Remember the Achbar Ha'Ir cover I mentioned in part four of "How Lisa Came to Israel"? Well, I found it in the archives - and it's rather different from the way I remembered it. It seems that I confused two different covers - there's another one that shows the fighting in the background, and I guess they just merged in my memory. I got a few other details wrong, as well. The message is the same, though. So I've scanned it and posted the cover below - as well as another two that I thought were interesting.



The words on the rolled up newspapers in the basket beside the television are "war" and "unemployment." The picture above the newscaster's head on the television is of a gas mask, and the man lying on the couch is reading Amos Oz's novel/memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness.



The woman on the left is watching an Israeli soap opera. "He's going to find out that he's not her father," she says, as a tear rolls down her cheek. The man on the right is watching Israeli fighter jets bombing a Palestinian town (identified as Palestinian by the mosque, front and center), and saying (roughly) "When is this going to end?" Note that the television showing the soap opera is much larger than the one showing the bombing.



By 2003, when this cover appeared, the presence of security guards at practically all places of business was taken for granted. There was a minor flap when restaurant owners started adding a charge of about 25 cents per patron to the bill, in order to defray the cost of hiring security guards. Later the Knesset passed a law that made the additional charge voluntary, like a tip. There was also a bit of a scandal over the fact that most of these security guards were risking their lives for very low pay, and some restaurant owners tried to compensate them by feeding them well.
The word on the security guard's cap is Hebrew for "security." The restaurant is called "Beatrice, French Bistro," the little sign hanging from the door handle says "open" and the menu to the right lists "desserts."