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Today Yediot Akhronot published a map showing which artists will appear at the Independence day celebrations organized by municipalities around the country.
Let’s take a good look at this map. Gush Katif is simply a part of Israel. Golan is also just a part of Israel. Judea and Samaria are demarcated with a green line—a pretty rare practice in Israeli mainstream newspapers, though it often appears in Haaretz.
Now the craziest part: Afula and Petakh Tikva are way beyond the green line. (So is Jerusalem, but that’s a borderline case.) I just don’t have anything clever to say about it.
But the most lovable thing about this map is that Tel-Aviv doesn’t appear on it at all! (And Nesher is there, even though most Israelis don’t even suspect that a city with this name exists, but that’s a minor thing.)
Welcome to Israel 5768-2008.
Aharoni in Unicode 
Shalom, I’m a feed reader of your blog since a while ago. Sadly I have to say that talking about festivals and if Tel Aviv is or not in the map, speaking of Golan that way, today, when 4 children and her mother have been balised, and a week after a Reuters camera an 17 teenagers dead, well, that’s just disgusting.
Do you believe there is anything to celebrate?
Do your homework, please—Israelis were killed in the last few days, too. Kassam rockets are shot at us daily and they are specifically aimed at innocent civilians. Innocent people from all nations have been killed here for over hundred years. As sad and cynical as it is to say it, nothing outstanding happened here in the last few days.
We celebrate that we are an independent country for sixty years, after countless wars, blown-up buses and restaurants; after we dragged 8,000 of our fellow citizens from their homes in 2005 to give land “back” to Arabs, even though Arabs never actually lived on it; after over 2,000 Qassam rockets were shot at innocent civilians in Sderot; after all the lies that are being spread about Israel by apparently respectable news sources such as BBC; we celebrate that after all that, we are still here.
Putting the weird map aside—this article is about the singers that will perform around the country on the Independence day. They are going to sing in Hebrew—a language that was dead for over 2000 years and was revived by Zionists. For me that’s the number one reason to celebrate.
You seem to expect too much from that newspaper. They drew a map (badly), looked up most words in the dictionary, they even could remember some names of cities besides tel-aviv. (They just have not a clue where these cities are). A friend told me the other day that i view israeli newspapers not as suppliers of news and commentary but rather as a source of “daxkot” (now you have to explain what it means, and why i could not write jokes here).
But look carefully at the true scandal there – they included Gaby Berlin there! Gaby Berlin! (ViVa Hadera!).
Isn’t it a little sad that you really cannot expect a lot on the quality news reporting side from the best selling newspaper in the country? But hey, it can get even worse—Yediot’s new free paper “24 Minutes” which they give away at train stations is far worse. It’s so unbelievably bad that you can’t even find daxkot there.
I presume that the etymology of ‘daxka’ is Arabic and akin to the Hebrew ts. x. k. root, which refers to laugh and related things, but i don’t have the Rosenthal dictionary with me to check it. Daxka is a joke, but when you can’t call it a joke, you call it a ‘daxka’. Maybe you can translate it as “gag”?.. Nah…
And—of course i noticed Gaby Berlin. In Jerusalem there’s this coffee shop, called “Between Gaza and Berlin”, on the corner of Gaza st. and Berlin st.; now that makes sense, but i have to agree that “Berlin in Hadera” is too much.
“Do your homework?”
What kind of disgusting answer is that?
And most of it_so we won’t wast time anymore.
Do yo condemn Gaza’s block yer or no? It’s just so easy!
“What kind of disgusting answer is that?” – Not any more disgusting than trying to make us feel bad about our Independence day. We achieved some good things in those 60 years and we are entitled to celebrate it.
Do i condemn Gaza’s block? Yes, i do condemn the block of the innocent people of Gaza by a fanatical group called Hamas, which thinks that bombing Israeli civilians is more important than helping the people who elected them lead their lives quietly.
So you don’t condemn the block, as far as I understand. Do you?
Do i condemn what the IDF does to protect Israeli civilians? No, i don’t.
If ETA would take over all of Euskadi and shoot rockets over Spanish civilians would you support ETA or the Spanish army?
I did my homework, brother _Oh, sorry, as a Sefardi gal you won’t call me sister, for sure. When my army killed 2 ETA members hitted to death in prison, I took the streets, as many other spaniards, and asked for the Minister rejection and trial.
State Terrorism is never a solution.
“As a Sefardi gal you won’t call me sister” – why not? :) I am Russian, my wife is Iraqi, my dentist is an Arab – we’re all brothers.
Unfortunately Israeli soldiers commit war crimes, too. When they do it, they are tried and imprisoned.
Unlike Hamas, we aren’t proud of bombing civilians. For many years we have stupidly let the Gazans educate their children that the highest honor is to die killing as many Jews as possible. I’d say that that’s one of our greatest mistakes. (Our number one greatest mistake is that very few Israelis bothered to learn Arabic; that’s a topic for a whole separate post that i may write some day.)
Do i think that the current blockade of Gaza is the best way to fight Hamas’ violence? No, i think that there must be better ways. But to say that the blockade is the only problem of the world, well, that’s naive at best.