It's called the Global Voices Online, and it's a group blog that was initiated by a couple of research fellows at the Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, a think-tank at Harvard Law School. Countries or regions are represented by various bloggers, who provide a weekly summary of what people are talking about in their part of the world.

And guess who's been invited to represent the Israeli blogosphere?

I admit that I sweated a bit over my first post: What to write, what to write?; Should I keep it all jolly, or deal with the controversial issues as well? In the end, it took me three times as long as I thought it would, but I promised Haitham, the incredibly patient editor of the Middle East and North African section, that I'll pick up speed by next week.

Anyways, I'll be posting every Saturday. So to all you Israeli bloggers who might be feeling a trifle miffed at being left out of this week's roundup, there's always next week. (How's that for an incentive to write?)

While you're visiting the GVO site, try clicking randomly on some of the country names that appear in the green header at the top of the page. I promise, you'll learn something. This is an awesome source of information.

The first time I went to Gaza City last summer, the time I went with Gal to interview some PA officials, I was accompanied by a local translator and guide whom I'll call Khaled. He was in his late twenties and spoke fluent idiomatic American English - which he said he'd learned while working as a barman in a southern European resort city. Khaled wore his sunglasses perched on his close-cropped hair, and he liked to quote the lyrics of American rap singers like 50 Cent. He also looked a lot older than his age, and he knew it. It's because of the shitty life here, he explained.

According to his story, Khaled was born and raised in Gaza but went to Europe in his late teens to work and study. He returned to Gaza in 2000, he said, because he believed in the promise of the Oslo Accords - the promise of peace and normalcy, and an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He missed his home and his family, and he didn't want to lose his right of residency in Gaza as a result of a prolonged absence.

And now, he said bitterly, I'm locked in. Then he said - longingly, but not angrily - I can't believe that, 10 minutes' drive from here, there are ordinary people sitting in cafes and living a normal life. And I'm stuck in this... (and here he just waved his hands expressively at the donkey carts and badly paved roads).

Khaled told me and Gal the following story about fear:

Shortly after he returned to live in Gaza, a few months before the second intifada broke out in October 2000, Khaled went to East Jerusalem to meet a friend who lived in the West Bank. He had never been to Jerusalem before, and he had never - he said - met a Jew who was dressed in civilian clothes.

After Khaled and his friend went out for drinks at a bar in East Jerusalem, they got in their car in order to return to Ramallah. But they took a wrong turn and found themselves in an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in West Jerusalem.

"I started to sweat real hard," said Khaled.

Gal and I didn't understand. "Why were you nervous?" we asked.

"Because," answered Khaled, "What if one of those religious Jews saw me and my friend, recognized us as Arabs, dragged us out of our car and beat us up or killed us?"

Gal and I were astonished. I think we even laughed.

That would never happen, we said. There are Arabs all over Jerusalem. Jews don't go around randomly beating up Arabs on the streets. Where did you get an idea like that?

A few days ago, I told this story to a friend of mine in response to a story she told me. This friend reads my blog, so I'll call her Hadas and hope she'll forgive me for not asking her permission before writing about our conversation.

A couple of months ago, Hadas went to the West Bank for the first time. She is 30 years old and was born and raised in Israel, but she had never visited the occupied territories. She has attended conferences devoted to co-existence with Palestinians abroad, she speaks several languages fluently and she has a graduate degree from Tel Aviv University. She is well-traveled, well-read and an all-round cool chick.

She drove in to meet a Palestinian journalist whom we both know as a truly wonderful guy - warm, open and incredibly generous. We both think the world of him, and for very good reasons. I'll call him Sayed.

Sayed and I spent the day in Gaza together in August. While we were walking through Jabalyeh, he asked if I was afraid, as an Israeli, to walk through a Palestinian refugee camp.

No, I told him, I'm not afraid. (and I wasn't).

Because you know that I would die before I'd let anything happen to you, right? said Sayed, very seriously.

Sayed met Hadas at one of the checkpoints near Ramallah, got into her car, and guided her into his city. Then, while they were driving around downtown Ramallah, which Hadas noted looked completely normal and quiet, he suddenly got out of the car and, without a word of explanation, walked over to a group of men who were standing on the street and began talking to them. Then he started to make calls from his mobile phone. Hadas was left waiting in the car, in a Palestinian-controlled city whose name is synonymous for many Israelis with the word lynch, and suddenly she began to shake with fear.

All sorts of thoughts went through her head - thoughts about politically-motivated kidnappings and killings. Images that we have seen on television and in the newspapers under banner headlines.

When Sayed returned to the car he saw that Hadas was terrified and immediately began to apologize profusely. He was a journalist, he'd seen a couple of contacts he wanted to speak with, and he'd just jumped out to talk to them. It hadn't occured to him that an Israeli who had never been to Ramallah would be afraid - any more than it occured to Gal and me that a Palestinian would be afraid to wander around a Jewish city or neighbourhood. And it certainly never occured to him that Hadas would be afraid of him - because they were friends.

Hadas and I were sitting in a cafe near Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv while she told me this story. We were drinking cappuccinos, a song by the Cocteau Twins was playing on the stereo, the barman wearing retro-frame glasses and a vintage shirt was frothing milk at the espresso machine, and we were surrounded by the trendy, leftist Tel Aviv bohemian types who populate the neighbourhood - writers, artists, actors and musicians.

I was so ashamed, said Hadas, as she smiled painfully. I can't believe I thought that Sayed would hurt me. Now I really understand how deeply the fear is lodged in our subconscious.

Once my bank account manager tried to call me on my mobile about my very scary overdraft, but she couldn't contact me because I was in Gaza and my mobile service provider doesn't extend its service across the Green Line. So she left a message, and the next day I went to the bank to sit down for a lecture about my dire financial situation and to try to sort things out. I explained that I hadn't been reachable the previous day because I'd been in Gaza.

"You were where?!" she shrieked. "Oh my God!" Turning to her colleagues sitting in the cubicles on either side, she yelled, "Orna! Rachel! Lisa went to Gaza!"

Orna and Rachel gathered around, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads and asking what in the world I was thinking about, wasn't I afraid to be in such a dangerous place, and did my mother know I went to Gaza?

Listen, I told them, it's really not the way it looks on the nightly news. I didn't see any masked Hamas men walking around, no-one threatened me. Actually, I had a really good time. I had a great lunch at a seafood restaurant near the beach in Jabalyeh.

Ah, they said, but you went as a journalist! And you spoke English! You didn't tell them you were Israeli, right?

Um, actually I told everyone I was Israeli, I said. I spoke Hebrew to a lot of the locals, because they didn't speak English but they'd worked in Israel so they spoke the language. And I didn't wear a sign that said "journalist."

Orna and Rachel looked at me doubtfully. My bank manager asked me again what my mother had to say about the matter of my life-threatening day trip across the Green Line. They all seemed to think I had a screw (or two) loose.

For a couple of minutes I hoped that my perceived bravery would win me a break, and that my motherly bank manager would agree to extend my overdraft for a week or two. But noooo.....

We Jews and Arabs, we live side-by-side and we watch each other and we interact (sometimes) but we don't really know each other. We think we do, but we don't. Ignorance leads to fear, and too often fear does lead to loathing.

Jews read the breathless reports in the Israeli mass circulation dailies about drive-by shootings of civilians in the West Bank and they draw their conclusions about "those Arabs." Not the Arabs who carried out the shootings, but those Arabs. And the Arabs read in their newspapers about the Jewish resident of the West Bank who shot and killed four of his Palestinian employees for no reason, and they draw their conclusions about "those Jews." Not the Jew who shot his employees, but those Jews.

When I interviewed an assistant minister of security in the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah a couple of months ago, he asked why the Israeli media never reported the incidents of cooperation between the Palestinian and Israeli police. He gave us a two-page list of such incidents - just for the month of June. Each incident had the name and contact number of the Israeli police officers involved, and we were invited to call them to confirm the veracity of the report.

No sane person would try to deny that there is a lot of political violence in this region. What we do deny is that we are far too influenced by how those incidents are reported. A three-page heart-rending story about the widows of the two men who were murdered in the lynch five years ago does sell newspapers. A story about Palestinian-Israeli cooperation does not. And I'd bet money that a nice story about a conference on Israeli-Palestinian co-existence wouldn't sell too many Palestinian newpapers, either.

So yes, we have a free and lively press in Israel. But let's not forget that a free press depends on its revenues to survive. And I really don't think that we're going to get anywhere around here until we learn to read between the lines, and to let the reporters and editors know that we'd like a more complete picture of what's going on. Otherwise we'll just remain convinced that the Other is a terrifying, murderous beast who simply cannot be trusted. Because he's one of those.

During a visit to Paris that fell on Yom Kippur, my friend Ilan once found himself unable to pay a for a taxi ride. He'd arrived at his destination, discovered that his wallet was empty and asked the driver to wait just one minute while he withdrew some money from a nearby automatic teller machine. That's when he learned that the debit cards issued by Israeli banks do not work on the holiest day of the year.

He was not amused.

Each year, I find myself having to explain to friends living abroad, or foreigners in Israel, what it means when a whole country simply shuts down from dusk one day until after dark the following day. And it's difficult for them to understand, because the Western world is so oriented toward a non-stop, 24-hour style of living.

But what if I need to call my driver to take me somewhere? asked the European journalist. You can't, I told him. Make sure that you are where you want to be on Yom Kippur, because you'll only be able to travel as far as your legs can take you. The airport is closed, the roads are closed to all non-emergency motorized vehicles, every single place of business is closed and there are no television or radio broadcasts.* Everything simply stops.

Yesterday morning I woke up very early just so that I could go outside and listen to the silence. It was still too early for the synagogue goers, and the kids on their bicycles weren't out yet either - just a few dog walkers and some old men reading their newspapers. I could hear the birds chirping and the leaves rustling in the breeze, and the peace was sublime.

Last year I wrote this post that describes my feelings about Tel Aviv on Yom Kippur.

This year, during one of the last television news broadcasts before Yom Kippur, the rabbi of a yeshiva in Petah Tikva was interviewed about the holy day as it is observed in Israel. The interviewer asked the rabbi what he thought of secular Israelis who spent the day watching movies on DVD at home, or riding their bicycles on the traffic-free roads, instead of praying, fasting and repenting for their sins at the synagogue. The rabbi smiled gently and told the interviewer that it didn't really matter how one observed the day of repentance in Israel. No-one, he said, could be immune to the special atmosphere of peace and spirituality on that day.

And I thought, that's my kind of rabbi.

*This is of course not true of the Arab towns and villages, or of East Jerusalem.

Diana just returned from a medical conference in Europe. She said there were a lot of physicians from various Arab countries - including a female physician from Saudi Arabia who was single, in her forties and chaperoned by her father.

We talked about her experiences there after the massive Rosh Hashana dinner she hosted at her place. Her 74 year-old widowed mother's boyfriend, who looks the way I imagine a member of the Soprano family's Bucharest branch would look, if there were one, is a chef at a Romanian restaurant in Jaffa. Diana can't stand him. She can't understand why her cultured, multilingual mother, who is also a physician, lives with a man who once worked as a waiter in Bucharest and pulls his thin gray hair into a little pig's tail at the back of his head. But the boyfriend does have one redeeming quality - a skill which Diana utterly lacks: he can cook. I would repeat the menu here, but I still have indigestion and just thinking about the enormous amounts of food that were practically stuffed down my throat makes me feel nauseated.

I had a lovely time, though. The guests were old friends of the family, ethnic Hungarians from Romania who had immigrated to Israel during the mid-1980s. With the exception of the dreaded boyfriend, they were all highly educated, cultured people who spoke Romanian, Hungarian and German pretty much interchangeably. Oh yes, and also broken Hebrew. Listening to the polyglot conversations, I felt as though I were caught in some Franz-Josef time warp.

The man sitting next to me was a 70 year-old who had a double PhD - in agronomy and accounting. He couldn't find work in his field when he came to Israel in his 50s, so he ended up working as a security guard at a high-tech company. He told me, in a mixture of Hebrew and German, that he was disappointed in Israel because there were Jewish children who were hungry in the Jewish homeland. This is Zionism? he asked rhethorically. After awhile he told me that he and his wife receive a combined national insurance pension of 1,800 shekels (less than $500) per month.

Okay, I said, I know you can't live on that. I'll bite: how do you manage?

Aha! he answered with an ironic gleam in his eyes. This is the sad answer: because I was in a German Lager (work camp) during the war, I receive monthly compensation payments from Germany. In other words, the German government makes it possible for me to live a decent life in the Jewish homeland, because I am a Holocaust survivor.

I reached for my wine glass and asked Diana if she needed help in the kitchen.

After the guests had departed and Diana's husband had rolled his belly to bed, Diana and I turned the lights down and sat down to chat. We've always spoken English, because neither of us knew Hebrew when we first met, 21 years ago. So we didn't mind that her twin girls were within earshot - they still haven't learned English, which they have come to regard as the language in which secrets are told.

So, I said, what happened at this medical conference that has you all roiled up?

It turned out that Diana was appalled by how ignorant the Arab doctors were about Israel. They don't know the first thing about our lives, she said. They think that we're all running around killing Arabs, that the whole country is a war zone. They don't know that we're just living normal, middle class lives. They think that the violent extremists they see on television represent the majority.

Uh huh, I said. Remember how mad you were with me when I suggested that perhaps most people in Gaza just want to live normal lives and don't support the Hamas terrorists?

So I called the aide to a very senior member of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and had the following conversation in Hebrew:

Lisa: Hallo? Hassan? * Shalom, how are you? It's Lisa, we spoke last week about arranging an interview with your boss for [Major European Newspaper].

Hassan: Ah, Lisa! How are you, sweetie? Shana tova [happy new year] to you and everyone you love. May it be a sweet and good year with peace for everyone.

Lisa: Thank you so much! And happy holidays to you too. [Ramadan is starting now].

Hassan: Thank you, thank you.

Lisa: Hassan, listen, did you receive my fax with the formal request for an interview?

Hassan: Walla, I'm not sure. I'll have to check again and I will call you back, my dear. I'll call you tonight, inshallah.

Lisa: Okay, no problem. But do you think we can arrange an interview for this week? It doesn't matter where - Ramallah, Gaza, Jerusalem. Just let me know when and where and we'll be there.

Hassan: I will call you tonight and let you know. Shana tova. Be well.

This conversation is hilarious because I sent the fax nearly one month ago, following a series of phone calls that were always cut off because his mobile phone has terrible reception. He always greets me with the enthusiasm one would expect from a close friend, he always says he'll check and get back to me, he always speaks to me in fluent Hebrew, and he always wishes me good health.

The big difference between dealing with aides to Israeli politicians and Palestinian politicians is this: the Israeli aide is often brusque to the point of rudeness, but s/he gives you answers. The Palestinian aide is always warm and polite, but incredibly difficult to pin down. You've just got to be persistent.

*Not his real name.

While waiting at the Ra'em army base for the bus that would transport the media to the closing ceremony at Neve Dekalim, I fell into a conversation with an Orthodox female photojournalist who works for a right-wing Israeli newspaper. She wore the traditional female settler's garb of long, shapeless smock dress over a long-sleeved T-shirt, sandals and a scarf covering her hair.

We talked about the disengagement, which was of course over by then, and she sighed and said that it was sad, but she had come to accept it. I'm a right-winger, she said, but I think that the government was crazy to let those people move to the West Bank. First they were kicked out of Yamit, then Gush Katif, and believe me some day they're going to have to leave the West Bank. How many dislocations can they handle? What are they thinking about? It's crazy!

And then she continued:

My son lives in [the West Bank settlement of] Tekoa, and I told him not to get too comfortable there. I told him that one day, probably soon, he'll have to leave. Because I'm a pragmatist, even though I'm a right-winger and I'm religious. I'm not an extremist. I know that it's only a matter of time before the government decides to evacuate the West Bank settlements. That's just the way it's going to be.

Then she looked at me straight in the eye and said, waving her hands for emphasis,

"The fact is that the Nation of Israel [Am Yisrael] simply does not want the settlements. It just doesn't want them, and that's it. And we have to accept that."

As soon as she turned away I scribbled down the conversation so I wouldn't forget it. It was like hearing an American Christian evangelist tell me she was reconsidering her position on abortion and school prayer.

The next post will be about Gaza, and then Tokyo.