Evidence of normality on the Rooftop

-


The endless hot-muggy weather has kept me more indoors than out. It's only in the early morning or evenings that I escape the AC for some fresh air. Venturing out at sunrise a few days ago I discovered that a fully grown sunflower had appeared on the Rooftop.      



Over the road, signs of work on the Tel Aviv metro.



A humid haze hangs over the sea to the west.



To the north on nearby Yitzhak Elkhanan, a big  residential tower is going up.



The sun rising through the office buildings to the east.



To be welcomed by the sunflower...


  
At this time, with the threat (no one for sure knows how real) of an imminent war with Iran and its satellites feeling more credible by the day, and just before we head off for NYC for a family visit, I wanted to post these signs of normality. In a superstitious attempt to ward off the coming disaster? As a way of documenting the Rooftop and its immediate surroundings before the ....      

Here's a small sampling from today's news:

"A foul wind is blowing over Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, with weekend gusts toward Caesarea. A wind of pugnacity. Before the eyes of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and in the spirit of the chants of which he is so fond ("They are frightened"; "There's no free lunch" ) - it's as if a new sign has been raised high, bearing the words: "Strike now!" " (Haaretz)

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak  advocate an attack of Iran's  nuclear facilities in the upcoming fall, Yedioth Ahronoth's senior commentators Nahum Barnea and Shimon Shiffer reported Friday. According to Barnea and Shiffer, "Not a single state official or military official or even the president – supports an Israeli attack in Iran." (Ynet)

Paris has reportedly drawn up emergency plans to evacuate French citizens from Israel in case of war.
The plan, reported by French news outlet La Tribune, would see 200,000 French nationals ferried in small boats to large warships stationed in the Mediterranean.Diplomatic sources told the news outlet the plan was drawn up amid fears that Israel may come under attack from Iran or Hezbollah in the wake of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear sites. (Times of Israel)


Wishing us all a safe fall.... 








Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Unfinished Apartheid Thriller

-
Image
                 An Israeli Prime Minister as imagined by the DALL-E AI programme     About six months ago, I was revisited by the writing bug and decided to try my hand at fiction  - a "diplomatic thriller" to be more specific. The choice of genre was not dictated by any literary preferences. I'm not a big fan of thrillers. But the idea was to use the thriller as the most suitable vehicle to write about what was really bugging me - Israel's inevitable slide into apartheid.      I also thought that my professional experience might come in handy. For more than two decades I worked as the press officer for the EU Delegation to Israel and followed the sometimes turbulent relations between Israel and the European Union from the vantage point of an Israeli working inside the EU, in other words as someone with a split identity. I believed that this familiarity with the mind-sets and decision making processes of both sides would somehow provide me with the tools to weave a b
Read more

Four Views From the Roof - Introduction

-
Image
  Four Views From the Roof   Introduction      In 1994, against the advice of friends and family, we managed to scrape together the deposit for a dilapidated three room, third floor flat in an old apartment building on Yehuda Halevi Street in south Tel Aviv.  It was all we could afford if we wanted to put down a stake in Tel Aviv.    The building and its environs literally reeked of negligence. The once impressive but now deserted building opposite ours that had once served as a courthouse, was populated by  drunks and junkies. To the west was tumbledown Neve Tzedek just starting to attract artists and students. To the east was a business area heavy on cheap eateries, wholesale textiles and low-end fashion outlets. Old men on tricycles navigated long bales of textiles against the traffic on the narrow streets (and still do). On parallel Lilienblum Street, dubious characters would whisper “Dollar? Dollar?” to passers-by interested in by-passing official restrictions against holding for
Read more