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Israel Is a Place, Not a Conflict
(New York Times) Shmuel Rosner - Two Sundays ago, I watched a "60 Minutes" segment on Tel Aviv, the place I call home. The people of "60 Minutes" must have come up with this ultra-positive story on the city that Lonely Planet ranks "the third hottest" in the world to compensate for the negative story on Israel's treatment of Palestinian Christians they broadcast in April. But even in a report supposedly about civilian life, about being chic and fashionable, Israel isn't portrayed as a country; it's portrayed as a conflict. Tel Aviv, as correspondent Bob Simon observes, is a place "bordered on all sides by danger." This is the Middle East, so of course every story has to have wars, bombs and sirens, and every triviality has to have hidden, broader meaning. The youngsters on the beach are not just fun-loving youngsters; they are people at whom are pointed "hundreds of rockets" and "thousands of missiles" from Gaza and Lebanon. And Tel Aviv's bar-goers aren't just drink-loving residents. They may be "dancing on the Titanic." The "nothing in Israel can possibly be unrelated to the Arab-Israeli conflict" thesis hardly stands up to factual scrutiny. People in Israel don't die younger than people elsewhere. Life expectancy at birth is 81 years for Israeli Jews and 79 for Israeli Arabs, among the world's highest. For people aged between 20 and 25, it is the fifth highest.