small talk 2.0

Did you hear this name - Ghajar? Small village on the Israeli-Lebanese border, that made big headlines last week after the Government of Israel decided to withdraw from the northern part of the village. Know why? The residents of the village, who belong to the alaouite branch of Islam protested against this decision and even organized demonstration demanding to stay under the control of Israel. I will repeat, so you didn't miss the point: the 2200 residents of the Muslim village of Ghajar demanded to stay under the Israeli control. A short historic introduction: after the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon in 2000, the United Nations identified and approved “the blue line" - the border between Israel and Lebanon. According to this line, the village was divided into two parts: northern part that was in Lebanon, and the southern part in Israel. After the war with Hezbollah in 2006, Israel withdrew from all of the Lebanese territory, accept for the northern part of Ghajar in order...

Since the deadly terrorist attacks against churches in Baghdad, there are a lot of discussions and reports about the plight of the Christian population in the Middle East. While this is definitely the case for almost all of the countries in the Middle East, there is one country where the number of Christians kept growing for the last 62 years. Your guess is correct - this is Israel. The Christian population In Israel after the establishment of our state was 34.000 people. At the time, most of the Christian population in Israel was concentrated in Jerusalem, Haifa and in the area of Galilee. Among the Christians, the major ethnic group was Arabs, with small Armenian minority in the Old City of Jerusalem, and other small ethnic groups. In 2010, the Christian population of Israel is 5 times bigger than it was in the 1948 - and reached almost 200.000 people. Arab Christians are still the biggest ethnic group in the Christian population, but since the beginning of the 90s, the Russian...

Two days ago I found something quite revealing: the blog I am doing in French was fully translated into English! Nobody contacted me about this, I found it by chance on the twitter account of the site called JEWPI - Jewish Press International. The blog has the same appearance as the original blog, you can see by yourself: Original blog (in French): http://www.yarongamburg.blogspot.com/ The translated version (in English): http://translate.google.com/translate?ie=UTF- 8&u=http://www.desinfos.com/spip.php%3Fpage%3Darticle%26id_article%3D21621&sl=fr&tl=en When I looked closely at theat blog,I saw that in fact this was not a human-made translation, it was Google Translate. However, the conclusion I made out of it is that the blogs by diplomats are something that people are looking for, and they don't care even if it's not high-quality translation. Food for thought.

It's been a long time since I wrote post on this blog. 3 months ago I moved to Paris after being appointed as media advisor to the Israeli embassy in France. So, in addition to all the necessary arrangements you have to do when moving to a new country, I also opened a new blog, this time in French, which became part of my new job. All beginnings are difficult, so I had to take a break from my 2 other blogs, this one and the one in Hebrew. After all, writing for 3 different blogs, in 3 different languages (of which none is your native language...) is not an easy task... Now I hope to be back on track on all the blogs, and I would like to tell you something about our social media efforts in the embassy, where we put into practice some ideas that were discussed in this blog: http://diplomatstalk.blogspot.com/2010/06/how-to-work-with-traditional-media.html I must tell, the first results of my diplomatic blogging were quite up to my expectations. After 3 month of my digital activity in...