Naomi Klein has an interesting article in The Nation, January 7: “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction”. The idea just reiterates what has been said for years – that if the policy worked in South Africa, it could work here. Klein deals in the article with the main reasons for boycott and the main objections. She doesn’t …
Today was D’s birthday and her mother had arranged tickets a month ago to a play at HaCameri – Tel Aviv’s municipal theatre. The play was “Was it a Dream” – a love affair between a leading actress of the 1930s, and a poet of the time. Of course, it was completely bizarre to be …
F. writes from London: …My heart, soul, and mind is in Gaza and I feel I cannot concentrate or think about anything else. Like you, we are braving the bitter cold to demonstrate against Israel’s new holocaust. Today we were 200,000 people marching in London, even though the metropolitan police and BBC will say it …
Richard Stallman recently railed against “cloud computing”. The Guardian’s Jack Schofield also warns against its dangers: “Look, if you have data online, you can lose access to it at any second, through hacking, an idle whim, a simple mistake, or some financial or even natural disaster. In fact, calling it “the cloud” is a good …
?The day started with the parade for independence day of school children in the area. Then we took a taxi from Joshimath to Govindghat. After eating a light breakfast there we began along the 13 kilometer uphill trail to Ganga ghari. This proved to be quite arduous towards the end. I began to feel my …
I’m sitting here on my patio, taking in the cool night air, listening to Kate Bush, thinking of my trip to India in a few days. There, across the valley, in Na’alin, a family is grieving the death of their child, killed yesterday by live ammunition. His family had tried to keep him home, away …
Last night, in the framework of the Jerusalem Int’l Film Festival, was the first public screening of the first two episodes of Chaim Yavin’s ID Blues (Teudah Kehula in Hebrew). The series very effectively explores relations between Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel (i.e., those who carry the blue Israel ID card). As with his …
M., originally from Barcelona and now in Jerusalem, had been a volunteer in Wahat al-Salam during the 2nd Gulf War. All the other volunteers had fled, before the airlines cut their flights Since that time I hadn’t seen her. I only knew that she had initially gone to live in Efrat (the West Bank settlement), …
I found myself turning the evening news off fairly quickly again tonight. The programme opened with an item about a government decision to investigate police wiretapping used as evidence in the investigation of a sexual harassment scandal involving a politician, several years ago. The TV news brings us stuff like that every evening, and I’m …
Every six weeks the Israeli Thich Nhat Hanh sangha holds a day of mindfulness in the Pluralistic Spiritual Ctr and I join partly to manage the screening of a recorded dharma talk. The last couple of times, besides the work with the projector, there have been lots of early morning preparations; this time carrying and …