Our family is visiting Israel now -- Aviv, Aden, Isaiah, Jordana and Jonathan (www.fischer-brown.blogspot.com) and we all visited Rosh HaNikra on the Lebanon border yesterday. Above is the view of the Israeli coastline looking south. Rosh HaNikra is a fascinating grotto -- a place where water has worn down the rocks so that there are a series of caves and caverns where the waves come crashing in. There is a path through the grottos and it is very exciting and unusual. Unfortunately the lighting is very complex inside so none of my pictures from inside were good. However, you can visit their website where they have many beautiful pictures at http://www.rosh-hanikra.com/default.asp and there is a selection in the upper left-hand corner for English. You get to the grottos on a racevel -- a cable car. Below is a picture of the racevel and another of the mechanism that pulls it up and down the mountain.






A couple of very interesting things on the political scene that I would like to comment on. The first is the amount of press coverage of the of the war in Georgia that appears in the Israeli papers. This is a conflict I did not understand at all (and if you are in a similar position, I recommend Wikipedia, which gives a succinct history that is very useful), but since there is so much attention here I have been reading. In the city of Gori, which is in South Ossetia (the breakaway province of Georgia), there still remain 200 Jews. According to this morning's paper, a family there, the Dovershvilis, had never considered emigrating to Israel because they like Georgia, but now they, and many of the remaining Jews there, are very interesting in making aliyah (moving to Israel). Gori has been under heavy bombardment. There is no water or electricity, roads are impassable, and dead and wounded are lying in the streets.

There are many Jews living in Israel who emigrated from the Caucasus, which is the region where the conflict is taking place. Israel has been militarily involved, supplying arms and training to the Georgians. According to the Israeli newspaper HaAretz, serious fighting broke out in South Ossetia earlier this month with Georgian troops and warplanes pounding separatist forces in a bid to retake control of the territory. Then Russia sent in forces to repel the assault. Israel's foreign ministry has recommended complete cessation of the sale of weapons and security-related equipment to Georgia in the light of the fighting between its troops and the Russian army.

Another issue which has come up of late here is violence against the Palestinians by Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Jewish settlers attack poor Palestinian farming families, trampling their gardens, burning their olive groves and their outbuildings and sometimes their homes, and then when the families flee, entering and smashing everything and taking their meager belongings. These horrors have been known for years, but this summer they are being regularly reported in HaAretz and the worst part of these stories is that when these families report the atrocities to the Israeli police or to the Israeli army who are there and sometimes even witness these events, the army or the police do not do anything about it and sometimes even deny that it happened. A few weeks ago there was a story of two Bedouin teenagers who were guarding their sheep who were taken in for questioning and kept all night. Their parents were completely frantic and got their friends to form a search party to look for the boys. In the morning the boys returned. The army denied that it had happened.

It is also true that occasionally the settlers will be brought to trial and fined for their violence. But not often.

It is not at all pleasant for me to write about these things, but I feel I must. So often I am in discussions with people about the occupation and so often I hear accusations that the Palestinians have no ethics, that they attack innocent people where as we, the Israelis, would never stoop to such horrendous acts. Clearly this is not true. The zealots among us are just as capable of heartless cruelty as are the zealots on the other side. We may not send in suicide bombers, but we wreck families and destroy their livelihoods just the same. It is well to remember this as we make judgments about events here.