Jerusalem Diary: Monday 26 May

By Tim Franks
BBC News, Jerusalem

EGGS AND IEDS

Israel may have failed twice this week - in coming ninth in the Eurovision song contest, and in its most famous footballing personage, Avram Grant, receiving the boot from Chelsea.

But there is one award which it must have made its own: the best use of the academic colon. The academic colon is the device used by desperate university types to encourage attendance at their lectures, or publication of their articles.

Sex and Death: Pathways to a New Hermeneutics for Beowulf. Revenge of the Sith: Dealing with Folded Basement in Laramide Uplifts.

Last Tuesday, at 0930, if you had been at the Rosh Hanikra Holiday Village, and had had the requisite security clearance, you could have listened to a presentation from Yossi Almog, a chemistry professor at Hebrew University and former Brigadier General in the Israeli police.

The talk was entitled Characterisation and Identification of Urea Nitrate: an Improvised Explosive that is Easier to Make than Frying an Egg.

"Actually," Professor Almog told me on the line from Rosh Hanikra, "I would think of making a cup of lemon tea. That's the nearest thing in the kitchen to making urea nitrate."

Yossi Almog was one a large number of defence experts and academics from around the world who were attending what the Hebrew University called The World's First International Symposium on Improvised Explosives.

The sessions were behind closed doors. According to Professor Almog, the experts were united for a week in their search for new ways to detect and disable.

Improvised explosives and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have had a long and powerful history in the Middle East. In his memoir of 1922, Lawrence of Arabia mused on the importance of a "well-laid mine" in guerrilla warfare.

Earlier this month, in Baghdad, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Stover noted that 35 of the 59 American soldiers who had died this year in the Iraqi capital, were killed by IEDs.

DIY TECHNOLOGY

The budget of the Pentagon's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation is $4,389,000,000 this year. It sounds like a large amount. But the problem with improvised explosives is precisely their home-made nature.

The two ingredients for urea nitrate, which Professor Almog says is the most frequently used IE in the region, are "so easily accessible: urea is the most inexpensive nitrogenous fertiliser; nitric acid, you can buy in any chemical or agricultural store".

The First International Symposium on Improvised Explosives was not just about work: sight-seeing, and what the programme called "entertainment" was also laid on.

Rosh Hanikra is a lovely part of Israel. Wedged against the border of Lebanon, it boasts white cliffs, dramatic grottoes, and two charmingly rickety cable cars that plunge towards and rise from the shore.

The Rosh Hanikra Holiday Village was chosen, Professor Almog said, because it provided a venue which could be completely isolated.

It also offered some - presumably - welcome distractions, before sessions such as Wednesday's pre-lunch presentation: Standoff Detection of Solid Traces by Single-Beam Nonlinear Raman Spectroscopy Using Shaped Femtosecond Pulses.

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Here is a selection of your thoughts and comments on Tim Frank's diary:

Leave it to the BBC to characterize a ninth-place finish in the Eurovision as a failure. In fact, Boaz Mauda did us all proud! Though I suppose it's just a little bit of jealousy, given how well Britain did this year.
Elianah, Haifa, Israel

Egg-frying and bomb-making share a critical aspect that your article leaves out entirely. On the world scene, in everyday life it is women who are left to clean up the mess.
Alice Winfree Bowron, St. Louis Park, MN, USA