THE INDEPENDENT
May 31, 1997
Matthew Kalman
Later this month, BBC's Omnibus will broadcast a documentary on the Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London. This bold experiment in 1920s suburban living has become an exclusive, largely white, middle-class enclave whose tree-lined streets and smart, red-brick houses have become a magnet for comfort-seeking residents as diverse as Lulu, King Constantine, Lord Soper, Martin Bell, the Sultan of Brunei and Richard & Judy.
A large part of the programme is devoted to the controversy surrounding the eruv, a plan to erect a symbolic boundary around several square miles of north London, including parts of the Garden Suburb.
According to orthodox law, Jews are not permitted to push …
Thursday, 31 May 2007
Tuesday, 8 May 2007
Herod's tomb reportedly found inside his desert palace
Ruled at time of Jesus' birth
 Standing in front of a projected image of a mesa rising more than 2,475 feet above sea level, Israeli Professor of Archaeology Ehud Netzer speaks during a press conference at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 08 May 2007. Netzer said that the tomb of King Herod, famed for expanding the Jewish second temple during his reign in the first century BC, had been discovered in the Israeli occupied West Bank, some 7.5 miles south of Jerusalem. (Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images) |
JERUSALEM -- The tomb of King Herod, the legendary Jewish monarch and ally of the Romans who ruled at the time of Jesus' birth, has been discovered in one of his palaces 2,000 years after his death, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced last night.
A Hebrew University team found the grave at Herodion, a stunning volcano-shaped desert fortress 5 miles southeast of Bethlehem. The team was led by Professor Ehud Netzer, who has been researching the site since 1972.
Herod the Great ruled the ancient kingdom of Judea from around 37 BC to 4 BC.
He built lavish palaces, seaports, aqueducts, and temples, including the magnificent Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, and the vast Mediterranean seaport complex and hippodrome at Caesarea.
The massive stones of the outer wall of the Temple Mount still stand today in the Old City of Jerusalem, where they are known as the Western Wall.
He also constructed an elegant winter palace on the north face of Masada, an imposing mesa overlooking the Dead Sea where Jewish rebel forces held out for a year against three Roman legions, decades after Herod's death.
Herodion, a series of underground tunnels hewn out of a mountain and topped with a magnificent palace complete with bathhouses, is regarded as one of the most astonishing engineering feats of the ancient world.
Herod was descended from the Edomites, a tribe of ancient enemies of the Jews who converted to Judaism in about 120 BC. When Palestine was under Roman rule, Herod's father became chief minister of Judea. Herod was made governor of Galilee when he was just 25 years old.
After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Herod became a protege of Mark Antony and Caesar's great-nephew Octavian.
In 39 BC, Herod invaded Judea to win the country back for the Romans and was made king.
The location of Herod's grave has long been a mystery among archeologists. The Roman historian Josephus Flavius wrote that Herod was buried at Herodion, but the grave had not been found until now. It seemed unlikely that a monarch who spent such huge sums on erecting monuments and palaces that have lasted for centuries did not plan his own colossal tomb.
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
He won't be war casualty, Olmert vows
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS, Tuesday, May 1st 2007
By Matthew Kalman Special To The News
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was fighting for his political life last night after a damning report found him personally responsible for a series of "severe failures" in last year's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But Olmert, who was elected with a large majority just over a year ago, said in a televised statement that he would not step down.
"It would be incorrect to resign and I do not intend to do so," he said.
"There were failures by the main decision-makers with myself at their head," Olmert admitted, but said he would work to correct the problems outlined in the 300-page Winograd Committee report.
Members of Olmert's governing coalition joined calls from opposition lawmakers for him to resign over his mishandling of the war in which more than 1 million Israelis were forced to flee their homes and live in underground shelters for a month as Hezbollah rained thousands of rockets on northern Israel.
More than 150 Israelis and 1,000 Lebanese were killed in the war, which began last July 12 when two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and eight more were killed in a cross-border ambush by Hezbollah guerrillas.
The report accused him of making rushed decisions at the outset of the war, and for failing to consult with either military or nonmilitary experts.
Amid rumors of a growing mutiny within his own party and the possible fall of his coalition government, demonstrators began gathering outside Olmert's official residence in Jerusalem to demand his resignation.
The acid test will come Thursday, when critics have promised to bring hundreds of thousands of Israelis to a demonstration in Tel Aviv to force Olmert to quit.
By Matthew Kalman Special To The News
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was fighting for his political life last night after a damning report found him personally responsible for a series of "severe failures" in last year's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But Olmert, who was elected with a large majority just over a year ago, said in a televised statement that he would not step down.
"It would be incorrect to resign and I do not intend to do so," he said.
"There were failures by the main decision-makers with myself at their head," Olmert admitted, but said he would work to correct the problems outlined in the 300-page Winograd Committee report.
Members of Olmert's governing coalition joined calls from opposition lawmakers for him to resign over his mishandling of the war in which more than 1 million Israelis were forced to flee their homes and live in underground shelters for a month as Hezbollah rained thousands of rockets on northern Israel.
More than 150 Israelis and 1,000 Lebanese were killed in the war, which began last July 12 when two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and eight more were killed in a cross-border ambush by Hezbollah guerrillas.
The report accused him of making rushed decisions at the outset of the war, and for failing to consult with either military or nonmilitary experts.
Amid rumors of a growing mutiny within his own party and the possible fall of his coalition government, demonstrators began gathering outside Olmert's official residence in Jerusalem to demand his resignation.
The acid test will come Thursday, when critics have promised to bring hundreds of thousands of Israelis to a demonstration in Tel Aviv to force Olmert to quit.
Thursday, 29 March 2007
Bolstering Bluetooth
THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
THE WIRED CAMPUS BLOG
March 29, 2007
Bluetooth is getting its first filling, thanks to researchers from Tel Aviv University's electrical-engineering school. The technology -- which passes data between cellphones, laptops, and other devices over short-range radio frequencies -- is already widely used, but the team at Tel Aviv discovered that it had some disturbing security holes.
Avishai Wool, a professor at the university, and Yaniv Shaked, a graduate student, say Bluetooth is vulnerable to "snipers" -- hackers who quickly breach cellphone security systems in order to place calls and browse address books. Skilled hackers can exploit Bluetooth's "pairing" technology, through which machines communicate with each other, to eavesdrop on communications from as much as a mile away, Mr. Wool says.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a commission that develops standards for the wireless technology, has already heeded the Israeli scientists' warning and developed a new security system that should solve the pairing problem. "It'll be more difficult for hackers to get into your cellphones and steal your address books and stuff," says Mr. Wool. -- Matthew Kalman
THE WIRED CAMPUS BLOG
March 29, 2007
Bluetooth is getting its first filling, thanks to researchers from Tel Aviv University's electrical-engineering school. The technology -- which passes data between cellphones, laptops, and other devices over short-range radio frequencies -- is already widely used, but the team at Tel Aviv discovered that it had some disturbing security holes.
Avishai Wool, a professor at the university, and Yaniv Shaked, a graduate student, say Bluetooth is vulnerable to "snipers" -- hackers who quickly breach cellphone security systems in order to place calls and browse address books. Skilled hackers can exploit Bluetooth's "pairing" technology, through which machines communicate with each other, to eavesdrop on communications from as much as a mile away, Mr. Wool says.
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, a commission that develops standards for the wireless technology, has already heeded the Israeli scientists' warning and developed a new security system that should solve the pairing problem. "It'll be more difficult for hackers to get into your cellphones and steal your address books and stuff," says Mr. Wool. -- Matthew Kalman
Wednesday, 21 March 2007
New Islamic party seeks the center
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Ramallah, West Bank -- A new Palestinian movement being launched today is aimed at the moderate middle of Muslim politics.
Wasatia -- Arabic for "moderation" -- is the first Islamic religious party to advocate a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a tolerant, democratic society at home.
The new party is the brainchild of political science Professor Mohammed Dajani, director of the American Studies Institute at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.
Dajani hopes to build Wasatia into a movement with a social and political wing that will eventually compete with Hamas for the votes of what he calls the silent majority of Palestinians.
"Wasatia is a term from the Quran which means 'centrism,' 'balance' or 'moderation,' " Dajani said. "The new party will foster a culture of moderation and attract Palestinian voters who are moderate in their religious beliefs. The existing Palestinian Islamic parties breed radicalism and fundamentalism."
Dajani said most Palestinians are proud of their Muslim heritage and respect the religious identity of Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but many are uncomfortable with the fundamentalism of those groups -- and after years of disastrous armed resistance, also are tired also of their extreme militarism.
"We want to foster a culture of moderation so that our children do not grow up just with the literature of hate and violence," he said. "We want our children to grow up in a culture where people can co-exist in peace and harmony."
Palestinian politics are now dominated by Hamas -- a hard-line Islamic party that refuses to recognize Israel -- and by Fatah. The two parties have just formed a power-sharing government.
The meeting this evening brings together Islamic religious leaders from several West Bank towns, former prisoners in Israeli jails, women, intellectuals and youth. They are expected to endorse a founding platform that blends verses from the Quran, extolling the virtues of moderation and tolerance, with calls for a negotiated peace with Israel and solutions to the acute economic, social and political crises plaguing Palestinian society.
In common with the mainstream Fatah movement, the Wasatia platform calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But in contrast to all other major Palestinian parties, it does not endorse the return of the estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel.
"I would say to the refugees: 'Move on with your life.' We cannot let the past bury the future, even though it should always be remembered," said Dajani.
Among the founders of Wasatia is Bashar Azzeh, a doctoral student in conflict system management who spent seven years studying and working in Kentucky before returning to the West Bank to work for a Palestinian development organization.
"The image of Islam in the United States is that it is extremist, but we have found that hardliners are not the majority among Palestinians," Azzeh said. "I have been to the villages and talked to people. There is a feeling that people have tried violence, they have tried everything, and this is what we need now. People want a moderate political culture and an end to violence and ignorance. They want a reflection of what we are."
Surveys suggest that many of those who swept Hamas to power in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections were casting votes against the institutional corruption of Fatah. A poll by Near East Consulting found that 54 percent of Hamas voters also supported the peace process with Israel. "A moderate, centrist Islamic party will take support from Hamas voters who will not vote for secular parties," said Hanna Siniora, a veteran Palestinian activist and publisher of the Jerusalem Times.
But Mahdi Abdel Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, said that centrist parties won only six of 132 seats in last January's election.
"Without alliances with powerful elites in society, this new initiative will be born dead," said Abdel Hadi.
Nicolas Pelham, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, agreed that Wasatia faces a major challenge.
"Political power relies on patronage," said Pelham. "Those factions which do maintain some form of popular allegiance are those which can offer services and jobs and some access to the remaining centers of power or salaries."
Dajani said that Wasatia will spend the next year building itself as a movement, undertaking voluntary work, creating new jobs and economic opportunities.
"Charity and voluntarism -- this is Islam," he said. "The creation of new jobs does not have to be related to arms and violence."
This article appeared on page A - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Ramallah, West Bank -- A new Palestinian movement being launched today is aimed at the moderate middle of Muslim politics.
Wasatia -- Arabic for "moderation" -- is the first Islamic religious party to advocate a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a tolerant, democratic society at home.
The new party is the brainchild of political science Professor Mohammed Dajani, director of the American Studies Institute at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem.
Dajani hopes to build Wasatia into a movement with a social and political wing that will eventually compete with Hamas for the votes of what he calls the silent majority of Palestinians.
"Wasatia is a term from the Quran which means 'centrism,' 'balance' or 'moderation,' " Dajani said. "The new party will foster a culture of moderation and attract Palestinian voters who are moderate in their religious beliefs. The existing Palestinian Islamic parties breed radicalism and fundamentalism."
Dajani said most Palestinians are proud of their Muslim heritage and respect the religious identity of Islamic groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but many are uncomfortable with the fundamentalism of those groups -- and after years of disastrous armed resistance, also are tired also of their extreme militarism.
"We want to foster a culture of moderation so that our children do not grow up just with the literature of hate and violence," he said. "We want our children to grow up in a culture where people can co-exist in peace and harmony."
Palestinian politics are now dominated by Hamas -- a hard-line Islamic party that refuses to recognize Israel -- and by Fatah. The two parties have just formed a power-sharing government.
The meeting this evening brings together Islamic religious leaders from several West Bank towns, former prisoners in Israeli jails, women, intellectuals and youth. They are expected to endorse a founding platform that blends verses from the Quran, extolling the virtues of moderation and tolerance, with calls for a negotiated peace with Israel and solutions to the acute economic, social and political crises plaguing Palestinian society.
In common with the mainstream Fatah movement, the Wasatia platform calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital. But in contrast to all other major Palestinian parties, it does not endorse the return of the estimated 4 million Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel.
"I would say to the refugees: 'Move on with your life.' We cannot let the past bury the future, even though it should always be remembered," said Dajani.
Among the founders of Wasatia is Bashar Azzeh, a doctoral student in conflict system management who spent seven years studying and working in Kentucky before returning to the West Bank to work for a Palestinian development organization.
"The image of Islam in the United States is that it is extremist, but we have found that hardliners are not the majority among Palestinians," Azzeh said. "I have been to the villages and talked to people. There is a feeling that people have tried violence, they have tried everything, and this is what we need now. People want a moderate political culture and an end to violence and ignorance. They want a reflection of what we are."
Surveys suggest that many of those who swept Hamas to power in the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections were casting votes against the institutional corruption of Fatah. A poll by Near East Consulting found that 54 percent of Hamas voters also supported the peace process with Israel. "A moderate, centrist Islamic party will take support from Hamas voters who will not vote for secular parties," said Hanna Siniora, a veteran Palestinian activist and publisher of the Jerusalem Times.
But Mahdi Abdel Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, said that centrist parties won only six of 132 seats in last January's election.
"Without alliances with powerful elites in society, this new initiative will be born dead," said Abdel Hadi.
Nicolas Pelham, a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, agreed that Wasatia faces a major challenge.
"Political power relies on patronage," said Pelham. "Those factions which do maintain some form of popular allegiance are those which can offer services and jobs and some access to the remaining centers of power or salaries."
Dajani said that Wasatia will spend the next year building itself as a movement, undertaking voluntary work, creating new jobs and economic opportunities.
"Charity and voluntarism -- this is Islam," he said. "The creation of new jobs does not have to be related to arms and violence."
This article appeared on page A - 7 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, 16 March 2007
A troubled region shows its funny face
Giant portraits' goal to erode Israeli-Palestinian stereotypes
Members of the "Face2Face" crew plaster giant photographs on the separation barrier in Bethlehem. Photo by David Blumenfeld, special to the Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Friday, March 16, 2007
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Bethlehem, West Bank -- Palestinians and Israelis were confronted last week with a larger-than-life image -- of themselves.
Thirty-foot portraits of taxi drivers, teachers, religious leaders and others from each side of the conflict were pasted in pairs on walls and buildings around the country, including the controversial Israeli security barrier. They appeared in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Hebron, Abu Dis, Tel Aviv and Haifa.
The photographs are part of a project titled "Face2Face," the work of self-styled French "artivists" JR and Marco -- they refuse to reveal their full names -- who first carried out a similar headline-grabbing project in Paris after riots there last year.
"I'm an artist-photographer who chooses the streets as the gallery," JR said as he climbed a ladder to paste the huge photographs on the exterior of a cement security wall surrounding an Israeli army base in Bethlehem. "Basically, I take pictures that I paste in the street, and I do this all around the world in different places, and the place where I put the photos is important for how the people will understand it."
"These people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families," he said. "We want that, at last, everyone laughs and thinks when he sees the portrait of the other and his own portrait."
Not everyone found it funny. The Face2Face duo was arrested March 3 by Israeli soldiers in Hebron, held for several hours and expelled from the town. A few days later, they were briefly detained by Israeli police in the old city of Jerusalem before being released with smiles and laughter all around and allowed to continue their project.
The photographs were purposely distorted in an effort to break through the stereotypes that each side has about the other.
"Palestinians and Israelis both suffer from the conflict, but although they are neighbors, they only see each other through the media. Both ignore the sufferings and the fears of the other," JR said.
"For an Israeli, a Palestinian is a terrorist who commits suicide attacks on a marketplace, killing women and children. For a Palestinian, an Israeli is an occupation soldier who humiliates him at the checkpoint and shoots civilians and ambulances. The reality is infinitely more complex," he said.
The photographs of 40 Israelis and Palestinians and one Christian priest were taken last summer using a 28mm wide-angle lens from very close up, and the subjects were asked to make funny faces expressing their feelings.
"I take a 28mm lens and I go 10 centimeters from you, so you have to know that something's going to happen with this picture," JR said.
Ayman Abu Alzulof, a Palestinian actor and tour guide from the West Bank town of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, said he agreed to be photographed because he knew the images would be seen on both sides of the border.
"It shows that both parties look like each other, as human beings, as races. It's difficult to differentiate between a Palestinian face and an Israeli face. It will also show that we live here," Alzulof said. "I think a lot of people will talk about it."
Marco, the other French artivist behind the project, said the two of them were trying to reflect a complexity not always obvious to people abroad. "Things are much more complex than what we thought, than what we were told by the media and by people on both sides before we arrived," Marco said.
"We saw people that within five minutes were in favor of war, in favor of peace, on both sides. It's very complex. People sometimes are good and bad at the same time. It's very ambivalent. That's something magic, and when you show them our pictures, sometimes we see Palestinians laughing when they see Israelis and vice versa, which is very funny, because they're not used to laughing when they see the others."
Not everyone in Bethlehem appreciated their efforts. Sheikh Taleb Awadallah, a local Muslim religious leader, said the huge distorted faces looked like the devil.
"This wall is evil," he said, pointing at the towering gray cement blocks of the Israeli security barrier. "But these pictures are more evil."
There are 19 double images -- a Palestinian and an Israeli -- in the collection. The single triptych is of three clerics: Rabbi Eliyahu McLean, Muslim Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Bukhari and Brother Jack Duncan, a Catholic.
"The Torah teaches that every human being is created in the image of God, so if everyone has different faces that they're given, those are also the faces of God," McLean said.
His words were reflected, like his photograph, by his Muslim opposite number.
"I see God's image in everyone," Bukhari said. "So if you see God's image in every person you look at, regardless what religion he has, when you love God and respect God, so you have to respect the person in front of you."
Marco said the setting was as important as the content. When JR was invited to exhibit a similar project in France at Paris City Hall, he agreed only on the condition that his images were displayed on huge billboards in Place Hotel de Ville, the square outside the building.
"I would qualify JR as an artivist, not an artist. It means that he uses all the ways that are available, including viral marketing (contagious publicity, through word of mouth, to generate buzz) and whatever, to show what he does," Marco said. "It's not activism, it's not art, it's something in between where you show your ideas and you display them the way people are open to see them. ... It's street art. It's second-generation street art. It's what comes after graffiti, the same family."
The artivists said they were not deterred by their brushes with Israeli security.
"In Hebron, it was a heavy situation, maybe more complicated than another city," JR said. "We came there to post really close to an army base, and they didn't know how to react. Also, maybe I shouldn't have posted on a door."
This article appeared on page A - 19 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, 9 March 2007
Heart lifeline linked to your mobile
DAILY MAIL March 9, 2007
By Matthew Kalman
A DEVICE enabling heart patients to be monitored via their mobile phone was being hailed last night as a potential lifesaver.
It is a portable electrocardiograph machine, so small that it can be used in the home, in the car or on holiday.
But crucially it can also be linked to a mobile to send real-time pictures of the heart's performance to a doctor anywhere in the world.
Erez Alroy, head of Shahal, the Israeli company behind the Cardio-Sen-C, said it would make taking an ECG as easy as taking your temperature.
The unit is connected to a dedicated medical control centre which can switch it on and off by remote control. Patients who suffer from heart disease, or are recovering from bypass surgery, or simply feel they are at risk, would be able to measure their heart activity at any time without travelling to hospital.
Digital transmission ensures the highest quality monitoring.
'We believe in the future more and more people will have various medical measuring devices at home,' said Mr Alroy. 'When people don't feel well, it can take time to make the decision to go to a physician or a clinic.
'Maybe they put it off until the next day. This is crucial time, when there can be irreversible damage to the heart muscle.'
It will also benefit heart patients who are wary of going on holiday for fear of being too far away from a doctor or clinic to measure their condition.
'We have customers who are transmitting their ECG from any part of the world you can imagine,' said Mr Alroy.
'Most people hesitate before going to a local doctor abroad. They are worried about problems with the language, about the lack of medical history.
'We find that people prefer to call the centre back home, where they can speak their own language and then take instructions.'
By Matthew Kalman
A DEVICE enabling heart patients to be monitored via their mobile phone was being hailed last night as a potential lifesaver.
It is a portable electrocardiograph machine, so small that it can be used in the home, in the car or on holiday.
But crucially it can also be linked to a mobile to send real-time pictures of the heart's performance to a doctor anywhere in the world.
Erez Alroy, head of Shahal, the Israeli company behind the Cardio-Sen-C, said it would make taking an ECG as easy as taking your temperature.
The unit is connected to a dedicated medical control centre which can switch it on and off by remote control. Patients who suffer from heart disease, or are recovering from bypass surgery, or simply feel they are at risk, would be able to measure their heart activity at any time without travelling to hospital.
Digital transmission ensures the highest quality monitoring.
'We believe in the future more and more people will have various medical measuring devices at home,' said Mr Alroy. 'When people don't feel well, it can take time to make the decision to go to a physician or a clinic.
'Maybe they put it off until the next day. This is crucial time, when there can be irreversible damage to the heart muscle.'
It will also benefit heart patients who are wary of going on holiday for fear of being too far away from a doctor or clinic to measure their condition.
'We have customers who are transmitting their ECG from any part of the world you can imagine,' said Mr Alroy.
'Most people hesitate before going to a local doctor abroad. They are worried about problems with the language, about the lack of medical history.
'We find that people prefer to call the centre back home, where they can speak their own language and then take instructions.'
Thursday, 8 March 2007
Israel's Hezbollah war: the best laid plans
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
BLOG: THE ROSS REPORT
Thursday, March 08, 2007
From Matthew Kalman, JerusalemLast summer's war in Lebanon was "planned months in advance" according to today's edition of the Israeli daily, Haaretz.
According to the newspaper, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Winograd Commission, set up to inquire into Israeli shortcomings in the war, that Israeli leaders had already decided how to respond if Hezbollah repeated its October 2000 kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers on the border with Lebanon.
Olmert said that in March 2006, he "asked the army commanders whether operational plans existed for such a possibility, and they said yes. He asked to see the plans, and they asked why. He responded that he did not want to make a snap decision in the case of an abduction, and preferred to decide at that moment. Presented with the options, he selected a moderate plan that included air attacks accompanied by a limited ground operation."
In fact, as the Chronicle reported in the early days of the hostilities, such planning had been long been underway. ('Israel set war plan more than a year ago')
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University, told the Chronicle at the time.
The outcome, as we now know, was a disaster -- both for Lebanon and for Israel.
Responding to the Chronicle story, some commentators made great play of the revelation that the Israeli assault was not a sudden reaction to perceived aggression, but a military action planned well in advance.
Much of that commentary was distorted.
For example, the Diplomatic Times Review asserted that the Chronicle's "analysis suggests that the attack on Hezbollah inside Lebanon was going to take place regardless of Hezbollah's action."
Guardian columnist George Monbiot, quoting the Chronicle story, concluded that "Israel's assault, then, was premeditated: it was simply waiting for an appropriate excuse. It was also unnecessary."
However necessary, or unnecessary, Israel's invasion of Lebanon was -- and the criticism of the war's execution has been unremitting inside Israel -- the Haaretz report shows that Olmert was not simply waiting for an "excuse," he was seeking to plan for a crisis which seemed likely to happen (and did) after the abduction of Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit (still being held) in a Palestinian raid across the border with Gaza.
"During deliberations last June, following Shalit's abduction, Olmert told the committee he was certain there would be a similar attempt to kidnap soldiers on the Lebanese border. He ordered the IDF to prevent this," according to Haaretz.
Posted By: Foreign and National Desk (Email) | March 08 2007 at 06:45 PM
Wednesday, 7 March 2007
Palestinians not happy with Obama
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
BLOG: THE ROSS REPORT
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
From Matthew Kalman, JerusalemSome Palestinians are feeling betrayed by Barack Obama. They say the man who at one time called for an "even-handed" approach to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. has done a policy U-turn now that he's running for president.
Speaking to a forum at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee in Chicago on Friday (prepared text here), Obama called for "a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel: our strongest ally in the region and its only established democracy."
He went futher, condemning "the smuggling of weapons and cash by Iran into Gaza" and vowing to continue "our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel" to "help Israel maintain its military edge and deter and repel attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza."
Ali Abunimah, founder of The Electronic Intifada, criticized Obama's "about-face."
"Obama offered not a single word of criticism of Israel, of its relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of Palestinians," Abunimah wrote in an editorial.
"While constantly emphasizing his concern about the threat Israelis face from Palestinians, Obama said nothing about the exponentially more lethal threat Israelis present to Palestinians."
He said Obama used to be more supportive of the Palestinian cause and recalled hearing him at a Chicago fundraiser in 2000.
"On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."
But then began a "gradual shift" towards the pro-Israel camp.
"The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.
"As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, 'Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.'"
Mohammed Dajani, director of American Studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem which Obama visited last year, has more confidence in Obama.
"His support for peace and a peaceful solution to the problem is much more valuable than his support for one side or another," Dajani todl me.
Walid Awad, a spokesman for President Abbas's Fatah party, said, in an interview, that Obama's pro-Israel statements were to be "expected really."
"Obama is a new face in America and he has to please everybody, most of all the Jewish lobby over there, so he cannot win without showing some inclination towards Israel," he said.
"Americans who want to be elected into office always are very keen on showing their support for Israel. The Jewish vote is important because the Jews supply the money and if he gets on wrong side of them he has no chance at all.
"It's like Mrs Clinton. Earlier she was pro-Palestinian and then she changed her attitudes. This is the format of the way things go in the United States.
"What matters to Obama most is to get the votes. If gets the votes by being pro-Israeli and pro-Jews he will do it. Hopefully once he gets the votes something will change."
------------
Matthew Kalman is a Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent, based in Jerusalem.
Posted By: Foreign and National Desk (Email) | March 07 2007 at 12:32 PM
Friday, 2 March 2007
Medical care for Palestinian children
U.S. group arranges local and overseas treatment
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLEFriday, March 2, 2007
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Jebaliya Refugee Camp, Gaza -- Smiling and laughing, Oday el-Jamal was playing soccer in the garden when visitors came calling at the family home in the Jebaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City.
The handsome 7-year-old with unruly brown hair seemed not to have a care in the world -- until he removed his sneakers and rolled down his trousers to reveal a leg that ended in a fleshy stump just below his knee. The rest of his leg and the foot that moments before had been kicking a soccer ball across the yard was made from metal and plastic.
Oday's leg was blown off last September by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell, which destroyed the house next door and sent jagged pieces of debris flying into his garden as he played there. His left foot was still intact, but only just, the bones twisted and deformed. His whole body was covered with angry pink craters, his young skin punctured by the deadly shards of metal.
This month, Oday will be in San Francisco, where doctors at UCSF Hospital will perform corrective surgery on his left foot and he will be fitted with a prosthetic right leg made just for him and taught how to use it.
"We thought he was dead," said his mother, Karima el-Jamal. "He was playing out in the garden and we heard an explosion, and next thing we knew the ambulance had rushed him off to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. When we got there, he was in intensive care. The doctors said it was touch and go.
After a few days, the little boy was transferred to Soroka, an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, where he remained for two months before he was transferred to Alyn, a specialist Israeli orthopedic center in Jerusalem.
"The Israeli doctors did everything for him. They operated on the wounds in his abdomen and tried to save his leg, but they couldn't," she said.
He was fitted there with a temporary artificial leg, which is already broken. Although the Israelis agreed to treat Oday, because of the political tensions between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, he and his mother were unable to stay in Israel any longer. Back in Gaza, he cannot receive the care he needs to resume normal life.
His case came to the attention of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, which contacted Walter Racette, director of orthotics and prosthetics in the UCSF department of orthopedic surgery. Racette agreed to donate the services required so Oday can be fitted with a prosthesis and learn to use his new leg. His mother will stay with Oday during his recovery.
Oday is just one of hundreds of Palestinian children to benefit from the work of the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, a charity based in Ohio that every year sends dozens of young patients in need of surgery to the United States and Europe, and brings in teams of specialist doctors to treat urgent cases in the West Bank and Gaza.
Last year, the charity raised close to $40 million. According to director Steve Sosebee, it has provided medical services worth more than $400 million, none of which was normally available to Palestinians.
One recent afternoon in Ramallah General Hospital in the West Bank, Dr. Aijaz Hashmi, a pediatric heart surgeon from Loma Linda University Children's Hospital in San Bernardino County, was inserting a catheter into the heart of Randa Abu Shamsiyeh, a 12-year-old girl from Hebron who was born with a heart defect that dramatically reduces the amount of oxygen in her blood.
"This should have been treated 10 years ago, and cannot be done here because they don't have the necessary post-operative care," said Hashmi, who was ending a whirlwind week of clinics and operations.
It was Hashmi's first time in the West Bank. He came with a team of doctors and nurses from Loma Linda who saw more than 130 heart patients in clinics in Jenin, Ramallah and Bethlehem, and performed eight procedures.
"It's extremely rewarding, very gratifying," he said. "If we don't do this, who else is going to do it? We're blessed that we can take the time off."
This article appeared on page A - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Losing the truth in Jesus's "lost tomb"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
THE ROSS REPORT BLOG
Posted March 02 2007 at 09:29 AM
From Matthew Kalman, Jerusalem
The story has been hyped, the questions raised, and the critics heard from. On Sunday night, when the James Cameron-produced "documentary" airs on American television, viewers get to form their own opinions.
Is a first-century tomb discovered 27 years ago at a Jerusalem construction site really the lost burial place of Jesus Christ? Could the astounding claim that Jesus is buried alongside Mary Magdalene and their hitherto unknown son, Judah, in a large family plot -- which also contained the remains of Jesus's mother Mary -- be true?
Back in 2003, I was asked by the documentary's director, Simcha Jacobovici, to locate many the inscribed burial boxes or ossuaries that are featured in the documentary. I was working as a researcher on Jacobovici's previous documentary about the supposed burial box of James, brother of Jesus.
The ossuaries were stored in the warehouse belonging to the Israel Antiquities Authority. Jacobovici asked for samples of the bone fragments inside the boxes so they could be tested for DNA. He said at the time he wanted to see if the DNA from the supposed Jesus family tomb matched the fragments in the James ossuary. But Jacobovici couldn't test the James fragments because they were long since lost. So that avenue of proof didn't exist.
Jesus's supposed tomb was discovered during construction work in 1980. It was explored and mapped by British archeologist Shimon Gibson. The ossuaries were removed and have been on display at local museums and the antiquities warehouse. The inscriptions with the names Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Judah were published more than 20 years ago. The ossuaries and the tomb were pronounced as the possible burial place of Jesus in a 1996 BBC documentary.
But the assertions not only fly in the face of Christian teaching, they are refuted by the Israeli archeologist, Amos Kloner, who wrote the official report on the tomb.
"The claim that [Jesus's] burial site has been found is not based on any proof, and is only an attempt to sell," said Kloner. "With all due respect, [Cameron and Jacobovici] are not archeologists," he said.
Archeologists acknowledge that the artifacts they discover and study rarely provide concrete answers to the questions about the ancient world -- even less so about "the truth of the Bible," a quest that books like 'The Da Vinci Code' has made so fashionable.
The results are unproven, highly dubious claims, advanced by special effects, marketing campaigns and breathless media coverage of a the kind that accompany 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus.'
"You have to have a publicist, you have to have somebody that says, boy, this is something, let's put this out, right," Professor James Tabor, author of "The Jesus Dynasty," says in Cameron's film.
In the background there exists a multi-million-dollar market in antiquities -- especially in relics that "prove" the Bible. Such items are often stolen from ancient tombs and smuggled out to collectors. Alongside the illicit trade in genuine artifacts, there is an even bigger trade in high-priced forgeries.
The most notorious modern-day case is currently being heard in a Jerusalem courtroom, where an Israeli collector is accused of faking an inscription to create the stone ossuary of Jesus's brother James, which caused a sensation when it was revealed to the world in 2002.
Jacobovici's film about the James ossuary was also broadcast by the Discovery Channel. He even appeared as a defense witness in the Jerusalem trial. Jacobovici claims that the James box is not only genuine but also came from the "lost tomb."
"Absolute nonsense," says Kloner, who catalogued all the burial boxes in the tomb.
Equally questionable are dramatizations in 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus' which viewers are led to believe consists of real footage of bulldozers crashing into caves, archeologists brushing dust from inscriptions and draughtsmen mapping out underground tunnels.
One of the opening sequences, for example, has the caption "Jerusalem, Israel 1980" over scenes filmed less than 18 months ago. Jacobovici himself is shown locating the supposed Jesus ossuary in the warehouse as if for the first time, even though I had led him to it more than three years ago.
The scenes are fakes -- just like the fake artifacts sold to gullible tourists.
-------
Matthew Kalman is a Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent, based in Jerusalem.
THE ROSS REPORT BLOG
Posted March 02 2007 at 09:29 AM
From Matthew Kalman, Jerusalem
The story has been hyped, the questions raised, and the critics heard from. On Sunday night, when the James Cameron-produced "documentary" airs on American television, viewers get to form their own opinions.
Is a first-century tomb discovered 27 years ago at a Jerusalem construction site really the lost burial place of Jesus Christ? Could the astounding claim that Jesus is buried alongside Mary Magdalene and their hitherto unknown son, Judah, in a large family plot -- which also contained the remains of Jesus's mother Mary -- be true?
Back in 2003, I was asked by the documentary's director, Simcha Jacobovici, to locate many the inscribed burial boxes or ossuaries that are featured in the documentary. I was working as a researcher on Jacobovici's previous documentary about the supposed burial box of James, brother of Jesus.
The ossuaries were stored in the warehouse belonging to the Israel Antiquities Authority. Jacobovici asked for samples of the bone fragments inside the boxes so they could be tested for DNA. He said at the time he wanted to see if the DNA from the supposed Jesus family tomb matched the fragments in the James ossuary. But Jacobovici couldn't test the James fragments because they were long since lost. So that avenue of proof didn't exist.
Jesus's supposed tomb was discovered during construction work in 1980. It was explored and mapped by British archeologist Shimon Gibson. The ossuaries were removed and have been on display at local museums and the antiquities warehouse. The inscriptions with the names Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Judah were published more than 20 years ago. The ossuaries and the tomb were pronounced as the possible burial place of Jesus in a 1996 BBC documentary.
But the assertions not only fly in the face of Christian teaching, they are refuted by the Israeli archeologist, Amos Kloner, who wrote the official report on the tomb.
"The claim that [Jesus's] burial site has been found is not based on any proof, and is only an attempt to sell," said Kloner. "With all due respect, [Cameron and Jacobovici] are not archeologists," he said.
Archeologists acknowledge that the artifacts they discover and study rarely provide concrete answers to the questions about the ancient world -- even less so about "the truth of the Bible," a quest that books like 'The Da Vinci Code' has made so fashionable.
The results are unproven, highly dubious claims, advanced by special effects, marketing campaigns and breathless media coverage of a the kind that accompany 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus.'
"You have to have a publicist, you have to have somebody that says, boy, this is something, let's put this out, right," Professor James Tabor, author of "The Jesus Dynasty," says in Cameron's film.
In the background there exists a multi-million-dollar market in antiquities -- especially in relics that "prove" the Bible. Such items are often stolen from ancient tombs and smuggled out to collectors. Alongside the illicit trade in genuine artifacts, there is an even bigger trade in high-priced forgeries.
The most notorious modern-day case is currently being heard in a Jerusalem courtroom, where an Israeli collector is accused of faking an inscription to create the stone ossuary of Jesus's brother James, which caused a sensation when it was revealed to the world in 2002.
Jacobovici's film about the James ossuary was also broadcast by the Discovery Channel. He even appeared as a defense witness in the Jerusalem trial. Jacobovici claims that the James box is not only genuine but also came from the "lost tomb."
"Absolute nonsense," says Kloner, who catalogued all the burial boxes in the tomb.
Equally questionable are dramatizations in 'The Lost Tomb of Jesus' which viewers are led to believe consists of real footage of bulldozers crashing into caves, archeologists brushing dust from inscriptions and draughtsmen mapping out underground tunnels.
One of the opening sequences, for example, has the caption "Jerusalem, Israel 1980" over scenes filmed less than 18 months ago. Jacobovici himself is shown locating the supposed Jesus ossuary in the warehouse as if for the first time, even though I had led him to it more than three years ago.
The scenes are fakes -- just like the fake artifacts sold to gullible tourists.
-------
Matthew Kalman is a Chronicle Foreign Service correspondent, based in Jerusalem.
Monday, 26 February 2007
Capitalism on the kibbutz
Many Israeli collectives shunning system of financial equality
BOSTON GLOBE | February 26, 2007By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent
KIBBUTZ DEGANYA ALEPH, Israel -- Yoya Shapiro sat on the veranda of her house, gazing across the manicured lawn of Israel's first kibbutz, or collective farm, founded by her parents and 10 other pioneers in 1910.
It was a unique experiment in communal living, rigorous socialism, and strict egalitarianism, and it thrived for decades on a spectacular site looking out at the Sea of Galilee and the imposing Golan Heights rising from the far shore.
But last week, Shapiro joined 320 fellow kibbutzniks in a vote that finally ended the financial equality among members that was a cornerstone of the ideology hewn during those early years of agricultural labor.
With that decision, Deganya joined a growing number of the nation's 270 kibbutzim in adopting many of the trappings of free-market capitalism, including differential wages and the ability to own private property. The vote ended nearly a century in which members worked according to their ability and received food, goods, clothes, and services according to their needs. Under the new system, kibbutz members keep their salaries, but pay taxes into a fund for common services such as health, education, and cultural events, as well as a support fund for poorer members.
As of December 2006, 61 percent of kibbutzim were paying differential salaries to their members and more than 20 percent had decided to transfer ownership of kibbutz houses from the collective to the members who live in them. At Gan Shmuel, north of Tel Aviv, the kibbutz leased large tracts of agricultural land to developers for a shopping mall and McDonald's. At Ein Gedi on the Dead Sea, the kibbutz guest house is now managed by an outside company that employs kibbutz members.
The privatization process began several years ago, but the symbolic importance of the change at Deganya rekindled a debate over whether the kibbutz movement could survive the inexorable march of capitalism.
"This is the end of a phase in the ideology of the kibbutz as we have known it until now," said Shlomo Getz, director of the Institute for Research on the Kibbutz and the Co-Operative Idea at Haifa University. "It's a very big difference. The kibbutz has changed over the years, just as people mature over time, but the change we are seeing now is very dramatic.
"The kibbutzim still have some characteristics that do not exist in any other place," said Getz. "They are no longer purely socialist or communes, but there remain some unique traits, including systems of mutual help and the practical responsibility of the community to its members. I expect the next step will be to divide the ownership of the communal assets, turning members into shareholders. It has already happened in two or three places."
At Deganya , the supporters of the reforms see the changes as inevitable, but not fatal.
"I voted in favor, but reluctantly," said Shapiro, who was born a few yards from her present one-story home in 1921, in what was then British-ruled Palestine. "I've lived here all my life and I know what my parents wanted. I felt like I was doing something against them, but I also felt it was necessary. I could see that the young people like these changes, and since they are going to live here in the future longer than me, I felt I had to go along with them."
The reforms were first introduced a year ago for a yearlong trial, which was approved by more than 65 percent of the members. Last week, 85 percent voted in favor of making the change permanent.
In the early days, members worked, studied, and did their laundry together as a collective. There was no food in their homes, since they all ate in a communal dining hall. Shapiro said she used to return from cleaning the laundry with a different blouse each week, and clearly recalled the day she was first presented with clothing tagged with her own name.
Until last year, members received their income from the central kibbutz coffers, strictly budgeted according to marital status, the number of children, and special needs like health or education. The basic income was equal for the kibbutz general secretary, a farm laborer, a hotshot lawyer -- or those who didn't work at all. Most members were assigned jobs in rotation, sharing menial tasks and being voted into positions of responsibility. Some worked outside the farm, but handed their salary to the kibbutz.
Now members can earn differential incomes and manage their own bank accounts. Those who work outside keep their earnings. The kibbutz has calculated a minimum wage and anyone earning more than that is taxed at a rate of 20 percent for services including health care and education, which are still provided on a collective basis. The wealthier members also pay into a crisis fund and a health fund to support the weaker members.
"I think it will save Deganya in the short term," said Allan Shapiro, 79, Yoya's husband, who immigrated to Israel from New York in 1955. "When we voted for the trial last year I was worried that the lack of equality would threaten social solidarity among the members, but that didn't happen. Now I see the reforms have come to institutionalize changes which had already taken place."
Realizing that the kibbutz could not be sustained by agriculture alone, Deganya built its first factory in 1967 . Today, its diamond-tipped machine-tool manufacturing plant, Toolgal, provides 70 percent of the kibbutz 's revenues, alongside 300 milk cows and 200 acres of fields producing bananas, dates, wheat, avocado, corn, and soy .
Among the reasons for the reforms at Deganya was the slow exodus of younger kibbutzniks. The Shapiros' son, who left Deganya to practice law and is now a judge, is among the 50 percent of young people who have left the kibbutz. The total population of the country's kibbutzim peaked at 124,000 in 1994 and has since fallen to 115,000; as a proportion of the growing Israeli population, kibbutz residents have fallen from 4.2 percent in 1952 to 1.7 percent in 2004.
Kibbutzniks express mixed feelings about the reforms.
At Kibbutz Gvat in the Jezreel Valley, similar changes were introduced in 2004. Paz Israeli, 31, who was born at Gvat and is now kibbutz secretary, said he would have preferred things to stay the same.
"Most of the people on the kibbutz wanted the change in order to be like people in the city," said Israeli. "They wanted to get more money in the bank at the end of the month if they worked harder. People just wanted more for themselves.
"I'm an old-fashioned guy; I would have liked better to stay in the old system. There is a value to living and working in a place where there is a larger ideal than just providing for yourself. I don't think it's the death of the kibbutz," he said, "but it is transforming into something very different."
Sunday, 25 February 2007
The HBO 'Treatment'
A popular Israeli TV series about therapy is getting a translation
BOSTON GLOBE | February 25, 2007By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent
TEL AVIV -- Hagai Levi, creator of the first Israeli drama series adapted for US television, has proved that less is more.
Israeli life is hardly lacking in daily drama. There is the horror of suicide bombings, the pain of war, the challenge of ending a 40-year occupation and finding peace with the Palestinians -- not to mention a raft of domestic corruption and sex scandals that in the past month alone have triggered the resignation of the country's justice minister and the start of impeachment proceedings against the president.
But "In Treatment," Levi's multi-award-winning daily half-hour drama series that has been snapped up for adaptation by HBO, has not a single gun, bomb, corrupt politician , or suicide bomber anywhere on the screen. Instead, it boasts a single indoor set in which the only action is two people sitting and talking to each other .
HBO will air 45 English-language episodes five nights a week in the fall, starring Gabriel Byrne as a taciturn but effective psychotherapist and Dianne Wiest as his therapist guide and confessor.
"In Treatment" became a television and social phenomenon in Israel, sweeping the Israeli television awards for best drama series, best director, best screenplay, best actor , and best actress, and attracting huge audiences in this tiny country.
Critics at Israel's three largest newspapers competed for superlatives to describe the show. Haaretz called it "the most important achievement in a drama series ever accomplished in Israel," and said it "proved that minimalism in television can generate maximum quality." Maariv said it was "the closest thing to literature to be found nowadays on television." Yedioth Ahronoth said it contained "the most sublime, refined dialogues ever to be seen on an Israeli screen."
Boston audiences can get a taste themselves on Tuesday, when the Boston Jewish Film Festival screens four episodes at the Museum of Fine Arts.
The format is deceptively simple and potentially boring. Each day in the week is dedicated to one patient's therapy session with Ruben, a 50-something psychotherapy counselor who, it soon transpires, is having some mid-life issues of his own.
On Monday, he treats an attractive single woman wondering whether to marry her boyfriend, whose highly charged erotic tales threaten to play havoc with Ruben's own fragile libido. On Tuesday, it's the turn of an air force pilot plagued by collateral damage -- the only scenario where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict intrudes but which will be adapted for a US story line. Wednesday is devoted to a teenage gymnast and Olympic hopeful whose recent brush with death may have been self-inflicted, and Thursday brings a bickering couple toying with the idea of aborting a pregnancy after five years of fertility treatment.
Little wonder that Friday evening finds Ruben seeking the guidance of 60-something Gila, his own mentor and therapist, where it soon becomes clear he's not quite the level-headed fo nt of wisdom his patients might expect.
"You always said our biggest problem is that we don't have an audience. It's true. There's no one to put in a good word for us. No one to tell us how great we were this session," Ruben tells Gila after one particularly heavy week.
Now this psycho-confession looks set to have the biggest US audience since Woody Allen (and Tony Soprano) made therapy fashionable.
After an initial five-part pilot, HBO was hooked. "We felt 'In Treatment' was unique on several levels, its format, its content, and its execution. For all of those reasons and more we felt it was a excellent fit for our original programming schedule," said Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment.
Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (HBO's "Carnivale," "Big Love") and Mark Wahlberg are the executive producers. Cast members include Josh Charles, Embeth Davidtz, Mia Wasikowska, Melissa George, and Blair Underwood.
The show came to Wahlberg through Israeli actress Noa Tishby, who saw the series on a visit home, contacted the producers and returned to California with a disk of the first five episodes. Tishby was signed to Leverage Management, which also represents Wahlberg, and so the connection was made.
Levi, the show's creator, believes the format is unique. He said he did not know another television drama in which two actors are sitting almost static for minutes on end, with hardly any action, relying almost entirely on the dialogue.
"The actors had nothing to hide behind," he said. "They were almost paralyzed. They could only use themselves and rely on the power of the words. Sometimes we just kept filming, using 20-minute shots instead of the usual few minutes at a time. It was very close to live theater."
The minimalism extended to the production costs, which Levi estimated at about one-quarter of a regular half-hour drama.
"Every episode was shot in a single day, which contributed to the tension," said Levi. "It was like simulating real treatment. Each actor had their day of the week and we filmed it chronologically, just like the characters in the story."
Levi and his chief scriptwriter, Ori Sivan, had just ended an intense creative conference on the upcoming second season, which took the form of a long walk in the cool evening air through the hip Shenkin neighborhood of Tel Aviv, where smart sidewalk cafes attract the cream of the city's bubbling creative class.
The HBO deal has catapulted Levi and Sivan to the pinnacle of Israel's media fraternity, although they say the money involved is modest -- "not millions" -- and neither will be retiring or ordering his yacht just yet. Levi is an executive producer on the HBO series and Sivan said the English scripts and characters are as close to the Hebrew originals as the trans-Atlantic transfer would allow.
Levi said the idea for the show was based on his own experience of psychoanalysis, while Sivan said he had never been through it himself, but both his parents were therapists.
The writers tried to ensure the authenticity of the script by bringing on board psychotherapist Roni Baht as an adviser. They soon found themselves at odds with their chosen expert.
"He did a brave job fighting with us," laughed Sivan. "We found that therapy and scriptwriting are very similar. The role of the therapist is to be in conflict with their patients. Roni was always encouraging us to go to a deeper involvement. He said the original scripts were too light, not brave enough. He said the therapist had to ask much more direct questions than we originally wrote."
The quality of the script was sustained by recruiting such screenwriters as Yael Hedaya, an Israeli novelist who helped shape the character of the young single woman whose Monday sessions set the tone for the week. Hedaya will be at Tuesday's "In Treatment" screening.
Levi and Sivan, both 43, studied together at Tel Aviv University film school and graduated in 1990. Levi is now head of the drama department at Israel's largest commercial television channel. His previous credits include several award-winning documentaries and series, among them the longest-running drama ever aired on Israeli television. Sivan has written several successful series while Nir Bergman, another co-director and co-writer, wrote and directed the acclaimed feature film "Broken Wings."
In the last 15 years, Israeli television has mushroomed with the birth of two commercial channels and cable channels commissioning original drama. "In Treatment" was originally produced for the HOT cable channel and then aired on Channel 2, the country's largest commercial broadcaster.
"Now there is an industry and money, which is attracting good people," said Levi.
And in a country of just seven million where everyone seems to know each other, movie and television benefit from complete cross-fertilization between the two genres.
"There is a total mixture," said Sivan. "Israeli academy award winners, writers, directors and actors move freely back and forth between film and television."
The cable broadcast attracted a staggering one million video-on-demand downloads and the commercial broadcast won impressive ratings. The series entered everyday conversation and was instantly included in university curricula on psychology.
Indeed, one of the attractions of the original production was the quality of the Hebrew-speaking cast headed by Israel's favorite bad-boy film star Assi Dayan -- think Jack Nicholson -- and local movie matriarch Gila Almagor -- the Israeli Judi Dench.
The show's creators are confident that "In Treatment" will hit the same nerves it tingled in Israel.
"America is the homeland of therapy, it is so deep in American culture. People are going all the time and the jargon of therapy is part of the language," said Levi. "They had to do very little to make it American."
Sunday, 18 February 2007
Israel tense over 'the Iranian threat'
As U.N. Security Council ponders new sanctions against Tehran, Jerusalem is watching warily
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign ServiceSAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Sunday, February 18, 2007 - Page A1
Jerusalem -- When the U.N. Security Council considers this week whether to impose new sanctions on Iran unless it abandons its nuclear weapons program, the debate will be watched closely in Jerusalem, where Israeli leaders fear that their country's very existence would be in danger if Tehran succeeds in acquiring the bomb.
Iran has never launched a direct conventional military attack on Israel, which is nearly 1,000 miles away on the far side of the Middle East. But it equips, trains and finances Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank and Gaza, and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. And Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a Holocaust denier who advocates wiping Israel off the map -- views that have made him popular with extremists in the Arab world.
Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy defense minister, told a recent briefing of journalists and diplomats that Iran's revolutionary ideology, as expounded by Ahmadinejad, posed a concrete threat not just to Israel, but to the entire free world. He said Iran sees itself as a growing global power "attempting to build a territorial belt from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea."
Officially, Israeli leaders support diplomatic efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program. Sneh stopped short of advocating a military attack, but when pressed by reporters, he pointedly said that "everything should be done in order to stop it."
Israel's own nuclear arsenal is a subject of intense speculation. Officially, Israeli leaders do not admit it exists, but a 2004 survey by Jane's Intelligence Digest estimated that Israel had at least 200 nuclear weapons, including thermonuclear weapons, and a heavily guarded weapons laboratory at Dimona in the Negev Desert.
Iran insists that its nuclear-enrichment program is intended only for energy production, an assertion that the United States and Europe reject. Last year, the U.N. Security Council adopted sanctions against Iran that freeze some of its assets and bar companies from selling to Iran materials and technology that could contribute to its nuclear program. The United States advocates tougher sanctions if Iran does not halt enrichment activities, which Tehran has refused to do.
The policy of the Israeli government has always been that it will never be the first to launch nuclear weapons. Its deterrent capability is based on the widely held belief that it has a significant second-strike arsenal capable of retaliating against any strategic attack on its major cities. The United States has consistently stood by Israel in resisting efforts to declare the entire Middle East a nuclear-free zone.
Last month, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned a conference on international security in stark terms about "the Iranian threat."
"For many long years, we have followed Iran's efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, in the guise of a civilian nuclear program," said Olmert. "In all the contacts I have had, there has been clear agreement that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons or the material to produce them. ... Those who believe, as we do, that a diplomatic solution is preferable, must now muster their strength to exert pressure on Iran and thus stay the course until change is achieved."
But should the diplomacy fail, Olmert warned, Israel would be left with little choice.
"Anyone who threatens us, who threatens our existence, must know that we have the determination and capability of defending ourselves, responding with force, discretion and with all the means at our disposal as necessary. We will not place the lives of our people, the life of our country, at risk.
"We have the right to full freedom of action to act in defense of our vital interests. We will not hesitate to use it," he warned.
The level of tension is so high between the two states that Israel's Mossad espionage agency has been accused of causing the death of a leading Iranian nuclear scientist in January from gas poisoning.
Ardeshire Hassanpour, 44, a prize-winning nuclear physicist, worked at a plant in Esfahan that produces uranium hexafluoride gas, a key component in the enrichment of uranium. U.S. security consulting company Stratfor and the London Sunday Times suggested his death was a Mossad "assassination."
Mossad has a documented history of killing scientists from countries deemed to pose a grave danger to Israel, including several involved in Iraq's weapons program under Saddam Hussein. But the accusation this time is almost certainly baseless, according to Mossad sources, and goes against all known modus operandi of the agency.
Meir Amit, former head of Mossad, told The Chronicle he thought it was unlikely Israel killed the Iranian scientist, but he called for the assassination of the Iranian president.
"Personally, I am against assassinating leaders, and all my life I was against it when I was head of Mossad. But Ahmadinejad has crossed the line. With all he is doing on the nuclear front, saying Israel should be wiped off the map and arranging a conference on the Holocaust, where he said it never happened -- from my point of view, he is somebody who shouldn't be with us," said Amit.
True or not, the story of Hassanpour's killing reflects a widespread belief that Israel will stop at nothing to prevent Iran from acquiring the ability to deploy nuclear weapons. Last weekend, Israel successfully tested its Arrow anti-ballistic missile defense system, intended to intercept and neutralize Iranian warheads.
In October, Olmert appointed hard-liner Avigdor Lieberman as his minister of strategic threats -- a newly created position that appears to have Iran as its main focus. "Israel does not have the luxury of waiting with its arms folded until Iran acquires unconventional capabilities," Lieberman warned in a recent interview.
The military option could leap up the agenda if Olmert's government collapses and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wins the next election, as currently predicted by opinion polls. Netanyahu has long advocated a military strike against Iran.
"Israel has to assist in the progress of an aggressive international coalition, but it also has to make sure to acquire the means necessary for our defense," Netanyahu said in an interview.
Israeli fears about Iranian intentions were buttressed by former CIA Director James Woolsey, who told the January security conference that "Iran is not remotely interested in nuclear power for purposes of electricity."
He described the Islamic republic as "a theocratic totalitarian movement for which destruction of Israel and the United States is not a policy but its very essence. It defines itself in that way. Saying that it should change its policy with respect to destroying Israel and the United States is like trying to persuade Hitler away from anti-Semitism."
But Iranian analyst Meir Javedanfar, director of MEEPAS, a Middle East political and economic analysis company, and co-author of a new book, "The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran," said the Iranian ideological threat was balanced by the pragmatism of its leaders.
"I believe the ultimate goal of Iran's nuclear program is for military purposes, but I do not think Iran will ever risk a first nuclear strike against Israel," Javedanfar said in an interview.
"The Iranian leaders are fundamentalist on the surface, but when it comes to survival they are very pragmatic. They know Israel's second-strike capability and know it is very likely their country will be destroyed. They did not survive eight years of war against Saddam Hussein and 20 years of U.S. sanctions just to see their country wiped out for the sake of attacking Israel," he said.
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, 16 February 2007
Webcams fuel furor over Jerusalem site
Muslims vow more protests near mosque
BOSTON GLOBE | February 16, 2007
By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent
JERUSALEM -- Israel activated webcams yesterday at the site of a controversial building project in Jerusalem's Old City as part of an effort to refute accusations by Muslims that the work is threatening the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, who was visiting Istanbul yesterday, also agreed to allow a Turkish technical team to inspect the site.
Islamic leaders denounced the streaming video as "cosmetic," and said they would organize massive demonstrations in Jerusalem after prayers today.
Riots erupted at the site last week after archeologists began excavating a centuries-old ramp leading from the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall up to the Temple Mount compound, known to Muslims as the Haram Al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) and the site of two landmark shrines -- the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, and the golden-capped Dome of the Rock.
The holy site is in East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War and then annexed. Most countries do not recognize Israeli sovereignty in the area.
Muslim leaders accuse Israel of trying to destroy the mosque by undermining its foundations. In a fiery sermon in Al-Aqsa last Friday, Sheik Ekrema Sabri accused Israel of desecration and said the Israelis were planning "attacks against the mosques."
But the ramp is outside the exterior wall of the Temple Mount compound and ends several yards from the Mughrabi Gate, which leads into the area holy to Jews and Muslims alike.
Part of the ramp collapsed after a snowstorm three years ago, and last week the Israeli government ordered that a bridge be built in its place.
The archeological dig that triggered the demonstrations is the first stage before construction of the bridge allowing access to the Mughrabi Gate, which is about 30 yards above the ground outside the wall.
Earlier this week, Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski suspended building work until all parties, including Muslim leaders, had been consulted. But he said the archeological dig would continue.
Yechiel Zeligman, the Israel Antiquities Authority archeologist overseeing the excavation, said the three webcams would broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the authority's website, antiquities.org.
The live feed from three cameras shows workers from the Antiquities Authority digging to uncover ancient buildings and artifacts hidden beneath the surface.
"Really, we don't have anything to hide," Zeligman said as he supervised 40 workers at the site yesterday. "We hope the presence of the cameras will show people that nothing here is threatening the mosques and things will quieten down so we can continue our work.
"The ramp ends more than 5 meters from the wall and the gate into the mosque compound, so we are nowhere near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nothing we are doing here poses any threat to it," he said.
But Sheik Raed Salah, a leader of the radical Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, remained defiant yesterday as he appeared in a Jerusalem court on charges of stirring public unrest and spitting at a police officer during disturbances at the site last week.
"An Israeli court has no authority to rule on issues connected to Al-Aqsa Mosque," Salah said. "Thus any decision made by this court over keeping me away from Al-Aqsa is null and void."
Israeli archeologist Meir Ben-Dov, an expert on the site and a strident critic of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the protests could have been foreseen and prevented.
In 1996, the opening of a centuries-old underground complex of tunnels running 50 yards alongside the Western Wall triggered similar accusations, sparking riots in which more than 90 Palestinians were killed.
Ben-Dov said the Israelis should have consulted with Muslim authorities and agreed on the work, just as he did when the other side of the ramp faced collapse 15 years ago.
"I have been warning the government for nearly two years, but no one would listen," Ben-Dov said.
"The bridge is nowhere near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and does not threaten it physically, but the whole matter has been handled with complete lack of sensitivity for the feelings of the Muslims," he said.
Ben-Dov has been working at the site since 1968 and wrote the standard work on the excavations. He said the new bridge was unnecessary because the ramp could have been repaired easily.
The ramp was created when Ben-Dov and his colleagues excavated on either side of the path leading to the Mughrabi Gate, digging down until they came to the Roman-era road that once skirted the huge Herodian walls of the Temple Mount compound. In 1992, Ben-Dov's group reinforced the southern side of the ramp with a modern wall built from the same Jerusalem stone as the ancient buildings.
"We had a problem, but through discussion and cooperation with the Muslim authorities we managed to overcome it," Ben-Dov said.
Yousef Natshe, chief archeologist at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, said the new webcams did nothing to allay Muslim fears.
"It's a cosmetic act designed to draw away the attention of the people who are concerned about this," Natshe said. "Putting this online doesn't give Israel any legal rights -- the act itself is illegal."
"For two years we have been writing to the Israeli police, to the mayor of Jerusalem, expressing our concern about this planned bridge, but they didn't even acknowledge our letters," he said.
Natshe conceded that the Israelis were probably not excavating underneath the mosque, but he accused them of continuous encroachments.
" This work is being carried out on the approach to one of the historic gates entering the Haram. . . . Maybe it is not physical damage, but it is cultural damage. It is distorting the site," he said.
To view the Israeli webcam, go to antiquities.org.il/home_eng.asp
BOSTON GLOBE | February 16, 2007
By Matthew Kalman, Globe Correspondent
JERUSALEM -- Israel activated webcams yesterday at the site of a controversial building project in Jerusalem's Old City as part of an effort to refute accusations by Muslims that the work is threatening the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, who was visiting Istanbul yesterday, also agreed to allow a Turkish technical team to inspect the site.
Islamic leaders denounced the streaming video as "cosmetic," and said they would organize massive demonstrations in Jerusalem after prayers today.
Riots erupted at the site last week after archeologists began excavating a centuries-old ramp leading from the Jewish prayer plaza at the Western Wall up to the Temple Mount compound, known to Muslims as the Haram Al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary) and the site of two landmark shrines -- the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site, and the golden-capped Dome of the Rock.
The holy site is in East Jerusalem, which was captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War and then annexed. Most countries do not recognize Israeli sovereignty in the area.
Muslim leaders accuse Israel of trying to destroy the mosque by undermining its foundations. In a fiery sermon in Al-Aqsa last Friday, Sheik Ekrema Sabri accused Israel of desecration and said the Israelis were planning "attacks against the mosques."
But the ramp is outside the exterior wall of the Temple Mount compound and ends several yards from the Mughrabi Gate, which leads into the area holy to Jews and Muslims alike.
Part of the ramp collapsed after a snowstorm three years ago, and last week the Israeli government ordered that a bridge be built in its place.
The archeological dig that triggered the demonstrations is the first stage before construction of the bridge allowing access to the Mughrabi Gate, which is about 30 yards above the ground outside the wall.
Earlier this week, Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski suspended building work until all parties, including Muslim leaders, had been consulted. But he said the archeological dig would continue.
Yechiel Zeligman, the Israel Antiquities Authority archeologist overseeing the excavation, said the three webcams would broadcast 24 hours a day, seven days a week on the authority's website, antiquities.org.
The live feed from three cameras shows workers from the Antiquities Authority digging to uncover ancient buildings and artifacts hidden beneath the surface.
"Really, we don't have anything to hide," Zeligman said as he supervised 40 workers at the site yesterday. "We hope the presence of the cameras will show people that nothing here is threatening the mosques and things will quieten down so we can continue our work.
"The ramp ends more than 5 meters from the wall and the gate into the mosque compound, so we are nowhere near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and nothing we are doing here poses any threat to it," he said.
But Sheik Raed Salah, a leader of the radical Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, remained defiant yesterday as he appeared in a Jerusalem court on charges of stirring public unrest and spitting at a police officer during disturbances at the site last week.
"An Israeli court has no authority to rule on issues connected to Al-Aqsa Mosque," Salah said. "Thus any decision made by this court over keeping me away from Al-Aqsa is null and void."
Israeli archeologist Meir Ben-Dov, an expert on the site and a strident critic of the Israel Antiquities Authority, said the protests could have been foreseen and prevented.
In 1996, the opening of a centuries-old underground complex of tunnels running 50 yards alongside the Western Wall triggered similar accusations, sparking riots in which more than 90 Palestinians were killed.
Ben-Dov said the Israelis should have consulted with Muslim authorities and agreed on the work, just as he did when the other side of the ramp faced collapse 15 years ago.
"I have been warning the government for nearly two years, but no one would listen," Ben-Dov said.
"The bridge is nowhere near the Al-Aqsa Mosque and does not threaten it physically, but the whole matter has been handled with complete lack of sensitivity for the feelings of the Muslims," he said.
Ben-Dov has been working at the site since 1968 and wrote the standard work on the excavations. He said the new bridge was unnecessary because the ramp could have been repaired easily.
The ramp was created when Ben-Dov and his colleagues excavated on either side of the path leading to the Mughrabi Gate, digging down until they came to the Roman-era road that once skirted the huge Herodian walls of the Temple Mount compound. In 1992, Ben-Dov's group reinforced the southern side of the ramp with a modern wall built from the same Jerusalem stone as the ancient buildings.
"We had a problem, but through discussion and cooperation with the Muslim authorities we managed to overcome it," Ben-Dov said.
Yousef Natshe, chief archeologist at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, said the new webcams did nothing to allay Muslim fears.
"It's a cosmetic act designed to draw away the attention of the people who are concerned about this," Natshe said. "Putting this online doesn't give Israel any legal rights -- the act itself is illegal."
"For two years we have been writing to the Israeli police, to the mayor of Jerusalem, expressing our concern about this planned bridge, but they didn't even acknowledge our letters," he said.
Natshe conceded that the Israelis were probably not excavating underneath the mosque, but he accused them of continuous encroachments.
" This work is being carried out on the approach to one of the historic gates entering the Haram. . . . Maybe it is not physical damage, but it is cultural damage. It is distorting the site," he said.
To view the Israeli webcam, go to antiquities.org.il/home_eng.asp
Monday, 5 February 2007
West Bank gays more at home in Israel
West Bank gays find social life in IsraelThey fear new wall will trap them where their lifestyle is taboo
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, February 05, 2007
By Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Ramallah, West Bank — In the center of town in a cafe named Stars & Bucks, a young Palestinian who likes to be known as the Diva Nawal sips a bright pink milkshake and checks out the early evening crowd.
"I'm not the only gay person here, but I'm the only one who's out," he says, exchanging silent greetings with two young Palestinian men at a nearby table. "They're also gay, but nobody knows, and you shouldn't approach them."
When the tall, slim, delicately featured Nawal dons the blonde wig, makeup and tight skirts that transform him into a drag queen, he's ready for his performance -- at gay clubs in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.
A 21-year-old university student with serious professional ambitions, Nawal wouldn't dream of performing in his hometown, where homosexuality, as in the rest of the Palestinian territories, is strictly taboo, sometimes violently so. Last year, a group of gay Palestinians visiting East Jerusalem from the United States were threatened and one of them badly beaten after they announced plans to join an Israeli gay pride rally. The Web site of ASWAT, an organization of Palestinian gay women, says Palestinian society "has no mercy for sexual diversity and/or any expression of 'otherness' away from the societal norms and the assigned roles that were formed for women. ... The Palestinian woman has no right to choose an identity other than the one enforced on her by the male figures in her family and surroundings."
So for Nawal and his friends, the only place where they can pursue a full social life is across the border in Israel.
"I can't be honest about my sexuality with my family because they wouldn't know how to respond, and I respect them too much to want to hurt them," he says. "But the same traditional family values which oppress me in that way also protect me."
Although his mannerisms sometimes attract unwelcome comment in the streets of Ramallah, he adds, "no one will attack me physically, because in our society that means my whole extended family will join together to attack them in return. It preserves a kind of balance."
He does not expect it to continue forever, and knows that after he graduates, he will probably leave the West Bank.
"This is not a free life," he says. "Apart from private parties inside people's homes, the only place where I can really behave as I wish is in Israel. Once they complete the security wall and I cannot reach Jerusalem, there will be nowhere to go. I will have to leave."
He is not alone. Saturday night is Arab night at Shushan, a gay bar in central Jerusalem, featuring a drag show that is part karaoke, part cross-cultural celebration. At the top of the bill is the Iman, also known as the Queen of Sheba, a 6-foot-plus black Palestinian with African roots -- who keeps his sexuality and nighttime drag queen theatrics carefully hidden from his wife and children. The crowd of about 50 this evening is a mix of Israelis and Palestinians, with a spattering of Western expatriates. The deafening music ranges from Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper to Arab divas Diana Haddad and Boshra.
Freddy A., a 27-year-old bisexual Arab from East Jerusalem, a regular at Shushan, is a veteran of the Palestinian gay scene.
"It's very tough being gay or bisexual because Arab behavior is still dominated by Islamic tradition, where it is forbidden," says Freddy, a hotel worker and the youngest male in a traditional Muslim family of eight children. "It's difficult to be with another Palestinian, and because of Israeli-Palestinian politics it's tough to see someone who isn't part of your community.
"I have one friend in his early 20s who was beaten by his family when they discovered he was gay, and forced to marry," he says. "Now he's not in a good situation. He has turned to drugs and drink."
Of his own family, Freddy says, "One of my brothers and one of my sisters know about me. My father suspects, but I have to hide it from him. It would be too hard for my family. I respect my father. I wouldn't want to hurt him."
He, too, finds a certain degree of freedom in Israel.
"I'm in Tel Aviv every weekend. On that side, they don't care. I have two Palestinian lesbian friends whose husbands don't know about them. To get together, they go to a hotel in West Jerusalem," he says.
In Israel, the status of gays and lesbians is more comparable with Western Europe.
As the British gay magazine Attitude approvingly reported in December: "Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset (Israel's parliament) has many openly gay members; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The country's army, the Israel Defense Force, has many dozens of openly gay high-ranking officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government. The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits.
"Nearly all mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel's representative, 80 percent of polled Israelis called her 'an appropriate representative of Israel.' "
At Shushan, gay Israelis and Palestinians mix freely and go home together, although Freddy observes that the broader state of Israeli-Palestinian relations has created tensions that didn't exist before.
"Times have changed," he said. "These days I feel the hatred between both sides even in the gay community."
But compared to gay Palestinians who don't make it to Israel, Freddy and Nawal are among the lucky ones, said Haneen Maikey, coordinator of the Palestinian Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Project at a Jerusalem gay center.
"It's actually becoming more difficult for gay Palestinians," said Maikey, 28, whose center organizes a Pride rally every year. "It's a collective and closed community in which some parts are very religious with a small village atmosphere. Every step toward coming out will get you another step back to the closet."
But she questions the sense of belonging that gay Palestinians like Nawal and Freddy feel in the Israeli gay scene.
"At some level, they face racism and discrimination because they are Palestinians," Maikey said.
"There is a hidden discrimination with Israeli partners -- a feeling that I can make sex with you, but I can't be seen out with you," she said.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, February 05, 2007
By Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Ramallah, West Bank — In the center of town in a cafe named Stars & Bucks, a young Palestinian who likes to be known as the Diva Nawal sips a bright pink milkshake and checks out the early evening crowd.
"I'm not the only gay person here, but I'm the only one who's out," he says, exchanging silent greetings with two young Palestinian men at a nearby table. "They're also gay, but nobody knows, and you shouldn't approach them."
When the tall, slim, delicately featured Nawal dons the blonde wig, makeup and tight skirts that transform him into a drag queen, he's ready for his performance -- at gay clubs in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa.
A 21-year-old university student with serious professional ambitions, Nawal wouldn't dream of performing in his hometown, where homosexuality, as in the rest of the Palestinian territories, is strictly taboo, sometimes violently so. Last year, a group of gay Palestinians visiting East Jerusalem from the United States were threatened and one of them badly beaten after they announced plans to join an Israeli gay pride rally. The Web site of ASWAT, an organization of Palestinian gay women, says Palestinian society "has no mercy for sexual diversity and/or any expression of 'otherness' away from the societal norms and the assigned roles that were formed for women. ... The Palestinian woman has no right to choose an identity other than the one enforced on her by the male figures in her family and surroundings."
So for Nawal and his friends, the only place where they can pursue a full social life is across the border in Israel.
"I can't be honest about my sexuality with my family because they wouldn't know how to respond, and I respect them too much to want to hurt them," he says. "But the same traditional family values which oppress me in that way also protect me."
Although his mannerisms sometimes attract unwelcome comment in the streets of Ramallah, he adds, "no one will attack me physically, because in our society that means my whole extended family will join together to attack them in return. It preserves a kind of balance."
He does not expect it to continue forever, and knows that after he graduates, he will probably leave the West Bank.
"This is not a free life," he says. "Apart from private parties inside people's homes, the only place where I can really behave as I wish is in Israel. Once they complete the security wall and I cannot reach Jerusalem, there will be nowhere to go. I will have to leave."
He is not alone. Saturday night is Arab night at Shushan, a gay bar in central Jerusalem, featuring a drag show that is part karaoke, part cross-cultural celebration. At the top of the bill is the Iman, also known as the Queen of Sheba, a 6-foot-plus black Palestinian with African roots -- who keeps his sexuality and nighttime drag queen theatrics carefully hidden from his wife and children. The crowd of about 50 this evening is a mix of Israelis and Palestinians, with a spattering of Western expatriates. The deafening music ranges from Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper to Arab divas Diana Haddad and Boshra.
Freddy A., a 27-year-old bisexual Arab from East Jerusalem, a regular at Shushan, is a veteran of the Palestinian gay scene.
"It's very tough being gay or bisexual because Arab behavior is still dominated by Islamic tradition, where it is forbidden," says Freddy, a hotel worker and the youngest male in a traditional Muslim family of eight children. "It's difficult to be with another Palestinian, and because of Israeli-Palestinian politics it's tough to see someone who isn't part of your community.
"I have one friend in his early 20s who was beaten by his family when they discovered he was gay, and forced to marry," he says. "Now he's not in a good situation. He has turned to drugs and drink."
Of his own family, Freddy says, "One of my brothers and one of my sisters know about me. My father suspects, but I have to hide it from him. It would be too hard for my family. I respect my father. I wouldn't want to hurt him."
He, too, finds a certain degree of freedom in Israel.
"I'm in Tel Aviv every weekend. On that side, they don't care. I have two Palestinian lesbian friends whose husbands don't know about them. To get together, they go to a hotel in West Jerusalem," he says.
In Israel, the status of gays and lesbians is more comparable with Western Europe.
As the British gay magazine Attitude approvingly reported in December: "Workplace discrimination against gay people is outlawed; the Knesset (Israel's parliament) has many openly gay members; in schools, teenagers learn about the difficulties of being gay and the importance of treating all sexualities equally. The country's army, the Israel Defense Force, has many dozens of openly gay high-ranking officers who, like all gay soldiers in its ranks, are treated equally by order of the government. The Supreme Court has ruled that gay couples are eligible for spousal and widower benefits.
"Nearly all mainstream television dramas in Israel regularly feature gay storylines. When transsexual Dana International won the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest as Israel's representative, 80 percent of polled Israelis called her 'an appropriate representative of Israel.' "
At Shushan, gay Israelis and Palestinians mix freely and go home together, although Freddy observes that the broader state of Israeli-Palestinian relations has created tensions that didn't exist before.
"Times have changed," he said. "These days I feel the hatred between both sides even in the gay community."
But compared to gay Palestinians who don't make it to Israel, Freddy and Nawal are among the lucky ones, said Haneen Maikey, coordinator of the Palestinian Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transsexual Project at a Jerusalem gay center.
"It's actually becoming more difficult for gay Palestinians," said Maikey, 28, whose center organizes a Pride rally every year. "It's a collective and closed community in which some parts are very religious with a small village atmosphere. Every step toward coming out will get you another step back to the closet."
But she questions the sense of belonging that gay Palestinians like Nawal and Freddy feel in the Israeli gay scene.
"At some level, they face racism and discrimination because they are Palestinians," Maikey said.
"There is a hidden discrimination with Israeli partners -- a feeling that I can make sex with you, but I can't be seen out with you," she said.
Tuesday, 30 January 2007
Holiday warning after Eilat blast
Daily Mail, 30 January 2007
By Matthew Kalman
Holidaymakers were warned to be vigilant after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed three people in the Israeli resort of Eilat yesterday.
It was the first such attack in the Red Sea port in the far south of the country which is popular with hundreds of Britons seeking winter sun.
The blast at a cafe-bakery in a residential area was the first suicide bomb in Israel since last April.
Police said it was likely that the bomber, identified as a 21-year-old Palestinian from Gaza, had intended to target a more crowded, tourist area.
He had probably blown himself up earlier than planned after his behaviour aroused the suspicions of passers-by.
Britons on holiday in the resort included Lorna Fitzsimons, Labour MP for Rochdale until 2005. Security at tourist hotels had been stepped up as police went on full alert, she said, adding: 'Nothing justifies terror on this scale,'
Benny Mazgini, 45, who was in an apartment across the street, said: 'I saw a man with a black coat and a bag. It is hot and it is strange to see someone with a coat.
'Seconds later, I heard a huge blast. It was awful - there was smoke, pieces of flesh all over the place.'
Rafi Caplin, of British-based Longwood Holidays, said the blast occurred in a part of town rarely visited by tourists.
'The general advice would be just to be vigilant, the same as when these types of incidents have happened elsewhere,' he said. Two Palestinian militant groups, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, claimed joint responsibility for the attack which they said had been planned for seven months.
They said the attack aimed to help end weeks of Palestinian infighting which has killed more than 60 people in the Gaza Strip. But four people were killed as fighting continued to rage there yesterday.
Palestinian news reports identified the bomber as Faisal al-Siksik.
At the family home, his brother Naeem said: 'We knew he was going to carry out a martyrdom operation. His mother and father prayed for him to succeed.'
Since April, Israeli security forces have caught about a dozen Palestinians planning to carry out suicide attacks.
By Matthew Kalman
Holidaymakers were warned to be vigilant after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed three people in the Israeli resort of Eilat yesterday.
It was the first such attack in the Red Sea port in the far south of the country which is popular with hundreds of Britons seeking winter sun.
The blast at a cafe-bakery in a residential area was the first suicide bomb in Israel since last April.
Police said it was likely that the bomber, identified as a 21-year-old Palestinian from Gaza, had intended to target a more crowded, tourist area.
He had probably blown himself up earlier than planned after his behaviour aroused the suspicions of passers-by.
Britons on holiday in the resort included Lorna Fitzsimons, Labour MP for Rochdale until 2005. Security at tourist hotels had been stepped up as police went on full alert, she said, adding: 'Nothing justifies terror on this scale,'
Benny Mazgini, 45, who was in an apartment across the street, said: 'I saw a man with a black coat and a bag. It is hot and it is strange to see someone with a coat.
'Seconds later, I heard a huge blast. It was awful - there was smoke, pieces of flesh all over the place.'
Rafi Caplin, of British-based Longwood Holidays, said the blast occurred in a part of town rarely visited by tourists.
'The general advice would be just to be vigilant, the same as when these types of incidents have happened elsewhere,' he said. Two Palestinian militant groups, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, claimed joint responsibility for the attack which they said had been planned for seven months.
They said the attack aimed to help end weeks of Palestinian infighting which has killed more than 60 people in the Gaza Strip. But four people were killed as fighting continued to rage there yesterday.
Palestinian news reports identified the bomber as Faisal al-Siksik.
At the family home, his brother Naeem said: 'We knew he was going to carry out a martyrdom operation. His mother and father prayed for him to succeed.'
Since April, Israeli security forces have caught about a dozen Palestinians planning to carry out suicide attacks.
Thursday, 4 January 2007
Journalist uses heroes, villains, place -- a la Dashiell Hammett -- to bring Palestinian life alive in novel
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
Thursday, January 4, 2007
Bethlehem, West Bank -- A frail, balding man in late middle age shuffles through the shadows of Bethlehem, collecting evidence of murder and trying to protect his loved ones from violence and corruption as the Palestinian uprising rages all around and Israeli hit squads lurk in the background.
Meet Omar Yussef, fictional hero of "The Collaborator of Bethlehem," the first novel in a mystery series by British author Matt Beynon Rees. Yussef is a cross between Yasser Arafat and Miss Marple, a reluctant sleuth plunged into a murky West Bank world of swaggering gunmen, cowering priests and defiant refugees.
In the novel, crafted in the tradition of classic noir detective thrillers, the streets that Yussef treads are littered with the debris of suicide bombers and Israeli snipers. Each turn in the ancient souk, or marketplace, leads to another hooded gunman with a Kalashnikov.
Yussef is an aging history teacher at the U.N. girls school in the squalid Dheisheh refugee camp, but when a close friend and former pupil is accused of collaborating in the assassination of a militant chief, he feels compelled to confront the dark forces of Muslim-Christian conflict that threaten to tear Palestinian society apart.
Rees, 39, the Jerusalem bureau chief of Time magazine throughout the intifada, tells his story with the compelling authenticity of an award-winning reporter and a lean discipline gained from a lifelong immersion in classic detective fiction.
Rees was born in Wales and studied English literature at Oxford University. He arrived in Jerusalem in 1996 after postgraduate journalism studies at the University of Maryland and reporting stints at Forbes and the Bloomberg wire service in New York.
"The Collaborator of Bethlehem," which will be published in the United States in February by Soho Press, is more than a simple mystery story. It's an exploration of Palestinian life from the inside, wrapped in the conflicting layers of religious fanaticism that power the Middle East conflict. The result is an evocative, compassionate tale that transports the reader into the biblical landscape of the birthplace of Jesus. The sights, smells and tastes of Palestinian life are arrayed, from the rice and chicken ma'alouba that Yussef eats to break his Ramadan fast to the bitter qahweh sa'ada coffee he awaits in the mourning tent of the murder victims. Like the San Francisco of his literary hero Dashiell Hammett, Rees' Bethlehem is a major figure in the story, its ancient alleys and turbulent traditions adding an extra dimension to the modern tale of murder and intrigue.
"The first mystery I ever read was 'The Maltese Falcon,' " Rees says as he walks the streets of Bethlehem. "Hammett inspired me to take not just the character but the whole social context of the story. Having been a journalist here for the past 10 years, I don't have to wonder what Palestinians are like."
Rees' decadelong immersion in the mysteries of the Middle East has produced some memorable journalism, including a groundbreaking Newsweek cover story exposing Arafat's "Mafia state" and Rees' acclaimed first book, "Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East," which explored the inner conflicts that haunt Israelis and Palestinians. But he says his novel explores the Palestinian experience more accurately than his news reporting.
"The Omar Yussef stories are all drawn from real things in Palestinian life, especially during the intifada, but writing them as fiction has been completely liberating," says Rees. "I can really get inside the head of a Palestinian. I'm not constricted by journalistic formulas."
He says the idea for the books came as he stood in a cabbage patch in a village on the outskirts of Bethlehem with the widow and parents of a militant who had been gunned down at that spot by an Israeli hit squad the night before.
"They were telling me what had happened, and I knew that this was going to end up as no more than one colorful paragraph at the top of my story. I wanted to try and find a vehicle to convey the emotional intensity, the reality for people living in this extreme situation," he says. "Working as a journalist, it was always extremely interesting to report, but I didn't always feel that the stories that emerged reflected how compelling the original material was. The structures and limitations of journalism were forcing me to leave out the facts which told me how Palestinians really lived and what they really thought. I was covering the peace process as though I was a sportswriter: Good or bad for the peace process today? I was missing out on a lot of things."
Rees decided to counter this by almost entirely excluding Israel from his novel. "Journalism takes Palestinian society and puts it in opposition to Israeli society, which makes everything look too simple," he says. "When you take Israel out of the equation, then you have a society that is very complex. The San Francisco of Dashiell Hammett is compelling decades later because it's not a perfect society infected by one bad guy who can be eliminated by the detective. Even when the mystery is solved, the ugliness is still out there and the hero must continue to face this complex reality.
"In Palestinian society there are people who really do kill, and they kill for very real reasons, whether we agree with them or not. Those villains, the people who are facing my hero, are grounded in reality. They are people who I've met. So as well as having a hero who can tell us more about Palestinian life than journalism can, I also have villains who can tell us more about the dark side of Palestinian society than the newspapers."
Omar Yussef is already scheduled to appear in at least two more mysteries. The next one, set in Gaza, is already written. Rees has a three-book deal, with translations into French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Hebrew and the possibility of a movie version.
Rees said he prefers to think about Yussef's adventures as a labor of love and is sanguine about becoming a successful novelist. "When I was 7 years old, I wrote a poem at school about a tree and the teacher gave me a gold star," he says. "Now I've had three starred reviews for Omar Yussef. I'm right back where I started."
This article appeared on page E - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, 24 December 2006
Holy Land's woes sink Bethlehem's Christmas spirit
Strife ruins celebrations, local economy
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign ServiceSAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Page A - 21
Bethlehem , West Bank -- This is the first Christmas season that Hamas has hosted in Bethlehem, and things are not looking good in the town where Jesus was born 2,000 years ago.
"This is the saddest Christmas. As you see, Manger Square is empty," said Mayor Victor Batarseh, a Roman Catholic mayor who was elected last year with support from Hamas. Only a statute requiring that the mayor and half the municipal council of Bethlehem must be Christians prevented Hamas and other Islamist groups from making a clean sweep of local government posts.
In the days leading up to Christmas, only a trickle of tourists visited the holy sites, half the shops were closed, and decorations were sparse. The foreign aid that once poured into Bethlehem has dried up, a victim of the international aid boycott imposed on the Palestinian Authority in March when the Hamas-led government took control of Gaza and the West Bank.
Like almost all public employees across the Palestinian territories, Batarseh and his workers have not been paid since the spring.
The Hamas government had promised to give Bethlehem $50,000 for the celebrations. Sheikh Raed Habib, a prominent Hamas supporter and the preacher at the Omar Ibn Khattab Mosque opposite the Church of the Nativity in Manger Square, approved of the allocation for Christmas despite the government's financial crisis.
"I am pleased that Hamas is helping to make Christmas," he said. "It is our duty to help with the decorations and congratulate our Christian brothers on their holiday. Muslims consider Jesus as one of the prophets, and we also celebrate his birth, but not as a major holiday."
Yet by Saturday, the promised money from the government had still not arrived. A municipal official said that even if it came, it would likely not be spent on Christmas lights. "We will pay the salaries -- that's more important," he said, on condition of anonymity.
Instead, the festive street decorations on the main road to Manger Square were donated by an Israeli-Arab Christian from the Galilee region of Northern Israel, who took shelter in Bethlehem with his family during the summer war to avoid the Katyusha rockets of Hezbollah.
Other Christmas lights were provided by local business owners, some of whom saw an opportunity to advertise their products. The Peace Center in Manger Square balked at displaying a banner wishing the people "Happy Christmas and Happy Eid from the Palestine Electric Corporation."
Before the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, burst out three months before Christmas 2000, about 50 buses a day made the 5-minute drive from nearby Jerusalem, bringing thousands of tourists who thronged the church, souvenir shops and local restaurants. These pilgrim dollars fueled a thriving trade in souvenirs fashioned from olivewood, mother-of-pearl and cheap silver. The town prospered.
But after six years of the intifada and Israeli military incursions, the tourists have disappeared, and Bethlehem's economy is in ruins. The town of 30,000 is now almost encircled by Israel's separation barrier, which has strangled Bethlehem's livelihood, cutting off the town from Jerusalem and deterring all but the most determined visitors.
Israel says it built the barrier to deter cross-border attacks, but Batarseh said it has transformed Bethlehem into "a big prison whose keys are in the hands of the occupier."
Only about 100,000 tourists have visited Bethlehem in 2006, compared to nearly 2 million annually before the intifada.
A fragile cease-fire in 2005 had encouraged some tourists to return, but this summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon discouraged most visitors. The eruption of deadly clashes between Fatah, the former ruling party, and Hamas two weeks ago was the final nail in the coffin.
"The political situation in Lebanon and the instability of politics in Palestine has affected tourism and pilgrimage," said Batarseh. "We have 65 percent unemployment and about 2,000 bedrooms in hotels that are empty."
Local leaders insisted that Bethlehem is safe. They said the kind of gunbattles that erupted in Gaza would not be repeated in the West Bank, where skirmishes between Hamas and Fatah have been fewer and less ferocious.
"What is happening in Gaza is alien to our culture, alien to our history, alien to our heritage as Palestinians," said Salah Tamari, the Fatah governor of the Bethlehem district. "We want Bethlehem to be a model. People in Bethlehem are aware of their mission. Bethlehem has a message of peace, for Palestinians first and then to humankind. Here we co-exist and live in harmony."
But for many Christians in Bethlehem, the new political domination of Hamas is only the latest phase in a process that has left them feeling isolated and vulnerable. Samir Qumsiyeh, owner of a local Christian TV station, has documented more than 90 incidents of anti-Christian violence carried out in the Bethlehem area in recent years and 140 cases in which Christian land has been taken over by what he describes as "Islamic mafia gangs."
George Rabie, a 22-year-old taxi driver and rapper from the neighboring town of Beit Jala, said he was beaten up two months ago by a group of Muslims from Hebron who reacted to the crucifix hanging from his rearview mirror. "It is a type of racism," he said. "We are a minority, so we are an easier target."
Farid Azizeh, an elderly restaurateur and former city councilman, was shot in the face and blinded after he got involved in a dispute with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah. Last year, his 16-year-old granddaughter was abducted by her Muslim boyfriend and was rescued only after the intervention of the Latin Patriarch.
Among the few pilgrims in town just before Christmas was Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who led a delegation of British church leaders to Bethlehem as a sign of solidarity. The clerics prayed in the Church of the Nativity along with Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Syrian bishops.
"We are here to say in this so troubled, complex land, that justice and security is never something which one person claims at the expense of another, or one community at the expense of another," Williams said. "We are here to say that security for one is security for all, and for one to live under threat of occupation or of terror is a problem for all and a pain for all," he said.
The visit to Bethlehem by the British church leaders was "the most important visit this Christmas," said Mayor Batarseh. "This event makes us feel that we are not left alone, and there is somebody who cares about our plight."
Mysterious Santa helps Bethlehem's neediest
The identity of the wealthy man who distributes toys and candy to poor Christian and Muslim families is known only to a few. Photo by David Blumenfeld, special to the Chronicle
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Page A - 17
Bethlehem, West Bank -- In a darkened room at a secret location in downtown Bethlehem, a small group of anonymous Palestinians is preparing for a secret mission.
Packages are being checked and placed in special bags. In one corner, a man in paramilitary fatigues nurses a semiautomatic machine gun.
Another man is being dressed in heavy disguise before being sent on his mission.
Everyone in this tight-lipped group is sworn to silence. The identity of the man behind the operation is a well-guarded secret.
Soon after night falls, in the twisting alleys of Hosh Nassar, a poor part of the old town near Manger Square, a man in heavy disguise carrying a large bag climbs the steps to the home of the Mickel family and knocks at the door.
Seven-year-old Daniel Mickel opens the door and stares into the face of Santa Claus. "Ahlan W'sahlan! -- Welcome!" he yells, and runs to fetch his brother Amir, 8, and his mother, Terry.
Baba Noel, as Santa is called here, has brought toys for Daniel, Amir and their older brother and sister, as well as chocolates for the family. It is a welcome moment of holiday cheer for the family, which has been living in poverty since 45-year-old Issa Mickel was confined to bed with a brain tumor seven years ago.
"We need help; we are in real trouble," says Terry Mickel as the boys tear open their presents. "This visit from Santa Claus has made the children very happy."
Around the corner, 13-year-old Myrna Siryani is excitedly waiting for the knock on her door after receiving a call from Santa last week asking what she would like as a gift.
"He spoke to me in Arabic!" says the delighted teenager. "He asked me what present I would like, and I said I wanted clothes, because I am too old now for toys."
This weekend, dozens of Bethlehem's poorest children, both Christian and Muslim, received the gifts they requested from the man in the white beard and red suit as he crisscrossed the town in a bright yellow taxi.
But few people know the real identity of the Secret Santa of Bethlehem. It's the closely guarded secret of a local businessman who in the past six years of acute economic distress has given away tens of thousands of dollars to the most impoverished families in the town.
"I try to go to the poorest families, those in real need, where the father is unable to work or perhaps isn't there anymore," he said, hiding his anonymity behind the nickname Abu Christmas -- his personalized version of Baba Noel.
"I ask people I trust to provide lists of the children who need help, on condition they do not tell anyone where the gifts have come from," he said. "They are only allowed to say that we are a secret Christian group that works undercover to make these families happy."
The young children choose toys and dolls. Teenagers usually want clothes, so Abu Christmas gives them vouchers to spend at a local clothing store. He said his only regret was that his own business has fared so badly, because of the drop in tourists to Bethlehem, that this year he will be able to deliver presents to only about 70 children instead of the 150 he has helped in previous years.
In addition to his Christmas operations, the same benefactor has stepped in numerous times in recent years to assist neighbors who have fallen on hard times.
"I believe that if a man needs food, you don't give him fish -- you give him a fishing rod and teach him how to use it," he said.
One grateful recipient of his help said the secret Santa could have bought "one or two houses" with the money he had given away in the past five years.
"I don't know how much the total is," said Abu Christmas. "I don't keep a notebook.
"I do this every day. If I started to calculate the amount, it could be a problem, so I'd rather forget. I'm sure that God will give me back much more than I have given away.
"There are so many people in need, I wish I could help everyone," he said. "I just want to see the children happy."
Daniel Mickel, 7, and his sister, Jessica, 13, receive presents from Abu Christmas, a nickname for the man who appears each year. Photo by David Blumenfeld, special to the Chronicle
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