It's fashionable, these days, to call Tel Aviv a bubble*. It's a city that has, for the past few years, insisted on maintaining the illusion that it is just like any liberal Western European city, or like New York - but with better weather. Like most people here, I stopped talking about politics a couple of years ago. The reality was so awful, so unbearably hopeless, that it just seemed to take up too much of our emotional energy. We couldn't relate to what was going on in the news, so we stopped paying attention. When we read the daily newspapers, we skipped directly to the arts and leisure section. Like snails, we pulled our heads into our shells.

But then, over the last month, I was pulled out of the bubble. I went to Gush Katif, twice. I went to Amman, and last week I crossed the Qalandiyah checkpoint and spent the afternoon in Ramallah. I listened to the stories of Israelis and Palestinians, and after awhile they all started to merge together into one big tale of suffering.

They kicked us out of our homes. They're going to kick us out of our homes. Look, this is where I got shot in the stomach. Look, this is where I lost a chunk of my shin when a mortar landed in my garden. My boyfriend was shot and killed while trying to drag his mentally retarded brother away from a violent demonstration. My neighbour's daughter was killed by a shell while playing outside. We really want peace, but they only understand violence. We want peace, but we're losing hope.

The cacophany in my head reminds me of the first time I sat down to meditate, at a Zen monastery in a wooded area of Upstate New York. Together with about 40 other people, I sat on a cushion in the silent zendo, cupped my right hand in my left hand in front of my pelvis, and watched my breath. We had been instructed to count in rounds of 10 breaths; if any thoughts floated into our heads before we reached 10, we should stop and start counting again.

It took me three days to get past two.

Last week I started to feel anxious and depressed, because I was stuck on two again. I suppose I wouldn't feel this way if I were some grizzled old combat reporter who just came from Baghdad or Kabul - the kind who spends his downtime drinking bourbon and comparing "how strange these natives be" tales with other journalists at the bar in the American Colony Hotel. Unlike them, I have a stake in all that's happening here, and I care.

I told all this to a friend of mine, an Israeli guy who works as a press photographer for a major wire service. He has photographed practically every violent incident that occured in this area over the past few years, so I figured he'd understand. He did. Then he told me that his employer wanted to send him to China for three years. And that he'd probably accept the job, even though he knows he'll be really homesick. Because he's pretty tired.

*This post is dedicated to Hadas.

Last night my friend Jill's boyfriend, Sa'ar, gave a sort of "unplugged" performance at a small nightclub in South Tel Aviv. Sa'ar is an actor/singer/songwriter who appears regularly in a local teeny-bopper telenovella called "Our Song." He also wrote the theme song for the new TV show of Ninette, who won "A Star is Born" - the Israeli version of "American Idol" - the year before last.

Ninette, who turned out to be a very sweet girl with her feet firmly planted on the ground, showed up with her entourage and a bunch of other local stars. And so, naturally, did the media. When we arrived, Jill and I were hugely amused to see that the tiny club was jammed with photographers and a film crew. Ninette - who was sitting right next to my table - was being interviewed by an entertainment reporter.


Ninette's on the left.


Sa'ar performing a love ballad he wrote for Jill.


Sa'ar and Jill, after the performance.

The crowd was enthusiastic, everyone had a great time, and I was finally lifted out of the vile mood that has been dragging me down for the past few days.

Diana and I spent Saturday afternoon enjoying a leisurely lunch at an ultra-yuppie hangout - the new branch of Comme il Faut at the old north port of Tel Aviv. After we'd finished our leafy greens and drunk our espressos, we walked a little - and I played with my new camera. I haven't really learned how to use it yet, and as you can see I'm not great at resizing photos, either. ;)






(Click to enlarge).


(Click to enlarge).

She always ran faster than me when we were kids, so I guess it's appropriate that Adina tagged me with the book meme.

Number of books I own:
Oh, hundreds and hundreds I guess. My incredibly patient mother is currently living with about 10 huge boxes crowding her Toronto apartment - these are the books I left behind in New York, five years ago; since I still haven't found the money to have them shipped to Israel, they ended up in Toronto. I miss my books.
My Tel Aviv apartment is sadly lacking in shelf space, so the books I've accumulated since moving here are mostly stacked on the floor. Sometimes I trip on them when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Reading style:
Mostly lying on my bed. Also, I almost never leave the house without a book - even if I'm just going to run errands; being book-less makes me feel vulnerable.

Last book I bought:
Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, by Niall Ferguson
I discovered Ferguson when his history of the Rothschild family received an impressive review in the New York Times. This story of how Britain came to rule most of the world is anecdotal, informative and generally a good read.

Last book I read:
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
Contemporary Afghanistan - before and after the Soviet invasion - provides an exotic setting, and the plot is pretty gripping, but basically this bestselling novel is brain candy. Take it to the beach - you'll finish it in a day.

Book(s) I am reading now:
"Empire" (see above)
Our Weddings, by Dorit Rabinyan (prep work for an interview with the author)
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham (present from Adina - it's winning the battle for my full attention).

Five books that mean a lot to me:

Only five, huh?

The Raj Quartet, by Paul Scott
Okay, I'm cheating: The Raj Quartet is actually four novels - "The Jewel in the Crown", "The Towers of Silence", "The Day of the Scorpion" and "A Division of the Spoils".
The plot takes place in India, between 1942 and 1947, when India gained independence. As far as I'm concerned, The Raj Quartet ranks among the best literature of the twentieth century. Scott dissects every aspect of life - love, violence, power, class, racism, intimacy - using the metaphor of the rape of a British woman by Indian men in colonial India. Yes, I know it sounds like E.M. Forster - but Scott paints a much deeper and wider picture.

The Brothers Ashkenazi, by I.J. Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer often said that his older brother, Israel Joshua, who died of natural causes when he was still in his forties, was a better writer than he. For awhile, I thought he was right; now I just think they're different. "The Brothers Ashkenazi " is often compared to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks": both have thick, multi-layered plots that follow a family for several generations, against the backdrop of major upheavals in history. Singer's novel is set in Lodz, from the mid-late nineteenth century until the 1930s.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
I discovered this story about a young, impoverished girl growing up in Brooklyn just before World War One when I was 11. It was the first book that made me cry.

My Darling Villain, by Lynne Reid Banks
So I'd just hit puberty, and I discovered this great contemporary novel about a 15 year-old girl from a middle-class London family who falls in love with a motorcycle-riding working class boy to whom her parents object. Meanwhile, she has for years been nursing a crush on the handsome older brother of her friend and next-door neighbour Rebecca. Suddenly, the older brother decides that he is interested in his kid sister's friend after all. Who will the protagonist choose? I was enthralled by the description of her first kiss; it made me want to get my braces removed, fast.

A Simple Story, by S.Y. Agnon
It's not an easy read in Hebrew, even for native speakers, but the English translation is excellent. Shmuel Yosef Agnon was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960; is most famous for his epic "Only Yesterday" (Tmol Shilshom), but I like "A Simple Story" best.
After her mother's death, Blume Nacht take a job as a servant for her wealthy cousins, who live in the fictional Austro-Hungarian town of Szybusz. When her cousins' only son, Hirshl, falls in love with Blume, mother Tsirl takes Machiavellian action and marries him off to a girl from a family of proper social and economic standing. Hirshl eventually goes mad, is institutionalized, cured by talk therapy and ultimately surrenders to his petit-bourgeois fate. Agnon paints a brilliant portrait of Jewish life in pre-World War One Austria-Hungary, and his psychological insights are way ahead of his time.

Next to be tagged:
Noorster; Allison; my brilliant friend in Tokyo; Karen (even though she won't be back from Europe for a couple of weeks); and Ashley.

The afternoon of the third day we took a break from the workshops and went out to explore Amman. The middle-class Palestinian women wanted to go shopping in Hamra, an upscale commercial district near the royal palace, but we Israelis wanted gritty authenticity. So a couple of the Arabic speakers amongst us stopped a taxi driver and asked him to take us to a real souq, or open market.

The driver asked Gal, our designated Arabic speaker, where he'd learned the language. By then we had been warned enough times against advertising our nationality, so we told him we were from Iceland, and that we were Middle Eastern studies majors.
The driver grinned and said to Gal, "No, you're not from Iceland. You're Lebanese. I can tell."
How can you tell? we asked.
Because Lebanese men are very handsome, answered the driver.
Here's Gal, posing with a few men at a coffee shop in the souq.

Credit: Ido Goren
We wanted to sit down and have a cup of tea, but women were not allowed - so we continued on after the photo op.

A few minutes later, Ido snapped this picture from the waist, so no-one would notice he was (gasp!) photographing a woman.

(click this one to enlarge).

So I was describing the four days I spent in Amman to Allison, and telling her that the experience of being dragged out of my Tel Aviv bubble had fired me up politically. I'm gonna work for change, I said. Enough of this hedonism and passivity. "Oh no!" answered Allison in mock horror, "Does this mean you're going to lose your sense of humour?"

Good lord, I hope not.

Today one of the Palestinian women I met in Amman, a young TV journalist who works out of Ramallah for an international news agency, called me at home. We spent more than two hours talking, even though we both kept claiming that we're not really into long phone conversations. Our conversation ranged over everything from family and boyfriends to work and travel, and we finally managed to get past the wall of politics and historical narrative that had been such a burden during the long group workshops in Amman. I felt incredibly pleased, because I really believe that the only way to resolve conflict is by transcending politics and building human connections at the grassroots level.

Once, someone told me - facetiously, I hope - that he couldn't hate me (I'd said something to annoy him) because I'm Jewish and he loves the Jewish people. To which I responded, don't love me because I'm Jewish; love me because I'm Lisa.

In Amman, I kept hoping that we would all see each other as individuals rather than as Israelis and Palestinians, but that didn't really happen. Many of us did develop strong feelings for each other, the result of intense conversations that went on at meals and in the hotel lobby, often until very late at night; but even though we parted with hugs, kisses, and promises to stay in touch and work together to report the truth - instead of the twisted nonsense that is 90 percent of the reporting coming out of this region - I didn't feel that we really succeeded in getting past the bullshit.

On the first day, for example, one Palestinian cameraman introduced himself as a refugee from a village near Haifa (he was born well after 1948) whose grandfather still possessed the key to the house he'd been forced to abandon. I rolled my eyes impatiently and muttered to an Israeli friend sitting next to me, "Maybe I should tell him that the house isn't there anymore. What do you think?"

That same cameraman - let's call him Abed - continued on his theme for the next couple of days until I couldn't stand to listen anymore. When one of the Israeli discussion leaders asked why the Israeli participants were being so passive, I leaned forward and, looking directly at Abed, said, "Since the first day, I've felt overwhelmed by a tsunami wave of rage from the Palestinian side. I didn't know how to respond to that rage, because it made me feel resentful. I thought it was understood that none of us would be here if we didn't think that the situation sucks for both sides of this conflict, and that we were here as professional journalists to find ways to work together in order to report more honestly and effectively, to learn about each other and move forward. But instead we seem to be stuck in the past."

Abed, whom I'd pegged as a boor and a big mouth, listened intently as my little speech was translated into Arabic (we spoke Hebrew and Arabic, with translation every few sentences). He blushed, covered his face with his hands, and then he apologized. I'm not angry at you, he said. I'm angry in general - angry at the situation. But I really appreciate you as a person.

On another occasion, a Palestinian journalist whom I'll call Youssef, a lovely man whom I came to respect immensely, gave me a great lesson in reporting. We discovered that we'd both been present at a demonstration last summer at the wall that has been built in Abu Dis. Mahatma Gandhi's grandson was there to speak about non-violent resistance, but the crowd didn't really seem that seduced by his philosophy.

There were the usual local roughnecks - guys with slicked back hair who had packs of cigarettes rolled up in their T-shirt sleeves - shouting slogans in Arabic; there was a smartly uniformed Palestinian boy scouts' marching band; there were groups of traditionally dressed middle-aged women holding framed photographs of "martyrs" close to their chest; and there was the usual assortment of Israeli leftists and International Solidarity Movement activists. It was hot, there was no shade, the speeches were boring, and anyways I hate crowds. After Gandhi's grandson spoke, Abu Alaa (Ahmed Qurei, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament) got up and launched into a long speech in Arabic. I gathered from the crowd's reaction that the speech - which I didn't understand, of course - was less than inspirational. Suddenly a few young men scaled the wall, which was behind the speakers' stage, stood on top of it and gave the "V" sign. The crowd woke up and began to whistle and clap, and all the photographers aimed their lenses just above Abu Alaa's head.

Qurei, of course, thought that the crowd was responding to his speech. His eyebrows rose in shocked pleasure, and I thought that was the angle for my story - that the crowds were bored by the politicians' speeches, but enthusiastic about populist (and pointless) gestures.

Youssef listened intently to my story, which I told while we were sitting outside near the swimming pool, and said, "No, Lisa, you missed the real story. The real story is that those guys who climbed on the wall started to throw stones. Don't you see? They'd come to an event that was supposed to be about non-violence, but they threw stones."

Credit: Ido Goren

Words will follow photo as soon as I find a little time to write - for pleasure instead of work, that is.

So I left my Tel Aviv bubble and went to a four-day workshop for Palestinian and Israeli journalists in Amman. It was an incredibly intense, emotionally exhausting experience and I'm having a lot of trouble sorting out my thoughts. Writing about those four days is hard. I met some amazing people, though...

Here's one little anecdote - and I'll write more tomorrow.

On the evening of the second day I was wandering the streets of Abdoun, an upper class area of luxurious villas, restaurants and coffee shops, with a bunch of Israelis. We were speaking Hebrew rather loudly, and stopping occasionally to look in shops and kiosks. People asked us where we were from, and we told them cheerfully, "Israel." They smiled and said "welcome," and we all felt excited about being in this Arab capital, getting along with the locals and building bridges and all that.

Then three Jordanian security officers beckoned us over to their official vehicle and asked, "Did you just say that you were from Israel?" Yes, we said. "Listen," they said, "For your own safety, do not tell anyone you are Israeli and stop speaking Hebrew on the streets. From now on, you are Germans. We are telling you this for your own good. It's dangerous for you here."

Last night's reception for Bernard-Henri Levy turned out to be...pretty boring, actually. But there were a few moments of levity, so I thought I'd share them with you. I figured we could all use a little break from settlers, right wingers, left wingers, Hitler analogies and all that jazz.

There was a very spiffily uniformed French guard with a perfectly barbered little beard at the entrance to the French ambassador's residence; he looked a bit confused when I automatically said "good evening" to him in Hebrew, so I quickly added "bon soir." A lovely French woman who bore a striking resemblance to Susan Sarandon asked my name, scanned her list and said, "Ah oui, presse literaire." I had no idea that the two articles I've written about Israeli writers qualifies me as literary press, but hey - if it'll get me free champagne, why not?

The reception took place in the large garden in the back of the residence. About 40 people were standing in little clusters on the beautifully manicured lawn, chatting quietly. Waiters served champagne and unidentifiable finger food. Nitzan Horowitz, the Channel 10 foreign affairs correspondent, was holding court near the round table set with trays of hors d'ouevres. He speaks perfect French, and had all the Gallic gestures - especially The Shrug - down pat.

Bernard-Henri was nearby, and my friend and I started to giggle because he was wearing a white shirt unbuttoned to his navel. He had a flat tummy, though, which is pretty impressive given his age. He was very good at The Shrug, too.

I kept waiting for the great philosopher to address the crowd, or for a musical performance, or for some real food to emerge from the kitchen (after all, it was dinner hour), but nothing happened. I kept thinking to myself, "And the point is...?"

After awhile, the Susan Sarandon look-alike joined me and my friend. She spoke pretty good Hebrew with a strong French accent, and immediately apologized for the dullness of the little soiree. We started to chat, and she said that she had been living in Israel for about 10 years and was married to an Israeli. She gestured contemptuously at the French men and said, "Israeli men are just so much...sexier."

Geez, yet another illusion shattered.