streets outside my apartment didn't feel safe to walk on the night there were riots in Jaffa, just a few minutes' walk away. And that seemed just incredible. Once again I was hanging out with friends, when one acquaintance walked into the apartment alone. How did you get here? we asked her anxiously. I walked! she said, in a "what's the big deal" tone. You walked!! we shouted at her. Alone?! Are you crazy? Listen, she said, relax, the streets are quiet. Yes, we said, but for how long?

Politically, things were deteriorating rapidly. But the economy was not really affected until the following year. That's when two things happened: the global market for high tech, already shaky since the stock crash in April 2000, finally crashed, and the suicide bombings began.

NEXT: Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, it does. Living with daily suicide bombings. The high tech market crashes, taking my start up with it and leaving me unemployed and broke. Unemployment rises to 12%. Tourism comes to an all-but-total halt, making Tel Aviv feel eerily isolated - even as the nightlife and cultural life go through an amazing period of development that is reminiscent of Weimar Berlin. Passover 2002 and Operation Defensive Shield. And I decide to accept a job offer in Tokyo.

High tech. Options. Start up. Internet. Venture capital. Peace.

Those were the words on everyone's lips in Tel Aviv, in September 2000. It seemed that nearly every other person I met had founded or was working for a high tech start up, or was benefitting from the trickle-down effect. Everyone knew that there were three high-tech capitals in the world: Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Bangalore. Shiny new office towers had been built in clusters called "industrial parks" all over central Israel - in Ramat Hachayal, Herzliya, Ra'anana. Entry-level programmers could command the same salary as a physician practicing in the public health care system, as well as a car, a mobile phone and often a laptop to boot.

Beautiful people wearing expensive sunglasses posed at outdoor cafes, drinking Illy coffee and talking on their late-model mobile phones, greeting their friends with enthusiastic kisses on each cheek. The Max Mara shop at the upscale Gan Ha'Ir (City Garden) shopping complex was full of customers, and luxury apartment buildings were being built all over central Israel. An interior designer friend told me in an incredulous tone that many purchasers of new apartments were spending up to $50,000 to replace the standard ceramic tile floors with imported parquet.

When I left Israel in the mid-1980s, there was one state-run - and very boring - television station. It could take years to get a telephone line installed (apartment rental listings were divided into "with phone" and "without phone" columns). There was one shopping mall in the whole country - the Dizengoff Centre. There was runaway inflation that ate up the foreign exchange value of salaries, which were low to begin with, and the selection of imported goods was small and terribly expensive. Very few people had air conditioning at home, not only because the units were expensive, but also because they drove the electricity bills to a prohibitive level. The coffee was not great, either. With the exception of a small, wealthy elite, most people lived modestly. Regular travel abroad was not taken for granted, as it is today for most, and local tastes in food and entertainment tended to reflect that fact. Israel was fun and charming, but it was provincial.

But all that had changed during the 1990s. Now there was cable television, air conditioning, imported Italian coffee, rapid Internet access, disposable income, affordable weekend travel packages to Europe, excellent theatre, film and music (literature was always good), Club Med and sushi restaurants. The good life had, for many, arrived. There was no need to seek it abroad anymore, and in fact the vast majority of my Israeli friends from New York, many of whom had lived abroad for a decade or more, had come home.

The sense of satisfaction was vey much connected to the nearly universal certainty that soon - very soon - there would be peace between Israel and all her neighbours. That we were accepted, at last. The borders would be open, and there would be business cooperation that would make the whole region prosperous. Fifty-two years of conflict were over, everyone thought, and at last Israel had become a normal, Western nation.

I called my friend M., a gay lawyer I'd last seen at a party in the East Village two years previously, who was living in Jerusalem. He told me enthusiastically that he'd recently formed a partnership with a Palestinian attorney in Ramallah. Come visit us at our office! he said. We'll take you out for lunch at a great restaurant in Ramallah. You can meet my partner's family.

My friend A., a successful diamond manufacturer, had recently moved his factory from Antwerp to the diamond district in Ramat Gan. His wife had just given birth to their second child, and they were living in a posh new North Tel Aviv apartment complex with a doorman and a swimming pool. Their neighbour was the Jordanian ambassador. Life here is great! he said. Last night I was sitting with a friend at an outdoor cafe by the beach in Herzliya Pituach, having a beer, watching all the gorgeous women, and I said, Man, this is a great country. The weather's gorgeous, there are lots of jobs, soon we'll be able to drive to Beirut and Damascus, it's like living in the South of France. You should definitely stay. Come over for dinner tonight - I'll pick you up and bring you back. And then, putting on a fake Israeli accent, he said, Lisa, welcome to the holy land.

Another Israeli couple I'd known in New York invited me to their newborn daughter's "brita" (party celebrating the naming of a girl) at their home in Savyon, a wealthy suburb of tree-lined streets and large private homes. When I'd known them in New York, he was studying for his MBA while working at the Israeli consulate, and she was studying industrial design at a well-known Manhattan college. Since then, he had risen to director of a well-known bank that specialized in high tech investment funding, and she had become a mother of leisure who had two Filipinas to help care for her three children and keep her house clean. The brita was extremely ostentatious, with a mini-playground set up for the children in the vast garden, a DJ, black-clad waiters and masses of catered fusion food for the 200 well-heeled guests. I wandered around with my glass of white wine, taking it all in. Five years ago these friends had been a young, struggling couple living in a tiny New York apartment. Now they were uber yuppies.

Everywhere I went, I was showered with warmth and hospitality. Acquaintances I hadn't spoken to in years responded warmly to my phone calls, invited me for dinner, asked whether I needed a place to stay, offered to help find me a job. My friend Anat, whom I hadn't seen in nearly three years, told me she was going to South America for three weeks, gave me the keys to her apartment, and told me to make myself at home while she was away. The day before Anat returned from her vacation, a guy I'd met just a week previously at a mutual friend's home told me he was going to India for a month, and I could have his apartment while he was gone. When I offered to pay his rent, he brushed the suggestion aside and said he'd been planning to leave the apartment empty, so I might as well enjoy it.

One night, soon after my arrival, my friend Gal took me for a ride on his moped along the Tel Aviv beachfront. It was a typically hot, sultry, mid-September night, and the humid breeze smelled like baked dust, sea water and diesel fuel. Gal kept twisting around to shout out the names of various landmarks as we roared along ("that's where you get the best homemade Sicilian ice cream in Israel"; "that's the beach where musicians get together on Fridays at sunset to jam") when suddenly I saw something that really caught my interest. Coming towards us from the opposite direction was a sleek new gray Jaguar with Amman license plates. The driver was wearing a double-breasted blue blazer with an ascot tucked into the open collar of his shirt, and his female passenger had "big hair" and carefully-applied red lipstick.

I rapped Gal's helmet with my knuckles and shouted into his ear, "Did you see that?! That was a car from Jordan!"

"Oh yeah," he shouted nonchalantly, "Rich Jordanians drive over all the time. They stay at the Dan Panorama [a five-star hotel] and go shopping at the new mall in Ramat Aviv."

This is it! I said to myself. The New Middle East has arrived. And I'm staying.

Soon after that I landed a job, through a friend of a friend who was the CTO of a brand-new start up company that had just closed $5.5 million in initial funding. The job would start about a month later. He offered me a salary that was competitive with what I would have earned for the same position in New York, given the much lower cost of housing in Tel Aviv, plus a mobile phone and a laptop. Even if I had a driver's license (what, I didn't tell you that I don't know how to drive?), the car issue was moot because I'd found an apartment within walking distance of the central Tel Aviv office. My sub-lettor in New York wrote that he wanted to stay on for at least another year, and agreed to continue paying the rent on a quarterly basis. I'd even met a guy.

Everything looked bright and wonderful.

When I write that there was no hint of the horror to come, you might shake your head and point to the fact that Barak and Arafat had just failed to come to a final agreement at Camp David. Or you might point out that there had just been a couple of violent incidents in the occupied territories - a soldier killed in an ambush in Gaza, some Palestinian policemen who had opened fire on their Israeli colleagues during a joint patrol in the (we thought) soon-to-be-evacuated West Bank. That the settlments in the West Bank were still expanding. But this is hindsight talking. There were some tiny ripples of unease in the aftermath of those incidents, but overall, seven years after the famous Arafat-Rabin handshake in the Rose Garden, Oslo seemed like a done deal. The IDF had already withdrawn completely from large chunks of the West Bank, which had been handed over to Palestinian authority. There was a Palestinian airport in Gaza, and a casino jointly owned by Palestinians and Israelis in Jericho. The IDF had withdrawn completely from South Lebanon, and Barak was promising imminent peace with Syria.

It seemed so very self evident that peace was good for everyone.

So when all hell broke loose at the end of September 2000, we were all in a state of shock. We sat in front of the television, watching the unceasing coverage of riots in the West Bank and IDF counter attacks, and we felt as if our world was falling apart.

I wrote in my diary, "I just feel like standing in the middle of it all and screaming, 'STOP!'"

NEXT: Watching the conflict heat up. The day of the lynch. The suicide bombings. And why I decided to stay.

In September 2000 I flew to Tel Aviv from Bangkok on Royal Jordanian Airlines. I'd spent the previous few months wandering around India, mostly in Himachal Pradesh, the Punjab and Rajasthan. My baggage consisted of a dusty, much-used backpack, a persistent case of dysentery (I probably shouldn't have drunk that unfiltered tap water when I was up in the mountains) and a rather bruised, post-breakup heart. My apartment in New York was sub-let for another two months, and the plan was to spend some time with old friends in Israel, check out Tel Aviv and see if I could find a job. If things worked out, I would stay; if not, I would go back to New York.

While Noorster and I were corresponding about our remarkably similar Jerusalem experiences (we even lived in the same dormitory building on the Hebrew University campus), I started to write her about my arrival in Israel four years ago - and then decided to leave her hanging, right in the middle, because hey, it's a blogworthy tale.

The flight:
I flew Royal Jordanian because it was the cheapest deal that Pattama, my favourite Bangkok travel agent, could find. The flight was via Doha, where there was a two-hour layover, and Amman, where Israel-bound passengers transferred to a small plane for the 20-minute journey to Tel Aviv.

Bangkok-Doha
There were a few other Israelis on the flight - young, pierced, tattooed, wearing the colourful, baggy and cheap clothes that tourists buy in India. They were friendly, chatty and completely certain that the young Jordanian guy with whom they struck up a conversation was just as interested in getting to know them as they were him. I felt a bit sorry for that polite young Jordanian, dressed in his Ralph Lauren Oxford cloth shirt, neatly pressed Levi's and loafers. He didn't seem to know quite what to do with those breezy, casual young Israelis and their incessant chatter. It was a long flight, and I watched as he sank further and further into his seat, speaking softly but never missing his conversational cue, probably wondering if he'd be obliged to keep talking for the entire flight. I wondered if he was uncomfortable because he didn't want the other passengers to see him being overly friendly with Israelis, or because his image of Israelis was being challenged. Or maybe he just wanted some peace and quiet.

We weren't allowed to disembark in Doha, so we stood in the aisles of the plane and looked out the windows at the vast brown expanse outside. All we could see was flat, dung-coloured earth, a long black strip of a highway, and a Mercedes dealership. It looked very hot out there.

At one point a middle-aged Muslim woman, dressed in a long cloak and a headscarf, pushed her way past us rather aggressively. She elbowed one of the Israeli girls, who was wearing a skimpy tank top and baggy trousers, in the ribs, stepped on my foot and muttered something in Arabic. What did she say? we asked the young Jordanian. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and muttered, She said that now you are in a Muslim country, so you should dress modestly.

Well. What do you say to that? (nothing).

Amman-Tel Aviv
There was a long queue for the toilets at the airport in Amman. The woman standing in front of me was wearing a huge, billowing black abaya and a hijab. When it was her turn to enter a toilet stall, she removed the entire garment with one fluid motion, flung it over the door - and suddenly she had a personality. Under the robe she was wearing a jade green silk suit, high-heeled pumps, a chunky gold necklace and matching earrings. She was wearing a lot of makeup, too. I was fascinated.

But even more fascinating was the fact that the Jordanian check-in staff for the Amman-Tel Aviv flight all spoke Hebrew. Good Hebrew. Were they Palestinians from the occupied territories who had learned the language the hard way? I wanted to ask, but hmmm...it didn't seem like an appropriate question.

Part of the very lengthy security check included a body search. I entered the curtained cubicle and was greeted by a grinning, gum-chewing young woman who had short, curly hair, wore pleated trousers belted snugly at the waist, and had rather a lot of violet-coloured eyeshadow smeared on her eyelids. She hooked an index finger over the seam of my white tank top (worn under a long-sleeved shirt), peered down my front and said, with mock shock, "What? No bra?" She winked at me conspiratorially and added, "Well, it makes things easier with the boyfriend, right?" She then patted me on the behind and said, "Yalla, you're done. Next!"

I couldn't stop giggling as I recounted the tale of my body search to the Israelis, as we sat drinking cappuccino near the gate.

My carry-on luggage consisted of a small purse and a tin of baklava I'd purchased at the duty free shop. But before I could board the flight I was called aside by yet another security officer. He started to empty my bag, which had already been X-rayed and searched, and was just opening my tube of lip balm when one of his colleagues called out something to him in Arabic. I caught the word for "enough," and, wanting to show off my 50-word vocabulary, said, jokingly, "Na'am, na'am khalaas." (Yes, yes, it's enough).

He looked up at me very seriously and said, in fluent Hebrew, "Yes, you are right. It's enough. I apologize. Please." And he handed me my purse.

But here's the thing: I was travelling on my Canadian passport. I wonder why he assumed that I spoke Hebrew? Don't any non-Israelis fly from Amman to Tel Aviv?

The plane that took me to Tel Aviv was the smallest I'd ever been on, but every one of its 50-odd seats was taken. The flight attendants spoke English, and the passengers spoke Hebrew. I didn't hear a word of Arabic throughout the flight, which was so short there was barely enough time to finish drinking my plastic cup of mineral water before the descent began. Not that we ever ascended that much: we flew so low - because the flight was so short - that I could see the lights of Jerusalem nearly as soon as the plane cleared Amman.

And then I was at Ben Gurion airport, hugging Diana.

NEXT: Tel Aviv during the last three weeks of the Oslo dream. And then everything exploded.

I know that rain is supposed to be a blessing in the Middle East, but sometimes I feel a little...too blessed. 

Toward the end of a quiet, rainy Saturday, my best friend Diana called and invited me to join her, her twin daughters and husband Roni for dinner at Moses. After a slothful day mostly spent reading in bed, it was good to get out of the house and be with the people who are my family in Israel.

Diana and I go a long way back. We met 20 years ago, when we were both enrolled in the preparatory program for foreign students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She was a new immigrant from Romania, and I was a wide-eyed 17 year-old struggling to overcome a provincial girlhood. After five years at a high school for girls that aspired to be more English than the English, I'd become a sort of Jewish-WASP hybrid. And Diana, with her five languages and easy ability to talk about everything from literature and art to boys and music, seemed like a character out of a pre-war novel set in central Europe.

Even though she'd never heard a word of Hebrew before immigrating to Israel, Diana passed the language exemption exam within six months and was accepted to medical school (I came to Israel knowing how to read and write Hebrew, but didn't pass the exam). Eventually she became a prominent neurologist in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, I drifted back to Canada and ended up completing my degree in New York.

We lived on different continents for 15 years, but we always stayed close. I guess you could say we're soulmates. Our birthdays are six years and one day apart, we complete each other's sentences, understand each other instinctively, trust one another without question. Often we'd have dreams about each other that compelled us to call long distance on an irresistible conviction that "something was up." And something always was up - a love crisis, a family crisis, the death of a friend. It was the morning after one of those dreams that I called and discovered Diana was pregnant with twins. But I didn't meet them until eight years later, when I moved back to Israel.

It took me quite a while to learn how to tell them apart. Now I see how the differences in their character are reflected in their body language. Lynn is a bit shy, and Kim is more of an extrovert - as you can see in the photos below.


Lynn


Kim


Daddy and his girls


Diana, Kim and me (photo taken by Lynn)

I've been lazy about writing lately, I know. I've owed some people emails for way too long, and meanwhile if I don't finish writing a couple of articles by the beginning of next week the stories may well be obsolete. Even if I did feel like staying in and writing tonight (I don't) I couldn't, because I'm invited to Karen's for dinner; I think this is the first time she and Ezi will be cooking for guests since they bravely undertook the daunting task of renovating their kitchen. So maybe tomorrow afternoon I'll sit down and write a post about the story I've been running around in my head for the last week: How Lisa Came to Israel.

Meanwhile, I'll try to keep you all amused with some of the photos I took today.

My friend Jill and I sat in a cafe while she scanned the ads for a new apartment and I indulged in my vices.


Jill


My vices

After awhile, her boyfriend Sa'ar rolled out of bed (it was around noon) and joined us.


Sa'ar

Later I went to the Carmel Market and photographed the juggler on the nearby pedestrian mall, but I'm having trouble re-sizing the photos so I'll try to post them later tonight - 'cause I'm late for dinner.

Allison took me out for lunch today. I took the inter-urban train from Tel Aviv to Herzliya, a journey of 10 minutes, and Allison picked me up at the station. Just as the doors to the train were sliding shut in Tel Aviv, a well-dressed woman "of a certain age" flopped into the seat facing me, took her Palm Pilot out of a large leather bag and, smiling at me, said, "I love taking the train in Israel. It's just like being in Europe."

And in fact the trains are a real pleasure. They run precisely on time, they're spotlessly clean, they're cheap and they're fast. I reckon that once they run more frequently, and the lines are expanded to include more destinations, central Israel will become one big "greater Tel Aviv." Maybe commuters will stop driving to work in my beloved but crowded city, and the smog and traffic congestion will dissipate. (Hey, I can dream..!)

But I digress...

We had a fabulous lunch at a restaurant in a moshav near Ra'anana. The weather was so warm and sunny that we sat outside on the wooden deck - near a famous blonde model and her friend; they did not, I notice, eat anything, but drank diet cola. Of course. We, however, decided to share a creamy, slightly spicy sweet potato soup, and a main course of chicken cutlets in chutney sauce. The food was so good that I practically licked the plate.

One of three customers sitting at the next table ordered the same main course. When it arrived he exclaimed to the waitress, "Oh, is that the chicken chakri?"

I snickered, and not quietly. He heard me and said, in a slightly aggrieved tone, "What? I've never been to India!"

We chicks discussed international politics and Greek philosophy over lunch (oh alright - we gossiped), then picked up little Naomi from her kindergarten and took her to her swimming lesson. "Why do you have a camera?" asked one of the little girls at Naomi's kindergarten.

"Because you're so beautiful that I want to take your picture," I answered. "Is that okay?"

She nodded and grinned as I clicked the shutter.



Inside, the kids were were making cookies...



But because Naomi was late for her swimming lesson she took a bag of dough home to bake later.

And then, bliss: while Naomi learned the breast stroke I got to soak in the jacuzzi and steam in the sauna.

Before heading back to the big city, I snapped little Tamar - who, despite the cold that made her poor little nose all red, was in a remarkably good mood.



Kids are so photogenic.

On Monday I spent the afternoon with a lovely and deeply intelligent young woman from Iceland, who goes by the nom de blog Hatshepsut. She is here on a short visit, but plans to start her graduate degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem next year. We sat at my local cafe, Ginzburg, and talked for hours. There is something deeply satisfying about a good conversation between two people who have disparate political opinions, but can agree to disagree with the utmost mutual respect.

Hatshepsut didn't want me to post the photos I took of her, so instead here are a couple I took of two guys who are institutions at the cafe.

This is Ronen, who knows how to make my coffee just the way I like it.


And this is my friend Avi. He sits in the cafe all day, writing a novel in longhand, smoking an endless chain of Rothman's, and drinking coffee. He's one of the smartest guys I know - and not only because he figured out how to live his life exactly as he pleases. He writes beautiful poems, and has a knack for showing affection without being false or effusive. His wife practices law from their apartment, and they learned how to make wonderful food during the year they spent in Paris.


After we left the cafe, Hatshepsut and I walked over to Dizengoff street so that she could do a little souvenir shopping. Here's the photo I took of the Dizengoff Centre, early evening.

Osem, the Israeli company that sells essential food products like Bamba and soup almonds, has a new television advertisement for its chicken soup mix.

It's Friday night, and the members of a prosperous-looking family - middle aged parents and grown-up children - are sitting around the dinner table. They are clearly Ashkenazi, and equally obviously secular. (Friday night dinner with the family is an Israeli cultural institution - whether you're religious or not). The elder son, who looks about 25, stands up. He places his hand on the shoulder of his modestly smiling, pretty blonde girlfriend, and says that he has an announcement to make.

"Jessica and I," he says, "have decided that it's time...

Pause. Everyone looks at him expectantly.

"...that it's time for Jessica to learn Mom's recipe for Friday-night chicken."

There's a second of shocked silence. Then tears of joy well up in Mom's eyes. The whole family erupts in a shout of, "Mazal tov!"

Cue theme music, and a picture of Osem's all-artificial chicken soup mix - the one that has all those chemical ingredients with the unpronounceable polysyllabic names.

Osem is a bedrock Israeli company that sells some of this country's best-known name-brand - and kosher - foods. It is not known for its cutting-edge advertising, preferring to appeal to mainstream cultural attitudes. So I'm fascinated to see that their idea of a typical Israeli family includes a son with a non-Israeli, and possibly even (gasp!) non-Jewish girlfriend. Note, however, that Jessica does not open her mouth - possibly to allow Osem deniability (she's not really a goya - she's a nice Israeli girl with eccentric parents who gave her an Anglo name).

Are Anglos finally making an impact on middle-of-the-road Israeli society? Haaretz has an editor-in-chief who is a native of the U.K., the Israeli every-family includes a son with an Anglo girlfriend, and now the new governor of the Bank of Israel is American. What's going on here?

Oh and P.S., for those of you who are wondering why I didn't comment on the sexist aspect of this advertisement, let's just say that I'm...beyond getting worked up by that subject (for now). I'm just delighted that the instructions on my package of laundry soap are no longer written in the feminine case.

People went dancing today... 


...because it was a beautiful day... 


...sat at beachside cafes... 


...and enjoyed the sunshine. 

Last night I met an old boyfriend at a cafe. Four years after our very messy breakup, we're sort of becoming friends. I have forgiven him for marrying the woman with whom he cheated on me, and for the fact that her name is Mona (and mine Lisa). The fact that he lives in Scandinavia, and visits Israel only once or twice a year, probably helps: our meetings are just pleasant catching-up sessions, with some reminiscing thrown in. Also, I have to give him credit for one thing: he really taught me how to speak Hebrew - but not intentionally. He was the first Israeli I met - this was when we were both living in New York - whose English was actually worse than my Hebrew. The day he said to me, "Ehhhhhhh, you didn't waz der last night, waz you?" was the day I said, "You know what? Let's speak Hebrew."

Two years later I arrived in Israel with the vocabulary of a gum-chewing, ecstasy-swallowing Tel Aviv club girl. My speech was dotted with so much slang that I raised more than a few eyebrows among my educated Israeli friends. Reading novels in Hebrew and watching hours of heavy Hebrew-language documentary films on Channel 8 fixed that situation pretty quickly. I still search for words sometimes - okay, frequently - but mostly I forget which language I'm speaking.

Old boyfriend was raised on a leftist kibbutz, but living in Europe has effected a remarkable change on his political opinions. He went on and on about the way Israel is demonized in the Scandinavian press, and how the Israeli left are a bunch of pussies who are feeding into the distorted view that Europeans have of Israel. He was practically frothing at the mouth when he mentioned Amira Hass and Gideon Levy.

That's the way it goes in a democracy, I said. It's called freedom of expression.

Oh fuck democracy, he said, You don't know what it's like to open the newspaper and see political cartoons showing Israeli soldiers eating Palestinian babies.

And you know what? he said, I have lots of Arab friends in [the country he lives in] and they hate their governments more than we do!

So what? I said. You can hate your government and love your country. What's your point?

You! he said. You're just another naive leftist. You don't understand that we live in a jungle, that power rules.

And on and on - cliche after cliche.

Old boyfriend, I said, You've become a reactionary. You've forgotten how to think.

And you, he said, you think too much.

To the guy from Saudi Arabia who found this post by using Google to search for Romi Abulafia: ahalan wa sahalan. You have good taste in women. I hope you'll come back to visit again soon.

Once a week, a very sweet young Arab man comes to wash the stairs in my apartment building. He has blue eyes, a small beard and a shy, snaggly-toothed smile. He never laughs when I speak to him in my little Arabic, even though he speaks fluent Hebrew and a Lebanese friend in New York once told me that I had the worst accent he'd ever heard.

He rides to work on a clattering old bicycle, with all his cleaning tools strapped to a basket on the rear wheel. No matter what the weather - and it has been raining for four days straight now - he always works barefoot, with his trousers folded up to his knees. He fills buckets with water from the tap outside, carries them to the top floor and pours the water down the stairs. Then he uses a long-handled squidgy to push the water down, working methodically until he finally sweeps the water outside.

When I saw him yesterday he was standing outside my building, facing the water tap. "Sabah al khayr!" (good morning in Arabic) I called out cheerfully.

No response.

I stopped and looked at him, and saw that he was standing still, barefoot as usual despite the cold concrete flagstones. His hands were folded over his lower belly, his eyes were shut tight with concentration and his lips moved. I'd interrupted him in the middle of his prayers.

I couldn't understand why he'd stop to pray right near the building's entrance, rather than looking for a little privacy in the courtyard in back, under the orange tree. I wondered why he didn't have a little prayer rug. And I felt uncomfortable about unwittingly interrupting him at prayer.

There's no point to this story. It's just a sort of written snapshot.

Israellycool is hosting the first-ever Jewish Israel Blog Awards. And I've been nominated in two categories.

Best New Blog 2004
and
Best "Life in Israel" Blog

I haven't been nominated for anything since someone thought I'd make a good grade nine class president. Which is when I learned that I am sadly lacking in leadership skills. (I've since decided that I'm neither a leader nor a follower).

As for writing skills, well, I did take a couple of creative writing courses when I was a callow university undergraduate. My instructors - one a New York Times culture critic and novelist, the other a fairly well-known playwright - were not terribly impressed by my efforts. Perhaps I've improved over the years?

The competition is stiff and I expect to get creamed, but still I'm really, really touched that some kind people nominated me. Thank you Annonymous, Mike (do you have a URL?) and Jonathan.

And a big thanks to Dave for all his time and effort.

Let the voting begin.

Now that I have cooking gas again, and since the rain is once more pouring down, I've decided to embrace the winter and make it mine - with my extremely fabulous Yemenite vegetable soup.

(I just can't get enough of this photo blogging thing).




You like what you see? Then do as follows:

Make a stock. Put chicken necks and beef bones in a big pot of water, bring to a boil, skim off the fat and scum, add an onion, a carrot, a rib of celery, a bunch of parsley, sea salt and whole peppercorns. Simmer for three hours, skimming the junk off the top occasionally.

Drain the stock through a colander.

Discard the bones and vegies (or feed them to the stray cats - they'll be your friends forever).

Wash the big pot in which you made the stock, and then use it to fry a chopped onion in olive oil. Add some salt.

Pour the stock back into the pot.

Add the following:
carrots
sweet potatoes
broccoli and/or zucchini
potatoes
celery
lots of garlic cloves (I like garlic, so I used six cloves)
chunks of pumpkin
salt
pepper

and the magic ingredient that makes a boring old vegetable soup into something special: two heaping teaspoons of hawayij. Simmer for about an hour. The soup tastes even better the following day.

There are lots of versions of hawayij, and of course you can make your own if there's no place to buy it where you live. I buy mine from the Amari Brothers (in the Carmel Market), who think my love for this Yemenite spice (and for their homemade zchug - a hot pepper paste) is absolutely hysterical. They keep asking me if I have a Yemenite boyfriend ("come on sweetie, you can tell us. Do we have competition?"), and make jokes about my being a Yemenite in my last incarnation.

What, Ashkenazi Jews don't know from good food?

During my first year in high school I was reluctantly recruited to sing in the school choir for the Christmas concert. I was fresh out of a religious day school, which I'd attended since the age of four, and was quite weirded out to find myself suddenly in the minority - one of only two Jewish girls (it was an all girls' school in the British style) in my class. But despite my fears of being struck down by a wrathful Jewish god, the pervasive atmosphere of acquiescence to authority was very compelling; I couldn't find the courage to refuse the music teacher's insistence that all junior girls were required to participate in the choir.

Rehearsals were held in a nearby Anglican church that looked like something straight out of the village in which Miss Marple lives. I remember looking timidly at the enormous brass cross in the nave while singing Handel's "Messiah" and feeling a bit nervous about bolts of lightning descending, but evidently God - the Jewish God - was feeling benevolent toward me because no punishment was forthcoming. And I really loved the music. At home it was more of the Bach, Mozart and Beethoven variety; I'd never heard Handel's grand baroque oratorios before.

I started listening to a recording of Handel's "Messiah" at home - especially the thrilling hallelujah chorus - over and over. This would have been fine if the walls of our house hadn't been rather thin. Our next-door neighbours were Lubavitch hasidim, who'd been sent by the rebbe to bring real Brooklyn-style yiddishkeit to the sadly assimilated local Jews. One day their 8 year-old son appeared at our door and told me, "My tateh says you should stop listening to that goyishe music." I got the hint, and turned the volume down.

The day of the Christmas concert arrived. Eighty girls stood in straight rows in front of the altar, shiny faces free of forbidden makeup, hair brushed smooth, school uniforms freshly pressed. We faced the music teacher and, in the pews behind her, rows of parents with fixed, polite smiles on their faces. The music began, Mrs. Babcock raised her arms, and we all opened our mouths to sing.

After awhile, I noticed the teacher staring at me with an expression of mild horror on her face, while she continued to conduct the singing. What was wrong? Was I off key? Was my blackwatch kilt shorter than the regulation limit of three inches above the knee?

It took me awhile to realize what the problem was. I was moving. Actually, I was swaying back and forth. We were in a place of worship, we were singing a song of praise to God, and I did what I'd been doing since the rabbis at school taught me to pray: I shockeled.*

I don't know why, but I just love that story.



*Yiddish word that describes the distinctive swaying back and forth of Ashkenazi Jews at prayer - originally a hasidic custom.

New Year's isn't really a big deal in Israel. We know the date is changing, and of course we live our everyday lives by the Gregorian calendar, but there's no sense of significance on December 31. In Tel Aviv it's simply another reason to have a party, not that we need one, and I went to a couple - but they were just normal Tel Aviv parties; there was no singing of auld lang syne, no countdown to midnight, no champagne, no greetings of happy new year and none of that blah-inspiring forced drunken merriment. Just music, good food (c'mon, we're Jewish - if there's no food, it's not a party), dancing and the pleasure of being with good friends.

While walking from one party to another, my friend Alon and I noticed for the first time the poetry banners that the municipality has strung up on the boulevards.



We stopped to read them - poems in medieval Hebrew, formal early-twentieth century Hebrew and contemporary spoken Hebrew. Some were so famous that we knew them by heart; others were by poets few non-Israelis have heard of - like Ronny Someck. Someck was born in Baghdad in 1951, and he and his family emigrated to Israel when he was a child. He's a prize-winning poet who is also a professor of literature, but his background includes a stint as a soccer player and outreach work with street gangs. I've translated the poem that appears on the banner below, which was published in a volume called "Songs of Joy."

We are placed on the cake
Like groom and bride dolls.
Even if the knife comes
We'll try to stay on the same slice.

And since I'm still giddy with the novelty of being able to post photos, here are a few more taken on this quiet Saturday - that also happened to be New Year's Day - in Tel Aviv.