A rogue cloud in Jerusalem

It rained in Jerusalem today - the first rain of the fall, an exciting event in Israel, where it doesn't rain all summer.

The rest of the country was dry, and the rain was not predicted by the forecasters.

Rogue cloud treats Jerusalem to first surprise shower of season

A freakishly hot summer in Jerusalem is being capped by a freak rainstorm that has swept across the city, bringing showers and joy to the capital.

The rainstorm is freakish not for the time of year — in fact it’s a bit late for the first rain of the season — but because it appears to have come out of nowhere.

Forecasts for Tuesday called for unseasonably warm weather and partially cloudy skies. The storm appears to be the result of a single large cloud that sneaked across the city.

“One cloud (the sky is clear nationwide) throws off all the models,” tweets the amateur meteorologist behind the popular Yerushamayim weather site, which crashes thanks to the storm.

“Fine, you caught me with my pants down. You don’t need to bring down the site,” he adds.

The first rain of the season is always an event in Israel, where the dry season lasts from mid-spring until early fall.

Jerusalem Street Kitten

I spent this afternoon taking a walk around the neighborhood of Katamon, which is where I'm currently living in Jerusalem, and first I came upon one of the many street cats of Jerusalem. Jerusalem street kitten

From Katamon June 24, 2014

Jerusalem from Har Gilo

A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine took me up to the top of Har Gilo (Mt. Gilo), which is just south of Jerusalem, across the Green Line (the border that used to exist between Israel and Jordan from 1949 to 1967). As my last post notes, Israeli settlements on the other side of the Green Line are not recognized as legitimate by any other state, but that has not stopped the Israeli government from either deliberately planning them or allowing them to be built. Har Gilo is right next to the Palestinian village of Walaje. Israel has almost entirely enclosed Walaje with the separation wall, even though since 1967, Walaje is within the Israeli-defined Jerusalem municipal boundaries.

In this map (a screenshot from Google Maps), the 1949 armistice line is represented by the dotted grey line.

After the 1967 war, Israel annexed east Jerusalem and a good deal of other land north and south of the city, including where Walaje is. This map shows the post-1967 municipal boundaries. I've marked where Har Gilo is. It's from PASSIA (Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs).

And here are some of my photographs from the visit to Har Gilo. The first two are of Jerusalem north from Har Gilo.

In the top of the photo you can see the Chords Bridge, at the western entrance of Jerusalem.

The hideous tall building in the center of the photograph is of the tower from the Holyland apartment development, surrounded by less tall but equally ugly buildings. Several people have been convicted of corruption in the building of the development.

On the horizon, the left hand tower is part of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at Mt. Scopus. The right hand tower is on the Mt. of Olives.

We're looking north towards the Jerusalem Zoo. The low building with a domed roof close to us is of the aviary.

Part of Walaje. Notice the high concrete wall - this is the separation wall, cutting of Walaje from the rest of Jerusalem.

Another photo of Walaje, also showing the separation wall, and beyond it, a large cleared area - for what, I don't know.

A view from Har Gilo towards the west, I think - I don't know what the hill we're looking toward is.

I took this photo on our way back to Jerusalem because I wanted a picture of the misty hills going off in the distance. I'm not sure what this view shows.

Photos from Jerusalem

Today I went to the renovated old Jerusalem train station (now called the תחנה ראשונה or "First Station"). Instead of the moldering old train station, there are now several restaurants, carts for people selling jewelry and other crafts, a farmers' market on Fridays, and places for kids to play. I had lunch with a friend at Landwer's Cafe and we walked around and looked at the stalls. Most of these photos are from today's visit and then my walk back home along the railroad trail.

The first photo, however, is from a couple of weeks ago, on the full moon. It's the view of the full moon from the garden of my apartment building.

This is one of the stands in the farmers' market.

 Graffiti on an electric box along the rail trail.

People walking and cycling down the trail.

A monastery next to the trail.

Some nice purple flowers.

Banners marking the trail just before you get to the Tahanah.

A pomegranate tree.

A nice house along the way.

Some pretty flowers.

Another interesting looking house.

More flowers.

Tiles attached to a wall made by students from the Studio for Ceramics.

Masaryk 12.

Pretty white flowers at 12 Harakevet, house of the Dayyan family.

Tile plaque on the home of the Schur family.

Numbered stones - I have no idea why.

A view down the trail towards Gilo (I think).

More graffiti - an Israeli soldier on a skateboard.

Israeli flag dangling from a balcony.

Inside a garden.

Poster on the outside of a synagogue, advertising the yearly pilgrimage to Uman, where Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav is buried.

A daisy, in the garden of the apartment complex where I'm staying.

The entrance to the garden in front of my building.

Trains, No Trains, and Trains Again - in Jerusalem

I'm staying in a neighborhood in Jerusalem called "Katamon" (the name is Arabic, but it comes from Greek, and means "below the monastery" - the monastery in question is on the hill at the top of a close neighborhood called San Simon). During the Ottoman period, in the late 19th century, the rail track was laid between Jaffa, on the coast, and Jerusalem, with the final station being on Emek Refaim St., and the line was officially inaugurated in September 1892. In 1920 the entire line was rebuilt by the British army. The last train on the line ran in 1998. When I was living in Israel from 1987-89, and then again in 1992-93, I used to hear the train pass by every day, and it was a comforting sound - I like hearing the train whistle. The train was re-opened in 2005, but the final stop in Jerusalem was no longer on Hebron Road, but in Malcha, in the southern part of the city.

So what to do with the old rail line? One proposal was to pave it over and create yet another big highway crossing through Jerusalem - something which would have divided a number of neighborhoods in half (the Katamonim, Baka, and the German Colony). The mayor of Jerusalem, Uri Lupolianski, was determined to build this highway, but he was turned out of office in 2008 by Nir Barakat, who agreed with neighborhood activists in the Katamonim that the rail line should be turned into a rail park. The rail park was finished earlier this year and it's a very nice place to take a walk, ride a bicycle, hang out with the kids, jog, and meet your neighbors from the surrounding neighborhoods.

A view from the Rail Trail looking south. I'm not sure what the hills in the distance are.

On the rail trail parallel to Emek Refaim.

Flowers along the path.

Jerusalem now has another train - the light rail, which was inaugurated in the fall of 2011. The route goes from Mt. Herzl in the western part of the city, to the center of the city on Jaffa Road, and all the way north to Shuafat, Beit Hanina, and Pisgat Zeev. Shuafat and Beit Hanina are Arab neighborhoods in the northeast and Pisgat Zeev is a Jewish neighborhood built since 1967 (actually, I've read that it's not entirely Jewish now, because east Jerusalem Palestinians have been moving in to some apartments there). The light rail crosses over the Green Line - the ceasefire lines from the 1948 war that determined the border between Israeli-controlled west Jerusalem and Jordanian-controlled east Jerusalem for 19 years. I haven't been all the way on the light rail but a few days ago I took it from Givat ha-Mivtar, not far from the Hebrew University at Mt. Scopus, to the big intersection of Jaffa St. and King George St. The next two photos are of people on the light rail.

The next photo is of Jaffa Road with the light rail in the distance coming from the Old City.

The photo below is of the intersection of Jaffa Road and King George. Notice the graphical sign for the light rail on the pole above the traffic light.

King George Street is named for King George V, who was the British monarch in 1924 when the street was dedicated. Below is the dedicatory plaque.

Herbert Samuel was the first British High Commissioner for Palestine - he was Jewish; under him was Ronald Storrs, a Christian and British official, who among other things decreed that all buildings in Jerusalem should be faced with Jerusalem stone; and under him was the mayor, a Muslim, Ragheb El Nashashibi, from one of the old Jerusalem Palestinian families who had been officials under the Ottomans for a couple of a centuries (other families were the Dajanis, the Husseinis, and the Khalidis). This seeming portrait of interfaith and communal harmony was not true then and is certainly not true now, even though everyone takes the light rail through the city.

Hungry for Jerusalem

This article makes me hungry for Jerusalem - literally!

Winter on Saladin Street.

The last grapes, the first strawberries, a sweet rosetta and bitter coffee. It’s the nicest time of year to roam the central artery of East Jerusalem.

Yum!

"Israelization" among East Jerusalem Palestinians?

A very interesting article in today's Ha'aretz about the "Israelization" of some Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

Some highlights:

• Isawiyah now has a post office
• increasing number of East Jerusalem Palestinians are requesting Israeli ID cards
• more high school students are taking the Israeli matriculation exams (bagrut)
• greater numbers are enrolling in Israeli educational institutions
• decline in the birthrate
• more requests for building permits
• rising number of young people in East Jerusalem volunteering for national service (I didn't know there were any!)
• revolution in health care services - the Israeli HMOs are now very active in the eastern part of the city, which has drastically improved health care there

Other signs:

More Palestinian presence in west Jerusalem - in the malls, on the light rail, and in the Mamilla mall (I've noticed this since the mall opened, a few years ago - it creates a pedestrian link between the Old City and west Jerusalem).

The light rail has made it much easier to travel from east Jerusalem to the city center.

Thousands of homes in east Jerusalem have finally been hooked up to the Israeli water system (rather than the Palestinian).

More flexibility in issuing building permits (this is a huge deal, because Israel usually refuses to grant east Jerusalem Palestinians building permits, so people build illegally, and then the municipality tells them they have to tear down the building and issue demolition orders against them).

Now the Festival of Light, which takes place in the Old City in the late spring (it's one of the many cultural events that the city sponsors now that Nir Barkat is the mayor) has spread to all four quarters, and the local Palestinian merchants are starting to open their shops in the evenings to cater to the hundreds of thousands of people who come to the festival. This is something I noticed this year when I went to the festival.

Counter-signs:

Not all of the residents of east Jerusalem can participate in this process, because they are stranded outside the separation wall, basically in no-man's land. They're within the municipal boundaries so the PA can't do anything for them, and the city has basically abandoned them. They lack the most basic services (for example, garbage pickup, ambulances entering to take people to hospitals, schools), and it's very hard for them to get into Jerusalem for services. About 70,000 of east Jerusalem Palestinians are in this situation. The Israeli government deliberately built the separation wall to keep them on the wrong side.

Jewish settlement activity in east Jerusalem

This article talks about the "King's Garden" plan on the lower slopes of Silwan, which would create a tourist area by demolishing 22 homes of east Jerusalem Palestinians, who would be forced to move. This would be run by Elad, a ultranationalist Israeli group that runs the City of David site.

There's a lot of other settlement activity within Palestinian neighborhoods, including in Sheikh Jarrakh, elsewhere in Silwan, on the Mt. of Olives, and places I don't know about. (Ir Amim has information on settlement activity on their website, as does the Settlement Watch run by Peace Now).

Yom ha-Atzmaut

Israeli flag hanging from my mirpeset (porch)

On Wednesday night, as I wrote in my last post, I was visiting friends in Tzur Hadassah and spent the end of Yom ha-Zikaron with them.

Yom ha-Atzmaut officially begins with a special national ceremony at 8:00 pm - the lighting of 12 torches at Har Herzl in Jerusalem. I watched part of the ceremony with my friends, something I hadn't done before during my previous visits to Israel. It was interesting. Apparently, every year there is a different theme and the organizers choose people connected to that theme to light the torches. The theme this year was water, so people from organizations that have something to do with water (like Mekorot, the national water carrier) or activists from groups that work for clean water (like the Society for the Protection of Nature) were chosen. Each person was introduced, then stepped forward, said a few words ending with "to the splendor of the state of Israel" (לתפארת מדינת ישראל), and then lit the torch.

After watching the torch-lighting, we went to the center of Tzur Hadassah and encountered the popular celebration of the day - complete with children spraying each other with shaving cream (fortunately not aiming mostly at adults), people wearing blinking glasses, headdresses, and even earrings, and holding enormous plastic hammers. (I remember, many years ago on Yom ha-Atzmaut going out to the center of town in Jerusalem and buying little plastic hammers that made a boink sound when you hit someone with them - they are apparently now passé, I didn't see any in Tzur Hadassah). There was entertainment - music and dance - and lots of people milling around. After a while the dance performances stopped, and there was another torch-lighting ceremony, this time by local people in education. And immediately afterward, fireworks!

 Little birds in the garden of my apartment building.

The next morning I got up relatively late and lazed around and took some photos of my garden.

Some of the beautiful roses in the garden.

Around 11 am I went to see other friends to have brunch with them on their porch. One of the great Israeli traditions on Yom ha-Atzmaut is to go out into the country and have a barbecue (or a mangal), but we didn't do that - we had bagels & lox.

Another traditional activity is a flyby by Israeli Air Force planes - we saw some big helicopters flying over the President's house (where there was a ceremony honoring the 100 best soldiers in the army), a formation of five planes together, and then some time later, a formation of four planes with exhaust trails making big circles in the sky (I didn't get any photos of them).

Three military helicopters flying over the President's Residence at the time of a ceremony honoring outstanding Israeli soldiers.

Five Israeli Air Force planes flying in formation over the skies of Jerusalem.

Then, later in the afternoon, we went out for our own visit to the countryside, for a hike and not a mangal. We went to a place called Hirbet Madras, which has several archaeological sites from the Second Temple period - first century BCE and CE, and into the early 2nd century. Below are photos of this beautiful area of the country and some of the archaeological sites.

Foothills of the Judean Hills, near Givat Yeshayahu, in the Adullam Park.

Looking across the Green Line, towards a large Jewish town/settlement, I don't know which one. The Green Line refers to the border between Israeli-held and Jordanian held areas of Palestine at the end of the 1948 War. Jordan named the area they occupied the West Bank (since Jordan was mostly on the east bank of the Jordan River, this was a way to integrate it into Jordan). In 1967 Israel conquered the West Bank.

Fig tree growing at the bottom of the entrance to caves where Jews hid from the Romans during the Bar Kochba revolt in the second century CE.

"Pyramid" over a Jewish burial cave, probably from the first century BC or CE

Cutting hay in the fields near Tzafririm.

The moshav of Zafririm.

Grasses drying in the late spring heat.

Looking towards fields from the Adullam Park.

Inside Jewish tomb from the end of the first century CE - on the right is an ossuary and its cover. An ossuary is a stone box where the bones were put a year after the burial in the cave, after the flesh had fallen off the bones.

Entrance of the Jewish burial cave - notice the round stone, which was rolled in front of the cave after burial. It was destroyed by vandals 15 years ago and recently restored.