This is what happens when you land in Israel: two minutes before the plane touches the ground everyone is turning on their mobile phones, when the plane touches the ground, everyone rises up to get in better position and get their stuff from the overheads, then the door opens, and after you survive the bull rush and exit the plane, there is a couple, usually mix, scanning the passengers for potential troublemakers. Or, to be less polite, looking for Arabs.

Then you start a walk toward the passport check. It is a long walk, almost a kilometer, and at some point, through a huge window on the left side, the arrivals encounter their first image of the holyland: it is a commercial painted on a lawn. A house resembling a box of cottage cheese with the slogan: „it is so good to have you back home“.

I don’t really know how to explain it, but cottage cheese is Israel. You can get cottage cheese elsewhere but it is never the same. I think it is easy to imitate the taste, but it is not possible to build the emotions surrounding the experience of eating cottage. It just feels not OK to eat cottage in Berlin or New York. It has the certain aroma of breakfast with cucumbers and tomatoes swimming in lemon and olive oil. You can capture this aroma only in Israel.

I don’t know how many of you heard about the cottage uprising in Israel.  For some of you it will look stupid: Israel is faced with such existential problems and its people are going to the virtual streets to protest over dairy?

It is not a mistaken approach, but here is something I’ve learned living in Berlin: When a society rises up against this amorphous thing called state over a two-cents increase in the price of a bread, this land (represented by a government) will think twice before it will pass any decisive decision over the heads of its citizens.

War over cottage cheese price may sound stupid, but it is not. It is a protest against and for the first thing we see when we come home, about childhood memories. It’s the Israeli society Litmus test.