2024-03 Israel

Israel 8,

March 22, 2024,

Hi Everyone,

I got home rather late last night and decided not to write my usual report for the day. We had to ‘pack up your troubles in your old kit bag…’ and leave the base. We all did a massive clean up the night before and the morning of, to leave the base as clean as possible for the next group. We were taken to Tel Aviv in big buses. The 20 minute journey took 1.5 hours due to the major traffic problem in the city. There are building projects everywhere and they say that the national bird of Tel Aviv is the ‘crane’.

We went to the ANU museum which a renovated ultra modern museum of Jewish History through the ages. We had a guide for the most part of the day and were free to roam around the museum ourselves as well which I usually like to do. Several times I lost our guide and the group as I got side tracked reading and looking at a particular exhibition of my liking. We came back to the hotel and I did my washing in a laundromat. It reminded me of my student days in Reims where I went to a similar laundromat once a week. The decor in laundromats does not change from country to country and has made no progress in 50 years.

Last night I went to Dizengoff Square for dinner. The square and the adjoining streets are filled with great restaurants. I thought that there were a lot of people present but apparently since the war started, the number of people is much less and the population much more subdued. There were a lot of negative comments about the recent Canadian parliamentary decision. The tail (ie the NDP and the Bloc) is wagging the dog. We need an election soon before we lose our good friends and gain new ones that we really don’t need at all. We are aligning ourselves with countries which have no voting in their own respective countries, or if they do, the vote can always be countered by the king, emperor, dictator or president for life. The only voting that many countries do is in the UN where the major vote is against Israel.

Love,

Brian