A vendor in the spice- and grain-sooq packing a bag for a female customer. Behind him you can see the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and on his left: Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the Hamas leader who was killed in an Israeli missile strike in March 2004. Hamas is not viewed as a terrorist organisation in most of the Arab part of the Middle East. Under the picture it says: "Kullunaa Ahmad Yassin" meaning "We are all Ahmad Yassin". When I asked someone to explain this to me, he said: "If you want to kill Hamas, you have to kill all of us."

The more I travel in, read and hear about the Arab Middle East, the more I want to live in Israel for a while. I want to experience the difficulties, pressures and fears that come with living in Israel. It is so easy for us to talk about our opinion of the conflict from afar, but can we actually estimate the severity of the situation of every day life there? Is our (hopefully) rational opinion accurate? When you have to live with a constant threat to your own life, as well as to those of your friends and family, can you really be expected to act rationally? Can we really afford an opinion from afar?