I just got onto a sherut (shuttle) to Tel Aviv after a pretty action packed 10 days in Jerusalem. To be honest, I'm running a little late, but that's just what happens when you hang out with Dan Sieradski. So anyway, I'm heading down his stairs to get to Jaffa street where the sherutim are, and the shopowner downstairs (Dan sort of behind a hat shop) looks at me with my huge backpack and bags full of marzipan rugalach and ceramics and kippas and says lo, asur to go outside, police, lo tov. And I'm like, what? And he says "bomba."

Shit. We're not talkin greasy peanut snacks.

So I go back upstairs to Dan's place and I'm telling him, they won't let me outside, there's some kind of bomb maybe or something? Dan flies across his apartment to the Mac and loads up ynet news and starts instant messaging people. No one knows what's up, there's no news of a bombing. As yet. He opens the window, we hear all kinds of megaphone noise, but Dan's Hebrew is as bad as mine – which is embarassing for him since he's been here 18 months now. Finally he calls up Dave Abitbol who laughs at him (what else is new) and says it's just the settlers' protest.

If you haven't been following the news out of Israel, there was another mini disengagement the other day…Israel pulled settlers out of their illegal outpost in Amona in the West Bank. There were only nine homes there but hundreds of settlers were there to meet the police in clashes far more violent, more premeditated and more bloody than those in Gaza last summer. The hafganah (demonstration) in Kikar Zion tonight is being staged by supporters of these settlers.

This topic has pervaded Israel this week, even the weird Israel that I'm seeing as a pseudo-yeshiva student hanging out with Americans. The other day at Simchat Shlomo, the hippie Carlebach yeshiva, our teacher Raz opened class by rocking back and forth to a niggun and telling us that he had had a bad day, suffering on behalf of the pain that comes when Am Yisrael battles itself. A religious cab driver yesterday told me that he is miserably unhappy about brothers hurting brothers. I have seen hundreds of orange streamers on people's backpacks (overwhelmingly those of young religious people) and tonight I saw a sea of orange in the square.

It took me a long time to get through the protest security because I was carrying two huge backpacks plus all this rugulach. But I had to go this way because this is where the sherutim to Tel Aviv hang out. And then I got in the van and immediately started feeling lame that I didn't hang out at the protest to experience this side of Israel. But friends, Tel Aviv was calling.

More on this later. Rei is pissed that we're not watching our movie. I do have a lot more to say but finding time to write is hard.