Growing the world's most expensive lemons
abercrombie ukIn a region where most land is desert and droughts commonplace, the issue of how water is used and shared is hugely important. Even individual gardeners face ethical questions in Israel.There is a quiet satisfaction in the patient husbandry of traditional gardening - that gentle and miraculous coaxing of new life from the unpromising earth. But there is a rapid and more convenient satisfaction to buying your shrubs and trees already fully grown.The joy we felt in watching our lemon tree being manoeuvred off the back of a flatbed truck by two burly delivery men was surely very similar to the joy you would feel in growing it from seed.It just took half an hour, rather than half a lifetime.There is an economic issue admittedly. So far I have harvested only four of my lemons and I think they have cost about ￡100 ($155) each, but I am obviously hoping that the average price will fall over time.For all the fragile grace with which it dances in the chilly winter winds, the tree conceals an astonishing number of thorns beneath its gentle leaves - although at the moment it is pricking my conscience more than my fingers. The problem is, that like most balcony gardeners in Israel, we have installed a miniature irrigation system to keep the lemon tree alive in the brutal heat of summer.It does not amount to much more than a couple of metres of brown plastic piping and a timer attached to a tap. But every time I hear the muted sloshing of another carefully calibrated dose, the desert around us feels a little drier.
abercrombie and fitch ukLack of fairnessOften the water issue here is reported as part of the broader tension between the Israelis and the Palestinians.A French parliamentary report, for example, recently concluded that the 450,000 Israeli settlers who live on the West Bank of the River Jordan, in defiance of international opinion, use more water than the 2.3 million Palestinians whose home it is. The fairness - or lack of fairness - with which resources are shared is important, of course.But there is a larger issue which may in the end be more important still. That is the alarming way in which the amount of water in the lakes and rivers which support life for everyone here is dwindling. The River Jordan carries water south from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, passing as it does through Palestinian, Jordanian and Israeli land.These days the Jordan in many places is hardly more than a listless and polluted dribble, but there is plenty of evidence that it was once very different. Frequent rapidsHalf way along the valley for example there is a hydro-electric power plant, long since abandoned.It is a sobering thought that once the river waters turned its mighty turbines, when these days they are hardly potent enough to moisten a handkerchief. And we have the writings of the 19th Century American naval officer William Lynch, who in the 1840s rather surprisingly persuaded the government of the United States to fund an expedition down the Jordan Valley.He spoke of rapids, frequent and most fearful, and of waves like the hammers of the Titans.
abercrombie sale ukEven allowing for the need to persuade his fellow Americans that they were getting full value for their tax dollars, it's clear that there was a lot more to the Jordan back then. That is partly because these days Israel pumps water out of the Sea of Galilee to feed its national supply system and partly because neighbouring Arab countries use water from the rivers that feed the Galilee.The effect on the River Jordan is measured best by watching what is happening to the level of the Dead Sea, into which it flows. It is shrinking by a metre a year. It is only about two-thirds of the size it was in the 1930s. The ancients once believed it was certain death to try to sail across the Dead Sea - give it another 100 years or so and you'll be able to step over it.Televised golfSo something has to be done - and attitudes to water in the Middle East are not always rational. There is the whole debate about how much sense it makes to grow non-native plants like bananas and oranges for a start. And I wince when the lawn-sprinkler system at my apartment complex switches itself on.Then there are the televised golf tournaments from elsewhere in the desert played on lushest of grass - it is bunkers and sand traps, not putting greens, which are native to the Middle East. And God knows how much that defiance of natural circumstance must cost. And of course, in its modest way our lemon tree is not helping. Every time I hear the gurgle of the irrigation pipe I imagine the Dead Sea shrinking a little further.By the time we come to leave Israel, I am told the tree will be too big to fit in our building's lift so a crane will have to be hired to winch it over the edge of the balcony - thus probably raising the average price of the lemons again by quite a bit.Instead of selling it, I am tempted to take it down to the shores of the Dead Sea and replant it there.Deprived of its artificial life support system it might not thrive - but it'll do it good to learn to fend for itself.Art experts are taking part in a conference in Germany aimed at recovering works looted by the Nazis.
abercrombie saleMore than 60 years after the end of World War II, there are still millions of lost or stolen items that have yet to be returned to their rightful heirs.The conference will provide advanced training in cultural plundering.The Nazis stole an estimated 650,000 religious items and works of art from European Jews during World War II. "This is an attempt to deal worldwide with the fact that there is no training in this," said Wesley Fisher - director of research for the Conference on Jewish Claims Against Germany."There are people who have some expertise... but they have not been formally trained."Auction marketThe six-day event in Magdeburg, eastern Germany, has been organised by the European Shoah Legacy and brings together 35 experts from more than a dozen countries.It marks the first meeting of the new Provenance Research Training Programme, which will later be extended to other countries."The press tends to focus on the high end of the art market, the major paintings and so on, but what was taken was far vaster," said Mr Fisher"Entire libraries were taken - you're talking about millions of books," he added. Mr Fisher stressed the importance of establishing a network of international experts, as the looted art often travels through several countries."Now, over 60 years later, you're beginning to get a situation where people are passing on and the items then end up in the family estate and are being given up for auction, so many of these things have been coming to the art market," he said. Last year, an online database was launched, with the cooperation of the National Archives and the Commission for Looted Art, which lists missing works
. abercrombie and fitch sale The British Museum has assisted in the return of 843 artefacts to Afghanistan, almost 20 years after they were stolen or smuggled abroad.The items include examples of the Begram Ivories, seen at the British Museum's Afghanistan 2011 exhibition, and an important sculpture of Buddha.Both were stolen from the National Museum of Afghanistan during its civil war and ended up on the black market.The artefacts were passed to the museum for safekeeping, ahead of their return.The items were seized by customs officials and the Art and Antiques Unit of the Metropolitan Police as they passed through Britain, presumably for sale on the black market. All the artefacts were identified by experts at the museum.Other objects - some of which were saved by private individuals - include Bronze Age carvings and medieval Islamic coins.Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, said the pieces' restitution was "the outcome of the ongoing dialogue between our cultural institutions, as well as the support of the authorities, to identify and preserve items from the national collection of Afghanistan that had been illegally removed during years of conflict".Assisted by the Royal Air Force, the collection left the UK last week, bound for Kabul, via the army base in Helmand.More than two thirds of the exhibits at the National Museum in Kabul were stolen or destroyed during the 1990s Afghan civil war."I'd like to think that anyone would do the same for us if we were unlucky to suffer major disaster or crisis," the British Museum's St John Simpson told The Independent.
