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Published: March 4th 2011
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This morning after sleeping in a comfortable bed, I had a long shower and then a beautiful breakfast with cappuccino. I had gotten used to Turkish coffee and while I'll continue to drink it at home, it can't compete with cappuccino. Jack had meetings, so I went for a walk. The only activity available in walking distance was the Educational Zoo, so I visited the monkeys, tigers, lions and ring-tailed lemurs. The "educational" signs were all in Hebrew, Arabic and English. Haifa is the city with the best relationship between Jews and Arabs.
I met Jack and Si, the head of Jewish Family and Children Services of Greater Boston, for a tour of the Bahai Gardens at noon. The gardens were built to honor the first prophet of the religion. There are about 6 million members of the religion who live in more than 150 different countries. They can not live in Israel as it is the holy land, but come to volunteer here for up to one year at a time. The religion is based on equality between men and women, the end of prejudice and peace between all people and for the planet. There is nothing controversial about their
mission. However, they suffer terrible persecution in Iran, where the religion originated, and several other Muslim countries. After walking down the 700 steps in the garden we went for falafel and walked around Haifa until about 3. By the time we arrived back at the hotel, everything was closed for Shabbat. Jack is napping and I've been posting all the material I'd accumulated this week but couldn't post because we weren't allowed to access the internet from the base.
We had dinner last night at the home of an Israeli family that is heavily involved in the Boston-Haifa Connection on the Israeli side. I would guess they are about 45 and have several teen-aged children. Tali and Noni had lived in London, New York and spent 4 years in Denver. She went to school and he started a company that he sold before returning to Israel. They live just down the hill from the hotel so you reach their home by simply climbing down external, public stairs. Haifa is built on steep hills so all the roads are switchbacks and it is much more efficient for pedestrians to use stairs than walk on the roads. There were about 25 people
there for dinner including their extended family, people from this group and several other Americans that do work supporting the Haifa community. We lucked out to be at the end of the table with Tali, the host, and Moshe, his brother. After talking about Israeli and US sports, Jack turned the discussion to politics. We heard there perspective on the need for a two state solution before the Arabs who have huge families outnumber the Jews. They also talked about the problem Israel is having trying to keep economic growth from being purely in Tel Aviv. They are less concerned about borders that I expected. Their rational is that if you already have Hezbollah sitting in Lebanon with thousands of rockets capable of hitting Tel Aviv, and Hamas in Gaza with thousands of rockets, borders cease to matter since surrounding Arab countries can kill everyone already.
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