Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘tel aviv’

This according to Lonely Planet, which released its annual list of top 10 party cities a few weeks ago.

Montreal ranked in second place:

Easygoing Montreal is increasingly popular with foreign travellers, who enjoy the joie de vivre of a place with bilingual ambience, good local beer and even skiing at nearby Mt Royal. Montreal’s irrepressible student population and atmospheric old quarter give the city a light-hearted, Bohemian air. There are Old World cafes, cool jazz clubs, packed discos and late bars to choose from, plus a popular comedy festival each July.

And perhaps more surprisingly – not to those of us who’ve been there, of course, but in the face of the public perception of those whose picture of Israel comes solely from media headlines – Tel Aviv made the list at #10:

Like elsewhere in the Mediterranean, Israel’s second largest city gets going late. The endless bars, pubs and cocktail venues start to fill up by midnight, from which point the nightclubs get revved up with dancing till dawn. Nowadays an international crowd joins Israelis for a mixed bag of funk, pop, house and techno at the city’s dozens of entertainment hotspots. Tel Aviv has a relaxed air, and prides itself on being gay-friendly and outgoing.

Belgrade, Serbia claimed the top spot. Rounding out the Top 10 were Buenos Aires, Dubai, Thessaloniki, La Paz, Cape Town, (surprisingly) Baku, and Auckland.

Some of these may be debatable, but Tel Aviv’s inclusion on the list is a nice sign, especially considering the bad press Israel often gets in the backpacker community.

A suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, near the central bus station, has so far injured at least 10 people.

What is there to say that hasn’t already been said thousands of times already?

Update: The latest figures say 22 people were wounded. Ha’aretz is reporting that the Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility, but suggests that it’s a bit murky and that the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade (in other words, Fatah) may be behind the attack.

What really irks me is that media reports call this the “first bombing in a year”. Not true. It’s the first suicide bombing (though not the first attack) of the 2006 calendar year. But it’s been barely five weeks since a terrorist bomber struck in Netanya on December 5th, murdering five Israelis.

Say it with me now: What truce?

Delusion can be defined as getting one’s hopes up again and again, even when disappointment is a certainty.

Tonight in Tel Aviv, a bunch of people decided to go out to the promenade by the beach, maybe have a drink or two. Now, 4 are dead and over 50 injured because of a suicide bomber who decided to take advantage of the ease in restrictions by the Israelis to go out and murder them:

About 20 to 30 people queued up outside the “Stage” club on the generally packed Herbert Samuel Boulevard shortly after 11 pm Friday night when the bomber, dressed as a reveler himself, struck. As he reached the front of the line he detonated a nail-packed device just before being searched by one of the club’s guards. The force of the blast ripped cars open like cans, and sprayed the victims’ blood onto the club’s smashed front fa ade. Shops and windows of nearby buildings were obliterated.

Israel agreed to speed up the pullout from Gaza. Israel released Palestinian prisoners. Israel agreed to resume security talks. Israel eased border restrictions.

The Palestinians responded as expected… with more terror, more violence.

Anyone who had dared to hope that maybe this time would be different – despite all evidence to the contrary – well, I don’t know what to say. Because we all continue hoping. We’re human. We think that there’s got to be a way out of this mess and we’ll grasp at straws to find one.

What is there left to even hope for anymore?

Allison points out this article at Israel21C about how gay Palestinians are seeking refuge in Israel:

Between Open House, its ’sister’ community center in Tel Aviv, the gay-friendly commercial spots and pick-up parks here and there around the country, the annual gay pride parades in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and a fairly indifferent street-level attitude toward open homosexuals, Israel offers a refuge for Palestinian gays.

In their everyday lives at home, they must hide their sexuality because revealing it – or having it revealed against their will – would put them in violation of one of the most forbidding taboos in Arab society. Palestinians exposed as homosexuals are liable to be killed by Islamic or nationalist activists, or by their brothers or other male relatives.

Next time you go to a left-wing rally on a university campus and see someone holding a sign reading “Queers for Palestine”, why not give them a copy of this article?

Michael Oren, author of what many consider to be the definitive history of the Six-Days’ War, has an article in last Wednesday’s National Post about the latest ongoing war between the Israelis and the Palestinians that’s absolutely required reading (link requires subscription):

Looking back at the last four years, the world can learn some invaluable lessons from Israel’s war on terror.

The first is, quite simply, recognizing that this is a war — a total war, an existential war, a war of survival. A national leader, accordingly, must put virtually all other considerations aside. He or she must seek to create a national consensus and to maintain vital alliances — to emulate Churchill in 1940 and Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor. Even then, the state and its leaders must be prepared to endure significant stress internally and bitter condemnations in the international arena.

Secondly, victories can be won against terror without totally devastating the host society. Victory is possible while maintaining basic moral and democratic values. This, arguably, is Israel’s greatest achievement in this war, for though the Palestinian people declared war against not just the state but also the people of Israel, we did not retaliate with war against the Palestinians. Throughout, Israel used only a fraction of its military force, and never fired a single artillery shell at a Palestinian target. And though some Palestinian neighbourhoods, particularly in Gaza, have suffered extensive damage, Palestinian society has not been reduced to rubble — no place in the territories even remotely resembles Dresden in 1945 or Hanoi in 1972 or Chechnya today. No place evokes a sense of what a country would look like after it had sent successive waves of suicide bombers against the civilian populations of France or Russia or the United States.

From a state of near-paralysis at the end of 2000, Israel has rebounded. The hotels are filled and the restaurants, though now gated and guarded, are packed. In this year alone, Israelis garnered the country’s first Nobel Prizes in chemistry, its first Olympic gold medal and the championships of both European basketball leagues — heady achievements for a nation at war.

I would urge other Western nations to take a close look. Israel has been your litmus, your laboratory. We have shown the world that you can prevail against terror.

Powerful words and food for thought, especially in the wake of this morning’s suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that has claimed three more innocent lives.

Allison thinks she’s officially seen it all, with the news of the apprehension of a hermaphrodite would-be suicide bomber:

Israeli security forces thwarted a suicide bombing planned for Tel Aviv when they arrested a Palestinian hermaphrodite armed with a 15-kilogram bomb in the West Bank, Palestinian sources said.

Amal Juma’a, 32, is a hermpahrodite who goes by the name Ahmed, Palestinian Authority sources told Army Radio. The report said the terror attack was planned for Monday.

Sign of the times? Possibly.

But more likely, it’s a sign of the culture. It’s difficult enough in supposedly liberal, advanced-thinking areas of the world to have a “different” gender identity. Imagine what it must be like in a society that still treats women like chattel and has honour killings of women who are no longer virgins? Palestinian society isn’t exactly known for its advanced attitudes towards homosexuals, transsexuals, or, well, in this case, hermaphrodites.

There’s one place all the people who feel outcast or alienated can go to feel accepted, powerful, and special: to the terrorists. Groups like Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade are only too happy to help the alienated “find purpose” by strapping some C-4 to their chests and going to blow up innocent Jewish children.

In case you’re wondering, this isn’t one of those “excuses for the terrorists” postings. It makes no difference whether a terrorist is a man, woman, hermaphrodite, or a Marilyn Manson-type: a murder is still a murderer.

But it’s a sad fact that the terrorist groups prey on the weak, on the maligned, on the fringes of society. They find their killers among people to whom murder-suicide seems like a career opportunity. There’s no way to tell whether that’s the case here. But it very well could be.

Update: Stefan and Harry are also amused. It wouldn’t have been so amusing had the intended attack actually succeeded.

More terror in Israel, as a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv kills 3 and injures 15:

Israel radio reports that a suicide bomber attempted to enter Mike’s Place, a seafront coffee house near the US Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Initial reports state the security guard at the restaurant tried to wrestle the terrorist to the ground when the terrorist detonated his explosives.

I hate to say it but I’ve almost become numb to this already. It sounds awful, doesn’t it? That terror has become so commonplace, that we tend to move right past the grief and shock stages, straight to a political analysis of the fallout.

And that, of course, is crystal-clear: the terrorists are making their point that, as the new Palestinian cabinet is approved, possibly paving the way towards more negotiations, they’re reminding anyone who may have forgotten that they will never accept any sort of peace agreement with Israel. They want nothing more or less than the total destruction of Israel, and they will keep on launching terror attacks until then.

The United States, however, is now in a position where it is committed to the “road map” and is politically indebted to European allies such as Tony Blair to make another push towards peace between Israel and the Palestinians. So, as these large forces shuffle their cards, Israel will once again be asked to make sacrifices, weakening its position in order to appease its allies, in exchange for only more terror and bloodshed. When will they realize that you can’t force peace between two parties who don’t trust each other?

A user comment on the Link directed me to this article at ArabicNews.com:

Two Palestinians yesterday carried out two operations near a coach station in the downtown of Tel Aviv that resulted in killing 23 Israeli settlers and wounding other 80, seven of them in a critical health condition.

Note the use of the word “settlers” to describe the Israelis killed in Tel Aviv. Yet more evidence of what the Palestinians truly mean by “end the occupation” – they don’t mean Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip; they mean all of “Historic Palestine” (read: they want to destroy Israel). To them, any Jews living in the Mideast are “settlers” or “occupiers”.

When will the world catch on?

As part of its response to yesterday’s terrorist attacks in Tel Aviv, the Israeli government has ordered the shutdown of three Palestinian universities, including Bir Zeit University near Ramallah, on charges that the campuses are breeding grounds for terrorism. Based on what we know about Palestinian education, I’d say this charge isn’t so far out in left field.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw adds another comment to a long list of European apologies for Palestinian terror, by expressing his “regret” that Israel won’t allow PA leadership to travel to London for a conference.

Straw deplored Sunday’s double suicide bombing which left 22 dead in Tel Aviv, but he appeared to suggest that such violence was understandable, even justifiable, in the absence of movement toward a political settlement.

“The 6 million people who live in Israel and the 3.5 million people who live in Palestine, in the occupied territories, can only live in peace if they are going to have a future,” he told the BBC on Monday.

Straw seemed particularly displeased that he had not been told in advance of Israel s decision to prevent the Palestinians from traveling to London, noting that he had only learnt of the decision on a BBC news program.

Just more of the same moral blindness. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.