Wednesday, August 09, 2006


Dining al fresco together

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi
im hamdy from egypt wht r u doing in these land u and all yr people must go one aday its our land our routes how could u take these land from us and kill us and stay in peace no
no peace u wanna killed us to take our land we will kill u 2

Unknown said...

Hamdy, Hamdy, Hamdy. Thank you for being so refreshingly honest and speaking from the heart. Does it really look like we're killing each other in my photos? Unless some idiot Reuters photographer is doctoring my photos. I'll kill the bastard.

Getting back to "our land, your land, my land" - this is where the problem lies. What if it's only God's land? It doesn't belong to any of us then, does it? But anyway, you should respect our holy books which gives us this particular piece of the world as an inheritance. And we of course have to respect the people (Palestinians) who live in it too.

Jews have always lived in Israel/Palestine - and Arabs, as far as I know, since 600 AD. And most of the land was barren and not occupied/lived in by much of anyone for hundreds of years - until the Turks populated it with "their" people. Then we came in droves from Europe from the 1880s on. But remember again - there were always Jews living here too, but not in large numbers.

But even before the major influx of Jews - Arabs and Jews lived side by side in Tiberias, Hebron, Safed, Jaffa, Jerusalem - pretty much in friendship - until the 1920s.

So if you want a Jewish-free Middle-East/Israel/Palestine, that is not possible. It was never Jew-free. I know having Jews in the Mid-East is a real sore spot for you. Get to know some of us and not through the ridiculous media of yours either.