I’m back in the States now, with no immediate plans to return to Israel/Palestine.  But here’s a final image, from another walk down near the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. Drawn by the lovely apricot umbrellas, I entered this cool space on a very hot day last week. What was going on here?  It wasn’t immediately clear.  The chairs were all lined up facing three largish TV sets, but nobody seemed particularly interested in watching the screens.  All but two of the customers–if they were customers–were black.  I approached this probably Ashkenazi couple sitting on the left, facing each other and talking in Hebrew–the guy is just outside the frame–who explained that this was a coffee shop, a Sudanese refugee coffee shop, and apologized for not being able to converse further: they were in the midst of a business discussion.  So that’s what they were doing there: taking advantage of a space where they were unlikely to be overheard as they talked business.  Or perhaps they were lovers, getting out of the public eye.  But what of the handful of Sudanese or Ethiopians or Eritreans seated here and there and not, as far as I could see, drinking a lot of coffee.  Could they, like me, have just wanted a place to sit down, out of the sun?  And why were the chairs aligned this way?  I decided that this elegant, provisional tent would fill up on evenings when a football match was being broadcast.

Willy-nilly, Tel Aviv has become what Doug Saunders has called an “arrival city,” part of a world of flight, migration, and resettlement.  Not always a happy story.  Anything but: think of the places where refugees from Syria, from the Congo, from Burma, are currently being received.  But it was, in a way, a relief to be reminded that there are other things going on here beyond the grinding down, by the State of Israel, of its Palestinian neighbors.