The Observer's Laura Kusisto asked last week if Israel -- where foreign buyers of luxury properties have not only rapidly and substantially driven up the cost of housing, but have created a fragile market -- may compare to Dubai's and to the US, whose real estate crashes were felt around the world. 

Meanwhile, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, the former MIT professor and Chief Economist at the World Bank, also last week, told a Knesset finance committee that an unusual phenomenon of Israeli parents helping their young married children buy first homes was also skewing the real estate market to make it look more similar to those countries which have had a bubble.

Both observations made headlines here in Israel.

Then, in a high-profile announcement in Jerusalem Monday, Israeli Housing Minister Yuval Steinitz laid out a bold government program to make it easier for young couples to buy a first apartment.

The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a former finance minister, is to be applauded for moving to increase the availability of affordable housing. While the steps they are taking are important, they do not address all the issues. As long as there are foreigners with money who want to own property in specific areas in Israel, prices will keep going up. Building more apartments, especially non-luxury apartments, will likely have little effect on this pricing.

But statistics fail to give the full picture. They do not consider each area of the country individually, nor the social and religious considerations of the buyers.  Jerusalem well demonstrates some of what is going on.  

While clearly, there are many factors that affect pricing, one of the most basic economic principles is of course supply and demand.  Who are the buyers purchasing all this property in Jerusalem? And who is creating the housing demand?

• There are the haredi (ultra-orthodox) buyers who are marrying young (usually the couple is in their early 20's), expect to have large families, and usually want to live in neighborhoods that are predominantly ultra-orthodox. Many in this population are economically weak, and families are under great fiscal pressure as they are expected to help their children purchase an apartment as they get married.

• There is the Arab population, also with large families and often economically weak. As most neighborhoods in Jerusalem are largely homogeneous, they live primarily in predominantly Arab neighborhoods.

• There is a more transient -- but still constant -- population of students (Israeli and foreign) who are studying in university and post-university programs for relatively short periods of time.

• There is a mix of modern (both religious and not religious) singles, young couples and families.

• And there are the "foreigners" who buy apartments that are often left empty many months each year.

The "foreigners" and some of the more affluent families in the "modern" group are buying luxury apartments, generally in neighborhoods near the center of the city or near the Old City. Catering to this group has caused the limited building in those neighborhoods to be exclusively high-end. As many of these buyers are religious Jews who will not commute by car on the Sabbath, having the Western Wall within walking distance will likely keep these neighborhoods from dropping in price.  

The pricing of luxury apartments is very high and will remain so as long as there is a demand by people that can pay these sometimes astronomical prices.  Purchasers of these apartments are not buying the apartments for an economic short-term investment. They are buying these apartments so they have a place to stay when they visit, and emotionally, they want to own land in Israel, especially in Jerusalem. It is possible that if the economy remains weak around the world, fewer people may be willing to buy a second apartment they rarely use and these prices will level off or go down slightly. But this class of buyer -- with strong attachments to the city and the State -- will always be around.

The lack of reasonably priced apartments in the central neighborhoods, caused by the increase in the luxury apartment prices, has also pushed up the prices on non-luxury apartments. This has forced many people to the surrounding neighborhoods, raising the prices in those areas, as well. But even a slight drop in the luxury market will not have any significant effect on the non-luxury apartments. Simply put, there is a very large demand and not enough supply for regular family apartments and apartments for young couples, professionals and students in the more central areas. This high demand surely will cause prices to at least hold or more likely to increase.

One needs to look at the neighborhood make-up of Jerusalem. There are many socio-economically weaker neighborhoods that surround more affluent ones. Young professional couples and students have seen this as an opportunity. They are moving into these neighborhoods, demanding better schooling and transportation, and fixing up the buildings and the neighborhood. And when a gentrification process begins, all neighborhood prices quickly go up. 

The municipality is putting an emphasis on affordable housing. Pressure is being put on developers to finally start building for non-luxury buyers. They are working on programs to give financial incentives to developers that make apartments available for young families and students. While short-term, this might cause prices to level off or even come down, as more apartments becomes available, the prices will jump back. The demand is there.

So, can one make a worthwhile real estate investment in Israel today? Absolutely. But you need to do your homework, as well as decide what you are expecting to get out of your investment. And avail yourself of professional advice. Not all Israeli cities -- nor sectors of the real-estate market -- are alike.

Mark Goldfarb, who is living in Jerusalem, is the CEO/Managing Director of the Israel-based Habira Group Capital Ltd. www.habiragroup.com Habira Group has recently launched an investment fund that is focusing on investing in lower-end residential properties in Jerusalem. Mark Goldfarb can be reached at mark@habiragroup.com.

Global Property Guide ranked Israel the hottest housing market for the last two years. In the most recent quarter, the publication reports that house prices in the country rose the sixth-fastest in the world. But four of the five were recovering from sharp drops, notes the Associated Press, meaning the nation of six million could have one of the hottest real estate markets around. In Tel Aviv, prices have risen 46 percent since the end of 2008 to an average of nearly $600,000 for a three-bedroom home. Jerusalem is up 15 percent this year to an average price of about $415,000. 

New Yorkers started flocking to the country to invest starting at least as far back as 2007 -- though the special relationship between the city's Jewish community and the promised land of course goes back much farther than that. In 2007, foreign buyers made up less than 5 percent of the country's total buyers, but made one-third of luxury property purchases. 

But rather than celebrate, the country is quivering with the fear that it will suffer the same fate as overheated markets like Dubai and, of course, the United States. Israel's Central Bank has raised interest rates several times in the last six months, hoping to pour some cool water on the boom. 

There are a few reasons it makes sense that Israel's market would be booming. The country's banking system has been far more stable than ours, even if its political situation is famously not. The flood of nearly 1 million Russian immigrants also increased demand for housing stock to a degree that's almost unimaginable here. In neighborhoods like the one near Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station, immigrants still cram several families into one apartment, unable to find or afford an apartment. 

But before the latest wave of New Yorkers decide to flock to the promised land, it's worth pausing to reflect on the perils. Experts there say the bubble is about to pop. Peace is, you know, fragile. So is the country's economy, which relies on a lot of American investment. 

Protest is also rising in the country, as many locals find themselves unable to find an apartment. Consider that salaries in Israel are significantly lower than New York, but an apartment is getting way more expensive. That could pressure the government to keep raising interest rates or change some of its current strict construction restrictions to allow for an increase in supply. 

At least this helps explain the government's refusal to stop building settlements in the West Bank.

lkusisto@observer.com

Into this cauldron of artistic activity and pretense bursts Jessica (Cécile De France), a star-struck provincial ingénue who bluffs her way into a waitress position at an Avenue Montaigne café after having been brought up on her grandmother’s tales of Parisian high life, though she herself had never risen above the level of a chambermaid at the Ritz Hotel.

With Jessica, it is another story entirely, as her guileless charm and good looks enable her to serve as the unwitting poltergeist for a variety of troubled personages. These include a tempestuously nervy television actress, Catherine Versen (Valérie Lemercier), who is hilariously trying to persuade a Hollywood movie director, Brian Sobinski (Sydney Pollack), to cast her as Simone de Beauvoir in his highly unlikely biopic of Jean-Paul Sartre; this will allow her to walk out on the bothersome theatrical producers of a Feydeau farce, for which she is currently rehearsing with great difficulty.

Jessica stumbles into the stormy lives of renowned concert pianist Jean-François Lefort (Albert Dupontel) and his bossy, managerial wife, Valentine (Laura Morante). The problem with Jean-François is that he has begun to lose patience with himself, his métier and the harried life he is forced to lead.

Meanwhile, Jacques Grumberg (Claude Brasseur), a wealthy art collector, enters Jessica’s congested orbit when he painfully divests himself of part of his collection. At the same time, he is trying to cope with his alienation from his disaffected son, Frédéric (played by the film’s co-writer, Christopher Thompson).

Ms. Thompson has previously displayed her directorial dexterity with such intensely serio-comic romances as La Bûche (1999) and Jet Lag (2002). Some reviewers seem unhappy with the fact that Avenue Montaigne fails to reflect the class and ethnic tensions to be found just outside Paris in its banlieus, which have recently made headlines in the world media, and thus is too complacently bourgeois for their tastes. My own view is that, at a time when Hollywood is evading our actual problems with darker and ever darker excursions into violence, horror and otherworldly paranoia, it is refreshing to encounter an example of escapism with a smile on its face.

This is not to say that Avenue Montaigne is completely successful with its stylistic legerdemain, and aside from Ms. Lemercier’s canny projection of a vulgar narcissist, there aren’t many laughs in the film. Still, the film serves as a timely reminder of the tastefully sybaritic terrain that our own mainstream moviemakers have largely ignored in the commercially driven thirst for blood and gore. And, anyway, when viewed through the prism of such exalted ideological standards, how much of the world’s great art and literature is not inescapably bourgeois—though seldom, if ever, complacently so?

In the Army Now

Dalia Hagar and Vardit Bilu’s Close to Home (Karov la Bayit), from their own screenplay, describes the day-to-day experiences of two Israeli women soldiers of contrasting personalities: outgoing and rebellious Smadar (Smadar Sayar), and the more conformist and inhibited Mirit (Neama Shendar). The two women are arbitrarily teamed as Jerusalem border guards as part of their compulsory two-year military service (Israeli men must serve three years). Both 18-year-olds are just starting their service, and both are uncomfortable with their onerous duties of searching and registering Palestinian men, women and children, most of whom are merely commuting to their daily jobs.

Smadar and Mirit are constantly monitored by their supervisors, who are also women. The title refers to the fact that some of these women soldiers are stationed near their homes and can spend their nights there, while others are stationed far from home and must sleep in the barracks with their comrades. Ironically, Mirit, who lives at home with her parents (and whose father is a military officer), yearns to be stationed far away so that she can escape from their oppressive influence. Mirit has already made an unfavorable impression on the other soldiers as a snitch, in her eagerness to avoid complications with her superiors. But the irrepressible Smadar merely shrugs her shoulders over the incident.

One day, the dull routine is explosively enlivened by a bomb going off on the Israeli side of the Jerusalem border, and Mirit lies dazed but unhurt by the concussion. When a young Israeli civilian named Dubek assists her, Mirit is immediately smitten—but, as it turns out, he is otherwise engaged. After many clashes between Smadar and Mirit, the two women are finally reconciled as they take part in an unpleasant collision between Palestinian intransigence and Israeli civilian reprisals.

Like many Israeli films, Close to Home is strikingly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and, as such, qualifies as exemplary humanism under the most extreme pressure.

RK-Whoa!

Six newly unearthed RKO feature films from the 1930’s, dating both before and after the imposition of the Production Code, are being exhibited at Film Forum from Friday, Feb. 23, to Thursday, March 1, under the joint auspices of Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum’s repertory-program director, and Turner Classic Movies. I would hesitate to characterize all of these films as classics, but for anyone with the slightest feeling for the cinematic past, the series is highly recommended—particularly A Man to Remember, which received a rave review from Frank Nugent of The New York Times and made his 10-best list for 1938. I hadn’t seen the film until recently, and my only prior familiarity with it arose from an amazingly sympathetic Meyer Levin review in a 1938 Esquire. It was the first film directed by Garson Kanin, from a screenplay by the long-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, and it’s based on the same novel from which the 1933 movie One Man’s Journey was adapted. (Lionel Barrymore, Joel McCrea and his subsequent 57-year marital partner, Frances Dee, appeared in the latter film.)

A Man to Remember will appear on a double bill with William A. Wellman’s 1934 Stingaree, about which I will say only that it contains the most preposterous musical “Down Under western” plot it has ever been my misfortune to witness, despite the presence in the film of the ever-incandescent (for me) Irene Dunne. The male lead in A Man to Remember is played by the sterling character actor Edward Ellis, with Anne Shirley and Lee Bowman in support. It was discovered in a Dutch archive and has Dutch subtitles, much like the surviving print of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) several years ago.

After almost 70 years, A Man to Remember is strangely timely as an attack on the medical establishment in a small American town. Ellis plays a free-thinking doctor who believes that saving human lives takes precedence over every cold-hearted calculation of financial gain in the supposedly sacred capitalist system (not in those “subversive” words, of course—but close enough to still cause discomfort in some circles).

The Film Forum series kicks off with John Cromwell’s Double Harness (1933), starring Ann Harding, William Powell and Henry Stephenson, and William Seiter’s Rafter Romance (1933), with Norman Foster and Ginger Rogers (on Feb. 23, 24 and 25.)

These are followed by John Robertson’s aforementioned One Man’s Journey (1933) and Lew Landers’ Living on Love (1937), with James Dunn and Whitney Bourne (on Feb. 26). A Man to Remember and Stingaree (Feb. 27, 28 and March 1) complete the series.

At 10:45 a.m. Bloomberg will announce renovation of Jerusalem's main ambulance center and blood bank, in Jerusalem.

At noon, Councilman Leroy Comrie will introduce a resolution at City Hall calling for a moratorium on the N-word.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly will give the keynote speech at a Harper's Bazaar anticounterfeiting summit at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

At 12:15 Elinor Tatum, editor in chief of New York Amsterdam News, will speak at Bronx Community College's Freshman Convocation.

At 1 p.m. Red Cross officials will release a report on the lessons learned from major urban disasters on West 49th Street.

At 1 p.m. the supervisor of North Hempstead will deliver the annual State of the Town address at George Washington Manor Restaurant in Roslyn.

Long Island AARP members will demand drug affordability outside the campaign office of Craig Johnson. At 1:30, the group will do the same outside the campaign office of Maureen O'Connell.

At 1:30 p.m. at City Hall, Councilman Eric Gioia will call for the city and state to divest pension funds invested in Sudan.

Starting at 2 p.m., the City Bar Justice Center will host a small business legal clinic at the Flushing Library.

At 3 p.m. Bloomberg will meet with the families of Israeli soldiers.

At 3:30 p.m. education advocates will call for the passage of a New York Bill of Rights for Adult Education on the City Hall steps.

At 4 p.m. Bloomberg will meet with acting Israeli President Dalia Itzik.

At 6 p.m. Bloomberg will meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert

A documentary about the Atlantic Yards project will be shown at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

And First Lady Laura Bush will speak at the Woman's Day Red Dress Award near Columbus Circle.

At 6:30 p.m., "Bamako," a documentary about African development and the economy, will be shown at Columbia University.

At 7 p.m., Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz will give his State of the Borough speech at Steiner Studios.

The Public Service Commission will hold a public meeting on the proposed gas rate increase and the proposed merger of National Grid and KeySpan at The Petrides School on Staten Island.

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum will speak on the work-family dilemma facing poor working mothers at Barnard Hall on West 117th Street.

And Amadou Diallo's mother and former mayor David Dinkins host the screening of the documentary, "Death of Two Sons," in honor of the eighth anniversary of the Diallo shooting, at the Riverside Church.

-- Azi Paybarah

He cajoled and exhorted, charmed and coaxed and used his amazing energy and unending enthusiasm to bring beauty and serenity to a city sacred to three of the world’s major religions. He metaphorically wrapped his arms around Jerusalem and protected it until the larger forces of extremism, both Arab and Orthodox Jew, started pulling it to pieces.

Teddy was a warm bear of a man with smiling eyes that I once saw fill with instant fury when I dared to suggest that “internationalization” was considered a possible solution to the problems of his city. For Jerusalem was his city. “To the Jews here, I’m a bastard,” he used to say. “To the Arabs, I’m a Zionist bastard.”

Teddy Kollek was in office for almost three decades, while six different Israeli prime ministers came and went. In 1965, the city was still barely more than a village when Teddy began to preside over its reunification and set out to restore its archeological treasures, to modernize its infrastructure and to bring a flourishing cultural life to the ancient metropolis.

He prowled the city on foot or drove himself around in a minuscule car that barely contained his bulk. In the summer of 1967, just after the war, he took me with him, a hair-raising experience—if he weren’t the mayor, he surely would’ve had his license lifted. Teddy would stop suddenly if something caught his eye. No one hesitated to walk right up to him to report a pothole or a dog fouling the walkway; he would pull his pen and notebook out of his breast pocket and write down the complaint. But in the long run, Teddy felt that his most important achievements were in making Jerusalem green, and in enforcing a rule that all the city’s buildings be faced in Jerusalem stone—the local limestone that gives the city its golden glow.

He created parks and squares and stopping places for tour buses and cars from which the people of Jerusalem could take in the sweep of the city. “Over there, you can see the Dead Sea, the desert, the hills of Moab, the old villages locked in time, the modern city, the Mount of Olives, Mount Scopus, Mount Zion, the Old City—you see there the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock, Herod’s Tomb.” He was taking stock of his city from the Walter and Ellen Haas promenade during another of my visits. “The special flag here is a pair of jeans,” he quipped, explaining that the donors were from the Levi family. The Levi family was just one of the many wealthy friends he called upon to support the Jerusalem Foundation, which he established during his first year as mayor, to undertake projects in his city. In addition to restoring Jerusalem’s ancient gates, the Western Wall, the Citadel and the stone path leading to the Stations of the Cross, he attended to the small details as well, like burying television antennas so they wouldn’t mar the historic landscape.

Each year, Teddy celebrated Christmas three times, once with his Roman Catholic constituents, once with his Greek Orthodox constituents, and once with the Armenian Orthodox. On any given day throughout the year, he would attend four breakfast meetings, three luncheons and several dinners—a schedule that played havoc with his waistline and left him little time for sleep. He became known for his catnaps. When an assistant once twitted him for sleeping at a public function, he replied, “You know, I wasn’t even tired, but I knew that was what was expected of me.”

During the Nazi occupation of Europe, he personally rescued Jews and raised funds to finance their escape. He was again the master fund-raiser when the fledging Israeli state needed planes and assorted weapons of war. As mayor, he worked impatiently to find ways to match a potential donor’s interest to a project. Of all those projects, the Israel Museum was his most personal: His goal, to create a world-class collection. To some in the struggling state, a museum seemed a luxury; to Teddy, it was an absolute necessity. He used his legendary powers of persuasion to extract contributions from around the world. It was a bitter personal disappointment, for example, when Mollie Parnis, the New York dress designer, allowed a treasured Matisse that he had his eye on to go to auction instead of to Israel, where he felt it belonged.

Mordechai Gur, the paratroop commander who led Israeli troops in the capture of the Old City in 1967, said of Teddy: “He was born for that job.” But as Teddy himself was fond of saying, he was also brought up for it. When he first immigrated to Israel, he lived on a kibbutz with Arab neighbors. Of growing up in Vienna, where his father was a director of the Rothschild bank, he recalled: “I lived in a Catholic city. There was a Catholic monastery next-door. I was not afraid of a church, as others might be who had come from a shtetl …. My father took me to museums every weekend. I went to opera, theater; I lived in a city that in 1919 had the first elections, and the election posters were in German, of course, and also Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Croat. It was a cosmopolitan city. I came from a multiracial society.”

But he knew that he could not re-create Vienna in Jerusalem, not with Orthodox Jews trying to impose their own laws on the entire city, and not with Arabs who refused to vote because the mayor was doing far more for the Jewish residents than he was for them. For a while it almost seemed possible that, under Teddy, the cultural mosaic would become a way of life—until October 1990, when the fragile truce was broken on the Temple Mount, an area sacred to Muslims and Jews. Nineteen Palestinians were killed by Israeli policemen in a clash that Mayor Kollek called “the most unfortunate thing that happened in the 22 years since the city was united.” That tragic incident, which Teddy felt as a personal affront, along with the intifada, all but ended the hope that this magical city could one day become (as a popular Israeli song would have it) “Jerusalem the Golden.”

Teddy Kollek was defeated for a seventh term as mayor. By 1993, the growing militancy of the Arabs and the rising population of ultra-religious Jews made Jerusalem a far less hospitable place for a liberal like Teddy. He lost to the Likud candidate, Ehud Olmert, now the Israeli prime minister, who eulogized him at his burial in a place of honor reserved for the giants of the Israeli state, on Mount Herzl overlooking the beloved city to which he had dedicated his heart and soul. “Jerusalem without Teddy,” Saul Bellow wrote, “is as inconceivable as Israel itself without Jerusalem.”

A table was set up on the dais. I recognized the Palestinian at once. He wore a pressed blue shirt and khakis, had a trimmed mustache. Sulaiman Al Hamri walked with a steel crutch. A smallish Jewish kid pulled out a chair for him, a mophead in his 20s with a string bracelet and jeans and old beaten shoes. Now I waited for the kid to bring in the Israeli. Then he sat down next to Al Hamri and I realized he was the Israeli. Just a kid. Elik Elhanan.

Elhanan introduced them. "We are not professors or experts. We did not come here to tell you the truth or what is absolutely right. We came here to tell you our stories and opinions."

Al Hamri told his story first, about spending 4-1/2 years in Israeli prisons. I'll blog about this in days to come, I want to tell Elhanan's story now.

Elhanan is a student in Tel Aviv, 29. He grew up in Jerusalem and as a boy, he did not realize there was a conflict in the Middle East. For he never thought about it, and when the time came that he did, he didn't see that he had any part of it. "I have no problem with the Palestinians, no fight with them." At 18, he joined the Army for the usual reasons. Out of a sense of duty, and privilege, and wanting to be part of something bigger than himself.

His consciousness changed. Over the next three years, he realized, "I am part of this conflict, I can't escape it."

Several events had taken place that had "obliged" him to see the larger issues. In some, he had found himself "an aggressor." He didn't want to go into these events, he said dismissively. They had made him aware of the "discrepancies between the very lofty discourse describing what we are doing and the reality on the ground.

"But the most influential event, I found myself all of a sudden, a victim. On the 4th of September 1997 two suicide bombers left Nablus and killed five people in Jerusalem. 180 people were injured. Among those killed was my sister Smadari and her friend. They were going to school." A third friend was so critically injured she is still not the same.

Elhanan said there are many social mechanisms in Israel to help survivors deal with grief. They are intended to keep people from "sinking into the pain," to get them back to normal life. He found that he had no interest in getting back to normal life. "Because this life is not normal. I thought, there is something very wrong with it, and I'm not willing to go back."

"I didn't limit my emotions to great sadness and great anger. I felt there must be something else. My sister deserves better than to be confined to a dark place, as an object of sadness. Or to be limited to a reason to be angry, to hate, to fear." And of course his sister's death was not like someone slipping in the shower, it was a murder; and Israeli society had an answer to a murder of this character. It was perceived as an attack on the nation, to which Israel would respond with vengeance to preserve its honor. This answer Elhanan also found unacceptable. He did not feel that he was missing his honor, all he missed was his sister. "By concentrating on this revenge I am doing something very terrible to her memory also." To have a body in exchange—that felt like a very cheap price to put on Smadari's life.

The soldier became withdrawn. "I don't like people speaking in my name. And I lost all faith in the judgment and common sense of the state to react to such situations."

One day his unit commander came to his house to tell him to come back to the army. A big operation was coming up in Lebanon. "I think it will do you some good," he said. "Maybe you will run into some terrorists, and you will have a chance to even the score." Elhanan was shocked and disturbed by the statement. The commander was a good, smart man. Yet he was describing a solution that sounded to him like "perpetual war—beyond history and politics and geography." Avenging a murder in Jerusalem by murdering someone in Lebanon.

He remembered of an operation he had been listed to take part in as a young soldier but that for administrative reasons he had missed, to his great regret: an action in Lebanon. It is the burning desire of all soldiers to make "a mark on their guns," and that had been his chance. The action was celebrated as the killing of 11 terrorists. But he had seen pictures and heard the other soldiers' stories: "three children and two old men."

Following the action, Katyushas had fallen on Kiryat Shemona and hurt Israelis. So because of the IDF's actions, Israeli civilians were hurt. So in Elhanan's view, Israeli soldiers were actually violating their oath, to protect the people of Israel. He had lost his bearings. "I had no idea who I was fighting, or where I was living."

After a process of reading and thinking, he came to a new understanding. Elhanan's voice became passionate. "My sister didn't die for the security of Israel. She didn't die because the Arabs are a lower breed, or because Islam is a fanatic religion or because of a clash of civilizations. She died very simply because there is an occupation. Over a disputed piece of land...I should struggle against the occupation, is what I should do."

When he had heard about the refusenik soldiers, he had joined them. Still, that felt passive. When a group talked of meeting with Palestinian ex-combatants, he jumped at the idea. Now "the emotions that were boiling inside me" found a place to go.

The soldiers' first meeting with the Palestinians, in Bethlehem, was illegal. It had involved the Israelis' hiding in an olive grove after dark to wait for taxis to show up on a street. But when the taxis came, the numbers were different from what they had been told, and the Israelis suddenly thought they were doing something very stupid, that they might never return to the safe place they were right then. "This was true, but in a different way than we imagined." They were brought to a house where the Palestinian men, the faces they had come to fear and despise, were waiting. The Palestinians also were afraid that it was a trick. The two sides began to talk.

Now they were coming to the U.S. for a month. They had a simple aim, to convince American Jews they had an active part in this struggle.

During the Question period, a man at the back spoke for me when he brought up the one-state solution. Why should we favor a two-state solution? The South Africa model showed that was not the answer.

Elhanan said, "The idea of one state is very compelling. It is the most just solution. But I think there is something paternalistic about it.

"I lived as a sovereign in my own country, I did not suffer all the problems of occupation. We can talk about false consciousness and a nationalistic dream, but I will tell you that my two grandfathers fought the British occupation [in the 1940s] to have a Jewish state and both were hurt in that struggle. One was from Europe where he had lost everything. I know what it meant for them to have a state, to have a passport, to stand proud on their own. I can't tell the Palestinians to renounce that."

The story of the peace process is not a love story, he said, it is a divorce story, a bitter divorce. "What we need now is separation. Not like the wall. But that each country can stand on its own side, reconstruct itself, and heal its wounds. After that, who knows, maybe there will be a federal solution. Right now, no way."

After the talk I stood in line to say hello to Elhanan. It felt a little like waiting to talk to a rock star, there were girls ahead of me. When I got my turn, I said that he had honored his grandfathers, did he also fault them?

"This is a hard question," Elhanan said. He might wish that they had been less Zionist or more socialist, but he could understand the state of mind they were in.

And for another thing, one grandfather had already done it for him; he "kind of faulted himself... I don't know if you know Mattityahu Peled." A hero of the 48 and '67 war, General Peled had become an Arabic scholar and a leader of the left in the Knesset. He was one of the first to meet the PLO. That was Elhanan's grandfather.

Then it all made sense: the unassuming manner, the eloquence, the natural sense of leadership, the authority.

Sulaiman Al Hamri and Elik Elhanan are near the start of a 22-city tour that will take them across the country. Tonight they are at the Village Temple, 33 E. 12th St. Go, and see a future leader of Israel.

And how revealing, that in seizing on the Golan provision of the report as one of its greatest challenges, Tim Russert and Andrea Mitchell just now on MS-NBC both described the return of these high, watered lands as something "we" were being asked to do: Americans, American politicians. As though we might snap our fingers and this ally in the Middle East would respond. The Baker report was also forthright on this point. "No American Administration—Democrat or Republican—will ever abandon Israel."

- Max Abelson

Designing a Contemporary Building, Jewish Style: Nearly Complete, Meltzer/Mandl-Designed Arlington Suites.

Delivers Sensitive Aesthetics and Unique Amenities to Riverdale Community

Architects' Vision Ties Together Diverse Urban Landscape with Modern 13-Story Structure Using Setbacks, Glass and Masonry Facade and Jerusalem Stone Base

NEW YORK (November 27, 2006) - A much ballyhooed 13-story, 26-unit condominium project in the Riverdale section of the Bronx has secured the approval of the community as it nears completion. Located at 3220 Arlington Avenue, and situated between a prototypical six-story, 1950s-construction red brick apartment building on one side and a two-story parish on the other, the sand-colored masonry and glass structure uses gentle setbacks to quietly ascend to a height of 143 feet without disrupting the tranquility of the streetscape.

"This was a challenging site," says David Mandl, the design architect and a principal of Meltzer/Mandl Architects, P.C. "The neighborhood was wary of the project and understandably concerned it would not fit in with the scale and mood of this lower-scale residential area. But now that the curtain wall is up and we can see how well the colors of the brick and glass in the oversized windows work with the stone base, it melds seamlessly with the nearby buildings. Recently, we've received very positive feedback from residents who are pleased with how this new project adds energy to the neighborhood."

Arlington Suites stands at the site of developer Shmuel Jonas' family home on an irregular lot that borders Arlington and Netherland Avenues. His insight into the community helped shape the project, which includes many unique Jewish culture-oriented amenities. "I wanted 'Kosher-smart' apartments that would still appeal to a broad demographic," says Mr. Jonas. "We have added every convenience conceivable for observant Jewish families, but the apartments are so well-designed that our buying audience is potentially unlimited."

The layouts include two- through four-bedroom units, generously ranging in size from 1,872 square feet to 3,333 square feet. Each apartment has floor-to-ceiling windows displaying at least two exposures, some offering Hudson River views, Harlem River views and city views that extend to midtown Manhattan. Eight of the units feature terraces, sized from 239 square feet to 1,810 square feet, and there are 15 balconies ranging from 62- to 71 square feet.

Common amenities include a 107-space parking garage, large storage units, 12-seat screening room, roof deck with barbeque and sink and a designated Sabbath elevator that is programmed to continually stop on each floor from sundown Fridays through sundown on Saturdays. An on-site fitness center will feature state-of-the-art equipment, plus pool and sauna, and will be open at separate hours for men and women. Among the more unusual features are two large terraces that meet strict spatial criteria for the Jewish religious holiday, Sukkos. The 4,553-square-foot third floor terrace will be shared between four apartments. The 6,000-square-foot second floor Sukkos terraces will be available to the balance of the residents.

The individual units include many special features geared to observant Jews, such as kitchens with double sinks and 48-inch double drawer Viking ovens. In addition, the developer is offering buyers a choice of two separate refrigerators or two dishwashers. Standard in the units will be double-drawer dishwashers that can separately clean dishes used for Kosher dairy-based meals and those for meat-based meals.

Even the two-story base of the building, composed of golden Jerusalem Stone from Israel's Mount Scopus, relates symbolically to western religious cultures and provides a sense of the Jewish homeland. "In addition to its spiritual references, the Jerusalem Stone works well with the building's facade," adds Mr. Mandl. "The colors and textures harmonize with the glass and the way the sun reflects off the stone base. It all works together for a contemporary look that also fits in with the neighboring buildings."

The first two floors of Arlington Suites are being leased to a medical practice that includes dentistry and pediatrics. The fitness center is also located on the first floor.

It is anticipated that Arlington Suites will be ready for occupancy in early 2008.

About Meltzer/Mandl Architects, P.C.
Meltzer/Mandl Architects, founded in 1995 by Marvin H. Meltzer, AIA NCARB, and David Mandl, AIA, has won six major industry awards in the past few years and was honored as 2004 Firm of the Year by the Society of American Registered Architects (SARA)

The station and the street outside were filled with kids with automatic weapons dangling off their hips. Most had on uniforms. One reservist ran past me in pajama pants and a tie-dyed shirt, with an M-16 smacking against one shoulder and his boots bouncing at the end of their laces off the other. Another guy was saying goodbye to his girlfriend with a pistol shoved down into the waistband of his gym shorts. Nothing in life prepares you for a city teeming with Jews with guns. Well, actually one thing does: the Holocaust. It is invoked frequently: the idea that Jews went passively to their deaths, abandoned by gentiles, is offered as a justification for the militarization of Israeli society.

On my bus, gun barrels poked into the aisle or up in the air. The more careful soldiers removed their magazine clips and wedged them into the metal handhold on the back of the seat in front of them. A girl in uniform sat down beside me. She had tattoos on her arm, and nails with gold crescents at the tips. She plugged in an MP3 player the size of a lighter and kept tugging her M-16 back to her side of the seat, like a stray umbrella.

No one was reading. Cell phones went off, soldiers murmured. We made our way north past slow-moving trucks with the soldiers sprawled out in the back. At every station, reservists ran up carrying worn backpacks made for treks in India, not bunkers. After their service in the army, almost all Israeli kids go traveling, to decompress, to escape this world of guns. Now and then, as if to keep the picture real, a fatty in uniform would run up to the bus with his shirttails out and jump on too.

We stopped for a while in Afula. I talked to a guy who looked like a professor, in fatigues and purple Crocs, his gun worn shiny.

“All Israel is together now; there is no right or left,” he said. “The feeling is beyond patriotism. It is not nationalism, or something taken from the inventory of ideas in Europe—this is essential. There are a very few on the left who have a different idea, but no one pays attention to them. The Palestinians do not want us to be here.”

I quoted a former minister in The Jerusalem Post saying that the war had begun not because of the attacks on civilians but because of the capture of three soldiers, damage to “the Army’s ego.”

The man nodded. “An ego is important …. The army is our echo of reality. Not to be poetic.”

After the Sea of Galilee, we lost our soldiers one by one. Then the bus pulled into Kiryat Shmona and a couple of civilians got out and I found myself alone. The town was empty. The Golan Heights loomed in the east, and smoke rose from what I would learn was a Katyusha landing. You could hear the ordinance now. I walked one way, then another on the big avenue, wondering what to do. A group of soldiers who had taken over an apartment building looked at me as though I were an idiot.

Thankfully, there soon appeared in the frame that genie for all foreign correspondents, that provider of Middle Eastern quotations: a taxi driver in a Mercedes. The guy shot his window down. “Journalist?”

After a while—I have to be vague about this under the constraints of my newfound calling—we were in a pretty town by the Lebanese border. The driver took me on a tour of the high fence separating countries, then back up the hill about a hundred yards—or, as Christiane Amanpour would say, meters—and dropped me at a hotel I must also be vague about.

One thing about war—in my experience—is that it rapidly sorts people out. The only people in the town older than 50 looked to be this group of slovens running a hotel, sitting around in various lumpish poses on the patio showing utter indifference to anything except when a credit card was needing to be swiped. They were catering to CNN. Its cables snaked through their lobby and dining room. One of the slovens, a fat gray unshaven man wearing threadbare white linen pajama pants with blue bikini underpants under them—take my word—gave me the key to Room 436 across the way.

A TV crew was sitting outside in the sun, as though by the swimming pool, though there wasn’t a pool. Before them was an Israeli army spokesman, feet apart, explaining very directly in a perfect American accent what Phase 3 of the war would involve. I noticed signs for the bomb shelter and went upstairs.

My first flutter. My room was the most exposed in the hotel, the most northerly on the top floor. The window looked out on two Lebanese villages on a ridge. I had a mind to ask for another room, but the last thing I wanted was to seem chicken in front of the CNN guys, so I lay down and read Hannah Arendt. I tuned out the crump of shelling, took a nap.

At 6, I went down for a beer and hung out some with the Israeli spokesman. He is a type you see a lot of over here, more American-seeming than Israeli. Their families made aliyot when they were in their early teens, so their accent was fixed in the States. This fellow had the aggressive quality that I recognized in Israeli spokesmen on the PBS NewsHour. He was not without charm, even twinkle-eyed, but he was utterly focused as he spoke in incisive and logical terms. We had been talking for only a minute or two when, without any prompting on my part, he explained why more Arabs died in their houses than Jews (apparently referring to both Lebanese Arabs and Israeli Arabs). The Arabs had the same understanding about war that Israelis did; still they chose to defy the building codes and did not put in bomb shelters, which were expensive, while the Israelis did put in bomb shelters, and arranged for an orderly evacuation of the war zone, too.

I have to say that contempt for Arabs is a theme in Israeli conversation, though it does not seem that the Israelis have spent any real time with Arabs. Of course, there is plenty of contempt toward Jews when you talk to Arabs. That is the most obvious problem in the Israel/Palestine situation: The two sides don’t talk. And within five minutes of meeting you, a middle-class Israeli is saying that Arabs are animals and you Americans are lucky you don’t have to deal with them. And meantime, the Israelis are putting up a giant concrete wall so they don’t ever have to talk to one another again. There is a reason for the wall, as there is a reason for everything people do to one another here, but some part of it seems a vanity. Israelis are convinced that they are a Western country. They say this all the time: We are Westerners. But they live 500 miles east of Istanbul. I wonder if they aren’t embarrassed by the neighborhood.

There was a restaurant up the hill. I walked up the road, and Israeli boys came down wearing helmets and camouflage and moving at a military trot. The ground invasion. And what a pretty little town we were in. There were flagstone sidewalks and rock-walled gardens and a plaque outside a writer’s house. When I had confessed to the spokesman that I was new to wartime correspondence, he told me that he’d been a paratrooper in the first Lebanon war and this is how things went, sitting around a remote town, half in civilian life and half in military engagement, waiting. It was nice of him to say, and in the pretty hill town, I began to feel a little like Hemingway in Spain. Where was Martha Gellhorn?

At the top of the hill. Here was the real reporters’ hotel. My cabdriver had boned me. This place was crawling with people I recognized, daring and a little meshuggeneh, near the beginnings of their careers, working for several outlets at once, trying to catch a break. I followed a group of them down the road. We passed their cars and vans, all with duct tape plastered to roofs and windows, shouting out: TV.

I wish I could tell you the name of the steakhouse. It was good. They served stuffed grape leaves and kohlrabi spears as antipasto, then a rib steak and local beer. Israeli officers were at half the tables, foreign correspondents at the others. The press were in helpless little packs of people who would not get along under other circumstances, leather-tongued old misfits, young whip-smart Englishwomen, a tall nonverbal guy or two, a dyke, a womanizer and the counterpart of a womanizer, a ball-buster.

At this time, I began to feel alone. It was night; I had no pack. The rockets went off, boom, boom, every minute or so, and the restaurant dog, a big old yellow Lab, pushed under my table, afraid. I tried to make out the incoming from the outgoing, using the lesson the spokesman had given to me, about waiting for the reverb on the incoming. One of the correspondents said into her phone, “We haven’t had so many as this before,” and I had my second flutter.

I stuck at my table, reading Hannah Arendt, and grew irritated by her manner. She used irony once or twice a page. She began sentences with “Well,” signaling her judgments.

At last I made myself go back to Room 436.

For a while, I couldn’t get to sleep. I told myself they had to take a break now that it was dark, but of course they didn’t. A few minutes would pass and there would be another explosion. I went to the window. There was only the silhouette of a little windmill on a well pump across the alley and, in a yard on the border, a group of soldiers monitoring the ridge. I went back to bed and didn’t sleep. I calculated how many people were left in the north, say 200,000, and how few had died. Then I turned on the light and read some more Hannah Arendt and began underlining the parts where she was ironic. I wrote in the margin, “Stop, Hannah.” Or “Bloody Irony.” Notwithstanding her manner, Eichmann in Jerusalem is a great, rich book; and then I wondered if I was getting more out of her book than from the war, if I wasn’t more of an intellectual than a man of action; and I was angry at myself for not having resolved this conflict and maybe dying for my neurosis, before I turned off the light and still couldn’t sleep. I thought about girls. That helped. I fell asleep, I think.

The next thing I knew, I was out of the bed. There had been a huge crack against the hotel building, under the window, it seemed. My first thought was: We’ve been hit. I ran to the door, then it came again—the crack sound came right through the room and the suspended ceiling tiles jumped up and down. The door of the room next to me slammed. No, we hadn’t been hit; it just felt that way. I wasn’t sure what to do. The loud cracks came a third time, then a fourth. It was like being inside a toaster that someone was hitting with a baseball bat.

Out on the balcony, I saw a red explosion on the ridge, and then it came to me that it was outgoing, not incoming: The Israelis had moved to a bigger gun, or they had changed the angle of fire. It was going right past the fourth floor. It was only then that I realized how deadly and serious this really was. Movies hadn’t prepared me for this, and not Tolstoy or Vonnegut, either. A friend who came close to a shooting war once in South America told me he was so scared that his only thought was the desperate feeling, “There has got to be a better way to deal with whatever you are quarreling about than doing this to one another.” I was right there.

I dressed and went down to the bomb shelter. There was a stack of mattresses in a polar-white cube the size of the bedroom in which you were conceived (indeed, in which I imagine some of you were conceived), but there was no one there. Chicken.

Up the road, a couple of the slovens were at a table in the piazza, but up the hill the other hotel was dark. A kid came walking down the road nonchalantly. Soldiers went by in a Hummer.

I went back to my room, and the sharp cracks continued. You can get used to anything. I fell asleep.

In the morning, one of the CNN guys told me he had been terrified too. Their crew was getting ready for the day’s action. They looked wildly excited, loose, wide-eyed, with the sort of joyful anticipation that exceeds even the anticipation of fucking. One of the slovens was having an argument with a European journalist. It was the moral-equivalency argument, the idea that our violence is different from theirs, the argument that goes round and round like a pepper grinder. The European journalist said, “They are both forms of terrorism. Hezbollah practices terror against civilians. Israel’s is state-sponsored terrorism.” The sloven said something dismissive of the world’s opinion, and I bent into the conversation. “Of course I agree with you,” I said, “but I am curious. Does it ever upset you that world opinion is so often against you?” The sloven shrugged. “It used to bother me, not any more,” he said, then offered the obvious unfolding of the thought: “The United States is on our side.”

I forget what reason I had to get out of there. The spokesman said I needed to get credentials in Jerusalem. Or I needed to see the Hagana Museum in Tel Aviv, or the Begin Museum in Jerusalem, or another of the many museums to the military ego. By 12:30, I was back in the bus station in Kiryat Shmona. It was now full of soldiers, one in a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, another lean, handsome one changing out of his fatigues into shorts and hiking boots right there on the platform, and a girl draped like a Versace waif against a railing, in flip-flops, her T-shirt cut off, an M-16 strap not covering a violet bra strap. A couple of hours later, we were in Afula, where Katyushas killed that day, and where you saw soldiers running up to one another and kissing each other—boys who hadn’t seen each other in years, I guess—and then after that we were out of Nasrallah’s range. Though it was not till that night, in Jerusalem, that a shop owner supplied that staple of war correspondence, the sober conclusion:

“The Palestinians live in misery. We do—we live in misery. And so do the Israelis.”

Anti-Israeli feeling in the Arab world, where I live and work, has reached fever pitch since the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon began four weeks ago. Much of the Nasrallah hero worship in evidence among Syrians and Jordanians may in fact be an expression of disappointment, of frustration, with their own ineffectual rulers, a raw, adolescent delight in the sense of empowerment brought about by the sight of an Arab militia fighting the great Israeli military.

Still, it’s sometimes hard, if you’re as susceptible to emotional suasion as I often am, and if you’ve spent as much time talking to penniless Lebanese refugees and angry pro-Hezbollah demonstrators, and watching pan-Arab satellite television, as I have lately, to empathize with the Israeli perspective on this war.

So I told my Jordanian interlocutors the truth, which is that I’d been feeling that I simply had to come to Israel, to talk to Israelis about the war, after several weeks of talking exclusively to Syrians and Jordanians and Lebanese, and to get a sense of the way the war looks and feels from Jerusalem, if I could.

I crossed into Israel last Saturday morning in the company of my friend Rebecca, an Israeli-American, and two cats belonging to another friend of ours recently evacuated from Beirut (they could feel the shelling through the tiled floors with their paws, he said, and were unnerved by it). The cats—fat, orange Brooklyn-bred Sid and lithe, calico Sam—nestled in their gray carrier box and wore looks of baleful resignation throughout this final phase of their long odyssey from Beirut to Jerusalem, which has, improbably, become one of the safest-feeling cities in the Middle East right now.

My Jerusalem plan worked, more or less, in the personal sense, in that I’ve developed a great deal more sympathy for the Israeli position on the war, and a kind of awed fascination for the Israelis’ national character: their wiry tension, their ability to live a relatively calm, modern, democratic existence perpetually on the brink of war and disaster.

But my time here has also made me a great deal less optimistic about the possibility of a quick and effective ceasefire.

I can well appreciate the Israeli position that it is simply unacceptable to have a guerrilla force, with no accountability to any legitimate government, operating at will and taking prisoners along your northern border. I’ve met a young Israeli woman who has lost a close friend in the fighting, and seen Jerusalem hotels packed with elderly refugees from Haifa.

But I think that the Israeli view of Hezbollah—that it can be dismantled, that the rest of Lebanon will eventually rise up to fight the Shiite militia as an enemy in its midst—is terribly flawed. Many Lebanese are, certainly, angry with Hezbollah for dragging their country into yet another war. But the old saw about how the enemy of one’s enemy is a friend doesn’t seem to hold true in this region. As many differences as they may have with Hezbollah, with each passing week, support is consolidating behind Hezbollah across the Arab world, and it’s becoming more and more impossible—politically incorrect at best, treasonous at worst—to criticize Hezbollah’s charismatic leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, in an Arab country.

According to my friend David, an American who lives in Jordan, the Arab street is “like the Loch Ness monster: ferocious, but imaginary.” But I worry that the Arab world has been pushed just a bit too far now, that the inhabitants of that so-called Arab street are much more reactionary than their leaders. Many Jordanians told me last week that they saw this new war as a proxy war, that the United States was using the Israeli military to fight Iran, by using Israeli power to disarm Iran’s force in Lebanon.

It turns out that many Israelis agree with them and think, in fact, that it’s just fine.

“I believe that this is the first phase of a war between the U.S. and Iran, and I feel sorry for Lebanon,” a reporter on Arab affairs for Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily, told me this evening, over iced coffee, in the garden of Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel. “Of course, I’ve never been there, but from what you see on TV, the Lebanese seem like a very open-minded, liberal people. And their country is being destroyed.

“For now, Israel is definitely trying to avoid attacking Syria,” this reporter told me. “But my military sources tell me that Syria is giving military support to Hezbollah and that most of the rockets falling on Israel are Syrian-produced. The Syrians are playing with fire; it’s like they’re sitting on a pile of explosives and playing with a cigarette.”

I’m heading back to Damascus first thing tomorrow morning, and my conversation with the Ha’aretz reporter this evening hasn’t exactly contributed to my peace of mind. I live in Damascus’ old walled city, and my bedroom window is set right into the old city wall, so that I could actually litter into the dry moat that surrounds it. The wall is a good four feet thick and feels solid, impregnable as any fortress. I just wonder how long that feeling will last.

Katherine Zoepf is a writer based in Damascus.