A song from Meydad Tasa for the new year, based on Psalm 137.

This is a guest post by Israelinurse

Rosh HaShana (Jewish New Year) is just around the corner and as ever we will be eating apples dipped in honey to symbolise our hopes for a sweet year to come. This seemed like a good time to take a closer look at the creatures without which we would have neither the apples nor the honey, so off I went to meet beekeeper Yaniv of the Reikin Farm on Moshav Natur.

Yaniv has been independent for five years, having spent some years before that learning the profession. He is in fact a third generation of beekeepers in Israel; his wife’s grandfather first began keeping bees as a hobby in 1919 in Petah Tikva where he was born, whilst working as a court secretary for the British Mandate and being active in the Hagana. The passion for bees passed down to his son and now to Yaniv, who continues the family tradition and has a photograph of Grandfather Azriel on the label of his jars of delicious honey.

Yaniv has some 600 hives which he moves around the Golan and Upper Galilee areas in the spring and summer when the apple, nectarine and pear orchards, as well as other crops such as pumpkin, need pollinating.  In the autumn and winter he takes his hives down to the warmer Jordan Valley and defines his honey as ‘wild flower’ honey due to the fact that during the dry summer season the nectar which the bees gather comes from the flowers of thistles, wild dill, rosemary and squill.

During the autumn Yaniv is busy preparing his hives for the winter by introducing new queens to the hives and creating new swarms. Each swarm comprises four to five combs and eight to ten combs make up a family which will only start producing honey a year after the swarm has been established. This is also the time when Yaniv takes care of the health of his hives by treating ailments and the ticks which can wipe out a hive before closing them up for the winter.

The native bee of Israel is the Syrian bee, which Yaniv describes as being ‘temperamental’ and gives little honey, so when commercial beekeeping first began in Israel during the 1950s bees were brought from Italy. Today’s bees are a hybrid of those Italian new immigrants interbred with bees from the Caucuses and are the result of the artificial insemination of queen bees with the aim of strengthening the hives. Yaniv buys ready inseminated queens to create new swarms and strengthen his existing ones.

Each of his hives yields between 30 and 60 kilograms of honey a year, depending on the weather conditions. In a year with good rainfall, evenly spread throughout the winter season, he can produce 17 to 18 tonnes of honey. Last year the rainfall was concentrated in a relatively short period of time which resulted in the wild flowers shortening their blooming season so he only managed to produce nine tonnes.  Yaniv also packs all the honey himself under the watchful eye of a supervisory body which has granted his produce the status of ‘quality honey’ and ensures that his product meets international standards.

It is always a pleasure to meet people who are passionate about what they do for a living and Yaniv’s obvious love of his profession makes his product very special. As he showed me how the bees beat their wings 2,000 times to cause the water to evaporate from the honey newly stored in the combs, I thought about the thousands of years of the ‘special relationship’ between man and this tiny, yet complex, creature which is essential for so much of our food production and how much we need people like Yaniv who truly respect and look after them. My apple dipped in honey is going to taste even more special this year.

Wishing all ‘Oy Va Goy’ readers a happy and sweet year to come.

You may recall that in May I gave a talk for Israel Connect about effective blogging and online campaigning. I am giving a similar talk for the Union Of Jewish Students on Sunday at their annual Campaigns Summit.

Meanwhile, having recently reached number two in the WH Smiths chart with my Simon Cowell biography, I am pleased to be back in the same chart with my Justin Bieber book. Good times.

Update: The UJS talk went well. They’re a lovely and impressive bunch of people. I loved meeting the legendary Alex Dwek, who kindly gave me a bottle of Israeli wine. Thanks to everyone for being so nice, particularly the man who paid me an extraordinarily generous compliment during the Q&A session. I wasn’t quite sure how to respond, but it was much appreciated.

This week there have been two posts on this blog about the plight of Gilad Shalit. The first was a guest post by Joel Weiner, which suggested an alternative approach to the issue. It is an excellent post and if you haven’t read it I recommend you do so. The second post was my latest Jewish News column, which recounted my experience of meeting Gilad’s father Noam.

As Gilad’s case means so much to me, and has been the subject of so much discussion on this blog, I want to clarify one point. In Joel’s post, he wrote: “Every time a new campaign is launched to bring Gilad home… Hamas looks on with glee – and raises the price of his release.” I have heard this cause-and-effect link suggested before, primarily by Israeli politicians. I took it at face value, and it made me uncomfortable about my involvement in protests on behalf of Gilad.

The only trouble is, as I have just discovered, it is not true.

On July 1, 2006, a week after Gilad’s kidnap, Hamas demanded the release of 1,000 prisoners in return for his freedom. As of today, that price remains the same. I am not suggesting that Hamas is anything other than despicable, nor that Israel should necessarily agree to its demands. But let’s be clear: the campaigning doesn’t alter the price.

For Israeli politicians to slander the campaign of the Shalits is not nice at all, particularly given the disturbingly low priority given to his case by the IDF and Israeli government in the six months after his abduction. My prayers continue to go out to Gilad and his family. I am realising more and more how much they need them.

An Israeli broadcaster recently made a darkly comic observation: if an alien arrived in Israel from Mars it would think that Gilad Shalit was being held hostage not by Hamas, but by the Israeli government. Such is the level of public pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu to secure the release of Gilad, that there is indeed a danger that we lose sight of the fact that Hamas is actually responsible for his incarceration.

Visibility of Gilad’s plight is naturally very high in Israel. In such a loving and humane country, and one in which there is military conscription, there is never any question of people forgetting about him. In July over 20,000 people joined a 12-day, 120-mile protest march calling for Gilad’s release. Everywhere you look there are posters and t-shirts highlighting his case.

The most poignant initiative for Gilad in Israel is the protest tent his parents have established outside the Prime Minister’s home. I visited the tent earlier this month, and spoke with Gilad’s father Noam. The atmosphere in the tent has been compared to a shiva. But the atmosphere I found was not one of mourning. Although Noam is weary, he remains determined to keep working for his son’s release.

I introduced myself and told him about my experiences on the vigil outside Downing Street, which was organised by the Federation of Zionist Youth (FZY) to coincide with the fourth anniversary of Gilad’s abduction. Noam was impressed to hear that we gathered over 6,000 signatures and handed out thousands of leaflets.

When I told him that I had personally handed one of the leaflets to the Deputy Prime Minister he broke out in a smile. “Well that’s encouraging to hear,” he said. His smile grew bigger as he added: “But I don’t think we’re expecting big things from this Nick Clegg guy.” I told him I knew just what he meant. We shared some mineral water and grapes, and chatted more.

I wish I could have told him of more activities in Britain. So many of us do not match our feelings with actions. We simply do not do enough for Gilad. It is disgraceful that the FZY was the only British organisation to mark the fourth anniversary of his abduction, while others were too busy with cosier, self-congratulatory ventures. With friends like them, eh? Whether or not we agree that Israel should strike a deal with Hamas for Gilad’s freedom, we should still remember him.

Why are people so apathetic? Some have said that initiatives for Gilad will never change anything. When I hear that I remember two things. I remember the posh grandmother from Southampton who I spoke to as she walked past our vigil. She had never heard of Gilad, but as I told her about what happened to him tears ran down her face. During the five minutes we spoke she not only learned about Gilad, she also went through a palpable paradigm shift in her view of Israel. She took a handful of leaflets and marched off, vowing to post them through the doors of her neighbours in Southampton.

I also remember the expression of pleasant surprise on the face of Noam Shalit when he learned of the London vigil. One cannot imagine the mental torture he and his wife must go through on a daily basis, and in truth the news of the vigil probably only offered the tiniest crumb of comfort. But it was an honour to be able to show him that people not only cared, but were willing to give up a few hours of their time for a greater cause.

From a grandmother crying in London, to a father smiling in Jerusalem, these reactions alone show that of course worthwhile things come from our efforts on behalf of Gilad and Israel. We should make such efforts more often.

A video to warm the heart.