Israeli companies will unveil this month an array of new technologies that will save and maximize use of the world’s most valuable resource… water.
The systems range from a drone that flies 300 metres (900 feet) above ground to fight water leaks– described this week in a recent Reuters article on fighting global leakage – to a petroleum gas storage system that sits on the ocean floor.
Arad Technologies’ water meter-reading drone takes off near Tel Aviv and then parachutes down after completing its flight. REUTERS/Gil Cohen Magen
Water technology is one of the things Israel does best. Two thirds of the country is arid, and its first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, famously declared that Israel would only survive if it could “make the desert bloom”.
Since then, Israeli companies have been pioneers in the field and many of of their developments have penetrated the global market.
You can take a look at some of the more intriguing systems to be exhibited at the government-sponsored WATEC conference in Tel Aviv on Nov 17-19 by clicking here.
The Reuters news desk, along with many foreign journalists in Israel, received a peculiarly worded beeper message in English from the Israel Defence Forces Spokesman’s Office on Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying hundreds of tons of Iranian-supplied arms on Wednesday.
It read as follows (the strangely worded part is in bold letters):
IDF Spokesperson Update: ‘FRANCOP’, the weapons laden ship intercepted by the Israel navy, left the Ashdod naval port yesterday evening, after all of the arms and munitions had been unloaded. The ‘FRANCOP’ has continued on its way, sailing towards its original port of destination after the incidents of yesterday. Israel Navy personnel released the ship without complications and with best wishes for their continued safe journey. (This is a retarded sentence for foreign press, comes across as obsequious) the arms unloaded were transported overnight, under the supervision of sappers, to an IDF ammunition base in central Israel, where the weaponry will be properly and safely stored.
The spokesman’s office issued an apology in a subsequent beeper message. An officer in the spokesman’s office told Reuters the unusual commentary in the original message was the result of a mistake committed by a low-ranking soldier.
PHOTO: Israeli soldiers stand near munitions displayed at the port of Ashdod November 4, 2009, that according to the military was found on the Antigua-flagged Francop vessel, intercepted overnight in the Mediterranean Sea, 100 miles (160 km) from Israel. Israeli naval commandos have boarded the ship carrying Iranian-supplied rockets destined for Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and taken the vessel to an Israeli port, the government said on Wednesday. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Ordinary women and men, wearing plastic bags on their feet, pulling pants up to knee level, clutch their children to their chests and roam along a 110-metre dark tunnel of sewage to cross from the Israeli-occupied West Bank to East Jerusalem.
Erected under a barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank in defiance of a World Court ruling, the tunnel serves as a gateway connecting Palestinians from the West Bank to East Jerusalem, a centre for medical, social, religious and other services for the Palestinians.
The passage goes from the village of Old Beit Hanina in the West Bank to the area also called Beit Hanina in what Israel has annexed as part of its Jerusalem municipality. It was first used in early 2004, locals say, when Israel erected the barrier between the two Beit Haninas. What was originally essentially one village became physically divided in two. The tunnel was last used during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan in late September by people anxious to visit family or to pray in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque. Israel restricts entry for Palestinians to the city. Since then Israel has blocked off the passage — not for the first time.
Scenes of people’s legs sinking up to the knee in sewage are depicted in ”Journey 110″ by Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, who spent six hours capturing the 12-minute-long clip last year.
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip can only enter Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as a capital for their future state, with often hard-to-get permits from Israeli authorities. In 1967, Israel captured the territories including Arab East Jerusalem.
Local officials in Old Beit Hanina estimated the number of people who crossed the passage at up to 150 per day while it was open. “People are not doing it for fun and this is may be the only way to get to Jerusalem,” said Saleh Daajneh, an official in the village.
When Israel first found out about it, soldiers blocked the passage with rocks but “tunnel operators” managed to find a gap for people to squeeze themselves out the other end of the tunnel. Israel says the barrier is needed to prevent Palestinian militants from attacking their cities inside Israel.
After Ramadan this year, Israeli bulldozers again blocked the entrance of the tunnel with rocks.
“There must be a compelling reason why these people have to go through this trip,” said film maker Jarrar after a screening in Ramallah. His film will compete in the film festival “Instants Video” in France’s Marseille next month.
PHOTO: Film maker Khaled Jarrar posing for a picture, with his film playing in background, after the screening of the film in Ramallah. December 27, 2009.
An Israeli coffee chain is boycotting ‘Turkish’ coffee in response to the current anti-Turkish sentiment in Israel following the screening in Turkey of a TV drama which portrays Israeli soldiers in a negative light.
Marketing manager of Ilan’s Coffee House Michal Steg said the chain decided to pull its “Istanbul coffee” off the shelves as a way to show support for Israel.
“We sell more than 30 kinds of coffee and one of them is called Istanbul coffee, cafe Istanbul, and… we decided that we are going to take part of the feelings that we had in Israel and not to sell this coffee like for the next few weeks, days,” said Steg. “The idea is because we wanted to be part of what’s going on here and to feel more patriotic and so its a more kind of symbolic way to show it”.
Coffee shop regulars had mixed opinions about the coffee shop’s reaction to the political dispute.
“I know politically this is a bit of a tough time with Turkey but it’s still a friendly nation and I’m sure there are other forums to solve these problems but I wouldn’t go to the route of boycotting goods and products,” said Len, a Tel Aviv resident.
Another Tel Aviv resident, Yehoshua David Merel, said the boycott is nonsensical because ‘Turkish coffee’ isn’t even really from Turkey. “The idea to stop selling Turkish coffee in Israeli coffee houses is ridiculous in my opinion because first off, Turkish coffee doesn’t actually come from Turkey, so you’re not in any way boycotting the country itself,” said Merel.
Once-close ties between the Jewish state and Turkey, a secular state with a Muslim population, have deteriorated since Israel’s offensive earlier this year in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Turkey recently barred Israel from participating in a NATO war exercise in Turkish airspace and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said the move was a result of public concern over the Israeli military campaign in the Gaza Strip. The drill was postponed indefinitely after other nations, including the United States and Italy, refused to take part without Israel’s air force. In January, Erdogan, who heads the Islamist-rooted AK Party, stormed out of a debate with Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland in protest at the Israeli Gaza offensive.
In recent weeks, Israelis have been protesting in front of the Turkish Embassy over what they see as Ankara’s anti-Israeli line.
But Turkey still values its ties to Israel, Ahmet Oguz Celikkol, the Turkish ambassador to Israel, said at a recent academic conference on Turkish-Israeli relations.
“I understand today they are not going to discuss only bilateral relations but also Turkey’s roles in the world, Turkey’s role in the region. I believe of course, our relations are very important, but also it is very important to understand our roles in the world, and Turkey’s a positive impact on the region,” said Celikkol.
Turkey has strengthened its relations with neighbouring Syria, viewed by Israel as an enemy state.
“The ambassador actually pushed the government line that Turkey has a regional role, being a regional power. And it has certain ambitions, and he expects the Israelis to understand that. Of course this we can understand, but we cannot understand that the prime minister makes anti-Semitic statements,” said Professor Efraim Inbar of Israel’s Begin-Sadat Institute.
Click below to see our October 27-29, 2009 coverage of the boycott, which include interviews with Steg, Celikkol and Inbar:
PHOTO: An Israeli woman looks at a sign depicting a crossed out Turkish flag taped to the window of a coffee shop in Tel Aviv October 27, 2009. Picture taken October 27, 2009. REUTERS/Amir Cohen
Today marks the 14th anniversary, according to the Hebrew calendar, of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination on Nov. 4, 1995, a day that many Israelis consider a stark reminder of political and religious fissures that have yet to be healed.
Rabin was shot in Tel Aviv at a rally to garner support for the Oslo Accords. His assassin, Yigal Amir, had a religious and right-wing background and rejected Rabin’s peace initiatives.
Today, Israeli papers are filled with reminders of the contentiousness that the death of one of Israel’s historic figures symbolizes.
In a commemorative posting on the Israeli blog Israelity, writer David Brinn notes that Rabin’s assassination is “not a holiday that brings the country together.”
“The Right blames Rabin and his followers on the left for the failed Oslo process and the Left blames the right for the environment that enabled an Israeli to take the life of a prime minister.”
Today’s Haaretz reported that right wing-groups were calling on students in Jerusalem to boycott Rabin memorials. Activists said they planned to pass out flyers alleging the remembrance day was being used by the Left to demonise Jewish settlers and their supporters.
The Israeli daily also released an editorial noting that while Rabin had set into motion the creation of a Palestinian state, he was effectively following a course charted by his influential foreign minister, Shimon Peres, and the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
“Rabin founded Palestine-in-the-making without resolving the conflict between that act and his stated opposition to the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state, the division of Jerusalem, and the handover of the Jordan Valley,” the editorial said.
In the Jerusalem Post, columnist Liat Collins, criticized the use of Rabin’s legacy as a political yardstick, and a rallying cry against right-wing politicians: “They also judge whether the [religious and settler] communities (which probably account for half the Jewish population of the country) are remembering him in a suitable fashion, with sufficient soul-searching and pain. They usually find the accused guilty.”
As Israelis struggle over their own divisions on this anniversary, Barak Obama will try to address the rift that opinion polls show has opened between the U.S. president and the Israeli public. Obama, who addressed Muslims worldwide in a fence-mending speech in Cairo in June, plans to pay tribute to Rabin in a videotaped speech that will be played at a memorial for Rabin on Saturday at the site of his assassination in Tel Aviv. It will be the latest in a series of Obama recordings targeting the Israeli public. Opinion polls put his popularity rating in Israel at between 6 and 10 percent.
PHOTO: Israeli soldier lights candle at the spot where Rabin was assassinated. Tel Aviv, Israel. November 4, 2008. REUTERS/Gil Cohen Magen
Shara’a Simsim, the Palestinian version of the popular television program Sesame Street, will air its fourth season on Palestine TV in January 2010. Funded through a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the new edition aims to teach Palestinian children that they can achieve their dream of an independent Palestinian state through tolerance, education and national pride, as opposed to anti-Israel violence.
“Our problem is that for so long we’ve been focusing on resistance and we gave up on other things like culture, education and tolerance,” said executive producer Daoud Kuttab.
The show will target mainly boys by teaching them non-violent ways of expression. Empowered characters such as six-year-old Basel, who in one episode is seen brushing his teeth, wearing his clothes and tying his shoelaces alone and then waving a Palestinian flag and declaring: “It’s Basel’s independence day!”, will serve as role models.
The show’s Palestinian producers chose to make no reference to symbols of the Israeli occupation such as the West Bank barrier and the network of Israeli army checkpoints, which Palestinians say are sources of hardship.
“This is a program for pre-schoolers and we don’t need to show them all the things they see too much of anyway, which are the tensions that exist in their daily lives,” said Gary Knell, president of Sesame Workshop, which produces Sesame Street.
Although the program skirts issues related to Israel, it touches on the Gaza Strip and its 1.4 million residents who live under the rule of the Islamist group Hamas and are cut off from the West Bank, which is governed by the rival Fatah party.
In one episode, a Shara’a Simsim character is upset after losing contact with his brother, who lives in Gaza. His friends send a paper plane to the enclave carrying a message asking the brother to get in touch. Contact between the two is restored.
In the Gaza Strip, Hamas has its own children’s program which has been criticized for urging kids to fight Israel. Writer and actor of a children’s television program called “The Pioneers of Tomorrow” on Hamas-owned Al-Aqsa TV, Muhammad Ramadan, congratulated Shara’a Simsim on its success but said it also faces criticism.
“I want to say that the successful work faces criticism. The program’s idea is to educate these children and teach them about the social concepts: prayers, charity, the morning prayers and other social issues,” said Ramadan on set in his bear costume. “We also focus on our lands that were stolen by the criminal zionists in 1948. These issues are normal for the Palestinian children. Our program does not argue about politics.”
Knell told Reuters Sesame Workshop had asked international non-profit organizations, including the United Nations, to seal a deal with Hamas that would pave the way for Shara’a Simsim to be aired on a local television network in the Gaza Strip.
“It is our goal to expose the children of Gaza to our programme. The children there have been in extraordinarily difficult circumstances not by their choice,” Knell said.
In Israel, Rechov Sumsum promotes coexistence between the country’s Jewish and Arab citizens through Israeli-Arab muppets such as Mahboub (pictured left). The young blue muppet was dubbed and puppeteered by Israeli-Arab heartthrob Yousef ‘Joe’ Sweid who is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic. “It’s really funny, but the character I identified most with [of those I've played in my career] was ‘Mahboub’ because you return to something very basic — the child within you,” said Sweid of his experience on Rechov Sumsum in an interview with an Israeli website.
An Israeli-Palestinian version of Sesame Street was made in 1996 but Kuttab insisted on having a purely Palestinian version, which translated into Shara’a Simsim.
“This is 100 percent made in Palestine — from A to Z,” he said.
Sesame Street celebrated its 40th anniversary this year. Its non-profit Sesame Workshop production firm takes pride in being the single largest informal educator of children in the world, with 30 active co-productions in 140 countries.
Knell admits that fostering tolerance and peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a more grueling task: “When (Palestinian President Mahmoud) Abbas and (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu wear Bert and Ernie watches, then our mission will be accomplished.”
Click below to watch our October 20-22, 2009 coverage of Shara’a Simsim in the making and our interviews with Daoud Kuttab, Gary Knell, and Muhammad Ramadan:
PHOTO: Palestinian actor Ezzat Natsheh speaks with puppet Kareem, operated by puppeteers Shaden Zamamiri and Raja’e Sandoqa, during the filming of a scene on the set of Shara’a Simsim in a studio in the West Bank city of Ramallah October 20, 2009. REUTERS/Fadi Arouri
Palestinian reconciliation efforts suffered another setback when President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree for presidential and parliamentary elections on Jan. 24, a move that was rejected by the Islamist group Hamas. Egypt has been mediating for over a year to heal the split between Abbas’ Fatah party and Hamas but the two rivals have continuously failed to reach a unity agreement. (Read our Q&A to understand why the two Palestinian factions fail to reach an agreement on Cairo’s latest proposal.) Most Palestinians believe a unity deal is crucial to achieving Palestinian statehood but don’t think an agreement is likely. However, the rare case of successful Fatah-Hamas partnership in the West Bank village of Beita might convince them otherwise.
Elected leaders of this town come from different backgrounds and political affiliations but all serve on the same council, working in synergy to build a robust independently-funded infrastructure – a rarity in the Palestinian territories.
In the 2004 municipal elections, Beita village produced an 11-member council comprised of 6 Hamas and 5 Fatah members, with Sheikh Arab from Hamas as mayor. Shortly after the elections, Sheikh Arab joined forces with Abu Haitham, a former mayor of 8 years who had headed the Fatah ballot list, and together they worked to start building what they call ‘Little Palestine’.
“We asked ourselves this question, ‘Why did we come to this council?’ and all 11 members answered: ‘We came here for the good of the town,’” Sheikh Arab told Reuters. “We cooperate on what we agree and we pardon one another on issues we do not agree. We try to pretend as if Beita is Little Palestine with all of its problems – political, social, economic, and security issues.”
Like most Hamas leaders in the West Bank, Sheikh Arab was arrested by Palestinian forces loyal to Abbas in 2007, the year Hamas wrested control of the Gaza Strip from Fatah. He was released in 2009 and now serves as deputy to the current mayor, Abu Muhanad, a Fatah member who last held the post while Sheikh Arab was in detention.
“Outside the walls of this municipality, I am still Fatah and defend Fatah, and he is Hamas and defends Hamas. But we defend the right things and what is wrong on what we all agree is wrong,” Abu Muhanad said about his relationship with his deputy mayor.
Unity and cooperation within the leadership isn’t the town’s only achievement, said Abu Haitham, the former mayor who oversees various investments and development projects. “On top of the slogan to have unity and cooperation, we have adopted another principle and that is how to move from relief to development. In this respect, we concentrated on investments and how to rely on our income,” he said.
Unlike neighbouring municipalities which rely heavily on foreign aid, Beita Municipal Council generates profit from its sustainable local development projects funded entirely by private investors from the village and by Palestinian expatriates. A factory for the high-end mineral water bottling company Yanabee gives 35 percent of its profit to the municipality, allowing the council to be self-sufficient and avoid taking orders from foreign donors on how funds should be used.
Other locally-funded projects include an infrastructure connecting most of Beita to water and electricity, a flea market where produce is sold in bulk and a housing project on a hill top near the Jewish settlement Itamar.
Another project or two and Beita will be completely independent and self-sufficient, the council says.
“We are an organisation that carries out services. When we sit around the table, we are supposed to find the grounds on which we can achieve whatever we can for our country. This is why we have harmony — not to forget, we are cousins,” said the current mayor, Abu Muhanad.
“My brother and I are in the same municipality council: my brother is Hamas and I am Fatah, what do you want us to start with one another now?” Abu Muhanad said with a smile.
Click below to watch our visit to Beita and our interviews with the village’s three mayors on October 21, 2009:
PHOTO: A Palestinian Fatah supporter gestures behind a Palestinian flag during a rally in the West Bank city of Ramallah against Israel’s offensive in Gaza and in support of President Mahmoud Abbas January 19, 2009. REUTERS/Fadi Arouri (WEST BANK)
Want to know how it feels to be George Mitchell, President Obama’s special envoy to the Middle East? Try getting from Jerusalem to Ramallah on a typical weekday at the rush hour. And experience stalemate, frustration, competitive selfishness, blind fury and an absence of movement that even the most stubborn and blinkered of West Bank bus drivers might see as a metaphor for the peace process that is going nowhere fast right now.
It took me 2 full hours to drive the 100 metres (yards) or so from the Israeli military checkpoint in the West Bank barrier around Jerusalem to reach the relatively open main street through Qalandiya refugee camp, the gateway to Ramallah. The reason? Well, at its simplest it’s traffic chaos caused by anarchy, a vacuum of law and order. Look further, as with much else in the Middle East, and you get a conflicting and contrasting range of explanations.
Traffic coming through the Israeli checkpoint must merge with that arriving on a main road that follows the West Bank barrier on the Palestinian side. Just beyond the checkpoint, where these two flows merge, they must also cross with traffic going in the opposite direction, from Ramallah, either into the checkpoint or along the barrier. The snag? No traffic lights, no traffic police, no nothing (barely smooth tarmac and certainly no painted junction lines) at the crossroads. The result? Check out the picture above.
Why does it happen? For many Palestinians, the cause as in so many other respects is Israel. Take away the checkpoint and the Jewish settlements protected by further military posts and traffic would circulate much more easily. For Israelis, the checkpoints, barrier and so on are the result of Palestinian violence during the Intifada of the first part of this decade. Bad traffic is the price ordinary Palestinians are paying. Dig further, and each side will come up with a long line of causes and counter-causes going back many decades, if not millennia. Stuck in a jam at Qalandiya checkpoint, you have time to muse on all of them, believe me.
There are a few nuances. Palestinians point out that the violence of the Intifada has died away. But Israelis note that a security guard was wounded in a stabbing at Qalandiya only on Sunday. As I sat imprisoned in a car on Monday, boys aged 14 or less took advantage of the inability of Israeli jeeps to drive out and grab them to lob stones into the checkpoint. Palestinians complain that Israeli troops have authority over the roads around the checkpoint under the Olso accords of the 1990s, but in fact show little or no interest in managing traffic beyond the confines of the checkpoints search bays. Palestinians argue that they manage traffic pretty well in Ramallah itself. A minor economic upswing in the past few months in the West Bank, grudgingly attributed at least in part to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policy of easing security roadblocks, seems to have contributed to bringing more cars onto the roads. Traffic lights and traffic cops keep reasonable order in the Palestinian cities. But out in the no man’s land close to the Israeli barrier, they are not allowed to operate.
What else can you learn sitting tight for a couple of hours breathing other people’s exhaust fumes? 1. Yasser Arafat is still popular, as attested to by some nifty graffiti art on the wall itself. 2. It’s an ill wind that blows no good in the Middle East – enterprising young men were hawking gum, cigarettes and sunglasses with rather more success than usual to the stranded motorists. 3. Brutally selfish pig-headedness seems to pay, after a fashion, in these parts. The guys with the baddest attitude and least regard for their fellow man or woman, seem to get to the front of the queue, and no one seems able to stop them.
That’s a pretty sad lesson to take away, but one that Mr Mitchell may be becoming familiar with as he struggles to coax anything looking like compromise from any of his interlocutors. However, if one can find any positives, perhaps it is this. I did eventually get across the crossroads, even if it did take a big chunk of my afternoon. And I did so quicker than I might have done if total anarchy had prevailed. For, in time, at least, in this small, ugly, scarred spot of the Middle East, ordinary people did come to the rescue. Groups of men from the refugee camp, with no obvious authority but the odd chequered headscarf, leather jacket or a don’t-mess-with-me moustache, started directing the traffic, blocking everything from cheeky Suzukis to belching 16-wheelers with their bodies and forcing apart the gridlocked mess to start the process of clearing the backlog. A few thousand years after Moses and the Red Sea, another miracle in the Middle East. Mr Mitchell may have to hope for one. But at least the good folk of Qalandiya camp showed that, just maybe, such things really can happen around here.
Hundreds of visitors to Jerusalem’s old walled city got more than the tour of religious holy sites they had bargained for on Sunday, as violence between Israeli police and Muslims at al-Aqsa Mosque spilled over into some of the otherwise charming cobblestone alleys that frame the compound.
Eighteen Palestinians and three Israeli policemen were injured in the latest of a series of recent confrontations at the mosque, situated on al-Haram al-Sharif (the Noble Sanctuary), which Muslims regard as their third holiest site. Jews revere the area as the Temple Mount, a site where two ancient temples once stood. The Western Wall remnant to a Roman-era temple, one of Judaim’s holiest sites, is right next door.
As the clashes ensued, tourists visiting a Christian holy site on a neighbouring Jerusalem street hurried on past as Israeli police scuffled with Palestinian protesters throwing stones, hurling an occasional firebomb and burning trash on an intersecting alley.
Helmeted riot police kept dozens of Palestinians waiting behind metal barricades even as they ushered through the tourists headed to see the site of Jesus’ biblical walk down the Via Dolorosa, where he was marched to his crucifixion. White-robed Palestinian medics could be seen hurrying in the other direction, carrying injured men and women out on stretchers to waiting ambulances outside the old city’s walls.
Bill Dykstra, a health consultant from Canada’s Vancouver, was one of many who sought to capture some of the drama by snapshot. He photographed a few dozen Muslim worshippers kneeling in prayer outside the closed green gates to the compound that houses al-Aqsa, just a few steps away from where some policemen were arresting two screaming Palestinian protesters.
“I see there’s confrontation,” Dykstra remarked. “There’s obviously a difference of opinion, a site of religious turmoil here.”
” A lot of people are very entrenched in the past and they need to move forward, for peace, to change their mindset,” Dykstra added. But Dykstra had no plans to change his tourist itinerary, he said, before sauntering down the stony Via.
There were also some unusual attempts at dialogue amid the tension.
Sali Abu Sneineh, a 60-year-old Palestinian resident of Jerusalem, tried arguing with one of the Israeli policeman on duty not far from the shut gates to the Muslim holy site. Abu Sneineh said he couldn’t understand why he couldn’t pray at the mosque. ”This isn’t right,” he said. “I’m not happy about this,” he told the Israeli border guard, who identified himself as Ben.
“What can I do that you’re not happy?” Ben replied. “If you people didn’t make a fuss there you could all go and pray.”
To a reporter watching the exchange, Abu Sneineh turned and said he thought both Israeli and Palestiniain political leaders were to blame, noting the peace talks stalled since December.
“If we could achieve the peace with a two-state solution, then we wouldn’t have any of this. But the trouble is we have one leader who stonewalls and another who acts like a meathead,” he said.
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