The Earth has a memory. It has records of African flowers blooming in the summer; it remembers cold, desolate Arctic winters since winters began, and the spawning of coral in the Great Barrier Reef one night, every spring. I remember my first lesson as a child, on how the Earth remembers. The teacher had brought […]
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How you can overcome fear and become a diver.
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Before the short, but icy winter melts into the fierce summer heat, Israel’s Heschel Center for Environmental Leadership will be teaming up with Hazon in New York for a four-day hike along the northern stretch of Shvil Yisrael, the Israel National Trail next week (23 to 27 March).
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We’re accustomed to the doom-and-gloom prophecies of Israel’s chronic water shortage and how the thirst of the growing population of a country that is over 50% desert is going to crash and burn one day in the future. So it came as a shock to the system to hear Machiavellian German hydrogeologist, Clemens Messerschmid insist […]
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I've been researching Bedouin issues in the Negev Desert Israel for about 5 years, and one of the first individuals I met was Nuri El-Ukbi. Nuri and the El-Ukbi tribe have claims to the land named in Arabic El-Araquib, which is roughly situated between Rahat and Beersheva.
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Probably my best memory of Israel is hiking in the Galilee as a teenager. With its green expanses enlivened with blood-red and yellow flowers and sparkling streams, there is no place in Israel like the Galilee. Much political furor has been provoked by Minister Meir Sheetrit’s promise to build an Arab city in the Galilee. […]
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The wonderful wild weather of last week, and according to forecasts, in the week to come; has inspired a series of special water-related posts. This first one examines the findings of a new International report focusing on the condition of the World’s Oceans. It does not unfortunately make for happy reading…………………. Ben Halpern, a […]
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It’s only February and the beach is already a hot topic in Israel, but alas, for all the wrong reasons. Work has got underway in the last few weeks to build a 350-apartment holiday resort on a virtually untouched part of Palmachim Beach, which lies midway between the cities of Tel Aviv and Ashdod. It […]
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While most Israelis take pride in having made the desert bloom, some of the imported “blooms” have been contested over the years as threats to the ecosystem. In a land where Biblical passages echo everywhere, it’s sometimes disconcerting to realize just how dramatically the face of the landscape has been changed in recent years, and […]
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Bring out the tissues. When we heard the news that a 15 metre fin whale had made it to Ashkelon, in Israel, our hearts filled with joy. We know whales have come to these shores before. Take Jona and the Whale story, for example. Our hearts sunk. The young female calf found swimming off the […]
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The Kishon River was once a notorious dumping ground for seven chemical plants, with the result that the entire ecosystem died and the river was even blamed for causing cancer in soldiers (though that has never been proven conclusively). In recent years, the Ministry of Environmental Protection has initiated what they refer to as a […]
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Israel has a number of Eco-Tourism options. But we suppose, at the end of the day, it all depends on semantics, marketing and what one classifies as “ecological.” We are of the notion that an eco-trip could be as simple as a walk in the forest, basking in the sunshine at your local cafe, or […]
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Stay in an 11-century Crusader Castle in Israel. Kerem Maharal.
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It could only happen in 2008. During the year of Shmitta, which is every seven years, Jewish law dictates that we not work the land of Israel in any way. The Jewish National Fund customarily organizes tree-planting activities that attract thousands of people in honor of Tu B’Shvat…but not during Shmitta.
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It’s a yearly ritual in Israel: we worry about rain. We worry when we don’t have rain in the winter, when it is supposed to fall; and we worry when we get rain if it’s the wrong time for the crops. This is not a new phenomenon: the Jewish religion is richly interwoven with customs […]
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