Days of Easter in the Old city of Jerusalem III

Armenian priests take part in the celebration mass of Orthodox Easter  at the Armenian Convent  of Saint James in the Old City of Jerusalem.

Days of Easter in the Old city of Jerusalem II

Greek Orthodox Priests during a procession in the streets of the Christian Quarter in the Old city of Jerusalem, celebrating Easter.

Remembering the victims of the Armenian Genocide, asking for recognition II

The Armenian community in Jerusalem gather to mark the remembrance day for the victims of the Genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, calling for recognition they"ve marched to the Armenian cemetery and then demonstrate in front of the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem. It's time for all the world to recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Remembering the victims of the Armenian Genocide, asking for recognition.

The Armenian community in Jerusalem gather to mark the remembrance day for the victims of the Genocide of the Armenians by the Turks, calling for recognition they"ve marched to the Armenian cemetery and then demonstrate in front of the Turkish consulate in Jerusalem. It's time for all the world to recognize the Armenian Genocide.

Days of Easter in the Old city of Jerusalem I

Dias de Pascuas en la Ciudad Vieja de Jerusalen.

Passover I - a deep cleaning - Jerusalem - Ultra Orthodox Mea Shearim

An ultra-Orthodox Jewish man immerses cooking pots into boiling water to remove remains of leaven in preparation for the upcoming Jewish holiday of Passover(Pesach) in Mea Shearim an Ultra Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. Passover commemorates the flight of Jews from Ancient Egypt as described in Exodus from the Bible.
Jews throughout the world celebrate the eight-day Passover holiday, which begins next week on April 18, to commemorate the Israelite' exodus from Egypt some 3,500 years ago.

Mr Goldstone What exactly do you know today that you didn't know then?

Cast Lead, from the series the war I didn't see.

Goldstone has paved the path for a second Gaza war

Anyone who honored the first Goldstone has to ask him: What exactly do you know today that you didn't know then? Do you know today that criticizing Israel leads to a pressure-and-slander campaign that you can't withstand, you 'self-hating Jew'?

By Gideon Levy, Haaretz.

All at once the last doubts have disappeared and the question marks have become exclamation points. Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu Al-Aish wrote a short book in which he invented the killing of his three daughters. The 29 dead from the Al-Simoni family are now vacationing in the Caribbean. The white phosphorus was only the pyrotechnics of a war film. The white-flag wavers who were shot were a mirage in the desert, as were the reports about the killing of hundreds of civilians, including women and children. "Cast lead" has returned to being a phrase in a Hanukkah children's song.
A surprising and unexplained article in The Washington Post by Richard Goldstone caused rejoicing here, a Goldstone party, the likes of which we haven't seen for a long time. In fact, Israeli PR reaped a victory, and for that congratulations are in order. But the questions remain as oppressive as ever, and Goldstone's article didn't answer them - if only it had erased all the fears and suspicions.
Anyone who honored the first Goldstone has to honor him now as well, but still has to ask him: What happened? What exactly do you know today that you didn't know then? Do you know today that criticizing Israel leads to a pressure-and-slander campaign that you can't withstand, you "self-hating Jew"? This you could have known before.
Was it the two reports by Judge Mary McGowan Davis that led to your change of heart? If so, you should read them carefully. In her second report, which was published about a month ago and for some reason received no mention in Israel, the New York judge wrote that nothing indicates that Israel launched an investigation into the people who designed, planned, commanded and supervised Operation Cast Lead. So how do you know which policy lay behind the cases you investigated? And what's this enthusiasm that seized you in light of the investigations by the Israel Defense Forces after your report?
You have to be a particularly sworn lover of Israel, as you say you are, to believe that the IDF, like any other organization, can investigate itself. You have to be a blind lover of Zion to be satisfied with investigations for the sake of investigations that produced no acceptance of responsibility and virtually no trials. Just one soldier is being tried for killing.
But let's put aside the torments and indecision of the no-longer-young Goldstone. Let's also put aside the reports by the human rights organizations. Let's make do with the findings of the IDF itself. According to Military Intelligence, 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the operation, 709 of them terrorists, 162 who may or may not have been armed, 295 bystanders, 80 under the age of 16 and 46 women.
All the other findings described a more serious picture, but let's believe the IDF. Isn't the killing of about 300 civilians, including dozens of women and children, a reason for penetrating national soul-searching? Were all of them killed by mistake? If so, don't 300 different mistakes require conclusions? Is this the behavior of the most moral army in the world? If not, who takes responsibility?
Operation Cast Lead was not a war. The differences in power between the two sides, the science-fiction army versus the barefoot Qassam launchers, doesn't justify things when the blow was so disproportionate. It was a harsh attack against a crowded and helpless civilian population, among which terrorists hid. We can believe that the IDF didn't deliberately kill civilians, we don't have murdering soldiers as in other armies, but neither did the IDF do enough to prevent them from being killed. The fact is, they were killed, and so many of them. Our doctrine of zero casualties has a price.
Goldstone has won again. First he forced the IDF to begin investigating itself and to put together a new ethics code; now he unwittingly has given a green light for Operation Cast Lead 2. Leave him alone. We're talking about our image, not his. Are we pleased with what happened? Are we really proud of Operation Cast Lead?

Juliano Mer -Khamis - a simple ferwell

Mer-Khamis and binational resistance movement

Through his life and his body, Juliano Mer-Khamis embodied the possibility of a binational resistance movement.

By Amira Hass, haaretz

Those who knew Juliano Mer-Khamis, the Nazareth-born actor and director who was shot in Jenin on Monday, will have to be the ones to write about him; all that the rest of us can do is write about the milestones in his life.
Juliano was lucky. He was born Palestinian and Jewish, Jewish and Palestinian. This angry man was beset by conflicting yet complementary identities. He was the long shadow of an imagined binational community from the 1950s. Like a Peter Pan who refuses to grow up, Juliano embodied the potential of a shared life (ta'ayush in Arabic ) while striving for equality. The son of a Jewish mother and a Palestinian father, he was born to two cultures, and chose to live in both. He saw no need to explain.
My guess is that Juliano wasn't entertaining illusions; sustaining blows from all sides, the potential of ta'ayush shrank. Ta'ayush is the sane vision, but the chance that it will be realized is increasingly slim. There are some who fantasize about the days of the Messiah to avoid thinking about the days before the next disaster strikes. Juliano's was the offspring of a fantasy of ta'ayush. His birth was the outcome of a fantasy of ta'ayush, and his death is a disaster.
Juliano was angry. His rage was the kind that only a Jew like him, who was born on the left and craved equality until the end, can allow himself to express as a way of life. Palestinians must conquer the anger, mellow it; they must tame it, repress it, sublimate it. That's the only way to stay both alive and sane (without getting arrested, wounded or killed ) under the conditions of physical and non-physical violence dictated by Israel.
Oy, this coarse violence, which reeks of rationalism and supremacy and pretends to be enlightened. It is found in every detail of life, moment by moment, from cradle to grave. It is found from a expropriation order and an accompanying map to the firing hole of a watchtower; from the Interior Ministry expelling Palestinian Jerusalemites from their home town to the blocking of return to the Galilee village of Bir'im; from the racist responses of Jewish youth in opinion polls to the drone that homed in on children playing on the roof in Gaza. The violence is always there, from the Jerusalem municipal taxes despite the ruined roads and uncollected garbage to the security cameras in the Jewish neighborhood/Crusader shtetl in Silwan; from the lush green of a settlement to the Palestinian cistern destroyed by an Israeli bulldozer; from the permits granted to individual ranches in the Negev to the incrimination of Bedouin as "infiltrators." In short, from the Jewish to the democratic.
This violence has so many different angles that it can drive you mad. Juliano was lucky to be an artist, and madness was one of his paintbrushes. Through the theater he founded in Jenin, Juliano allowed himself to criticize repressive aspects of Palestinian society. One would guess he did so as a left-winger, as an actor committed to the artist's oath of truthfulness, and as a Palestinian. Let's hope that the killer will be found, and then we'll know if a Palestinian artist was killed because of his courage to live in a way that disrupts the order, or if a Jewish artist was killed because he gave himself permission to overtly criticize a society that is not his, according to some, or if a left-winger was killed because he was disrupting the norm. Or perhaps all three together. Even if he was killed for some other reason, Juliano was still an artist and a Palestinian, a left-winger and a Jew.
Now that the prospect of the sane vision of ta'ayush is small, what is left? The path. This is the option of a binational resistance movement, which wants to topple the Gadhafi-like, Mubarak-like, Assad-like rule of one people over another.
There are some who insist on fantasizing about a binational movement as a historic necessity, as a logical antithesis to the ideology of the demographic separation that has become the bible of the Oslo process. The truth must be said: In the meantime, most of those who harbor such a fantasy are Jewish. Thus do we soften the contradiction between love for the people and the place on the one hand and the abhorrence of the enlightened violence on the other.
Through his life and his body, Juliano Mer-Khamis embodied the possibility of a binational resistance movement. The killer, whatever his motive, was aiming for the body. In his death, Juliano has bequeathed us the possible.

Israeli actor Juliano Mer-Khamis shot dead in Jenin

Juliano during a demonstration against the IDF operation in Jenin at the Jenin checkpoint April 9,2002.

At his home in Haifa during an interview

Many of the photographers and journalists working here came across Juliano during the last years, mainly because he was always there, I was one of them. We’ve meet as I was covering the conflict, in demos, in the camp, he was always in the first line. He believed in the project he was running in the camp, he was a man of facts on the ground, doing things, not only talking about it.

Always provocative, pushing the boundaries, an example of real need for coexistence, not the one in the comfortable rooms of Universities, cafes, or homes in Israel, but in the tough difficulties of Jenin camp.  He was against the Occupation with all his heart, body and soul.  

Once, in his home in Haifa during an interview he explained to us how he sees himself as Palestinian and Israeli, completely natural, as a hole.

He was a brave man, because he went till the end with his truth, and found his dead in the camp close to the “Freedom Theater”, his project.

A great lost, of the person,  and  the idea. Shocking and outrageous.

El Mar Muerto esta herido, pero no muerto aun. The Dead Sea is injured but not dead yet.

Si bien el gran problema del Mar Muerto, que se achica a promedio de un metro por anio, es conocido y se han escrito ya muchos artículos, cuando uno se encuentra ahi a la hora exacta, cuando los rayos de sol pintan las montanias que lo rodean es dificil no dejarse seducir por su belleza.
Es triste pensar que es el hombre el que esta destruyendo su medio ambiente y la belleza que lo rodea. Hace unos días acompañe a mi hijo Guil y sus compañeros de clase a un paseo por la zona. Mirando un atardecer paradisíaco, no podía sacarme de la mente la idea de cuanto el Mar Muerto se ha achicado. Recuerdo mi primer visita hace mas de veinte anios. Sin dudas las diferencias son enormes.
Hace un tiempo trabajando para una nota, Gidon Bromberg Director de Friends of the Earth en el Medio Oriente, me explico que el principal motivo del achicamiento del Mar Muerto es consecuencia de que Israel, Siria y Jordania desvían el 98 por ciento del agua del Rio Jordan, principal fuente de agua del Mar Muerto.
"Si los tres países cortaran el desvió de las aguas del rio Jordan a la mitad, el Mar Muerto gradualmente volvería a su tamanio" me dijo, "pero la gran pregunta es porque siguen  interesados en hacer crecer bananas en el desierto".