There's a great song – yesh le sympatia l'anashim hagarim betel aviv. I have a warm feeling for people who live in Tel Aviv. Tonight on TV Shlomo Gronich and Matti Caspi and their wives, Michal and Rachel sang it – It's a very catchy jazzy song and they sing it incredibly well. It reminded me that when I moved to Israel I was under the impression that Tel Aviv was a supercilious, pseudo-sophisticated city where people were not friendly. Jerusalem was the spiritual city, Haifa was the workers' city, Beer Sheva was the pioneers' city, and Tel Aviv was where people lived who would rather be in New York. It didn't take me long to figure out that the idea was a cover-up. That Tel Aviv is an amazing place. It's hard to explain exactly why – in the old days when there were tourists, I used to try to show them something of the magic – but I always had the feeling that the secrets of this city defied 'show and tell.' You had to live it. Now, with all the economic hardships, the security problems, and the strange fatalistic yet escapist mood of the city, it is even more beguiling. It's not just the smell of jasmine that intoxicates once you step off the main thoroughfares, or the strange conversations you can have with storekeepers (see, for example, "Shopping in Tel Aviv" on my website. It's that strange combination of super-sophisticated modern metropolis and nineteenth century European shetl, that manifests itself in innumerable ways…

In fact if there is anyone out there who knows what I mean and has examples of it, let me know and I'll post them.

and while we're at it - i just managed to erase the first 4 pages of this journal entry - from may 11th and the peace rally and the likud congress - if there is anyone out there who copied it - please send me a copy - i've just discovered that when you write on line with no drafts or backup you can get into trouble...

Here are the pictures of the peace rally anyway. 1 and 2 And the poem I was talking about before the discussion got erased is here: "Hostage Crisis" . I can't remember the immediate context that I referred to it here, but the poem itself was about the difficulty of assigning blame to specific acts when ideological or emotional considerations intervene. And the poem about Jenin is on Ariga. It took me a while to decide to put it on. Yesterday (May 14), I was talking with Yael about writing about 'the situation' and she mentioned that she had sent a poem to the papers about her son's induction into the army and received the reply that it was not a good time to publish a poem like this. People seem to feel that controversy is problematic at this time, and there is a great deal of interal censorship. Even at the peace rally people were in conflict. Should they be there? Were they doing something unpatriotic? Notice how i moved to the third person here - as if I myself was not conflicted. I was so conflicted i accidentally erased my journal entry about it. Enough said.