Women Wage Peace

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(Photos can be enlarged with two separate clicks.)

Meet two delightful new friends, Faheema and Maya.
Our banner says "Women Wage Peace.  We vote for [or: choose] a negotiated diplomatic peace agreement."

We met yesterday at the women's peace march in Jerusalem organized by the new non-political  NGO Women Wage Peace / Nashim Osot Shalom.
Thousands of women, both Jews and Arabs, came from all over Israel to make their voice heard.
We gathered at the memorial pillar in the square next to Israel's Supreme Court building. 

The warm-up on a cold Jerusalem day: circle dancing, music!

We set out on the march, pausing for photos at the Japanese bonsho peace bell.

 Down the hill and through the big Sacher Park.

Women Wage Peace SOUTH.
Two of the organization's guiding lights from Meitar and our neighbor from the Bedouin town Hura.

Facing the Knesset building, singing in the rain, and hoping our speeches, cheers, and applause would be heard and taken to heart by the country's lawmakers, policy makers, and voters.
Start talking peace so we can stop fighting wars, that is the message of many mothers, grandmothers, and wives of soldiers. 

After hours of walking, circling the Knesset, and standing to hear speeches, we returned to the Supreme Court, where our buses waited to take us home, whether south to the Negev or north to the Golan.

The message one sees when driving out of Jerusalem was especially poignant and hopeful yesterday.
Written in stone, the Hebrew says "Tsetchem la-shalom," literally, May your going out be toward peace.
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A news video about our demonstration: http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/israel/politics/63184-150304-israeli-women-protest-for-peace-ahead-of-election

Newspaper reports:
http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Thousands-of-mothers-gather-at-Knesset-to-demand-Israeli-Palestinian-peace-accord-392948   The best expert quote here is " “Israel as a state is going through a kind of collective PTSD post traumatic stress disorder … and it’s time to help our people heal.”

http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/1.645360

And one in French: http://www.afp.com/fr/info/israel-un-mouvement-de-femmes-veut-reveiller-le-camp-de-la-paix

More photos of the march and more info at Women Wage Peace on Facebook.
Shalom!
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Huge gathering of Jews in the streets of Jerusalem today

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Haredi Jews in Jerusalem's Old City

Hundreds of thousands of religious Jews are flocking to Jerusalem today for a huge prayer rally protest against legislation to draft the haredi young men into the army. 

See my previous post for more about it.

Ynet adds "Inside the haredi community there were calls from rabbis ... to attend the rally, and the community's leaders gave a rare permission for women to attend – but on separate streets. All boys from the ages of nine and older were also called to attend."

It probably has never happened since the Israelites gathered at Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments and probably will not happen again today,  but the Talmud says that a special blessing should be recited when one sees 600,000 Jews gathered together in one place:

ברוך אתה ה' אלהינו מלך העולם חכם הרזים

Blessed are you, O Lord our God, ruler of the universe,
the wise One who knows all secrets.

(Rashi interprets this to mean that that only Hashem knows the secrets that each of these individual people think.)

Meanwhile 4,500 (some say 3,500) police and "ushers" are assigned to try to keep order in today's huge gathering.
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Times of Israel is having a live blog to update us as it happens.
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Last night's demonstration in Jerusalem

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The young woman with the bullhorn led the slogan-chanting of the demonstrators.
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I came up behind them, as I was just exiting the big Givati Parking Lot Dig where guided tours of the excavation were going on.

I had to cross the street to get to the annual City of David Archaeology conference.
I needed to squeeze between the many Border Police to get this photo.
The policemen outnumbered the demonstrators, it looked like.

The narrow street leads from the Arab Silwan up to the southern wall of the Old City.
To the left is the Dung Gate into the Old City.
The dome you see is El Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount.
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I'll tell you more about the conference itself in the coming posts.

If you want to try to understand the reason for yesterday's demonstration, please see my earlier post http://jerusalemhillsdailyphoto.blogspot.co.il/2010/09/trouble-in-jerusalem.html.
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Use it or lose it

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A dirty door with broken glass for today's Monday Doorways.
And to my further chagrin, ISRAEL COINS & MEDALS CORPORATION is what the metal letters on the door say, both in English and Hebrew, in between the menorahs.

If you enlarge this photo, look for the sign next to that door.
It says DANGEROUS BUILDING, NO ENTRY.
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The smaller signs says No Parking, to no avail.

In addition to housing the Coins and Medals office/store, this must have been a hotel once, judging from the remnants of a sign.
This decaying building just off Keren Hayesod Street is one of several in central Jerusalem that have been standing empty for years, caught in legal battles between contractors, investors, and government bureaucracy.
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As I hope your news media have told you, the past month is seeing an unprecedented wave of grassroots "social justice" protests all across Israel (well explained here).
For one thing, young people are demanding affordable apartments to buy or rent, saying that the cost of housing has risen 50% in the last two and a half years.
And thus the current tent encampments of protestors in the big cities now.
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Some of the students went around finding and photographing buildings like the one shown above and then digging in municipal files to find out why the structures are caught in limbo.
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They presented their findings to the Jerusalem Municipality and also got time on the evening TV news.
These young people claimed that these buildings could be renovated and turned into hundreds of available apartments much faster than the years it takes to get permits and finish construction of new housing.

Not to mention that Jerusalem is almost out of space to build new places, at least if we want to stay inside the Green Line (the previous border) and not to encroach on the surrounding green lungs (e.g. the forested Jerusalem Hills).
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This post can surely be for That's My World.
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Coming together in protest

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First there was the Arab Spring; now we have the Israeli summer.
Ordinary individuals started Facebook protest groups, and this has rapidly mushroomed into tent cities and protesters marching in the streets in cities all over Israel, even now as we speak.
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Last month the three dairy monopolies raised the price of cottage cheese by many shekels.
One man fought back with a Facebook page and soon had the whole nation boycotting the product.
And we won! The price was lowered.
The Cottage Cheese Revolution was "a watershed in the economic life of Israel."
And the people got a taste for revolution.
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Then young Daphni Leef needed to move and discovered the exorbitant rents in Tel Aviv.
She started another Facebook movement.
Now citizens have moved into tents in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and other cities to emphasize the lack of and price of rental housing.
Students mostly, but also other sectors who can't afford to buy apartments, even if there were enough to buy.
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These two pictures are from this morning in Independence Park.
Apparently it is a subgroup of the bigger tent city. The sign says "Public housing for all."
Certain families, mainly single parent families, below the poverty line are entitled to public housing; but again, there is just not enough of it.
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Dairy farmers came up to Jerusalem to protest today too.
The government was threatening to import milk.
What a stupid idea.
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The doctors in public hospitals have been striking off and on for the past 128 days.
Yesterday they started a march to the capital, led by their union head who began a hunger strike.
They are camping overnight at Kfar Chabad and will arrive here tomorrow.
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What's great is that the students and everyone are staying mostly civilized when blocking traffic by sitting down in the street in the midst of the marches and when confronting police.
And all the different groups help one another and all of us support our doctors.
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The chant most chanted is "Ha-am doresh--tsedek hevrati!"
"The people demands social justice!"
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http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/netanyahu-i-have-been-aware-of-israel-s-housing-crisis-for-years-1.374989

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_housing_protests_in_Israel

http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=230518
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All this is to share with That's My World meme.
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Greenpeace on the bridge strings!

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NEWS FLASH!
I just saw on the TV news how Greenpeace activists climbed 50 meters up the strings of our Calatrava Bridge of Strings today!
Wish I had known sooner, would have gone in to Jerusalem to see.
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From Wall Photos album of Facebook group Greenpeace Mediterranean - Israel

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Five of them unfurled a giant sign saying

"Bibi, stop [the building of] the coal-fired power plant!"

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According to the AP, the action took six hours and the sign stayed up for forty minutes.

The young male and female climbers were not arrested.

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You can see exciting photos in several of their Facebook albums.
They just put up a video too!
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