The ultimate tale of a missed opportunity, now staged by the Bolshoi on Tel Aviv's opera stage, resonates strongly in an Israeli heart that still recalls an old hope. It does not end like an opera. No diva is sprawled on the stage, a dagger in her heart and a high D♭emerging emerging from her throat. I remember stepping out of "Eugene Onegin" stunned. Could there really be an opera that dealt with real life, rather then the melodramatic opera universe? Did Pushkin and Tchaikovsky both just send me off with the message: "life sucks, deal with it?" It was…

From Taba to Taba via trouble. The government issued a severe travel warning, urging Israelis to stay out of the Sinai Peninsula. I've bumped into those occasionally in newspapers and on the radio over the past few days, yet am still planning to venture in briefly. It's not that I doubt the sincerety of the warning: while much Israeli fear-mongering is unfounded propaganda, Sinai terror alerts are sometimes followed by a fair bit of blood. I simply owe my readers and myself a true taste of the Egyptian border. This will be a difficult border to follow. The road running…

From Aqaba to Eilat via an intolerant electric appliances store, a metaphoric volleyball court, and a strange play of reflections. The first thing I notice in Jordan is a picture. It is hanging over my hotel bed: a representation of Rachel's Tomb near Bethlehem in its "before" state (for its "after" state, see the end of part 13). The second thing I notice are tall curbs. Jordan has insane curbs and consequently so do many West Bank cities, which were once subject to Jordanian civil engineers. I figure that such curbs impede parking on sidewalks, but they must also force…

A simple weekend vacation in the south had some more meaning as the region was changing around us The magic of it all I happened to be in Eilat this weekend for a deserved rest as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was spending his last hours in Cairo. I was watching Fox News (that’s all they had - what can I do?) as the reporter suddenly heard the crowd at Tahrir square begin to roar. The roar was getting louder and louder, and nobody could figure out what was going on. Only a few minutes later, it was understood that the…