[Note: The names of people below are changed. --- J.M.H.]

Muhamed

At least once a week Muhamed telephones from his Galilee village to chat about the news and ask how things are in Tel Aviv. He likes to reminisce about happy days in Tel Aviv of the 1980s, before the first intifada killed the mood and the first Gulf War scared the tourists away. Since those days, Tel Aviv has acquired a new opera house, endured a decade of sporadic suicide bombings, and begun sprouting high-rise buildings. It has not fully recovered its pre-intifada upbeat attitude, though. The young Brits and other Europeans who used to come here to work and travel no longer enliven the place. Muhamed recalls restaurants that have ceased to exist and local celebrities whose faces are no longer seen.

Muhamed watches Aljazeera television a lot. When he telephones from his village he often already knows the details of a breaking story from Iraq. Sometimes he launches into a monologue on the comparative benefits of living in the State of Israel. He praises its food, climate, health care, economic progress, even its law-enforcement. He was born only a few years after the establishment of the state and has spent most of his life here. He says he does not understand why people in his village complain as they do. Jews and Zionism have been good for the place, he says. Sometimes he goes to Haifa and discusses politics and history in a coffee house. He has no one to talk to in his village, he says. [more]

by Joseph M. Hochstein @ 10:38 PM CST [Link]