Despair and Joy: 24 Hours Around Jerusalem

Three years ago, I scoffed from Tel Aviv at Jerusalem. Tel Aviv, Israel's global party city on the sea, seemed to be the younger sister who just got more and more luscious as her older sister turned into an old maid. But Jerusalem is actually turning out to be a cougar. This is a city of endless faces, where you can live in different centuries depending on your neighborhood, and where you can experience bottomless despair followed by euphoric ecstasy within 24 hours.

Take the last two days. Monday night was the beginning of Tisha Be'Av, the fast day commemorating the destruction of the Second Temple and the exile of the Jewish people from ancient Israel. Two thousand years later the wounds are still fresh. So I went down to the Western Wall in Jerusalem's Old City to find the crying people.

Basques in Jerusalem

Although I already wrote about the weekly protests in East Jerusalem's Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, yesterday I went down again with my camera to see how this recently founded institution is doing. Since November, about 500 people come each Friday afternoon to protest the eviction of Palestinian families and their replacement with Jewish settlers.

This week I didn't see any arrests or serious protester-police altercations. But that didn't mean everything was totally normal...About 20 protesters were Basque activists, and they sang a song about Basque political prisoners with the accompaniments of accordion and recorder. One of them told me they were part of a delegation visiting the region because "If we let the Israeli state do what it wants to do with Palestine, it will push the Spanish government to smash the Basques."

The Darfurian National Dish...Hummus?

While in Tel Aviv Monday I decided to check out the first Sudanese-owned hummus restaurant in the country, Hummus Gan Eden (Paradise Hummus) on Yona Hanavi Street in Tel Aviv. Hat tip to Ben Hartman at the Jerusalem Post for reporting it first. Here are two of the three co-owners, Hassan Muhammad (29) on the left and Muhi Muhammad (33) at his side. Hassan said the two are actually from the same place and the same tribe but only met when they arrived in Israel.

For some background: Made of chickpeas, sesame paste, garlic, lemon and olive oil, hummus is a major staple of Israeli cuisine. This year Israel unsuccessfully battled Lebanon for the Guinness World Book of Records title of largest plate of hummus; in the Arab-Israeli town of Abu Ghosh, this translated into filling a satellite dish with the spread. The Hummus 101 site tracks the best greasy spoons in the country in Hebrew and English. Supermarkets sell as many varieties of hummus as Americans do toothpaste.

Voting Lieberman in Abu Snan

"I have an Israeli flag out every day," Nawaf Azzam told me in his living room in Abu Snan, a village near Haifa. "If it rips, I fix it. Just to stick it to other people."

At 62, Azzam is enjoying his retirement from the Haifa police in Abu Snan, a humid, leafy and colorful village of 12,000 set over green rolling hills of the Galilee. His house has one Israeli flag on the balcony and another on the roof.

I met him as part of a field trip I did Friday with Yossi Yovel. During the week Yossi is a biologist, but on Fridays he tours Arab villages in Israel as part of a ten-part series he is writing for free for Ynet, the Web site of Israel's most popular daily Yediot Aharonot. Yossi said he wanted to volunteer in a project to bring Arabs and Jews together and figured that by writing about his own travels in the Arab countryside, he could encourage his fellow Jewish countrymen to visit their neighbors. He takes breathtaking photos to illustrate the villages that for the average Jewish Israeli, are off the map. (Hebrew Web site here). His first piece on Umm el Fahem drew 262 responses. I was curious about his mission, so I asked to ride along.

An Odyssey to IKEA

The cafeteria offered hummus and herring, but Ikea Israel is an unmistakeably Swedish outpost in the Levant. I went there last week on Thursday to celebrate extending my Jerusalem lease by buying furniture I would have to assemble myself.

This year, Ikea opened a second branch in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rishon Letziyon. There are 37 Ikea outlets in the United States serving a citizenry of 300 million people. That's an average of one store for every 8 million people. By contrast, Israel's has two megastores for the tiny population of 7 million. There may be a third, in Haifa, by 2012.

Ikea is so ingrained in the national psyche that when the satirical show "Eretz Nehederet" imagined future archaeologists discovering the ruins of Israel in the future, they pictured Ikea at the center of the Israeli Mecca:

Charming Summer Street Art

Summer means lots of greys as this part of the world dries out, but graffiti and street art in Bethlehem and Jerusalem have been particularly compelling lately.

Let's start with the Palestinians: Bethehem's stretch of the separation barrier that roughly divides Israel from the West Bank is covered in graffiti paintings of giant camels and the Palestinian flag. Long ago, the Bahamas restaurant used the wall as free advertising for its menu of misspelled seafood. But for World Cup season, Bahamas outdid itself and aimed a projector at the 24-foot-high concrete wall.

I went on the cool summer evening when Germany clobbered Ghana. The Taybeh beer was smooth, kids ran around and sweet apple-scented argila was ubiquitous. I asked the owners of Bahamas what they'll do with the screen after, and they are thinking about a permanent set-up as a cinema. If you want to see the World Cup on the Wall, go before the final game on July 11.

Back in Jerusalem, street artists have been animating fire hydrants and the traffic lines on the street. I love it.

"No one understands me."

Pacman:

Being chased by this guy:

A Tale of Transportation

Jerusalem lies on the seam of three entities. There's Israel, where buses run with relative regularity to most places and hitchhiking is confined to the northern and southern reaches of the country. There's the West Bank, where Palestinian cities and towns are well connected by microbuses. And there's Judaea and Samaria, the settler world of the West Bank, where hitching is so ingrained that drivers pull up to bus stops as they head out of town, filling up their cars with teens en route to Jerusalem.

In moments when I am huffing my bike through Jerusalem at noon in summer, or when a bus ride takes me three hours out of my way, I regret not owning a car. But having no wheels also forces you to participate in the local transportation, and this weekend I took that to the max.

Day 1: This Friday, I went to Wallaje, a village south of Jerusalem. Getting there took a 30-minute walk from the Malha Mall at the southern edge of my new hometown, including a 10-minute hike straight uphill. I was there to report on a protest in the village, but I stopped at Abed Rabah's cave a kilometer away, where he's sitting on his grandfather's ancestral land, much to the Israeli government's chagrin. He's preparing for the coming separation fence, which will isolate him from both Bethlehem and Jerusalem, by growing rabbits, chickens and vegetables.

Freedom Coffee

As Israeli-Turkish relations go icy following the deadly takeover of the Mavi Marmara, Israelis aren't taking the chill sitting down. They are cancelling group trips to sea-and-sun resorts on the Turkish coasts, yelling at the owners of Turkish-themed restaurants [whether or not they're Turkish], and debating renaming Turkish coffee to something that doesn't remind them of the blustering Turkish Prime Minister and his furious fellow citizens.

Here's the daily cartoon from Haaretz newspaper. The woman's taking down a package of Turkish coffee off the supermarket shelf. "Is it ok?" she asks her fuming husband.