Peace Talks? What’s on TV?
By ROGER COHEN
NYT
TEL AVIV — I recently went to a dinner here hosted by a charming Israeli couple, just back from Umbria with assorted Italian delicacies, and found the guests riveted not by the ritual of a new round of U.S.-mediated peace talks but by the climax of “A Star is Born.”
We all rushed from the table to see 18-year-old Diana Golbi — a Russian immigrant born Diana Golbanova in Moscow — belt out her winning song on the Israeli version of “American Idol.” The runner-up, a Sephardic commander in the Israel Defense Forces named Idan Amedi, looked to the heavens and thanked God for second place.
Speaking of God, He struck me as pleasantly absent in Tel Aviv, a city that is secular and sensual and spared the follies that attend fanatical attachment to faith and identity. It is warm sand to Jerusalem’s hard stone. Juice bars are its answer to Jerusalem’s devout Judaism. I have little doubt Tel Aviv could make peace with Ramallah, another town of cafés and commerce, in short order.
But reason is only an occasional and selective visitor to the Holy Land. A vast realm of irrationality surrounds the competing national movements of Jews and Palestinians, each with its symbols and disasters. It is hard not to shrug, as most Israelis now do, at this latest U.S. stab at solving the unsolvable.
(More here.)
NYT
TEL AVIV — I recently went to a dinner here hosted by a charming Israeli couple, just back from Umbria with assorted Italian delicacies, and found the guests riveted not by the ritual of a new round of U.S.-mediated peace talks but by the climax of “A Star is Born.”
We all rushed from the table to see 18-year-old Diana Golbi — a Russian immigrant born Diana Golbanova in Moscow — belt out her winning song on the Israeli version of “American Idol.” The runner-up, a Sephardic commander in the Israel Defense Forces named Idan Amedi, looked to the heavens and thanked God for second place.
Speaking of God, He struck me as pleasantly absent in Tel Aviv, a city that is secular and sensual and spared the follies that attend fanatical attachment to faith and identity. It is warm sand to Jerusalem’s hard stone. Juice bars are its answer to Jerusalem’s devout Judaism. I have little doubt Tel Aviv could make peace with Ramallah, another town of cafés and commerce, in short order.
But reason is only an occasional and selective visitor to the Holy Land. A vast realm of irrationality surrounds the competing national movements of Jews and Palestinians, each with its symbols and disasters. It is hard not to shrug, as most Israelis now do, at this latest U.S. stab at solving the unsolvable.
(More here.)
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