So there we were, a group of us sitting around having lunch together, mulling over the latest happenings in this crazy, half-baked, but much loved country of ours. The subject got on to a Pink Floyd tribute band that had been on at the local pub, and I was asked why I hadn't bothered to go along.

'I don't really like Pink Floyd' I told them, 'far too modern for me. Give me Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, even Amy Winehouse (at a pinch), but not Pink Floyd.'
'Shame' said Yael, 'it was a good show'.

I then mentioned hearing a radio advertisement for a forthcoming concert at Ra'anana Amphitheatre, featuring the American jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater in a tribute to Billie Holiday – right up my street.

'You guys wanna come?' I asked.
'No thanks' said Yael, 'I don’t like the old rock'n roll music.'
I looked puzzled.
'Anyway' she continued' I thought he was dead.'
'Who's dead?'
'Billie Holiday' said Yael.
'But Billie Holiday was a woman!' I told her.
'Ma pittom' (What are you talking about), 'Billie Holiday died in a plane crash 50 years ago. I saw the film.'
'I promise you, there was no plane crash in 'Lady Sings The Blues', I insisted.
'There was. He died very young after recording that song 'Raining In My Heart.'

Then the penny dropped.
'You're talking about Buddy Holly', I laughed. You've got completely the wrong person.
'But you said you were going to see a tribute show to Buddy Holly'
'No I didn't. I said I was going to see a tribute to Billie Holiday!'
Oh, that's not the same person?'
'No. Not at all.'
Then we all burst out laughing. When speaking in tongues, if you don't fully concentrate, you can easily get the wrong end of the stick.
 
It's not the first time I've been involved in some verbal confusion over here. In fact, it happens all the time.

On my first visit to Israel as a raw 18-year-old, back in 1985, my pal and I were hanging around the beach at Nethanya trying to catch the eye of two gorgeous local girls sunbathing right next to us. We made a couple of ill-fated attempts at engaging them in conversation, and after establishing that they weren't the least bit interested in us, we packed up our things and wandered off by the water's edge.

A minute later, we heard someone shouting and turned round to see one of those absolute stunners running down the beach towards us, not unlike Pamela Anderson in Baywatch. Slightly breathless, she stopped next to us, produced the sunglasses that I had left next to them on the beach, and declared in faltering English under a heavy Israeli accent,

'Hey did one you guys leave his testicles on the beach next to me?'

When I first moved to live in Israel some 13 years ago I was enrolled in basic Hebrew classes. It was like a Jewish version of the old British 1970's comedy show 'Mind Your Language'. None of us could speak more than a word or two of Hebrew and the class was assembled of people from Argentina, Brazil, France, Russia, Hungary, America, England, Venezuela, New Zealand and more. It was an incredible mix and confusion reigned.

On the first day we learned a few basic phrases including the word 'haval' which means 'never mind, or 'what a shame'. We learned this particular word as it is very similar to one of the basic foodstuffs required for everyday living, namely milk, the Hebrew for which is 'halav'.

That very same day I went to open a bank account around the corner from the school and was approached by a man who was clearly having a bad day. He rattled away in some language or other, throwing his shoulders skyward and with a face fraught with anguish and hopelessness. I felt sorry for him and didn't run away. I stood there for four or five minutes with my most sympathetic face on. and when he had finished he stared at me for some words of consolation.

Fumbling for the phrase learned only that morning in class, I looked at him sincerely and said "halav". He stared back at me for a moment, then shrugged his shoulders, gave me a disdainful look, and wandered off. Puzzled by his reaction, it was only when recalling the story to some friends, they pointed out that I had responded to the story of his wretched existence by declaring "milk".

At the same language centre I displayed a home-made poster in the foyer advertising a party in the 'miklahat' (what I thought was the basement) in my building. It wasn't more than a minute or two before the principal came to my room and advised me that I had advertised a party in my shower, having confused 'miklat' (basement) with 'miklahat' (the showers). I told her it would be fun either way, which she didn't find the least bit amusing, the po-faced cow!

My first eye test in Israel ended in uproar. A very dishy young optometrist took me into a darkened room and illuminated the board behind me. She smiled politely and I said to her in my faltering Hebrew, "At rotsa she anee orid et ha michnasayim shelee?"
She almost screamed in horror.
'What's wrong? What have I said?'
Unfortunately, I had confused 'mishkafayim' (glasses) with 'michnasayim' (trousers), and had perfectly innocently just offered to take my trousers down for her!

We eventually cleared up the misunderstanding, but it was a very tense and uncomfortable eye test, I promise you.

Some people quickly give up on trying to speak Hebrew and restrict themselves pretty much to the company of those that speak their common tongue. It is a very big mistake to make as you have little or no chance of ever becoming part of mainstream society.

If you come to Israel and want to really fit in, don't give up despite the many mistakes you will make with your Hebrew. Most Israelis find it quite charming when foreigners do their best to speak their language and readily forgive, and often seek to help and correct any mistakes made. The problem though seems to me that as we get older we become more reluctant to expose ourselves to being a laughing stock – even if it's all just part of the learning process.

 

 

 

 

 

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As a child I was fascinated in studying history, and until the age of 15 I really believed that a life as a historian would suit me down to the ground. Like so many of us, I found other interests attracting me more and ended up studying the form book rather more than the history books. 

One thing I remember being told as a child was that if you want to understand what is likely to happen in the future, you really should study what happened in the past. If Hitler had studied his history books he would have understood that trying to conquer Russia in the winter, just as Napoleon had attempted to do 130 years earlier, was nothing more than a suicide note for him and his army.

Thankfully, Hitler's megalomania got the better of him and he chose to divide his forces and suffered a crushing defeat in the East, a defeat that changed the course of the war and the shape of Europe and the world order in years to come. Let's not even mention what might have been the fate of what was left of European Jewry had he taken the time to study the potential consequences of his actions.


My particular interest in history was in studying Ancient Greece and Rome, Norse mythology and the history of Britain. The bible never really turned me on, as I was never quite sure if I should believe the extraordinary stories told there. There are however, many salutary tales to be found in biblical studies and one saying that has forever stayed with me is, I think, from Jeremiah, where the definitive line "As ye sow, so shall ye reap" is first mentioned. 


I find it hard to think of a more pertinent line in describing the current embarrassing situation Israel finds herself in over the building of 1600 more houses in East Jerusalem, and the war of words being exchanged between Jerusalem and Washington. As a moderate, a centrist in the Israeli political spectrum, I am truly angry at the way this situation has developed.


I'll be straight with you and state that I voted for Tzipi Livni and Kadima at the last general election. She won the most seats, but not enough to enable her to govern effectively without forming a coalition; that's pretty much always the case with the nutty proportional representation system we have over here. After much to-ing and fro-ing, Livni finally decided she couldn't sell her soul to the fringe religious parties, the mainly right-wing and Ultra-Orthodox groupings who hold the balance of power (like the tail wagging the dog). She would not give in to their demands of extortionate grants for religious institutions and the development of housing projects in the West Bank. 

Livni's thirst for power was not as strong as her principles. She told President Peres she could not form a government, so he in turn (as the constitution demands) asked Binyamin Nethanyahu, leader of Likud, the party with the second highest number of seats after polling, to try and do what Livni had failed to do.

Nethanyahu is not at all like Livni. 'Bibi' (as he is known here), likes to be boss and it doesn’t really matter who he has to get into the proverbial bed with to do so. He will make the deals and then see how he can manipulate it to his benefit. Bibi willingly grasped the hands of the Ultra-right wing and religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, enabling him to govern alongside his other coalition partners, Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beitainu and the much weakened Labor party of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, another who will pally up to virtually anyone if it keeps him in ministerial stationery.

Bibi, has made his bed, and now he's having to lie in it. He sowed the seeds of what we are seeing now as deteriorating relations with Israel's one true friend, the United States, - oh, I've forgotten the island states of Micronesia (bless 'em),  - by selling his soul to parties who would at a moment's notice bring down his government. If he were to stop building in the territories, land they see as God-given to the Jewish people, or reduce handouts to religious institutions, they would pull the plug on his government without a moment's hesitation. This is the price for one man's immeasurable ego. What a terrible mess we are in now.

A contrite Bibi was forced to apologise to visiting US Vice President Joe Biden, when last week, in the middle of Biden's push to re-energise the failing peace process, the Israeli government took the wind completely out of Biden's sails by announcing the building of the 1600 new housing units in the much disputed East Jerusalem area. Apparently, (and quite understandably), Biden was absolutely furious, but remained diplomatic in his references to the policy in public. US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was less restrained, barely disguising her anger in referring to Bibi's policy as "a deeply negative signal", this coming only a couple of weeks after Bibi had suggested that there would be no further development of new housing projects for the time being. 

It might well be the case that Bibi himself believes that the policy of house building in East Jerusalem is wrong, but he should have thought of that when he decided to sell his soul to the devil. Remember Bibi, 'As ye sow, so shall ye reap'. 'There's no such thing as a free lunch', once again, 'you made your bed, now lie in it', 'what goes around, comes around' etc etc.

I know most middle-of the-road Israelis are appalled by what our government has done. In pandering to the demands of a small minority of religious and messianic nuts, they've again jeopardised any hope of making significant progress on the peace front, at a time when warnings of a new Intifada are growing stronger by the day, and, at the time of writing a missile from Gaza has just been reported to have landed in Ashkelon and killed a man. (Judge Goldstone, take note!) 

With 99% of East Jeruslaem being Arab, what sort of a Jew is it that would want to live in an environment now swamped in unfettered hostility? Probably the same type as the 120 Jews who live in an armed enclave in Hebron amongst 100,000 Palestinians. They're welcome to it if that's the way they want to live, but they're not doing it in my name, and not in the name of the majority of Israeli citizens.

We're being sold out (again) by Bibi. The price for one man's ego and lust for power is likely to have to be paid by us all in the form of a weakened alliance with the United States and the probability of significant unrest within our borders should another Intifada kick off. When eventually Bibi wakes up from his delusions and realizes that, rather as Oliver Hardy said famously to Stan Laurel, "That's another fine mess you've gotten us into", it might just be too late to repair the damage.

Shame on him, shame on the Labour and Yisrael Beitenu parties who are standing idly by, and shame on his loony religious coalition partners, whose blind faith takes us ever nearer the abyss.         
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There was a radio album recorded some decades ago now in the US called 'You Don't Have To Be Jewish' in which there were a wide variety of comedy scenarios played out by obviously Jewish characters. I've been looking for an old recording but haven't found one so am having to rely on my memories of listening to this LP more than 30 years ago.

One scene that used to make me laugh was about a Jewish secret agent who had a problem hiding his identity, who knocks on the door of Mrs 'Shmendleberg' and promptly sneezes at the very moment it opens. 'Look Harry' she says to her husband, 'it's the spy who came in with a cold!'

Following the shenanigans in Dubai recently, I wondered for a while if this was part of a new version of the old 'You Don't Have To Be Jewish' compilation.

Old joke. Question: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Don't worry, I'll just sit here in the dark.

New joke. Question: How many Israeli spies does it to take to kill a single Hamas commander? Answer: 26…and counting!

Maybe I'm a little naive, but although I would not be the least bit surprised if the hand of Mossad is not involved somewhere in the removal of a particularly unpleasant man, I find it hard to believe that the paper trail left by those allegedly involved in the plot was so totally obvious. It smacks of an amateurish plot and one that doesn't fit the mould of the normal Mossad modus operandi.

Anyone that recalls the daft British comedy movie 'Carry On Spying' might well think that the Dubai farce was an unreleased scene from the 1964 film. If you've been following the news and watching those two guys on the closed circuit pictures coming out of the lift in their tennis gear, (one of them looking a dead ringer for Peters Sellers as Inspector Clouseau), you, like me, might also have anticipated seeing Barbara Windsor revisiting her character of the curvaceous Daphne Honeybutt, being pursued by Kenneth Williams and Charles Haughtrey. I'm not sure if Sid James was in that one.

Leaving the jokes to one side for a moment, there have certainly been some rum goings on with regard to the passport details of ex-pat Brits whose identities have been swiped and used as aliases for the alleged gang. It must have come as a very nasty shock to the real passport holders to find themselves on an Interpol list of most wanted criminals, when, like one nerdy sort now living in Jerusalem, he'd been slaving over a hot computer in his downtown office and never even left the Holy City, never mind travelled to the Gulf to 'rub out' one of the most dangerous terrorists on the globe.

Now the poor man and another 10 British passport holders living in Israel can't go back to that 'green and pleasant land' without being nabbed at customs and locked up pending investigation. I'm half expecting to be stopped at Manchester Airport when I return to visit the family in May. If they do lock me up and throw away the key, alleging I am Mossad's version of 'Q' from the Bond movies – let's call me 'Tet' – I'd be grateful if followers of this blog would organize a vociferous campaign urging the powers that be to release the 'Zichron One'. (The papers will like that type of name now that the 'Guildford Four' have been proved innocent).

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but newspaper reports suggest that the alleged spies operating in Dubai used credit cards that were easily traced. That doesn't sound like very high-level spy etiquette to me. It is also understood that at least of two of those allegedly involved left Dubai on a flight to, of all places, Tehran, the most logical place for an Israeli secret agent to flee!

I wonder if the Dubai chief investigator is just sitting around dreaming up numerous implausible scenarios as he hasn't really got a clue how Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was bumped off. I reckon that his next announcement will be to reveal that he might have died of one of up to 26 different methods, as all the suspects took turns in trying to finish him off.

If Israel's Mossad did do it then they didn't do it very well. If they didn't do it, it is still in their interest to say nothing so that other Arab fanatics will believe that they could be next in line. It needs to be remembered that not just Israel, but many other nations, many of them Arab countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even Dubai and her fellow Gulf States, have good reasons for wanting to lessen the threat of Islamic fundamentalism in their own backyards.

I Googled the phrase 'how not to get caught spying' and found a treasure trove of   amazing suggestions I'd never thought of, such as:

'If you see an enemy is in a car, you should take pictures of their license plate. Do not go after him or he will know you are chasing him.'

'Be ready to get out of tough situations. Remember things to say if you are caught, to avoid suspicion.'

'Learn to read lips if the subject is far away. If you do this you might want to have a pair of binoculars handy. (You can do this by watching a DVD on mute with the subtitles on to get used to the mouth.)'

'Things you'll need: Sunglasses (unless spying at night), Spy gear and gadgets, A good buddy to run to if you know your gonna get caught.'

The advice ends with the following warnings:

'Remember: you may face moderate to severe legal repercussions from partaking in most forms of spying. Please be careful'

'Always watch your back: if someone catches you, your cover is blown, and you're most likely done for.'

Armed with these pearls of wisdom I'm now ready to take on the combined forces of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda, all on my very own. This might be my last blog.
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It seemed just what the doctor ordered. I'd been at home most of the day working on another 'literary masterpiece' – not – when my good friend Arnold called and asked if I would care to join him for a breath of fresh air on the beach at Caesaria, next to the Roman aqueduct, for a walk to the Arab village of Jisr-A-Zarqa a few kilometres along the coast.

I didn't take much persuading and at around 5pm yesterday, as the sun started to set slowly in the west, we strode purposefully onto the Mediterranean sands with the backdrop of the well preserved 2000 year old Roman structure only yards away from the water.

We hadn't gone more than 100 metres when Arnold asked me if I could see something about 70 metres off the beach bobbing up and down. I strained to get a good look at a black object clearly visible and then decided to jump up on the broken plinth of a sunshade to get a view from a loftier position.

"It's a barrel. A black plastic barrel, I think" said I.
Arnold's eyebrows disappeared into his hairline.
"Just a minute, haven't those nice Hamas chappies been sending out barrels full of explosives into the sea to wash up on Israeli beaches and cause havoc!"
"You're right" said Arnold, 'that is definitely a barrel."

I looked around the beach to see if anyone else could corroborate the evidence of our own eyes and could only notice a jogger half a mile away and a couple who had apparently rather more important things on their minds at that moment.

I've found a bomb! And it's only 70 metres away! Now, if it had been just little old me spotting such an item, you (dear Listener) would have been quite right to take my finding with a serious pinch of salt. But, as my companion is no less than a Commander in the Israeli Navy and has some understanding of these matters, I feel confident that what we saw was definitely a barrel that 'may' have the potential to cause serious harm. The again, it might be filled with pirate treasure or Captain Morgan rum.

Arnold was straight onto the police and after explaining for five minutes what we had found, was told they'd be with us immediately. As the sun set and the barrel continued to bob up and down, moving ever closer to a rock promontory 30 metres off shore, we retired to the other side of the structure constructed during the time of that champion of children's rights, King Herod. In hindsight, that was a pretty daft move as I wouldn't have fancied my chances of coming out unscathed after 100 tonnes of Roman masonry fell on my bonce!

20 minutes went by and clearly the Caesarea branch of the Israeli police had other more pressing matters to attend to like giving out parking tickets or waiting for the kettle to boil in the canteen. Arnold called again – they were definitely on their way this time. I offered him a bet of even money that they would arrive. He declined. Maybe they couldn't find the seashore?

After another 15 minutes the light was all but gone and the barrel was becoming less easy to pick out. Feeling uneasy at being potentially in close proximity to a major bomb that was no longer visible, we went for a stroll a kilometre up the beach and back again – as you do at such times – during which Arnold explained that these barrel bombs are detonated by remote control via a mobile phone when the bomb maker is satisfied it can cause most damage.

"Just a minute" said I, "if they can't see the barrel as they're in Gaza 50 miles away, how do they know when to press the button?"
"That is the flaw in their cunning plan" Arnold observed. "They just wait until they think it should be there or thereabouts and then dial the code and it explodes."
"And what if the current carries the barrel back towards the Gaza Strip?" I puzzled out loud.
"Then they suddenly become Israel's latest secret weapon" he laughed.

Back at 'Barrel Beach' it was now dark and no police had moved their lazy backsides within shouting distance of the Caesarea Aqueduct. I thought of calling again and speaking in English saying something like:
"Now look here. You chaps need to get a move on and deal with this nuisance. This isn't how to fight a war on terrorism. There is a bomb. I repeat there is a bomb in a barrel in the water only 50 metres away from me!"
But the Israeli police are the Israeli police. Lazy, of dubious incorruptibility and only interested in dealing with things that allow them home in time for the end of their shift.
If you read in days to come of an explosion on a beautiful Israeli beach that destroyed part of a world heritage landmark, then you will at least know that two reasonably good citizens did try to avert the disaster.
As it was, it was getting a bit chilly so we went home and had hot chocolate and a nice slice of cake.

 

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