Turning Lemons Into Lemonade

This is the link to the Rockets Into Roses website.  This is an amazing concept that is totally new to me.

None of us can imagine what it is to live in fear of neighborhood rocket attacks that happen on a regular basis.  The town of Sderot in Israel has built a bomb shelter in the form of a tunnel in its children's playground so that the children can run into it when the rocket attacks start.  Again, I can't imagine what it would be like to raise a family in a place where rocket attacks are a normal occurrence. 

Yaron Bob, in the town of Ashkelon, Israel, takes the spent Kassam rockets and uses them to create beautiful metal roses.  A portion of the profit from the sale of each rose will be donated to Operation Lifeshield (to build bomb shelters in Ashkelon).

This is what the website says about the roses:

"The sculpture's base is a map of Israel with the rose growing out of the border with Gaza. The stem is mounted on a base in the shape of Israel, with each rose "growing" from the region where most of the have rockets landed.

"Although the rose, stem and base are made of Kassam remains, there is no sign the flower comes from rocket metal.

"The larger more detailed roses can take significantly longer to create, especially the bouquets.

"The premium and ultimate rose have a rounder shape flower. They also have drooping greenery below the flower. The petals are finer, thinner and more elegant than the standard and long-stemmed rose. There is significantly more work, craftsmanship and attention to detail involved."

It is unfortunate that the world chooses to look the other way while these rockets fall on innocent Israeli civilians every day. 

On January 4, 1919, His Royal Highness the Emir Feisal ibn-Hussein, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, signed an agreement to abandon all claims of his father to (Western) Palestine if he secured Iraq and Eastern Palestine as Arab territories.  Later that year, 75 percent of the land promised to Israel was given to the Hashemites (that land was known as Transjordan).  The tribe of Ibn Saud and the Wahabi Muslims had driven the Hashemite Tribe out of Mecca and Medina, where they had been custodians of the two cities for centuries, and the British gave the Hashemites Transjordan (carved out of the land the British had promised Israel).

My point in the above history lesson is that if anyone has a right to be angry about the distribution of land in the Middle East, it is the Jews--not the Arabs.  Meanwhile, until the Arabs agree to accept the existence of the State of Israel, we will not have peace in the region.