My grandfather’s greatest praise for Israel came as a result of how it treated its less fortunate citizens My grandfather, who lived to be more than 100 years old, used to say, “I’ve seen them all and there are none like the Jews.”



Our small Druze town had remained virtually the same for hundreds of years under Ottoman and later British rule. When Israel was established in 1948, rapid development ensued, and for the first time, our homes had electricity and running water and every child received a quality, free education.



Even among all that modernity and relative luxury, my grandfather’s greatest praise for Israel came as a result of how the young state treated its less fortunate citizens. For the first time in his life, my grandfather, a retired factory worker, received a pension and had access to quality health care. He said that a society could be judged by the way it treats the elderly, sick and unemployed and that Israel had proved itself both strong and compassionate. Certainly, he would say, such a nation would prevail.



That is the untold story of Israel, a nation that measures its strength not by its wealth or military prowess but by the vibrancy of its civil society and the diversity of its democratic system. In a country where the symphonic orchestra, the theater and the university were all built before the state’s political institutions, there are now more than 40,000 independent civic associations. They strengthen our system of education, protect our environment and work to bring peace and justice to our region.



Israel is an immigrant society with a diverse population: 1.3 million of its citizens are Arabs belonging to various religious and ethnic groups. Indeed, some still suffer from poverty and lack equal investment in their communities from the government, but Arab-Israelis still have a standard of living higher than any of their brethren living in the region. They are full citizens who can vote and be elected to public office. They have the right to worship, assemble and speak freely without fear of intimidation or oppression. Since the establishment of our young nation, the freest Arabs in the Middle East reside in the Jewish state of Israel.



With all the challenges it faces, Israel remains the only democracy in the Middle East. This alone does not make Israel’s political system perfect, but it is the endless pursuit of greater equality that sets Israel apart from its neighbors.



In my hometown, I have seen the fulfillment of the ‘Israeli Dream’: young professionals of all faiths who have established successful careers in law, medicine, business and diplomacy. We all come from middle-class families that used the public school system and government universities to create a better future for our children. None of us would have had that opportunity were it not for the free and open society in which we live.



Today, our freedom is threatened by the vile ideology of hate spewed by Hamas, Hizbullah and other similar organizations. With the support of their backers in Teheran and Damascus, these extremists rain rockets down upon Israeli villages and send suicide bombers into our buses and markets. Their supporters espouse a false narrative of eternal victimhood, attempting to justify every act of brutality and blaming Israel for every hardship. This empty rhetoric does not change the fact that the shrapnel of their weapons knows neither age nor ethnicity. And the resulting violence affects every Israeli regardless of race or religion.



The defense against this onslaught requires military action, but the solution to the complex issues that have brought us to this point is found in the strong bond that has developed between Arabs and Jews in Israel. If we peacefully coexist in Haifa and Asifiya, why not in Gaza, Beirut or the rest of the region?



Recently, I attended a ceremony at Georgia’s state Capitol commemorating the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Like Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin, he gave his life in defense of the dream of coexistence.



Because of what my grandfather saw, my children and I are able to live this dream as citizens of Israel. Today, we look to our borders wondering when our neighbors will embrace the dream of peace rather than the nightmare of war.





(Reprinted from the Atlanta Journal Constitution)

If the camera could lie, would you let it? Three Israeli computer scientists from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have developed the ultimate enhancement tool for retouching digital images. Called the Beauty Function, their program scans an image of your face, studies it and produces a slightly more beautiful you.

Introduced at a conference in Boston recently after more than three years of work, the Beauty Function is the inspiration of TAU’s Daniel Cohen-Or and Tommer Leyvand.

In developing the Beauty Function, they surveyed 300 men and women and asked them to rank pictures of peoples’ faces with varying degrees of beauty, on an attractiveness scale of 1-7. The scores were correlated to detailed measurements and ratios of facial features such as nose width, chin length and distance from eyes to ears.

Some 250 measurement points were taken into account and once formulated, researchers developed an algorithm that could let them apply some of the desired elements of attractiveness – as mathematical equations – to a fresh image.

The result is a computer program that within minutes can decide how to make you more beautiful. Larger eyes perhaps? A less-crooked nose? How about lips slightly closer to the chin?

When carried out on a large number of sample images, volunteers agreed that 79 percent of time, the effects of the Beauty Function – which can be applied to both men and women – made a face more attractive.

Photo-editing software companies such as Photoshop’s Adobe are potential customers of the new tool, and likewise researchers hope it will become a must-have add-on for all digital cameras in the future, “just like the red-eye function is today,” notes Leyvand.

Like a true scientist, Leyvand has also tried using the Beauty Function on himself and family members. One relative told him that she was pleased with the output.

“She told me, now I know what I need to do to improve my make-up application,” Leyvand told ISRAEL21c.

“If you can understand what the algorithm of the Beauty Function has chosen to do on your face,” he adds, “it can help you accentuate parts of yourself deemed more attractive. You might want to use more lipstick to make your lips fuller.”

Plastic surgeons, he adds, may find it helpful to increase business. With a flick of a switch they can show people how minor alterations on the face and neck can enhance attractiveness.

Chances are most people will opt to keep enhancements in the realm of the digital world. And there is a need: it is no big secret that celebrities and models are being digitally-enhanced in pictures and magazines. Why shouldn’t all of us enjoy some of that picture-perfect retouching too?

“Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder,” says co-researcher Cohen-Or. “Beauty is merely a function of mathematical distances or ratios. And interestingly,” he adds, “It is usually the average distances to features which appears to most people to be the most beautiful.”

“I don’t know much about beauty and I don’t pretend that I do,” he adds, “But the nice thing about this project is that we didn’t intend or aim to define beauty. We don’t care about the reasons that make someone appear to be more beautiful. For us, every picture is just a collection of numbers.”

Leyvand and Cohen-Or envision such a tool will be used for producing the ultimate dating site picture, and as a one-stop-shop enhancement tool for photo editors at glossy magazines. British newspapers say that it could be good for late-night revellers who want to remove baggy eyes and traces of hangovers.

Whatever the purpose behind using it, the researchers are confident it will make a splash in the photo editing world. Unlike existing software that relies on human intervention to decide what changes to make, the Beauty Function uses the computer to decide. Also, current touch-up software has magazine editors complaining of doctored images looking “cartoony” and little like the original. On comparison, the output of the Beauty Function looks natural.

Since it’s unveiling in Boston, the response to the Beauty Function has been overwhelming: media including New Scientist and Forbes have been eager to report on a computer program that can change the landscape of digital photography.

The Beauty Function idea started around the time when Leyvand had finished his Masters degree in 2003. Lingering around the computer science lab at TAU, he continued to ping-pong ideas off his former mentor Cohen-Or. Together, they decided to build on a body of work started by Dr. Gideon Dror from the Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo working in the area of computer learning.

“When I thought about what he did,” recalls Leyvand, “I thought about using his idea to guide an actual change towards making a picture more beautiful.”

Today, Leyvand is in Redmond, Washington working for Microsoft as a computer developer, while Cohen-Or has taken on the duty of commercializing the beauty software.

As part of his ongoing work as a computer scientist, Cohen-Or also works with the notion of finding a similar beauty function related to color. Color harmonies exist, he says, yet not a lot has been done with aesthetics and color. Finding or matching the right harmonies of color – opposites ones or colors belonging to the same hue – can have a big impact on advertising and art, he believes.

With or without color, the Beauty Function, as it stands now, is bound to make an impact on the way snapshots of our faces are taken and processed.

“Think about how great this could be for a professional photographer at a photo shoot,” says Leyvand. “Normally they take hundreds of pictures to capture the right expression for the perfect shot. It is a rare combination of light, camera position and angle of the face that makes the perfect picture.

“Getting that moment is a kind of magic. I think with our software we can capture that magic moment every single time.”

As soon as you see an Israeli and a Palestinian on the same page… you’re assaulted by clichés.If you’ve ever thought that conventional journalism failed to portray the realities of Israel and the Palestinians accurately, you’ll know why I decided to quit magazines and write a mystery novel instead.



For 10 years, I covered the Middle East, including six years as Time magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief. Eventually I grew frustrated with the limitations of journalistic formula and wrote The Collaborator of Bethlehem, a murder mystery set in the dark days of the intifada.



The novel is entirely about the Palestinians. There are no Israelis in it whatsoever. Partially that’s because as soon as you see an Israeli and a Palestinian on the same page – whether it be of a magazine, a newspaper or a novel – you’re instantly assaulted by clichés.



But mainly it was because telling the real story of the Palestinians was the best way to set things right about Israel. And fiction, of course, is a much more ‘real’ way to tell a story than journalism with all its fictional pretensions to objectivity.



Journalism is written in a straight-jacket of ‘balance’ – as if everything had two equal sides, both as worthy of recognition and understanding as the other. If I ever again start a paragraph with the deadly words “To be sure…” I want you to know I’ll be screaming with pain as I write them. Because the more I covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more I realized that many things didn’t have two equally legitimate sides. I was covering a conflict, not writing a sports report, and in conflicts things are done which are unjustifiable and wrong.



I also discovered that the most important Palestinian stories were nothing to do with Israel. They were about what goes on within their society. The Collaborator of Bethlehem, for example, is about the gunmen who run wild in Bethlehem and their violent exploitation of the Christian community there. The second novel in the series, which is to be built around the same detective character, will examine the infighting among top Palestinian military chiefs in Gaza. Book Three aims to detail the corruption of the Palestinian government.



My detective character is an amateur sleuth named Omar Yussef. A schoolteacher in Dehaisha refugee camp, he’s forced to turn detective when one of his former pupils is accused of collaborating in the death of a gunman. There’s no law and order, so only Omar Yussef is prepared to risk the wrath of the gangsters in the Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and try to clear his former pupil.



Just as in many of the stories I covered, Palestinian characters in the novel blame Israel for something that was really the result of internal Palestinian strife. Omar Yussef sets out to highlight that evasion of responsibility.



I occasionally dealt with sectarian violence, corruption and infighting among Palestinians in my journalism. But mostly editors wanted me to write about the long-defunct ‘peace process’.



It seemed to me a fundamental misconception. I’d often think of those generators from back in high-school physics, where a spark would jump between the electrodes. I’d imagine those electrodes as Israeli and Palestinian society.



All my editors used to see was the spark leaping between the two, but they ignored the cables tracing back from each electrode into the machine, which caused the spark in the first place. It’s that machinery writers ought to focus on, not the spark.

So long as editors – and readers – don’t see the internal issues disturbing Palestinian society, they’ll have an equivalent misunderstanding of why Israel isn’t at peace.



That’s one mystery I hope Omar Yussef can help solve.

How do you explain that many of Israel’s Arab citizens actually like the country where they live?Here’s something about Israel that will surprise you. After last summer’s war between Israel and Hizbullah militias in Lebanon, researchers asked Israeli citizens – Arabs and Jews – if they would rather be citizens of another country. As one might expect after a war, patriotism was the order of the day. A huge proportion, almost 88.5 percent of Israeli Jews, said yes, Israel is the one country whose citizenship they preferred. But listen to this: Among Arab citizens of Israel, an astounding 73 percent agreed with the statement that they would rather be citizens of Israel than of any other country in the world.



That number is even more astounding because many Arabs in Israel admit they feel pressure to deny they like being Israelis. That, in fact, was the finding of a different survey. The first results came as part of a highly respected project called the Peace Index at Tel Aviv University. The second survey came from the Joint Israeli-Palestinian Public Opinion Poll. There, a majority – 52 percent – of Israeli Arabs agreed that, “many of the Arab citizens of Israel identify with Israel in private but refrain from expressing it in public due to social pressures.”



After all we hear about Israel, these findings can boggle the mind. Isn’t Israel that awful ”apartheid” state, as Jimmy Carter implies with the title of his peculiar new book?



I must confess, I agree with those arguing, as Carter does, that much of the world has an inaccurate image of what goes on in Israel. Just about everything about that minuscule piece of land, a fraction of 1 percent of the Middle East, inflames passions practically no other stretch of hills, rocks and sand does. The world’s attention had focused obsessively on the territory long before this second incarnation of Israel came into being in 1948, and even before Middle Eastern oil became the holy grail of international politics less than one century ago.



For devotees of the anti-Israel position now espoused by Carter, Israel must look like a hellish bastion of anti-Arab racism. And yet, how to explain that many of Israel’s Arab citizens actually like the country where they live? As a matter of fact, I would wager that millions of people don’t even realize that Israel has Arab citizens – more than a million of them – with full rights under Israeli law.



When we do hear about Israeli Arabs in the press, we usually hear complaints about discrimination and prejudice. Is there discrimination and prejudice? No question about it. Israeli Arabs, like minorities in many other countries, face obstacles in their path to equality. In this case, the obstacles are made greater by the political and security situation that touches everyday life. With every suicide bombing by a Palestinian, many Israelis feel a little more nervous around Arabs. The fact that a few Arab Israelis aided their Palestinian brethren in their terrorist operations hasn’t helped.





There’s more of course. There are bigots in Israel. And there is a small percentage of Israel’s population that qualifies as extremists. And there’s the fact that Israel was founded as a Jewish state, although one committed to respecting the rights of all its citizens.



Israeli Arabs participate in just about every aspect of the country’s life. There are Arab political parties and Arab members of parliament. And don’t think the Arabs in parliament behave as docile lackeys of the government. They are as at least as critical of government policies as any party in the opposition. Israel’s Arab citizens participate in their country’s democracy more freely and actively than the citizens of just about any Arab country.



Salim Jubran, an Arab Christian, holds a permanent seat on Israel’s Supreme Court. Arabs play major roles in other areas. The chairman of Tel Aviv University’s Political Science Department is a Druze, and Arabs – though underrepresented – occupy positions in business, government and academia.



If Israel truly resembled the horrifying picture painted by its enemies, Israeli Arabs would feel much differently about the country. That, of course, explains the pressure to deny that they identify with their country. And it explains why surveys about those sentiments receive so little attention from those who would blame all the problems of the region on the actions of a handful of Israeli Jews.





(Originally appeared in the Miami Herald – Reprinted with permission of the author)

Finding a world class gourmet meal… with a view of Jerusalem’s Old City.The expression ‘friends with benefits’ usually has less than PG-rated connotations. But this week, my wife Jody and I felt we were true recipients of the benefits of having the right friends when we were invited to a gourmet dinner party held in honor of Mallory and Eli’s upcoming wedding.



The venue was a private restaurant in Jerusalem’s historic Yemin Moshe neighborhood. The establishment, called Spoons, is open only by private booking and is situated in the living room of chef Hila Solomon, an Australian immigrant who realized her passion for cooking and turned it into both a business and an art. Dining there is like having your own personal chef.



Hila and Mallory have been friends for many years; the dinner party was Hila’s very personal wedding gift.



Hila specializes in high end clientèle – diplomats, heads of state, high tech executives. A framed letter of appreciation from the mayor of Chicago rests on one wall. Hila has hosted clients from the ADL, AIPAC, AJC, US Senators and members of Congress, trade missions, bishops, journalists and even the Cardinal of Mexico.



The space itself is part of the experience. An elegantly set candle-lit table awaits guests upon their arrival; the living room upstairs has a million dollar view of the Old City lit up at night (the expression here is clearly not just a figure of speech). The house with its domed ceilings dates back 120 years from when Yemin Moshe was established as one of the first settlements in Jerusalem outside the Old City walls.



Hila and her staff got us in the mood for celebrating Mallory and Eli’s upcoming nuptials with a pre-dinner cocktail of grapefruit juice, vodka and ginger. After some amiable banter we descended to dinner.



Hila varies her style depending on the event and her mood; tonight’s meal was decidedly French… but this being Israel, our host couldn’t resist a few Middle Eastern touches. We started with freshly baked bread to be dipped in olive oil, zatar, and home-made tehina. There was also a bowl of black olives that had been pickled in house.



This was followed by a choice of appetizers: a fillet of yellow tail served sushi raw with wasabi-lemon dressing, capers and pickled ginger, or cooked figs stuffed with minced chicken and poached in a tamarind sauce. Jody and I split the two dishes; they were both sublime.



The appetizer was followed by an amuse gueule – in this case basil and lemon sorbet served with a pure Polish vodka chaser. I wouldn’t have imagined that sorbet could be made from basil, but I was delighted to be proved wrong.



Next we were served two soups – a small demitasse of hot pear soup (a Spoons signature dish), and a full bowl of bouillabaisse. The pear concoction had a taste of coconut and was out of this world. The bouillabaisse was rich with wonton-shaped fish and a slice of bread to soak up the flavors.



By this time we were already stuffed, but the main course was still to come – a subtle duck in a fresh pomegranate sauce served with a side of Jerusalem artichoke.



The entire meal was accompanied by a Petit Castel 2004 red wine which Hila told us is the only wine whose grapes are grown entirely in the greater Jerusalem area – from the Ramat Raziel farm just outside the city near Kibbutz Tzova. It was heavenly.



Jody and I are both serious chocoholics and we were not disappointed by dessert, a massive hot chocolate soufflé which Jody described as the best she’s ever eaten, accompanied by strawberry slices dipped in homemade orange liqueur and slices of coconut sorbet. Just when we thought there couldn’t be anything else to eat, out came a slab of fresh halva, imported from Turkey, and a tea composed of sage, geranium, lemon balm and mint from the garden.



The food at Spoons is Glatt Kosher (by Rabbi Katzin of the Sephardic Center) and can be either dairy or meat, according to one’s preference. Hila Solomon also offers visiting dignitaries culinary tours of the city – taking them to check out the produce at the Mahane Yehuda shuk or to visit the goat cheese farms and wineries in the Jerusalem hills.



Prices for a meal at Spoons usually cost from $60 per person for lunch, and $85 and up for dinners. Brunch is served the first Friday of the month for NIS 100 a person ($24). Take-away meals (for Shabbat or holidays) are available. The restaurant can accommodate from 4 to 25 people (there is also a romantic candlelit dinner option in good weather on the upstairs porch).



Mallory and Eli, however, only invited three couples to this intimate evening; they told us during the meal they wanted us to be there not only because we’re close friends but because they know we appreciate quality food. They were right on that count!



It’s good indeed to have ‘friends with benefits.’