Mother's Day in East Jerusalem

Winter is not going out without a fight. With falling temperatures the past few days ... by late evening today it started to rain. Unbelievable. It's relatively heavy and quite cold. Yesterday's Equinox went by without much attention though most people were expecting a better start to Spring (or Summer in our case).

Fresh bouquets for sale on
Mothers' Day

It's Mother's Day in Palestine today. Many shops are selling balloons and fresh bouquets of Spring flowers ... but there're not many buyers. The economy is still very bad and most people cannot afford to celebrate the feast day with these little things that cost. And the remark is in Palestine, Mother's Day is not so much about giving mothers a gift of flowers ... rather it's the opposite, of mothers placing flowers over the graves of their children killed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ... children who cannot celebrate with their mothers today.

The PM's scare tactic that won him the elections is still on the headlines. All the major institutions and people who fell into it are keeping s sheepish silence ... but one conservative Jewish institution has broken ranks and openly denounced the scare tactic as unethical, to scare jewish voters to elect him as PM because "arabs are coming in droves" to vote Israel out of existence. All I can say is I never saw so much racist slurs and palestinophobia in elections in the recent years. Not nice. If this can happen to palestinians, what's stopping the next elections to become xenophobic, or anti-christian or anti-druse or anything deemed non-Zionist? And I can safely predict that if this is allowed to go on (with no judicial intervention) ... then it'll only end up being used against its own jewish citizens, those who hold different opinions from the incumbant PM or party. It's implosive and self-destructive ...

The Status Quo ladder

My headache is much lessened now but the heavy medication has caused severe diarrhea and giddiness. The asthma attacks have mainly stopped (75%) but I still wheeze quite badly and have coughing spasms. I ended a course of Prednesone last week but now am on another course ... I hate it. My fingers and feet are all swollen. But I still managed to go to the Holy Sepulchre today to say a prayer for you. The Lenten ladder is back in its Status Quo place for the next 50 days ... a strange practice through the centuries in the Holy Sepulchre where nothing changes, when no one else remembers why it was placed there in the first place hundreds of years ago.