I read the news today, oh boy

What really kills me is the repetition here. Today I again had the experience of opening the news website and seeing the headlines and thinking, honestly believing, there must have been a mistake. They must have somehow, on accident, put up an archived webpage. This is last year's news.

Today is was this article that caused me to think this. A tourist, stabbed at night in the Old City of Jeusalem, has died of his wounds. Last July or August, the headline was the same. We had a friend visiting from Boston at the time. He was staying at a hostel in Jerusalem and I had agreed to meet him at Yad VaShem (the Holocaust Memorial museum.) When he arrived he was visibly distraught.
"Did you hear about the stabbing in the Old City?" he asked.
"Of course!"
"Well, it was right outside my hostel. I got there about a minute after it happened, but it was already too late. There was just too much blood. And it took forever for the police to arrive. By the time there was anyone there who could do anything at all, it was definitely too late."
The poor guy also had his camera stolen that day. Then we spent two hours in a Holocaust museum. What a vacation.

I was also in the old city this week. We took two American friends there with us. One of the friends was here for Birthright (apparently not to be confused with Birthright International ) and had been told never to go to the parts of the old city where we took him. While lunching on knafe and drinking strong Arabic coffee, he asked, "Is this what everyone told me to be afraid of? I'm never going to believe anything anyone tells me about this place."
"Don't believe anything we say either," I told him. "Everyone's got his own bias."

After wandering for a while and buying frankincense and myrrh outside the gate that leads from the Dome of the Rock, and visiting the Wailing Wall, we did some shopping near Jaffa gate. In one of the stores, the lovely Palestinian salesman started chatting with us. We stayed so long he invited us to settle in and drink a cup of coffee with him. We discussed the group he volunteers for that unites Israeli Jewish and Palestinian kids in different high schools over the web. We talked about the war with Lebanon, the notorious Ministry of the Interior in East Jerusalem, that he says is better now than it was. We discussed pot growing in California, how a bill becomes a law in the US, whether or not he enjoys his job teaching or should move on to something else, and so on for two hours. In the end we exchanged cell phone numbers and shook hands and thanked each other from making one another's day a little better. Another day in Israel: beauty, good food, strong coffee, death, fear, hope and friendship.