Yeitgeist: palestine

Photographs tell the truth - they are what they are, readings of light in a certain time and place - and yet they can easily tell lies, especially lies of omission. At the same time, every land is a land of contradictions.

Here is one West Bank, hard to do justice with a bad camera and a worse photographer.

Here is another West Bank.

The shepherd on the left is carrying a little lamb in his arms.

Both are the true West Bank, and the randomly-selected photographs almost always show elements of both. In fact, almost every photograph in the second series corresponds to a photograph in the first series that was taken in almost the same time and place. The important thing is to see them both, and not let stereotypes or ideology cause blindness of the other side.

Magnificent breakfast in Inbal Hotel Jerusalem

No travel report is complete without a report on the cuisine encountered.

That said, it's quite impossible to do tastes justice with pixels, so this will be short and savoury.

Israeli cuisine is a mix of the elements one would suspect, and that's a good thing!

Tasty kosher delicatessen, Russian spoken here

There is much that's cold and pickled, fresh vegetables and dried

fruits, Balkan cheeses and yogurts, smoked fish and European pastries. Whoever pretends not to like this is almost certainly an anti-Semite!

Israel also has plenty of American, Russian, Ethopian and Moroccan food, as well as the usual wonderful choice of restaurants one finds in developed metropolises.

Interestingly, it has adopted Arab shawarma and especially falafel, not without some dumb controversy.

Falafel and shawarma in Haifa, Israel

Palestinian cuisine is also diverse, with distinct Turkish, Greek, Persian and Bedouin influences. Shawarma is everywhere, often accompanied with kebab, falafel, very flavourful hommos, baba ghanouj, cucumbers, cauliflower (often coloured pink), Turkish salad and tabbouleh. For the carnivorous there is lots of chicken. The most unique foods are knafeh - fried cheese and sweet noodles native to Nablus - and sour green almonds eaten with salt and zatar, a spice.

Green almonds by Qalandia checkpoint

There is mansaf, but all Palestinians will point out, while they eat with utensils, that it is actually a Bedouin dish. Flatbread is cheap, very virgin olive oil is generously applied, but seafood has been mostly removed from the cuisine because of the impossibility of getting it from the sea. There are many sweets, often based on phyllo dough and fruits and nuts like pistachios and figs. It would actually be a relatively easy place to eat vegetarian.

There are also foreign restaurants in the West Bank, for example Chinese and Italian, and also restaurants called Kentucky Fried Chicken and JFC - Jenin Fried Chicken.