"I feel so sad that killing each other seems to be the only response"

I posted yesterday about the current situation in Israel. One of the comments to my post was as follows:

Anonymous said...
"I don't have any answers, Lisa, but I feel so sad that killing each other seems to be the only response from either side. So many wasted lives!"

What would you like Israel's "response" to be exactly? Israel has tried everything to live in peace with Gaza. It unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, and since Hamas took power in 2007 Hamas has invested every penny it has in armaments. Israel supplies water to Gaza so what did Hamas do? They dug up many of their water pipes and turned them in rocket launchers. (Google it if you don't believe me). 

Funny isn't it that Gaza is short of everything except rockets?

Israel has allowed thousands of Gazans each day to come into Israel and work. Israel has allowed Qatar to literally send in suitcases of money into Gaza. And at every turn Israel has been met with rockets launched at its cities. And on 7th October 2023, when Israel's guard was down, 2,500 Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and tortured and butchered 1,500 people. Whole families, kids, women, the elderly. And then kidnapped another 200 people. What would you have Israel do? What would YOU do in that situation? 

Even now Israel is only trying to eliminate Hamas and avoid harm to Palestinian civilians. That is why Israel gave advanced warning to Palestinians to move to the south of Gaza to avoid being hit. And what did Hamas do? They blocked the exit routes with lorries on the 2 main exit roads to prevent civilians from leaving. Hamas use Palestinian civilians as human shields whilst firing rockets at Israeli civilians. And nothing delights Hamas more than when there are Palestinian casualties, knowing that the western liberal elites will lap it up. Witness the world outcry at the Palestinian hospital that was hit 2 days ago. And when Israel gives categorical proof that it was an Islamic Jihad misfired rocket that hit the hospital, suddenly know one is interested anymore.

Israel is in an impossible situation. Damned if it does, damned if it doesn't. So I repeat, what would you have Israel do? What would YOU do in that situation?

A Time Like No Other

I haven't blogged for quite some time. We lost our soldier son in May 2022 and honestly I haven't felt like there was anything to write about or share here. But I am aware that my blog is called "Handmade in Israel" and that I have shared many wonderful things about the country I live in over the years. It's time to share some not so wonderful news.

On Saturday 7th October "Operation Iron Swords" began with a coordinated surprise offensive on Israel. The attack began in the early morning with a barrage of at least 3,000 rockets launched from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, one of which reached the city that I live in. In parallel, some 2,500 Palestinian terrorists breached the Gaza-Israel barrier and massacred civilians in neighbouring Israeli communities. At least 1,350 Israelis were massacred, including residents of eight kibbutzim in southern Israel and 260 young people at the "Supernova" music festival. 199 unarmed civilian hostages and captured Israeli soldiers were taken to the Gaza Strip, including women, young children and babies. This was the largest sustained slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

Hamas, an Islamist terrorist movement, launched its attacks during the end of the Sukkot Jewish holiday and 50 years after the 1973 "Yom Kippur War", which also began with a surprise attack. Israel began conducting retaliatory strikes before formally declaring war on Hamas a day later.

I am not a particularly political person and anyway, I prefer to leave politics out of this blog. But these are the facts. Visiting my son's grave at the local cemetery, I discovered six new graves of young soldiers who have been killed in action in little more than a week. There are more new plots in the non-military section. We hear constant booms in the distance of the Iron Dome, Israel's mobile air defence system, intercepting rockets. Worry, together with the non-stop roar 24/7 of air force jets, keeps me awake at night. We have watched memorial service after memorial service on the television of those murdered and killed in action. Last Friday we stood holding Israeli flags in a guard of honour on the route to the cemetery for a former student at our boys' school. We worry about what will happen to our sons' friends and the children of all our friends when we progress into Gaza.

The terrorist attacks by Hamas are pure evil. Israel has a right to exist and anyway, as Golda Meir said, we have nowhere else to go. The antisemitic demonstrations in London, New York and around the world have shown us that. 

I urge you to keep us in your hearts in the coming days.

* The cards are all commissions I have made over the years for young people who are or were IDF (Israel Defence Forces) soldiers or about to start their military service.

** This post has been shared on My Corner of the World, Little Things Thursday and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday).

Waiting

28 years ago this year a young woman got on a plane and flew to Israel, alone, to make a new life for herself. Growing up in a very small Jewish community and after many wonderful holidays in Israel, she wanted to see what it was like to live in the Jewish State. So that young woman got on the plane, studied hard in Ulpan (Hebrew language school) to learn Hebrew and got herself a job working in the field of graphic design.

That young woman was me.

The years passed and I met Richard and gave birth to two boys. I set up my own small business working from home, creating paper art which made people happy. I toured and hiked around Israel and blogged about it, sharing my experiences with others. I wanted everyone to see the country I loved. אין לי ארץ אחרת - I have no other country - so the song goes. And I believed it. I believed I was bringing my sons up in just the right place. I was bringing them up in a land where they could be proud Jews, where they were free to spend hours outdoors, hiking and swimming and simply enjoying themselves. They were not, like I had been, the only Jews in their class. They learnt Hebrew and Bible studies, the history of the land and much, much more. Truthfully, their school education was not what we hoped it would be but it was a compromise. I truly believed that, despite their education, they were better off living here than abroad.

21st May 2022 changed all of that. On 21st May 2022 we lost Gadi, our youngest son. I still find it hard to write those words today. Gadi was serving his time in an elite unit of the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) as a tank driver. He was home for a long weekend, having been on his base for 21 days previously. I have written his story before. Inexplicably Gadi chose to end his life after “a negative interaction with the Police”. (These were the words used by the IDF in an end of year news article about suicide in the Israeli army.)

What did Gadi do? We understood at the time that he had been caught smoking weed in the park with a friend. Weed. In bars and cafes across Israel, the air is thick with cannabis smoke. For years, smoking weed has been socially permissible in Israel despite being technically illegal. Patio tables in cities like Modi’in and Tel Aviv are dotted with people openly rolling joints and lighting up without a second thought.

Richard and I didn’t like or approve of it but what harm was Gadi doing that night? It was late, the park was empty besides Gadi and his friend, they were just having a bit of, albeit foolish, fun.

3 hours after being released by the Israel Police onto the street, Gadi was dead. For over a year we waited patiently for the army report investigating the events of that terrible night. We really, really wanted to understand what happened to Gadi. We hoped that somehow we would get some kind of answers to our many questions and then at least we could begin to grieve.

Last month we were finally presented with the army report. We got 5 pages of nothing.

The report lacks details, has factual mistakes and there is a huge black hole about the entire interaction between Gadi and the Israel Police. In fact, the Military Police failed to even interview them. In a whole year.

At one point the report refers to “Levi”. They didn't even bother to check Gadi's name. Crucially, we did learn that there were no drugs or alcohol in Gadi’s body at the time of his death. None whatsoever.

On one side of the report it is written, "that his [Gadi’s] commanders and friends described him as a good soldier, sociable and loved, with a joy of life and a sense of humour." And on the other hand, he committed suicide. Why? What happened to Gadi that made him turn from someone who had plans for the near and far future to someone who commits suicide? The elephant in the room is of course the Israel Police.

Now we are struggling just to get the investigation material so that we can fill in some of the (huge) holes in the report and decide on our next step. The army is “working on it”. Surely all the details and facts should have been collected for the report from the beginning? Goodness knows what they are working on now. Are they perhaps trying to cover something up or do they hope that if they take long enough, we will simply give up and stop asking?

Gadi did nothing wrong. He was a smart, creative and sometimes silly young man, but he did nothing wrong.

אין לי ארץ אחרת - I have no other country. Could this happen elsewhere? Perhaps, but I rue the day I set foot on that plane and came to a land where the police and army fail to look after a young man who is risking his life to protect them and their families.

* This post has been shared on Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday) and My Corner of the World.

The Exhibition I Wasn’t Ready to See

All photos by Ingrid Muller

In May we put together an exhibition of our son Gadi's drawings in a local gallery space, to mark the year since his passing. While Gadi created some wonderfully detailed artwork over the years, we never expected to be putting together a show of his art for a long time to come. It was something that I hoped - no, believed - would happen one day in the future. The events of 21st May 2022 changed all that and when a friend, curator Shira Friedman, approached us with the idea of putting together an exhibition of Gadi's work, we thought it was the perfect way to remember Gadi and to share his talent.

Gadi loved to draw. He would spend hours in his room creating highly detailed pieces based on his passions at the time. He drew football players and knights, animals and steampunk characters, mythical islands and maps. There was a long period when he drew football stadium after football stadium, concentrating not on the pitch but on the crowd. These stadiums are not the stadiums that Gadi visited in his short life. We can’t see Ironi Modi’in’s stadium, nor Hull City’s. He didn’t draw Camp Nou, which we toured back in 2017, or the Emirates. These are the stadiums of Gadi’s imagination, filled with animated crowds waving flags and banners and setting off flares. He drew each piece in great detail, using an extra fine pen to add each and every member of the crowd and to include even the wording on their banners.

Football stadiums aside, Gadi’s work was almost always in black and white. Though he had drawers full of felt tip pens and coloured pencils, he preferred a simple graphite pencil and, later a super fine black pen. His early drawings are sweet and simple but with a strong use of line to define his shapes and figures. His later pieces are small in scale but full of detail.

Gadi was not precious about his work. He was proud to show us his drawings when he was satisfied with them but many, many pieces ended up in the rubbish bin as well. The reason we were able to hold this exhibition was because I carefully saved what I felt were the best of them when tidying up Gadi’s incredibly messy room! Aviv, Gadi’s best friend, did the same when Gadi would leave his drawings lying around at school.
Gadi was still drawing when he was in the IDF (Israel Defence Forces). His sketchbook was found in his tank. He had told friends that he wanted to make better use of the many spare hours he had, when he found himself sitting around doing very little.

Gadi was also a brilliant writer. His short stories, written from the age of six and upwards, were very, very funny. Characters such as Felinius the Genius and Mister Bakewell Tart were so very English that it was hard to believe they had been thought up by a young boy living in Israel! I don’t remember ever having made a Bakewell Tart in my life, but Gadi was a voracious reader and probably learnt all about them from a book. As he got older, he wrote less, but the stories remain as amusing as the day he penned them.

A particular favourite of ours was a long story he wrote for Mister Handmade in Israel's 50th birthday back in 2014. In fact, the name we gave to the exhibition, "The Good, the Bad and the Snoring", was the name 11 year old Gadi gave to the story. With the help of Mister Handmade in Israel's brother and his amazingly talented friends and colleagues in the UK, this story was made into a wonderful short film which we showed on the opening night of the exhibition.

I have posted it below for you to enjoy too.

The exhibition was visited by hundreds of our friends and many others who had heard or read of Gadi's story in The Jerusalem Post,  Israel's most-read English newspaper. The mayor of Modi'in-Maccabim-Re'ut came, as did senior members of the IDF and many of Gadi's soldier friends. The opening night - after months and months of planning - was somewhat stressful because four hours before the exhibition was due to open, missiles started coming over from Gaza. We decided to go ahead with the evening anyway, posting on social media where there were protected spaces if needed!

I am sure that Gadi would have been very proud of the exhibition and happy that so many people were able to see his work. I only wish he had been there to enjoy it for himself.

* This post has been shared on My Corner of the World and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday).

19 Years of Mum's Birthday Cards

I was saving this post for my youngest son's 21st, just as I did for his older brother back in December 2021, but it wasn't meant to be. Little did I know that he would not reach 21, nor even 20. It is impossible to believe that my cards stop at 19.

Gadi died on 21st May 2022. You can read his story here. 19th January 2023 would have been his 20th birthday. Instead of making him a special card and a yummy cake, we have invited his friends and fellow soldiers to join us for a barbeque, to remember Gadi and share stories about him.

Now I will tell you all about Gadi through the cards I made him every single year of his short life. I am so happy that I carefully saved them all.

Age 1. Gadi's 1st birthday card showed a little bear holding a balloon. The bear is sitting on a block with a big number 1 on it.

Age 2. This year a big smiley lion with a beautiful red mane went on Gadi's card.

Age 3. Gadi had developed an interest in pirates. He loved dressing up in his Early Learning Centre pirate costume, so I showed a pirate with a red spotted bandana. Next to him is a skull and crossbones flag or Jolly Roger. I added an island and palm tree and X marks the spot indicating where the pirate treasure is buried.

Age 4. This year Gadi was into knights and dragons. This rather sweet looking knight is holding a large shield and sword. The fiery red dragon looks a little scary.

Age 5. It looks like Gadi was still into pirates - or perhaps highwaymen - and swords, but he was also developing an interest in animals. We once visited a hedgehog hospital in the UK, so perhaps that is why I added one to his 5th birthday card. 

Age 6. I wrote in my blog post that Gadi had been checking for weeks that I had made his 6th birthday card and that he told me exactly what should be on the card. He wanted me to show him wearing his Dracula dressing up costume, with a bat on his shoulder. Gadi was into all things scary.

Age 7. Gadi had great plans when he was 7. He wanted to be a scientist when he grew up. Not only a scientist, but a scientist who travelled to the moon and deep down under the sea, thus the spaceman and his rocket and a diver and fierce shark. He was an avid reader, loved to draw and was fascinated with the scary things in life. I added a couple of bats and a mummy to the design. He also loves the animated series Ben 10, so I showed him wearing a Ben 10 shirt and holding some 'scientific potions'.

Age 8. Football has always been THE sport in our house but at 8, Gadi had his own ideas and was passionate about the Korean martial art of Tae Kwon Do. He had a yellow belt with two very important stripes on it and the design on his birthday card showed him in action, wearing his white suit and the aforementioned belt. He was still a big reader and still loved to draw. The very scary looking 'Weeping Angel' in the top right hand corner of his card had to be included because of his interest in the science-fiction series Doctor Who. 'Mocca' the toy guinea pig popped in too!

Age 9. Gadi was very creative. He loved to draw and wrote some great short stories. But with the creativeness came messiness and there wasn't a pencil in his room which had not been gnawed. For his 9th birthday card I showed him wearing his favourite "leather" jacket, with his bullet necklace round his neck, a book in one hand and the aforementioned chewed pencil in the other. In front of him is one of his Doctor Who drawings. Cookie the hamster is perched on top of the number 9. Finally I added some coloured Lego blocks - another favourite activity - and a big pile of books.

Age 10. When Gadi turned 10 I decided to show him surrounded by his books. He would leave them all around the house and would often simply start reading a book if there happened to be one near to where he was sitting.  He has paper and pencils in front of him too, since he still loved to draw.
I also showed him barefooted on the card. Gadi was always dressed for the summer. He never seemed to feel the cold. He wore a t-shirt when it was pouring with rain and would remove his socks the minute he got home, to walk barefooted on our cold tiled floors.
His other main interest at the age of 10 was maps. He had great plans to travel the world. The National Geographic map I have shown on his card is still on the wall above his bed.

Age 11. This year was the year of the Nerf Gun. I showed my now 11 year old with his new Nerf in his hands. Little blue and orange Nerf darts are scattered around him and there is a big pile of books in the background. Gadi was still a huge reader. His drawing of a Komondor dog - or as he called it, "The Mop" - is on top of the pile of paper in front of him. A couple of pencils are lying around too.

Age 12. Gadi always really wanted a dog, so I showed him hugging one. Behind him is his new scooter.  A pile of books had to feature on the card, as did the obligatory pencils and Nerf bullets as well. Gadi was now practising Krav Maga and is dressed in his blue Krav Maga trousers and white t-shirt. He is barefooted, as he was when practising Krav Maga, but then he was almost always barefooted anyway!

Age 13. This year's card, like last years, had to be about dogs. Every day Gadi would remind us all just how much he wanted a dog. He showed us pictures of them on his phone and we would watch clips together from The Daily Puppy online. At meal times he would shuffle in his chair, "I want a dog. Let's get a dog".
I wish we had got him one.

Age 14. Gadi was obsessed with his laptop, but when I did manage to peel him off it, he was still the artistic, creative, bookworm that we loved. Once again books had to feature on his birthday card, though by this age you'd find him with a Kindle in his hand instead. His phone, laptop and headphones had to appear too, along with some pens and a pencil. He still loved to draw. New additions this year were his skinny jeans and hair gel. He used to get his hair cut more often than anyone else in the family and then spend ages styling it in front of the mirror! Finally I added a little short-legged dachshund, which was his favourite breed of dog at the time. 

Age 15. Gadi's favourite dog this year was the Golden Retriever, so that's what I put on his card. He has his Xiaomi phone in one hand and behind him is his laptop computer with one of his favourite Instagram pages, The Daily Woof, open on the screen. I also added some sushi, his Kindle and the badges of his two favourite football teams, Ironi Modi'in and Hull City. Football had begun to take over.

Age 16. When Gadi turned 16 I showed him holding an Israeli drivers L-plate in one hand and in his other hand he is holding his grey MUN folder. MUN, or Model United Nations, is an academic activity in which students can learn about diplomacy, international relations, and the United Nations. Gadi, though a bright kid, was not the most serious of students, but he really enjoyed the MUN conferences. He was even willing to dress the part and would put on a white shirt and tie for the occasion! In fact, his school has renamed their conference the YachadMUN 2023 in Memory of Gadi Isaacs. A big honour. 

Once again I included the team crests of Gadi's favourite football teams, Ironi Modi'in and Hull City, along with a football. His Xiaomi phone had to appear on the card as well, along with his Kindle and some pencils to represent the hours he spent drawing in his bedroom.
Finally, he had almost given up on asking us to get him a dog and had reverted to begging for a hamster, the pet we used to have when the boys were younger. You can see a tiny little hamster peeking out from under the Israeli L-plate.

Age 17. Gadi's 17th birthday card yet again featured dogs. He used to walk several of the neighbourhood dogs, two of his regular clients being a couple of very cute dachshunds. He often brought them round to our home for me to see them too and one of them left me a 'present' which you can see on his card! It certainly made Gadi laugh when he opened it.
When Gadi went to visit grandpa in the UK in the summer of 2019, he returned home with a Hull City jacket which then rarely came off his back. I showed him wearing the much loved jacket on his card, along with his black adidas sweatpants and the Blundstone boots that all the Israeli kids wear. The blue t-shirt was a nod towards our local football team, Ironi Modi'in. He had a guinea pig in his hand. He was still desperate for a pet.

Age 18. Gadi turned 18 when Israel was in its third lockdown and it certainly wasn't the 18th birthday he had dreamt of. He had to make do with celebrating his special birthday at home with mum and dad. The dog that appeared on his birthday card is Tofu, our neighbours' dog, who Gadi walked daily. Those two loved each other.
Gadi had passed his driving test since his last birthday and, when we were not in lockdown, liked to take dad's car out for a spin with his friends. I showed the car on his card. He is proudly pointing to the car keys. I added Ironi Modi'in's badge to his card as well. Gadi could now legally enjoy a beer with his friends, so I included an overflowing beer glass, along with his precious phone, which never left his hand.

Age 19. Gadi spent his very last birthday in the company of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). He had enlisted back in August and was a tank driver. I showed him with short hair on his birthday card. The army required him to keep his curls short. He is holding his rifle and there is a tank behind him. I also included Ironi Modi'in's badge. Even though he was somewhat preoccupied, Gadi still managed to keep an eye on what they were doing and went to an occasional game too. Finally, I showed him against a stunning orange sunset. He had a good eye for photography and had sent us a few great shots of tanks in the desert since his service began.
Gadi loved his card and squirrelled it off to his room to place it on the shelf next to his Giyus Kal (an easy call-up) card. They are both still standing there.

Happy 20th birthday Gadi. I love you and miss you so much.

* This post has been shared on Little Things Thursday

Atlit Castle and Khirbet Karta

The day that we went to see the flamingos in Atlit we also took a walk along the beach to view the ruins of the Crusader fortress Château Pèlerin, also known as Atlit Castle. Built in 1218 by the Templars and taken over by the Mamluks in 1291, it was one of the largest fortresses in the Holy Land. The fortress was built on a promontory, with two main walls cutting the citadel off from the land and a protected harbour on the south side of the promontory. It also had three fresh water wells within its enclosure. 

Château Pèlerin was not demolished by the Mamluks, as was their normal practice after capturing a Crusader fortification. It in fact remained intact for several hundred years, until suffering damage in an earthquake in 1837.

Aaron Aaronsohn (a Jewish agronomist, botanist and head of the NILI espionage group) established an agricultural station at Atlit in 1911. Château Pèlerin became an important observation point used by the NILI spy team in transferring data to the British during World War I. The NILI spies would make contact with the British who would sail by. The British would send a small boat in to shore in the middle of the night to give gold coins to support the Jewish effort and in return would get detailed plans of Turkish movements. These interactions with the British Intelligence played a part in General Allenby's successful defeat of the Turkish army in Israel in 1917.
Today the fortress is an Israeli Navy base and the headquarters of the Shayetet 13 naval commando unit. As a result, it is within a closed military zone and we were only able to view it from the beach.

We were however able to explore the large Crusader cemetery south of the fortress. The cemetery dates from the 12-13th century and has more than 1,700 graves, above and below. Knights, pilgrims, residents and professionals working on the fortress were buried there and some gravestones are decorated with stylized patterns of crosses and icons indicating the status and profession of the deceased.

I read that the best place to view Château Pèlerin was from the viewing terrace at Khirbet Karta, so that was our next stop. We parked in the Limor picnic area, named after a member of the Genio family who founded the salt works in Atlit, and walked up to the viewing point which was once a British Mandatory water tower. The views of the salt ponds full of flamingos and other migrating birds, the Mediterranean Sea and Mount Carmel were wonderful. To the north we could see the ruins of Château Pèlerin and Le Destroit.

Le Destroit was a Crusader fortress which preceded Château Pèlerin. It was built sometime in the 1100s to protect Château Pèlerin and to secure the convoys that traveled along the sea. It was demolished by the Crusaders themselves about a century after its founding. The reason for this was the Crusaders' desire to avoid a Mamluk siege on the tiny fortress, which count not withstand it.

The Crusaders called Le Destroit Districtum and in French Destroit. The Hebrew name, Khirbet Karta, is related to the Hebrew churvan, meaning desolation or a destroyed place. Karta, which is taken from Aramaic and used today in modern Hebrew, means city, which this place does not really seem to have been.

Excavations inside the fortress and the surrounding area revealed water cisterns and the remains of clay pipes used to collect rainwater. To the north of the fortress are the remains of horse stables, below. There is a row of cavities, which were probably used for tying the animals. On the southern side of the stables, there is a row of sockets in the wall that were likely used to support the beams of a wooden roof that covered the place.

Further along we saw a guard booth hewn from sandstone and on the vertical, eastern quarried wall of the fortress, a large ancient inscription which has been cut into the rock. The letters are Phoenician script, probably the first two signs of the name of the Phoenician settlement.

Khirbet Karta is one of those sites that draws large groups of flower lovers every year, to view hundreds of blooming sea squills in one spot. Sea squills bloom at the end of August and September and into October each year, depending on the area and temperature. The blooming occurs earlier in the colder areas and later in the warm places. It just so happened that we visited Khirbet Karta back in October, when the flowers were in full bloom!
The sea squill is a common plant that stands out in the landscape. It is special due to its lifecycle and structure: its onions, its leaves, its flowers and its toxic materials. In November it grows leaves which last through the winter and early spring. By April the leaves wilt and all above-ground parts of the plant die. At the end of the summer a single flowering white pillar without any green leaves rises for just a few weeks. This can grow up to two meters high. The flowering begins from the bottom of the high flower pillar and every day another group of about 30 flowers opens above the previous ones, and the flowers that opened the day before wilt. The flower opens at night and remains open for approximately 18 hours.

The fact that the plant produces leaves in the spring and flowers in the fall is a way to survive the Mediterranean climate because the summers here are so hot and dry.

In Hebrew the sea squill is called Hatzav, from the root meaning "to chisel" because this hardy flower chisels itself into rock. The Jewish sages mentioned that Joshua used the sea squill to mark the borders of the Land of Israel. The plant's toxicity deterred people from digging up the bulbs to move the boundaries. The Egyptians referred to the sea squill as Ein Sit, the god who resists the sun, because it only blooms in the autumn.

The sea squill is one of the rare poisonous plants in Israel and one should not touch the bulbs without wearing gloves. It is related to the onion and, just as onions causes your eyes to burn when you chop them, sea squill leaves contain burning needle-like crystals. The flower was often used to protect graves in Arab cemeteries so that predators like wolves, jackals and hyenas wouldn't dig up the corpses. The flowers are thought of as messengers and are known as basl el maytin (bulb of the dead).

A folk saying across the Middle East and North Africa goes "The sea squill blooms and the summer ends". The sea squill may only bloom for a short period but it is one of the most beloved plants here in Israel. Children are taught to look out for it and the plant even has its own song, כמו חצב, written by Naomi Shemer, one of Israel's leading songwriters.

* This post has been shared on My Corner of the World, Little Things Thursday and Wordless Wednesday (on Tuesday).